Obituaries

At Catholic University, he received a master's degree in theology in 1980 and a master's in canon law in 1983. He also received a master's degree in education from Virginia Tech in 1999.

He was a member of Epiphany of Our Lord Byzantine Catholic Church in Annandale.

Survivors include his wife of 21 years, Kathleen Borota Kisner of Lorton.

-- Adam Bernstein

Janice J. CramNSA Cryptolinguist

Janice Jayne Cram, 87, a cryptolinguist for the National Security Agency and its forerunners, died Aug. 3 at Mercy Hospital in Portland, Maine. She had congestive heart failure.

Mrs. Cram was essentially a code breaker and relied heavily on analytic skill and on her knowledge of Russian.

She spent much of her career on a Cold War project code-named "Venona," for which U.S. intelligence cryptolinguists deciphered Soviet espionage messages. Their work, said to have ended in 1980, showed how the Soviets for decades had recruited dozens of agents throughout the U.S. government.

In 1995, the release of some information about the Venona project made the public far more aware of the contributions of Mrs. Cram and her colleagues.

She was a native of Bridgeport, Conn., and a 1942 graduate of New York University. Soon after, she began working at the Army Signal Security Service. She retired in 1980.

Her husband of 56 years, Charles D. Cram, died in 2006. That year, she moved to Scarborough, Maine, from Cheverly.