Gene Grabeel (June 5, 1920 – January 30, 2015) was an American mathematician and cryptanalyst who founded the Venona project.

[1][2][3] Grabeel was born on June 5, 1920, in Rose Hill, Lee County, Virginia, where she grew up; her mother raised chickens and her father farmed tobacco.

[4][5][6] On the recommendation of a friend of hers, Frank Rowlett, Grabeel joined the Signal Intelligence Service on December 28, 1942, where she was assigned to attack intercepted Soviet ciphertext.

On February 1, 1943, she founded the Venona project, a counterintelligence program aimed at decrypting Soviet communications.

[4] In his book Code Warriors: NSA's Codebreakers and the Secret Intelligence War Against the Soviet Union, Stephen Budiansky describes how she came into the opportunity to work as a U.S. government cryptanalyst: Gene Grabeel ... was teaching high school near Lynchburg in central Virginia and dissatisfied with her job when she met a young Army officer in the post office who was looking for college graduates to go work at an undisclosed location near Washington, to do a job he could not offer any details about.