Early Career
In 1917, Rochefort had joined the Navy while still in high school in Los Angeles. He enlisted in the Navy in 1918. He was commissioned as an ensign after graduation from the Stevens Institute of Technology, and in 1919 became engineering officer of the tanker USS Cuyama.
A fellow officer observed that Rochefort had a penchant for solving crossword puzzles and adept skills at playing the advanced card game auction bridge and recommended him for a Navy cryptanalysis class in Washington, D.C.
Rochefort's tours ashore included cryptanalytic training under Captain Laurance Safford as his assistant, and worked with the master codebreaker Agnes Meyer Driscoll in 1924.
He then served a stint as second chief of the Division of Naval Communications' newly created cryptanalytic organization, OP-20-G, from 1926 to 1929; training in the Japanese language from 1929 to 1932; and a two-year intelligence assignment in the Eleventh Naval District, San Diego, from 1936 to 1938. Until 1941, Rochefort spent nine years in cryptologic or intelligence-related assignments and fourteen years at sea with the U.S. Fleet in positions of increasing responsibility.
Read more about this topic: Joseph Rochefort
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