March 16, 2017 Speaker Stephen Budiansky

Writer and historian Stephen Budiansky is the author of Battle of Wits: The Complete Story of Codebreaking in World War II, Her Majesty’s Spymaster, Blackett’s War, and numerous other books of military and intelligence history, science, and biography.

The former foreign editor and deputy editor of U.S. News & World Report, and former Washington editor of the scientific journal Nature, he is a regular contributor to the Wall Street Journal’s book review pages.

He received his master’s degree in applied mathematics from Harvard and in 2011 was a recipient of a John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship as a writer of general non-fiction.

He will be speaking to us on March 9 about his latest book, Code Warriors: NSA’s Codebreakers and the Secret Intelligence War Against the Soviet Union (Knopf), a comprehensive history of NSA in the Cold War that draws on an array of recently declassified documents to explore the technical and political challenges of the long intelligence struggle against the Soviets, and to trace the historical forces behind the headlines surrounding NSA’s recent controversies.