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Marie Meyer was a language scholar from Illinois with a Master's Degree in Latin, as well as knowledge of Greek, German, and Sanskrit. She was hired in 1943, probably as a German linguist by the Signal Security Agency.

During the summer of 1946, Ms. Meyer took a University of Chicago correspondence course in Russian and moved to the Venona problem, a project attempting to decode Soviet messages to emissaries in the United States. Meredith Gardner, a well-known linguist on the problem, credited Ms. Meyer with making some of the initial recoveries of the Venona codebook.

Ms. Meyer spent the remainder of her career on some facet of the Russian problem and taught several Russian language classes at NSA.

Ms. Meyer was the first person to receive NSA's Meritorious Civilian Service Award.