Rona Geib Stoetzer cracked a German code for the Federal Bureau of Investigation during World War II. After the war she had a job at the Central Intelligence Agency and never told her family what she did. Once married and settling down as a homemaker in Wilton and Milford she took on more prosaic duties as a Westport Planning and Zoning secretary and tax preparer for H&R Block.
“She was quiet, an avid reader, liked to do the New York Times crossword puzzle, loved to travel and she traveled the world,” said her son, Anthony, who lives in the 1823 farmhouse where she grew up in Milford.
Rona Geib was born was born March 11, 1919 in Carneys Point, NJ. Her father, Henry was a doctor and mother Mary Ellen a nurse. In 1926 they moved to Milford where she was Milford High School valedictorian in the Class of 1936. She attended Smith College majoring in French, spent her junior year in France, and graduated in 1940.
“She was good in languages and knew German too,” said Anthony, noting the skill helped her land a job in the FBI’s cryptanalysis division where she cracked a German code. This achievement produced a letter dated May 15, 1944 from Director J. Edgar Hoover. He noted she had solved an “official problem which faced the FBI laboratory” and lauded the “remarkable piece of work that resulted from your complicated and painstaking efforts.”
After the war in 1946 she was assigned to the Counter Intelligence Corps in Berlin and Frankfurt working to get gold bars and art looted by the Nazis returned to their owners.
It was in Frankfurt where she met Otto Carlos Stoetzer, a lawyer and native of Argentina who spoke German and Spanish and had to return to Germany to reclaim his family’s frozen assets. They came to the United States in 1948 where she joined the CIA and he became a State Department translator, later earning a PhD in history at Georgetown University. They married in 1956. Besides Anthony they also had a son Eric who currently lives in Honolulu. “I don’t know what she did at the CIA,” said Anthony. “We’d ask her and she wouldn’t tell us.”
The family moved to Wilton in 1961 where Rona raised her sons and took on jobs in Westport and working for H&R Block. Otto commuted to Fordham University in the Bronx where he was a professor in political science and Latin American History from 1966 to 1991.
Rona and Otto divorced in 1989, and she moved back to her old house in Milford where she died in 2013 at age 94 in the same room where her mother died.
Otto spent his last years in Argentina where he died in 2011.
