\nAre women useful as spies?<\/span> If so, in what capacity? Maxwell Knight, an officer in MI5, Britain\u2019s domestic-counterintelligence agency, sat pondering these questions. Outside his office, World War II had begun, and Europe\u2019s baptism by blitzkrieg was under way. In England\u2014as in the world\u2014the intelligence community was still an all-male domain, and a clubby, upper-crust one at that. But a lady spy could come in handy, as Knight was about to opine.<\/p>\nIn a memo \u201con the subject of Sex, in connection with using women as agents,\u201d Knight ventured that one thing women spies could do was seduce men to extract information. Not just any woman could manage this, he cautioned\u2014only one who was not \u201cmarkedly oversexed or undersexed.\u201d Like the proverbial porridge, a female agent must be neither too hot nor too cold. If the lady is \u201cundersexed,\u201d she will lack the charisma needed to woo her target. But if she \u201csuffers from an overdose of Sex,\u201d as he put it, her boss will find her \u201cterrifying.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat is required,\u201d Knight wrote, \u201cis a clever woman who can use her personal attractions wisely.\u201d And there you have it\u2014the conventional wisdom about women and spycraft. Intelligence officers had long presumed that women\u2019s special assets for spying were limited to strategically deployed female abilities: batting eyelashes, soliciting pillow talk, and of course maintaining files and typing reports. Overseeing operations? Not so much.<\/p>\n
Historically, women had indeed counted on their charms in practicing espionage, mostly because charms were often the only kind of weapon permitted them. During the American Civil War, when a group of elite hostesses relied on their social connections to gather intelligence for both sides, Harriet Tubman was an outlier who actually ran spying efforts. But the aggression, vision, and executive capacity required to direct an operation were not considered within the female repertoire.<\/p>\n
Even as Knight was ordering his memo typed, however, change was at hand. World War II, a \u201ctotal war\u201d that required all able male bodies for global fighting, offered new opportunities. In the United States, \u201cWild Bill\u201d Donovan recruited blue-blooded women for his Office of Strategic Services, the forerunner of the CIA. Among them was the future chef Julia Child. But most OSS women were consigned to the secretarial pool, the \u201capron strings\u201d of Donovan\u2019s outfit, in his words. Those who went far beyond their brief\u2014his secretary Eloise Page helped plan Operation Torch, the invasion of North Africa\u2014got little recognition.<\/p>\n
Europe presented more possibilities. Spy agencies were expanding to cope with the need for covert action in countries where insurrection had to be plotted under the noses of occupying Germans. The French Resistance called on women\u2019s courage, as did the Special Operations Executive, or SOE, created by Winston Churchill to \u201cset Europe ablaze\u201d by planting bombs, stealing plans, and stoking internal opposition. Colloquially known as the Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare, the SOE sought agents willing to parachute into occupied France or be off-loaded by air or sea. Behind enemy lines, SOE operatives had to recruit locals as agents, establish networks, receive clandestine shipments, set up safe houses, manage communications, suss out traitors.<\/p>\n
The SOE\u2019s leaders were readier than the old boys of MI5 and MI6, the foreign-intelligence agency, to grant that women enjoyed certain advantages. Many French men had been sent to labor camps in Germany, so women operatives were better able to blend in with a mostly female population. As Sarah Rose writes in D-Day Girls: The Spies Who Armed the Resistance, Sabotaged the Nazis, and Helped Win World War II<\/i>, a British captain who recruited three female SOE agents, Selwyn Jepson, believed that women were psychologically suited to behind-enemy-lines work\u2014\u201csecretive, accustomed to isolation, possessed of a \u2018cool and lonely courage.\u2019\u2009\u201d Some officers thought women had greater empathy and caretaking instincts, which equipped them to recruit and support ordinary citizens as agents. Women were considered good couriers\u2014a high-risk role\u2014because they could rely on ingratiation and seeming na\u00efvet\u00e9 as tools in tight spots. The war also provided openings for women to show that they could execute operations, making strategic life-and-death decisions.<\/p>\n
In intelligence, <\/span>as in computer science and so many other fields associated with male prowess, women have made far more important contributions than they have gotten credit for\u2014but a recent boom in attention to their stories is remedying that. \u201cIn the French resistance as a whole, women played crucial roles,\u201d the historian Lynne Olson writes in Madame Fourcade\u2019s Secret War: The Daring Young Woman Who Led France\u2019s Largest Spy Network Against Hitler<\/i>, her masterful biography of Marie-Madeleine Fourcade, the patronne<\/i>, or boss, of Alliance, one of the largest Resistance networks. Nazi sexism helped: Germans\u2019 stereotyped ideas about female domesticity blinded them, early on at least, to women spies in their midst.<\/p>\nIn some cases, women had their own blinkered views of female leadership to overcome. Barely 30 when she was recruited in 1940, Fourcade had lived abroad, and relished the liberated environment of 1930s Paris. Still, she was astonished when \u201cNavarre,\u201d the code name for Georges Loustaunau-Lacau, asked her to be his deputy. Being a woman surely ruled her out, she protested to the World War I hero, who was secretly mobilizing citizens worried by Nazi aggression in Europe. That was precisely why she would be above suspicion, he told her. \u201cGood God\u2014it\u2019s a woman!\u201d cried another recruit, who became one of her most trusted aides. After Navarre was arrested in Algiers in 1941, Fourcade became the undisputed leader of Alliance.<\/p>\n
The Alliance network, backed by MI6, comprised thousands of agents; its main mission was to infiltrate German submarine bases along the coast and report on U-boat movements. The head of a shipyard provided crucial plans and drawings. On the bases, bartenders and prostitutes listened to chatter, which Fourcade passed on to the British in code. She and her lieutenants hiked into fields at night, waving in planes flown by Royal Air Force pilots. Fourcade\u2019s code name\u2014POZ 55 at first, and later Hedgehog\u2014initially enabled her to hide her gender from the old-line British officers. She feared they wouldn\u2019t take her seriously, and she didn\u2019t want to risk the lives of agents in her network, who depended on British support and funding. When she did meet one U.K. colleague, she was accompanied by a male deputy. \u201cThis is a joke, isn\u2019t it?\u201d the British agent said. Looking at the man, he asked: \u201cYou are the real POZ 55?\u201d<\/p>\n
Fourcade showed the skeptics who was boss\u2014not least by pushing the British to alter their communications routine to protect her agents. In occupied Europe, being a wireless-radio operator was one of the most dangerous jobs, and it often fell to women. Nazis on patrol would look for a signal emanating from a house or a hotel room, and then strike. For Fourcade\u2019s agents in touch with London, every moment spent awaiting a British response put them at risk. She wanted the Brits to make contact first. Hammering at the war bureaucracy of men in pin-striped suits, she persisted in making the case for her department\u2019s safety and welfare.<\/p>\n
The intelligence her network provided was astonishing. One of her assets was the brilliant Jeannie Rousseau, who spoke five languages and at age 20 began working as a German translator. Rousseau hung around with Nazi officers, who seized the chance to mansplain their exploits, including a new rocket technology, the V\u20112, the first ballistic missile. As she later put it: \u201cI was such a little one sitting with them, and I could not but hear what was said. And what they did not say, I prompted.\u201d They also showed her their plans. Rousseau had a photographic memory. Fourcade passed the material to the British, who bombed the rocket plant at Peenem\u00fcnde. Impressed, the British sought to bring Rousseau to London for debriefing. En route, she was captured and taken to a concentration camp, where she survived through remarkable acts of defiance.<\/p>\n
In 1943, when the Germans began to crack down on saboteurs in grim earnest, the Alliance network was a chief target. Scores of agents were arrested in successive waves. Among them were women tortured by Klaus Barbie, the \u201cButcher of Lyon,\u201d who burned their breasts with cigarettes. \u201cIn my network, no woman ever faltered, even under the most extreme kinds of torture,\u201d Fourcade later remembered. \u201cI owed my freedom to many who were questioned until they lost consciousness, but never revealed my whereabouts, even when they knew exactly where I was.\u201d She was exfiltrated to England, after a two-and-a-half-year career running operations against the Nazis\u2014most Resistance leaders lasted no more than six months in place before their cover was blown\u2014and continued to work from there. \u201cI\u2019ve often wondered what you were like,\u201d one male British colleague confessed upon meeting her.<\/p>\n
If obstacles hone leadership<\/span> (as research suggests), few female spies cleared more hurdles than Virginia Hall, one of the SOE\u2019s first operatives of either gender and the subject of A Woman of No Importance: The Untold Story of the American Spy Who Helped Win World War II<\/i>. She became, as the British journalist Sonia Purnell writes, \u201cthe most successful Allied female secret agent,\u201d unimpeded by her sex or by a wooden leg she nicknamed \u201cCuthbert.\u201d (According to a famous anecdote, Hall was trekking across the snowy Pyrenees to escape the Gestapo, and radioed to her handlers that Cuthbert was giving her trouble. The response from a novice: \u201cHave him eliminated.\u201d)<\/p>\nBorn into Baltimore high society in 1906, Hall grew up outdoorsy, adept with horses and guns. She ditched a boring fianc\u00e9, attended Barnard College, traveled to Jazz Age Paris, and studied in Vienna. When her father lost his fortune during the Depression and then died, she took jobs as a clerk in the American embassies in Poland and Turkey (where, while snipe-hunting, she blew off her foot and nearly died of sepsis). She tried over and over to join the U.S. diplomatic corps, but the State Department kept turning her down on flimsy pretexts. After war broke out, she began driving an ambulance in France, among the few active jobs for which women, even one missing a leg, were accepted.What many of these women spies had in common\u2014along with grit and remarkable courage\u2014was a man who saw their potential. Key in Hall\u2019s case was George Bellows, an undercover British agent milling around a Spanish border-town train station in 1940, gathering intelligence for the SOE. He chatted with Hall, whose sights were set on England as the Nazis overran France. The British realized that an American\u2014the U.S. was still neutral\u2014could move freely without attracting suspicion in occupied France.<\/p>\n
Under the cover of being a newspaper reporter, Hall operated as a \u201csecret liaison officer,\u201d on an ambitious and dangerous mission to build a Resistance network in Lyon, where she knew no one. \u201cIn the field, she would either learn fast or die,\u201d Purnell writes. Hall learned fast. In a city overrun with refugees from occupied sectors, she recruited women helpers from marginalized communities. Hall quickly went way beyond her job description. She began collecting details on the political situation in France. She helped downed British pilots escape, organizing French women to escort them to safety.<\/p>\n
Much like successful women today, Hall was called brusque, and her handlers were reluctant to formalize her authority as chief. Instead they elevated a reckless and incompetent agent codenamed Alain. Yet her self-taught professionalism and, yes, caretaking instincts made Hall a magnet for incoming operatives. \u201cHer apartment had become the center of all resistance,\u201d Purnell writes, and she was soon directing operations herself. Alain, her nemesis, was fired for \u201cwomanizing, boasting, and boozing.\u201dHall\u2019s \u201csuccess opened the gates to more women agents,\u201d Purnell points out\u2014agents who faced mounting danger. Nazi reprisals became savage. Hitler wrote a memo saying that saboteurs would be \u201cannihilated without exception,\u201d and of the 39 women sent to France by the SOE, a third never returned. Some ended up in Ravensbr\u00fcck, the women\u2019s concentration camp. Some were poisoned, others shot. Odette Sansom, one of the operatives featured in Rose\u2019s D-Day Girls<\/i> and the subject of a biography by Larry Loftis, Code Name: Lise<\/i>, survived being burned and having her toenails pulled out. She never divulged the information the Germans wanted.<\/p>\n
Virginia Hall, though hunted by Klaus Barbie and arrested at least once, always managed to get away. Eventually she was exfiltrated, and worked in Spain until late 1943. She was then finally hired by her own country, and the OSS sent her back into France, under heavy disguise. She directed guerrilla forces to support the D-Day landings by destroying railway communications, organizing roadblocks and ambushes, and cutting telephone wires. Incredibly, the OSS refused to put her officially in charge. Having a woman at the head of a paramilitary operation was considered \u201ccontroversial,\u201d so putative control was given to her petulant, often-absent male boss. Disguised as a milkmaid, she sold cheese and eavesdropped on the German Seventh Army, which, Purnell writes, helped \u201cpave the way for the Allied recapture of Paris.\u201dAfter the war, the contribution of these women was overlooked and then forgotten. The CIA blossomed, becoming institutionalized, slick, and buttoned-down\u2014a place where, in Purnell\u2019s words, \u201cbrilliant masculine brains and well-connected college kids had taken charge.\u201d Hall stayed on, but nobody quite knew what to do with the person one wet-eared upstart described as \u201cthe gung-ho lady\u201d from the war. In 1953, the head of the CIA, Allen Dulles, convened a \u201cPetticoat Panel\u201d to look into attitudes toward women at the agency. Compared with men, they were seen as more emotional, less objective, and insufficiently aggressive.<\/p>\n
That was then. Now the CIA is directed by a woman, Gina Haspel, who has promoted veteran women to head top directorates. These leaders have antecedents, whether or not they know it. Thanks to these overdue volumes, they can now find out all about them.<\/p>\n<\/section>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
. . .<\/strong><\/p>\nOn August 29 last year we posted the sixth installemt<\/a> of our series, The End of Civilization As We Knew It<\/em>. The piece was lengthy, wide-ranging and one of our more important ones. It deals with much that led up to and has transpired as a result of or in spite of the defeat of fascism in World War Two, our work and various states of public awareness and consciousness up to today, and many related topics. We recommend revisiting it in full. However, for the purpose of this post, we revisit the following:<\/p>\nLast year, we posted that twenty years ago tomorrow, \u201cwe arrived with our production crew from Seattle in Charlotte, North Carolina. It was Saturday night. We were starting one of the biggest shoots in our history for a public service campaign over the Labor Day weekend, in the U.S.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\nA major focus of the post last year was learning of the death of Princess Diana upon arriving, the impact it had globally and why. It was being revisited in a major manner in the media at the time on the twentieth anniversary. We will revisit that post, observations then and related observations since, at another time.<\/em><\/p>\nThe point of this revisiting of our production in Charlotte that year, is the production itself, and what happened during it.<\/em><\/p>\nThe purpose of the production of the public service ads was, in the most general sense, to promote community service. One of the series of ads (different lengths and venues, TV, radio, print), was focused on regular basketball games for and between youth in the community.<\/em><\/p>\nIt was an astonishing and inspiring sight. The kids, across gender and racial identities, playing as equals together\u2014all out. All with absolute respect and comradery. And pride, in themselves and each other.<\/em><\/p>\nGirls and boys racing full-court, back and forth. With incredible skill, grace and passion. With physical endurance born of doing this over and over. No gender or racial stereotypes. A human family.<\/em><\/p>\nIt was an activist\u2019s dream and a filmmaker\u2019s dream.<\/em><\/p>\nWe had a large production team and a lot of equipment. And we made the best of it\u2014to make the best of what the kids showed us. Spinning, jumping, shooting. Fast motion passing\u2014the ball sped up for a second laser-like. To slow motion of all the kids spread across the court, just standing together, at different depths, all eyes on the cameras.<\/em><\/p>\nFaces serious, eyes soulful, penetrating. Look at us, the eyes demanded. Respect us as we respect ourselves and each other. We are the future.<\/em><\/p>\nThen back to the game, our best shots from above the net as they took theirs.<\/em><\/p>\nWe were looking at what we\u2019d been fighting for all our lives.<\/em><\/p>\nEquality. Strength of character. Empathy. Common purpose.<\/em><\/p>\nThe kids were from different backgrounds. Some, perhaps most, if not being where they were and doing what they were doing, would be at-risk, or more at-risk.<\/em><\/p>\nThen, an improbable sight.<\/em><\/p>\nA white man in his mid-seventies starts to play with them.<\/em><\/p>\nFull-court.<\/em><\/p>\nFor as long as they do.<\/em><\/p>\nHe\u2019s one of them. And an important character in our mini-movies in this production.<\/em><\/p>\nWe talked with him, and the kids, at-length, in between takes, and after we finished the shoot.<\/em><\/p>\nWe learned from others that the man in his mid-seventies, 53 years earlier as we spoke, had been on the beaches of Normandy and fighting the Nazis in the hedgerows.<\/em><\/p>\nIn film terms, the closest one could perhaps come to understanding these experiences would be in the movie Saving Private Ryan\u00a0and the HBO series Band of Brothers\u00a0(based on the book by Stephen Ambrose). We recommend reading everything one can about such events. But in an age when film and related media are the cultural communication currency in many ways, and are their own meaningful experience as an art form that at best can put you in the experience in a virtual manner, the above are indispensable.<\/em><\/p>\nWhen we first saw Band of Brothers in 2001, Richard Davis\u00a0\u201cDick\u201d\u00a0Winters, the commander of \u201cEasy Company\u201d (who died in 2011), portrayed by Damien Lewis, reminded us\u2014exactly\u2014of the man on the court with the kids in Charlotte.<\/em><\/p>\nThis is, in a way, a well-known stereotype of the young men in that generation who fought to save the world. But it is clear, from our experience of many others who served in this war, and the widely-discussed and written-about experience of nearly everyone about this generation, a stereotype that is true.<\/em><\/p>\nIt\u2019s utterly humbling to be in the presence of such a person. They are incredibly humble themselves. Their focus is on others. On service. The man on the court in Charlotte came every day, to be with and grow with and be a mentor, as an example, for the kids, who treated them as equals and more.<\/em><\/p>\nThe one thing he wouldn\u2019t do\u2014again a stereotype that\u2019s true\u2014was talk about his wartime experience. Perhaps in part a stoicism that both served and hurt his generation (everyone since could use more of the stoicism\u2014the full-range of the roots of the term need to be studied if one is not aware). But the larger reason appeared to be humility. You did your duty. It was your honor. You are, by a miracle you cannot understand, or by chance you cannot stand, still alive, instead of your brothers you watched die. You would never allow yourself to be seen as heroic or as trying to be seen that way.<\/em><\/p>\nWhich of course just increases the level of heroism the rest of us witness.<\/em><\/p>\nThere was a point when talking about this became naturally unavoidable.<\/em><\/p>\nThe man started to call us by positive adjectives we can\u2019t stand to repeat, speaking of not being able to stand something. What we do has always been our honor. But to hear this man speak of us so kindly with our saying nothing about him was unbearable. We tried not to. But we teared-up. And when he asked why, the tears rolled down one of our cheeks.<\/em><\/p>\nSo, we talked. And we thanked him. And we kept thanking him until he stopped trying to stop us. And the moment was so genuine that it became clear in his eyes, then his words, how genuinely he appreciated it.<\/em><\/p>\n. . .<\/strong><\/p>\nThe appreciation, in the end, from all of us who have lived and are living since, is for him and all of his brothers and sisters who sacrficed everything for all of us.<\/p>\n
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D-Day, June 6, 1944\u2013June 6, 2019, 75th anniversary, Time It is impossible to overstate the importance of D-Day, June 6, 1944, the largest amphibious invasion in history, of Nazi occupied Europe on the beaches of Normandy, by the allied forces in World War Two. 75 years ago last Thursday. Almost all of the first […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1001004,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[54],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7390"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1001004"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7390"}],"version-history":[{"count":14,"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7390\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7476,"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7390\/revisions\/7476"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7390"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7390"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7390"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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