Women were considered good couriers-a high-risk role-because they could rely on ingratiation and seeming naïveté as tools in tight spots. As Sarah Rose writes in D-Day Girls: The Spies Who Armed the Resistance, Sabotaged the Nazis, and Helped Win World War II, a British captain who recruited three female SOE agents, Selwyn Jepson, believed that women were psychologically suited to behind-enemy-lines work-“secretive, accustomed to isolation, possessed of a ‘cool and lonely courage.’ ” Some officers thought women had greater empathy and caretaking instincts, which equipped them to recruit and support ordinary citizens as agents. 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. The SOE’s leaders were readier than the old boys of MI5 and MI6, the foreign-intelligence agency, to grant that women enjoyed certain advantages. 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. 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. The French Resistance called on women’s courage, as did the Special Operations Executive, or SOE, created by Winston Churchill to “set Europe ablaze” by planting bombs, stealing plans, and stoking internal opposition. 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. Those who went far beyond their brief-his secretary Eloise Page helped plan Operation Torch, the invasion of North Africa-got little recognition.Įurope presented more possibilities. But most OSS women were consigned to the secretarial pool, the “apron strings” of Donovan’s outfit, in his words. Among them was the future chef Julia Child. In the United States, “Wild Bill” Donovan recruited blue-blooded women for his Office of Strategic Services, the forerunner of the CIA. World War II, a “total war” that required all able male bodies for global fighting, offered new opportunities. But the aggression, vision, and executive capacity required to direct an operation were not considered within the female repertoire.Įven as Knight was ordering his memo typed, however, change was at hand. 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. Historically, women had indeed counted on their charms in practicing espionage, mostly because charms were often the only kind of weapon permitted them. Intelligence officers had long presumed that women’s special assets for spying were limited to strategically deployed female abilities: batting eyelashes, soliciting pillow talk, and of course maintaining files and typing reports. “What is required,” Knight wrote, “is a clever woman who can use her personal attractions wisely.” And there you have it-the conventional wisdom about women and spycraft. But if she “suffers from an overdose of Sex,” as he put it, her boss will find her “terrifying.” If the lady is “undersexed,” she will lack the charisma needed to woo her target. Not just any woman could manage this, he cautioned-only one who was not “markedly oversexed or undersexed.” Like the proverbial porridge, a female agent must be neither too hot nor too cold. In a memo “on the subject of Sex, in connection with using women as agents,” Knight ventured that one thing women spies could do was seduce men to extract information. But a lady spy could come in handy, as Knight was about to opine. In England-as in the world-the intelligence community was still an all-male domain, and a clubby, upper-crust one at that. Outside his office, World War II had begun, and Europe’s baptism by blitzkrieg was under way. Jump to navigation Real-life James Bonds: Actual spooks reveal what a job in MI6 is really likeįrank Gardner, the BBC’s Security Correspondent, secured a ground-breaking interview with two serving MI6 intelligence officers.Are women useful as spies? If so, in what capacity? Maxwell Knight, an officer in MI5, Britain’s domestic-counterintelligence agency, sat pondering these questions.
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