“Loose lips sink ships,” a famous World War II poster warned. While men dominated the spy game in World War II, women might have been better at it. Why? Because they took the poster’s warning to heart, and never talked about it. Women of that era had learned how to hide their true feelings from men, and by extension, the world. “The girls were good at role playing,” British spy trainer Leslie Fernandez recalled in Marcus Binney’s The Women Who Lived for Danger. “Survival did not just require physical strength but the ability to live a cover story—which women could excel at.”
The official line on how the British broke the German codes, which they dubbed “Ultra,” was kept fully under lids until 1974, when English spy Frederick Winterbotham (a man, I note) published The Ultra Secret, revealing the now legendary decryptions at Bletchley Park. Female codebreaker Mavis Batey, who was 53 years old in 1974, was shocked to see what she’d kept secret for 30 years suddenly in the public sphere. “Could we now tell the family why we were so good at anagrams, Scrabble and crossword puzzles?” she wrote in Michael Smith’s Bletchley anthology Action This Day.
When exposing Bletchley’s activities, Frederick failed to give Mavis and the other women who toiled in Bletchley’s decryption “cottage” their due. Men of that era didn’t like to give women credit for brain work—sitting up late at night with pencil and paper, or wrestling with machines that mimicked how their enemies encoded the message. The public preferred to cling to the stereotype of the rare female spy as a femme fatale. Mavis fumed about an earlier male writer who insisted that a beautiful spy dubbed Cynthia broke an important Italian naval code the feminine way. She had supposedly enthralled the Italian attaché in Washington to sneak the codebooks from him. Thanks to Cynthia, the British won the battle of Matapan.
Not true at all, Mavis said. She knew, because she broke the code herself. “If we had such books we wouldn’t have needed codebreakers as it would have been child’s play,” Mavis sniffed.
Her Bletchley boss Dilly Knox knew the value of his “girls,” and composed a light-hearted poem in their honour, the women who really defeated Mussolini. “These have knelled your fall and ruin, but your ears were far away/English lassies rustling papers through the sodden Bletchley day.”
Women weren’t only rustling papers, but they went in the field too. By necessity in the UK, with nearly all men off to fight Hitler overseas, large numbers of British women entered the espionage game under the Special Operations Executive (SOE), the true cloak and dagger stuff, and made up one-third of that secret service.
“In the real world of spies, Vera Atkins was the boss,” famed 007 author Ian Fleming, a naval intelligence man, wrote. Though a select few people knew that Vera was born in 1908 as Vera Maria Rosenberg, a Romanian Jew by way of Germany and South Africa, no one knew who she really was. Vera “became known as tight-lipped, outspoken, kind, ruthless, beautiful, dowdy, a social butterfly, a scholar, proudly Jewish, [and] more English than a vicar’s daughter,” her biographer William Stevenson wrote in Spymistress.
She was 31 years old when World War II broke out in her adopted homeland of Great Britain. Her wealthy father, a financial advisor to the king of Romania, had ensured Vera had a handy mix of accomplishments: shooting guns, riding horses, and dancing. Vera’s first major assignment—before the war when she was only 23—was to loosen the lips of the German ambassador to Romania, and Vera got him to blab about Hitler as they dined in fine restaurants.
Men of that era didn’t like to give women credit for brain work—sitting up late at night with pencil and paper, or wrestling with machines that mimicked how their enemies encoded the message.
She snuck into Poland three days after the Nazis invaded to rescue key Polish codebreakers. Vera was also an airplane pilot. Was there nothing she could not do? “Women are best at such clandestine work,” she declared to her companion, Elder Wills, who developed spy gadgets for the SOE. He did not disagree. Their conversation turned to politics, with Vera supporting a socialist. Wills said Churchill would never support a socialist in parliament. “Winston’s changed his mind,” Vera said. “Just like he’s changed his mind about lady killers.”
And well he might, when some of the male operatives could be show-offs and big mouths. Consider this American spy in Istanbul in 1944—when Lanning MacFarland entered a local nightclub, the music stopped and a spotlight beamed down on him. Then, the orchestra struck up with a song apparently called “Boop, Boop, Baby, I’m a Spy!” as recounted in Evan Thomas’s CIA history The Very Best Men.
Vera had a special talent to recruit the right women. She scrutinized them cagily, because her position as a director of the SOE was kept secret even from her spy colleagues. One of the few who knew her true role was in awe of her calm yet ruthless statement: “We know very bad men plan very bad things. We must find out who they are and kill them.”
Vera’s agents became legendary themselves. Virginia Hall had cover as a correspondent for the Chicago Times in France. After the Nazis invaded, she pretended to be French Canadian and became the leader of a safe house in Lyons, where she hid Allied servicemen “who burrowed their way out of prison camps” as they escaped to neutral areas such as Spain. No matter that she had a wooden leg, which she called Cuthbert—she built up her own fighting units. A Gestapo chief grumbled, “I’d give anything to get my hands on that Canadian bitch!”
Besides Europe, women were also active in espionage in Far East during the war. The American spy service, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), maintained its regional office Kandy, India, where agents kept an eye on Burma, Thailand, and other strategic countries. Kandy also happened to be the headquarters of Admiral Lord Mountbatten, supreme commander of the combined Allied operations. A heady locale for an innocent 30-year-old California gal, Julia Child. She and her debutante pal Betty MacDonald were of the same ilk, cheerfully admitting they were only middling as spy personalities, as recounted in Jennet Conant’s biography of Julia, A Covert Affair. However, their OSS compatriot Jane Foster was of a different mold. She got others gossiping, yet gave nothing away herself as she became everyone’s friend. “She was the jolliest girl on land or sea,” an OSS lieutenant said. Jane was also cosmopolitan: she spent the 1930s flitting through the salons of Paris and Nazi Germany, and lived a time in the Dutch East Indies. She became fluent in French and Malay.
Julia, Betty and Jane started in the OSS propaganda department, but they received full sleuth training, which included covert trailing and the use of arms. By the time they got to India, the three women were promoted to assessing clandestine reports and tracking secret agents in the field. Jane was the only member of the female OSS team—which was based in outlying bungalows of the command compound—to be invited to Lord Mountbatten’s fabulous parties at the colonial palace.
Near the end of the war, as the US and UK battled it out for spy supremacy in the Far East, Julia was transferred to Kunming, China, to monitor the rise of Communism there. America hoped to stop Communism from spreading to nearby Burma and Thailand, the setting for my espionage novel Doublespeak. Meanwhile, Jane was put in charge of repatriating prisoners of war in Indonesia, documenting war crimes, and filing daily reports of political developments on the ground.
Within ten years of Jane’s heyday, the FBI accused her of being a Russian spy during the McCarthy witch hunts. Jane denied it, and her OSS friend Betty refused to believe it. Pragmatic Julia stayed quiet about her opinion for decades until, in an interview near the end of her life, she just shrugged while referring to “that fascinating and amusing girl, Jane Foster, who turned out to be a Russian agent.”
Certainly, neither Jane nor Julia could be said to have loose lips. Suck on that, Mr. Boop Boop Baby.
