Women Spies

From the Revolutionary War to World War II

UNLIKELY SPIES

Julia Child

Before she became a famous chef, Julia Child was a spy. She worked for the Office of Strategic Services, a precursor of the CIA, and went undercover to Sri Lanka (called Ceylon at the time) with top security clearance. In World War II, she helped the U.S. Navy solve their problem with sharks—who had a habit of setting off underwater explosive devices, foiling U.S. plans to blow up German U-boats—by developing shark repellent. She met diplomat Paul Child when she was working for the OSS, and they married. When Paul was posted to Paris, Julia trained at the famous Cordon Bleu cooking school and began her second life as a chef.

Hedy Lamarr

Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler is best known as Hedy Lamarr, movie star of the 1930s and ’40s. But she was also an inventor who patented an idea that was to become the key to modern wireless communication. During World War II, Hedy, along with George Antheil, invented a way to make military communications secure through frequency-hopping, an early form of a technology called spread spectrum. Hedy’s status as a beautiful and successful actress provided her with the perfect cover: she was able to visit a variety of venues on tour and interact with many people, none of whom suspected that the stunning starlet might be listening closely and thinking of ways to help the U.S. cause.

Josephine Baker

Josephine Baker was another World War II-era entertainer whose celebrity status helped distract from her mission as a spy. Josephine was an African American dancer and singer from St. Louis, Missouri. She found some success in the United States, but was hindered by racial prejudice. She moved to Paris when she was nineteen and became an international star. When World War II began, she started working as an undercover operative for the French Resistance, transporting orders and maps from the Resistance into countries occupied by Germany. Her fame and renown made it easy for her to pass unsuspected, as foreign officials were thrilled to meet such a famous performer, but she wrote the secret information in disappearing ink on her sheet music just in case.

The Girl Guides

During the First World War, the Girl Guides—the British version of Girl Scouts—were used as couriers for secret messages by MI-5, Britain’s counter-intelligence agency. Messengers were needed to work in the War Office at the time, and at first Boy Scouts were used. But they proved to be difficult to manage, so Girl Guides were asked to serve instead. The girls, most of whom were between fourteen and eighteen years old, ran messages and patrolled on the roof; for their efforts they were paid ten shillings a week, plus food. Like all employees of MI-5, they took a pledge of secrecy. But unlike many employees of MI-5, they were among the least likely spies to arouse suspicion.

REVOLUTIONARY WAR SPIES

During the Revolutionary War, many women up and down the East Coast passed important information along to General Washington at Valley Forge. Philadelphian Lydia Barrington Darragh spied on the British for American officers. Two Loyalists (citizens loyal to Britain), “Miss Jenny” and Ann Bates, spied on the Americans for the British. Ann Trotter Bailey carried messages across enemy territory in 1774, as did Sarah Bradlee Fulton, nicknamed the “mother of the Boston Tea Party”; Emily Geiger rode fifty miles through enemy territory to deliver information to General Sumter. The anonymous spy “355”—a numerical code that meant “lady” or “woman”—was a member of the Culper Ring, a New York-based secret spy organization. She was seized by the British in 1780 and died on a prison ship—but not before she named Benedict Arnold as a potential traitor.

CIVIL WAR SPIES

Pauline Cushman was an actress who worked as a Union spy. She was captured with incriminating papers and sentenced to be executed, but was rescued just three days prior to her hanging. President Abraham Lincoln gave her the honorary commission of Major, and she toured the country for years, telling of her exploits spying for the Union.

Mary Elizabeth Bowser was a freed slave who served as a maid in the Confederate White House. Her servile status—and the mistaken assumption that she could neither read nor write—allowed her to be present for key conversations but largely ignored. She smuggled important information and papers to the Union Army.

Sarah Emma Edmonds disguised herself as a man so that she could serve in the Union Army, where she became known for her bravery and chameleonlike ability to blend in, whether she was masquerading as a black slave or “disguised” as a woman. She successfully fought for the Union as Frank Thompson until she became sick with malaria. She checked herself into a private hospital to avoid having to reveal her true identity. But when she learned that “Frank Thompson” was listed as a deserter, she came clean, and worked as a nurse for the Union—under her real name—until the end of the war. She wrote about her experiences in a memoir titled Nurse and Spy in the Union Army.

Rose O’Neal Greenhow spied so well for the Confederacy that Jefferson Davis credited her with winning the battle of Manassas. She was imprisoned twice, once in her own home, and the second time with her eight-year-old daughter in Washington, D.C.’s Old Capital Prison. After she was released from prison, she was exiled to the Confederate states, where Jefferson Davis enlisted her as a courier to Europe.

Nancy Hart served as a Confederate spy, carrying messages between the southern armies. When she was twenty, she was captured by the Union; she was able to escape after shooting one of her guards with his own weapon.

Elizabeth Van Lew was a spy for the North. She realized when she visited Union prisoners held by the Confederates in Richmond that they were excellent sources of information, as they had been marched through Confederate lines. Over the next four years, she worked as a spy, bringing food and clothing to Union prisoners and smuggling out information. For her efforts, she was made Postmaster of Richmond by General Grant.

Dr. Mary Edwards Walker was an abolitionist, a prisoner of war, a feminist, and a surgeon who dressed as a man and worked as a physician and spy for the Union. She is the only woman ever to receive the Congressional Medal of Honor.

Harriet Tubman is most famous for her work in freeing slaves, but she also served with the Union Army in South Carolina, organizing a spy network and leading expeditions in addition to fighting as a soldier, working as a cook and laundress, and aiding the wounded as a nurse. Through her experience with the Underground Railroad, leading more than 300 slaves to freedom, she came to know the landscape intimately and was able to recruit former slaves to be her eyes and ears, reporting on movements of the Confederate troops and scouting out the rebel camps. In 1863 she went on a gunboat raid, with Colonel James Montgomery and several black soldiers, that ultimately freed more than 700 slaves, thanks to the inside information from Harriet’s scouts.

Ginnie and Lottie Moon were sisters who spied for the Confederates during the Civil War. Lottie began her career as a spy delivering messages for an underground Confederate organization at the behest of her husband. Ginnie too delivered messages over Union lines, on the pretext that she was meeting a beau. Ginnie and the girls’ mother risked considerable danger when they accepted a mission to retrieve sensitive papers and supplies from the Knights of the Golden Circle in Ohio. They were apprehended by Union agents; Ginnie was able to swallow the most important written information they carried, but their cache of medical supplies was discovered and confiscated, and they were put under house arrest. Lottie came in disguise to plead with General Burnside—a former beau—for their release, but instead she was placed under arrest with her sister and mother. Ultimately the charges were dropped. Lottie eventually became a journalist, and in the 1920s Ginnie headed to Hollywood, where she had bit parts in several movies—none of them with plots as exciting as the sisters’ real life adventures.

WORLD WAR I SPIES

Two famous and controversial World War I women spies, both of whom were executed, were Mata Hari (born Margaretha Geertruida Zelle McLeod) and Edith Cavell. Mata Hari was a dancer who used her vocation as a cover for her spy work for the Germans. She was shot by the French as a spy in 1917. Edith Cavell was a British nurse who worked in Belgium during the war. She secretly helped British, French, and Belgian soldiers escape from behind the German lines, and she hid refugees in the nursing school she ran. By 1915 she had helped more than 200 British, French, and Belgian soldiers, but the Germans grew suspicious and arrested her. She was executed by firing squad.

WORLD WAR II SPIES

Virginia Hall, an American originally from Baltimore, Maryland, spied for the French during World War II. She was chased by the Nazis over the Pyrenees Mountains into Spain and eluded them, even though she had a wooden leg. After escaping, she trained as a radio operator and transferred to the OSS, America’s secret spy agency. In 1943 she returned to France as an undercover spy, gathering intelligence, helping to coordinate air drops in support of D-Day, and working with the French underground to disrupt German communications. After the war, Virginia was awarded America’s Distinguished Service Cross, the only American civilian woman to receive such an honor. She continued to work for the OSS, and later the CIA, until her retirement in 1966.

Princess Noor-un-nisa Inayat Khan was an author and a heroine of the French Resistance. The Princess trained as a wireless operator in Great Britain and was sent into occupied France as a spy with the code name “Madeleine.” She became the sole communications link between her unit of the French Resistance and home base before she was captured by the Gestapo and executed.

Violette Bushell Szabo was recruited and trained by the British Special Operations Executive after her husband, a member of the French Foreign Legion, was killed in North Africa. She was sent to France, where she was captured during a shoot-out. She refused to give up her information and was sent to the Ravensbruck concentration camp, where she was eventually killed. She was awarded the George Cross and the Croix de Guerre posthumously in 1946.

Amy Elizabeth Thorpe, also known as Betty Pack and “Code Name Cynthia,” was an American spy first recruited by the British secret service and later by the American OSS. She is probably best remembered for her procurement of French naval codes, necessary to the Allies’ invasion of North Africa, which she accomplished by tricking a man connected to the Vichy French Embassy into giving them to her. Not only did she steal French naval code books from the safe in his locked room, she also stole his heart: after the war they were married, and they spent the rest of their lives together.