"AMERICA'S WOMEN SPIES"

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP74-00297R001200300003-6
• Release Decision: RIFPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 5
• Document Creation Date: December 23, 2016
• Document Release Date: May 7, 2013
• Sequence Number: 3
• Publication Date: May 1, 1951
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

i) A? 19: I, i),,4411z
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PERIODICALS
America's Women Spies"
Cosmopolitan
May 1951
111
BA' DONALD DOVIINSON
It took a woman, of course, to help pull off the
biggest espionage coup of the past decade.
. No Soviet secret was ever more closely guarded
than Red progress in developing the A-bomb. For
years, American intelligence men tried to learn the
fact,s, and failed. More than one disappeared, or
was found with his throat cut.
? Then the Central Intelligence Agency?the IJUited
States' new, world-wide espionage network--did
what every smart spy organizetion does after its
mile agents flop. It assigned a woman to the task.
. 'The woman in question is still working for us
' behind the Iron Curtain. The slightest clue to her
identity could mean her death. All that Washington
' al say about her is, "She is an American girl, not
-Unattractive, who knows her way around Europe,"
The following can be revealed, however, about
the incredible job of undercover work she did:
'Through contacts With anti-Communist elements in-
side the U.S.S.R., 'she?fielped set up a pipeline into
one of the 'most .confidential offices in the entire
Russian atomic project!
_ That pipeline, it can now be disclosed, was so
. effective that on the morning in July, 1949, that the
Soviet completed its first A-bomb, Washington had
word of it.
?On the basis of information obtained through this
. pipeline, the American Government had scientists on
' hand in the Middle East, ready to record the radio-
logical effects of the Red' A-bomb when the Rus-
sians ran 'surreptitious tests of it a few weeks, later.
Tliat women excel as intelligence agents is nothing
"-flew. For five thousand years, every espionage serv-
' ice on eartii?has turned over to,womeri the missions
'that have been too delicate foe-its--men to handle.
' ?However, only Within the tagt few yeats have Amer-
'Can 'women had an- opportunity. to-prooth?thatahey,
' too, can- perform braVely-clinckbfilliafinly,in,that
' perilous nether world ofi-.spynd-counterspy. --(The
2 llilii:ed States didiv't even have an espionage,urgan-
'. izalinu until World' War IL)
t.'illie' operations of American women in the intel-
? ligenee field have been shrouded in official secrecy.
Their exploits from 1941 to 1945 in the fabulous
Office of Strategic Services, the first international
undercover organization the United States ever had;
and more lately with the Central budligence Agency.
,iiiiun,rI IC
???????? Irr
1. :V. P.
:
MARIA MOBLEY, shown-here in her peaceful pur-
suit of teaching Powers models how to apply make-up,
guided dozens of American agents through Nazi lines
in. one oft/ie most hazardous missions of World War II.
DOROTHY" HUSTON. who died of cancer two years
ago, was considered the top woman spy in the 0.S.S.
Although she was slim, tall, and attractive and looked
veri young, Mrs. Huston had three grandchildren.
Si
I. ? N'''."..?"7"1"..77'' ? 7-7727,'"r77-
? , ? ? ? `,
' A
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PERIODICALS
Cosmopolitan
May 1951 " America's Women Spies"
4?.
????????????111....11MR,,, ????????????/.
KAY RA LEE (whose OSS. nickname was "Mata Halle") did important work subverting
enemy morale by the clever development of rumors and the distribution of leaflets and false
information. Secret pipe lines then infiltrated this damaging material through the enemy's lines.
MRS. EMMY IS A DO interviewed the refugees who had managed to reach the United States
from Occupied Europe and Africa. A pleasant, soft-spoken woman. she easily gained people's
confidence and extracted valuable information her informants didn't realize they possessed.
59
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There was "Lillian," who danced at the
Folies Bergere?and dated German officers;
there was the girl whose cooking enchanted
the Communists; and there were other girls
who, one way or another, made men talk
the 0.S.S.'s peacetime successor, have been marked top
secret. But now, for the first time, the Government has
relaxed its regulations, and the activities of American
women intelligence agents can at last be reported.
More than three thousand American women served
in intelligence during the war. They did every conceiv-
afite kind nf work, from analysis of enemy documents
to sabotage and espionage. And they did it well. Along-
side many of them, Mata Hari was an amateur.
Take, for instance, the alert, sharp-eyed little O.S.S.
girl, just nineteen years old, who was singlehandedly
responsible for knocking out a German oil refinery.
As she leafed through a schedule of freight rates on
German railroads one day, she remarked to her chief,
"Here's something funny. This schedule quotes rates
on oil shipments to a little town in Austria that's never
been listed before."
"What of it?" he asked.
"There's no reason under the sun for anyone to ship
oil to that town," she said. "I bet the Nazis have built
themselves an oil refinery there."
, An aerial reconnaissance was made and the girl's
suspicions confirmed. A new refinery had just been
erected in 'that tiny Austrian village. Twenty-four hours
later, Eighth Air Force bombers paid it a visit.
? Then there was Rachel Geise, the former Columbia
University professor, who had charge of a hush-hush
0.S.S. setup in Algiers. It was her task to take the
reports that came in from O.S.S. agents all over Africa,
Italy, and France and piece them together into a com-
plete, well-integrated intelligence picture. If anything
was missing, it was up to her to spot it and see to it that
all ??. facts were procured. She got the Legion of
Merit for the job she did.
While this writer was on duty with the staff that
planned the invasion of southern France. he saw some
of Miss Geise's thorough intelligence reports. They even
included the addresses of the thirty-two brothels in
Marseille and the names of their proprietors.
Back in New York City, Mrs. Emmy Rado had the
key assignment of interviewing refugees arriving in
this country from Occupied Europe and Africa. A
pleasant, soft-spoken woman, she could extract the last
morsel of information from a person without his realiz-
ing it. It was Mrs. Rado who came to the r?cue when
the United States Army was searching desperately for
MRS. WALLY CASTELBARCO, daughter of Tosca-
nini, carried vital messages through Nazi lines to the
Italian underground?and once outsmarted the Gestapo.
data on the harbor at Bane, in Algeria. The Army was
planning the November, 1942, landings in North Africa.
Mrs. Rado dug up a refugee who used to five in Bane.
"What's your profession?" she asked.
"Hydraulic engineer," he replied.
That was perfect, but there was an obstacle. Mrs.
Rade) couldn't let him know that the United States was
interested in Bane. So she devised a neat camouflage.
"I'm writing a textbook on the economic life of
Algeria," she said, "and I wonder if you'd help me."
Without his ever suspecting why, she gleaned from
him the details on water depths, piers, pipe lines, har-
bor defenses, and everything else at Bane.
The Army has stated that the material she gathered
was one of the biggest intelligence scoops of the war.
Many O.S.S. women infiltrated the German lines and
worked shoulder-to-shoulder with anti-Nazi guerrillas.
"Artemis" was one. This thirty-seven-year-old Amer-
ican woman, whose real name is still a secret, was
landed in Normandy by submarine, walked right across
France to the Haute-Loire region, and made contact
there with the French Resistance. There she organized
three different bands of guerrillas, taught them demoli-
tion techniques, and personally led them during sabo-
tage operations. On one occasion, she blew up a bridge
all by herself while a German truck convoy was passing
directly over it. A hundred Nazi soldiers were killed.
Another O.S.S. woman, Mrs. Wally Castelbarco,
daughter of the famed conductor, Arturo Toscanini,
lived, worked, and fought with an underground group.
Her band of Italian partisans once shot it out with a
German army unit at a range of seventy-five yards.
Mrs. Castelbarco's mission was to act as a courier
between the Italian underground and O.S.S. headquar-
ters in Switzerland. When the ultrasecret negotiations
for the surrender of the German forces in Italy were
in progress. she made her way on foot through the
Nazi army in Italy, (Continued on page 133)
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(Continued from page 53)
carrying vital messages from the pari-
sans on the movements of the Welirmacht
troops. Nothing fazed her. Not even the
Gestapo patrol that stopped her just be-
fore she reached the Swiss border.
"What's a woman like you doing on
the streets alone at night?" the patrol
leader demanded.
"My husband's drunk," she replied,
"and I'm afraid to go home."
The Gestapo waved her on, and she got
her messages through to Berne.
XIMTIIEN IT came to out-and-out espi-
V)V onage, O.S.S. women shone even
more brightly.
There was "Lillian" (her code name),
who danced in the Folies Bergere every
night and dated German army officers.
She picked up many nuggets of useful
information on the operations of the Nazi
military machine.
Out in the Orient, Rose de Saint-
Phalle, a short, dark-eyed American girl
who was born in China and spoke a half-
dozen Chinese dialects, was on duty in
Kunming. Whenever the O.S.S. wanted
the inside dope on what was happening
behind the scenes of the Chinese capital,
it turned her loose.
Rose was the only American, O.S.S.
officials say, to win the confidence of
Wang Shao-lai, Number Two gunman of
Shanghai and a ranking mogul of the
Chinese underworld. He confided every-
thing to her?from the daily activities of
his seventeen wives and forty children to
the latest news on which Chinese gangster
was collaborating with the Japanese.
Incidentally, a black-satin dress with
a low-cut neckline was not the pre-
scribed uniform for American women
spies. On the basis of the 0.S.S.'s record,
it can be said that the resourceful, adapt-
able woman who was a good listener and
had the ability to inspire confidence in
others was, as a rule, far more effective
than any vamp.
Mrs. Louise Page Morris, who served
with the O.S.S. in London, is cited by the
O.S.S. as an example. They say she col-
lected vast stores of information, not be-
cause she was a slinky siren, but because
she was a fine hostess and a talented
cook. Working over a decrepit two-
burner gas stove in her minute Chelsea
flat, Mrs. Morris concocted such tasty
meals that practically everyone in Lon-
don sought a bid to her dinner parties.
?Naturally, she made it a point to invite
people who had information in which
the O.S.S. was interested.
This is not to say that an attractive
girl with bedroom eyes can't succeed
as a spy. Or that sex isn't important to
a woman in the intelligence game.
Take the case of the woman writer
the O.S.S. sent to Madrid to learn the
names of German spies operating in
Allied countries under the guise of being
Spanish consular officials. She had writ-
ten several books, and some articles for
prominent American magazines. Her "cov-
er" was that she was seeking material
for articles on living conditions in Spain.
The Gestapo was suspicious, but it
made no difference. She arranged for in-
terviews with prominent Spanish officials
and. as an attractive woman with a sultry
figure, had no trouble in striking up a
friendship with an outstanding man in
the Franco regime. For four months. she
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134
.
dangled this Spaniard on a string and
through him discovered the names of
twenty-odd German spies working in
England and the United States.
if RS. DOROTHY HUSTON, the best
JI American undercover agent of them
all, combined both glamour and resource-
fulness in her work. The wife of a
former official of the League of Nations,
Mrs. Huston was a gifted actress, a
splendid linguist, and a person of enor-
mous vusatility. Tall and slim, she ap-
peared aliout thirty-five. To look at her,
no one would have dreamed that she had
three grandchildren.
It was she who cracked one of the
most dangerous espionage rings in the
United States.
One evening, late in 1944, a British
secret-service man stationed at Croydon
Airport near London saw someone slip
a letter to a New York-bound passenger.
He didn't *know what was in the letter,
but it had not gone through censorship,
so he notified the O.S.S.
When the plane landed at LaGuardia
Field in New York, an O.S.S. man picked
out the passenger and trailed him to a
brownstone house in the East Sixties.
It was then Mrs. Huston entered the
scene.
"We want you to get a line on this
guy," Frank Bielaski, the chief of coun-
terintelligence for the 0.S.S., told her.
"Maybe he's harmless. Maybe he's not.
Find out."
Through a few discreet inquiries in
the neighborhood, Mrs. Huston learned
that the airplane passenger was one of a
trio of foreigners who lived in a small
apartment on the third floor of that house
in the Sixties. She also learned that there
was a vacant apartment on the same
floor and that the lower two floors were
occupied by a private school for children.
She had a quiet talk with the principal
of the private school. Within two hours,
she'd been engaged as a French teacher
and given a lease on the vacant apartment.
She didn't make a move to approach
the foreigners. She didn't talk to them
when she met them in the hall; she
didn't even smile.
Her stratagem succeeded. Her aloof-
ness disarmed them, and soon they were
trying to approach her.
"As a new neighbor," one of them said
to her, "we should get to know you."
She ignored him, but he persisted and
finally Mrs. Huston condescended to say
"Good evening."
Within ten days, she had them spilling
secrets all over the place. They were
Polish refugees and actively involved in
espionage against the United States.
Through agents whom they had scattered
around the nation, they were harvesting
military information and feeding it back
to Germany via Argentina. ?
AFTER every other method had failed,
Mrs. Huston loosened the tongue
of Vice-Admiral Eugenio Minisini of the
Italian Navy. In one of the trickiest op-
erations of the war, a-n O.S.S. team
headed by Commander John Shahean
spirited Admiral Minisini out of Italy
during the fall of 1943. The admiral was
taken to the United States along with his
wife, lodged in a big house in New York,
and questioned about the reservoir of
data -he was known to have on the Nazi
war plans. But he wouldn't talk. Every
servant in the house was an O.S.S. op-
erative, but the admiral was so close-
mouthed they couldn't learn a thing.
Eventually, "H-4"?Mrs. Huston's code
number?was put on the job. She was
introduced to Signora Minisini as a Miss
Eileen Donnelly, because Minisini's
mother had been Irish.
"Would you like me to show you
around New York?" she asked the ad-
miral's wife.
Mrs. Minisini was delighted to be
guided around the town, and in no time
the two women were bosom pals. Then
Mrs. Huston went to work on the ad-
miral. She'd learned from his wife that
he was an Anglophobe so she promptly
told him she hated the British. Before
the month was up, she had drawn out
of him much of the information the
O.S.S. wanted.
Dorothy Huston will handle no more
clandestine assignments, though. She
chanced death a score of times and es-
caped unscathed. But two years ago she
succumbed to cancer.
WHAT SORT of women made good
intelligence agents?
At the outset, the O.S.S. enlisted a large
number of rich society girls. It needed
women in a hurry and only in wealthy
circles could it readily find girls who
had lived abroad and knew languages.
Insiders say many of these girls
proved disappointing. They were more
interested in the men they could meet
and the parties they could attend than
in parachuting into enemy-held coun-
tries. "Cocktail commandos," the men
agents called them bitterly.
In general, the O.S.S. got far better
results from women it recruited from col-
lege campuses, newspaper offices, and the
ranks of the WAC. Thirty-seven of its
best agents were missionaries' daughters.
How did the women compare with the
men?
According to Colonel Otto Doering, the
0.S.S.'s distinguished Executive Officer,
"In the face of extreme danger, O.S.S.
women showed courage and ability on
a par with any man's."
Or.S.S. women ran enormous risks. One
girl, operating in German-occupied sec-
tions of Holland, was captured by the
Nazis, beaten to a bleeding pulp, and
raped by fourteen Gestapo men in a row.
Months later, when the Allies liberated
all of The Netherlands, this girl was
located by an O.S.S. mission. She was
virtually crippled, completely out of her
mind, and pregnant. It required long
years of care before she recovered her
mental and physical health.
Another D.S.S. girl parachuted into
France early in 1944 and for five months
traveled up and down enemy-held Eu-
rope, contacting various underground
groups. Dressed like a poor peasant girl,
she carried guns, radios, and other
equipment for the underground right in
front of the Gestapo. Had anyone opened
her old-fashioned straw suitcase, it
would have meant torture for her.
Once a Gestapo agent did halt her.
"What's in -that valise?" 'he asked.
She giggled and answered, "I've got a
load of guns in it."
The Nazi laughed and let her pass. She
had three submachine guns in the valise
at that moment.
ftSS, .EXPERIENCE refutes the charge
that women cannot he -trusted to
keep a secret.
Colonel Russell Forgan, the handsome
Wall Street banker who directed all
O.S.S. activities in Europe, says, "Most
men think a woman is somelne who
shoots off her mouth and tells everything
she knows at the first cocktail party, but
,the fact is that women are a helluva lot
more security-conscious than men. The
average man always has some woman
he wants to impress.
"It never occurs to a woman to tell
man that she is a big shot in the co
munications center or that she is a sec et
agent. Her desire is to interest a man for
herself alone, not for her job."
But the old cliche holds true: If a
woman falls in love with the man upon
whom she is spying, she can no longer
be trusted. Women realize this them-
selves, as witness the O.S.S. woman who
was assigned to "get next" to a German
spy operating in London.
"Make him fall in love with you," she
was ordered, "so he'll reveal his con-
tacts."
Unluckily for the 0.S.S., the German
'spy managed to make the American fall
in love with him. The girl knew what
was happening, though, and she didn't
betray her country. Instead, she went to
her chief and said, "My usefulness to
you is over. Please send me home?soon."
The perfect situation, it seems, exists
when women agents are in love with
the officer "controlling" them. They'll do
anything he asks them to do, and he
doesn't have to worry about their becom-
ing enamored of an enemy mate.
Today the Central Intelligence Agency,
which has assumed the O.S.S. functions,
is very careful to choose only those
women whom it considers emotionally
stable." It prefers married women, al-
though it will use single women who
have both feet on the ground. Women
who are just getting over unhappy love
affairs haven't a chance. They're too likely
to fall in love with the wrong man on
the rebound.
THE PERSONNEL Of the C.I.A. is top-
secret, but it's known that it is using
hundreds of American girls, here and
abroad. Three out of ten persons in
the C.I.A.'s essential Evaluation Branch,
in Washington, D.C., are women, and
collectively, they speak and read twenty-
nine languages. Abroad, C.I.A. has scores
of women at work. Some are active in the
underground railroad that has been get-
ting thousands of anti-Communists out
of Czechoslovakia and other satellite na-
tions. Several have been operating in the
shadow of the Kremlin. Most have been
doing as good a job as ,did their prede-
cessors in the O.S.S.
The Politburo certainly thinks so. It
, recently issued an official pamphlet
warning the officers of the Red Army to
beware of the C.I.A. women who, the
pamphlet said, often ply Russian officers
with liquor to make them talk. "Some-
times," it continued, "they" (the C.I.A.
women) "tryto catch Russian officers
by staging a skillful love story. . . .
Anyone who displays weakness and gives
in to temptation is not guaranteed that
he will not be dragged into a quagmire
of moral disintegration and political
tre,ason."
It is ,tudikely that the C.I.A. women
employ such obvious methods as the
Russians think. But our women in the
intelligence field are certainly not pass,
ing up any chance to get us the informa-
tion we must have to protect ourselves
from another Pearl Harbor.
So, Russians, watch out! THE ENP
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