Wise gals, p.1
Wise Gals, page 1
ALSO BY NATHALIA HOLT
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G. P. Putnam’s Sons
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Copyright © 2022 by Nathalia Holt
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Holt, Nathalia, 1980- author.
Title: Wise gals: the spies who built the CIA and changed the future of espionage / by Nathalia Holt. Other titles: Spies who built the CIA and changed the future of espionage
Description: New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, [2022] | Includes bibliographical references and index. |
Identifiers: LCCN 2022019091 (print) | LCCN 2022019092 (ebook) | ISBN 9780593328484 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780593328491 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: United States. Central Intelligence Agency—History. | Women intelligence officers—United States—Biography. | Intelligence officers—United States—Biography. | Women spies—United States—Biography. | Spies—United States—Biography. | Intelligence service—United States—History—20th century. | United States. Central Intelligence Agency—Officials and employees. | Discrimination in employment—United States—History—20th century.
Classification: LCC JK468.I6 H63 2022 (print) | LCC JK468.I6 (ebook) | DDC 327.1273009—dc23/eng/20220518
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022019091
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022019092
Cover design: Sandra Chiu
Cover image: © Shelley Richmond / Trevillion Images
Interior art: World map © Oleksandr Molotkovych/Shutterstock.com
Book design by Kristin del Rosario, adapted for ebook by Maggie Hunt
pid_prh_6.0_140847917_c0_r0
For the women who toil,
invisible,
invaluable,
for Laurie
Put yourself behind my eyes
and see me as I see myself,
for I have chosen to dwell in a place you cannot see.
—JALĀL AL-DĪN MUḤAMMAD RŪMĪ
CONTENTS
AUTHOR’S NOTE
November 1953
PART I
“ISN’T THAT A STRANGE PROFESSION?”
1. Jessica, 1934–1944
2. Safehaven, 1944–1945
3. Werwolf, 1945
PART II
“UNSAVORY ACTS”
4. Rusty, 1946
5. Belladonna, 1946
6. Trident, 1947
7. Opera, 1947–1948
PART III
“SHE GETS INTO YOUR DREAMS”
8. Vermont, 1949
9. Kubark, 1950
10. Loss, 1951
11. Aquatone, 1952
12. Petticoat, 1953
PART IV
“FUMBLING IN THE DARK”
13. Farmer, 1954
14. Musketeer, 1956
15. NSG5520, 1957
16. Bluebat, 1958
17. Aerodynamic, 1959
PART V
“THE WORK OF A MAN”
18. Mudlark, 1960
19. Lincoln, 1961
20. Psalm, 1962
21. Hydra, 1965–1972
Epilogue: State Secrets
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
NOTES
INDEX
AUTHOR’S NOTE
The Wise Gals are no longer with us to tell their stories, and yet they still speak. This work of nonfiction was researched thanks to the materials they left behind, which include diaries, letters, interviews, reports, memos, scrapbooks, and photographs. In addition to these sources, the Central Intelligence Agency has released primary documents about the careers of these women and the challenges they faced. All the work published in this book is declassified and was obtained through the Freedom of Information Act.
A large portion of this book is credited to the CIA officers, both retired and active, who contributed their stories and memories. Just like the work these men and women perform, their contributions to the book remain anonymous. For this reason, their names appear as redacted in the source notes, and their own stories, while worthy of telling, have mostly been left out.
Firsthand accounts of historical events are often slanted by those who have lived through them. To limit this, I have used material from archival sources, acquired from multiple countries, to ensure that the material I obtained through these interviews is factual. Occasionally, material obtained from an interview was unable to be supported through outside sources. In these instances, I’ve weighed other evidence, and carefully checked dates and timing, when deciding whether to include these portions within the book. When I’ve chosen to include these firsthand histories without supporting documentation, I’ve noted the instance in the endnotes.
The thoughts and feelings of individuals in the book were obtained through their personal materials and author interviews with those who knew them. All quoted material is obtained directly from primary sources and credited in the endnotes.
This is the kind of book the Wise Gals could not have anticipated would ever be written. In their later years, they watched as their male colleagues became the subjects of multiple biographies, while their lives and accomplishments remained undocumented. Sadly, their stories could not have been told while the women were still with us. If living, neither the identities of the women, nor their work within the agency, would have been disclosed by the CIA. It is only in death that the full measure of their accomplishments can be revealed.
ADDY HAWKINS
LIZ SUDMEIER
MARY HUTCHISON
JANE BURRELL
ELOISE PAGE
NOVEMBER 1953
A small group of women gathered together just a few blocks from the White House to contemplate the dismal future of American intelligence. They had spent the past decade forming the fledgling American espionage enterprise known as the Central Intelligence Agency, breaking new ground for women in the workplace by working alongside men in dangerous, important operations. They’d played an integral part in gathering the intelligence that had won World War II for the Allies, and now they were on the front lines of the Cold War, spreading their network of spies across the world. But at this moment, these female founders were taking a rare opportunity to look inward.
And what they saw made them angry.
Eloise Page wasn’t the kind of woman who was prone to emotional outbursts. Her friends would tell you that when she was upset, her demeanor was usually icy rather than explosive. She had a firm sense of right and wrong, and she never hesitated to reprimand those who crossed a line. Yet on this unusually balmy day in Washington, D.C., her temper was fiery.
For the past few months, Eloise and a group of twenty-two of her female colleagues at the CIA had tackled a seemingly impossible goal: to strip away the inherent sexism that plagued the institution they loved. Women were doing the same work as their male counterparts, Eloise and her colleagues argued, but they weren’t getting the same pay or recognition as the men they worked alongside each day. That had to change. To accomplish this, they had carefully documented the experiences of women at the agency over the course of years. The daring missions. The enormous responsibility. These women had given everything to safeguard America’s security. In fact, some of their colleagues had even given their lives.
Eloise and the other women knew that achieving their aim of equal pay and recognition for their work would not be easy. They met in the evenings, after their regular workday was over, gathering statistics and stories that would prove their case to the higher-ups at the CIA. While the group was officially named the Committee on Professional Women, everyone at the agency jokingly called them the Petticoat Panel. It became a nickname they loathed but adopted nevertheless, as a reminder of exactly what they were up against.
For Eloise, who had spent years overseas working in complex CIA operations, the task before them was rather mundane. They compiled numbers from each department of the agency, took into account the education and work experience of every employee, combined the dry statistics with personal anecdotes, and then prepared their reports. Yet their training in covert operations was aiding their progress in ways their male managers could not have predicted. As they interviewed female employees, they peeled off the niceties that people naturally coated their experiences in and exposed what a career in government service truly looked like if you were a woman.
What they found wasn’t pretty.
Repeatedly they heard frustration in their colleagues’ voices. The number one reason that women were leaving the CIA was not marriage or pregnancy, as so many executives cl
The problem wasn’t that the women weren’t being given responsibility, either; it was that they weren’t being paid for it. Many female employees had advanced degrees and were directing the activities of large teams. They had worked on successful operations and had years of experience in the field. In many cases, they even had the support of male colleagues and the recommendations of their bosses.
Yet they couldn’t get a raise.
As she looked around the room, Eloise realized that she had never worked so closely with a group of women before. No matter whether she was in London, Brussels, Paris, or Washington, D.C., it seemed she was always in a room of men. Nor had she ever known her fellow CIA officers so well. After all, they were (by nature and by profession) a secretive bunch, often scattered around the world in various sensitive locales. But the Petticoat Panel was a chance for her and the other women in the CIA to meet and open up to one another in a way they weren’t usually able to when on the job. While delving into the experiences of the women of their agency, it was only natural for them to share their own backgrounds. When one of her colleagues asked Eloise how she’d managed to secure a promotion from secretary to officer from General William Donovan, the father of American intelligence, after the war, she responded, “Oh, I had the goods on Donovan,” a wicked smile on her lips.
Everyone loved the lively Elizabeth Sudmeier, whom they called Liz. She had grown up on a reservation in South Dakota and liked to tease her friends in the Lakota Sioux language. She had recently completed Junior Officer Training, also called JOT, and was the only woman in her class, so she could report directly on gender discrepancies in CIA instruction and mentoring. “Women in the JOT program need to be more highly qualified than most of the men,” she said.
Then there was Mary Hutchison, a woman who had first been dismissed by the agency as a “contract wife.” The term referred to a woman married to a CIA officer, who was assumed to be trained and employed by the agency merely because of her marriage. Such roles were often entry points for women into the CIA, but Mary—with her proficiency in several languages, her doctorate in archaeology, and her string of fiery comebacks—was uniquely suited for a career in espionage. If only she could get the higher-ups at the CIA to notice her exemplary work.
Eloise had grown closest to the chairwoman of their group, Adelaide Hawkins, whom she called Addy. They were the same age, they both hailed from small towns in the South, and they each had joined the CIA during World War II, before it even officially existed (when it had gone by the moniker OSS, or Office of Strategic Services). Friendly as they were, Eloise sensed Addy’s envy of her overseas assignments. While Eloise had spent years in Europe, Addy, a divorced mom with three children, had been bound stateside. It didn’t matter that Addy’s children were grown, that fathers were allowed to work overseas, or even that she was highly qualified for such positions. Addy was a mother, so she would never be sent overseas; that was that. Annoyed by the inconsistency of the agency, Addy hoped that her work with the Petticoat Panel might spur an overseas assignment for herself.
There were dangers overseas. A few members of the panel knew about another woman, one who wasn’t there that day. Jane Burrell was the model of a tough, successful CIA officer. Working across France and Germany, Jane had wrestled with difficult double agents, charmed deadly assassins, and sent dozens of Nazis to their doom.
With Jane’s example to lead the way, how could the Petticoat Panel not succeed? They had a cadre of smart women who had picked this moment, in 1953, to transform the intelligence agency they had built a decade earlier. It wasn’t just their colleagues who were counting on them; it was the CIA itself. Talented women were leaving the agency, and each dissatisfied officer was fragmenting the future of American espionage.
The panel represented both their opportunity and their legacy, and the senior male administrators felt the crushing pressure of their historic expectations. The stakes were high, and their opponent was unrelenting. “I think it is important to remember how it came into being,” said one of the men, referring to the Petticoat Panel, “because [of] a couple of wise gals.”
PART I
“ISN’T THAT A STRANGE PROFESSION?”
CHAPTER ONE
JESSICA
1934–1944
The message could kill someone. It moved from Berlin to Lisbon to Normandy. Then it was stolen off the coast and sent to Bletchley. Twisted around until nearly unrecognizable, it was shipped off to America. In Washington, D.C., it was jumbled once more before being sent to London and then back to France. The paper swam in a sea of secret messages that formed a flood of intelligence during World War II. Finally, in Normandy, on December 20, 1943, X-2 counterintelligence agent Jane Burrell caught it and read the name that had been hidden between the mixed-up letters.
The name: Carl Eitel.
* * *
Carl Eitel had other names. Ten years earlier, when he worked as a waiter on the SS Bremen, moving between Germany and New York, he had been known as Charles Rene Gross. The waiter had spent long hours detailing the ports of New York in his notebook, with an emphasis on their fortifications and aircraft support. Once in the city, he slipped off to the Roxy cinema and then got a beer at Café Vaterland on the corner of Eighty-Sixth Street and Second Avenue. Relaxed and happy, he casually wandered the streets, stopping at every bookstall he could find. He didn’t look for reading material. Instead, he purchased technical magazines by the dozen. No matter the subject, Eitel wanted them. Although his behavior had been unusual, he’d passed unnoticed at the time. It was 1934, after all, and the borders of America were then wide open for Western Europeans . . . even those with an odd penchant for technical detail.
In his hotel in New York, Eitel took a tube of what looked like modeling clay, working it through his fingers until the material was soft and supple. Squeezing a little into a glass partially filled with water, he stirred the substance until it turned a mustardy yellow color. He dipped a toothpick into the thick liquid and dragged it across a sheet of rough paper, writing sentences that quickly faded as the fluid dried on the page. The rugged bond obscured any imperfections caused by writing with a crude toothpick, and soon the sheet of paper appeared blank again. Eitel then used that same piece of seemingly blank paper to write an innocuous letter to Germany, sharing mundane details of life in Manhattan and how much he missed his homeland. But underneath these pleasantries, the contents of his missive were anything but harmless.
Eitel was in fact working for Abwehr, the German intelligence agency, scouting details about the technological capabilities of the country his homeland would soon be at war with. Of all his various duties in the US in that precarious inter-war period, however, none was more important than recruiting new agents. Earlier in 1934, he had introduced a young Spaniard named Juan Frutos to the world of German espionage. Frutos was at the time a baggage handler who also worked on the SS Bremen. An ocean liner was a wonderful place for a spy like Eitel to enlist new agents: it was full of young people who spoke multiple languages, were accustomed to travel, and were in need of money. Frutos was enthusiastic about working for Eitel, no matter how seemingly inconsequential the mission. On one trip he had extravagantly handed Eitel an envelope, as proud as if it contained Winston Churchill’s darkest secrets. Instead it was packed with the modest request made by Eitel: dozens of postcards, each one depicting a different French warship. Simple, yes—but these sorts of details would inform crucial intelligence for the years and conflicts that followed.
