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Dearie: The Remarkable Life of Julia Child. Julia Cooked Up Double Life As a Spy NBC news McIntosh, Elizabeth P. A Covert Affair: Julia Child and Paul Child in the OSS Maybe it doesn’t matter what we call her – spy or administrator – what she was above all else was an innovative, creative person that conquered life with humor and ebullience.Ĭhild, Julia and Alex Prud’homme. But, despite the facts, people will insist that Julia Child was a spy in the war. Nowhere ever does it state “absent with leave, “ a euphemism for the time a spy spends undercover. Her OSS file is easily obtainable on line. But, regardless, the work was not that of a spy but administrative work. Julia handled her work with the OSS with diligence, humor and grace. McIntosh stated, “ I flew over the Hump in a storm-tossed flight with imperturbable Julia McWilliams, who calmly read a book while all the rest of us were preparing to die.” The plane they took had to fly over the dreaded “hump of the Himalayas,” a particularly high and dangerous mountain peak that had caused quite a number of fatal crashes. McIntosh also relates a story about their transfer from Ceylon to China.
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McIntosh says that Julia had “a sense of responsibility, executive know-how and a trained and imaginative mind, a sense of humor was also obligatory.” McIntosh relates several stories of Julia’s humorous approach to boring filing work including sending tongue-in-cheek instructions that everyone had to initial and threatening Washington with ridiculous consequences if information was not returned promptly.Īpparently, Julia did deal with most situations with humor and aplomb. It was Elizabeth McIntosh, her colleague in the OSS that stated Julia was the “keeper of secrets,” in her book Sisterhood of Spies. “(Still,) Julia had a very responsible job - she handled top-secret material.” “They were not spies in the sense that people think of operational agents dropping behind enemy lines, they were intelligence officers,” Conant said.
BEING A SPY AGENT CODE
She was sent to Ceylon to work for General Mountbatten where she would be head of the Registry, the nerve center of the OSS that stored all of the top-secret cables, war plans and code names of their agents, as Jennet Connant described in her book, A Covert Affair, about Julia and Paul Child’s work in the OSS. Six months later she was promoted again to work on a hands-on, experimental program to prepare fliers who were downed at sea.īut, when a chance to work overseas came, Julia jumped at the chance for adventure. But she was diligent and responsible and, a year later, was promoted to Senior Clerk in Donovan’s office. Initially, Spitz says it was organizing and filing and filing and organizing. Not just any secretary, according to Spitz, she was a junior assistant to Wild Bill Donovan himself, the colorful character who created the OSS. And, by the end of the war, Julia had worked her way up to a senior civilian intelligence officer and, more importantly, the “keeper of the secrets,” according to her biographer Bob Spitz.īut, she did begin her work with the OSS in the capacity of a secretary. Any administrator will tell you that the secretary is the backbone of the office and the most important person there. That’s not to say her work wasn’t critical.
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But, Julia was a spy in the way that a school secretary is an educator. Yes, she did work for the premiere intelligence agency, that part is true. Newspapers across America ran deliciously intriguing headlines such as “The Spy That Fed Me” and “Julia Child Cooked Up Double Life as a Spy.” In 2008, the National Archives released 750,000 pages of previously classified personnel files from WWII, including 24,000 employees of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the forerunner of today’s CIA. MWC does not hold collections related to Julia Child. Note: this blog post about Julia Child was related to a performance at the Museums of Western Colorado’s 2019 Chautauqua event.