WOMEN IN INTELLIGENCE: The Hidden History of Two World Wars, solid history of how women have always contributed everything they have

WOMEN IN INTELLIGENCE: The Hidden History of Two World Wars
HELEN FRY
Yale University Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$22.00 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: From the twentieth century onwards, women took on an extraordinary range of roles in intelligence, defying the conventions of their time. Across both world wars, far from being a small part of covert operations, they ran spy networks and escape lines, parachuted behind enemy lines and interrogated prisoners. And, back in Bletchley and Whitehall, women’s vital administrative work in MI offices kept the British war engine running.

In this major, panoramic history, Helen Fry looks at the rich and varied work women undertook as civilians and in uniform. From spies in the Belgian network ‘La Dame Blanche’, knitting coded messages into jumpers, to those who interpreted aerial images and even ran entire sections, Fry shows just how crucial women were in the intelligence mission. Filled with hitherto unknown stories, Women in Intelligence places new research on record for the first time and showcases the inspirational contributions of these remarkable women.

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My Review: Every machine has cogs. No machine moreso than the War Machine, and perhaps the total wars fought between 1914 and 1945 did more cog-making than any others in human history.

As men were perceived as more suitable to the killing parts of war than women, and as modern war is hugely more industrial than at any prior time, who did the admin? Who answered the phones, staffed the production lines, translated the intelligence intercepted in all the newfangled ways?

Women. Not that the men who mostly documented the wars, then wrote about the wars, ever gave them much credit for their work. Comme d'habitude. It does mean that there are tantalizing holes in the records. I hope generations of future scholars will feel the itch to fill them in.

This 2023 book set out to restore the women who worked in the ever-more-important field of military intelligence to their place in the historical record. Author Helen Fry had her finger on the pulse, a pulse that current powers-that-be are doing their best to still in every way possible. The crisis of the World Wars caused old attitudes about women, and society more broadly, to shift. These advances are what make the men (mostly, still men at the top) in charge so uneasy and eager to turn the clock back.

For my part I oppose this. After reading this chronicle of just how central women doing the work that needed doing, doing it well, and maintaining the everyday functioning of the world for the fighting men, you might just agree with me.

Reading the book is not always a joy...Author Fry's narrative voice is well-honed but not always euphonious in my reader's ear...but it's really the sources that let the reader down. Many aren't available, remaining "classified" for some variety of reason. Some were just never there in official records, needing tracking down and interpreting implied or obfuscated truths from elsewhere.

A fan of spy fiction would do well to look into how it was really done by those whose need of answers was pressing. A reader of women's history will find rabbit hole after rabbit hole. The resister of regression will find a pile of reasons not to give up, nor give in, to the regressive pressures on us all.

I want, perhaps naïvely, to believe there are enough of us unwilling to lose what we have all as a society gained to make that our reality.

THE LAST SECRET AGENT: My Life as a Spy Behind Nazi Lines, once there were Giants...very short ones

THE LAST SECRET AGENT: My Life as a Spy Behind Nazi Lines
PIPPA LATOUR with Jude Dobson
St. Martin's Press (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.75* of five

The Publisher Says: After decades of silence, the last surviving World War II British spy reveals the real, untold story of her time as a secret agent in the deadly world of Nazi France.

From a unique and singular voice comes the incredible true story of the last surviving undercover British female operative in WW2. Pippa Latour parachuted into occupied France in 1944 to conduct sabotage and subversion behind enemy lines. Selling soap to German soldiers and hiding codes on a piece of ribbon, she sent back crucial information about troop positions in the lead up to D-Day, and continued her work until Paris was liberated. From her childhood as an orphan in South Africa to her years as an undercover agent, Pippa's story is that of a woman determined to honor her principles and risk her life to fight against the greatest evil of the 20th century.

The Last Secret Agent is a posthumously published memoir, co-written with journalist Jude Dobson. Pippa was decorated highly for her actions, including being made a Member of the Order of the British Empire and receiving the Légion d’Honneur in France. For years, Pippa kept her involvement in the war effort secret from everyone, including her family, but for the first time, her story can now be told in full.

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My Review: It makes me sad that Pippa Latour did not live to see her story told publicly at long last. Sh desreved to be here to hear, if not necessarily accept, our kudos. She was a modest person, and I suspect suffered from some terrible PTSD based on what I read in this book; that's not a person likely to want to stand in fromt of a room full of applauding people. Never mind she deserves the plaudits. Never mind she was angered by online misinformation about the realities of WWII. She did what she did, honored her Official Secrets Act duty, and lived the life she helped make safe for herseld and millions of others.

I salute you, Ma'am. (Royal address use deliberate.)

From her African colonial childhood, where she picked up practical and communication skills easily, to her European youth, where she put every skill she developed to use, hers was a life of intensities sought, mastered, and used for the purpose she chose to learn them for. This kind of mental toughness and goal-driven living is rare. People like Pippa Latour do not get born often. That she lived until she was 102 is astounding, yet utterly unsurprising. It's our good fortune that she decided to tell her story to a qualified journalist...who filled in gaps that inevitably appear in aging memories...in the trained researcher's best-practices way. (Her specialism is in creating WWII informational films and other materials.) There are reconstructed conversations, unsupported anecdotal statements of fact, and all of that must be okay with the story's best reader. It is, I feel sure, inevitable with the stories of any covert operative.

All the verifiable points check out. I'm not inclined to think someone who told this story at this late date, insisting it be brought to the world's attention after her impending death, would lie. I could be wrong. (It happens to the best of us.) But nothing in her account rings false, as happens with other memoirs. I trust her, I never met her, and isn't that just exactly what a truly skilled covert operative could do in her sleep?

A very powerful story...risking life and sanity to defend strangers' right to freedom of thought and of self-determination...told well. Why then do I dock a fractional star? Because sources aren't cited where they exist, and I'm not really sure which non-conversational (I take it as given that any conversation is the product of memory and imagination) parts aren't sourced or at least grounded in source materials. Much as I understand and accept the reality of a covert operator's limited access to documentation, if this story's appearing at all, the Official Secrets Act applies so it was approved in some fashion. What occurred to make that decision possible?

It's a cavil, but it niggled at me.

The effects of her wartime service on her family? Not delved into, though she explains that her reasons for not speaking of it to her ex-husband and children were grounded in the lingering trauma (my term, not hers) and the need not to breach her oath to keep it zipped up tight. makes perfect sense to me. I would say that, if you're looking for salacious stuff, you move on. Pippa is telling us a story her way. That is not going to be full of gossip.

It is a story we badly need to hear. A woman so small, so frail-looking she could pass as young teen chose to risk torture and death and live among the collaborators and the silently acquiescent to work against a great evil, is a role model to any...all...of us living in this ugly, ugly passage of the 21st century. I'm sorry the late, great lady can't tell me this: Did she see our awful present developing? Is that really what opened her mouth at long last?

It wouldn't surprise me one little bit. She was a shrewd observer and a good judge of character.

PROPAGANDA GIRLS: The Secret War of the Women in the OSS brings the underknown role women play in Intelligence to light

PROPAGANDA GIRLS: The Secret War of the Women in the OSS
LISA ROGAK
St. Martin's Press (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$14.99 ebook edition, available now

Rating: 4.25* of five

The Publisher Says: The incredible untold story of four women who helped win WWII by generating a wave of black propaganda.

Betty MacDonald was a 28-year-old reporter from Hawaii. Zuzka Lauwers grew up in a tiny Czechoslovakian village and knew five languages by the time she was 21. Jane Smith-Hutton was the wife of a naval attaché living in Tokyo. Marlene Dietrich, the German-American actress and singer, was of course one of the biggest stars of the 20th century. These four women, each fascinating in her own right, together contributed to one of the most covert and successful military campaigns in WWII.

As members of the OSS, their task was to create a secret brand of propaganda produced with the sole aim to break the morale of Axis soldiers. Working in the European theater, across enemy lines in occupied China, and in Washington, D.C., Betty, Zuzka, Jane, and Marlene forged letters and “official” military orders, wrote and produced entire newspapers, scripted radio broadcasts and songs, and even developed rumors for undercover spies and double agents to spread to the enemy. And outside of a small group of spies, no one knew they existed. Until now.

In Propaganda Girls, bestselling author Lisa Rogak brings to vivid life the incredible true story of four unsung heroes, whose spellbinding achievements would change the course of history.

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My Review: I think most of us know who Marlene Dietrich was; I thought Betty MacDonald was the author of The Egg & I, but that's not the case; none of the others caused even a flicker of recognition.

This, my fellow Murrikans, is not an accident. As covert-operations experts, it was never likely that the four women here...with one obvious exception...would become household names. Even Dietrich's wartime service, though, is very much downplayed and undercredited in biographies of her remarkable life. The others...well...I know we'll all clutch our collective pearls when we learn that they were passed over for promotions given to men they trained. Shocking, no?

Lisa Rogak has set out to tell the details, insofar as available, of the women whose lives were offered in service during a huge global war. The aftermath was predictably enough not glorious. The women are, I'm afraid, not part of the broader public record; that makes keeping track of them in this narrative of their covert activities a matter of noting names. No archive of their careers exists (pace Marlene), so we have little personality development. From divergent beginnings, they converge on a bored, rebellious attitude they are all entitled to. It just does little to keep their characters separate in one's mind. It doesn't help my sense of them as people that, based on the title, I was expecting more or less a Bletchley Park kind of ethos for them to operate together, as more or less a unit, to develop. Nothing could be further from the truth...they barely ever crossed paths and were not in the same kind of circumstances within the propaganda operation.

It's not so much a flaw in my mind as an inevitable consequence of the manner in which these women were treated as fungible, expendable units where their male colleagues were noticed and promoted...often on the backs of the women's efforts. The effect of propaganda on one's enemies is, obviously, a subject of great national importance in today's online world. I shudder to think what a popular entertainer of Dietrich's stature could do with social media at her command. Any one of these rumormongers, these evidence-fakers, these insiders-turned-enemies could do astonishing amounts of damage given free rein on the internet.

Heaven knows their descendants are. We ignore the ways and means of the past at our peril. We're still seeing these techniques used, as refined, against us now.

Why I couldn't reach a fifth star was really down to niggles, like the sort-of-faceless grievance ball the women turned into as I read along. It wasn't avoidable, I understand that we're dealing with people who didn't leave huge divots in the lawn of History here. It was, however, a distraction, so that's why this well-written, researched, and obviously very personally meaningful to the author story doesn't get its optimal five full stars.

THE PERFUME THIEF, WWII espionage in a beautifully evoked Paris setting

THE PERFUME THIEF
TIMOTHY SCHAFFERT
Doubleday
$17.00 trade paper, available now

Rating: 3.8* of five

The Publisher Says: A Gentleman in Moscow meets Moulin Rouge in this stylish, sexy page-turner about Clementine, a queer American expat and notorious thief of rare scents, who has retired to Paris, only to return to her old tricks in hopes of protecting the city she loves when the Nazis invade in 1941.

Clementine is a seventy-two year-old reformed con artist with a penchant for impeccably tailored suits. Her life of crime has led her from the uber-wealthy perfume junkies of belle epoque Manhattan, to the scented butterflies of Costa Rica, to the spice markets of Marrakech, and finally the bordellos of Paris, where she settles down and opens a legitimate shop bottling her favorite extracts for the ladies of the cabarets.

In 1941, as the German's stranglehold on the city tightens, Clem's perfume-making attracts the notice of Oskar Voss, a Francophile Nazi bureaucrat, who comes to demand Clem's expertise and loyalty in his mysterious play for Hitler's favor. Clem has no choice but to surrender fully to the con, but while she knew playing the part of collaborator would be dangerous, she never imagined it would be so painfully intimate. At Oskar's behest, and in an effort to win his trust, Clem recounts the full story of her life and loves, this time without the cover of the lies she came to Paris to escape.

Complete with romance, espionage, champagne towers, and haute couture, this full-tilt sensory experience is a dazzling portrait of the underground resistance of twentieth-century Paris and a passionate love letter to the power of beauty and community in the face of insidious hate.

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My Review: Lush, lovely prose telling a story that made me squirm so hard I wore a hole in my upholstery.

Stories about coercion of trans folks using their identity as trans are not comfortable reads. I do not think this was intended to be a comfy-cozy kind of a read but it was clear in its empathy for its trans main character. So, blessedly, I was not left with the rather unclean film of exploitive appropriative use of trans identity as a negative signifier on my lens into the story.

Still, this story causes me horripilation. As things that have Nazis as the antagonist should.

The felt-like-he-was-factual Oskar Voss, nasty boss Nazi spymaster, based like the rest of the story—as per the author—on real people who were in Paris to escape the judgments of Society in the safety of the big city. Then, the worst-possible worst result happens to them all when the vileness of the Nazis come barging in with their giant, outsized hatreds, and their very overblown sense of purpose. Oskar is typical of the cynical bandwagon-hoppers that puritanical movements attract like horse apples attract dung beetles. He is very much not interested in the ideology of his paymasters. He wants power over others. His means of getting more of his drug is to use whoever and whatever he can to buy himself a seat at a higher-placed table.

Enter Clem(entine). And a lot of Clem's fellow misfits. They need to survive, and their Otherness has equipped them to do this any and every way they possibly can including stealing and blackmailing any and everyone they need to. Oskar wants to ensorcel Hitler with some super-special scent, which TBH just fell flat for me as a motivation...but it led to butch lesbian/transman Clem recounting, for honestly flimsy reasons, her lifetime's-worth of stories to the rapt Oskar. Whatever excuse made that happen is good enough for me.

Clem, a very old person for that era at seventy-two, has Lived A Life, maybe three or even four, in those years. A born tale-teller, as anyone making a living as a con artist and thief operating among the very rich must be, Clem completely wraps Oskar up in the memory palace of the past. How much of it would pass the fact-checking of the internet age, well...who cares. I do not really buy into the motivations of Oskar for any of his actions, but that left me no less delighted to spend time with Clem.

The horrors of Nazi-occupied Paris, the horrors that were to come, all seemed to Clem to be clear because these puritanical control freaks are just like the others from the past. None of it is downplayed, and there are terrible passages in this story, but the way it is presented feels...convenient. Oskar is easily led by his greed for power, Clem is easily swayed by a murky sense of responsibility that all just jelled a bit too patly for this reader.

I will not, though, say anything to discourage anyone who longs for ancestral representation for their own kind to get stuck in right away. I think the transmasculine Clem, while imperfect, is perfectly delightful to spend page time with. The hurts and betrayals of lives long over make for great stories, even knowing they were painful and hard to live. You will come away edified for knowing the honorable, sensible, deeply relatable hero that is Clem.