12 Mar Undercover Girl
Undercover Girl, WWII book by Elizabeth P. MacDonald (later Elizabeth P. McIntosh)
(1947) Elizabeth P. “Betty” MacDonald joined the OSS (Office of Strategic Services) in 1943. She had been a newspaper reporter for six years and lived with a Japanese professor and his wife in Honolulu for over a year while she covered the war, including the attack on Pearl Harbor. Betty’s background and the fact that she could speak some Japanese made her a perfect candidate to join the new “Oh So Secret” wartime intelligence agency in Washington DC.
Her book is a treasure. There is even a two-page introduction written by Major General William J. Donovan, Wartime Director of the OSS. As Donovan explained, “Only a small percentage of the women (who worked for the OSS) ever went overseas, and a still smaller percentage was assigned to actual operational jobs behind enemy lines.”
One of the associates she describes was the “serious minded” Julia McWilliams. Julia ended up married to OSS’er Paul Child and, of course, became the famed and beloved French chef Julia Child.
Betty MacDonald was immediately assigned to “MO,” the morale operations branch of the organization. Her job was to create “black propaganda” and send it behind enemy lines in an effort to alter the actions of whoever reads or hears it.
“Who knows better than a woman how to use the poison darts of slander–the razor-edged rumor. Break a man with the twist of a phrase! Change an attitude of mind with a well placed snicker!” (Jan, a gentleman with MO, explaining “black radio.”)
As an example of “black propaganda” one month her team “produced three forced newspaper clippings, falsified ten diaries, inserted faked Tokyo bomb-damaged photographs in Jap soldier mail.” Wherever they were they had to somehow scrounge up printing presses with authentic paper and ink as well as experts in Japanese handwriting.
What I liked so much about this book was that MacDonald wrote it right after it happened. Details are rich. She wrote with a sense of humor as she described her overseas missions in India, Burma, China, and then back home again. When she wrote about working at the Washington DC compound, she was describing where my mother, Hedvig Johnson, worked from early 1942 until January 1944.
When the war was over the OSS was liquidated. MacDonald wrote her memoirs (this book!) and went on to work for the CIA, the successor to the OSS. In 1998, she wrote Sisterhood of Spies: The Women of the OSS under her married name of Elizabeth P. McIntosh. She was recently honored in Woodbridge, VA as a recipient of the 2012 Virginia Women in History award. At 97 years old, Betty MacDonald McIntosh has lived the remarkable history that so many of us are writing about.
Undercover girl (Classics of World War II. The secret war) at amazon
You can read Undercover Girl at Open Library.
Update: Elizabeth Macdonald McIntosh died on June 8, 2016. As the Washington Post headlined, “… spy whose lies helped win a war, dies at 100.”
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