Julia Pierson: Head of Secret Service

From CNN:

Julia Pierson was sworn in Wednesday as the first female director of the Secret Service in its 148-year history. She took the standard federal oath administered by Vice President Joe Biden with President Obama holding the Bible in the Oval Office.

"As Joe Biden pointed out, this person now probably has more control over our lives than anyone else, except for our spouses, and I couldn't be placing our lives in better hands," Obama told reporters after the swearing-in.

Pierson has been the chief of staff to the director since August 2008. Her 30-year career began in 1983 when she served as a special agent in the Miami field office. In 2000 she was promoted to special agent in charge of protective operations.

FBI Files On Lana Peters

From the Huffington Post:

Newly declassified documents show the FBI kept close tabs on Soviet dictator Josef Stalin's only daughter after her high profile defection to the United States in 1967, gathering details from informants about how her arrival was affecting international relations.

The documents were released Monday to The Associated Press under the Freedom of Information Act following Lana Peters' death last year at age 85 in a Wisconsin nursing home. Her defection to the West during the Cold War embarrassed the ruling communists and made her a best-selling author. And her move was a public relations coup for the U.S.

When she defected, Peters was known as Svetlana Alliluyeva, but she went by Lana Peters following her 1970 marriage to William Wesley Peters, an apprentice of Frank Lloyd Wright. Peters said her defection was partly motivated by the Soviet authorities' poor treatment of her late husband, Brijesh Singh, a prominent figure in the Indian Communist Party.

Women Warriors of Mossad

From Globes:

They are one of the State of Israel's most important assets. If we sleep soundly at night, it's in large part thanks to them. If we win the next war, they will have a considerable share in the victory. Our security is entrusted to their hands, but, despite their importance to the country, you won't read about them in the newspapers, you won't see them on television, you can't applaud them. Recognition and glory are not their lot. You can't identify them, because they operate under cover. The women of the shadows.

Their brains invent daring and ingenious operations that make the difference between success and failure. They bring to bear a capacity to improvise, rare expertise, sophisticated weaponry, command of languages, and psychological insight. They have to get inside the mind of the other.

These women working in secret are senior operatives of Israel's intelligence agency, the Mossad, an organization that needs no wordy introductions about the cunning and boldness of its operations.

They live under threat to their lives, to their families, and to their freedom. They disappear from their homes, emerge under various identities, conceal themselves, rub shoulders with the enemy. It's hard to grasp the price they pay. A spy who is captured in an enemy country can expect tough interrogation, torture, and execution.

See also:

Women of History - The Women of Mossad

Women of History - Mossad, Women & Israel

Confederate Women - Two Stories

From GO San Angelo:

Recently, folks here recognized a lady not too well-known when her burial place in Fairmount Cemetery was singled out for special honors by the local chapter of the Sons of Confederate Veterans.

Mamie Ann Yeary is a special person to folks researching Civil War materials, records and documents.

Despite being handicapped throughout her life, over the years she compiled a fantastic volume of personal stories told by veterans of the conflict.

The book, published in 1912, is titled "Reminiscences of the Boys in Gray, 1861-1865." It's 904 pages and contains memoirs submitted to her by Confederate veterans living in Texas at the time of its writing.

Another woman who did more than her share during that brutal war was Isabelle (Belle) Boyd, an actress and Confederate spy. Although she was a native Virginian, her varied career brought her to Texas at least twice.

Her first trip to the Lone Star State came when she performed on stage at Houston and Galveston theaters. Later, she settled for a time in Dallas.

In 1861, Belle shot and killed a Union soldier who broke into her home.

Noor Inayat Khan

From VOA News:

A campaign is underway to honor Noor Inayat Khan, an Indian woman who spied for Britain during World War II.

Born in 1914, she favored India's independence from Britain. But she put her feelings aside to help the British fight Nazi Germany. She was eventually caught in occupied France and executed at Dachau concentration camp.

Edith Cavell by Diane Souhami

Review in the Financial Times:

The British nurse Edith Cavell worked as part of a Belgian resistance network during the first world war, operating from the training school she had been recruited to set up in Brussels in 1907. The Germans had turned her school into a Red Cross hospital, where she and her nurses treated German soldiers as well as French, Belgian and British. Cavell was asked to help injured British soldiers by resistance leaders who were members of the Belgian aristocracy. She hid soldiers in the hospital, and provided false papers, guides and safe houses en route to Holland.

The school, however, came under increasing scrutiny and suspicion until Cavell and several of her colleagues were arrested. She was tricked into making a false confession; a hasty trial followed, conducted in German, culminating in the death sentence. A series of diplomatic blunders and a lethargic response on the part of the US ambassador in Brussels were insufficient to divert proceedings and Cavell, along with her colleague Philippe Baucq, were executed at dawn on October 12 1915 at the national rifle range outside Brussels.

BBC Interview: Eileen Nearne

From BBC News:

As fresh details emerge about the extraordinary bravery of wartime spy Eileen Nearne, the BBC has unearthed an interview conducted with her for a television documentary in 1997.

Miss Nearne died of a heart attack in Torquay in September 2010, at the age of 89.

In this interview for the documentary about the work of Britain's secret army, Miss Nearne talks about her experiences in occupied France.

Female Spies of WWII

From the Daily Mail:

A glamorous Nazi spy became amorously entangled with two British secret agents in wartime Cairo, previously classified files show.

Sophie Kukralova - codenamed R 37 49 by her German bosses - developed a 'most undesirable familiarity' with the two intelligence officers.

One already married agent offered to leave his wife and marry the blonde while the second threatened to blow her cover unless she slept with him.

And from the Telegraph:

Andree Peel - known as Agent Rose - helped a string of British and American pilots flee occupied Europe.

Winston Churchill wrote her a personal letter of congratulation, which had to be destroyed once she had read it for security reasons. She was awarded a second Legion d'Honneur last year in recognition of her bravery.

She spent three years with the Resistance and recounted her experiences in her autobiography Miracles Do Happen.

The Women of Mossad

From the Telegraph:

Meir Amit, the director-general of Mossad in the 1960s, laid down the rules for kidon women in a document that remains in force today. It contains the following passage: “A woman has skills a man simply does not have. She knows how to listen. Pillow talk is not a problem for her. The history of modern intelligence is filled with accounts of women who have used their sex for the good of their country... It is not just sleeping with someone if required. It is to lead a man to believe you will do so in return for what he has to tell you.”

'Gideon’s Spies: The Inside Story of Israel’s Legendary Secret Service’ by Gordon Thomas is available from Telegraph Books.

The Mystery of "Penelope"

From the Daily Mail:

To her neighbours in the nearby Rue Verdun, Penelope was just another eccentric foreigner living her life as best she could in the heart of war-torn west Beirut.

What has, however, become apparent is that far from being an innocent Englishwoman abroad, Penelope was a Mossad spy trained to use her feminine wiles to inveigle her way into the life of one of the world's most feared terrorists - and then help kill him.

Evidence that has emerged over the years suggests that she was in fact a British woman by the name of Erika Maria Chambers, and she was born and brought up in London as part of a wealthy Anglo-Jewish family.

But there is one further, extraordinary, twist to the story. Erika Maria Chambers, 'Mossad assassin', has a brother. His name is Nicholas Chambers - and he is a QC and leading civil court judge who is a pillar of the British judicial establishment.

US: Women in the CIA

From the Atlantic:

CIA Director Leon Panetta is taking steps to increase the number of women at the highest levels of the nation's most fabled spy agency.

Today, Panetta announced that Stephanie O'Sullivan, formerly the head of the Science and Technology Directorate, has been promoted to the position of Associate Deputy Director --effectively, the agency's third in command. She replaces Scott White, a long-time CIA manager who has decided to retire. Earlier this year, Panetta promoted Sue Bromley to Chief Financial Officer.

The position of Associate Deputy Director replaced the position of "executive director," which has been held by a woman before: Nora Slatkin, who served in the Clinton administration. During the Bush administration, Jami Miscik held the position of Deputy Director, Intelligence. Human intelligence remains a male-dominated enterprise, though the CIA has strenuously increased the number of women it recruits, particularly for the directorate of operations. At the Office of the Director for National Intelligence, one of the six top positions is held by a woman: Dawn Meyerriecks, the deputy DNI for acquisition and technology. Both the DNI's CIO and CFO are women; Priscilla Guthrie was brought to the CIO's job by Blair and Marilyn Vacca was promoted internally.

The U.S. is behind the curve when it comes to promoting women to the top ranks of intelligence services. Britain's Security Service, MI-5, bears the distinction of having fielded the first woman director, Stella Rimmington.

Women in MI5

From Times Online:

In the early days of MI5, most women recruits were recommended by existing members of staff. When, after 1914, demand outpaced supply, the service turned to Cheltenham Ladies College and other leading girls’ public schools and to St Hugh’s and Somerville Colleges at Oxford. Women played a more important role in the security service than in any other wartime government department, maintaining its registry and letter checks which were kept up to date by 130 women clerks. By early 1917, MI5’s Central Registry contained 250,000 cards and 27,000 files on its chief suspects.

During the early months of the war, the registry was “almost overwhelmed” by “the tidal wave of documents” which descended on it. When Hilda Cribb (who in 1920 was to become controller of women staff) began work in the registry in February 1915 she found unfiled papers stacked on filing cabinets. All this changed with the appointment of Edith Annie Lomax as lady superintendent. She proved to be one of the ablest administrators in service history, later becoming the first female member of staff to be appointed MBE (subsequently upgraded to OBE).

The biggest obstacle to female promotion was the general conviction throughout the British intelligence community that women were unsuitable for agent-running. The only woman selected for the first agent-running training course in 1973 was Stella Rimington, later the first female DG. Rimington believed that, in the aftermath of “The Women’s Revolt”, management “were genuinely surprised at the strength of feeling and sufficiently concerned that so many of their good female staff, essential to the running of the service, appeared to be disgruntled, that the policy was changed”. A number of female assistant officers, Rimington among them, were promoted to full officer rank and women began, like men, to be recruited at officer level.

Over the next decade in the recruitment of female officers the service moved ahead of much of Whitehall and most employers in the private sector. By the early 1990s some 40 per cent of its officers were women.

Penny Mirigian

From the Fresnobee:

For 50 years, Penny Mirigian kept the secret about what she really did in the Navy WAVES during World War II. When people asked, she simply said: "I was a radio operator."

"Spy" would have been closer to the truth. From 1943 to 1945, Mirigian was part of an elite group of "intercept operators" who typed up Japanese radio broadcasts to be decoded. The work was top secret.

Famous Five

No, not the book series by fictional author, Enid Blyton, but five famous female spies.

Who are there - here is the list according to CNN:
1. Mata Hari: Margaretha Geertruida Zelle MacLeod (1876--1917) - Having spent time in Java with her husband, Captain Campbell MacLeod, Margaretha returned to Holland and sued for divorce. To make ends meet she took up exotic dancing and the name Mata Hari (meaning "the light of day" in Malay). With her sensual performances becoming the attraction of the major European cities came the men and the gifts for her favors. Many of these favors came from royalty and high-ranking French and German military officers.

2. Noor Inayat Khan: Khan was born in 1914 and at a young age moved with her family first to England and then to France. In 1940, Khan, along with her mother and sister, escaped back to England just before France surrendered to Germany. On September 13, 1944, Khan and three other female British spies were executed by the Nazi SS. In 1949, Khan was posthumously awarded the George Cross.

3. Belle Boyd (aka "La Belle Rebelle"): In 1864, Confederate president Jefferson Davis asked Belle to carry letters for him to England. The Union Navy captured her ship, but the officer in charge fell in love with Belle and let her escape. The officer, Lieutenant Samuel Harding Jr., after being courtmartialed and discharged from the Navy, traveled to England, where he married Belle.

4. Elizabeth Van Lew: After developing a hatred for slavery, Elizabeth returned to Richmond and freed all her family's slaves. She also went so far as finding where her freed slaves' relatives were and purchased and freed them also. When the citizens of Richmond found out that Crazy Bet was an act, they shunned her. However, at her death, the state of Massachusetts placed a memorial marker on her grave.

5. Sarah Emma Edmonds (or Was It Frank Thompson?): In 1861, Frank (Sarah) enlisted in the Second Michigan Infantry and over the next two years not only fought in a number of Civil War battles, but also served as a spy for the Union Army. Solders in her unit called Frank "our woman" because of his feminine mannerisms and his extremely small boot size. However, none of her comrades ever figured out that Frank was really Sarah.


Who would have made your top five list.

Female Spies

The recently released movie "Female Agents" or "les Femmes de l'ombre" depicts five women who were part of the secret world of espionage during World War II.

It put me in mind of other movies depicting women who "fought behind enemy lines" - Nancy Wake "the white mouse"; Violette Szaba "carve her name with pride"; Mata Hari - to name but a few.


Female Spies of World War One - by John Craig
Female Spies in History - About Women's History
WWII Female Spies
Women in Espionage - the Women who were Spies



"Female Intelligence: Women & Espionage in the First World War" by Tammy Proctor

Pearl Cornioley

WW2 heroine, Pearl Cornioley has made news again. Following her death in February 2008, Pearl's wartime records are being released by the British National Archives on Monday 7th April 2008.

According to the article in the Telegraph, Pearl ".....became one of the most illustrious members of the Special Operations Executive - set up to foster resistance to the Germans across Europe during the Second World War - after being parachuted into occupied France. Taking control of 1,500 resistance fighters, she led a number of daring attacks on the Germans and boasted of capturing 18,000 enemy troops."

The International Herald Tribune had this to say:
"She escaped France before the Nazi invasion and returned to Britain via Spain. Upon returning to Britain, she worked briefly at the Air Ministry in London but used her French to gain a slot as a Special Operations Executive agent — one of about 40 women to serve. The Air Ministry became part of the Ministry of Defense in the 1960s while the Special Operations Executive evolved into the Secret Intelligence Service, known as MI6. Early in her training with the Special Operations Executive, supervisors noted that she lacked the natural moxie to excel as an agent, but she compensated with her social nature, innate skill with weapons and useful memory."

Read the Women of History post "Pearl Cornioley Honoured" from February 2008.