Authors: Margit Liesche
Tags: #Fiction / Mystery & Detective / General
This book is a work of fiction inspired by two sets of WWII heroines—the Women Airforce Service Pilots (WASP) and the women in intelligence—and by an actual home front spy case involving a countess-counteragent.
Ten years ago, in casual conversation with a friend, I learned that her mother-in-law had been a pilot during WWII, transporting fighter planes along the East Coast for the military. “She was a WASP,” my friend said.
WWII was a time of tremendous opportunity for women. I knew that. But I had never heard of this elite unit. “That was over fifty years ago,” I said incredulously, doing the math. “She would have just turned twenty-one.”
My friend hauled out her mother-in-law’s scrapbook. We pored over old photos and articles. I learned that 1,074 women were admitted to the WASP; 38 of them lost their lives. Their duties included towing targets for gunner training, conducting test flights, and ferrying every variety of military aircraft, including the biggest bombers and the fastest fighters, all across the continental U.S. The objective was to free up male pilots for combat missions in war zones.
The women delivered a total of 12,650 planes of 77 different types. Problems with machinery, fuel, and weather were routine, and ferry pilots were issued guns to protect the valuable planes they flew in the event of enemy contact. Still, acceptance into military aviation ranks did not come easily. The women endured everything from patronizing raised eyebrows and outright resentment to sabotage attempts. Yet their sense of duty and unwavering passion for flying catapulted the women “above and beyond” it all; of course, it didn’t hurt to have the wind at their tail, provided by the founder and leader, test pilot Jackie Cochran. She won the necessary political battles to keep the program up and running, even expanding WASP flying opportunities along the way.
A thirst to learn more about these women drove me to one of my favorite places, the library. And when I raised the subject with others, I found the WASP to be a well-kept secret. Fine, I thought, I’ll write about these women and their heroics.
I’ll
spread the word about them. My story’s protagonist would be a composite of members of the WASP. Jackie Cochran, the real-life leader, would also play a role. Heady stuff.
I saw writing a story about these women of courage and action as an escape away from my own conventional life. But escape often means venturing far away, only to discover you’ve never left home. I began wrestling down a plot and it was brimming with espionage, a DNA quirk that runs in my blood.
My parents were Hungarian refugees who arrived in the States in 1947 following eight years of missionary service, and the birth of my four siblings, in war-torn central China. Born in Ohio, the family’s “Miss America,” I was weaned on my parents’ tales of isolation and survival, and their arduous exodus to the U.S. Like Tarzan and Jane, popular icons then, they’d lived in the jungle and had their share of heart-pounding adventures: navigating the family in sampans through storms and floods, dealing with coiled cobras and malaria, and encountering Japanese fighting units.
My parents had expected to return one day to China and also to their homeland, but Mao in China, Stalin in Hungary, closed the door. Their dreams adrift with the shifting political winds, we settled into a series of parsonages at outposts in northern Michigan and Minnesota, eventually landing in Illinois.
In 1956, correspondence arriving from family in Budapest prompted hushed discussions. I was a wisp of a child, so I drew little attention anyway. Perched on the stairwell just off the living room, I was an invisible recorder, absorbing my parents’ anguished conversations about the evils of communism, the revolution, freedoms lost, their fears for family—strife, torture, imprisonment, death. It was a time when magazines, such as
LIFE
, printed graphic black-and-white photographs of insurgents, caught and hung by their feet from trees in Budapest’s main square; streets were spattered with bodies and littered with rubble left by tanks. I sponged up the images. And I would never forget the line of teletype that had skittered across the foot of our television screen one grisly day, weeks earlier. “
Civilized people of the world, in the name of liberty and solidarity, we are asking you to help. Our ship is sinking. Start moving. Extend to us brotherly hands. People of the world, save us. S-O-S.”
The plea, from Hungarian freedom fighters believing the U.S. and United Nations had promised to come to their aid, went unanswered.
Waves of Hungarian refugees sought sanctuary in Chicago, a few of them passing through our home. The arrival of a young man, a former freedom fighter in the ’56 uprising, was particularly memorable. Rough-edged porcelain stubs protruded from his gums where his front teeth should have been, and the tips of his fingers on both hands were disfigured. I was at once repulsed and curious. We went for a walk. We strolled and he described the horrors of living under communism, explaining the disfigurement was part of the torture inflicted on him for trying to escape.
So it was that when I began plotting
Lipstick and Lies
, I couldn’t help transmitting what I had absorbed from my parents’ stories and the personal experiences passed on by the freedom fighters into the book’s events and characters.
The investigative process took me to local libraries where I scrolled through reels of microfilm and microfiche, perused WWII magazines and newspapers, and browsed through what few point-on books I could find. A
Look
magazine piece, “How Hitler Can Bomb the Midwest—A Nazi Raid on Detroit Is Not Only Possible but Probable,” showed promise. I copied it.
I devoured biographies and histories of the period, one day stumbling upon a true tale of home front espionage involving female enemy spies. One of them, a countess trained at Ast X, the Harvard of spy schools in Berlin, infiltrated our country in 1941, posing as a lecturer and charm consultant. My definition of women of action and accomplishment had suddenly broadened!
My vision of the book grew and I stepped up my sleuthing. The archives at the Hoover Institute at Stanford were next, and a visit to the Textual Division of the National Archives in Washington, D.C., followed. There, pawing through research stacks, I uncovered a line buried in an FBI letter that gave me goose bumps. The countess-operative, besides heading up a ring of Nazi spies, was “
a known espionage agent who is also working for us.
”
A countess-counteragent! I had found the backbone of my story.
The enticing kernel inspired a letter-writing campaign. I penned requests to the Bureau of Prisons, then the FBI. Soon reams of correspondence and newspaper clippings pertaining to my historical event of choice (many with lines and words blacked out) overflowed boxes stuffed into a crammed office closet. I found magic in the clutter. I frequently sat sifting the pages, delighting in the archaic gems preserved in the old-school style of writing. The treasure trove was also where I prospected for answers to niggling questions about the countess’
modus operandi
. How could she live such a baldfaced lie? And double lie? How could she carry it off for so long, nearly two years?
It was at this stage in the process that I came to know another group of unsung WWII heroines, the women in intelligence. I had already conducted numerous interviews with Peggy McNamara Slaymaker, a former WASP. Then John Taylor, senior archivist at the National Archives in Washington, introduced me to Elizabeth MacDonald McIntosh, a former female operative with the Office of Strategic Services—precursor to today’s CIA. Here was another government branch where groundbreaking wartime opportunities for women had unfolded.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt was the first president to realize that America’s greatest hidden source of manpower was womanpower. Major General William J. Donovan, Wartime Director of OSS, explained the impact of women in his agency in this way:
The great majority of women who worked for America’s first organized and integrated intelligence agency, spent their war years behind desks and filing cases in Washington, invisible apron strings of an organization which touched every theater of war. They were the ones at home who patiently filed secret reports, encoded and decoded messages, answered telephones, mailed pay checks and kept the records. But these were necessary tasks without the faithful performance of which an organization of 26,000 people, with civil and military personnel, could not be maintained.
There were some, however, who had important administrative positions and others with regional and linguistic knowledge of great value in research, whose special skills were employed in exact and painstaking work such as map making, cryptography and research.
Only a small percentage of the women in OSS ever went overseas, and a still smaller percentage was assigned to actual operational jobs behind enemy lines.
*
As the intelligence agency grew in size and scope, a morale operations (MO) branch developed. MO dealt with “black” psychological warfare, or the art of influencing enemy thinking by means of “subtle” propaganda, ostensibly coming from within the enemy’s own ranks. Mrs. McIntosh served with the MO branch and was one of the select few to serve behind enemy lines.
A trip to Detroit, the scene of the crime involving the true-life countess-counterspy, was another must in the discovery process. There, I viewed archives at the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn and visited a maximum security jail where the titled enemy operative and her cohorts were held for seven months before they were sentenced and transferred to federal prison.
Back home, my personal archives, thick with articles and documents, continued to be my inspiration, while snippets of my family history dogged me, insistent on somehow being recycled. It would take seven years before I could successfully weave the true tales into a work of fiction highlighting these women’s stories—both dark and light—as I had set out to do. What remains a mystery are the final chapters of the countess’ life. Correspondence and news articles culled from my archives that bear on this point are included on my web site, www.margitliesche.com. You are invited to review the materials and form your own conclusions. I would enjoy hearing your speculations.
*
From Donovan’s introduction to
Undercover Girl
, a memoir by Elizabeth MacDonald McIntosh, published in 1947. A more recent book,
Sisterhood of Spies
, also written by Mrs. McIntosh, was published by the Naval Institute Press in 1998.
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