An Historical Summary of Women Agents
by Terry Crowdy
Throughout history women have played a crucial and often, leading role in espionage, either as the keepers of safe houses, as informants, accomplices and agents themselves.
Chronology of espionage
The history of espionage can be an extremely frustrating subject to research. What we do know is probably just the tip of the iceberg. Almost every important conflict or phase of Empire can be linked to the theft of secrets somewhere along the line.
I first came to this subject through studying Napoleon. Very few people realise the extent to which espionage put him on the throne of France and maintained him there. When you read the majority of history books you are missing a key element in his story, in his decision making processes. As a parallel, imagine if we didn’t know about the Enigma decryption in the Second World War. Our understanding of the conflict would be hopelessly off the mark. Without knowing what cards were left hidden under the table we will never truly understand historical events.
To begin with, before introducing some of the more famous women agents from history, I thought it might be useful to embark on a little mental exercise to acquaint ourselves with the scale of the topic and timeframe in which our subject exists.
Much of what we study today centres around the Cold War, however, in terms of the known history of espionage, this era constitutes only a tiny fragment. To demonstrate this I have condensed the three thousand year story of espionage and secret agency into a hypothetical 24 hour period.
Counting backwards, using this timescale, if we go just eight minutes back in our hypothetical day we find ourselves at the end of the Cold War, in Berlin twenty years ago with the Wall about to fall. This event marks the beginning of our current age.
I firmly believe historical cycles repeat themselves. A parallel few people make, is the fall of the Berlin Wall came 200 years after the fall of the Bastille in the French Revolution. That event provoked 26 years of war and major upheaval in which States were born and lost. In that context the uncertainties of our times should be less unexpected.
Twenty minutes ago we have the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. Here we have one of the most dramatic potential flash points of the Cold War at its height. This Cold War developed out of the race to develop and stockpile nuclear weapons. Women played a key part in Soviet atomic espionage – as we will see.
Moving back a little further, just under half an hour ago we find ourselves in the Second World War, in the build up to D-Day landings in 1944. Some of the most famous spies in history were at work deceiving Hitler about allied plans. Double agents successfully misled Nazi high command into believing the Normandy landings were only a diversionary attack and that a secret army under Patton was poised to attack at the Pas de Calais as soon as the Germans moved their reserves. Although Garbo is the most famous of these spies– several of the famous ‘double-cross’ agents were women.
33 minutes ago, it’s now 1931 and the true start of the Second World War as Japanese forces begin the invasion of Manchuria. On the evening of 18 September, Japanese sappers staged an attack on their own railway, blaming the action on the Chinese. The subsequent conquest of Manchuria was the climax of a clandestine campaign at the heart of which was the female agent, Eastern Jewel.
40 minutes ago one of the most iconic spies in history was executed. It is 1917 and Mata Hari is about to be shot as a spy. We will return to her case very shortly.
Around 45 minutes ago France was thrown into turmoil by one of the most infamous miscarriages of justice in history – the Dreyfus Affair of 1894. Here a Jewish officer was framed for an espionage crime he clearly did not commit. The real culprit of course was a fellow intelligence officer, who amassed large debts and tried to rebuild his fortune through gambling and stock exchange speculations, with predictably disastrous results. When faced with his creditors, Walsin-Esterhazy resorted to treason and in August 1894 sold secrets to the German military attaché in Paris. His guilt came out in the end.
Less well known is a case the previous decade in which French Minister of War Senator Ernest de Cissey was accused of espionage by a radical newspaper. In 1880 the ‘Petit Parisien’ accused de Cissey of supplying secrets to his mistress, the Baroness von Kaula, a German spy. Although the charges of treason could not be proved and the editors were convicted of criminal libel, de Cissey was still obliged to resign.
Just over one hour ago and despite the best attempts of the Baltimore Plotters, Abraham Lincoln is inaugurated in 1861. The ensuing Civil War was a fertile ground for female agents, many of whom we will soon introduce.
One hundred minutes ago there was a rebellion in Britain’s American colonies. One of the rebels, Nathan Hale, became known to history as America’s first spy. Although Hale was a disaster as a spy, as a martyr he was without peer after being hanged by the British on 22nd September 1776.
Far more successful in terms of intelligence provided was the so called ‘Culper’ spy ring. This network operated in and around New York City, which had been seized by the British shortly after Nathan Hale’s execution. One of the members of the Culper spy ring was Anna Strong who is said to have arranged the dispatch of intelligence reports with a semaphore system using petticoats and handkerchiefs hung from a washing line.
Coming up to the two hour mark Frederick the Great was penning the famous ‘instructions to his generals’ One of the most important pieces of military writing from the eighteenth century, these instructions contained a lengthy article on the employment of spies on all occasions. A great believer in espionage, after inflicting a telling defeat on the French at Rossbach in 1757, Frederick wrote of his French rival: “Marshal Soubise is always followed by a hundred cooks; I am always preceded by a hundred spies … the proportion of spies to cooks in my army is twenty to one.’
Actually, Old Fritz was being slightly unkind as his Gallic foes were no slouches in espionage either. Earlier in the Seventeenth Century French King XIV spied on his English counterpart Charles II with the courtesan Louise de Kérouaille. As mistress to Charles II Kérouaille was well placed to report Royal tattle back to the French court.
Three hours ago it is 1587: Elizabeth I was the Protestant queen of England. She had enemies everywhere after the Pope strongly hinted anyone assassinating her was guaranteed a VIP pass to heaven. The Catholics even had a replacement waiting in wings – Mary Queen of Scots. All they needed was Elizabeth dead. That Elizabeth survived and Mary lost her head was in large part down to spymaster supreme, Francis Walsingham. Walsingham received little official thanks for his efforts. He paid his spies from his own purse and died with enormous debts because of it.
Seven hours fifty minutes ago Hasan-I-Sabbah and his sect of ‘assassins’ were causing havoc in the Middle East. The Assassin’s reign of terror in the Middle East lasted for nearly two hundred years. Their specialty was the murder of prominent rival Shia Muslims. Daggers were the weapon of choice and attacks were preceded by secret intelligence gathering to ensure maximum shock value was attained by their ‘martyrdom’ attacks.
In a parallel with the modern world, those about to embark on suicidal missions believed they would gain entry to a veritable garden of delights on achieving martyrdom. It is commonly believed the word ‘assassin’ originates from the term HASH-Sash-een – a user of hashish. This word was applied to the assassins by their enemies and could mean, not that the assassins used the drug, but they acted insanely as if they were on drugs. Interestingly the assassins referred to themselves fedayeen – a word still very much in use today, deriving from the Arabic for ‘one who is ready to sacrifice their life for a cause’.
In fact there is a strong heritage of secret agency and espionage with early Islam. About ten hours ago, at the Battle of Badr in 624 AD Muhammad and his supporters were at war with the people of Mecca. The employment of spies allowed Muhammad to defeat a numerically larger army and firmly establish Islam in Arabia.
Where there are positive examples of espionage in Islam, in Christianity spying is only associated with the negative. In the Christian calendar the Wednesday before Easter Sunday was traditionally known in England and Ireland as ‘Spy Wednesday.’ This is because sometime around 32 AD - fourteen hours ago in our hypothetical day - this was the day that Judas Iscariot agreed to betray Jesus. In return for thirty pieces of silver Judas betrayed Jesus’ hiding place at Gethsemane on the Mount of Olives. The result of this action is well enough known. 2000 years after his passing Judas’ name still synonymous with treachery and betrayal, and spies have been tarnished by his example.
Going back twenty five hundred years, or eighteen hours we reach the time of Sun-Tzu. His writings show espionage was a highly developed art in ancient China and I have an interesting story of female agents from this era.
Twenty three and a half hours back to one of the earliest surviving example of espionage dating from the time of Pharaoh Rameses’ war against the Hittites in 1274BC. We know the story from a carving on at the Temple of Abû-Simbel. Pharaoh captured two Hittite spies and had his officers interrogate them.
Under repeated blows, the spies revealed Rameses was walking into an ambush. Pharaoh was therefore able to bring up reserves and avert disaster at what became known as the Battle of Kadesh.
The example of Kadesh is more or less contemporary with the Biblical stories of Moses and Joshua using spies in the quest for the Promised Land. The story of Joshua sending spies into Jericho is well enough known and provides us with the story of Rahab the harlot and the first ‘safe house’ in history.
Finally, a full twenty-four hours ago in 1323 BC, the first recorded secret mission in history. The earliest secret mission we know of involves Queen Ankhesenamen, widow of Tutankhamen.
Trying to retain her position as Queen, the widow petitioned the Hittite King asking for a prince to marry as she did not want to marry ‘one of her subjects.’ A candidate was chosen, but was mysteriously murdered on his way to Egypt. The Queen asked for a second prince but the king was naturally suspicious of her motives given the death of a son. He sent an ambassador to negotiate, asking him to secretly find out what was really going on in Egypt and if he could trust the Queen.
This secret part of the ambassador’s mission sets the precedent for the so called ‘Legal resident’ spies now so common in embassy missions. They are nothing more than an ‘agreed spy.’
This three thousand years in twenty four hours only deals with recorded history. Of course Darwinists would have us believe human history goes much further back before the Biblical era, albeit into a time populated only by myth and legend.
With no firm dates to anchor on, attempting to sort out a chronology of ancient times will keep academics arguing for decades, but from our point of view, it is useful to see how long the ‘Great Game’ has been in play.
We know espionage was an important part of statecraft in ancient India. Brahmin priests were the guardians of knowledge which passed from generation to generation aurally. Information was not written down, but memorized through a process of constant recital. This makes it very hard to apply dates to the knowledge, but we could be looking at anything up to 10,000 years ago. On our earlier time scale that is something like another seventy two hours before the present. By comparison the Cold War occupied a time period of something like twenty minutes.
Many of these ancient principles were later codified in the Arthasastra, a guide to kingship written in India sometime shortly after Alexander the Great invaded the subcontinent. The Arthasastra is an amazing source on ancient espionage. It covers almost every eventuality in the employment and usage of spies, both as a method of internal police and as a potent weapon in war. In places it reads as an assassination manual, providing a lethal menu of poisons and the method of their concoction. It also details the role of women in espionage and I would like to begin my survey of women spies in this era.
The ancient Indians perfected the use of female spies and agents, realising the glaringly obvious fact that, through the lure of seduction, even the most powerful of men could be made vulnerable.
One of the most important classes of female spy were the Bhikshuki. These were impoverished widows from the religious Brahmin caste. They were very intelligent women wanting to dedicate their lives to asceticism. Such women were highly honoured in Royal harems and would also have access to the residences of the king's prime ministers, thus making them very well placed to gather secrets.
The Arthasastra mentions how Bhikshuki were to use ‘secret messages’ to send intelligence reports back to their controllers. Confirmation that ‘secret writing’ was known to women comes from the Kama Sutra, which was written about 500BC. This manual of the erotic arts states that women should be skilled in ‘the art of understanding writing in cypher’, although it must be said this was generally to maintain a veil of secrecy over their love affairs not matters of state.
The ancient Indians perhaps provided us with early honey traps, with female spies at the forefront of counter-espionage operations. Foreign spies were known to frequent liquor bars, so operating in the guise of actresses, female spies skilled in linguistics would seek them out, get them drunk and murder them.
Poison was the weapon of choice for female spies and there were a number of ingenious methods of delivery. Women posing as food vendors could cause havoc to an enemy army by selling poisoned food, while others stationed in a harem could blow a poisonous powder over a sleeping man, or less subtly, throw a poisonous snake at him.
Perhaps the most cunning means of delivering a poison was the use of Vishakanyas or 'poisonous damsels'. The Vishakanyas were female courtesans who from early childhood were given doses of poisonous herbs or the venom of snakes and scorpions. By the time they reached adolescence, although they themselves had become immunised to the venom, they had become deadly poisonous to those who had contact with them - especially if the contact was intimate. As with the legendary Sumerian female demon Succuba to whom they have been compared, a night of passion with a Vishakanya was likely to be fatal.
Image of the female spy
Returning to somewhere nearer the present, I’d like to ponder for a moment the popular image of women spies. Our views of espionage are heavily influenced by Hollywood and in particular the James Bond movie franchise. In truth, for most people the role of women in espionage equates to the phrase ‘Bond Girl.’ Yes, glamorous women are sometimes involved in espionage, but not necessarily as spies.
One of the most iconic images of ‘espionage’ we have in Britain is from the infamous Profumo affair of 1963. Minister of War John Profumo had an affair with a show girl called Christine Keeler. At the same time Keeler was in a relationship with Captain Yevgeny Ivanov, the assistant naval attaché in London, and a known GRU military intelligence officer. The fear was Ivanov was using Keeler to blackmail Profumo into providing secrets on atomic weapon deployments.
Here Christine Keeler is seen provocatively sat astride her chair. This is what many people have in their minds as the female spy – it corresponds to the stereotype of the ‘Bond Girl’ image. Actually it appears Keeler was very much a pawn rather than agent-provocateur in the scandal.
In contrast when confronted by the face of a real woman spy it came as something of a shock to the British public. Melitia Norwood’s involvement in espionage was long running and fairly damaging. Recruited by the Soviets under the codename HOLA in 1937, Norwood supplied secret information on nuclear research, including schematics for the British atom bomb as early as 1945. Her treachery was perhaps on a par with Klaus Fuchs and other ‘atomic spies’ of the early Cold War era. However, Norwood’s involvement was only revealed by the defection of Vasili Mitrokhin in 1992. When the news was made public in 1999, given her advanced years, the authorities decided not to prosecute.
Compared to the fate of Ethel Rosenberg, Norwood was extremely fortunate. The Rosenberg case is one of the most infamous of the Cold War. To give a summary of it, Ethel’s husband Julius was an electrical engineer who joined the Army Signal Corps in 1940. Julius and Ethel were both communists and met through membership of the Young Communist League. In 1943 Julius Rosenberg began providing information to the NKVD. Ethel’s brother, David Greenglass was employed on the Manhattan Project and he was talked into providing secrets to the Rosenbergs.
This all came out in 1950 when the Rosenberg’s and their accomplices were arrested. Both Ethel and Julius Rosenberg were sentenced to death and went to the electric chair in June 1953. They were the first civilians executed for espionage in United States history.
It is still debatable to what extent to Ethel was genuinely guilty, or if she was only guilty by association with her husband. Much of the evidence against her was based on her brother’s testimony – Greenglass later admitting he had testified against his sister to protect his own wife. It is also unclear what value the Soviets put on the secrets provided. Some have concluded they were only minor couriers.
However, the case should be seen in the context of the era. In 1948 there had the Berlin Airlift; the Soviets exploded their first atomic bomb in 1949 and the Korean War erupted in 1950. With such a succession of seismic events, a deterrent was required against further treachery.
Returning to the Melitia Norwood case, it is interesting to look at her motivation. She was not blackmailed or tricked into providing secrets. She was not short of cash: she was motivated ideologically. She told one interviewer: "I did not want money. It was not that side I was interested in. I wanted Russia to be on equal footing with the west … "
To understand her motivation it is important to see their time in context. Nationalism had resulted in the slaughter of the First World War; capitalism had caused the Great depression. For idealists only two options remained: Communist or Fascism. It is unsurprising then that arguably the most successful female spies were those Soviet agents at work between the 1930s and 1950s.
The best known of these female ‘illegals’ went by the codename SONYA. Born with the name Ursula Kuczinski, Sonya was a German Jew. After joining the Communist Party she accompanied her first husband Rudolf Hamburger to China in the 1930s. Her husband was involved with Soviet intelligence and she was also recruited after meeting the famous Soviet spy Richard Sorge. He suggested Sonya went to Moscow for training.
Prior to the Second World War, the Soviet Union’s penetration of Germany was conducted from Switzerland. This landlocked country bordering Italy, France and the Nazi Reich was the perfect location for such activities and the Soviets succeeded in building up a very strong network there: one of the most famous in the war, in fact.
Swiss operations were controlled from Moscow by GRU officer, Maria Poliakova AKA Gisela. Under her stewardship three independent networks were combined to form what some call ‘Gisela’s Family’ and others the Lucy Ring.
The primary source of intelligence was LUCY, the codename of an ex-pat German Rudolf Rössler. LUCY had a number of informants well placed in German high command. The actual identity of these sources was never revealed: some believed LUCY was actually supplied with intelligence by the British who wanted a backdoor to influence Soviet decision making.
Others believe the most important of LUCY’s informants – a source known as Werther – was none other that Hitler’s deputy, Martin Bormann. Regardless of the truth, LUCY supplied this information via a cut out to his case officer, Rachel Dübendorfer (AKA Sissy). From there the intelligence was passed to a Hungarian named Alexander Rado.
In 1940 Rado had been put in touch with Sonya. He desperately needed radio operators to stay in contact with Moscow should Hitler and Stalin go to war and Sonya facilitated this. She recruited two English veterans from the International Brigade fighting against Franco in the Spanish Civil War and trained them up for Rado. Thus the chain from Lucy to Moscow was completed.
Although Stalin was initially mistrustful of LUCY he had changed his tune by the battle of Stalingrad. Information supplied by LUCY allowed the Soviets to redeploy reserves to the region and thus prevented the German advance from succeeding. The crowning achievement of the LUCY ring came before the Battle of Kursk in 1943. Forewarned of the German plans, the Russians were able to spend four months preparing for the battle. When the Battle opened on 5 July, the Russians knew the exact time of the German zero-hour, so, ten minutes before it, they opened up on the German positions with artillery and launched a massive pre-emptive air strike. After Kursk there was only ever going to be one winner on the Eastern Front.
Sonya was not destined to remain in Switzerland to take part in these successes. She was needed for work in England. She married one of her English radio operators to get a British passport and entered the country in February 1941.
Taking up residence in the Oxford area, she was put in contact with ex-pat German physicist Dr Klaus Fuchs. Fuchs was working on the development of an atomic bomb at Birmingham University and was recruited as an agent by Sonya’s brother, Jurgen Kuczinski who was also a soviet agent.
Fuchs began meeting Sonya and passed her secrets for transmission to Moscow. When Fuchs was transferred to America in 1943, Sonya instructed him on how to remain in contact with Soviet agents.
Sonya remained in Britain committing espionage. It was only in 1947 she came under scrutiny when one of the British radio operators she had recruited for the Lucy Ring defected from the GRU to MI5. It was not until the arrest of Klaus Fuchs in 1950 that Sonya finally called quits on her profession. She returned to Germany, taking up residence in East Berlin where she remained until her death in 2000.
Interestingly, according to one interview she never regarded herself as a spy, but as a member of the Red Army involved in the reconnaissance service. Meilita Norwood gave a very similar justification: “I never considered myself a spy, but it's for others to judge."
Guilty, in my book.
Other than Ethel Rosenberg there were a number of female Soviet ‘atomic spies’ at work in America. The full extent of their activities is a matter of some dispute and will not be resolved without further classified document releases.
Chief among them was Elizabeth Zarubin, the wife of the NKVD’s ‘resident’ intelligence officer in the United States from 1941 to 1944.
Elizabeth had been engaged in intelligence work herself since 1919, working as an ‘illegal’ in Turkey and Germany where her husband was responsible for recruiting a leading member of the Gestapo. By 1941 she was a captain in the NKVD. Where ‘Sonya’ was employed by the Red Army, Elizabeth was employed by the political branch and the fore-runner of the post-war KGB.
She was certainly active in the United States. According to the memoirs of Pavel Sudoplatov her prime responsibility was to cultivate sympathies with the Oppenheimer family. A word of warning; like all memoirs one has to be cautious, but taking Sudoplatov at his word, Oppenheimer’s wife Katherine was sympathetic to Communist and Left Wing groups. This was Elizabeth’s way in.
At no time is Oppenheimer accused of being a Soviet spy; instead he is described as being sympathetic, of allowing himself to be persuaded to take on anti-German fascist scientists like Klaus Fuchs and employ them in the Manhattan project. Elizabeth Zarubin is said to have come to a similar arrangement with physician George Gamov. A Russian émigré, Elizabeth is said to have threatened Gamov with retribution against his relatives back home. Faced with this Gamov is supposed to have provided the names of scientists with left wing sympathies who might be recruited as informants.
Elizabeth also had a hand in the case of two deep cover agents on the West Coast. One was a polish dentist codenamed Chess Player. The other was an informant in the Radiation Laboratory in the University of California in Berkeley.
Another of Elizabeth’s recruits was said to be Margarita Konenkova. In 1998 a series of ‘love letters’ were discovered addressed to Konenkova from Albert Einstein. Dated from 1945 and 1946 the letters show Konenkova had become close to the great scientist. The inference being this was another Soviet attempt to gain secret information on the Atomic program.
In the meantime, Elizabeth’s husband was denounced as a double agent by Lieutenant colonel Mironov, one of Zarubin’s subordinates. In the subsequent investigation, ZA-rubin and his wife were cleared, while Mironov was arrested for slander. The pair returned to the USSR in 1946. If Sudoplatov’s memoirs are correct they show the Rosenbergs as relative small fry in comparison to the network of informers among leading scientists working on the development of atomic weapons.
This claim may not be so far-fetched after all. Many of scientists like Oppenheimer were pacifists at heart. They feared the awesome potential of the weapon they were creating and saw themselves as members of a broader world-wide scientific community. Some believed their work on developing a bomb would actually be enhanced if they shared information with Soviet scientists. Is it so hard to believe they tried to do this through the back door?
Further indication of female involvement in the theft of atomic secrets comes with Lona Cohen, the courier used by Klaus Fuchs in New Mexico to his control officer Anatoli Yatskov in New York.
Lona Cohen had been recruited by her husband Morris – a veteran of the Spanish Civil War where he had been recruited and trained as a spy by the Soviets. Lona was initially reluctant to get into espionage, fearing she was committing treason. Morris talked her round to the idea spinning her a line about “universal truth and justice.”
Acting as a courier, Lona Cohen excused her frequent trips to New Mexico explaining she was visiting a sanatorium there as a cure for tuberculosis.
When the Rosenbergs were arrested, the Cohens fled to Moscow. From there they were reinvented as a New Zealand couple under the names of Peter and Helen Kroger. They were given a new assignment in Britain providing radio and technical support to KGB agent Gordon Lonsdale. They were finally arrested with Lonsdale in 1961. After twenty years in jail they returned to Moscow.
Just to show the Soviets did not have all the luck, the case of Elizabeth Bentley is a timely reminder of what can go wrong when an agent defects. A member of the American communist party, Bentley became involved in espionage after obtaining a post in the Italian Library of Information in New York City. This was fascist Italy's propaganda bureau in the United States. She then approached the Communist Party telling them she was willing to spy on Italians. She was put in touch with an NKVD officer, Jacob Golos. Bentley believed she was procuring information for the American Communist Party alone, and was apparently unaware of Golos’ links to the NKVD. Apparently it took her two years to realize this, despite becoming lovers with Golos.
Golos used Bentley as a courier and also to run a front business cover operation. When Golos died from a heart attack in 1943 Bentley stepped up and took full control of the network which included important sources in the War Production Board. As her sources were considered very important by the Soviets, Bentley came under pressure to hand all her contacts over to a Soviet Agent. She did not want to do this and became depressed, a problem exacerbated by heavy drinking and mourning the death of Golos.
By the end of the Second World War Bentley had lost all her contacts and her position in the front company. She came under increased pressure to defect to the Soviet Union and when she appeared reluctant there was some talk about having her liquidated. Bentley continued to resist Soviet pressure and went to the FBI. In a series of interviews she implicated scores of people she believed were Soviet agents and informants. Many of these had already been implicated by earlier defectors such as Igor Gouzenko – the man who famously went to interviews wearing a paper bag on his head to shield his identity.
Unfortunately, although the FBI tailed something like 80 suspects they were frustrated in their attempts to prosecute. J. Edgar Hoover courteously told the British details of the defection. What he did not know was the British secret service had been penetrated by a group of communist spies since known as the Cambridge ring. Penetration agent Kim Philby alerted Moscow what had gone wrong and allowed them to shut down all contact with Bentley’s agents before the FBI could build cases against them.
WWII female agents
This ideological motivation was not confined to agents of the Soviet Union. During the Second World War women played an important role in the conflict. Women worked in the factories and as part of the air defence forces. Women also played an important role in the Secret War, providing code breakers and even frontline secret agents parachuted into France to work with the Resistance.
Women were particularly important in resistance work. In the occupied territories men of military age were conspicuous. The majority of young Frenchmen were either held prisoner in German POW cages, or were employed on various Government or Nazi work schemes. Women were far less conspicuous and were better able to move around and work as couriers between resistance groups. Women were also well placed to work as radio operators. The Germans had developed a sophisticated radio detection service. If resisters broadcast from the same address night after night it would only be a question of time before the Gestapo came knocking. The key to survival was moving from safe house to safe house, night after night. This of course entailed risk, and again women were marginally less likely to be stopped.
The records of the Special Operations Executive show that 49 women were sent into France, 12 of whom met their end in Nazi concentration camps like Ravensbruck and Dachau. Female agents were told the hazardous nature of what was being asked of them and what they might expect if captured, but they were encouraged to volunteer all the same.
One of the most famous of these female agents was Nancy Wake a native of New Zealand who grew up in Australia and moved to France where she married a French industrialist in 1939. Living in Marseilles, Wake joined the Resistance as a courier and worked on an Allied escape network.
Hunted by the Germans who called Wake the ‘White Mouse’ she escaped over the Pyrenees to Spain and travelled to Britain where she joined SOE. Wake was then parachuted back into France and by April 1944 ended up in command of a maquis of several thousand resisters.
Pearl Witherington was another of the most successful female agents. Raised in France she was the perfect choice as an agent. Initially sent to France as a courier, she ended up in command of a sizeable army of resisters.
Witherington was involved in one of my favourite stories of French Resistance. All over occupied Europe industrial resources were put to work for the Nazi war effort. In France this applied to the Peugeot automobile works. Allied bombers attempted to attack the target but missed and hundreds of innocent French civilians were killed when the bombs landed on their town. SOE agent Henri Rée came up with a solution. He visited the owner of Peugeot and offered him a deal. If he allowed SOE access to sabotage the plant, Rée would call off future Allied bombing missions. Rudolphe Peugeot agreed to the request and a precision attack late in 1943 knocked the plant out of action.
Following this successful raid, British Bomber Command offered SOE a fixed time period to offer similar ‘blackmail jobs’ to other industrial targets. Next up was the Michelin factory. They were offered the same deal as Peugeot: precision sabotage or carpet bombing. Michelin told them to get lost.
Witherington made a reconnaissance of the area and noticed the anti-aircraft defences were fairly light. She sent a message back to London by Lysander aircraft, writing: “I hate to suggest this bombing of Michelin but ... I think it would give the management a lesson.” The bombers went in and on 5 April 1944 she reported back that the plant had been destroyed.
There is a slightly bitter postscript to Witherington’s story. Governments prefer to keep their clandestine activities secret and there is often a reluctance to draw attention to these actions by giving much official recognition to the participants. SOE was a civilian organisation and so agents were therefore technically ineligible to receive military decorations. After the war Pearl was therefore offered a civilian award – an MBE. She declined this ‘honour’ claiming there had been ‘nothing civil’ about her actions.
Female ‘Double Cross’ agents
The use of double agents for deception in the Second World War is well enough known. Among the many agents run by the British ‘Twenty committee’ there were three women.
The first was a subagent of the Yugoslav spy, Dusko Popov. Codenamed Gelatine, Friedl Gartner was an Austrian socialite living in Britain. By attending social occasions, Gelatine provided a plausible source for supplying political information. The information was in fact all provided to her by her MI5 case officer. All Gartner did was phrase the information in her own style and then have it written in secret ink.
These reports were echoed by another socialite spy codenamed Bronx. The daughter of the Peruvian chargé d’affairs in Vichy France, Elvira Chaudoir had lived in England since the beginning of the war. Bronx was recruited by the Germans during one of her visits to Vichy France. In return for economic and political intelligence, they offered her a salary of £100 a month. Unknown to the Germans she had already offered her services to MI6.
She was highly trusted by the Germans and sent more than 60 letters to a cover address in Lisbon in the run up to D-Day. These letters helped deceive the Germans about the invasion of France, which Bronx reported would come through France’s western Atlantic coast.
Perhaps the most interesting of the female double agents was Treasure. An émigré Russian brought up in Paris, Lily Sergeyev was recruited by the Abwehr in late 1940. She volunteered for a mission in Britain on the back of having relatives in the south west of the UK. She received extensive training and in June 1943 was sent to Spain from where she sought passage to Britain.
While in Madrid she made an approach to the MI6 representative at the British embassy. She explained her mission and offered to come under Allied control if she was permitted to travel to the UK. The British agreed.
Before leaving Spain, Lily Sergeyev made one demand from the British. She knew about the strict quarantine laws for animals entering the country, but she wanted to take her pet terrier with her. This clause became a major obstacle in the smooth running of the case.
To cut a long story short, the dog was left behind and died in quarantine. Treasure held MI5 squarely to blame for this and threatened to take revenge. A week after beginning transmissions, on 17 May 1944 Treasure informed her case officer that she had been given a security code to insert in her messages if she was working under British control. At this point Treasure was part of the D-Day deception scheme and it was feared if the Germans realised she was under British control they might scrutinise their other agents in the UK. Made just weeks before D-Day was about to go ahead, the threat to blow her case was extremely worrying. As a precaution all future messages were sent by a substitute radio operator.
There were many other women spies at work in World War two, the cases of which could keep us going all day. The treacherous double agent in the French Resistance, Mathilde Carré; the exotic dancer, Josephine Baker; the Nazi invasion spy Vera Erichsen; American OSS agent Virginia Hall, the list goes on. However, to provide a rounded summary of the topic we must move further back in time to the previous Great War of the Twentieth Century.
Mata Hari
Perhaps the most famous female spy in history is Mata Hari. I find this deeply ironic as, in my opinion, she was one of the least successful espionage agents of her era.
Before the First World War, exotic dancer Mata Hari had attracted a string of lovers, including Royals, high ranking politicians and soldiers. It was her endless desire to acquire the attention of power-broking men that ultimately led her into trouble. Performing in Germany just a few months before the outbreak of war in 1914, French spies in Berlin apparently saw Mata Hari consorting with members of the German Secret Service. Further investigations revealed Mata Hari’s affairs with the German Crown Prince and the Dutch Premier. Then, on her return to Paris, she was believed to be a mistress of the Minister of War and an official high up in the Department of Foreign Affairs. Her activities bore all the hallmarks of an active, busy spy seducing her way to the heart of government.
Despite her being under constant surveillance, the French could find no evidence against her, nor her ‘letter box’ for reporting the intelligence she was no doubt collecting on behalf of Germany. In the absence of proof, the French Deuxième Bureau deduced she might be using the legation of a neutral country to transmit messages to her German employers. It appears not to have occurred to them she might not be a spy at all.
When she was blocked from visiting a wounded airman she had fallen in love with, Mata Hari approached Georges Ladoux, head of the Deuxième Bureau. In return for a pass, Ladoux asked Mata Hari to spy for the French.
Mata Hari was a Dutch national and therefore neutral. The French wanted her to use this neutrality to get into occupied Belgium and to renew her acquaintance with the Crown Prince of Germany. Travelling to Belgium by boat from Spain to Holland, Mata Hari’s journey took her to Britain. The British suspected she was a German spy and sent her back to Spain with a stern warning she was playing with fire and ought to quit while she was ahead.
Alas, Mata Hari ignored this advice. In Madrid she began an affair a member of German intelligence. This proved her undoing. Learning of the affair the French at last claimed they had proof of her being a spy.
Her trial came at a time when the French government was under heavy criticism for its management of the war, and also when there were widespread mutinies among soldiers in the field. Without any real proof and despite Mata Hari being a citizen of a neutral country, she was found guilty of espionage and sentenced to death by firing squad.
There were far more effective female spies than Mata Hari active in the First World War. While Mata Hari dug a grave for herself in Madrid, agent Marthe Richer had succeeded in penetrating German Intelligence by becoming mistress to the German naval attaché in Madrid. Known by the codename ‘the Lark’ Richer succeeded in locating German U-Boat refuelling points on the Spanish coast and the routes taken by German agents across the Pyrenees.
Despite good service, typically enough she was snubbed at the end of the war because of her affair with a German. She moved to England, remarried and her contribution was only recognised with a Legion of Honour in 1933.
One of the most productive female agents of the war was the Frenchwoman Louise de Bettignies who worked for the British under the nom-de-guerre ‘Alice Dubois.’ A native of Lille, de Bettignies had fled as a refugee to Britain where she was recruited, trained and sent back behind enemy lines.
De Bettignies assembled her own network of sub-agents, chief among them a chemist who could produce secret inks and forge passports. Once a week intelligence reports were smuggled into neutral Holland from where they were forwarded to her case officer. After several months the Germans began to clamp down on the routes to Holland. After several close-shaves de Bettignies was finally caught. Confined in a Brussels prison she was sentenced to death on 2 March 1916.
This sentence came on the back of the execution of British nurse Edith Cavell the previous October. Although the Germans were perhaps justified in charging Cavell with espionage and heading an escape network, putting a nurse up against the wall and shooting her proved as bad for PR as sinking the Lusitania. Because of this Louise de Bettignies was spared the death sentence, in favour of life in penal servitude. A bullet might have been kinder. She was extremely ill treated in captivity and died just weeks before the end of the war in 1918.
The two oldest professions
Moving in a different direction, it is often said that spying is the second oldest profession after prostitution. It is also true that the two oldest professions are very often intertwined.
During the Second World War male agents of the SOE were warned against using brothels as safe houses. They were cautioned that European prostitutes were often police informants.
This is true enough, and the practice appears to hark back at least as far as Napoleon’s era. Napoleonic France was a perfect example of a police state at work. Under the guiding hand of Police Minister, Joseph Fouché spies were installed at every level of society – not least among the brothels tending to the needs to Napoleon’s many soldiers. If the soldiers grumbled –and they often did- the cause of discontent was relayed up the chain of informants.
The arrangement between harlot and spymaster was formalised in Germany by Bismarck’s spy master, Wilhelm Stieber. In 1853 Stieber was director of the Security Division at Berlin. Thereafter he embarked on a number of police-related cases through which he became fascinated with the world of high class prostitutes and their rich clientele, who were often high ranking officers and members of government. He quickly realised these men would be extremely vulnerable if the prostitutes acted as agents of a foreign power.
Thinking it best to have these women on his side, Stieber helped establish a ‘Prostitutes Recovery Fund.’ The whole vice trade became much more regulated and in return for his favour, prostitutes began to supply Stieber’s officers with information relating to crimes. Before long they had became the best police spies in the city.
Stieber continued this practise when he went on campaign with Bismarck in the Franco-Prussian war. As German troops steamrollered their way to Paris, Stieber ensured girls in French brothels were recruited as informants too.
One of Stieber’s most notorious achievements in this area was the ‘Green House’ a high class bordello in Berlin. Stieber staffed the ‘resort’ with police agents who monitored their patrons, drawn as they were, only from ‘people of consequence.’
Pandering to every imaginable vice, depravity and perversion, patrons were only admitted by invitation. However, these gratifications came at a price. Stieber would keep a file on each patron and when a favour was required, he would blackmail them by threatening to reveal their indiscretions.
Taking this concept a stage further the Nazi intelligence service set up the infamous Salon Kitty in Berlin. Set in a fashionable district, the Salon Kitty was a brothel for foreign diplomats and businessmen. In each room technical experts had constructed false walls behind which microphones were installed. Through automatic tape recorders every word spoken in the house was recorded and assessed for potential blackmail use.
The house was managed by Katharina Zammit, who went by the name Kitty Schmidt and was staffed by twenty girls each selected by the Berlin vice squad, indoctrinated and taught to recognise military insignia.
The existence of the Salon Kitty was revealed in the memoirs of Walter Schellenberg, chief of the SD. According to Schellenberg one of its most noted victims was the Italian foreign minister, Count Ciano who had been against an alliance between Italy and Germany. Schellenberg also reported how his SS boss ‘Hangman’ Heydrich made personal inspections – with the tape recorders switched off, of course.
The American Civil War
The American Civil War is notable for the number of female spies and secret agents who were employed during the conflict. For the first time, we not only have the names of women spies, but many wrote accounts of their adventures and many were photographed. To begin with I’d like to consider perhaps the most famous case.
After an embarrassing defeat at Bull Run on 21 July the Union Army suspected their plans had been betrayed to the Confederates. Therefore, when incoming General McClellan was given command of the Army of the Potomac he invited detective Alan Pinkerton to provide a counterespionage service as both Baltimore and Washington were said to be alive with confederate spies and supporters.
The top rebel spy in Washington was suspected by many as being Rose Greenhow. A politically well-connected, socialite and widow Greenhow had indeed been recruited as a spy at the beginning of the war by West Point graduate, Thomas Jordan, a US officer who joined the Confederate army. Before leaving Washington, Jordan provided Greenhow with a simple cipher and instructions on how to contact him.
Pinkerton put Greenhow under surveillance. One rainy August evening, along with three of his agents, Pinkerton tailed a Union officer to Greenhow’s home. When an upstairs light came on, Pinkerton had his men form a human pyramid with himself at the apex. Glimpsing into the room, Pinkerton saw the young officer handing Greenhow a map and heard him give instructions on how to read it. Then the two went into a back room out of view where Greenhow no doubt provided the young man with suitable reward.
An hour later, the officer departed Greenhow’s home with a kiss. Pinkerton had the officer arrested and, when confronted with the evidence, he later committed suicide in his cell.
Meanwhile the surveillance continued. An embarrassing list of prominent figures were seen coming and going from the Greenhow home, including former President, James Buchanan.
Before the situation got any worse, Greenhow was arrested. Pinkerton searched her house and recovered an amazing hoard of classified Union documents including plans of Washington’s defences and fortifications. Prize among them was Greenhow’s diary which detailed the full extent of the Confederate spy ring. In terms of counter-espionage, it was priceless. It gave the names of Greenhow’s contacts, her informants and means of delivering messages to the Confederacy – numerous arrests followed.
The damage could have been worse for the Confederacy if Greenhow’s 8-year-old daughter had not intervened. She apparently hid up a tree outside the property and called down a warning to anyone she recognized approaching the house: “Mother has been arrested!”
With Greenhow in custody arose the problem of what to do with her? She was too well connected to send to the gallows but, the number of prominent soldiers, politicians, bankers and so on involved with this conspiracy made her presence acutely embarrassing for Lincoln.
In the end, after a trial, Greenhow was sent to Richmond where she continued her celebrity lifestyle. She was later sent on a mission to London, where she had an audience with Queen Victoria and to Paris where she was received in the court of Napoleon III. After writing her memoirs she returned to the Confederacy in 1864 on the blockade-runner Condor. Chased by a Union gunboat, Condor ran aground and Greenhow drowned. There’s a sort of poetic justice how so many spies meet untimely ends.
As I mentioned, the American Civil War was notable for the number of female agents on both sides and I would like to give a few more cases for you to consider.
There is the case of Sarah Edmonds, who enlisted in the Union Army under the name Frank Thompson. Volunteering for a mission behind enemy lines at Yorktown, Edmonds gained entrance to Confederate camps disguised as a slave, having bought a wig and stained her skin with silver nitrate. Her cover was nearly blown when the dye began to wear off with the sweat from her toil in a work gang. She gave her ‘fellow’ slaves in the work party the implausible excuse: “I've always expected to come white at some time; my mother's a white woman.” It’s amazing what you can get away with if you keep a straight face!
Pauline Cushman also merits an honourable mention. An actress from New Orleans, Cushman followed the Confederate army ‘looking for her brother,’ but in reality was spying for the north. She was captured and sentenced to be hanged, but was rescued by Union troops in the nick of time. President Lincoln made her an honorary major.
Also of great service was the freed slave, Mary Touvestre, who was housekeeper to a Confederate Engineer in Norfolk, Virginia. She stole a set of plans for the first Confederate ironclad warship and took them safely to Washington.
Another former slave often linked to studies of espionage is Harriet Tubman an escaped slave from Maryland who spent the 1850s as a conductor on the Underground Railroad. During the Civil War Tubman found herself serving as a nurse. However, her experience moving covertly though the marshes of eastern Maryland saw her brought into reconnaissance work and intelligence gathering in South Carolina and Florida.
Of all the civil war’s female agents the connoisseur’s choice must be ‘Crazy Bet’ Elizabeth Van Lew. From a northern family settled in Richmond, Van Lew did not hold with the southern way of living. When her father died, she used her inheritance to free the family slaves, an act which gained her a reputation among society as somewhat of an eccentric.
After the arrival in Richmond of Union soldiers taken prisoner at Bull Run, Van Lew obtained a pass to visit them. While providing them with food, medicine and clothing, Van Lew began collecting messages from the prisoners, which she had smuggled to their homes. This simple act of generosity soon developed into an espionage network, known as the Richmond Underground.
This comprised of an elaborate network of spies, messengers and safe houses for prisoners she helped escape. By way of an example, in 1864, Van Lew was responsible for the escape of 109 prisoners, half of whom she quartered at home while waiting to be smuggled back north.
Of course, the Confederates were not entirely unaware of Van Lew’s activities. From 1862 they had her under surveillance, but without success. Aware she was being watched, Van Lew began to act very strangely, confirming suspicions she was unbalanced, if not actually insane.
Van Lew’s spy ring was centred on one of her former family slaves, Mary Elizabeth Bowser. Early in the war, Van Lew obtained Bowser employment as a servant in the home of the Confederate President Jefferson. As a Black female servant, she was ignored by the President’s guests who did not suspect her of carefully eavesdropping on their conversations, or reading documents on Jefferson’s desk while going about her chores.
To collect reports from Bowser, Van Lew recruited a local baker who made deliveries to the Confederate ‘White House’. The baker collected the messages to Van Lew enciphered them and passed them to an old man – another former slave – who took them to the Union General Grant, hidden in his shoes. Again, because the man was seen as a slave, he passed unnoticed under the auspices of carrying flowers.
In 1864 an attempt to catch Van Lew red-handed was made by Confederate Provost Marshal John Henry Winder. He ordered her property searched by troops, who found nothing, despite there being prisoners hidden in a secret room on the third floor.
After the raid, Van Lew went berserk in Winder’s office, declaring him ungentlemanly and forcing an apology from him. A few short months later the war was over General Grant made a special point of visiting Van Lew, thanking her for the excellent intelligence he had received from Richmond.
Unsurprisingly, Van Lew’s neighbours were less than pleased to learn the full extent of her treachery. ‘Crazy Bet’ spent the next 35 years of her life despised as an outcast and a traitor.
Spy mistresses:
In the UK there was great excitement at the appointment of a woman as head of the Security Service, MI5 in 1992, a move that acted as inspiration for the casting of Dame Judi Dench as ‘M’ in the more recent Bond movies. Although the appointment was perhaps a milestone in the modern era, women have held the reins in espionage organizations before.
Cast your minds back fifteen hundred years to the Byzantine Era and the city of Constantinople. It was a confused age. The Byzantines called themselves Roman but spoke Greek: no wonder their name is now synonymous with excessive complexity.
While Emperor Justinian admittedly had a profound effect on the later development of European laws he was not much of a spymaster and paid for his lack of intelligence with the loss of large swathes of territory. On the other hand, his Empress, Theodora excelled herself in the employment of spies.
The Empress Theodora is an interesting case. She had what you might call ‘a past.’ A commoner by birth, Theodora’s vocation was at best described as ‘exotic dancer’ and at worst: harlot. She had a reputation for appearing in bawdy comedies or performing lewd, exotic dances. Naked except for a token slither of ribbon, her party piece was to have slaves scatter barley over her, then to unleash specially trained geese to peck her clean.
Despite her deserved reputation, or perhaps even because of it, Justinian fell deeply in love with Theodora, changed the law that he might marry her and even began a tradition of Byzantine Emperors marrying commoners. Needless to say, once made Empress in 523, Theodora became sensitive to references of her early life, so much so she kept a large retinue of spies to inform her of those gossiping against her.
The chief account of this era comes from the soldier historian Procopius, who recorded some of her more notable victims and summarized her actions in the following way:
‘No other tyrant since mankind began ever inspired such fear, since not a word could be spoken against her without her hearing of it: her multitude of spies brought her the news of whatever was said and done in public or in private. And when she decided the time had come to take vengeance on any offender, she did as follows. Summoning the man, if he happened to be notable, she would privately hand him over to one of her confidential attendants, and order that he be escorted to the farthest boundary of the Roman realm. And her agent, in the dead of night, covering the victim's face with a hood and binding him, would put him on board a ship and accompany him to the place selected by Theodora. There he would secretly leave the unfortunate in charge of another qualified for this work: charging him to keep the prisoner under guard and tell no one of the matter until the Empress should take pity on the wretch or, as time went on, he should languish under his bondage and succumb to death.’
Reading this passage now, it is interesting to see ‘extraordinary rendition’ is not something unique to modern times.
Two Chinese spies.
Other than the antics of Theodora, I did not find much proof of female involvement in espionage during the first millennium. In fact the Dark Ages offer little light on much espionage history – only tantalising glimpses and occasional hints. However – absence of evidence is not always proof in itself.
That said, to pick up our trail we have to jump right back into antiquity, to ancient China, five or six hundred years before the time of Christ.
The Chinese state of Wu had bested the neighbouring state of Yue in war. The King of Yue therefore wanted revenge, but knew his country was not yet strong enough to go to war.
Instead King Goujian embarked on a carefully planned ruse to weaken the enemy Kingdom of Wu from within. He asked his Prime Minister to select ten of the most beautiful women he could find, two of whom would be sent to Wu’s King Fu Chai as part of a tribute payment.
These two women would be no ordinary concubines, but highly trained and determined secret agents who were to encourage the Wu King to expend his military resources making war on his neighbours and to alienate his skilful Prime Minister, Wu Zixu.
Legend has it the two candidates were Zheng Dan and Xi Shi. For three years the women were trained in court etiquette and such entertainments as would keep the enemy King happily distracted.
When the time came, Xi Shi and Zheng Dan were introduced into Fu Chai’s court. Their selection immediately paid dividends. The king of Wu was so overcome at the sight of them he ignored protocol and stood to greet them. The Prime Minister correctly suspected a plot and urged caution, but Fu Chai ignored him and greedily took the bait. He was besotted with the two women and soon forgot everything outside the sphere of his private chambers.
The more the Prime Minister denounced the two women the more he began to upset the king. Egged on by the two agents, the king finally had enough and ordered the Prime Minister to commit suicide. The ungoverned country soon began falling apart. Famine came, then war.
Seizing his chance, King Gou Jian launched his long awaited revenge attack on Wu. Only then did the King of Wu realize the two women were in fact enemy spies. Before committing suicide the King killed Zheng Dan, but Xi Shi escaped and passed into folklore as a self-sacrificing patriot and one of ‘four beauties’ who altered the course of Chinese history.
A tale the Chinese might be less proud of comes from the Twentieth century and involves the Japanese seizure of Manchuria. At the sharp end of this operation was one of the most outrageous female spies in history: the Chinese Princess and Japanese spy, known as Eastern Jewel.
From the end of the Shogunate Era in Japan a secret society of ex-samurai warriors formed a clandestine pressure group known as the Black Dragons. Often at odds with official Japanese policy, the Black Dragons set their hearts on expanding Japan’s influence through South East Asia and had particular designs on the region of Manchuria.
In 1911 there was a revolution in China in which the child emperor Pu Yi was forced to abdicate. As the country became a republic, Pu Yi retired to a villa in Tientsin where he enjoyed a playboy lifestyle with his increasingly opium-addicted Empress, Wan Jung. Faced with the crippling cost of maintaining his royal trappings, Pu Yi was desperate to regain the throne.
This partially played into the hands of the Japanese who sought to legitimize their planned capture of Manchuria by offering Pu Yi the throne and allowing him to rule as their puppet. The Black Dragons approached the deposed emperor and offered him the deal. On his part, Pu Yi hesitated, partly confused that the Black Dragons were making the approach, not a legitimate Japanese government official.
In order to coerce the Emperor into signing, the Japanese unleashed agent Eastern Jewel.
It is difficult to know where to begin with Eastern Jewel. By birth she was a Manchurian princess, but her father had given her to a Japanese ally to adopt and raise as his own. Her father was a member of the Black Dragons and she grew up with the name Yoshiko Kawashima.
To put it mildly, she lived life on wild side, plunging herself into the seediest haunts the Far East had to offer. In late 1930 Eastern Jewel hitched herself to the head of the Japanese secret service in Shanghai. Through this connection her services were offered to the conspirators trying to ensnare Pu Yi.
Eastern Jewel became a house guest of Pu Yi. Her and the Empress had similar family backgrounds and struck up an improbable relationship. Eastern Jewel repaid this hospitality by encouraging the empress’ opium habit. At the same time she began seducing Pu Yi.
She quickly learned the empress was the cause of Pu Yi’s reluctance to side with the Japanese. Drastic action was therefore required to get the Emperor away from his wife long enough for the deal to be done.
The head of the Japanese plot was the Black Dragon Kenji Doihara – a dubious character in his own right. He told Pu Yi there was a price on his head and Chinese republicans were sure to strike. To add credence to the threat Eastern Jewel placed some snakes in Pu Yi’s bed. She then arranged for the delivery of a bomb hidden in a fruit basket. Doihara did his part, sending warning letters that Pu Yi would be assassinated at his favourite night spot. He then paid some local agitators to start a mini-riot.
Scared out of wits, Pu Yi at last agreed to Japanese protection, travelling without the Empress on Eastern Jewel’s advice. While he was bundled into the trunk of a car and driven off to ‘safety’ his empress was left in the safe hands of Eastern Jewel and an opium pipe. Without his wife to caution him, Pu Yi quickly agreed to the Japanese demands and a dark era of Chinese history began.
After the mission Eastern Jewel remained an ally of Japan throughout the war. Her good looks quickly faded and her appetites became all the more exotic and depraved. At the end of the war Eastern Jewel declined an offer to return to Japan and went into hiding. Acting on a tip-off, Chiang Kai-shek’s counter-intelligence officers picked her up in November 1945. Eastern Jewel’s time on this earth came to an end in 1948. She was led to a wooden block and decapitated by a swordsman.
Delilah
Now to my concluding story and a return to the ancient world. The Bible gives us many tales of espionage, not least the first female secret agent in recorded history. Although I doubt Delilah of Sorek was the first woman to be involved in spying, she is certainly the first one to my knowledge we can put a name to.
To recall the tale, Israelite Samson had been born to end the Philistines' suppression of his people. He was enormously strong: a veritable Arnold Schwarzenegger of his day. In a demonstration of his amazing brute strength, Samson was discovered spending the night with a prostitute in the enemy city of Gaza. To avoid capture - or worse - he simply tore open the city gates with his bare hands and walked free.
Unable to best this ultimate warrior, the Philistine rulers resorted to devious means to bring about Samson's downfall. Their opportunity came when Samson fell in love with a woman from the Valley of Sorek, named Delilah. The Philistine rulers solicited her aid saying: "See if you can lure him into showing you the secret of his great strength and how we can overpower him so that we may tie him up and subdue him. Each one of us will give you eleven hundred shekels of silver."
The result is well known: Delilah agreed and eventually teased out the secret of Samson's strength - his head had never been shaved and therein lay the root of his power.
Delilah contacted the Philistines and, after Samson had fallen asleep on her lap, she called in a man who shaved off his seven braids of hair. Robbed of his strength, Samson was unable to resist capture by the Philistines who gouged out his eyes and bound him with bronze shackles.
The truth of this story can never be established. Unless Samson’s hair really was imbued with some long lost magical property, the parable is probably a metaphor for something else: perhaps the old boxing metaphor: ‘women weaken the legs.’
The real meaning of the story is perhaps a discussion for theologians, not a conference on intelligence history. However, very much like the story of Rahab the Harlot and her safe house, the story of Delilah demonstrates that in the ancient Middle East women were involved in espionage and could be recruited as agents to discover secrets, secretly. That in itself is the important point.
When I came to the end of researching my book The Enemy Within I was amazed at the extent to which espionage has shaped human history. You know, there really is nothing new in this world. Three thousand years after Delilah, the Middle East is still unsettled. Delilah’s assignment was the precursor for missions like the female Mossad agent who convinced a Christian Iraqi pilot to defect to Israel with the latest Soviet-made MiG-21 in 1966.
My conclusion here today then is hopefully one of perspective. For as far back as you want to go in the human story, there is evidence of espionage. Wherever there is evidence of espionage it should now be apparent the extent to which women have played a full and leading role.