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Feb. 5, 2023 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
59:21
Edition 699 - Nathalia Holt
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Across the UK, across continental North America and around the world on the internet, by webcast and by podcast, my name is Howard Hughes and this is The Unexplained.
Thank you very much for all of your emails.
Please keep those coming.
If you'd like to make a donation to the show to help it to continue, then you can do that at the same place that you can send me emails.
That is my website, theunexplained.tv.
There are links for both of those things there.
And thanks to Adam, my webmaster of many years, for his hard work on the site and getting the show out to you.
Thank you for your emails.
When you get in touch, please tell me as ever who you are, where you are, and how you use this show.
Just want to say hello to Pete at Hive in Southampton.
Sean got in touch with me, Pete, and just asked me to give you a mention.
Apparently, Pete, you introduced Sean to The Unexplained, and I think you both work for the post office there.
And apparently, Pete is a big fan of the show, and the podcast has helped both Pete and Sean get through cold winter mornings by listening, presumably on earbuds, which I found one of my local post people doing recently.
He'd been listening for ages to the show, and it was only when he turned up at my front door, rang the bell, that I realized that that was the case.
Because he said, I'm listening to you.
How bizarre is that?
But also gratifying.
Now, very special and different edition of The Unexplained here, featuring Natalia Holt and her book, Wise Gals, and her research into this particular story.
She's a New York Times best-selling author, wrote books like Rise of the Rocket Girls.
This is about the very early days, and indeed before the foundation of the Central Intelligence Agency, the CIA, America's spy agency.
And it would not exist in the form that it exists and would not be as efficient as it is, were it not for the efforts of five people whose work is detailed in this book.
Jane Burrell, the first CIA operative killed in the line of duty.
Adelaide Addie Hawkins, the high school graduate turned codebreaker and communications mastermind, Eloise Page, the southern socialite who would become the CIA's first female station chief, Mary Hutchison, the spy master who chafed at being seen as merely a CIA wife, and Elizabeth Liz Sudmeier, the intrepid officer who single-handedly ran Iraq when her colleagues were forced to leave in the wake of revolution in the late 1950s.
It is a story that spans many decades and many stories and a lot of bravery, both internally and externally, dealing with America's foes and indeed the world's, or the Western world's foes, let's put it that way.
So it's a fascinating tale, beautifully written, is also serialized at the moment on BBC domestic radio in the United Kingdom.
So I've also had a chance to hear it, as well as see the book, a hardback copy of which I've got.
The book is called Wise Gows.
The guest is Natalia Holt.
And we'll be talking about espionage and some of the groundbreaking women who are involved in it.
I love to tell stories, they're the best stories, I think, of people who maybe after a fight or a struggle get their just desserts, their dues in this world.
You know, a lot of people work very hard, achieve a great deal, and get absolutely no recognition for it.
And some people don't do an awful lot and get an awful lot of notoriety.
That's just how the world works.
But when you can right the wrongs and redress the balance to an extent, I think it gives you a nice warm feeling.
So I'm guessing that's how Natalia feels about this book that is getting the story of these groundbreaking women out there for us all to read.
So I'm not going to hang about.
Thank you very much for being part of my show.
Remember, the website is theunexplained.tv, and the Facebook page is the official Facebook page of The Unexplained with Howard Hughes.
And the guest, western part of the United States, is Natalia Holt.
Natalia, thank you very much for coming on my show.
Thank you for having me.
I think it's very gratifying and it gives you a nice warm feeling to pick up a story of people whose lives and efforts you were never aware of.
And you realize when you read that these were very important people.
So I'm guessing that was one of the main motivators for you to tell the story of some people who were literally unsung.
That's right.
When I learned of these women, and I came across their stories really by accident, but when I learned of them, I realized that they hadn't even had Wikipedia pages made for them.
There was just nothing out there about their stories, about their experiences.
And this really struck me because these are women who sacrificed so much for their careers.
These are jobs that they loved.
They worked during World War II and then during the early Cold War in intelligence.
And so to be able to share their stories and finally give them the recognition that is their due was just such a joy for me.
It was so important for me to be able to tell their stories this way.
There's a lot of research I mentioned to my listener when I was doing the intro to this.
This has involved a tremendous amount of research, and it's in a field of espionage, intelligence, counterintelligence.
How were you able to do the amount of research that yielded you the amount of detail that you got?
Well, it wasn't easy, although I do like to joke that my last book dealt with Walt Disney Studios.
And so I like to say that that book was far more difficult to research because Disney is so protective of their archives.
But, you know, exactly.
But no, this book was quite a chore to research.
It took many, many years for me to file the Freedom of Information Acts that then got the CIA documents declassified.
And then, of course, that wasn't enough.
And so I also then had to go out and find the colleagues that worked with these women and learn their stories.
I also found their families and their friends.
And this was really important because it gave me a lot of personal stories about what their lives were like, the men that they were in love with, the men that they married, the men that they didn't marry, their children.
All of these stories really helped add a full picture of what their lives were like.
And then I also, sorry, I was just going to add that I also spent a lot of time in archives.
I was able to find a lot of research in the National Archive in the UK, as well as, of course, archives in the U.S., especially just some small archives.
I found one in Missouri that just had this wealth of information.
So it's just, it's always fun because you never know when you're doing research like that what you'll turn up.
True enough, there is a quote in the book, and you talked about the background of these five women and, you know, who they loved and how they lived.
A quote in the book later on says effectively that if you choose this as your way of life, especially in those days, if you were a woman, you had to subjugate, subject the rest of your life to it.
You know, everything else had to take a back seat.
That is very true.
It's true for any intelligence officer and during this profession, but even more so for these women during this era.
These are women that joined intelligence in the 1940s during World War II, and they all had different backgrounds.
And so you have Adelaide Hawkins, who's a single mom of three.
You have Mary Hutchinson, who has a PhD in archaeology and is married.
And then you have Eloise Page, who is single.
And all of these women really had to find a way to make their lives fit into the world of the CIA.
It was definitely not the other way around.
And so what we see is that for a woman like Elizabeth Sedmeyer, for example, she was engaged.
There was a man she wanted to marry, but she was not able to do so because he was Italian and CIA officers were not and are still not able to marry those foreign nationals.
And what's interesting when I wrote about this is that Liz's boss was actually married to a Syrian woman.
So these rules could be bent for some, especially if you were a man.
But if you were a woman, it was much more difficult to get away with anything.
And so what we see is that these women decide that they love intelligence.
They believe in what they're doing.
They feel like they are preventing war and keeping the world safe.
And so they continue on and make these very big sacrifices.
And in many cases, they were huge sacrifices.
In one case, as you say, the operative who found herself in Iraq, she sacrificed her life for it, I think I'm right in saying.
She didn't.
I mean, she did risk her life.
She did not die in Iraq.
Oh, sorry, no, it was Jane Burrell.
It was Jane Jane.
Jane Burrow, yes, who died.
Yes, so she was, she started in American intelligence during World War II.
And I really loved writing about this era because American intelligence is just fumbling during this period.
They're really relying on their UK counterparts to learn how to spy, how espionage works.
And Jane is a member of this.
So she was a housewife on a dairy farm in New York.
And she decides that she wants to join the war effort.
And when she first applies to the U.S. government, there is this line that reads, specify how much you're willing to travel.
And she checks the least amount of travel box.
She is hoping not to leave the country.
And this is not how it turns out because Jane is incredibly well educated.
She speaks French fluently.
And so she ends up becoming part of an elite unit known as X2 and is sent first to London where she receives training from the UK and from espionage officers and then is sent to Normandy.
And there she begins working with a group of both British and American officers who are seeking out German intelligence agents, approaching them, and turning them to work for the Allies.
This is, of course, highly dangerous work.
And Jane turns out to be very good at it.
She is very effective in convincing these men to work for the Allies.
And it's really just her persuasion.
You know, there's so many, of course, silly stereotypes with women and intelligence of being the femme fatale.
And this is not the reality, of course, for this group of women.
These women were able to pull off these operations because of their intelligence and because of their great manipulations.
We really see that with Jane.
And so her involvement in some of these operations during World War II ended up having a stunning impact because she had her German agents essentially giving intelligence back to the Nazis that had their U-boats and troops headed to sites far away from where Allied landing sites actually were at.
So Jane basically played a huge role in what eventually became V-Day.
That's right.
You know, she did.
And operations after that as well.
This is a woman that really believed in what she was doing.
And so she continued, even after the war, when there was a real fear that the Nazis had been hiding treasure across Europe as a means to return to power.
And so we see that after the war, Jaden is involved in these treasure hunts where they're going across the countryside.
And there's this really great moment that happens in a castle in the Italian Alps where they end up finding this horde of gold coins, 103 gold coins worth millions in today's currency.
And it's such an exciting moment, of course, when they finally find it.
And it really goes to show how varied Jane's actions were, that she was able to be part of so many different operations and have so many different impacts.
And you say in the book that she was a master interrogator.
She was.
It's interesting when you go through the transcripts of these interrogations, because we see how they played with different ways to try to get these German agents to work for them.
And mostly they did not use threats.
They often used bribes.
Although in Jane's case, what we see is that she was very good at getting them to talk to her And getting these men, many of whom were really despicable people that had done horrible things, but she was able to get them to trust her.
She was able to really talk to them so they felt as if she was a friend.
And then she used those connections she had made to then spread her web and bring more German agents into the fold.
So it was highly effective.
And in particular, I think it all started with a man called Carl Eitel, who was an Abwehr, German intelligence guy.
And she was able to turn him.
And once she turned him, then other people followed, including somebody who became absolutely crucial for passing, as we say, duff information back to the Germans that they would believe.
That's correct.
Yes.
And this wasn't easy.
You know, some of the agents that she was speaking to did not want to cooperate at all, of course, especially not at first.
But even after a while, she would often have to keep coercing them, keep getting them on her side.
Many of them tried to just disappear, and they would have to track them down and convince them to continue work for them because this was dangerous.
They knew that they were putting their lives at risk by cooperating with the Allies.
So, you know, to really be part of these moments and to see Jane's history during this time, it just gives you a really different perspective on what it must have been like to be an American intelligence agent during World War II.
It's really this boots on the ground mentality of how they were able to accomplish this.
And of course, all their stories not only span the important stages of World War II, but it's that period after World War II where some of those areas that had been occupied by the Nazis become very fluid.
There's all kinds of activity running underneath the surface there.
And you almost need intelligence then more than you need it during the actual war itself.
It's true.
We see that even after World War II, immediately operations begin against the Soviets because of this jockeying for position in Europe.
And to see how these operations unfold and how these women are essentially trying to find out what weaponry the Soviets are making and what agents they are working with.
It was an incredibly delicate position because these were still ostensibly their allies that they were now turning against.
And of course, it leads the way into the early Cold War where we see these operations really expand.
But just to get back to Jane for a moment, because I know we alluded to her death, but she did die on a plane crash that occurred in 1948 in January.
And because the CIA had been formed in the United States just a few months earlier, this actually makes her the first CIA officer to die in service to our country.
However, she has not been included on the agency's memorial wall.
And so this is an injustice that I am trying to correct.
Well, that is absolutely shameful.
Sorry to jump in there.
You know, I hope you succeed.
Yes, it's important that we do so because, you know, this is a woman that did so much during World War II and after the war in her work with the monuments men and to really show her career, what she sacrificed.
It's critical.
And I do believe that if she were a man, she would have been included long ago.
And you think that that's the factor that even all these decades later has stopped them from putting out there some kind of formal recognition?
That is astonishing.
Well, I should say I think it's one factor.
For any bureaucracy, any government agency, it takes time to impact change such as this and to include someone on a memorial wall.
And so my hope is that by documenting Jane's work and showing what she has done, I've really proven why she needs to be included on the memorial wall.
And hopefully that will change soon.
You say in the book, and I think it's important we say this here, that a lot of the women who were recruited, in fact, I think all of the women who were recruited, were recruited at a lower grade.
In other words, they were given one job description, but the stuff they actually ended up doing was much more convoluted and complex than that.
Yes, that was commonly done by the CIA for all of these women.
They were hired at these lower analyst positions, even though they were actually working as higher intelligence officers.
These are women that ran their own operations.
They recruited their own agents.
They really had an incredible amount of responsibility.
But they were hired at these lower positions mostly because that's kind of just what was done for women at the time.
Women weren't seen as having these more responsible positions.
And so we see that with Jane, who had this whole network of German agents that she had recruited and was working with.
We also see that with a woman named Elizabeth Sudmeier, who worked in Baghdad for many years.
And she has such an interesting history because she grew up on a reservation in South Dakota.
She then served in World War II.
She was hired as a secretary at the CIA at first before going to junior officer training and then being sent to Baghdad.
And in Baghdad, she is able to form a spy network using resources that no male agent in the country had access to because she recruited people from a hair salon and a dress shop.
And what she would do is she would go into these places, she would pretend to just be a housewife, and then she would make conversation.
So she would make friends there and she would learn what these women's husbands and brothers did, what their relatives were up to.
And when she found one woman whose husband was an engineer who worked for the Soviets, she immediately annealed to her and began deepening their friendship.
And then she took an incredible risk by going directly to this husband and convincing him to work for the Americans.
And in doing so, she was able to form a very large network that then gathered secret documents, technical documents of Soviet fighter jets and other weaponry that ended up being very important to American interests in the Cold War.
And it's incredible that she was able to do this because this isn't something that most officers were able to accomplish.
This is a very difficult thing to be able to run all of these agents.
And Liz, of course, took an incredible risk in doing so.
But perhaps what's fascinating is that she was doing all of this at this lower pay scale and at this lower position.
You know, so it was difficult for those in Washington to then decide to promote her or to give her any honors just because of the position that she had.
But she took incredible risks.
And indeed, she was of necessity and of duty.
She decided that when there was a coup there and the whole place was blowing up around her, that it was her duty to remain.
So when other people flew back home, she stayed.
That's true.
And this happened in 1958.
And immediately after this military coup, Americans and other Westerners were being targeted in Iraq.
And the CIA office completely evacuated.
They took everyone out except for Liz.
She's the only person that remained.
And she did so.
She stayed undercover in order to protect the agents that she had recruited.
She had all of these double agents working for her and she wanted to be able to protect them as well as get information to relay back to Washington.
And this was actually important because at the time, President Eisenhower was considering military action in the Middle East.
This would be the first time American troops were sent to the Middle East.
And they did begin.
They went to Lebanon.
But it was really thanks to the work of Liz and many of the other people in the region that they were able to show that no military action was not called for at this time.
So certainly her work prevented war and really kept interest safe in the area.
She sounds like an amazing person.
Sorry, you were saying.
Oh, yeah.
Well, what's really, obviously I can talk too much about all of these women.
Tell me at any time.
Please.
I mean, I pray for guests like you.
But I did want to add that, so her station chief was a man named Arthur Callahan, and he nominated her for this Intelligence Medal of Merit, which is a very high honor in American intelligence.
And in Washington, administrators were aghast.
They were just, they just couldn't believe it.
They said, no, no woman can receive this.
They flatly denied this nomination.
And it took years of Liz's station chief championing on her behalf for her finally to get this medal, this recognition for this incredible risk she took in Iraq in 1958.
Are you aware, and I don't think I read any in the book, but I did a speed read, so I might have missed the detail.
Are you aware of situations when she was at particular danger, when it looked like she wouldn't come out of it?
Yes, there are several in the book.
I talk about one instance where she's in a taxi cab and the cab just starts heading out into the hills.
It's not going anywhere where she had asked to go and she is really fierce for her life at this instance.
And there's a few other moments as well.
You know, this is a woman that was doing dead drops.
And so what she would do is because she was undercover, she would go to a movie theater and they would arrange to have these secret plans from the Soviets that then were hidden in part of a seat.
So she would go in the movie theater, she would pick up these plans, she would bring them back to the CIA station office, copy them, and then return them back to the officer she was working with that was stealing them from the Soviets.
So every one of these meetings, whether they did it clandestine, whether they sometimes met openly in cafes together, every one of them was an incredible risk.
And she had to be extremely careful.
You describe her, and I think it's a beautiful way of describing her, as fiercely intelligent.
She was, you know, Liz, wow.
What she was able to accomplish was as a woman that spoke Arabic fluently as well as many other languages.
She had a real gift for being able to assess situations as well as these technical documents.
And so as she's getting out these plans for the Soviet fighter jets, she wants to create sheets for those in Washington to understand just kind of a cheat sheet of what this fighter jet is capable of.
And this is really going to inform spy plane development as well by Westerners.
And so these sheets end up being kind of critical information for, so her ability to go through technical documents and understand them was quite incredible.
And I should mention that she was fiercely intelligent.
She was also incredibly beautiful.
If you look at the pictures of her in my book, wow, just an amazing beauty as well.
So it's fun to really see that full side of Liz, all the parts of her.
Absolutely.
And, you know, I think if you were to tell people in the eras in which she worked that there were such people, they wouldn't have believed it, would they?
They wouldn't have.
And that was what gave them such an advantage.
You know, we see that people didn't expect women to be intelligence officers during this period of time.
And so these women were able to really get away with things that male counterparts wouldn't have.
And they often used this to their advantage.
So we see that with Adelaide Hawkins, the single mom of three.
Nobody expected this mom to be an intelligence officer.
It just seemed ridiculous to even contemplate such a thing.
Don't you say in the book, don't you say, and here I am jumping in again, don't you say that she joined mainly to get away from her mother-in-law?
Yes, she did.
She joined during World War II because she wanted to get out of the house and away from her mother-in-law.
Yes, and Addie just has this incredible story because she then went from that, from being in this position where she was working in the message center during World War II, to then rising in the ranks and becoming chief of covert communications.
She developed a plethora of spy gear, including small microdot cameras and this one woman's compact that looked just kind of an ordinary compact with a mirror, But when held at the right angle, it revealed a secret code.
So she just had this incredible history of what she was able to develop and accomplish and really used her identity to her advantage.
And her family didn't even know what she was doing.
It wasn't until after her death that they realized that she was working for the CIA and that she had such an important position.
And don't you say, I think it's about her in the book, that the family believed that when she said she was going to New York or wherever it was, that's where she was going.
But in fact, she was going to far-flung places on secret, you know, assignments.
Yes, that's right.
So she had multiple assignments in Europe during the early Cold War period, and her family just had no idea.
They thought that she was just a secretary who was going on these small work trips up and down the East Coast.
No idea that she was actually part of these very large intelligence operations.
You have a, in my opinion, as somebody who spent a lot of his career writing news mainly, you always look for nice, snappy phrases, and you have a lot of these in the book.
You say, of the work, you say, you are expected to perform exceptional tasks without tangible recognition.
That line to me sums it all up.
It does, doesn't it?
It's true then.
It's true today.
People that work in intelligence do not make policy decisions.
These are not the people that decide where troops go, where bombs are land.
These are the people that are gathering intelligence, and they do so without any expectation of recognition.
And in the book, I talk quite a bit about the difference between the many paramilitary failures that take place during the Cold War, all of which, of course, have been written about quite a bit because the CIA had so many failures in the 1950s.
This, of course, is Cuba, Iran, Guatemala, the many times that these paramilitary teams came in.
And I contrast that with what these women did.
These are women that learned espionage during World War II, and they did this classic intelligence gathering, which is really a very different kind of intelligence.
It's the kind where you are going out.
You're the one making friends and you're bringing back information.
And so it is the quiet kind.
It's the kind that doesn't get noticed.
Many of the operations that I describe in the book have never been written about before, but they ended up having quite a big difference in preventing war.
And Eloise, I have a soft spot for Eloise through the book because, you know, she achieved so much.
And there's even a reference to her, we'll talk about it later if we get time, in reference to 9-11 because she tried to get into the CIA building after she'd retired and they wouldn't, effectively, they wouldn't let her in.
But, you know, if we can get to that, we'll get to that.
But Eloise was the most unlikely person.
She was short and a socialite.
You know, she was a short, demure by the sounds of the description.
Socialite.
Not the kind of person you would expect.
And I suppose that's part of the success of her.
Not the kind of person you would expect to be doing work like this.
That's exactly right.
She used the way she looked to her advantage.
She knew exactly what she was doing.
When she put on her white gloves and her pearls and her heels, she knew that nobody suspected that she was anything more.
And so she has such a great history because she rose from being a secretary in World War II to becoming the most powerful woman at the CIA in the 1950s.
She became head of scientific and technical operations.
And so she played a large role in gathering intelligence on Soviet biological and nuclear weaponry.
And we really see her influence in these operations and how she was able to make contact with scientists, form relationships with scientists, and then bring their intelligence back to the United States.
And then in 1973, she ended up getting quite a promotion because sadly, the chief of station in Athens, Greece was assassinated, and Eloise was offered the job.
And she took it, even though, of course, this was a very big risk to go to a country where American intelligence was being targeted by terrorist groups at that time.
This is the 1970s.
But this was a big push for her because she decided that they had to form operations that would learn how terrorist organizations worked.
And so some of the lessons that they learned during that time then do end up being applied in later years.
And it was a very risky time to be in Greece.
I mean, that was a tremendous promotion.
I actually listened with relish to the description of this.
And if you haven't heard it yet, I'm sure you have.
But on the BBC reading of the book, it's remarkable because she took tremendous risk.
There was a terrorist group operating there at that time, and she could have been picked off at any time.
And the reading describes, and the book describes, how this demure lady wearing, I think, a white suit with a skirt, there was a bulge at one side of the waist, and that was her firearm.
She had to carry a firearm at all times.
Yes, that's right.
Her life was really in danger during that period.
And it was a position she took because of that.
She had been offered other chief of station positions previously, and she turned them all down because she felt they were too soft.
They were too easy.
She wanted one that was a challenge, and she definitely got it.
What did her family, did we ever find out?
Were you able to find out?
Since she came from that background, you know, it was quite, as we say, you know, quite a well-to-do background, as we would say here in the UK.
What did the family, when they found out, make of it?
Yeah, so her parents passed away before she could tell them, but she felt that they would have approved.
And I should mention that she had a very famous name and heritage in the South with her family, but her family didn't actually have that much money.
And so we see that she's able to sort of use that as well, that identity to her advantage, where she knows how to be a socialite, how to present herself that way, but also the nitty-gritty of what it's like to be the daughter of parents who don't have enough and often have to move house to house, are often scrambling for work.
So I think all of that really forms her identity.
Eloise never married.
She never had children, but she had a large network of friends.
She never told any of them about her work.
So I really, she was very tight-lipped about what she did.
Of course, that was just the way.
So I had to learn a lot about her personality and what she was like at work from her colleagues, from the other CIA officers who worked alongside her.
And so it was really interesting to, you know, a lot of these comments she made.
This was a very strong woman.
She was called the Iron Butterfly.
That was her nickname at the CIA.
And she certainly had a forceful personality.
That is something that everyone I spoke with could agree about Eloise.
But the kind of person you could look at and you would not guess her line of work.
Definitely not.
Yes, you would never suspect.
She had a zest for detail.
I think we kind of skirted around that, but because she dealt in information, she must have had a tremendous capacity to take information in.
And I noted that she was involved in the research, if we can call it the espionage into the Soviets' development of nuclear weapons and the suspicion around a calcium-making plant in the east of Germany.
And, you know, she was pretty key in getting that information out there and getting the people back home to understand how serious that potentially could be.
That's right.
So that operation in East Germany took place right after World War II.
And it's when the U.S. was trying to learn how the Soviets were going to make the bomb and how that was going to go.
They didn't know the timing.
They didn't know what was happening.
And so that operation was really critical in trying to get, put the pieces together and find out what the timing would be.
And for the most part, it's a failure.
They don't end up getting the data they need.
They're not able to sabotage this calcium plant that they wanted to in order to prevent the Soviets from furthering their weaponry.
But it does end up being a real stepping stone for Eloise in making connections with scientists that prove very helpful in the years ahead.
And I enjoyed actually writing about some of these failed operations because they tell us a lot about where the intentions were for the intelligence community during the early Cold War and what they learned from it.
You know, we see there's just so many mistakes that are made, and especially by the Americans in the early years when intelligence just wasn't something that had been done.
It was really something learned from the UK.
And so it takes a while for them to learn how to do basic operations on their own, which is always fun.
But, you know, remarkable people.
Let's talk about Mary because we haven't talked about Mary.
Now, Mary was the term that you use is contract wife.
Yeah?
Yes.
This was kind of the derogatory term that was used for women that were married to another CIA officer.
And so they were seen as having positions within the CIA only because of their marriage.
And for Mary Hutchinson, this is ridiculous.
This is a woman that had a PhD in archaeology.
She spoke fluently four languages.
She was incredibly intelligent.
She served in World War II as an intelligence officer.
But then when she applied to the CIA after the war, she was only offered the position of secretary.
And she was livid.
She told the man interviewing her, that is a waste of my abilities.
And so she was then hired as an intelligence officer and stationed with her husband.
And what we see with Mary is that after World War II, she ends up making these very interesting connections in Germany.
She forms an alliance with a man named Aradi, and the two of them form the first alliance between the U.S. and Ukraine.
And at the time in Washington, administrators are very skeptical of this.
They say that Ukraine lacks nationalism.
It can never be a worthy ally.
But Mary keeps working on it.
And over the years, what we see is that she forms this web of double agents who are, they're called playback operatives because they go in as double agents who are actually working for Soviet intelligence, but have been turned to work for the Americans.
And then they take their orders and they play them back and tell the Americans what they've been doing.
This, of course, were these were very dangerous operations.
Many of them failed.
Many of the officers were killed, which was very difficult for Mary to be part of that.
But they do end up yielding some important intelligence because they end up revealing a Soviet biological weapons plant that's in Soviet Ukraine, as well as some other weaponry that the Soviets are developing.
So it's interesting to look at that early period between Ukraine and the U.S., because of course it echoes so much of what we're seeing today.
Indeed, it does.
It definitely chimes with today.
And in the book, you talk about the Ukrainian scientists who were developing biological substances, biological weapons.
And some of those were transferred because they'd done so well.
The Soviet Union would have seen it.
They were transferred to work in the Soviet Union.
So to be able to get under the skin of that operation, I think, was absolutely crucial at that time.
It was.
And knowing the wealth of weaponry and what Westerners were up against during that period of the Cold War really helped keep it cold.
It helped understand what would happen essentially if things began to heat up.
And so it ended up informing later treaties for nuclear and biological weaponry.
You say in the book that Mary was always having, as we hinted as we started talking about her, always having to justify, quotes, her career as being as valid as her husband's career, which of course, from everything You said it absolutely was and more so.
And you say that, delightfully enough, you say on page 104, she was born to be a spy.
Yes, I think that's true.
I mean, this was a woman that was so good at being able to be friends with different types of people.
And we really see that.
She was able to have tea with her aunts who lived in Texas, and she was able to be wild with her friends in New York City.
She had friends all over the globe, and she really loved learning about different cultures.
She loved language.
She loved reading.
It was so much fun for me to really go in depth into what that was like and all the books she enjoyed.
But certainly the CIA did not always appreciate her abilities.
And we see that in these personnel reports that Mary herself would not have access to at the time.
But one of them read, quote, she has an inborn, perhaps feminine tendency to resist direction.
Of course, nothing like that would be written today, but that was 1952.
It was a totally, you know, almost another planet, but definitely a different era.
And in fact, you know, through the book, you list the kinds of things that were said by men who are no longer with us, but should be ashamed of themselves by today's standards that women were more emotional and they're likely to go off and get married and all that kind of stuff that I heard in some places when I was starting my career.
And I could never believe it when I would hear these words coming out of managers' mouths.
But it was a fact and people had to live with it back then.
Yes.
And that is why in 1953, these women decided to form the Petticoat Panel.
And this was a response to exactly that, to all of the comments they had heard, all of the just slights and gestures that they had been subject to during their operations overseas.
And the Petticoat Panel was, even though the name is ridiculous, it was a real dig at the women.
It was an attempt to rectify these injustices and give women more power at the agency.
So we see all of these women that I write about coming together and becoming friends during this time because they had to share so many of their personal experiences of what it was like to be a woman in intelligence.
You know, there are two fights.
I was thinking this as I was reading the book.
There are two fights going on.
There is one against America's foreign enemies, the ones who would wish us ill and want to take us over or whatever.
And then there was their internal fight with the system.
And this is 1953.
It's long before the 1970s and women's lib and the world as we know it now.
So when they formed the Petticoat Panel, and as you say, that itself is a derogatory, a kind of derogatory term.
But they were denied data.
They needed data to be able to come to conclusions and make recommendations.
But at the beginning, they were told that they could not have the data that they wanted because, well, it's classified.
Yes, it was just another attempt to slow their progress.
They did finally get the data, and they ended up creating the 77-page report that really detailed how women were being hired into the agency at positions that were beneath them and at salaries that were less than the men that they worked beside doing the same exact work.
So they spent a lot of time creating these statistics, creating these charts.
They really believed that they were going to change how the CIA worked with this report.
And of course, today, it's not surprising to us that in the 1950s, women were paid less than men.
But what is surprising is how these women decided to tackle this issue at the time.
And it's really their efforts during this period that led to what the CIA is today, which is an agency that is half woman that has a woman, Avril Haynes, at its helm.
I think I've got this statistic right.
I was trying to do the math, as they say.
But on average, they worked out that a woman doing the same work was making...
That's right.
The average or the median pay grade for women in 1953 was three levels below the men they worked beside.
And there wasn't a single woman who had an executive position within the CIA during that time.
That would all change after the petticoat panel, but it would definitely take some fighting because the men were not inclined to go along with it.
And you say also that at that time, only 7% of people who did the dirty work, the field operatives, only 7% were women.
That's right.
Yes, it really took a big push from this group of women, all of whom did field operations, to bring more women in.
And what we see is that as these women rose in the ranks, they tended to hire more women under them.
And they were excellent mentors.
That's exactly what I heard from the men and women that I interviewed who are in the CIA today, is that they really remember learning espionage, learning how to do classic espionage from these women.
So these are skills that are still important.
You talk about the training costs that they had to go through.
And I was most struck by the difference between the live letter drops and the dead letter drops and how they were both risky, as we indicated just before.
They're both risky in their own ways.
That's right.
You know, you have, I think I talked a little bit about dead drops and live drops earlier, but certainly they used a number of different techniques in order to pass information.
All of them carried a risk.
Whether or not you were handing documents directly to someone or you were picking them up at a clandestine location, you certainly had to be careful of being watched.
And we see examples of this all throughout the book of the precautions these women took.
Now, these women went through different training programs than today.
Today, of course, much has been written about the farm at the CIA and how grueling That training is.
And I certainly talked to many men and women who told me that it is very difficult.
And in some ways, actually, the modern CIA officers that I spoke to had some disdain for these early officers because they didn't have to go through that.
These were women that were hired during World War II.
And so training was different during that time, as you can imagine, although it had many of its own challenges.
Were there occurrences, occasions where any of the five, maybe more than one of the five, had found themselves in a situation where they've had to talk themselves out of extreme danger?
Well, these are women that mostly welcomed extreme danger.
They didn't seem to have much fear of it.
And I give many examples of this in the book.
You know, even Addie Hawkins, who's the single mom of three, she was anxious for a field assignment.
She wanted to be overseas.
She really believed in what she was doing.
And certainly we see these women taking on these challenges.
But they, you know, they certainly were cautious.
They were not trying to risk their lives.
They were, you know, not, they were not the James Bonds that we see in TV and movies of chasing cars and using guns, things like that.
That was not the kind of work these women were doing.
No, this is methodical work where you absolutely, positively, definitely have to get it right.
That you mentioned Addy, Addie was involved in the development and use of microdot cameras.
Now, when I was a kid, and I think in the early James Bond films my mum and dad used to take me to see, of course, micro dots were crucial, these little tiny packages of information, you know, that you could cram so many details, so many pages of a document that you were clandestinely photographing into this tiny photographic negative.
But she was involved in those.
She was.
And this was a very small sliver of time.
It was right in the late 1940s where they were making these microdot cameras.
They were just the size of a quarter.
They were so small.
But you could fit pages and pages of text within a tiny little dot, like the dot of a sentence.
And so Addie was involved in this and lots of other different spy gear.
And we really see her rising in the ranks because then she goes from that, making the spy gear, to then being part of operations that analyze spy plane and satellite data later on in the 1950s.
So her trajectory through the CIA really follows modern technology because she then goes from spy planes and satellites to then bringing in IBMs for the first time within the CIA.
She was one of the very first officers that went to computer training and started setting up that network at the agency.
You mentioned the U-2 spy plane.
She was a fierce defender of the U-2 spy plane when some of the military brass were not convinced.
Yes, well, we certainly see many mistakes, many things that go wrong with the U-2 spy planes, all of which, of course, have been written about before.
But it's interesting to look at Addie's perspective on this because at that time, she has to be the liaison between the CIA and the NSA, the National Security Agency.
So she has to be the link between them that is getting all of the data in and that's really giving a complete picture.
And, oh, it is just a mess.
They're trying to understand how the spy planes run.
And when they lose one, the one that Richard Powers is flying over the Soviet Union, it just brings everything into a tailspin.
And it's quite a lot of work to retrieve that program and build it back up.
And we see her really leaning on satellite data in the years ahead.
And of course, that ends up being very important.
And you talk about the mistakes, the errors that were made along the way.
The brass made various wrong estimates of when the Soviets would get the A-bomb.
I think those estimates started, I think, around 1950 and ended up at 1956 or so.
And it was somewhere closer to the beginning of that span of dates that they got the A-bomb.
That's right.
And we see that Eloise Page was actually one of a number of officers who was fighting against those estimates, who believed they were wrong and were really pushing for more surveillance.
She ends up being right on that.
And she actually ends up being right on several other operations as well.
We see that for Sputnik, because she has agents that she is working with in Soviet scientific circles, she knows exactly when Sputnik is going to launch and exactly its trajectory.
And she fights very hard.
One of her biggest fights, actually, with the CIA during this period, is when she wants to tell the American public about Sputnik.
And they don't believe her.
They say, no, we don't believe that you have these connections and that these are real dates.
And she says, no, I know I'm right.
And she really goes to town trying to get them to warn people because she's concerned that it's going to start a panic when Sputnik is finally launched.
And when Sputnik is launched on the date that she says it was, using the exact trajectory that she had predicted from her Soviet spy network, one of her bosses ends up sending her a case of champagne as an apology.
Okay.
Well, that was fairly chivalrous of the boss, wasn't it?
But the space program, of course, was hotly contested.
In the end, it was a race to get to the moon.
The Soviets had to drop out of it because their technology was fatally flawed.
Were the women that we're talking about here, were they involved in trying to get data on the space program to see if the Soviets were greatly advanced of the United States or whether, in fact, their technology, as it seems to have had subsequently, had fatal flaws in it?
They were absolutely getting data from Soviet scientists about the space program.
And this was interesting for me because I've written quite a bit about the American space program.
I have a previous book about work done at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California.
And so this gives such a different angle on it because you see that this group of officers is really intent on learning what the Soviets are doing, not because they want to get ahead, but because they are trying to further satellite spy technology.
And at the same time that we are making these great and beautiful advances into space, we're also using it for our own purposes.
And it's kind of incredible how soon these spy satellites are launched.
I like the way that you put the book together, slotting these women into their appropriate place in history.
In other words, it's a chronology.
You don't delineate it in terms of, as we've done here on the podcast, because I think it's a good idea to do that.
We've talked more about the individual characters and kept them segmented in that way to an extent.
But in the book, they appear as appropriate in the unfolding story, everything from the Bay of Pigs to the Suez, you know, the Suez events here that were so much a part of British news in the 1950s and NASA and all the rest of them.
I mean, NASA, not the space agency, NASA the politician, the Egyptian politician.
So, you know, you put them in their appropriate context.
I think that's very valuable.
So what are you hoping will happen with this research now?
Would you like it to become a movie?
Because inevitably, the book has made an impact on me, but you will make an impact on the millions if this gets picked up and made into a movie, which I think it should be.
Oh, you never know what will happen with movies and those kind of things.
But, you know, for me, just being able to tell their stories as accurately as I possibly can, all of their flaws, all of their successes, that is the real win for me is really being able to show what they did in their careers, what they did in their lives, what they deserve to be lauded for, and the mistakes they made as well.
It gives us a full picture of their contributions, but also gives us this wider perspective of the early Cold War, of the end of World War II, that I think is very valuable at this moment when so many echoes of our struggles with the Soviets are coming back up.
And it certainly feels very similar to that period of time.
When you read the book and the operations they were part of, many of them feel very familiar to what is happening in the world right now.
I was turning this into a screenplay all the way through the book, but coming to the end, close to the end, where Eloise tries to get into CIA headquarters.
She'd retired in 1987 and she tries to get in in 2001 in the aftermath of the terrible events of 9-11 and she can't.
They've deactivated or temporarily stalled her pass to get into the building and she rationalizes why they would think of her at that time or indeed a lot of people as a security risk.
That's right.
It's such a heartbreaking moment.
This is a woman who helped build the CIA.
She was there right from the beginning.
She helped put that agency together after World War II.
She's had such an incredible number of roles and then she can't even enter the building.
And her, the crush that she experiences, the devastation, I just really felt it as I was writing that scene.
I really felt for her.
And it's thanks to her colleagues at the agency that they are able to change that and get her access back to the building again.
But you certainly feel how history can be cruel.
It can forget those that have delivered so much and that have been important.
Talking of all five of them, when you cease to do that work that's full of excitement and challenge, but when you cease to do it, what happens?
In the case of them, how did they live their lives?
This was a sad part of the book because what I found was that after they had retired and left the CIA, it was very difficult for most of them to continue on.
We see that Mary Hutchinson and her husband manage perhaps the best because they have each other and they have travel and they have books and cats and they manage to have a very happy life up to the end.
And she ends up not retiring for a long time, even after her husband does so.
But for the others, it's much more painful.
We see that for Elizabeth Sudmeier in particular, she turns to alcohol and she's miserable.
She misses the agency.
She did not want to leave.
It was a forced retirement because of her age.
At first, she's based in Washington, D.C. for a while, and that's hard for her.
And what I learned when I spoke to other CIA officers is that this is a common experience, that it's very hard to go from a life where you feel that every day is vital and is essential to national security, to then coming down to a life where that isn't the case and where your everyday actions aren't so important.
So yes, there's certainly a lot of sadness there, but there's very sweet moments too.
And we see that Elizabeth Sudmeier, although she had been forgotten by so many, after her death, she then does become remembered by some of the female CIA officers and her contributions are accepted and they're brought to a head by those female CIA officers that come after her.
There's lots of imagery in the book and as I say, I was sort of making up a screenplay as I drank my coffee and went through it.
You know, I was sort of seeing the images.
And when I heard the reading on the BBC, there I am publicizing the BBC again.
But when I heard the reading, that gave me all sorts of pictures and images.
And the one that I take away is the seething cauldron that appeared to be Brussels at the very end and in the time subsequent to World War II.
You know, I don't live that far from the continent here in London.
I had no idea that that was the case.
Yes, that's true.
You know, it is a really poignant image, isn't it, to think of.
It really just shows the sacrifices these women made in that image and to think of it that way.
To me, it was a really powerful way to end the book because I think it highlights the recognition that they deserve.
Well, I hope they get it.
And I hope that the book is, you know, those training courses that we talked about.
Maybe the book could be put on those training courses because the chronology It gives you and the story that it tells you is unique.
And I think you've done a good thing.
I appreciate that.
Thank you so much.
Natalia Holt, and the book is Wise Gals.
And that book is out internationally now.
It's only recently been released in the United Kingdom, and it is well worth picking up, either in the hardback version or the softback version, or at the very least, listening to the serialization while it's available on BBC Radio 4.
I don't know why.
The BBC never did much to promote me, but it's on BBC Radio 4's listen service here, and it is well worth hearing because it's beautifully read.
More great guests in the pipeline here at the Home of the Unexplained.
So until next, we meet.
My name is Howard Hughes.
This has been The Unexplained Online.
And whatever you do, please stay safe.
Please stay calm.
And above all, please stay in touch.
Thank you very much.
Take care.
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