If there’s one secretary whose name is recognized around the world, it’s Miss Moneypenny. What is less known is that “Penny”, made famous in the James Bond novels and films, is based on a real person: Kathleen Pettigrew, assistant to the head of MI6, whom Ian Fleming met during of its naval intelligence mandate. officer during the Second World War.
The mysterious lives of Pettigrew and his colleagues are revealed by historian Claire Hubbard-Hall in Its secret services — a celebration of the secretaries of MI5, MI6 and GCHQ who knew as many state secrets as their bosses but were nonetheless confined to behind-the-scenes roles in the theater of British espionage. Across the Atlantic, Jonna Mendez offers a contrasting vision of the life of a secretary with her memoirs In True Face, which chronicles a CIA career spanning from the modest pool of typists to his final position as chief of disguise. Together, these books trace women’s struggles for recognition within the British and American spy agencies over nearly a century of Allied operations.
Hubbard-Hall’s secretaries were at the forefront, recruited during World War I and World War II to staff a growing intelligence bureaucracy. The files they created were for espionage, she claims, “what ammunition was for a fighting force.” While female spies such as Violette Szabo and Vera Atkins became famous for their wartime heroics within the Special Operations Executive, much less has been written about the invisible army of women who worked in the depths of the intelligence machine. information in the broad sense.
Prospects should have been much better in mid-1960s America, when Mendez, the new wife of an American spy, was hired as a CIA typist.. But she soon realized that as one of the CIA’s “contract wives,” she was part of an invisible, underpaid, second-rate workforce that maintained the administration of afloat agency – another type of secret work that is only now fully understood.
When Mendez finally made it out of the back office, she embraced the thrill of espionage, traveling to “no-go zones” such as Russia and China, where disguises were essential to avoid constant surveillance. She describes being called to verify rare footage of Venezuelan terrorist Carlos the Jackal, being recognized by a jihadist in the lobby of a hotel where she posed as a guest, and committing a daring heist to steal a printing machine. encryption in a Soviet embassy. His career coup included briefing then-President George HW Bush in the Oval Office about his team’s latest technology, while wearing a mask modeled on that of one of his colleagues.
Hubbard-Hall’s book is also rich in color, but some stories – such as the identity of Pettigrew’s mysterious lover, “Kit” – are painfully vague due to the ghostly qualities of the secretaries she was investigating. These women are difficult to track down because the Foreign Office’s marriage ban – which prohibited women from keeping their jobs after marriage – persisted until 1972, so many remained single and did not have a children they remember. Hubbard-Hall finds his subjects’ diaries and letters hidden in family collections; using skills more familiar to a counterintelligence officer than an academic, she cherished the memories of her surviving loved ones.
Pettigrew, who grew up in a working-class family in Bermondsey, south London, proved particularly elusive. She distanced herself from her family in order to maintain her cover and took her vows of secrecy seriously. The most prominent of the spy secretaries, she served throughout her life as assistant to five heads of MI6, each known by the code name “C”, the apparent humility of her title belying her true status. Hubbard-Hall reveals that she had access to the chief’s safes and even knew the locations of dead mailboxes. She was, at her peak, “regarded by all with a respect bordering on fear.”
Less than a decade after Kathleen retired to the Devon coast, Jonna Mendez was starting as a junior secretary at the CIA, a job she nearly left despite seeing no fulfilling future. Luckily, her boss turned her away at the last minute by suggesting that the CIA’s photography department might fit her creative ambitions. From there, she progressed to the Clandestine Communications Division, specializing in secret messaging and microdot technology, and eventually to the Disguise Department.
While Mendez previously co-wrote books on CIA operations with her late husband Tony (their story of the plot to exfiltrate six American diplomats from Iran in 1980 was made into a film, Argowith Ben Affleck), it is her first solo adventure and the only one to address what it means to be a woman in the agency.
Both authors are most compelling when questioning gender politics in intelligence work. In the UK, histories of spy agencies – written predominantly by men – often draw on declassified official documents and reflect a top-down male perspective. As a general rule, according to Hubbard-Hall, these neglect or, at the very least, underestimate the role of women.
Her book describes the countless ways in which women were disempowered, emphasizing that those, like Pettigrew, who worked for British spy agencies during World War I, were responsible for guarding the government’s top secrets, but n were not considered worthy of the vote. Even after the extraordinary intelligence operations carried out by female spies during World War II, women were not encouraged to stay after the conflict ended. In 1945, new female recruits to MI5 were told: “Women are happiest in junior positions”.
The few women recruited into the operations became accustomed to having their judgment doubted and their advice overruled. This was particularly true for Jane Archer, who, although a formidable interrogator, was fired from MI5 for insubordination in 1940 after pointing out the weaknesses of her new boss, Jasper Harker (within weeks of her dismissal he was demoted). . Hubbard-Hall points out that Harker was also responsible for ignoring repeated warnings from one of his female agents about Communist Party member Melita Norwood, who became the longest-serving KGB agent on British soil.
The difficulties Mendez encountered at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, were different but only slightly less restrictive. During her years as an “indentured wife”, her rights were limited and any promotions earned overseas were terminated upon her return to Washington. Even when she was officially employed, Mendez endured a range of insults, from being excluded from “men-only” drinks after successful surgeries to having a grenade thrown at her during a training class by a male colleague who was piqued by her promotion (the gun had been defused, but still set off a giant explosion that left her shaking for hours).
When she was blocked and undermined by a sexist boss on an overseas tour, Mendez considered taking legal action against the agency, but knew from experience that women who won discrimination cases paid for the loss of their careers. Later, she was disappointed to find that a course for CIA women moving into leadership positions focused more on helping women fit in than changing a culture “that excused generally misogyny of men and neglected the potential of women. A campaign for better treatment led by Janine Brookner, director of the agency’s Jamaica station, gained momentum in the early 1990s: Mendez believes that for an organization that prided itself on detecting disorders before they did not lead to revolt, the CIA seemed blind to the emerging events. dissent within its own walls.
It is striking how much and how little has changed in the century covered by these books. Stella Rimington, the first female director general of MI5, shares a history with Pettigrew and Mendez, having started her intelligence career as a typist employed by the British Embassy in Delhi where her husband worked as a diplomat. Even after she was appointed to this top job in 1992 (and rose to a much higher rank than her former spouse), a newspaper ran the ad under the headline: “Mother of Two Gets Tough on Terrorists “.
In the United States, Gina Haspel became the first female head of the CIA in 2018, winning a victory for equality. Nonetheless, that same year, Tim Weiner, a journalist who wrote a history of the agency, opined that with the exception of the Marines, there was “no branch of service in the U.S. government so hostile to women.” than the clandestine services of the CIA. “.
Mendez knows that the tendency of intelligence services to underestimate women – as was the case with Jane Archer – has been difficult to reverse. She recounts how, ten years after her retirement, she and her husband Tony filmed a video for PBS to demonstrate counter-surveillance techniques. FBI agents followed the two men through the streets of Georgetown, Washington, as if they were part of a real operation. At the start of the exercise, Tony and Jonna separated; the FBI agents had to make a split-second decision about who to follow and as the couple predicted, they chose Tony. In the meantime, Jonna changed her disguise three times and managed to thwart her supervisors.
“We would bet on the FBI assuming that he, this man, would do the ‘real’ work. . . This was a strategy we had already used in many parts of the world, in real-world espionage situations,” Mendez writes. “For better or worse, in the 21st century it has proven to be just as effective. »
Her secret services: the forgotten women of British intelligence by Claire Hubbard-Hall Weidenfeld & Nicolson £25, 352 pages
In True Face: the life of a woman in the CIA, unmasked by Jonna Méndez Public Affairs £20/$30, 320 pages
Helen Warrell is an investigative journalist and former defense and security editor of the FT.
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