The Girl Guides
During the First World War, the Girl Guides—the British version of Girl Scouts—were used as couriers for secret messages by MI-5, Britain’s counter-intelligence agency. Messengers were needed to work in the War Office at the time, and at first Boy Scouts were used. But they proved to be difficult to manage, so Girl Guides were asked to serve instead. The girls, most of whom were between fourteen and eighteen years old, ran messages and patrolled on the roof; for their efforts they were paid ten shillings a week, plus food. Like all employees of MI-5, they took a pledge of secrecy. But unlike many employees of MI-5, they were among the least likely spies to arouse suspicion.
REVOLUTIONARY WAR SPIES
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During the Revolutionary War, many women up and down the East Coast passed important information along to General Washington at Valley Forge. Philadelphian Lydia Barrington Darragh spied on the British for American officers. Two Loyalists (citizens loyal to Britain), “Miss Jenny” and Ann Bates, spied on the Americans for the British. Ann Trotter Bailey carried messages across enemy territory in 1774, as did Sarah Bradlee Fulton, nicknamed the “mother of the Boston Tea Party”; Emily Geiger rode fifty miles through enemy territory to deliver information to General Sumter. The anonymous spy “355”—a numerical code that meant “lady” or “woman”—was a member of the Culper Ring, a New York-based secret spy organization. She was seized by the British in 1780 and died on a prison ship—but not before she named Benedict Arnold as a potential traitor.
CIVIL WAR SPIES
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Pauline Cushman was an actress who worked as a Union spy. She was captured with incriminating papers and sentenced to be executed, but was rescued just three days prior to her hanging. President Abraham Lincoln gave her the honorary commission of Major, and she toured the country for years, telling of her exploits spying for the Union.
Mary Elizabeth Bowser was a freed slave who served as a maid in the Confederate White House. Her servile status—and the mistaken assumption that she could neither read nor write—allowed her to be present for key conversations but largely ignored. She smuggled important information and papers to the Union Army.
Sarah Emma Edmonds disguised herself as a man so that she could serve in the Union Army, where she became known for her bravery and chameleonlike ability to blend in, whether she was masquerading as a black slave or “disguised” as a woman. She successfully fought for the Union as Frank Thompson until she became sick with malaria. She checked herself into a private hospital to avoid having to reveal her true identity. But when she learned that “Frank Thompson” was listed as a deserter, she came clean, and worked as a nurse for the Union—under her real name—until the end of the war. She wrote about her experiences in a memoir titled Nurse and Spy in the Union Army.
Rose O’Neal Greenhow spied so well for the Confederacy that Jefferson Davis credited her with winning the battle of Manassas. She was imprisoned twice, once in her own home, and the second time with her eight-year-old daughter in Washington, D.C.’s Old Capital Prison. After she was released from prison, she was exiled to the Confederate states, where Jefferson Davis enlisted her as a courier to Europe.
Nancy Hart served as a Confederate spy, carrying messages between the southern armies. When she was twenty, she was captured by the Union; she was able to escape after shooting one of her guards with his own weapon.
Elizabeth Van Lew was a spy for the North. She realized when she visited Union prisoners held by the Confederates in Richmond that they were excellent sources of information, as they had been marched through Confederate lines. Over the next four years, she worked as a spy, bringing food and clothing to Union prisoners and smuggling out information. For her efforts, she was made Postmaster of Richmond by General Grant.
Dr. Mary Edwards Walker was an abolitionist, a prisoner of war, a feminist, and a surgeon who dressed as a man and worked as a physician and spy for the Union. She is the only woman ever to receive the Congressional Medal of Honor.
Harriet Tubman is most famous for her work in freeing slaves, but she also served with the Union Army in South Carolina, organizing a spy network and leading expeditions in addition to fighting as a soldier, working as a cook and laundress, and aiding the wounded as a nurse. Through her experience with the Underground Railroad, leading more than 300 slaves to freedom, she came to know the landscape intimately and was able to recruit former slaves to be her eyes and ears, reporting on movements of the Confederate troops and scouting out the rebel camps. In 1863 she went on a gunboat raid, with Colonel James Montgomery and several black soldiers, that ultimately freed more than 700 slaves, thanks to the inside information from Harriet’s scouts.
Ginnie and Lottie Moon were sisters who spied for the Confederates during the Civil War. Lottie began her career as a spy delivering messages for an underground Confederate organization at the behest of her husband. Ginnie too delivered messages over Union lines, on the pretext that she was meeting a beau. Ginnie and the girls’ mother risked considerable danger when they accepted a mission to retrieve sensitive papers and supplies from the Knights of the Golden Circle in Ohio. They were apprehended by Union agents; Ginnie was able to swallow the most important written information they carried, but their cache of medical supplies was discovered and confiscated, and they were put under house arrest. Lottie came in disguise to plead with General Burnside—a former beau—for their release, but instead she was placed under arrest with her sister and mother. Ultimately the charges were dropped. Lottie eventually became a journalist, and in the 1920s Ginnie headed to Hollywood, where she had bit parts in several movies—none of them with plots as exciting as the sisters’ real life adventures.
WORLD WAR I SPIES
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Two famous and controversial World War I women spies, both of whom were executed, were Mata Hari (born Margaretha Geertruida Zelle McLeod) and Edith Cavell. Mata Hari was a dancer who used her vocation as a cover for her spy work for the Germans. She was shot by the French as a spy in 1917. Edith Cavell was a British nurse who worked in Belgium during the war. She secretly helped British, French, and Belgian soldiers escape from behind the German lines, and she hid refugees in the nursing school she ran. By 1915 she had helped more than 200 British, French, and Belgian soldiers, but the Germans grew suspicious and arrested her. She was executed by firing squad.
WORLD WAR II SPIES
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Virginia Hall, an American originally from Baltimore, Maryland, spied for the French during World War II. She was chased by the Nazis over the Pyrenees Mountains into Spain and eluded them, even though she had a wooden leg. After escaping, she trained as a radio operator and transferred to the OSS, America’s secret spy agency. In 1943 she returned to France as an undercover spy, gathering intelligence, helping to coordinate air drops in support of D-Day, and working with the French underground to disrupt German communications. After the war, Virginia was awarded America’s Distinguished Service Cross, the only American civilian woman to receive such an honor. She continued to work for the OSS, and later the CIA, until her retirement in 1966.
Princess Noor-un-nisa Inayat Khan was an author and a heroine of the French Resistance. The Princess trained as a wireless operator in Great Britain and was sent into occupied France as a spy with the code name “Madeleine.” She became the sole communications link between her unit of the French Resistance and home base before she was captured by the Gestapo and executed.
Violette Bushell Szabo was recruited and trained by the British Special Operations Executive after her husband, a member of the French Foreign Legion, was killed in North Africa. She was sent to France, where she was captured during a shoot-out. She refused to give up her information and was sent to the Ravensbruck concentration camp, where she was eventually killed. She was awarded the George Cross and the Croix de Guerre posthumously in 1946.
Amy Elizabeth Thorpe, also known as Betty Pack and “Code Name Cynthia,” was an American spy first recru
ited by the British secret service and later by the American OSS. She is probably best remembered for her procurement of French naval codes, necessary to the Allies’ invasion of North Africa, which she accomplished by tricking a man connected to the Vichy French Embassy into giving them to her. Not only did she steal French naval code books from the safe in his locked room, she also stole his heart: after the war they were married, and they spent the rest of their lives together.
How To Be a Spy
THE WORD “spy” comes to us from ancient words meaning “to look at or watch.” And indeed, despite the modern movie emphasis on technology and machines as integral to a spy’s bag of tricks, in essence what makes an excellent spy is her ability to watch, pay attention, look, and learn.
TOP-SECRET COMMUNICATION
Girl Scout whistle and hand signals
These secret signals have been used by the Girl Scouts since before World War I. You can use them to alert or direct your spy team when you are out in the field.
Whistle signals
♦ One long blast means “silence / alert / listen for next signal”
♦ A succession of long slow blasts means “go out / get farther away” or “advance / extend / scatter”
♦ A succession of quick short blasts means “rally / close in / come together/ fall in”
♦ Alternate short and long blasts mean “alarm / look out / be ready / man your alarm posts”
Hand signals
♦ Advance / forward: Swing the arm from rear to front, below the shoulder
♦ Retreat: Circle the arm above the head
♦ Halt: Raise the arm to full extension above the head.
Secret codes
A code is a way to send a message while keeping it a secret from someone who isn’t supposed to know about it. Codes can be easy or complicated—the trick is to make sure the person on the receiving end of your secret message has the key to decode it without making it too easy for anyone else to crack. Here are a few simple codes you can use.
♦ Write each word backwards
♦ Read every second letter
♦ Use numbers for letters (A=1, B=2, C=3, etc.)
♦ Reverse the alphabet (A=Z, B=Y, C=X, etc.)
♦ Sliding scale alphabet (move the alphabet by one letter: A=B, B=C, C=D, etc.)
♦ Use invisible ink (write with lemon or lime juice; after it dries hold the paper up to a light source to read the message).
♦ Pigpen code: Each letter is represented by the part of the “pigpen” that surrounds it. If it’s the second letter in the box, then it has a dot in the middle.
TOOLS
In movies, spies often use high-tech equipment to accomplish covert tasks, but all spies are grounded in the basics: good, old-fashioned, low-tech observation that can be performed without the aid of any fancy hardware. In World War II, women spies used something called an “escape and evasion” scarf—these were scarves with maps printed on one side, so that any agent who needed to find an escape route or nearby town or road had a map that was easy to get to but not so easily detectable by someone else. You can make your own with an old scarf or other fabric and a permanent marker (providing you get permission to mark up the scarf first).
A few other tools that would be good for a spy to have handy are things like binoculars; a small notepad and pen; walkie-talkie; magnifying glass; Swiss Army knife; hat or wig for quick disguising; sneakers or other quiet shoes for stealth walking; clothes in dark or subdued colors. The best tools of all, though, are your eyes, your ears, and your ingenuity. Pay attention to everything that’s going on around you, blend into your surroundings so you can observe without being noticed, look for subtle clues to tell you more about what’s happening, and write everything down. With any luck, you’ll not only become a great spy, you’ll be on your way to becoming a great writer. You know, just in case the espionage career doesn’t work out.
YOUR SPY TEAM
The life of a spy can be a lonely one, with so much secrecy and subterfuge and no one to share it with at the risk of blowing your cover. It’s much more fun to operate within a spy ring and work as a team to accomplish your undercover goals. On a team, spies can have specific tasks or areas of expertise, and of course code names.
The Agent-in-Charge: This is the head spy. She is responsible for directing, planning, and organizing the mission. All team members report to her.
The Scout: This is the person who scopes out the physical landscape to see if it’s safe for the rest of the team to move in. She goes ahead of the team when they are out in the field, and no one moves in without a signal from her. She should have excellent eyesight and hearing and should be an expert on geography and the outdoors.
The Tracker: This person acts as the “trigger,” the spy whose job it is to monitor the target of investigation. She tracks and observes the suspect’s actions and alerts the rest of the team when the suspect is in range.
The Techie: This is the group’s technology maven. She knows about computers, tools, and gadgets, from using them to fixing them to creating new ones. She is the one who draws up any maps, plans, or charts, and also keeps notes about the mission.
The Wheel Artist: This is the person who organizes the get-away, or who can use her wheels to accomplish any stealth maneuver. If she can drive, that’s great, but she doesn’t have to be commandeering a car. The wheels can be anything that gets your spy team out of the field in a timely manner. She can oversee a fleet of scooters, ride another spy to safety on her bike, or even accomplish a sensitive mission lightning-quick on her skateboard or roller skates.
The Stealth Master: This is a small, quiet person who can sneak into tight places and generally move around unnoticed. It helps if she is also a master of disguise, and an illusionist, able to use card and magic tricks for purposes of distraction.
The Social Engineer: This person is brave, chatty, outgoing, and able to interact with suspects and others to extract information. She can be the public face of the team while other team members gather evidence or perform surveillance, using her considerable social skills to both distract and engage.
Of course, no matter what her specialty, a spy should be able to: appraise a situation, balance, bluff, climb, be diplomatic, escape when necessary, gather information, hide, intuit, be insightful, jump, listen, move silently, read lips and body language, respond quickly, tumble, transform, and, above all, be levelheaded.
After each mission, all members of the spy team should rendezvous at an agreed-upon meeting place or secret hideout, where they will report to the agent-in-charge and exchange information. No matter what her role on the team is, a spy should always note suspicious activity, try not to be seen or heard, cover her tracks, and never reveal her true identity to outsiders.
SPY LINGO
Acorn
Someone who is performing an intelligence function.
Agent
A person officially employed by an intelligence service. (Also undercover agent: a secret agent; deep-cover agent: an agent under permanent cover; double agent: an agent simultaneously working for two enemies; agent-in-charge: the head agent.)
Babysitter
Bodyguard.
Blowback
Unexpected negative consequences of spying.
Blown
Detected, as in “your cover is blown.”
Bona Fides
Proof of a person’s claimed identity.
Brush Contact or Brush Pass
Brief contact between two agents who are passing information, documents, or equipment.
Burn notice
An official statement from an intelligence agency saying that an individual or group is an unreliable source.
Chicken feed
Low-grade information given by a double agent to an adversary to build the credibility of the double agent.
Cobbler
Spy who creates false passports, visas, diplomas, and other documents.
Comm
Small n
ote or other written communication.
Cover
A secret identity.
Dead drop
A secret hiding place somewhere in public where communications, documents, or equipment are placed for another agent to collect.
Doppelganger
A decoy or look-alike.
E&E
Escape and evasion.
Ears only
Material too secret to commit to writing.
Eyes only
Documents too secret to be talked about.
Floater
A person used occasionally or even unknowingly for an intelligence operation.
Friend
An agent or informant providing information.
Front
A legitimate-appearing business created to provide cover for spies and their operations.
Ghoul
Agent who searches obituaries and graveyards for names to be used by agents.
Honey Pot/Honey Trap
Slang for use of men or women to trap a person using affection or romance.
Informant
A person who provides intelligence to the surveillance team.
Joe
A deep-cover agent.
Legend
Background story or documents to support your cover.
Letterbox
A person who acts as a gobetween.
Mole
An agent who penetrates enemy organizations.
The Daring Book for Girls Page 19
