Something spicy was cooking under Ms. Child’s apron.
The Office of Strategic Services, an early branch of the CIA, released the names of spies for Roosevelt during World War II. The list included Sterling Hayden (an actor in The Godfather), notable historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr., and, of course, Julia Child.
While Child was teaching us all how to be fat and happy, she was also spying for the US. Maybe her cooking contained messages…or maybe she poisoned people…who knows?
This is just a reminder that we can’t be sure of anything.
Here’s more, from AP:
- WASHINGTON (AP) — Famed chef Julia Child shared a secret with Supreme Court Justice Arthur Goldberg and Chicago White Sox catcher Moe Berg at a time when the Nazis threatened the world. They served in an international spy ring managed by the Office of Strategic Services, an early version of the CIA created in World War II by President Franklin Roosevelt.
- The secret comes out Thursday, all of the names and previously classified files identifying nearly 24,000 spies who formed the first centralized intelligence effort by the United States. The National Archives, which this week released a list of the names found in the records, will make available for the first time all 750,000 pages identifying the vast spy network of military and civilian operatives.
- They were soldiers, actors, historians, lawyers, athletes, professors, reporters. But for several years during World War II, they were known simply as the OSS. They studied military plans, created propaganda, infiltrated enemy ranks and stirred resistance among foreign troops.
Read the full story here.
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Weight Watcher’s International Inc. (WTW) - September ‘07
Network Services 3 months ago
I will continue to seek advice from Julia as my life progresses. Network Services
John 3 months ago
Of course, it is simply not news that Child was OSS. To be sure, she never said she was a “spy,” but anyone can read between the lines:
From Julia Child’s “My Life in France,” p. 12:
“We [she and her to-be-husband Paul] had met in Ceylon in the summer of 1944, when we’d both been posted there by the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the precursor to the CIA. Paul was an artist, and he’d been recruited to create war rooms where General Mountbatten could review the intelligence that our agents had sent in from the field. I was head of the Registry, where, among other things, I processed agents’ reports from the field and other top-secret papers. . . .”
Ahem. If you’re doing stuff for Mountbatten, it isn’t just filing.