Julia Child: Chef and WWII Spy
An official list of the nearly 24,000 members of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), an international spy ring created during World War II, has been revealed and it includes beloved chef Julia Child. Read more about her experience with the OSS from Military Officer magazine.
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4 Comments:
This is old news and all the more reason that Julia is totally awesome!
beano at 2:08PM on 08/14/08
Is this a light news day, or something? Julia Child never made any secret of her work with OSS; she started as a file clerk and her superior organizational abilities earned her a chance to develop a filing system for the office where she worked. Just because she worked for OSS doesn't mean she was a "spy."
VictoriaB at 5:11PM on 08/14/08
Old news; she talked about this for years. What no one has mentioned is that the information was released the day before what would have been her 96th birthday, and the day after the 4th anniversary of her passing.
Julia Child, August 15th 1912-August 13th, 2004. We miss you!
Deb07 at 6:44PM on 08/14/08
This is not old news. Do you all really think that Julia Child would talk about a Top Secret, classified intelligence job for years, like it was nothing? The first thing they tell you to NOT do when you are given a Top Secret clearance is not to talk about the classified work you do! And if you had read the first line of the linked article you would have seen this:
"When Julia McWilliams left Newport News, Va., by troop train to travel to California before her assignment in Southeast Asia, she was instructed to tell people she was a file clerk. She had been sworn to secrecy and forbidden to keep a diary. It was February 1944."
Farther down on the page was this:
"Though Julia would later say, modestly, "I was just a file clerk," she had a high security clearance for her work, which included all classified papers for the invasion of the Malaysian peninsula. She tracked sensitive documents, dispatches, and espionage/sabotage under the South East Asia Command, then headed by Mountbatten. A colleague in Air Force Intelligence, Byron Martin, stated that Julia "was privy to every top secret ... which required a person of unquestioned loyalty, of rock-solid integrity, of unblemished lifestyle, of keen intelligence.""
litenarata at 8:12AM on 08/15/08