The Hidden Figures of the Intelligence Community
BOOK REVIEW: WOMEN IN INTELLIGENCE: THE HIDDEN HISTORY OF TWO WORLD WARS
By Dr. Helen Fry / Yale University Press
The Reviewer – Lena Andrews is a former military analyst at the CIA and is author of Valiant Women: The Extraordinary American Women Who Helped Win World War II. She will soon be joining the University of Maryland’s School of Public Policy as an Associate Research Professor.
REVIEW – Dr. Helen Fry’s latest book, Women in Intelligence: The Hidden History of Two World Wars, is one of the most exhaustive accounts of women’s varied roles in the British intelligence apparatus to date. This important book provides a vital corrective to the decades of history and analysis that have ignored or minimized the contributions of British women to the intelligence operations that helped the Allies win two world wars.
From the outset, Fry acknowledges that she has undertaken a difficult analytic task: identifying, recounting, and contextualizing the contributions of British women to intelligence operations in not one, but two, world wars. Fry’s job is made particularly difficult by the challenges of the topic she has chosen, including, firstly, that much of the historical record on this topic remains classified. What’s more, the erasure of women’s contributions to intelligence operations, as well as the women’s own unwillingness to talk about their work only complicates Fry’s task further. (In one instance, she notes, a family only found out about their mother’s wartime spy duties when they stumbled on an assassin’s pen in her jewelry box.)
But Fry approaches the topic creatively, and by triangulating between declassified government, intelligence, and defense reports as well as publicly available sources, she provides readers with a detailed and engaging account of the unknown British women intelligencers, operatives and secretaries who made such a significant contribution.
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The result is a revealing portrait of the British women who were often at the very heart of intelligence operations in the First and Second World War. In collating dozens of short vignettes, Fry points out that women were found in every corner of British intelligence operations. Whether it is the story of the secretaries in MI5 whose organizational skills allowed them to run spy networks in their free time, or the women whose language and puzzling skills made them expert codebreakers, or the women who convinced German agents that they were reporting back to the Nazis when they were in fact sending secrets back to the British, Fry makes evident that the entire intelligence apparatus benefited from the skills of these women.
The vignettes in the book cover some well-trodden ground, including the stories of Edith Cavell, Vera Atkins, and the women of Bletchley Park, but they also reveal several lesser-known heroes. Indeed, there are numerous anecdotes that even longtime students of this period will find fascinating, including chapter eight, “When The Walls Had Ears,” which builds on Fry’s prior work about the men and women who devised a cutting edge operation to spy on German prisoners of war by bugging the walls of their detention cells.
Fry leaves no doubt that British women made a clear and important contribution to the myriad intelligence operations that existed during and between the two world wars, but her thoroughness, at times, can come at a cost. Some readers may find Fry’s meticulous accounting undercuts her ability to generate the narrative momentum found in popular accounts of women in intelligence, and readers should not expect another popular history of women in intelligence from Fry. That’s fine by me, since many of those already exist elsewhere, and the scope that Fry conveys is a worthwhile tradeoff.
Perhaps more than anything, Women in Intelligence is a testament to the fact that intelligence work is a team sport, and a reminder that women have often been a part of the starting lineup. In making this point, Fry dispenses with of the myth that the history of women in intelligence is “the world of honeytraps, alluring agents, fast cars, and Bond-girl glamour” and instead, makes clear us that “the true story is one that evokes awe and respect.” Fry, to her credit, approaches these women and their stories with the respect and seriousness they deserve, and provides us all with an important reminder to do the same.
Women in Intelligence earns an impressive three out of four trench coats
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