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World Wars I & II – Women in Intelligence – Helen Fry
178 Plays1 year ago
Ep 042 – Nonfiction. Across both world wars, women ran spy networks and escape lines, parachuted behind enemy lines, and interrogated prisoners. Helen Fry joins me to discuss her fascinating new book, "Women in Intelligence: The Hidden History of Two World Wars."
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Transcript
Introduction to Women in Intelligence
00:00:00
Speaker
my book is really ambitious in that it's pretty much the first
00:00:05
Speaker
book to comprehensively look at the history of women in intelligence from the first world war so from 1914 all the way through to the end of the second world war 1945 and I bring out some really interesting overview actually of what women achieved so it's not just that women were there it's what did they actually achieve and what I discovered was that a large amount of what they achieved
00:00:34
Speaker
was hidden by official secrecy.
Helen Fry and her Book
00:00:58
Speaker
Today, I am super excited to have on the show Helen Fry for her newest book, Women in Intelligence, the Hidden History of Two World Wars. Helen is a historian and biographer. She is the best-selling author of The Walls Have Ears. That's a great title, by the way. Spy Master, MI9, and more than 20 books on intelligence, prisoners of war, and the social history of the Second World War. Helen, how are you doing today?
00:01:26
Speaker
Oh, it's great to be with you. Thanks for having me. Yeah, likewise. I'm really excited to be talking about this topic today. I know we were talking a little bit before we started recording World War II, super interesting to me. And topics like yours, Women in Intelligence, love that you wrote this book because, again, it's a book about stuff that just doesn't get talked about too much.
00:01:51
Speaker
And as you kind of write about in your book, when we do hear about women in intelligence, it's often like these like really dramatic stories that overshadow some of the other equally, if not more important work done by other women in intelligence. So yeah, I got to ask, so your book is about two World Wars, the World War I and World War II, which seems very ambitious.
00:02:20
Speaker
Did this project start off like that? Or were you like, there's so much material here, I got to go for both World Wars instead of focusing on one?
00:02:30
Speaker
Well, I actually made the decision in conjunction with my publisher to cover both World Wars and the 1920s and 30s, so the period between the First World War and Second World War. But of course, once I started, I realised the humongous task that I had, the momentous task ahead of me,
00:02:50
Speaker
and really it was containing the sheer volume of stories and, well, very exciting stories. But to understand what women achieved in the Second World War, a lot of the roots and many of the women that I studied for so many years
00:03:06
Speaker
had worked in intelligence from the First World War and right the way through to the Second World War. That's not true in all cases, but for me, I felt we had to understand what were women doing as early as the First World War. Of course, I could have gone earlier, but you have to contain this somehow. Yeah. Well, that's like the historian's curse, right? It's like, when did things actually start? Like, did World War I cause World War II, but did, you know,
00:03:35
Speaker
Did the Franco-Prussian War cause World War I? You can just keep going back for a while. So stopping at World War I was probably a good idea.
Diverse Roles Debunked
00:03:47
Speaker
Well, I like to ask when authors come on this show, one of the things I like to ask is, and we just kind of touched on this, but in your own words, can you just tell us what is your book about? My book is really ambitious in that it's pretty much the first
00:04:04
Speaker
book to comprehensively look at the history of women in intelligence from the first world war so from 1914 all the way through to the end of the second world war 1945 and I bring out some really interesting overview actually of what women achieved so it's not just that women were there it's what did they actually achieve and what I discovered was that a large amount of what they achieved
00:04:33
Speaker
was hidden by official secrecy. So I look at women who were in uniform, so in military intelligence, in air intelligence, naval intelligence, and I also look at the secret service organisations. So for the UK that's MI5, which is in charge of home security,
00:04:54
Speaker
and MI6 which is in charge of our security abroad if you like so the equivalent of the FBI and the CIA and trying to understand they weren't just women sat at a desk with a pencil and paper they were doing far more than that and in fact sometimes the titles that they had for their roles
00:05:17
Speaker
well, they certainly weren't cooks or secretaries, for example. So for me, it was a matter of putting on record and understanding the diversity of what women had achieved in this period of, you know, one of the most important times in the 20th century.
00:05:37
Speaker
Yeah. A quick question on, I'm glad you brought up like the equivalent with like the, I think you would call them the M offices and like the CIA here in the States. How many M offices are there? Because James Bond is MI6, right? That's like the one that's most well-known. Maybe he's MI5. I think it's MI6. He's MI6, yeah. He's a secret agent. How many M offices are there?
An Overview of MI Offices
00:06:08
Speaker
Well, traditionally, it started from MI1, so MI stands for military intelligence, and it went from MI1 all the way up to MI19. There were just a couple of them that weren't ever used, but they cover different aspects of intelligence. So MI8, for example, covers the radio security service and code breaking, traditionally like Bletchley Park came under that, Code and Cypher School,
00:06:38
Speaker
Well, actually part also fell for a while and still under MI6, but those military intelligence, MI9, for example, was in charge of the escape line. So you had something equivalent in American intelligence in the Second World War, getting our allied airmen and soldiers back from behind enemy lines. There was a branch of military intelligence in America and in the UK that was bringing our guys back.
00:07:04
Speaker
so that they could fight another day effectively. They used escape gadgets and all that kind of James Bond cue gadgets and they had secret escape lines. So yes, there were several military intelligences and most of them don't survive today. Was that right? Oh, was that just because like their functions are no longer necessary to modern intelligence gathering?
00:07:28
Speaker
Yes, as far as we can tell, or maybe they were closed down at the end of the Second World War and in contemporary times, maybe they started similar intelligence work under new names. I don't know, I haven't studied contemporary intelligence, but by and large, we're left with just two that we know of, and that's MI5 and MI6.
00:07:50
Speaker
Okay, well thank you for that kind of explanation for our American audience who might similarly not be hip to the designations in the UK, although maybe everybody knows this and I'm just kind of waking up to it.
00:08:07
Speaker
Well, speaking of intelligence history, let's talk a little bit about, so obviously, a large part of your book is about British intelligence. What's the history leading up to World War I?
Historical Context of Women's Roles
00:08:22
Speaker
What's the history of intelligence leading up to where your book starts?
00:08:27
Speaker
And traditionally, like how, and I don't know if this is something we even know, but how have women traditionally been, have they played roles in intelligence up to World War I?
00:08:40
Speaker
The answer is yes. There has been a book written about women working in intelligence espionage in the 17th century. I do make reference to one of our queens, Queen of England, Elizabeth I, so she reigned in the 16th century, so the 1500s, and she was what we would really term a spy mistress.
00:09:04
Speaker
So she founded her own intelligence network. It wasn't very formalized like we have the FBI and CIA today, but nevertheless she had a very famous minister, Sir Francis Walsingham, and they were engaged in all kinds of traditional spycraft. Yes, they were opening people's mail and seeing if they were plotting against the Queen because the Queen's throne was a threat. Monarchs throughout history had to keep their
00:09:30
Speaker
thrones in the UK actually you know there were a lot of threats against the stability and their survival and we had a short period where we had the civil war where we had no monarch where a man called Oliver Cromwell instigated effectively a republic but we went back to monarchy again and we still have the monarch and I'm great you know I'm a great monarchist and I think that's fabulous
00:09:55
Speaker
But of course, before the First World War, we didn't really have women in uniform working in intelligence. So in terms of intelligence services, it was largely a male domain. That's not to say that women weren't used discreetly in areas where there were conflict, particularly we're talking about the Boer War in South Africa towards the end of the 20th century.
00:10:20
Speaker
So it ends in 1902. So we don't really know what women were doing there. We know that some were involved in intelligence, but not in uniform. And it's really the first world war where things begin for women.
00:10:34
Speaker
Well, let's talk about World War I then. So what characterizes intelligence gathering during World War I? What kinds of activities are going on?
WWI Intelligence and Women's Involvement
00:10:47
Speaker
I think you write in your book that Britain was kind of terrorized by the idea of Germans among them. Talk a little bit just about that atmosphere and how intelligence went.
00:11:02
Speaker
So the British intelligence services were founded, what now today we know is MI5 and MI6, was founded in 1909 because of the threat from Germany. Germany was seemed to be a threat to the stability and that turned out to be true in 1914. In August 1914
00:11:23
Speaker
when German forces occupied Belgium and Luxembourg and a bit of northern France so we were at war with Germany then and there was a fear that there were German spies operating in Britain
00:11:38
Speaker
and trying to destabilise the situation in Britain. And so our domestic security service, MI5, was in charge of the two threats really, the threats of German spies, and it was turned out to be probably quite over-exaggerated for the First World War, but there was this sort of fear.
00:12:01
Speaker
And there was still the threat of communism from the Russians. So they had that dual threat which still was something through the 1920s and 30s into the Second World War.
00:12:14
Speaker
We have the women of MI5 who start conducting all kinds of intelligence work. A lot of their early work is administrative, but they soon become experts. And some of them, a couple of key prominent women, become experts on Soviet intelligence, so on all things Russian.
00:12:35
Speaker
And then if we look at occupied Europe, so we're talking as I said about Belgium and Luxembourg that's occupied by the Germans, Holland is not occupied in the First World War, so Holland is neutral and that's a really good place for lots of spies to go in and out of Holland and they're trying to, our British intelligence spies are trying to get into Belgium and Luxembourg trying to see
00:13:02
Speaker
what the Germans are doing in terms of behind enemy lines, in terms of moving their troops. Because to move their troops to the front line, which is in France, they have to cross the whole of Belgium, pretty much. So Belgium is sort of there in the middle. So we have really important intelligence networks. One of them is called the White Lady Network. An incredibly brave men and women, Belgians,
00:13:29
Speaker
And some Dutch actually would try and smuggle messages out into neutral Holland. And there was an MI6, what's called MI6 today, MI6 man there and getting the intelligence back to the UK. So if you could, you could monitor the huge movement of troops across a few days, because at that time, logistically it took a long time.
00:13:54
Speaker
for the Germans to move all their armaments and troops, which they did by train. And they're moving it across Belgium. And if you could work out which direction they're going or they're heading to right in the far corner of northern France, you know where the next offensive is coming. So you can move your own troops to counter that. That's really, really important because otherwise you could be in an area that's not so secure, that's not so easy to defend. But you know, even with their help,
00:14:24
Speaker
It was a long and difficult war across four years. You know, it was a real bloody war with trenches and a stalemate. And without those intelligence networks, it could have been a very different outcome.
00:14:39
Speaker
Well, a couple things. One thing that, as you were talking, that I thought of was about spying on the Soviets. And of course, I think 1917 is when the Bolsheviks
00:14:55
Speaker
I don't actually, I mean, that's actually, that's maybe a can of worms, but more or less there's a revolution in Russia and the communists eventually come to power. What was the fear from the Soviets at the time because they weren't in power yet? Were people afraid that maybe communism was spreading? Like what were the attitudes towards communism?
Espionage and the Communist Threat
00:15:19
Speaker
Generally, I think of like when people are very afraid of communism,
00:15:23
Speaker
I think of either like the interwar period or in America, like post-World War II, but not so much during World War I. So I'm not an expert on the Russian Revolution itself. What I do know from studying British intelligence in this period is that communism was a threat to democracy. And when we get to the end of the First World War a year later, so all the guns fall silent in November 1918.
00:15:50
Speaker
And the Western armies are starting to disband. They're starting to demobilise. We have the Treaty of Versailles in 1919, which is designed to bring peace to Europe and various new countries are created. But amongst that, a lot of the British intelligence spies were trying to track communist spies and agents.
00:16:16
Speaker
And what those communist spies and agents were doing, they were trying to infiltrate those armies of Europe that were disbanding, that were demobilizing. And what they were trying to get them to do was to overthrow democracy in those countries, in France, Britain, wherever, trying to get those armies to mount a coup. Now, we've been there in recent times, haven't we, with Ukraine? That was one of the first things.
00:16:43
Speaker
that the Russians tried to do was to get the Ukrainian army to mount a coup and overthrow.
00:16:49
Speaker
Zelensky government etc. So we see some very interesting patterns, that's as far as I go in contemporary times I don't study, but we mustn't underestimate that after 1917 it really was a threat and the Soviets were very active in espionage and they'd embedded spies all across Europe and across the world actually
00:17:14
Speaker
and in particular in the UK. So again, we've got MI5 tracking Soviet spies in the UK. We've got MI6, otherwise known as secret intelligence service, tracking spies across Europe in case they're trying to infiltrate Britain.
00:17:31
Speaker
Well, before we get ahead of ourselves, I was wondering if maybe you could share a couple of the stories from the women that you chronicle in your book from World War I, the World War I period, if maybe you could just share the two that you find most striking.
Heroic Stories of Edith Cavell and Gabrielle Petit
00:17:51
Speaker
One of the most striking of the stories from the First World War is about a British nurse, which I think most people have heard of. She was Edith Cavell.
00:18:02
Speaker
She was British, but she was working in Belgium, in Brussels, in the capital. And at that time, she was, well, at the outbreak of war, nursing French soldiers and eventually
00:18:15
Speaker
British soldiers, she was trying to get Belgians out of the country so that they could enlist and fight with their king who was in exile. But what I discovered was that she was actually a spy as well. So not necessarily the nurses around her, but she herself independently founded this spy network.
00:18:34
Speaker
and she had a whole raft of men and women working for her as agents who were not necessarily doing the nursing profession. They were actually a separate organisation. And we've always had this discussion in Britain, you know, was she a spy or not? And sometimes people say, yes, of course she was. Well, what's the evidence?
00:18:57
Speaker
Do we really, really know? And then others would say, no, she was just rescuing wounded soldiers and smuggling them out of Belgium. Well, her network was. But I discovered that actually she was a spy. And of course, the Germans believed she was guilty of espionage. She was betrayed by one of her network under intense interrogation. This chap, Krienne, who is his surname, had intense interrogation and he betrayed
00:19:25
Speaker
It's sort of understandable, but he betrayed her. And she was shot at dawn on the 12th of October, 1915. I mean, that was a consequence. So she went- So that was her network. The goal was to smuggle wounded soldiers who were behind enemy lines back to Britain. That was what she did.
00:19:47
Speaker
That's one aspect of her work, but she was also running separate to that or alongside it an intelligence network to actually smuggle intelligence out to the British. So not just the soldiers. And I worked very hard and found
00:20:04
Speaker
found the evidence in London that she absolutely was a spy. So we can rest that now. We can say with absolute certainty that she was a spy. What was the evidence? Did she write down, I am a spy? What's the evidence?
00:20:22
Speaker
It's investigations by our military intelligence services, MI5 and MI6, into her death and into the betrayal. And they also interview some of those that were closest to her that were in the network. And a lot of them were women. And these women talk about traditional spy craft. So using invisible ink, small messages, hidden, smuggling things out, acting as couriers. I mean, incredibly dangerous.
00:20:53
Speaker
And you asked me about two women. I think the other one would have to be, it's very, very hard, you know, because they're so, so brave. The other one was a woman called Gabrielle Pritit, who was Belgian. And she founded a similar intelligence organization called the Alice Service. But she also
00:21:17
Speaker
was captured by the Germans. And she always said when she first started out, the thing she feared most was the firing squad at dawn of being shot. But she was so brave. She took courage from Edith Cavell. Edith Cavell was sort of her role model. But Gabrielle Petit did pay with her life for smuggling intelligence out to the Allies. But it was so needed because how else were we going to know what was happening
00:21:46
Speaker
in occupied Belgium. The Germans had actually constructed this electrified fence. You'll remember reading about that in the book. And it was very difficult for people to come in and out of Belgium after May 1915. So they were so, so courageous. So what are the activities women in intelligence did? And I'm curious how that compared to what men in intelligence were doing.
00:22:16
Speaker
Well, if we look at what the women were doing behind enemy lines, they are largely invisible. I do refer to them as invisible spies because they're doing an important job that the men can't do. If the men are of an age when they should be fighting in the army and they're busy cycling through enemy occupied territory, the Germans are going to look and think,
00:22:38
Speaker
Oh, you know, he's 23, 24, whatever. Why isn't he in uniform? Why is he not fighting on the front line? So they might pick him up as a spy. So women were doing a lot of the intelligence work. There were much younger sort of teenagers and men in their 70s, 80s would be involved in the networks. But that whole middle age of men would largely couldn't really do much behind enemy lines because they should be fighting in their own regiment.
00:23:07
Speaker
and the Germans would be suspicious of them. When we talk on the home front in Britain, it was slightly different in that the intelligence services were quite hierarchical and men would quite often be paid more for the same job than the women. The women primarily started out with the clerical and administrative duties
00:23:32
Speaker
But what I found exciting, and it's something I mentioned earlier, is that the women start to become experts and they start to become indispensable and necessary. And that for me is a really important window into something that's been hidden for so long. And our audience can read about that in the book, just how that change is made.
00:23:55
Speaker
Well, I wonder if there was any recognition post World War I for these women in intelligence. Did they largely go unknown or was there any recognition?
00:24:08
Speaker
In terms of awards to Belgians, men and women actually, they did receive awards and their names were listed in one of the major London newspapers in 1919. So there was a move to have them recognised and the men and women were recognised given awards for bravery depending on what they had achieved. So there was no differentiation on gender. If they were brave enough to qualify for a particular medal,
00:24:37
Speaker
then that's what they got. So there was a recognition, which I think was great. Yeah. Well, let's fast forward to World War II, which I know you do you do write about an interwar period, which largely is trying to root out communists. When we get to World War II, how has how has spycraft changed? How has how has intelligence changed?
WWII: Women in Military Intelligence
00:25:04
Speaker
And how is the role of women in the intelligence services? How has that changed? Well, we get a sense that since the First World War, by the time we get to the Second World War, we've got, of course, a lot more women in uniform. And we get thousands upon thousands of them that start to work in all aspects of military intelligence. But that also includes naval intelligence. If they're enlisted into the Navy,
00:25:33
Speaker
as we call them Wrens, and also Air Intelligence. So again, we've traditionally dismissed the women, much like in the early days when the co-breaking site of Bletchley Park, the women had been overlooked, but now we've got a huge understanding
00:25:53
Speaker
of what went on at Bletchley Park in that two-thirds of the workforce were women and they were doing the code breaking, they were mending the machines, they were doing all kinds of things. In fact, some of them cracked the Japanese codes as well as the German Enigma codes.
00:26:11
Speaker
enigmas. So that for me was important to focus on some of the women that haven't really been written about with regards to Bletchley Park and that whole co-breaking field. So we've got about 8,000 women working on that one site, about 30 miles north of London. But what I also uncovered were there were other secret sites where women are doing aerial intelligence and by the middle of the war there are American personnel
00:26:41
Speaker
working with these women, again analysing photographic intelligence from the missions over enemy territory by our aircraft with these huge cameras. They're taking the photographs and then the men and women at these secret sites are analysing them, particularly the women.
00:27:04
Speaker
are coming up with all kinds of details. Some of the files say that the women are much more patient at analysing in for the long run and that's why they managed to pick up some of the obscure looking items on some of the photographs that they actually identified as one of Hitler's secret weapons.
00:27:26
Speaker
you know could have changed the war if we hadn't discovered that and then at another secret site the women were the first interrogators
00:27:37
Speaker
extraordinary stories. In the Second World War we used the first female interrogators in wartime and today we might not think that is particularly unusual but in the Second World War interrogation was very much a man's world. You've got your German prisoners of war and in some cases Italian prisoners of war as Italy was fighting on the side of Germany for the
00:28:00
Speaker
early part of the war. So those men, those soldiers are expecting to be interrogated by two men, and he walked two women. That's very interesting. I should have asked this when we were talking about World War I too, but how many women were in the intelligence service? You gave the number 8,000.
00:28:22
Speaker
I think well eight thousand yeah eight thousand working it will actually park the code breaking site when we look at the other aspects of intelligence very hard because we don't have a full list of their names we don't have a full list of names of women well all men that worked in mi5 and mi6 that's just they never released those files and then we have a whole raft of
00:28:51
Speaker
women and men again working behind enemy lines, helpers, couriers, they're helping on the escape lines to get our guys back from behind enemy lines. And again, we don't have the helpers files released. Those families are protected forever. They're not released into the British archives. So we don't know. We have no idea, but it's thousands.
00:29:14
Speaker
Well, what are a couple of the World War II stories that you found particularly interesting? I think for World War II, actually, you interviewed former spies in person, correct?
00:29:29
Speaker
I have done over the years, yes, so this research is accumulation of material that I've gathered across 20 years. I've been writing for some 20, 25 years. I know I don't look old enough, but I am. And in that time, I realized that some of these stories
00:29:49
Speaker
needed to be told and they needed to be told alongside a book about the women because I thought some of these stories would not be told by contemporary historians. They might think they're not important enough and we have a lot of focus on the secret agents, the women that would drop behind enemy lines into France. Famously of course we have Virginia Hall
00:30:11
Speaker
spy with a wooden leg has been quite a lot about her in America and Inyat Nor Khan, the Sufi Indian who became the first wireless operator to be dropped into France. So I briefly look at those because so much has been written about them but the SOE as it was called the Special Operations Executive
00:30:33
Speaker
had a number of women that were pretty senior. They might not have the title in the role but one famous one, Vera Atkins, might be familiar to our audience. She was the deputy head of the French section and she sent Virginia Hall, Inyat Nor Khan and other women and men behind enemy lines into France but I uncovered a whole raft of other women who were parallel to her
00:31:01
Speaker
that were sending the agents into places like Austria, into the Balkans on hugely dangerous missions, into Germany, and recovering their legacies. There's just been complete silence about them. And then I also look at some of the agents that were dropped into other parts of Europe, some of the women, I mean, incredibly dangerous missions. And some of them, of course, you know, like with the French section, didn't survive. I mean, it was just perilous.
00:31:29
Speaker
The bravery, women, so many of them were just in their early 20s, incredibly brave. If there is one story that you're like, this is incredible and extraordinary, but nobody really knows about it, what story would that be?
Spy Swap Story
00:31:47
Speaker
That would be probably, it's a hard question, but it would probably be the female spy who was actually the subject of the only spy swap of the Second World War, the only one that we currently know about from Declassified Files. But I was reliably ensured that she was subject to the only spy swap. So we think of, you mentioned the Cold War earlier, we think of the Cold War, Glenica Bridge, that wonderful film Bridge of Spies, one of my favourite all-time films actually, I love it.
00:32:17
Speaker
So we think of spy swaps in the Cold War but there was one spy swap in the Second World War and I devote a substantial chapter to this woman who is incredibly brave and spent a lot of time in Gestapo prisons but she was obviously so valuable that she was swapped for a German prisoner
00:32:40
Speaker
and then goes on to work in brave circumstances in the Cold War and spends nine years in a Soviet prison, but is eventually released. So she is one of those hugely courageous women. And I find myself asking, what is it in those women? Is it this sort of iron courage? I'm not wanting to say that they're braver than the men, not at all, but we've come across some pretty feisty,
00:33:10
Speaker
You know iron cast women that of course would never have seen themselves as heroines or particularly brave Well, I wonder if there are just kind of thinking about the traits that make up some of these these brave women I wonder what what's the typical background of a woman in the intelligence service? What kinds of families do they come from? What how do they get recruited into a lot of these these roles in the first place? Just what types of people are there?
00:33:41
Speaker
Well, that's a whole raft of questions and a whole subject of a book in itself almost, because the ways of recruitment, if I answer that part first, were various. They were different for different women. If they enlisted in the uniformed forces, so air, naval, army, then at some point they might have seen an advertisement which says, you know, do you speak languages?
00:34:07
Speaker
we could do with you, would you like to do special duties, that kind of thing. Sometimes they were approached, it could be various. The early women who worked at Bletchley Park, that code breaking site, a lot of them were what we would call debutantes. So they'd had a particular kind of education. They had come from good backgrounds, but eventually women of all backgrounds were used. And so that's on the home front.
00:34:34
Speaker
behind enemy lines in both World Wars, what I discovered were the women could be of all ages and of all backgrounds. So they could come from quite humble, poor backgrounds, but also they were sometimes counts, countesses. So from the aristocracy, helping, living in their castle, sheltering people, smuggling messages. So there isn't one particular kind of person
00:35:04
Speaker
who's actually doing this work, which is interesting because you never know when you start out in your research, really what you're going to find. You might find there's one particular group that tends to be doing this work, but it's not. It's right across society. Yeah. Well, since we, so your book's about to come out in America. By the time this publishes, it will be out in America. What do we know about American women?
00:35:31
Speaker
in intelligence, is there anything that we know about, maybe there weren't American women overseas, maybe there were, what do we know about American women during World War II and intelligence?
00:35:45
Speaker
Yeah there were absolutely and there are a whole raft of really good books that are just coming out. Lisa Mundi has just bought out a book on the women in the CIA and there are other books on women so I would encourage your listeners to Google away and check because recently in the last six months or coming out soon in the next few weeks
00:36:06
Speaker
there are there's a body of work by women primarily historians in America who've looked at the American story because to be perfectly honest it isn't possible for either of us the historians in America or the historians here like me in the UK to cover both it would just be um it wouldn't do justice
00:36:30
Speaker
to the depth that we need to understand now. It would just be too much of a broad overview. So I really welcome the fact that there are historians at both sides of the Atlantic that are writing specifically on American women in intelligence. And I've written not solely, but largely from the British angle.
00:36:51
Speaker
Yeah. Well, just kind of speaking about the women in other countries, the Nazi-aligned spies, the German spies, what do we know about women in adversary countries' intelligence services?
00:37:12
Speaker
Well, the Germans did use female spies, but not very many of them actually. And I haven't studied it in any detail, but it looks like most of them were really working for us. I mean, I could be wrong. Again, it's what material is available for research and
00:37:31
Speaker
Primarily, the Germans didn't really think of women as spies. I mean, they did use some of them. They used some of our double agents, the British double agents. They thought, here we have a group of women who we've managed to recruit for us, and we're sending them back to try and infiltrate British intelligence, but they're really working for us. But actually, it was the other way around. The British intelligence had sent them
00:37:57
Speaker
and successfully got the Germans to take them on board. So a bit like the male double agents. So in that case they're not really working for Germany so it's incredibly difficult to tell actually. I'm not sure the material is totally available but traditionally
00:38:16
Speaker
Germans thought that, during the First World War, thought that women should be at home, or were at home, looking after the family, and if they're out and about in occupied territory, then they're obviously going, they're going shopping, they're going to go and get a loaf of bread, maybe they're visiting relatives, but it didn't occur to them, and that's why I use that phrase, I come back to that phrase again, the women were invisible spies. They were just invisible to the Germans.
00:38:42
Speaker
So I don't think the Germans used them, certainly not in their uniform services in the military in the same way. They did have some senior test pilots, two women, but on the whole, they didn't use women. Well, thinking about how
00:39:02
Speaker
As you've mentioned, a lot of these stories have gone untold and obviously the role of women in both these world wars and the intelligence services was very important. You do write in your, I think in your epilogue, you write that, yes, there was the patriarchy and a lot of times men made it difficult for these stories to get out, but it was actually more like bureaucratic
00:39:31
Speaker
red tape, a lot of these stories are still shrouded in secrecy that made it very difficult for you. But I am actually interested in maybe the more the patriarchy aspect of some of these stories. What do you think was the hardest channel for a lot of these women to navigate in terms of proving themselves to men and into the world?
Challenges and Recognition in Intelligence
00:39:54
Speaker
I think the hardest thing was for them to reach senior roles.
00:39:59
Speaker
So in many cases, they become experts in their fields, even if they don't have the title and the promotion. And there were moves to get women promoted, but only so far. And there were discussions in the files that I've discovered, where men were supportive of the women and were trying to, so their senior officers were trying to say, look, women are doing this job, they should be paid the same as the men. So let's not forget also in civilian life,
00:40:28
Speaker
women were behind in that respect. So what I find is that in much of the intelligence world, I think the progress was made quicker than in civilian life. And that there are examples. There's no question that, of course, that it was a patriarchal society. There were limitations for women. But one of the surprising things for me
00:40:52
Speaker
was that throughout this period that I'm writing about, women do become experts and they are utterly indispensable in terms of intelligence, even if they don't become deputy director or director. It took a long time for women to reach the top. And this year is the first year that we have a female director of GCHQ, the successor of Bletchley Park. So you would have your approval be NSA, I guess.
00:41:21
Speaker
So we have our first female director after all this time and it was founded in 1909 so it's a lot of progress so women didn't reach the glass ceiling as we would say for a very long time but that doesn't mean that they didn't achieve the most incredible things that were probably beyond their status role
00:41:44
Speaker
Before you started writing this book, I'm curious how you personally changed by the time you were done with it. How do you now view the world differently? What personally about you would you say has changed from the beginning to the end of this book?
Fry’s Motivation and Moral Obligation
00:42:02
Speaker
I think across the whole sort of 20-25 years I've been working on this, a growing sense that these stories must be told, that if I've stumbled across them, I have almost like a moral obligation to tell these stories, because if I don't, who will? Each historian has his or her or their own
00:42:26
Speaker
way of navigating the research and they come across their unique staff but I do seem to have found some quite unusual material which is important that's impacted on the outcome of war and you know in terms of those intelligence stories I have been lucky enough to interview veterans a whole raft of them I've been the only one that's managed to interview them
00:42:53
Speaker
If I don't tell their stories, who will? And so I've probably changed in that sense in feeling a moral obligation to keep going. But not an obligation necessarily. Maybe not. Maybe obligation is not the right word. Maybe it's what I find these stories incredibly exciting.
00:43:12
Speaker
And I just love the research. I love the writing. But I think there is an imperative. If we are in a position where we can tell these stories, I think there is a moral imperative.
00:43:24
Speaker
and to provide new heroes and heroines for our current times, for our contemporary generation. I think that's really important. Role models. Just thinking about how interviewing people in person who went through World War II, I'm always, whenever I meet somebody here in the DC area, we have the US Holocaust Memorial Museum and they will often have
00:43:54
Speaker
people at the entrance, just like at a desk, who were in a concentration camp, who survived the Holocaust that you can go up to and you can talk to. And I am always just, I don't know if overwhelmed, but there's something so special about talking to somebody who lived through a lot of this stuff and just knowing like, you're looking to the eyes of somebody who witnessed like really,
00:44:21
Speaker
incredible, terrible things. This is a generation that is going to age out. It's not going to be around with us. I wonder how either lucky you feel or maybe how driven you feel to capture some of those stories and how important that capturing them is to you.
00:44:45
Speaker
Oh, absolutely vital. In fact, during the lifetime of many of my veterans, and they've all gone now, all the ones I interviewed, I felt driven to tell their stories during their lifetime so they would have some recognition. They didn't want recognition. To a person, they were very humble. In fact, it took me, in some cases, a number of years
00:45:07
Speaker
to sit down and get their confidence. They didn't want their stories told. You know, I'm not a hero. Why me? And then you just gradually talk around different ways and then, well, OK, if you really do want to write a book about me. But, you know, it took a lot of persuading because they don't see themselves as very brave. But.
00:45:28
Speaker
I think that's good. I think they were happy in the end. It gave them a new lease of life when they're in their 90s, a new occupation in retirement when they were having interviews and being on television and that kind of thing. But we have lost that generation. And for me, I think we have to be really careful not to impose contemporary, should I say contemporary
00:45:51
Speaker
agenda's contemporary worldview way of looking at the world on the era of 80 years ago, 100 years ago, to try and understand that world at that time. And that's something which we're trying to do here in the UK. I'm not sure if it's happening in America, but we really have to be careful that we understand
00:46:14
Speaker
why certain things happened the way they did and not to look back with modern eyes and reinterpret in a way that actually isn't accurate because then we're sort of rewriting history and we're not understanding history
00:46:29
Speaker
and then of course we're destined potentially to repeat the mistakes of history. I think it's really important we understand history in its context and what does it say to us today? What is it? What's its message? We might not agree with the message or we may agree with the message but I think for me that's a really important aspect and that certainly wasn't true 20 years ago. This is a big new move now. I do worry about
00:46:58
Speaker
some of the interpretations of history. Yeah. Yeah. Well, Helen, this has been an incredible interview. I love the answers that you gave to my questions. Really such a fascinating topic. If people want to stay in touch with you, how can they stay in touch? Are you on social media? Actually, I do know you're on social media because I follow you on Twitter and everyone out there, you should follow Helen on Twitter. She has an excellent
00:47:26
Speaker
where you often share stories of people in World War II, in other words. But where can people stay in touch with the work that you're doing?
00:47:35
Speaker
So if they could have a look at my website, Helen-Fry.com, but as you said, I'm very active on Twitter. I'm a bit quite active on Instagram, but Twitter, if you do Twitter, Twitter X, then you'll see some of the exciting stories I'm uncovering. You'll hopefully be passionate about history in the way that I am. I think you'll kind of understand me if you look at my Twitter X feed and enjoy the stories that we're putting out there.
00:48:03
Speaker
Perfect. Well, Helen Fry, Women in Intelligence, The Hidden History of Two World Wars. Go check it out from your library. Go buy a copy. A great story here, Helen. And again, thank you so much for your time today.