by Bob Spitz
Julia knew a handful of people who worked for the OSS, elite grads like her, who had come to Washington determined to see action abroad and got co-opted by the insatiable intelligence machine. The job, which ranged from research and analysis to clandestine operations behind enemy lines, demanded smart, resourceful self-starters with a dash of maverick in their DNA. Professors were among the agency’s earliest recruits, many of whom attracted their brightest students. An educated woman especially fit the director’s ideal, which he described as “a cross between a Smith graduate, a Powers model, and a Katie Gibbs secretary.” Julia must have figured she had two out of the three, with the potential to hit the trifecta. She also came from old money, which helped her cause, the thinking being that those who were financially self-sufficient were least likely to take a bribe.
The Office of Strategic Services wasn’t established as a result of the war, but actually six months before Pearl Harbor, in June 1941, when FDR ordered William Donovan, a longtime legal adviser and a decorated veteran of World War I, to form America’s first intelligence-gathering agency. The United States had always been satisfied with its national security. Now that it was almost certain the country would be drawn into World War II, “enforcing our will upon the enemy by means other than military action” was crucial to the president’s objective for victory, to say nothing of America’s well-being.
“Wild Bill” Donovan was the right man for the job. Described as “a rosy-cheeked smiling gentleman with a voice as soft as the leaf of a shamrock … and a punch in each hand like the kick of a mule,” he was an unrelenting warrior who had hunted down Pancho Villa in 1917 and led the Fighting Sixty-ninth Regiment through some of the bloodiest battles of World War I, for which he was awarded the Medal of Honor. In the years between the wars, he prospered as a high-powered Wall Street lawyer, but he’d always kept a hand or three in global affairs.
Roosevelt gave Donovan what Capitol Hill called “carte blanche”: permission to use his office—Room 122, in the basement of a central building on the Naval Medical Campus on E Street—for anything he saw fit. No strings attached! The spy business demanded a free hand to conduct its “sensitive” affairs. As such, Donovan was exempt from the usual red tape that ensnarled most federal programs, and he answered only to the president. He may, in fact, have been the only person to be given such authority. This meant staffing his office with fiercely loyal operatives, smart cookies of unquestioning obedience and above reproach, with allegiance to one god: Bill Donovan.
“He attracted the top lawyers and the nation’s top public servants, and they brought their brightest and most congenial people into it,” recalls Fisher Howe, a high-level career diplomat who gained his own rite of passage in Room 122. “There was no question that the OSS was packed with congenial, college-educated people who enjoyed working together, motivated by their glamorous leader.” So congenial, in fact, that grudging outsiders claimed OSS stood for “Oh So Social.” According to Howe, “It was the envy of everybody—but also the disparagement.”
To those outsiders, the agency seemed elitist, unwieldy, a government boondoggle that, in time, would employ more than 21,000 dilettantes. It was impossible for antagonists to wrap their arms around such an entity, especially one that operated outside the system and “where standard operating procedure was almost taboo,” and that had “an unvouchered budget that ran into the hundreds of millions [of dollars].” The military decried its lazy discipline. Bureaucrats were unable to penetrate its apolitical ranks. Rivals, like J. Edgar Hoover, despised the Almighty Donovan. The proletarian Hoover resented Donovan’s disciples as a bunch of “amateur playboys.” Moreover, its credo was nondenominational, its ministry open to all, including Communist sympathizers, Marxist enthusiasts, right-wing extremists, and leftist idealists. All one needed to join was to sign an oath of secrecy. “The O.S.S. was a fraternity—a fraternity of Ivy League upstarts,” says Fisher Howe. “No question Julia would have found like-minded people there.”
In fact, the OSS was a perfect fit for Julia McWilliams. She knew it, too, her first day on the job—December 14, 1942. Loping across the majestic E Street complex in a standout new leopard-fur coat, she had great expectations of what lay ahead. Friends who’d been working there since the bureau was formed painted a sanguine picture of their utopian circumstances. The office was more or less run by “very bright girls engaged in cloak-and-dagger activity, working not for the money, but for the thrill” of doing something clandestine. The whole scenario was in full swing, fairly “buzzing,” upon Julia’s arrival at OSS. “Walking in, there was a feeling of excitement in that office,” she recalled. “It was a special place, filled with special people doing special work—top secret work.”
On first blush, her job seemed less than glamorous. She was appointed a junior research assistant to the director himself, which involved organizing his prodigious files concerning the Secret Intelligence (SI) branch of operations, its personnel, encoded messages, and the documents detailing war plans. During most of the time, Donovan was away from the office, cultivating shadow agents and the cooperation of generals. Julia would work unencumbered by pressure, alongside a coven of Donovan’s “glamour girls.” It was donkeywork for the most part, organizing and filing, filing and organizing, but Julia was content just to be part of the team. “My typewriting helped a great deal, and I was used to office procedures,” she recalled, “—and I was responsible,” which added to her well-being. Perhaps a weightier perk was the impact of her co-workers—“so many interesting people”—whose intellects and imaginations fascinated her no end. “It was my first real encounter with the academic mind,” Julia recalled. Especially the wonks in Research and Analysis, who evaluated the covert material used in planning subversive operations. She loved listening to them sift through and discuss the variables in vigorous, scholarly choctaw, most of which sailed right over her head. Despite her elite education, Julia still nursed an inferior view of herself. “I was sort of a plain old middle-class bourgeoise,” she said. “I was not an intellectual type.” She felt humble in their presence, unlicked and unformed. But she had the desire, a craving for something more. She was hungry for stimulation of this sort and sensed, perhaps for the first time, that she was around something that would change her, reshape her, in substantive ways.
And she was willing to work hard, six days a week, because there was so much at stake. By the end of 1942, OSS agents were buried deep in all key European cities, as well as across Southeast Asia, where “bodies” were stationed tactically to identify enemy arsenals, munitions dumps, industrial facilities, and supply routes. Information of all kinds was the currency on which the agency thrived. A flood of information—of even the smallest, most insignificant intelligence—flowed into the office each day. And not only was every word of it analyzed for content, it had to be sorted, filed, collated, and routed to the proper office where military experts would know how to utilize it.
Most all of the classified intelligence passed through Julia McWilliams’s hands. As she opened dusty pouches and sifted through coffee-stained reports, there would be code names necessitating identification, phrases that required flagging, words that triggered critical responses, photographs that demanded studying, intercepts combed for names and contacts, charts, maps, diagrams—transcripts full of material involving some understanding of the entire American intelligence operation. The work was painstaking, elaborate, complicated, often convoluted, but it wasn’t long before Julia mastered the office’s bewildering maze.
All the more remarkable considering Julia had shown no previous evidence of accomplishment, not for work, not for discipline, not for exploring her potential. Up until then, Julia lamented, “I never had any brilliance whatsoever,” chiefly because her left-brain generator, so to speak, “was only working on half cylinders.” But something had changed in the process. Almost overnight, Julia morphed from a self-proclaimed dilettante into a dedicated civil servant, managing deadlines and supervising perso
nnel with relative confidence. She labored long hours in that airless office, helping steer more than forty colleagues through the bureaucracy. Took care of managing her professional approach, to the point that OSS became a transforming experience, what Julia later called “my growing‑up period.”
In early 1943, her diligence paid off. Julia earned a promotion, first to the position of clerk in General Donovan’s office, and eventually to senior clerk, overseeing his administrative support staff. She was clearly on an upward trajectory, taking a firm, if arm’s-length, grip on her life. Washington “intrigued and amused” her. Living on her own “seemed civilized,” better than she’d expected. A good crowd her age was doing important work there. She enjoyed an active social life, if not yet a meaningful relationship, merging a clique of educated peers with more proletarian émigrés. Even relatively recent friends from different State Department units played repeating roles in an endless engagement of parties. Yes, it was Oh So Social in those growing‑up years.
AND THE GROWING wasn’t finished yet.
A mid-year move to a new department placed Julia in one of the more hands-on experimental programs on the government’s wartime drawing board. There was a furious urgency to the endeavors of the new Emergency Rescue Equipment Section (ERES). Its mission was to prepare fliers downed at sea for survival, and with each new campaign more pilots were at risk as the war spread across Asia and the Pacific theaters—ERES was working against the clock. They weren’t concerned with the traditional gear used for rescue and recovery: flares, flotation rafts, wetsuits, transmitters. Those were already operational and sufficient for the short term. Instead, they anticipated the problems a pilot might face should he be stranded in a remote location, where assistance or food wasn’t available.
The OSS encouraged “unconventional” approaches to seemingly straightforward problems, even those as critical as survival, and since Strategic Services was funding ERES its experiments were often conducted by “eccentric schemers” and leaned toward the “harebrained.” Julia discovered these screwball methods almost as soon as she joined ERES. Along with a colleague, she was dispatched to the market and ordered to buy fish. Why? So researchers could test whether it was possible for a soldier lost at sea to sustain himself by squeezing the liquid from a fish into his mouth. Thereafter, Julia referred to her department as “the fish-squeezing unit,” although its think tank was also engaged in more fundamental aspects of rescue work, like developing shark repellent, exposure suits, and rescue kits.
Among the characters she met during her tenure with ERES was Jack Moore, a talented illustrator who had left art school to join the army soon after war broke out. Moore developed maps and other graphics for the Presentation Division, a branch of Research and Analysis under the State Department’s umbrella. Despite the comfort of his job, he was awaiting assignment overseas, most likely to India, where his boss, Paul Child, was setting up shop, in service to Britain’s Lord Mountbatten, Supreme Allied Commander, South East Asia Command. The change of scenery would be welcome; he couldn’t wait to get over there, closer to the action but still out of harm’s way. Julia was drawn in by Moore’s musings about working abroad. He made it sound more like an exotic adventure than a military posting. To a woman who had been searching her entire life for something meaningful—for spiritual growth, for contentment, for her identity as a woman—the prospect of foreign travel was not only alluring but constructive as well. A posting abroad offered an antidote for Julia’s lack of initiative thus far.
Coincidentally, the OSS was establishing new bases in Southeast Asia, to facilitate vital field operations surrounding the fighting in Burma. “They began sending people overseas,” Julia recalled—researchers, interpreters, provisioners, administrative personnel—to get the intelligence apparatus moving before installing key operatives. At Jack Moore’s urging, Julia expressed her interest.
Overseas: a transfer that radical might work to expand and enliven her world. Her situation in Washington, at least professionally, seemed to have hit a wall. “I was just doing office work,” Julia conceded of her three years at OSS. Further advancement, she realized, was going to be a slow, if impractical, process. “I didn’t have any languages. I naturally wasn’t trained as a spy. My history background didn’t amount to anything.” When you looked at her résumé, she had nothing distinctive to offer. Another promotion, as administrative assistant in the registry, amounted to nothing more than a fancier title and a raise—which was appreciated. But when she came right down to it, Julia was still just doing office work.
She needed to break the chain. Getting away—overseas—might be a good first step in that direction. Europe was the most sought-after posting. It was the logical choice for someone without much of a specialized background. But Julia saw no possibility of an opening there. Choice jobs like that were out of her reach. Besides, Europe wasn’t that exotic, it wasn’t that far off the beaten path. Plenty of her friends had spent holidays there. “I knew I’d sometime get to Europe,” Julia reasoned, “so I signed up to go to the Far East.”
JULIA ASSUMED FROM the start that she’d be posted to India. The OSS had established an outpost there in August 1943 with a mandate to gather intelligence that would ostensibly help liberate Burma, across the Bay of Bengal. Holding Burma was a buffer, critical to “keep[ing] the door open to China,” so there was plenty to be done on that busy, chaotic front. At the same time, however, there was a proviso to monitor another vital interest: it would be a perfect opportunity for OSS observers to provide Washington with updates on the nationalist movement in India. British colonial power was in its last smoldering throes. With the country in turmoil, politically and socially, with the British Raj on the ropes—with warfare raging across the Pacific theater—the situation threatened to destabilize further the entire subcontinent.
On February 26, 1944, Julia left Washington on a troop train bound for California, the first leg of a journey that would take her halfway around the world. For Julia, whose only travel experience outside the United States was that Caesar salad in Tijuana, the idea of entering the land of spice and yogis—where it was known that Westerners often disappeared for good in the fetid, human sprawl—was pure excitement. She knew this would be “the adventure of a lifetime.” It meant “taking each new experience as it came,” which Julia was up for, “come hell or high water.”
Hell came first. The trip west was a gauntlet of sorts, with three women riding solo among cars of swarming soldiers. A gallery of admirers soon sprung up, a gallery of men to whom these civilian gals were an anomaly—and an enticement. The women were constantly hit upon, not harassed, but pestered—incessantly. Be that as it may, Julia loved the attention. She loved men, felt comfortable around them, men of all shapes and sizes (but especially the virile and handsome ones). The exact nature of her interaction with this contingent isn’t known, but Julia’s reference to “more handsome men than you could shake a stick at” in a letter to her father suggests that it involved all the elements that, throughout her lifetime, demonstrated more than a keen fondness for the opposite sex. This, in direct contrast to the sympathies of her traveling companions: Ellie Thiry, who was overwhelmed somewhat by the unnatural imbalance of the sexes, and Cora DuBois, a lesbian who couldn’t have cared less. All three, though, made the trip without undue complication or incident.
And then came the high water. On March 9, 1944, following an orientation that approximated boot camp, with orders, briefings, and survival training, Julia sailed from Wilmington, California, aboard the SS Mariposa, a former Hawaiian Islands luxury liner that had been pressed into military service in the aftermath of Pearl Harbor. It was to be a month-long voyage, zigzagging furtively across the Pacific, where Japanese subs had already sunk nine such troop transports. On board, the journey was an expansion of Julia’s fanciful train ride west—with nine women this time and more than three thousand male admirers, mostly GIs, a state of affairs that gave rise to a rather rowdy departure. In the profusi
on of high-polished decks and hastily converted quarters, thousands of excitable enlisted men, single and married, surrounded the huddled distaff, serenading the women with “wolf calls and whistles,” to say nothing of propositions that came with the fanfare. It was, according to Julia, “an utterly strange experience,” though nothing that intimidated her or that she couldn’t handle. Still, several of the other women weren’t as adept. If they had hoped to avoid the lusty push-and-pull by melting invisibly into their surroundings, it soon became clear there was nowhere to hide. “Julia launched a rumor that we are missionaries, which has helped curb the outbursts,” a passenger noted in her diary two days out to sea, but if the men were at all savvy, they weren’t buying. That left only the cabin for refuge—one cabin shared by all nine women, another world entirely, with triple-decker bunk beds pushed against two walls, clothes and bags strewn everywhere, severely overcrowded, like Calcutta, which was where they were headed.
As Julia discovered, there was nowhere to think in that compact slip of space. The cabin was not a place for the restless or the curious—and she was both. Nor would it do for her to spend the voyage in seclusion, which is what some of the women chose to do to protect their privacy. Instead, Julia mingled with the civilians on board, many of whom were the brightest minds on the government’s payroll—linguists, diplomatic attachés, scholars, correspondents, anthropologists, photographers, economists, cartographers, historians, and specialists in Asian and especially Indian culture. They had begun to form their own independent intellectual circle, comparing notes and waxing eloquent about subjects that bisected their individual areas of interest as they ignored the potential dangers of crossing the ocean during wartime.