Before Julia Child became the beloved star of television's "The French Chef," before her debut cookbook, "Mastering the Art of French Cooking" and before her husband Paul Child introduced her to gourmet cooking, she served during World War II with the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the predecessor of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).
Julia Child served in Asia with a close-knit group of bright idealists including her future husband Paul, a worldly artist; Betty MacDonald, a fearless former reporter and field agent; and the pivotal figure in this tale: Jane Foster, a free-spirited artist fluent in several languages who was a superb counterintelligence agent.
Author Jennet Conant chronicles the wartime exploits of Julia Child and her colleagues in her recent book, "A Covert Affair: Julia and Paul Child in the OSS" (Simon & Schuster, $28). After the war, as Ms. Conant writes, Julia and Paul Child were swept up in the McCarthy witch hunts of the 1950s because of their friendship with the openly left-wing Foster. In this uncertain time, the Childs stood up for their friend.
Publisher's Weekly praised "A Covert Affair": "Conant's vivid tapestry of the 1940s skillfully interweaves interviews, oral histories, memoirs, and recently unclassified OSS and FBI documents with unpublished diaries and letters. The adventurous young OSS recruits spring to life throughout this meticulously researched, authoritative history."
Jennet Conant has written extensively on World War II and the intelligence community in her previous books "The Irregulars," "Tuxedo Park" and "109 East Palace." She lives in New York with her husband and son.
Did "A Covert Affair" grow out of your earlier writing on World War II?
A little bit. I was actually on a book tour for "The Irregulars," which was about British spies in Washington in World War II and the early days of the OSS, when the National Archives released a huge cache of classified documents in the fall of 2008 [with the] names of individuals [in] the OSS, like Supreme Court Justice Arthur Goldberg, Jr., Moe Berg, the White Sox catcher, and historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. The name that got the most attention was Julia Child. Everywhere people asked me about Julia Child and her espionage career. I started looking into it, and what I found intrigued me.
Did you set out to tell a story about World War II intelligence and the McCarthy era through the lives of Julia and Paul Child and their friend Jane Foster?
I was interested in chronicling what happens to a group of people. I was lucky that one of their colleagues, Elizabeth McIntosh [Betty MacDonald] is still alive. She was a counter-espionage agent and I had her on hand as a narrator from the Washington years through Ceylon and China, the Paris years and the [government] investigations. Then I had Julia and Paul's diaries. But the person that got them all in trouble in the McCarthy era was their OSS colleague Jane Foster, so I had to tell her story as well.
I decided to tell the story of this group of four people who were in some ways very similar: privileged, well-educated, liberal. They were recruited by the OSS and served their country during the war, but then got in trouble during the McCarthy era.
And these friends, including Julia, served in trying locales during the war: Ceylon and India and China.
And the difficulties can't be overstated, particularly in China. [Julia] was assigned to a remote outpost in Kunming, and it couldn't have been more primitive. If you read the accounts, and the diaries of Paul Child in particular, people were desperately sick from dysentery. They also endured a historic flood in 1945 that destroyed the neighboring villages and submerged their headquarters in three or four feet of water. They used life rafts they pulled off Army planes to salvage all the documents they could. All the rats from the surrounding countryside sought high ground and brought with them a deadly cholera epidemic. People were dropping like flies. They saw the bodies floating down the river. And everything was tainted: the water, the fresh vegetables.
A lot of young men who worked with Paul Child cracked under the strain. And he chronicles how Julia thrived under the pressure. She could deal with these difficulties and discomfort, and she was very cheerful. The wartime citation she won afterwards said that morale in her unit was extremely high.
What did Julia and Paul Child and Jane Foster do before the war?
Before the war, Julia was very different than what people think of her today. In 1942, when she volunteered to join the OSS, she was a little bit lost. She was 30, unmarried and unemployed. She was tending house for her widowed father, a wealthy Pasadena farmer who owned quite a bit of land. She grew up with a household cook, so she couldn't boil water. Her mother had died when she was very young.
After college at Smith, as she put it herself, she spent her time as a social butterfly playing a lot of golf and tennis. She tried to be a writer. She moved to New York, and the "New Yorker" rejected all of her submissions, so she felt defeated. She also tried an advertising career in Los Angeles and got fired.
Paul Child was absolutely as different from her as he could have been. He was 10 years older and a head shorter than she was. She came from a right-wing California family. He came from a left-wing Boston family. He hadn't gone to college and was a self-taught artist. He had lived in Europe doing odd jobs: tutoring and teaching. He spoke fluent French and was a sophisticate and bohemian character.
He was recruited by the Allies to build war rooms for generals. He was brilliant with visual displays and so adept that all the generals demanded his services, so he went all around the China-Burma theater. But he was a difficult, prickly character, and not an easy man, as [Julia] wrote in her diary. But she loved him.
Paul was smitten by younger, attractive women, and Jane Foster fascinated him.
Jane Foster was a mirror image of Julia. She was another wealthy California girl from a conservative family. She was well-educated at Mills College. And she was adventurous, as Julia was, so she joined the OSS. But that's where the similarities ended.
Jane was politicized at a young age, whereas Julia was not political early on. Jane had seen the Depression and had traveled all over Europe and Asia, and became politically aware. She was angry about oppression and poverty, and anti-Hitler early when she saw fascism rise in Europe. She was very sophisticated, outspoken and very bold and adventurous. So she was trained by the OSS as a real counterespionage operative.
And Julia was awestruck by Jane, but Paul Child adored her. They had a lot in common. Jane also was an artist by training. Both were fluent in French and had traveled all over. They hit it off immediately and were inseparable during the first year they were together in Ceylon.
What were Julia's OSS duties?
She wasn't a spy. She would have loved to have been a spy, but what qualified women to be trained as spies was languages. Julia, who had seven years of high school and college French, admitted she really didn't speak a word, so she couldn't qualify.
But Julia desperately wanted to go overseas and she volunteered. And she was very efficient and organized, and ended up with a lot of responsibility. She ran the OSS Registry, the nerve center of their detachment [that] contained all the classified documents: the cables from the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the coded messages, plans for upcoming invasions, the "eyes only" reports on troop movements and the names of agents behind enemy lines. She had to be absolutely discreet and trustworthy. She became a highly respected member of their detachment and a very capable intelligence officer.
And you cannot stress how difficult and demoralizing their work was. They worked around the clock and the work was grueling. A lot of them were sick. Paul Child lost 30 pounds. They all came out of India desperately ill with dysentery and amoebic infections that they suffered all the years they were abroad. That could wear people down. But Julia was such a good trouper, and so sturdy and so unflappable and so cheerful, she kept people perked up.
And Betty MacDonald also figures prominently in this story.
Betty was a young reporter who happened to be at Pearl Harbor at the time of the attack. She studied Japanese and did a lot of reporting in America's first war zone in Hawaii. The OSS found out about her language skills and she was recruited. She was very tough and had seen a lot of bloodshed firsthand. She [learned] to shoot a pistol in Pearl Harbor in the weeks following the bombing. Betty was sturdy and bright and did a lot of counterespionage work and black propaganda to demoralize Japanese troops in Burma and China.
You vividly describe the quirky members of the OSS.
It was really an eccentric group of people. If you were an ornithologist at Harvard and you had chased a rare bird across Burma, you were made the Burma section chief. Gregory Bateson, the husband of Margaret Meade and a leading anthropologist, was sent off on all kinds of missions and he was very eccentric.
You can't make this stuff up. The OSS certainly did some good, but they also came up with some of the most harebrained schemes you've ever heard of. It had brilliant people but it had fruitcakes and a couple criminals as well that Donovan brought in.
And OSS Director Col. William J. Donovan, a World War I hero, put together this singular group?
You have to give him credit. He had to find talent in unusual places and build this operation virtually overnight. We needed a foreign intelligence service, and we didn't have one. A lot of what he did was very important [and] later institutionalized at the CIA.
You recount some outrageous schemes like putting explosives in cans of pork and beans disguised as American supplies and dropping the cans behind Japanese lines?
That was one of many of the nefarious schemes from the OSS. These were attempts to demoralize Japanese troops. They would leave satchels of food that looked abandoned, and the Japanese troops were so hungry they would seize on it and the food would be booby-trapped or poisoned.
And someone proposed dropping devices that sounded like hissing snakes in the belief that the Japanese had a deadly fear of snakes.
That was a cultural expert on China. I thought that Jane Foster's scheme to stuff condoms with propaganda materials and malaria pills and set them afloat on the shores of Indonesia was hilarious. They actually did that one.
They also did radio broadcasts to set nationals against the Japanese.
That actually worked. They'd pick up these Japanese stations and set up shadow stations that broadcast from behind the lines in Thailand and Burma. They'd send broadcasts out to the Japanese that were full of depressing news, about losses at the front and political disarray at home [with] material to politically offend the local Thai or Burmese population, so they'd want to rise up against the Japanese occupying force and help the Allies.
After the war, the OSS group dispersed. Paul and Julia drove across the United States before they wed in 1946. But Jane Foster continued with the OSS in Indonesia and was upset by U.S. support of the colonial powers.
She was very angry. Her job was to recruit and train native agents. She had followed the Roosevelt line of promising to support flourishing democracy if they would help us fight the Japanese. She had made promises based on what the Roosevelt administration had said, then the Truman administration abandoned these territories and gave them back to our European allies.
And Jane Foster became a target of the McCarthy probes.
She had been outspoken and didn't hide the fact that she had been a member of the Communist Party. And McCarthy tried to embarrass Donovan and expose the left-wing people in the OSS as a way of destroying Donovan's intelligence apparatus when [FBI Director J. Edgar] Hoover wanted all the power to himself. So McCarthy went after these people, and Jane was a sitting duck because she was openly left-wing and critical of our government.
And, with the investigation of Jane, her colleague Paul Child became a target, too, when he and Julia were living in Paris.
Yes. They were the closest of friends during the war, and again in Paris. So the FBI began investigating Paul as a possible member of [Jane's] Communist circle. He was subjected to a full loyalty inquiry because he was still a government employee [with] the propaganda arm [United States Information Service].
Paul was even accused of homosexuality despite his marriage to Julia. It seems the FBI ignored Julia.
They did investigate her [but] she didn't have any dirt because she came from such a right-wing family. And her father was one of Nixon's earliest supporters and had given a lot of money to Nixon's secret slush fund. I fully believe that it was Julia's political contacts and family that allowed Paul to skate by.
What do you hope readers will take from the book?
I hope people will see some of the similarities between that time and our time and how fragile democracy can be -- that even someone as beloved and as American as Julia Child is to us now could have been caught up with her husband in such a dangerous time. That wasn't very long ago, and that kind of demagoguery is always a danger.