Tag: CIA

On a Thoughtful Gift

The relationship between the United States and the Soviet Union between the end of World War 2 and the beginning of the Cold War changed exponentially. Allies during the war against Germany, the two nations became bitter enemies once the war was over. However, that transition from friend to foe didn’t happen overnight. Both nations mistrusted each other for years but saw the relationship as being necessary to defeat the Nazis. However, that doesn’t mean that, at times, friendly gestures were exchanged while the two countries were allies.

Take the gift that was given to the US Ambassador to the Soviet Union, Averell Harriman, in 1945. The gift was a hand-carved wooden replica of the Great Seal of the United States. And the gift was formally presented to the ambassador by a large contingent of the Soviet Union’s young person’s organization, the Young Pioneers. The Pioneers were much like a politicized version of the Boy or Girl Scouts in the west, but in the case of the USSR, membership wasn’t optional. However, the presentation of the gift was reported in the press as a wonderful gesture of gratitude on the part of the young people to their vital ally in the Great Patriotic War against Nazi Germany.

You see, when Hitler decided to invade the Soviet Union in 1941, the United States had not yet entered World War 2. The country was desperate to find the weapons and materiel to fight the war against the invaders. The United States arranged to begin supplying Russia with armaments and some products needed to fight. It’s safe to say that, without the aid of the United States, the USSR’s ability to defend itself against Germany would have been severely hampered. So, as the war was nearing the end in the summer of 1945, the giving of a gift to the US representative in Russia seemed more than appropriate.

At the presentation ceremony, Harriman, surrounded by the boys and girls in their red Pioneer scarves, graciously accepted the large wooden plaque on behalf of the United States. He ordered the plaque placed in the US Embassy in Moscow. It occupied a place of honor behind the large desk in the ambassador’s office and hung there for the next seven years.

Then, in 1951, something odd happened. A communications officer in the British Embassy in Moscow as sitting at a radio in his office one day when he suddenly heard something unusual on his set. What he heard was American voices coming over the air, bleeding through a Russian military broadcast he was monitoring. The communications guy couldn’t understand how that could be; the nearest American radio station that could be broadcasting was several hundred miles away in Western Europe. He continued to listen, then, it dawned on him what he was hearing. He jumped up and ran down the hall to the office of the British Ambassador.

It was then that the world found out, after seven years, that the beautiful carved wooden plaque that the Pioneers had presented to the Americans wasn’t what it seemed.

The gift, given by the Soviets to the Americans in the pretense of friendship, was actually a listening device.

On a Tall Spy

Carolyn was pointlessly tall, she believed. at 6’2″ (1.88m). So was so tall that she was not able to join the Women’s Army Corps (WACs) in World War 2. This denial of service devasted Carolyn, so she sought other ways to help the American war effort. She found it. The Office of Strategic Services (OSS), led by General Bill Donovan, was the pre-cursor to the CIA. Carolyn found acceptance there and began to work directly for the head of the agency as a researcher.

Her family had a background in government, and she had completed a degree in history from Smith College in Massachusetts. Spying was not her first career choice. Carolyn wanted to write, and she hoped to become a magazine writer and a novelist. But she took to the spy game because of her sharp mind and ability to solve problems. Soon, Donovan felt that she was ready for field work, so Carolyn was first assigned to what is now Sri Lanka and served as a handler for several Asian contacts the OSS had in that area. She later was posted to China in a similar capacity.

That was about the time that Donovan brought a problem to her attention. The OSS had an issue with the ordinance it had developed as an anti-submarine tactic. German U-boats had been the bane of naval and supply shipping even before the entry of the US into World War 2. This anti-U-boat ordinance had a major issue with its effectiveness: Curious sharks kept detonating it prematurely. Donovan wondered if something could be developed that would repel the sharks from coming near the ordinance.

Now, Carolyn was no cook by any means. Her family was wealthy enough to have a cook, and she never learned as much as how to boil water while growing up. However, this situation with the sharks intrigued her problem-solving personality. She set up a sort of laboratory in her apartment kitchen and working on creating something that would make the sharks stop blasting themselves (and the ordinance) into oblivion.

Her experiments worked. She concocted a powder that, when sprinkled in the water around ordinance, did indeed repel sharks. A variation of her formula is still in use today by the armed forces of the US. The agency was so impressed with her work that she received a citation recognizing her contribution to the war effort. Her OSS service record is available online for all to see and appreciate.

The other major event that happened to Carolyn during her time in Sri Lanka was that she met and eventually married another OSS agent, a guy named Paul, a man who later worked for the US Foreign Service in France. It was in France after the war that Carolyn made a return to the kitchen, this time to work creating not something repellent but rather something delicious.

You know her as Julia Carolyn Child.