Laura Shapiro Read Online Free Page A

offered her a future, and she grabbed it.

    â€œI got an awfully late start,” Julia reflected once. She wasn’t talking about marrying at thirty-four, or beginning her life’s work at thirty-seven, or launching a television career at fifty. The start she had in mind was the moment when her childhood finally ended and she could feel herself coming into focus as the person she wanted to be. It happened during the war, in the heat and stress of a military office rigged up on a Ceylon tea plantation. Later, when she looked back at this turning point, she could hardly believe she had spent so long in a foreign country—and she didn’t mean Ceylon, she meant Pasadena.
    What she really wanted to do in Washington was join the newly formed Office of Strategic Services (OSS), headed by General William “Wild Bill” Donovan, who was organizing what would become a far-flung network of espionage and intelligence operations in Europe and the Far East. It’s not clear whether Julia hoped to become a spy—she wasn’t exactly someone who could fade imperceptibly into a crowd—but by this time she was a master at typing and filing, and her background made her just the sort of woman Donovan was trying to hire. An OSS recruiter once said that Donovan’s concept of the ideal office worker was “a cross between a Smith College graduate, a Powers model, and a Katie Gibbs secretary.” Julia fit the template nicely. She started as a file clerk at OSS headquarters, but as soon as word went out that Donovan was establishing bases overseas and was looking for volunteers, she put her name forward. Although she knew some French and a bit of Italian, she didn’t ask for a posting in Europe. When the war was over, she would surely get there on her own and maybe even live abroad for a time. In hopes of just such a possibility, she was already taking French lessons three times a week. But here was a chance to travel someplace completely improbable, someplace way, way off the map of her life to date. She requested India and sailed on a troop ship from California in March 1944.
    Once they all arrived—a flock of men and a handful of women—their orders changed. The new OSS base was to be in Ceylon, where Admiral Lord Louis Mountbatten was directing the South East Asia Command from Kandy, up in the hills. “Our office is a series of palm-thatched huts connected by cement walks, surrounded by native workmen and barbed wire,” Julia wrote to her family from the tea plantation that became OSS headquarters. Though she had an emergency signaling mirror and felt quite ready for attack or capture, her job turned out to be chiefly paperwork. Julia’s assignment was to set up and operate the Registry, a massive chore that she did single-handedly until an assistant showed up months later. The Registry handled all the highly classified documents pertaining to intelligence in the China-Burma-India theater, and Julia created the system that would keep track of every scrap of information and make it quickly accessible.
    There were insects the likes of which she had never seen before, elephants and tropical rains, golf games and a huge workload—Julia thrived on all of it. Primitive living conditions didn’t bother her, and she was calm about dealing with the vital wartime secrets that flowed in and out of her office. When the OSS shifted operations to China ten months later, Julia was transferred to Kunming to set up the Registry there. By now she was getting tired of a daily life devoted to paperwork, but she liked the idea of seeing another new country, and not even the famously treacherous flight over the Himalayas upset the genial self-possession that was a hallmark of her personality. One of her OSS colleagues remembered sitting on the plane from Calcutta to Kunming as it rattled through ice and wind—hundreds of flights on this route ended disastrously—while the people