OSS Operation Black Mail is the story of a remarkable woman who fought World War II on the front lines of psychological warfare. Elizabeth "Betty" P. McIntosh spent eighteen months serving in the Office of Strategic Services in what has been called the "forgotten theater," China-Burma-India, where she met and worked with characters as varied as Julia Child and Ho Chi Minh. Her craft was black propaganda, and her mission was to demoralize the enemy through prevarication and deceit, and ultimately, convince him to surrender. Betty and her crew ingeniously obtained and altered personal correspondence between Japanese soldiers and their families on the home islands of Japan. She also ordered the killing of a Japanese courier in the jungles of Burma to plant a false surrender order in his mailbag. By the time Betty flew the Hump from Calcutta to China, she was acting head of the Morale Operations branch for the entire theater, overseeing the production of thousands of pamphlets and radio scripts, the generation of fiendishly clever rumors, and the printing of a variety of faked Japanese, Burmese, and Chinese newspapers. Her strategy involved targeting not merely the Japanese soldier but the man within: the son, the husband, the father. She knew her work could ultimately save lives, but never lost sight of the fact that her propaganda was a weapon and her intended target the enemy. This is not a typical war story. The only beaches stormed are the minds of an invisible enemy. Often a great deal of time and effort was expended in conception and production, and rarely was it known if even a shred reached the hands of the intended recipient. The process was opaque on both ends: the origin of a rumor or radio broadcast obscured, the target elusive. For Betty and her friends, time on the "front lines" of psychological warfare in China-Burma-India rushed by in a cascade of creativity and innovation, played out on a stage where a colonial world was ending and chaos awaited.
This book may be fictional, but the accuracy and attention to detail yields a fine overview of the extraordinary contributions of a heretofore under-appreciated wartime agency.
In 1943, William R. Peers – who would later lead the CIA's rst training program – became the head of OSS Detachment 101 aer his predecessor, Carl F. Eier, was injured. Peers subsequently became the head of all OSS operations in the ...
All these colorful individuals form the story of Asian Americans in the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the forerunner of today's CIA.
A second contingent of troops arrived in April, and the unit manning roster was complete.422 Now at full strength, unit operations became routine. The women functioned together like a well-trained team. By then it was April 1945.
Women made important contributions to OSS morale operations. See Ann Todd, OSS Operation Black Mail: One Woman's Covert War Against the Imperial Japanese Army (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 2017). On Child, see Jennet Conant, ...
Pearson, Ruth, and Kyoko Kusakabe, Thailand's Hidden Workforce: Burmese Migrant Women Factory Workers (London: Zed, 2012) 1510. Pim Koetsawang, In Search of Sunlight: Burmese Migrant Workers in Thailand (Bangkok: Orchid Press, ...
“Mrs. Harrison on Russia,” New York Times, March 13, 1922, 2. 40. Harrison, There's Always Tomorrow, 432–34. 41. Report made by William E. Dunn, September 26, 1921, investigative case files of the Bureau of Investigation, 1908–1922, ...
OSS: The Secret History of America's First Central Intelligence Agency. Stursberg, Peter. The Sound of War: Memoirs of a CBC Correspondent. Todd, Ann. OSS Operation Black Mail: One Woman's Covert War Against the Imperial Japanese Army.
Bestselling author Jennet Conant brings us a stunning account of Julia and Paul Child’s experiences as members of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) in the Far East during World War II and the tumultuous years when they were caught up ...
A seasoned journalist and veteran of sensitive OSS and CIA operations, McIntosh draws on her own experiences and in-depth interviews with more than one hundred OSS women to uncover some of the most tantalizing stories and best-kept secrets ...