Is Wanda June? Is Catherine Jerrie? Is Jerrie June?

Reading A Woman I Know by Mary Haverstick for The Telegraph, 15 November 2023

This is an anxious, furious, forensic contribution to the study of the assassination of US president John F Kennedy. Forensic, because Haverstick has spent a dozen years learning how to read the US National Security Archives; furious, because the subject of this work, begun as a hymn to female empowerment, turned out to be a monstrous double-agent who maims cats and poisons drinking water; anxious because, as Haverstick is at pains to point out, these forays into espionage, assassination and casual violence have taken her about as far away from her creative comfort zone as it is possible to imagine.

Haverstick is an independent filmmaker. Home, her feature starring Marcia Gay Harden, came out in 2008. Her publisher’s web page says that Home came out in 2009. There is in fact a French documentary called Home released that year. Explaining to IMDB that the “Home” I was after was a “drama” from “2008” threw up a touching French comedy, also called Home, starring Isabelle Huppert. If looking up a movie generates this amount of fuss and bother, imagine what Haverstick’s been wading through for the last dozen years. Very early on in researching the life of female aeronaut and NASA hopeful Jerrie Cobb, Haverstick was taken aside by an unaccountably friendly woman from the Department of Defense and told that Jerrie’s government paper trail was largely “classified” and not worth the bother. It’s possible that she was genuinely trying to do Haverstick a favour.

Haverstick’s subject is Jerrie Cobb, one of the “Mercury 13” — female flyers who many observers assumed would participate at some point in NASA’s space programme. Their (never official) training programme was scrubbed in September 1962. In 2009 Jerrie agreed that Haverstick should tell her story, and strongly implied that this story was bigger — much bigger — than it first appeared. What she absolutely wouldn’t do was share her story: instead the elderly Jerrie spent years dropping expertly timed clues into Haverstick’s lap as the two travelled the world on cruise ships — trips that were “exotic, stressful, exhilarating, scary, and fascinating but never exactly enjoyable”. (Much the same could be said for this book. Haverstick has a sizeable and material axe to grind, and has little time for Dealey Plaza neophytes.)

The book draws together several figures who may or may not be real people, and are anyway rarely the people they say they are, even when there’s only one of them to contend with, which is almost never. (Welcome to spycraft.) There’s Jerrie Cobb, the disappointed astronaut. There’s June Cobb, the double agent who arranged for the delivery of poison pills to US enemy number one Fidel Castro. Jerrie and June aren’t related, though they’re of an age and came from the same town — and are you thinking what I am thinking? There’s Catherine Taaffe, who’s no relation at all to Jerrie and definitely a person in her own right — only how come Jerrie bears scars from a knife wound that are supposed to belong to Catherine? And — the cherry on this teetering cake — there Wanda Baran (savour that name), a Belgian con-artist whose company suckered in communist countries looking for nuclear materials. Is Wanda June? Is Catherine Jerrie? Is Jerrie June? Well, yes. Or sometimes. Or something.

I’m being flippant only because flippancy saves space. Haverstick has over five hundred pages to explain her case — that the privately funded astronaut project we’ve come call Mercury 13 was, among other perfectly legitimate things, a cover for the case officer driving the Kennedy assassination. She needs every single one of those pages and she does not waste a line.

Did I buy into every one of her speculations and inferences? No. No-one will. This genre has form. Arguably the most successful espionage book of all time, 1976’s A Man Called Intrepid, about the adventures of Sir William Stephenson, turned out to be the melancholy fabulations of a man suffering catastrophic memory loss.

At the same time, I’m certainly not going to throw the first stone. Haverstick is in earnest here and has a memory like a filing system and a filing system like a vice. The least this book could possibly be is a compelling real-life thriller, full of passion, free of writerly fuss, woven from the most intractable archival cat’s cradle imaginable.

That’s what you’ve got, even before you think to take it seriously — and I’ll bet the farm that you will.

“The solutions are not even in the works”

Reading Pegasus by Laurent Richard and Sandrine Rigaud for New Scientist, 1 February 2023.

Fifty thousand?”

Edward Snowden’s 2013 leaks from the US National Security Agency had triggered a global debate around state surveillance — and even he couldn’t quite believe the scale of the story as it was described to him in the summer of 2021.

Whistle-blowers had handed French investigative journalists Laurent Richard and and Sandrine Rigaud a list of 50,000 phone numbers. These belonged to people flagged for attack by a cybersurveillance software package called Pegasus.

The journalistic investigation that followed is the subject of this non-fiction thriller: a must-read for anyone remotely interested in cryptography and communications, and a dreadful warning for the rest of us. “Regular civilians being targeted with military-grade surveillance weapons — against their will, against their knowledge, and with no recourse — is a dystopian future we really are careening toward,” the authors warn, “if we don’t understand this threat and move to stop it.”

Pegasus offers a fascinating insight into how journalism has evolved to tackle a hyper-connected world. Eye witnesses and whistle-blowers have better access than ever before to sympathetic campaigning journalists from all over the world. But of course, this advantage is shared with the very governments and corporations and organised crime networks that want to silence them.

To drag Pegasus into the light, Laurent’s Forbidden Stories consortium choreographed the activities of more than eighty investigative journalists from seventeen media organisations across four continents and eight languages.

The consortium got together in March 2021 knowing full well that they would have to conclude their investigation by June, by which time Pegasus’ creators at the Israeli company NSO were bound to twig that their brainchild was being hacked.

The bigger the names on that phone list, the harder it would be to keep any investigation under wraps. Early on the name of Jorge Carrasco cropped up: the lead partner in Forbidden Stories’ massive cross-border collaboration to finish the investigations of murdered Mexican journalist Regina Martínez. Then things just got silly: a son of Turkish president Recep Erdogan turned up; and then the names of half the French cabinet. Also the cell number for Emmanuel Macron, the president of France. Laurent Richard recalls, “Macron was the name that made me realise how truly dangerous it was to have access to this list.”

In a pulse-accelerating account that’s never afraid to dip into well-crafted technical detail, the authors explain how Pegasus gains free rein on a mobile device, without ever tipping off the owner to its presence. Needless to say it evolved out of software designed to serve baffled consumers waiting in long queues on tech support call lines. Shalev Hulio and Omri Lavie, who would go on to found NSO and create Pegasus, cut their teeth developing programmes that allowed support technicians to take charge of the caller’s phone.

It was not long before a European intelligence service came calling. Sold and maintained for more than sixty clients in more than forty countries, Pegasus gave security services an edge over terrorists, criminal gangs and paedophiles — and also, as it’s turned out, over whistleblowers, campaigners, political opponents, journalists, and at least one Emirati princess trying to get custody of her children. This book is not a diatribe against the necessary (or at any rate ubiquitous) business of government surveillance and espionage. It is about how, in the contest between ordinary people and the powerful, software is tilting the field wildly in the latter’s favour.

The international journalistic collaboration that was the Pegasus Project sparked the biggest global surveillance scandal since Snowden; it’s led to a European Parliament inquiry into government spyware, legal action from major technology companies, government sanctions against the NSO Group and countless individual legal complaints. But the authors spend little time sitting in their laurels. Pegasus may be dead, but demand for a successor is only growing. In the gap left by NSO, certain governments are making offers to certain tech companies that add zeroes to the fees NSO enjoyed. Nor do the authors expect much to come out of the public debate that has followed their investigation: “The issues… might have been raised,” they concede, “but the solutions are not even in the works.”

Stone the Fool and others

Reading Stars and Spies: Intelligence Operations and the Entertainment Business
by Christopher Andrew and Julius Green for the Spectator, 18 December 2021

On 2 October 2020, when he became chief of the UK Secret Intelligence Service (MI6, if you prefer), Richard Moore tweeted (*tweeted!*)

#Bond or #Smiley need not apply. They’re (splendid) fiction but actually we’re #secretlyjustlikeyou.

The gesture’s novelty disguised, at the time, its appalling real-world implications: Bond was, after all, competent; and Smiley had integrity.

Stars and Spies, by veteran intelligence historian Christopher Andrew and theatre director and circus producer Julius Green, is a thoroughly entertaining read, but not at all a reassuring one. “The adoption of a fictional persona, the learning of scripts and the ability to improvise” are central to career progression in both theatre and espionage, the writers explain, “and undercover agents often find themselves engaged in what is effectively an exercise in in long-form role play.”

It should, then, come as no surprise that this book boasts “no shortage of enthusiastic but inept entertainer-spies”.

There’s Aphra Behn, the first woman employed as a secret agent by the British state during the Second Anglo-Dutch War in 1665: reaping no secret intelligence from her former lover, “ASTRA, Agent 160”, she made stuff up.

As, indeed, did “The Man Called Intrepid”, Sir William Stephenson, subject, in 1976, of the biggest-selling book ever on intelligence history. His recollections, spanning everything from organising wartime resistance in Europe to developing the Spitfire and the jet engine, work on the German Enigma code, and developing nuclear weapons, turned out to be the melancholy fabulations of a man suffering catastrophic memory loss.

The authors imagine that their subject — the intersection between spying and acting — is entertaining enough that they can simply start in the England of Good Queen Bess and Christopher Marlowe (recruited to spy for Walsingham while a student at Cambridge; also wrote a play or two), and end with the ludicrous antics (and — fair’s fair — brilliant acting) of US spy show Homeland.

And, by and large, they’re right. Begin at the beginning; end at the end. Why gild the lily with anything so arduous as an argument, when your anecdotes are this engaging? (Daniel Defoe’s terrifying plans for a surveillance state were scotched because the government’s intelligence budget was being siphoned off to keep Charles II’s mistresses quiet; and why were the British establishment so resistant to the charms of Soviet ballerinas?)

This approach does, however, leave the authors’ sense of proportion open to question. They’re not wrong to point out that “the most theatrical innovations pioneered by Stalinist intelligence were the show trials”, but in the context of so many Corenesque quasi-theatrical anecdotes, this observation can’t help but feel a bit cheap.

Once the parallels between spying and acting have been pointed out, the stories told here (many of them the fruit of fairly arduous primary research) sometimes come across as slightly fatuous. Why should the popular broadcaster Maxwell Knight not be a powerful recruiter of spies during the inter-war years? There’s nothing counter-intuitive here, if you think about the circles Knight must have moved in.

We are on surer ground when the authors measure the sharp contrast between fictional spies and their real-life counterparts. In the movies, honeypots abound, still rehashing the myths attaching to the courageous World War One French spy Mistinguett and the sadly deluded Margaretha Zelle (Mata Hari).

In truth, though, and for the longest while, women in this business have been more middle management than cat-suited loot. Recruited largely from Oxford’s women’s colleges and Cheltenham Ladies’ College, women played a more important part in the Security Service than in any other wartime government department, and for years, we are told, the service has been recruiting more women at officer and executive level than any other branch of government.

As for seduction and pillow-talk, even a fleeting acquaintance with men in their natural environment will tell us that, as Maxwell Knight put it, “Nothing is easier than for a woman to gain a man’s confidence by the showing and expression of a little sympathy… I am convinced,” he went on, “that more information has been obtained by women agents by keeping out of the arms of a man, than was ever obtained by willingly sinking into them.”

Fuelled by Erskine Childers’s peerless spy novel The Riddle of the Sands (1903), by Somerset Maughan’s Ashenden stories and by everything Fleming ever wrote, of course the audience for espionage drama hankers for real-life insight from writers “in the know”. And if the writer complains that the whole espionage industry is a thing of smoke and mirrors, well, we’ll find that fascinating too. (In Ben Jonson’s spy farce Volpone Sir Pol, on being told of the death of Stone the Fool, claims that Stone actually ran a sophisticated spy ring which communicated by means of dead drops hidden in fruit and vegetables. Eat your heart out, Le Carré.)

Andrew and Green, who both at different times studied history at Corpus Christi, Christopher Marlowe’s old college, are not really giving us the inside track. I would go so far as to say that they are not really telling us anything new. But they marshall their rare facts splendidly, and use them to spin ripping yarns.