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Post by Jenbo on Mar 31, 2014 20:34:30 GMT
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Post by jestress on Apr 8, 2014 3:57:44 GMT
I like that article, especially how it points out that mothers can be good spies because they interact with a wide variety of people. That's really at the heart of Scarecrow and Mrs. King. One of Amanda's assets is that she has developed connections with other people through her various school, scouting, and volunteer activities as well as just random people she's met (Lee included!). She's also learned a variety of useful skills because of the projects she's worked on with her family, like how to find her way in the woods and the boating skills that she uses on the Mata Hari II.
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Post by Khell on Apr 8, 2014 9:38:47 GMT
Actually, the other day I watched - well, tried to watch - a documentary on the history of espionage. It didn't cover the whole history as far as I got it but started somewhere in the 1930s so I guess they were focusing on WWII and the Cold War. There was that woman, Ruth Werner, one of THE top spies during WWII. She was married and had kids, too. jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/werner-ruthSo - no, not that far-fetched at all!  |
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Post by iwsod on Apr 18, 2014 3:37:44 GMT
Thanks for sharing Jenbo - and pass on thanks to your hubby! Soooo ironic that the article has picture of James Bond to go with it!!! okay I know the article is about MI6, but it is really about spies. woman spies. not MI6 and not James Bond. Even more ironic because the article is about WOMEN spies being really good.. and because James Bond is a flippin Misogynist!!!!! Why not give us a picture of Angelina Jolie in Salt? Or I know.. a picture of Valerie Plame, or Naomi Watts portraying her in the movie Fair Game??!!! (which was a brilliant movie btw - anyone seen it?? she was mentally tough as nails- tougher than James flippin Bond) Still, a very interesting read: go the women!!!! Thanks Jenbo! |
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Post by jestress on Apr 29, 2014 3:56:00 GMT
Recently, I discovered a podcast called Stuff You Missed in History Class. It's by the same people who do howstuffworks.com, and it covers famous and no-so-famous people and events in history around the world. Awhile back, they did a series on spies during the American Civil War. One of the things I thought was interesting was that in the podcast on Allan Pinkerton, whose detective agency influenced the formation of the FBI, they said that most of the people spying during the war were civilians because the army didn't provide spy training in those days. Kind of clashes with what Lee's uncle says about the army training the spies in the beginning, doesn't it?
The women spies they covered were just women with strong feelings toward one side or the other who realized that they were in a position to obtain information and pass it on to people who could make use of it. Belle Boyd was a pretty young woman from a family with Confederate sympathies who used her feminine wiles to obtain information. She kind of reminds me of an early version of Francine.
Elizabeth Van Lew's family owned slaves when she was young, but she influenced her family to free them all after her father died. She spied for the Union, obtaining her information while bringing charity to prisoners of war at Libby Prison in Richmond. She got some of her information from prisoners and some from the guards, listening to them talking among themselves. To keep people from getting suspicious of her, she pretended that she was mentally disturbed so that people would think of her as a harmless eccentric or crazy person. She recruited others to help her as well, developing her own spy ring.
One member of Van Lew's ring was one of her former slaves. People aren't certain about all the details of her past, but she was apparently known as Mary Bowser. Van Lew recommended her as a servant for Jefferson Davis's wife, and Bowser used her position to spy on the Davises directly. The Davises were unaware that Van Lew had arranged for Bowser's education and that Bowser could read the papers she found in Jefferson Davis's desk. There were other slaves and former slaves who also probably spied on Confederate households because, like Francine pointed out in Spiderweb, servants and waiters are the kind of people that you just don't notice because they're always there in the background. They were in a unique position to be able to observe others up close in personal settings and were often underestimated by the people they were observing.
Anyway, it's really interesting stuff, and it supports the idea that spies can be and have always been basically ordinary people who figured out how to make best use of their positions in life to obtain information.
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Post by Khell on Apr 29, 2014 8:23:22 GMT
Ack, now I got that mental image of Francine going all Ashton (as in Ashton from "North and South") to obtain information on the Davises ... *lol*
Really interesting, Jestress! And so true about waiters, servants, etc. Party service people. You see them but you don't notice them (well, unless you're Sherlock Holmes). The perfect spies, really.
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Post by jestress on Apr 29, 2014 15:32:04 GMT
And so true about waiters, servants, etc. Party service people. You see them but you don't notice them (well, unless you're Sherlock Holmes). The perfect spies, really. Exactly! When Francine said that in Spiderweb, it was part of her ramble about Amanda being one of those "little people" no one notices. She was saying it kind of derisively, but when you think about it, that's really perfect for a spy. The whole idea is to see things without being seen. It also kind of brings up Life of the Party, doesn't it? Like you said, the party service people were pretty invisible even in plain sight. They were just expected to be there, doing their routine jobs, and probably most people noticed the uniforms before noticing any individual characteristics about them. |
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Post by jestress on Jun 22, 2014 4:55:44 GMT
This is kind of a continuation of what I was saying about Civil War spies. Jestress has a toy! In a lot of ways, U.S. intelligence services have their origins in the Civil War. Before that time, there just weren't any organized intelligence services in this country. Both sides evolved their own spy networks and experimented with different techniques in espionage, including secret codes. This is a replica of a Civil War Cypher Wheel. It's a cylinder made of up rotating wheels marked with lines of letters and numbers. To use them, you need sets of identical cypher wheels, so that the sender and recipient(s) have matching ones. The sender then lines up the letters of a message by rotating the wheels, like I've done here. Then, he or she picks any other line of text on the wheel and sends that as the coded message. When the recipient gets the message, he lines up the letters he's been given and then turns the cylinder around until he sees the real words of the message. Check it out: OPVOUMFYOHMW!  |
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Post by KC on Nov 26, 2014 1:26:45 GMT
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Post by learjet on Nov 26, 2014 22:36:25 GMT
She must be such an interesting person to speak to. What a life! I suspect rambling in French sounds more melodic than rambling in English
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