Meet Elizabeth Peet McIntosh – The OSS Spy

Elizabeth Peet McIntosh OSS

ELIZABETH P. MCINTOSH, a reporter and the daughter and wife of reporters, was working for two Honolulu newspapers when the Japanese brought the United States into World War II by bombing Pearl Harbor. She became a war correspondent, and by 1943 had been recruited into the Office of Strategic Services, the O.S.S., the less louche forerunner of the own C.I.A. There she worked in the blandly named Morale Operations, the home of so-called ”black” propaganda,” which today is often called disinformation.

Elizabeth McIntosh died at the age of 100 in 2015, conjured lies in the line of duty for the US Office of Strategic Services, and, as an author wrote about the women who used their brains, and sometimes their bodies, to help the spy agency in the Second World War.

The daughter of a sportswriter, McIntosh, grew up in Hawaii and followed her father into journalism. She reported on women’s issues for the Scripps Howard news service but grew restless after having witnessed the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour in 1941. A family acquaintance with connections to the OSS, which later became the CIA, asked her, she recalled, “‘Wouldn’t you like to get into something interesting like…’ You know, he didn’t say ‘spying’, but he just said, ‘more interesting maybe than the work you’re doing.'”

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