Giving Voice to Women in Spy Stories

Let´s talk women in the more or less history of espionage...Automatically, it comes to mind the glamours of Mata Hari and the swings of Josephine Baker and some equally glamorous counterparts of James Bond. However, although unequally represented on the economy of jobs, women working in espionage, all over the world, mean more than that. And, contrary to the generally accepted stereotype, they can do more than being ´honey pots´.

A French freelance author Chloé Aeberhardt had the idea of writing a book about various women from all over the world famous intelligent services. A tremendous and not always successful work because of the secretive and sensitive nature of the work. The book was recently turned into short animated series on Arte that I just finished watching today. 

Truth to be told, the life of women involved in intelligence is limited. The life of a woman in general is limited by family, children, family and house-related obligations. But more and more women are able to make it through and succeed. Because, in fact, there is no intelligence related job that a woman cannot do. Only that society is limiting a woman´s ability to outperform. Sometimes, women too are resigning to accept their limitations, which is also a matter of choice.

The women featured in the TV mini-series (I have the book too and hopefully will be able to read and review it soon) are former operatives of CIA, KGB, French intelligence, Stasi and Mossad. My favorite case, for her freedom is the hero of the episode Yola and Hotel Mossad featuring a former ELAL flight attendant, part of a massive Mossad operation in Sudan aimed to smuggle endangered Ethiopian Jews to Israel. The story was recently featured in a movie on Netflix, The Red Sea Diving Resort but probably the reality was even more complex than the fiction. One of the stories I never heard about was how the Manuel Antonio Noriega was caught out of the Embassy of Vatican where he took refuge following the American invasion of Panama.

Another woman featured in the movie is a former Stasi operative in the then West Germany that was recruted through the so-called Romeo-network of the famous Markus Wolf, the head of the Main Directorate for Reconaissance, the foreign intelligence division of Eas Germany´s Ministry for State Security. The so-called Romeos were Stasi agents sent to the West Germany to recruit women working in top/sensitive working positions. They were usualle falling for the boys and were further recruited to work for the East. At a great extent, the success of this operation confirmed the weakness label of women leading to women being considered as a liability therefore not deem of a trustworthy work within the security network, unless it involved sex. Gabriele Gast, interviewed in the movie, started to collaborate with the East for a purposely love story, but ended up working for convinctions, without accepting any payments.

It´s one of the many new beginnings in she-writing the history with a focus on female actors and although it is just a start, it´s worth continuing because it not only allows to make a difference, but equally create a space for new debates and understandings.

´Cold War Spy Stories from Eastern Europe´

I don´t remember when I´ve read the last time about spy stories in Eastern Europe. It used to be a topic I dealt with as a historian, especially when reconstructing intellectual profiles and histories from this part of the world. Personally, I´ve considered it a real hole of rats that disgusted me deeply. Once you start searching through the files carefully set up by the so-called ´intelligence´ services of the time, there is no end of human ignominy. It helps when you try to avoid to have role-models but still, why they should be so low and accept to betray their neighbours, friends, relatives in exchange for money or priviledges that will never amount to the harm they did. I remember I met once a woman who once was recruited when she was in school, a teenager. She accepted. When the public discussion about collaboration and relationship with communist secret police was hot, that woman met me for a coffee and confessed that once she said candidly ´yes´. I tried to be polite with her, finish my coffee and avoid her for the rest of my stay. Simply, don´t want to have anything to do with such people and it is my personal choice for reasons of mental hygiene.

Cold War Spy Stories from Eastern Europe, edited by Valentina Glajan, Alison Lewis and Corina L. Petrescu. is a volume of stories collected from the Stasi archives, Romania´s Securitate and the Ukrainian KGB, among others. In addition, there are also chapter on the representation of the Cold War in movies on both sides of the Iron Curtain. 

If you are not familiar with the Cold War context and its intricacies do not expect to understand it by reading this book - that I had in audiobook format - but otherwise the stories outlined are really interesting for the specific topics addressed. For instance the story of a Romanian Jew that worked as a secret police officer before being dismissed after ten years of activity on an anti-Semitic ground - which happened very often at the time. Another chapter deals with the many faces of the GDR spymaster Markus Wolf. Literature and the production of books in general were a very important matter of interest for the secret services at the time. They use writers as informers and censors in a clear effort of divide the intellectuals and keep them under the state control. The story of the Romanian-born Hungarian Jew Ana Novac - her real name was Zimra Harsanyi - , a Shoah survivor, a plawriter and memorialist that died in Paris, is an example in this respect. People that were in contact with her were writing surveillance notes with a strong personal note of disdain for her burgeois habits and her sexual activities. Another topic that I´ve found personally very interesting regards the Turkish men working as seasonal labour force in the West that were recruited by the East during their trips to the communist part of Berlin looking for fun and sexual adventures. The story of the Orthodox priest who denounced his collaboration with the West that a couple of years after the end of the Soviet Union was among the ultranationalist Russian-speaking publication Zavtra is no surprise. 

Personally, I was interested in reading more stories from the secret files but that was maybe rather an intellectual voyeurism. I was entering the mood of terrible stories and was ready to remember that this is how the human nature works, regardless the intellectual preoccupations and the particular education. The final part of the book deals with the movies representations of the Cold War, through the analysis of a couple of the productions. The relevance of the topic of surveillance, in a post-Cold War context remains, but as in many respects regarding the multi-polar world, there is a lot of political ambiguity and circumstantial meaning. 

Cold War Spy Stories from Eastern Europe were not intended to be more than fragments of a complex mosaique that still has its own secrets. It has a critical box of tools as well as conceptual delimitations and definitions which are very helpful for the reader that have not experienced directly the political pressures of the time. Personally, I would be curious about the feedback about such stories from someone who never faced the restriction of democratic freedoms. 

Maybe it is about time to delve back into some Cold War stories or write more myself. One day...

Rating: 4 stars