The Peculiar Truth about Julia Child, Spy

• Washington, DC, 1942: A tall, leggy woman arrived for work at the Office of Strategic Services, a newly formed spy agency within the federal government. The CIA didn’t exist yet. The OSS was its forerunner.

• At 6’ 2”, the young woman was too tall to join the military but she wanted to contribute to the wartime effort. So she took a job as a secretary and researcher in the office of the OSS chief, William “Wild Bill” Donovan.

• Her name was Julia McWilliams. After the war ended, she married an American diplomat named Paul Child. Years later, she became famous as the cookbook author and TV chef Julia Child.

• Although she never actually spied for the OSS, she did perform clandestine work for the agency.

• Julia McWilliams was born in Pasadena, CA in 1912 to upperclass parents. Her mother was the wealthy heiress to a paper manufacturing company. Julia had two siblings, and she was the oldest of the three.

• She was an athletic young woman. When she attended Smith College in northeastern Massachusetts, she played basketball and tennis. On graduating, she imagined a life as a novelist.

• When that didn’t come to fruition, Julia moved to New York City where she took a job as an advertising copywriter for a furniture store chain, a job she held for years throughout her twenties.

• When the US joined the Second World War, Julia tried to enlist. However, neither the WACs (Women’s Army Corps) nor the WAVES (the naval equivalent) could accept her because she was too tall. Julia, then age 30 and unmarried, took the OSS job in Washington instead.

• The OSS had a special division designated just for Emergency Sea Rescues. Julia was promoted to a position with the group.

• The scientists were asked to solve a problem. US Naval vessels dropped mines at sea to thwart German U-boats. Sharks sometimes swam too close to the explosives, however, and unintentionally detonated them.

• So the team concocted a shark repellant. Although Julia was not the creator, she contributed to the scientific research. That repellant, Shark Chaser, a combination of black dye and copper acetate, is still used today.

• In the final year of the war, Julia was posted to Ceylon, now called Sri Lanka. Her new position was Chief of OSS Registry. She was responsible for receiving and filing secret intelligence communiques from OSS assets throughout Southeast Asia. Again, didn’t perform spy work per se, but she knew many spies and was entrusted with their top secret information.

• While stationed in Ceylon, she met a fellow OSS agent named Paul Child. He was a worldly, erudite man with fine culinary tastes especially for French food. They married in 1946 after the war ended.

• 1948: The couple moved to Paris for Paul’s assignment with the US State Department. It was there that Julia, then 36, fell in love with French cuisine.

• She took cooking lessons and graduated from the famous Cordon Bleu school in 1951. At age 40, her life as a world class chef began.

• Despite all of that buttery French food - or perhaps because of it - Julia Child lived a long life and died two days before her 92nd birthday.