Researching the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) during World War II for my novel-in-progress, One Person’s Loss, I discovered that many famous people worked as agents — that is, spies — for the forerunner of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Among them was chef Julia (McWilliams) Child; supreme court justice Arthur Goldberg, film director John Ford, Hollywood actors Sterling Hayden and Marlene Dietrich, anthropologist Margaret Mead, and Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Ralph Bunche (who was paid $5,600 a year). They were primarily recruited for their “intellectual sweat.” The 35,000 OSS personnel files in the National Archives were not released to the public until August 2008, more than sixty years after the agency ceased wartime operations.
