A Woman I Know
female spies, double identities, and a new story of the Kennedy assassination
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- £9.99
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- £9.99
Publisher Description
The true story of a filmmaker whose unexpected investigation of her film’s subject opened a new window onto the world of Cold War espionage, CIA secrets, and the assassination of John F. Kennedy.
Independent filmmaker Mary Haverstick thought she’d stumbled onto the project of a lifetime — a biopic of a little-known aviation legend whose story seemed to embody the hopeful spirit of the dawn of the space age. But after she received a mysterious warning from a government agent, Haverstick began to suspect that all was not as it seemed. What she found as she dug deeper was a darker story — a story of double identities and female spies, a tangle of intrigue that stretched from the fields of the Congo to the shores of Cuba, from the streets of Mexico City to the dark heart of the Kennedy assassination in Dallas.
As Haverstick attempted to learn the truth directly from her subject in a cat-and-mouse game that stretched across a decade, she plunged deep into the CIA files of the 1950s and 60s. A Woman I Know brings vividly to life the duplicities of the Cold War intelligence game, a world where code names and doubletalk are the lingua franca of spies bent on seeking advantage by any means necessary. As Haverstick sheds light on a remarkable set of women whose high-stakes intelligence work has left its only traces in redacted files, she also discovers disturbing and shocking new clues about what really happened at Dealey Plaza in 1963. Offering new clues to the assassination and a vivid picture of women in mid-century intelligence, A Woman I Know is a gripping real-life thriller.
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Filmmaker Haverstick's head-spinning debut recounts her investigation of Jerrie Cobb (1931–2019), a celebrated aviatrix and one of the 13 women who passed NASA's qualification tests in the early 1960s but were never admitted to the space program. After befriending Cobb while prepping a movie about her life, Haverstick became convinced that Cobb had a secret identity as June Cobb, a CIA asset with a remarkably similar biography—they were from the same Oklahoma town, undertook similar aviation training and travels in Latin America, and even had similar clavicle scars. (Pictures of the two women look nothing alike, but Haverstick chalks the discrepancy up to CIA deception.) Among other exploits, Haverstick credits Jerrie—as June—with spying on Fidel Castro while working undercover as his secretary, orchestrating assassination plots against Castro and Congolese leader Patrice Lumumba, and being the mysterious figure known as "the Babushka" seen in film footage of John F. Kennedy's assassination, where she supposedly fired the fatal head shot with a camera-pistol. (Complicating things further, Haverstick suggests that Jerrie was also Kennedy's mistress.) Haverstick presents exhaustive timelines showing that Jerrie and June were never in two different locations at once, and her narrative is full of captivating intrigue—she suspects Jerrie once served her a bowl of poisoned strawberries—but it creates more puzzles than it solves. The result is a colorful but far-fetched account of the Kennedy assassination.
