Julia Child’s China Spying Days

I had a conversation in Peking recently with a friend who is a long time foreign correspondent in the city. We were discussing the history of foreign journalists being accused of (or in actuality) being spies in China over the decades. She mentioned to me Julia Childs. Now, being a Brit, I’m not overly familiar with Julia Childs and her fame as a cooking programme person in America – don’t watch TV much, don’t cook and don’t remember the programme ever being on TV (we got an awful women called Fanny Craddock in my day). Still, I understand Childs was/is a household name in America.

Now we are to get a movie about her starring Meryl Streep but I have no idea if Child’s China espionage days are included.

After Pearl Harbour Childs apparently volunteered for service for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) – the predecessor of the CIA. At first she was assigned to typing thousands of names on index cards, which formed a sort of rudimentary indexing system to help keep track of people before the days of computers. After this she was promoted to a senior clerical position and worked for the Emergency Rescue Equipment section, where she was assigned the task of determining whether people stranded on a lifeboat at sea could survive by catching fish and squeezing the water out of them. She called this the “fish-squeezing unit.” In 1944 she was assigned to work in India and ended up in Ceylon, where she had top secret access to communications detailing all manner of covert military matters. According to a colleague of hers in US Air Force Intelligence, Julia “was privy to every top secret … which required a person of unquestioned loyalty, of rock-solid integrity, of unblemished lifestyle, of keen intelligence.”

In March of 1945, the China-Burma-India division of the OSS relocated to Chongqing (left) where she started training to be a proper spy according to people who worked with her but the war ended. After the war she accompanied her husband to France, got into cooking and then became a TV star in America. I must admit the whole TV chef thing strikes me as boring as hell – but the spying in China sounds much more interesting