McIntosh, Elizabeth Peet, 1915-2015

Elizabeth Peet McIntosh was known for her undercover work during World War II for the OSS. Raised in Hawaii, McIntosh studied and learned to speak Japanese before attending the University of Washington and earned a degree in journalism in 1935. McIntosh was near the attack on Pearl Harbor while working as a correspondent for the Scripps Howard news service. She then returned to the Washington, D.C. area once World

In January 1943, she was asked to join the Office of Strategic Services because she had become fluent in Japanese. She was then sent to India in July 1944, where her main job was to intervene in the postcard communication that troops would send home to India while stationed in Japan.She became one of the few women assigned to Morale Operations, along with future chef Julia Child who she befriended, where she created "disinformation," or fake reports, documents and postcards, which would "undermine Japanese morale."

McIntosh also served with Detachment 202 in China, where she helped develop propaganda leaflets. While in China, one of her assignments was to help create a script for a popular Chinese fortune teller to read on the radio, with the goal of causing distress among the Chinese and Japanese who listened. The script said that "something terrible is going to happen to Japan. We have checked the stars and there is something we can't even mention because it is so dreadful and it is going to eradicate one whole area of Japan." Later that day, the US dropped the atom bomb on Hiroshima, something that McIntosh's team had not known about prior to writing the script.

McIntosh went on to work for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Voice of America, the State Department, the CIA, and the United Nations. After her time with the OSS, McIntosh published her memoir, Undercover Girl, in 1947. She also wrote Sisterhood of Spies: The Women of the OSS, first published in 1998. McIntosh died on June 8, 2015, in Lake Ridge, Virginia after a heart attack. She was 100 years old.