Hell Hath No Fury (44 page)

The fate of women like Hanadi Jaradat and Reem Raiyshi prompted the American feminist writer Andrea Dworkin to observe critically that “the female suicide bombers are idealists who crave committing a pure act, one that will wipe away the stigma of being female. The Palestinian community is not sacrificing low women, women of no accomplishment, women with no future. Instead, the women suicide bombers are the society's best in terms of human resources, a perverted example of the best and the brightest.”

In November 2005, a Belgian woman became the first European suicide bomber when she died in Iraq in a failed attack on American troops. Muriel Degauque, from Charleroi, had become a devout Muslim after marrying a radical Moroccan Islamist and had adopted the
chador
(Islamic dress that covers women from head to toe). She later traveled to Iraq through Turkey. A Belgian passport was found near her body. It has been estimated that between 2001 and 2006 some fifty women carried out suicide attacks worldwide.

In April 2006, Hamas announced that it intended to abandon its use of suicide bombers. However, this did not deter Hamas activist Fatma Najar from becoming, at seventy, the world's oldest female suicide bomber (and the first to be a great-grandmother) in November 2006 when an explosive device strapped to her body was activated by a grenade thrown at her by Israeli soldiers as she advanced toward their position north of Gaza. In a video she made shortly before she died, Fatma Najar, a mother of nine, declared, “I offer myself as a sacrifice to God and to the homeland.”

Reference: Barbara Victor,
Army of Roses: Inside the World of Palestinian Women Suicide Bombers,
2003.

TRIBAL REVENGE

For thousands of years, women of many cultures who were banned from the battlefield were given their chance for revenge on the enemy when their victorious warriors brought home the prisoners of war. Fully aware of what they would have suffered at the hands of the victors if their menfolk had lost, women young and old sharpened their shells, blades, or knives and set to work. This work was exclusively assigned to the women because of their lowly and despised status in their warrior tribes. Prisoners being tortured to death suffered, in addition to the physical agonies the women were ready to inflict, the overwhelming humiliation of dying at the hands of a woman, something like a cross between an untouchable in India and an
Untermensch
of Nazi race-hatred theory.

These practices are most clearly documented among some of the Native American tribes of North America in the nineteenth century, notably the Apache, Cherokee, Iroquois, Omaha, and Dakota. The women of the Shasta tribe of California accompanied their men to war and had the special task of hobbling the enemy, cutting the hamstrings of the fallen to disable them from fighting again. But the history, myths, and legends of the ancient world all speak of women who haunted battlefields to torture, murder, and pillage the fallen. For the Greeks, the goddess Demeter was the Mother, who took her “children,” the dead and dying warriors, to their last home. In Celtic mythology, five goddesses of war—Fea, “the Hateful,” Nemon, “the Venomous,” Badb, “the Fury,” Macha, “Battle,” and their leader, Morrígú or Morrighan, “Great Queen”—all served as role models for the flesh-and-blood women who combined business with pleasure as they scoured the fields of the fallen, cutting off a finger to release a ring here, excising an eye or a testicle there, until sated with booty and blood.

For women who were largely powerless and widely abused in the traditional society of tribes, these rituals of rapine and revenge were an opportunity to assert themselves in ways that their men could neither prevent nor control. This may account for their extraordinary cruelty and viciousness, which drew this dark verse from the poet and chronicler of the British Empire, Rudyard Kipling:

If you're wounded and left out on Afghanistan's plains

And the women come out to cut up what remains,

Just roll to your rifle and blow out your brains

And go to your Gawd like a soldier.

As late as the mid-twentieth century, the women of Afghanistan retained their fearsome reputation for the sadistic mutilation of prisoners. Pilots and crew flying air-control missions over the North-West Frontier between India and Afghanistan in the late 1930s always carried a “blood chit,” a piece of paper promising to pay the bearer a reward if they handed back any captured servicemen, but only if they were still unmutilated and in full possession of all their organs and appendages.

Afghani and Apache women traditionally enjoyed the reputation of being the cruelest practitioners of this hideous art. But it is found everywhere, challenging once again the belief that men go to war to protect a sex that is inherently softer and weaker than their own. In seventeenth-century colonial Massachusetts, a mob of women tortured two Native American prisoners to death, after overcoming their guards. In the same vein, the women of the Tupinambá of Brazil not only enthusiastically tortured prisoners of war to death but dismembered and ate them, too. And in 1993, in an action that brings the savage man-killing Maenads of ancient Greece right up to the present day, women were active in a Somali mob that dragged the bodies of US soldiers through the streets of Mogadishu, mutilating and dismembering them. In the same year Somali women also took part in the lynching of four foreign journalists.

Reference:

www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.htm?id11000491

www.etext.org/Politics/Somalia.News.Update/Volume.2/snu-2

11

ARMIES OF THE SHADOWS

Spies, Agents, and Underground Workers

Without the Resistance, I was nobody…. the Resistance gave us wings.

—Female member of ELAS, Greek Resistance movement in World War II

O
F ALL FORMS OF WARFARE
, undercover operations have afforded the greatest opportunities for women to serve in the front line and have witnessed some of their most extraordinary feats of heroism, daring, and endurance.

As spies, women have enjoyed one great social advantage, the routine undervaluing of the female sex that has always been a woman's lot, and the most successful undercover agents turned this to good account. Many men in war missed women's underground activity because they could not conceive that women were capable of it.
Andrée de Jongh
(see Chapter 11), organizer of one of the most successful escape lines in World War II, was released by the Nazis because they could not believe that a formidable enemy was sitting before them in the person of this demure young woman.

Women are also equipped by nature for subterfuge, as their biological capacity for multitasking enables them to keep a number of different realities alive at the same time. So they could convincingly play their assigned role, no matter how dull (a number of the Cold War spies were no more than modest housewives to external eyes) while relentlessly pursuing their covert ends, making light both of the reality of their situation and of the often elaborate deceptions and charades they devised.

The story begins with the earliest recorded texts. Women spies were active on behalf of the Chinese in the fifth century
BCE
, when the philosopher Mo-tzu advocated reporting anyone who committed evil deeds to the authorities. Since then the roll call stretches from one of the world's first “honey trap” operatives, Delilah, who ensnared Samson for the Philistines, through the
American Civil War
(see Chapter 11), on into the Cold War and up to today.

An early mistress of the honey trap, Delilah anticipated by almost two thousand years the techniques employed by
Cheryl Bentov
(see Chapter 11). Delilah worked for money; the price of trapping Samson was eleven hundred pieces of silver from each of the lords of the Philistines.

Then as now, money was a key factor in procuring intelligence, but women spies and undercover agents in the Bible more often acted out of love or loyalty.

More undercover work for women came when the international power politics of medieval and Renaissance Europe encouraged the growth of intelligence networks, and every ruler had a chief adviser like King Henry VIII's lord chancellor, Cardinal Thomas Wolsey, who in sixteenth-century England sat at the center of a spider's web of spies. Henry's daughter,
Elizabeth I
(see Chapter 2), similarly understood that mastery of the secret world was more than half the battle, and her choice of the brilliant Francis Walsingham to run her intelligence network was a key factor in maintaining England's international security in a troubled and warlike age.

The role of women as capable, plausible, and sometimes ruthless intelligence agents remained unchanged for centuries. In the American Civil War, outdated notions of male gallantry, and much strong drink, enabled skillful operators such as the Confederate spy Belle Boyd in the
American Civil War
(see Chapter 11) to ply their trade, gathering useful “overheard” indiscretions from bibulous Union officers. Echoes of this amateur but often effective approach reverberated into twentieth-century warfare, perhaps most notably in the tragicomic espionage career of
Mata Hari
(see Chapter 5).

In 1940, as in 1588, Britain was fighting for national survival. That year saw British prime minister Winston Churchill establish the
Special Operations Executive
(SOE, see Chapter 11), an agency whose purpose was to gather intelligence in occupied Europe and Southeast Asia, to carry out sabotage, and to liaise with Resistance groups. Its American counterpart, the
Office of Strategic Services
(OSS, see Chapter 11), was formed in 1942. SOE in particular made significant use of female agents in the field and found, in the figure of
Vera Atkins
(see Chapter 11), a formidable but sometimes fallible spymaster to match Walsingham in the single-minded harrying of the detested enemy.

SOE's chief recruiter in the early years, Selwyn Jepson, was a keen advocate of the use of women in the secret world. In a battle in which moral strength often counted for more than mere physical prowess, he believed that the right kind of woman would always be more ruthless and clinical than her male equivalent. “Men usually want a mate with them,” he observed. “Women have a far greater capacity for cool and lonely courage than men.” His view was borne out by the phenomenal bravery and resourcefulness of women such as
Pearl Witherington
(see Chapter 11), and
Virginia Hall
(see Chapter 11), the latter of whom did not let a trifling thing like an artificial foot, code-named “Cuthbert,” stand in the way of a successful career in the field both for SOE and OSS.

In the postwar years, OSS evolved into the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and SOE veterans gravitated toward the British equivalent, MI6. In the Cold War they were fighting a new enemy and former World War II ally, the Soviet Union. In the war years, Joseph Stalin devoted almost as much attention to spying on his Western allies as he did to fighting Nazi Germany. This was to pay the Soviets handsome, albeit temporary, dividends in the late 1940s and early 1950s, an era of nuclear paranoia and seemingly endless spy scares, when despite Soviet shortages, there was always enough money to fund intelligence gathering.

But female spies generally follow their lonely and hazardous career out of conviction, not for cash. Among other noteworthy dedicated denizens of the shadows are the Cold War warriors
Ruth Werner,
code-named “Sonya,” the German Communist spy dubbed “the most successful female spy in history,” and
Jeanne Vertefeuille,
the CIA operative who doggedly uncovered one of the most dangerous Soviet spies in the United States, the traitor
Aldrich Ames
(see Chapter 11).

In the early 1990s, the Soviet Union collapsed and was replaced by a new threat, militant Islam. During this sea change in the 1990s, two British women,
Eliza Manningham-Buller
and
Stella Rimington
(see Chapter 11), rose to the top of the intelligence tree. Inconceivable as it would have been to the great killer and casual sexual psychopath 007, Miss Moneypenny had ousted James Bond.

AMERICAN CIVIL WAR

The American Civil War (1861–65) was arguably the first war of the modern era, in which increased firepower (early machine guns, improved artillery, mass-produced rifles) and improved communications (railways, the telegraph, the submarine) changed the technological terms of conflict and massively favored the industrial North over the primarily agrarian South. However, these factors had relatively little effect on both Union and Confederate commanders, many of whom handled their troops in a manner more fitted to the Napoleonic battlefield than the Civil War killing grounds dominated by weaponry whose lethality far outstripped that of Bonaparte's Grande Armée. In similar fashion, the attitude of these commanders to intelligence gathering often displayed naïvéte and a reluctance to move with the times in equal measure, not least when it came to the activities of the Civil War's female spies.

These were many and varied, on both sides of the national divide (for one of the Union's most successful female intelligence agents, see
Harriet Tubman,
Chapter 4). One of the most famous Confederate spies was
Belle Boyd
(b. 1844, d. 1900) of Martinsburg, West Virginia. Her father's hotel provided the forceful and flirtatious Belle with a ready-made listening post, where she gathered overheard fragments of conversation with amorous and indiscreet Union officers and then conveyed the information to the Confederacy. During the Shenandoah Valley campaign in the spring of 1862, Boyd provided valuable intelligence about the Union forces' intentions to General T. J. “Stonewall” Jackson. The grateful Jackson appointed her a captain and honorary aide-de-camp on his staff, enabling Boyd to attend troop reviews. In July 1862 she was arrested by the Union and detained for a month in Washington before being released in an exchange of prisoners. Belle proved to be a lively prisoner, gaily waving Confederate flags from her window and warbling “Dixie” to admirers below. She communicated with them by means of a rubber ball, which was tossed in and out of her cell and onto which she sewed messages. She was arrested for a second time in June 1863 but contracted typhus and was released. In May 1864 she sailed for England, but her ship was intercepted and she was arrested as a courier for the Confederacy. The resourceful Boyd escaped to Canada with the help of a Union officer, Samuel Hardinge, who then accompanied her to England and married her in August 1864.

While in England, Belle wrote her colorful memoirs,
Belle Boyd in Camp and Prison,
and appeared onstage. Hardinge died in 1865, and the following year Belle returned to the United States, where she continued her stage career, styling herself “the Cleopatra of the Secession” and performing in a Confederate uniform. She acquired two more husbands, the second seventeen years her junior, and died of a heart attack while touring in Wisconsin, broke but unbowed.

Another successful spy,
Rosie O'Neal Greenhow
(b. 1817, d. 1864), was a prominent figure in Washington society and a passionate secessionist. The intelligence she gathered is said to have played a part in the Confederate victories at the Battles of Bull Run. Dubbed “the Wild Rose,” she was imprisoned twice by the Union but continued to smuggle messages to the Confederacy and was then exiled to the Confederate states. She was warmly welcomed by their provisional president, Jefferson Davis, who dispatched her to England as a propagandist and fund-raiser for the Confederate cause. Greenhow's memoirs were published while she was in London, where she moved easily in aristocratic circles and met Queen Victoria. In Paris she was granted an audience with Napoléon III.

In 1864 she returned to the United States on the blockade runner
Condor,
which ran aground at the mouth of the Cape Fear River in North Carolina. With a Union gunboat closing on the
Condor,
Greenhow escaped in a rowboat but drowned when it capsized and she was dragged to the bottom by the weight of the gold sewn into her skirts, the royalties from her best-selling memoirs.

She was buried with full military honors in October 1864. Her coffin was draped with the Confederate flag and borne by Confederate troops. The marble cross that marks her grave bears the epitaph “Mrs. Rose O'N. Greenhow, a bearer of dispatches to the Confederate Government.”

One of the members of Greenhow's spy ring was
Eugenia Phillips
(b. 1819–d.?), the Jewish wife of a successful politician and lawyer, Philip Phillips. Eugenia was a Washington socialite whose secret sympathies lay with the Confederacy. Her husband sided with the North and was understandably astonished when in August 1861 federal detectives placed the entire Phillips household under arrest. Phillips secured the release of his wife and daughters by agreeing that they would settle in the South, in Richmond, where Eugenia resumed her spying career. On a visit to Jefferson Davis she handed over military maps and memoranda that she had smuggled out of Washington.

Eugenia and her daughters later moved to New Orleans, which was then occupied by Union troops. Here she was arrested after allegedly showing disrespect at the funeral of Union soldiers by bursting into peals of laughter as the procession passed by. She was arrested under the so-called Women's Order, issued by General Benjamin Butler, which imposed draconian punishments on those who “by gesture, look or word” showed contempt for Union officers and men.

Phillips was imprisoned on the malarial Ship Island in the Gulf of Mexico. The spirited spy had one last shot in her locker as she was escorted to the ship that was to take her into internment. She turned to a triumphant Butler and withered him with the observation that “[Ship Island] has one advantage over the city, sir—you will not be there. It is fortunate that neither the fever nor General Butler is contagious.” The release of Phillips and her daughters from Ship Island was secured after some months by her long-suffering husband, but internment had taken a toll on her health. The date of Eugenia's death is not known.

Reference: Belle Boyd, Drew Gilpin Faust, and Sharon Kennedy-Nolle,
Belle Boyd in Camp and Prison,
1997.

ATKINS, VERA

World War II Intelligence Officer, 1908–2000

A woman of mystery and formidable self-control, Vera Atkins was the assistant to Maurice Buckmaster, head of F (French) Section in the British
Special Operations Executive
(SOE, see Chapter 11). Many of her contemporaries considered Atkins to be the section's real boss.