'Women are better spies... they're more devious'

Daily Mail Online: 'Women are better spies... they're more devious': The widows who became best friends after discovering both were World War II secret agents

As they sit side by side reminiscing on the sofa, the two elderly widows don't look any different to the other residents of their Virginia retirement community.
But these two women have a secret - both were spies during World War II.

Betty McIntosh, 96, and Doris Bohrer, 88, were part of a small band of women who worked for America's first intelligence agency, the Office of Strategic Services, and both went on to work for the CIA after the war.

Mrs McIntosh travelled through China and India, writing 'black propaganda' to lower Japanese morale, while Mrs Bohrer created maps from aerial photos, eventually helping to plan the Allied invasion of Italy.

They only discovered their shared past when they moved in on the same street of Lake Ridge seniors' village a few years ago, after a mutual CIA friend recommended the retirement community to both of them. Now they're inseparable.

Mrs McIntosh says she calls her friend every morning, just to make sure she's alive. Mrs Bohrer, who still drives, returns the favour by running errands.

The two women never met while they were working for the OSS, but often wonder whether they might have brushed past each other in the canteen.

Mrs McIntosh told the Washington Post: 'But you didn’t really mix with people. You wouldn’t know what to talk about. I couldn’t talk to you about Morale Operations. And I wouldn’t understand your maps.'

Along with their female colleagues, they became known as 'Donovan's Girls', after William 'Wild Bill' Donovan, a Wall Street lawyer who led the OSS.
The atmosphere was entirely male-dominated. Mrs Bohrer said: 'We were neglected. We had no privacy. Down the hall, there was a bathroom with no running water.

She was asked to deliver what she thought was a lump of coal to a Chinese operative, but only later discovered it was 'Black Joe', an explosive used to blow up trains.
The agent would board a train with the coal in his knapsack, throw it into the engine and then jump off.

She said: 'I felt very badly. I felt that this one piece of coal that I was responsible for killing all these men.'

They came into the OSS on very different paths. Mrs McIntosh, who grew up in Honolulu and went to the same school that Barack Obama would later attend, was working as a newspaper and wire service reporter in Washington.

She could speak Japanese and was desperate for a job reporting overseas. Then, in 1943, she was approached by an OSS operative when she was covering a Department of Agriculture event.

He asked her if she was interested in a secret overseas assignment for the government.
She said yes - and suddenly found herself learning how to fire a pistol.
She soon started work as a propagandist in Morale Operations, travelling to India to dream up authentic-sounding news articles and radio reports to lower Japanese morale.

On one mission, she had to forge a Japanese government order which told its soldiers in Burma to surrender if caught rather than fighting to the death.
An OSS agent shot dead a Japanese courier, then put the order in his knapsack. She told the Washington Post: 'Then the Burmese agent went to the Japanese and said, "Get your man."

'And the Japanese went through his knapsack and found the new order. At the end of the war in northern Burma, there were lots of surrenders'

Meanwhile Mrs Bohrer was stationed in Northern Italy, after signing up to the civil service soon after the Pearl Harbor attack.

At first she worked as an OSS typist, but in 1943 she was promoted and began analysing aerial photographs of Europe, turning them into relief maps made out of balsa wood so agents could go behind enemy lines and rescue spies.

At just 20-years-old, she found herself helping to plan the Allied invasion of Italy.

She told the Post: 'It was an interesting way to look at the world. It was almost as good as flying. You’re looking over people’s shoulders. Maybe I am nosy.'

Her work even led her to discover where Hitler's concentration camps were. She said: 'That’s how we knew where the concentration camps were located, but we were too late.

Double life: A photograph of Doris Bohrer from her time stationed in Northern Italy
'We kept wondering where all the trains were going. The Germans were also building rocket and electronics factories. We watched what went in, what went out.'

When the war ended, both women continued their espionage careers with the CIA.
Mrs Bohrer went to Frankfrurt, where she wrote up interviews with German scientists kidnapped by Soviets during the war, and then came back to Washington, where she became the agency's deputy chief of counter-intelligence.

Mrs McIntosh joined the agency in the 1950s, but swore an oath of secrecy never to reveal what she did there.

Both women married fellow agents. Mrs Bohrer's husband, Charles, was the CIA's director of medical services.

Mrs McIntosh has had three husbands. She divorced her first, OSS agent Alexander McDonald, after they were posted apart for two long, and her second husband, Richard Heppner, died at his office in the Pentagon.

She married her third husband, Air Force pilot Fred McIntosh, soon after his death, and the couple were married for 45 years until his death in 2006.

The following year, a CIA friend, Murray Minster, recommended she move to the retirement village. A couple of years later, he made the same recommendation to another friend - Mrs Bohrer.

He said: 'Once they moved in here, I got them together, and then came all the questions. It’s just one of life’s 45 billion coincidences, I guess.'