A captivating dive into the heart of female espionage
Notice to fans of James Bond and the Bureau of Legends! On January 28, ARTE Editions and Steinkis publish the graphic novel Les espionnes racontent. Its originality: to focus on espionage seen and experienced by women, through the testimonies of six former spies collected by Le Monde journalist Chloé Aeberhardt, and beautifully illustrated by Aurélie Pollet. From Washington to Moscow, Paris, Munich or Tel Aviv, Chloé Aeberhardt has been interested in the lives of former intelligence professionals, and the decisive role they played in major conflicts of the Cold War. These testimonies were first published in 2017 in the form of an investigative book published by Robert Laffont. Chloé Aeberhardt traveled to the four corners of the world to meet these women spies at home, and to understand why, and how, they decided to devote part of their lives to the sensitive field of intelligence.
Anticliché
His investigation deconstructs clichés. And gives another image of spies than that of the sexy James Bond Girl, gun hanging on the garter belt. These women, with unique stories and backgrounds, all integrated the information for different reasons. Chance, love, ideology or a taste for adventure. They have been analysts in an office, or agents in the field. "Under legend", so as not to be spotted. Their lives are worthy of novels. They carried out risky operations, sometimes risking their lives, imprisoned. Freedom-loving, daring, none regrets having exercised this extraordinary profession.
But these stories also question the place of women in the very masculine milieu of the secret services. During their careers, these spies found themselves facing the same difficulties as any other woman. Sexism, betrayals, difficulties in reconciling their professional activity with a private life.
Spy "by chance"
Her name is Geneviève, she dreamed of being a stylist, she was first a teacher before joining the DST "as an absolute neophyte". The year is 1971. She has just had a child, has left teaching but does not want to stay a housewife… Her husband, who worked at the DST, "pistoned" her and she joined the very prestigious anti-Soviet division as an analyst. An ant's work. But after her second maternity leave, her boss transfers her to a position without interest… While his work will have identified forty-seven Soviet diplomats who will be expelled from France, and more than two hundred from the United States.
Spy for Love
Germany's Gabriele Gaste, a doctor of political science, joins the STASI out of love for a man she doesn't know is an agent when she meets him. Recruited by the East to spy on the activities of the West, when the wall fell in 1989 she was arrested and sentenced to six years and nine months in prison. Her former lover received only eighteen months suspended… To Chloe, Gabriele will say that she was a spy "for love, then for ideology".
It's also love (and maybe the attraction of the unknown?) which led Russia's Ludmila down the path of intelligence. She meets Vladimir at a student party in Moscow. A few days before their wedding, he confesses to her that he is a KGB agent. In order to follow him to Buenos Aires, Ludmila agrees to change her identity and cut ties with her family. Before returning to Argentina, and to perfect their legend, they married a second time in London. In Buenos Aires, they open a Bar in the German quarter of the city, very popular with former SS…
Fearless
A profile and a path at the opposite: that of Lieutenant-Colonel Martha Duncan, one of the first female officers to have risen through the ranks of the DIA, an organization founded in 1961 and responsible for informing the Pentagon and the White House about the intentions of foreign armies, the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, terrorism and international drug networks. For four years, she participated in missions to destabilize socialist regimes in Latin America. Passionate about her job, fearless, Martha had companions but never married. In 1989, she joined an ultra-strategic cell tasked with tracking down General Manuel Noriega, who had evaporated into the wild. She ends up trapping him by gaining the trust of her mistress… What she couldn't have done if she had been a man.
When reality surpasses fiction
The story "Hollywood to the rescue of the CIA" is jubilant. It is about Jonna. This spy worked in the eighties with her husband Tony Mendez. Specialized in exfiltration operations (he will realize one hundred and fifty) Tony Mendez inspired the director Ben Affleck for the film Argo. Jonna held, a few years apart, the same position as her husband: "Chief of Disguise" in the Office of Technical Service (OTS). The equivalent of Q in James Bond… In 1989, the management asked them to exfiltrate from the USSR one of the CIA's most valuable agents, Petr Leonov, and his wife. Thanks to the talent of John Chambers, one of the most famous makeup artists in Hollywood, the Mendez pretend to be the Leonov and exfiltrate them under the nose and beard of the KGB… During those years, Jonna would say that she "had mortal fun." Yola's testimony is equally thrilling. It also takes place in the eighties. Patriotic, daring, polyglot (Yola speaks Hebrew, Arabic, English, French and German), she is recruited by a Mossad officer while she is a flight attendant. The mission he offers her, and that she accepts: to participate in the exfiltration to Israel of the Falachas Jews of Ethiopia, via Sudan. Her cover: manager of a holiday center created from scratch by the Mossad, in an abandoned hotel in Sudan, and which serves as their secret transit base. A very risky operation that could have cost him his life, but which in three years allowed Yola and his team the exfiltration of two thousand Falachas. Three years that were "the best years of his life".
Women underrepresented in intelligence
In her investigation, Chloé Aeberhardt was advised by a former French foreign intelligence officer, who admits to having met few women. Between 1970 and 1980, he noted that only Russians and Anglo-Saxons gave women a chance. And explains it by a very simple phenomenon: the secret services are the reflection of the culture of a country. The British and Americans, of Protestant tradition, and the communist Russians were much more egalitarian than the French. Today, less than a third of DGSE civil servants are women. An under-representation that the former officer deplores. Because according to him "in intelligence as in life, women have more intuition than men". Truth or cliché, almost all the men the journalist met share this point of view.
The spies tell is a beautiful tribute paid by the journalist to these singular women: "As different as they are, all the spies I interviewed have this same need for recognition, this same thirst for justice: for the history of intelligence to be accurate, it must be rewritten by giving women the place they deserve."
The authors
Chloé Aeberhardt is a journalist at Le Monde. Born in 1984, she is the author of the investigative book Les espionnes racontent (Robert Laffont, 2017) for which she traced the spies of the main intelligence services involved in the Cold War.
Aurélie Pollet is a graduate of the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs in Paris. She is a director of animated documentaries. She directed the series Les espionnes racontent for ARTE, the series Culte, lecteurs sous influences, and many episodes for Karambolage. Author of comics, illustrator for publishing (New York Pop city, Le Chêne) and for the press, she is co-artistic director of the project The Parisianer.
Spies tell
Co-editions Steinkis / ARTE Editions
176 pages – 20 euros
Published January 28, 2021
The six episodes of the series Les espionnes racontent (6 minutes) are to be found on Arte.tv.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=r1eQ1RaurDg
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