In August 1939 Albert Einstein signed a letter to President Franklin Roosevelt, warning of the potential of Adolf Hitler’s Nazi regime to use uranium to develop an atomic bomb. “The most important source of uranium,” he added, was in Africa—in the Belgian Congo (now the Democratic Republic of Congo). It was therefore a priority for the U.S. to build its own bomb and to secure all available Congolese ore. But there was a risk that uranium might be smuggled out of the Belgian colony to Germany. To prevent this, the Office of Strategic Services, America’s new intelligence service and forerunner of the CIA, established a station in the Congo. The station’s agents included a courageous woman named Shirley Chidsey, one of the small number of women OSS agents to serve overseas.
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Shirley Chidsey, born Elinor Shirley Stewart, was in her mid-thirties when she first went to Africa. Her features were plain, but she had an intelligent, independent, and lively air, which made her almost beautiful. OSS files record that she had grey eyes, brown hair, a fair complexion, and petite build: just five foot one inch tall, weighing 52 kg. Her father died when she was little and when her mother married again, she was given his surname of Armitage. She grew up in a gracious home in Swarthmore, Pennsylvania, where her family frequently appeared in the society pages. But Shirley wanted more out of her life than a busy calendar with the smart set. She studied in New York at Barnard College and then at Columbia University, taking “numerous writing and lit. courses,” as well as French.
Shirley had a huge appetite for travel and adventure. She lived for three years in Haiti, three months in Hawaii, a month in France, and a month in Germany, and visited China. In 1935 she married the author Donald Barr Chidsey and went with him to Tahiti, where she sailed in his boat and helped to manage a coconut plantation; she also learned Tahitian. While there she made friends with a number of writers, including F. Scott Fitzgerald. Tahiti has often been described as paradise, but the same could not be said of the Chidseys’ marriage: Shirley separated from him in February 1940. She went to New York and placed an advertisement in the Saturday Review of Literature for a “Girl Friday”—to do typing, research, and stenography.
When the U.S. entered the war, she joined the Office of Strategic Services in New York as a stenographer in French. As a woman, she was in a minority in OSS, which was dominated by men and male attitudes. The Ivy League universities that most of them had attended “were all male, and the OSS was very heavily so.” One agent, Elizabeth MacDonald, wrote a memoir after the war entitled Undercover Girl, which describes the sexism of the organization. “Women have no place in the war,” one colonel told her dismissively. “All the time I’ve put in overseas—and that’s four years—I’ve only come across one who was worth her salt.” When General William Donovan, the head of OSS, gave instructions about the “right types” of women to be hired, one definition of right type was a Smith graduate who could pass a filing exam. Most of the 26,000 women who joined OSS worked in the secretarial field and only a small percentage—some 700—served overseas.
These attitudes held women back. But Chidsey was eager to serve overseas and when an opportunity came up in French Equatorial Africa in 1943, she jumped at it, though it meant leaving OSS. The post was that of transcriber at Radio Brazzaville, a radio transmitter beaming propaganda on behalf of Free France. This, thought Chidsey, would be an ideal way of doing her bit for the war.
But she was unhappy in Brazzaville and wondered if it might have been better to join the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps. “Rather wish,” she mused with feeling to her mother, “I had joined the WAACS tho’ and perhaps got to North Africa with them.” It was not all bad news though. “But I did have one nice thing happen,” she reported home. “I had dinner with a handsome naval officer and sat on his terrace overlooking the Congo and saw the full moon rise big & red out of the dark river and had a tall whisky and soda …”
Then another nice—but far more significant—thing happened: she was able to return to OSS. But this time, it was to work not in the New York office, but in the OSS station in Léopoldville (now Kinshasa), the capital of the Belgian Congo. In Brazzaville she had met Dock Hogue, the OSS chief of station in Léopoldville, on the opposite side of the Congo River. Thirty-four years old and just short of six feet three, Hogue was athletic and strikingly good-looking, with a narrow moustache. A sombre and very clever civil engineer, he nursed a dream of becoming an author. But for now, he was carrying out a top secret mission for his country: keeping Congolese uranium out of the hands of the Axis powers. His cover was the investigation of diamond smuggling and his codename was TETON.