More acute male observers in Washington were also beginning to appreciate the growing strategic significance of women in the shifting ter-rain of the Cold War. Women’s traditional role as educators made them potentially powerful agents of development—“Educate a man and you educate an individual,” so the saying went, “but educate a woman and you educate a family, a community, a nation.” Modernization also promised to liberate women as a political force, to enable them to go “from Purdah to Parliament.” The CIA understood this. “It is obvious that women are now a very important factor in the nation-building going on in a large part of the world,” noted one intelligence officer. “The possibility of developing new techniques to help them find their own role in the hopefully growing democratic societies is becoming a greater factor all the time.”30 In other
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words, the Committee of Correspondence’s engagement in network building, training, and letter writing, all of which may be interpreted as evidence of a nascent international feminist consciousness, might also be viewed as clever tactics in the Cold War.
Moreover, the outward appearance of the Committee’s being disengaged from the superpower struggle helped conceal the fact that certain of its members were involved in activities that differed little in practice from the work of professional spies. Dorothy Bauman, for example, appears to have been assigned the role of the U.S. government’s chief woman agent in the covert Cold War, carrying out a series of what she called “special jobs” during the 1950s and 1960s. These included observing and reporting on communist-backed international conferences, such as the 1952 peace rally in Vienna (where doves flew out of the audience and Korean mothers held aloft screaming babies who were alleged to be victims of American germ warfare) and a meeting of the Women’s International Democratic Federation in Copenhagen the following year. Communist agents followed Bauman wherever she went. While going in search of opera in Vienna, she wandered by mistake into the Soviet-controlled zone and found herself seated in a box with three communist officials, who pursued her from the theater, demanding to know who she was and what she was doing there. During the Copenhagen conference, she reported every evening to the First Secretary at the American embassy, Lucius Battle.
“Again I was followed,” she recalled, and “my room in a perfectly good hotel was searched.” Battle introduced Bauman to a British intelligence officer, who “was so impressed” by her reports that he invited her to London to brief his colleagues there, and she was “brought into their intelligence apparatus.” Bauman’s clandestine work was curtailed abruptly in 1956, when her husband, John, died of a heart attack in a taxicab just as she was returning home from a WIDF gathering in Brazil, and she was forced to find full-time work in order to support herself and her children. Even then, however, she still found time to help run various voluntary groups and consult regularly with the USIA. Like other ideologically driven members of the CIA’s covert network, Bauman had a prodigious capacity for self-punishingly hard work.31
Meanwhile, the CIA improved its arrangements for supporting the Committee of Correspondence. As with other front operations, clandestine payments made via individual agents were replaced by more elaborate
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arrangements involving dummy charitable foundations. In October 1953, the Committee received a letter from its “sponsor” in which it “was congratulated upon its work thus far” and “advised that a decision will be made in January concerning support for . . . next year.”32 Clearly, the organization’s activities were winning admirers in the intelligence world (Rose Parsons also received complimentary letters from William Donovan and C. D. Jackson).33 Predictably, the CIA review board’s ruling went in the women’s favor. In February 1954, a letter arrived from the Dearborn Foundation of Chicago encouraging the Committee to apply for a grant. (“This letter should not be construed as a commitment of assistance on our part,”
it read. “I think I can assure you, however, that your application will receive our earnest consideration.”)34 An application was submitted, and an award of $25,000 (precisely the same amount as the first, direct payment from the CIA through Bauman) duly materialized, enabling the organization to carry on making, as another letter from the Dearborn put it, a “substantial contribution to the unity of the free world through international women’s activities and organizations.”35 In 1955, the CIA subsidy increased to $30,000, and an additional grant of $23,000 was made for “expanded activity.”36 In all, the Dearborn Foundation contributed some $587,500 to the Committee of Correspondence between 1954 and 1966.