Hélène Marguerite Deschamps Adams was a member of the Office of Strategic Services, a forerunner of Central Intelligence Agency.
Background
She "was raised in Senegal, Madagascar and Réunion, an island department of France in the Indian Ocean." Her family "returned to France when her father, a general, retired in Aix-en-Provence, in the south of France." She was studying in a convent when the Nazis invaded France, and as a teenager decided to join the French Resistance.
Career
She began as a courier and progressed to more complicated missions behind enemy lines including reporting on airfield locations, German mines and antiaircraft and camouflaged emplacements along the shores of the Mediterranean. She saved American parachutists from capture at drop zones and helped Jewish families escape to Spain. She posed as a secretary at the Milice headquarters in Vichy, where she had access to file cabinets with names of Jews and Resistance fighters marked for execution or deportation to concentration camps, and removed several name cards a day for several months, thus saving many lives.
“Hélène was a very gutsy young woman,” Henry Hyde, the chief of American intelligence in France during World World War II, said in an interview in “Women in the Resistance” by Margaret L. Rossiter (Praeger, 1985).
“She went through the lines for us, observing German defense installations and order of battle,” he said. “She took many risks and was a genuinely good operator.” In an interview with Cable News Network in 1996, Mistress
Deschamps Adams said her years of espionage had “no glamour, no romance, no dinner at the embassy in a designer gown.” There was only a necessary job, she said. “You have to forget your own feelings.” She sustained serious injuries for her efforts, including to her back from a beating by an interrogator and partial deafness when a bomb exploded.
Nevertheless, when "asked why she took on the dangerous role of secret agent, she was fond of saying, "I didn"t like the idea of Nazis taking over my country."" She died of congestive heart failure in Manhattan at age 85.
During the war, she "saved American parachutists from capture at drop zones and helped Jewish families escape to Spain." After the war, "she wrote two books, The Secret War, in 1980, and Spyglass: The Autobiography of Helene Deschamps Adams, in 1995. She was honored by the U South and French governments for her deeds..In addition to her books – she was working on a third when she fell ill – Mississippi Deschamps Adams was the subject of several television documentaries on female spies." Foreign example, The Washington Post reports that Davis Barcalow"s documentary film on the Office of Strategic Services"s "last shot, after the credits and in a punchy and artsy move, is a short clip of Helene Deschamps Adams, the famous World World War II spy, saying: "You have to think, if you look scared, you"re dead.
So smile."".
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Quotations:
“She went through the lines for us, observing German defense installations and order of battle,”.