Despite the corny title and sometimes (not always!) corny writing (it was written in another era), this is a fascinating story of the beginning of the CIA, the OSS in WWII. And you will get a brief glimpse of Julia Child before Paul Child and before Paris. If you love spy tales and can find this gem, enjoy. ( )

Elizabeth McIntosh, a journalist who saw Pearl Harbor bombed by the Japanese in World War II, was invited to help her country by joining the OSS (Office of Strategic Services) and was intrigued by the idea of becoming a spy. But that was not what the OSS wanted her for, they wanted her to become a member of the MO, aka Morale Operations. She was sent to spy school, but she was told to never, never to try to become a spy, she just wasn't cut out for it. When she started out in the Morale Operations office, she had no idea what they wanted her to do or how to accomplish it. Elizabeth takes the reader on a trip that is at times hilarious, heart stopping, and sobering. When she writes of the natural beauty that she finds, her prose becomes poetic.

Elizabeth is taught how to create subversive propaganda to demoralize the enemy and to incite the local population. She is then sent on to Delhi,then Calcutta and eventually Kumming, China. On the way she made friends, learned what its like to be one of the few women in a war zone (you get invited to lots of parties), became enchanted, intrigued and dismayed by foreign places, and devised ways to make things difficult for the Japanese with the propaganda she created. Elizabeth also learned to follow her own ideas and realized that she can even do better in this field than many men.

In this memoir the reader not only learns how the propaganda was created and dispersed, but how Elizabeth had to overcome many issues. She persuaded the British in New Delhi to let her use their printing press (by making outrageous promises she could never keep), create Japanese military orders that looked like they came from General Togo (with seemingly unobtainable rice paper, perfect calligraphy, the right chop), among many other problems. Many times she writes of these problems with a self-deprecating humor. Elizabeth described the many people who came through - going on to set up their own printing posts behind enemy lines and what they were able to accomplish. The pastor, a shy, quiet man, who set up his shop beneath a convent in Canton and drove the Japanese crazy with his sly, disruptive flyers and articles. She writes of the Japanese MO efforts and how the Allies counter them.

Most of the fifteen months that Elizabeth lives overseas, she is working in Kumming, a base of operations for Americans and specifically the OSS. The Chinese are not totally engaged in fighting the Japanese, as much as fighting each other. There are multiple factions - Nationalist, Communists, warlords, pirates, etc. The ordinary Chinese people are not nationalistic, just pragmatic. As Elizabeth learns its easier to appeal to their humor or greed, instead of their nationalism.

When the end of the war comes, the two A-bombs, she is deeply saddened, deeply affected. But the end does come, people are released from the Japanese internment camps (how those people had suffered) and at last the OSS operations can be stopped and its operators go home. But, however, not before the Chinese factions erupt into clashing with each other. She leaves knowing that civil war is on the way. Her trip home is a study in how not to travel in military transport. It has its humorous moments.

Ms. McIntosh believed deeply in her work with the OSS and believed that it had application in the post-war world. In this she was proved right with the formation of the CIA, in which she came to work years later. ( )