Will America’s 100-Year-Old Female Spy Finally Be Recognized for the Hero She Is?

Capt. Stephanie Czech arrived at the U.S. embassy in Berlin wearing civilian clothes, as always, and delivered the report she’d been carrying to the intelligence section. The war may have ended, but Czech was still working, undercover.

Berlin was not her home base. Czech had arrived in Poland in October 1945, and spent the next four months driving around the countryside. She claimed to be a clerk at the U.S. embassy in Warsaw, searching for distant relatives in her spare time. In fact, Czech was an officer in the Women’s Army Corps and one of only two members of the Office of Strategic Services stationed in the country.

The OSS, the precursor to the contemporary CIA, was America’s first central intelligence service, and only three years old. Its recruits weren’t working from an espionage playbook, they were writing it as they went. The OSS founder, Gen. William Donovan, called the carefully selected members of his new tribe his “glorious amateurs,” men and women who were educated, who spoke languages fluently, and might never have imagined a wartime career, much less a clandestine one. Donovan would later credit the OSS amateurs with “some of the bravest acts of the war,” though most of their exploits were never told.