So, the news wires are all atwitter that recently released classified documents show that culinary icon Julia Child worked as a spy during World War ll.

Pretty big scoop. Only it isn’t.

If anyone is interested, they can read about Julia’s OSS involvement in her postumously published 2006 book, ”My Life In France,” which she wrote with with Alex Prud’homme. She talks in detail about her work there. She joined the OSS partly because she was too tall for the WACs and WAVES.

She met her husband, Paul, in Ceylon in the summer of 1944, when they both had been posted there by the OSS. Paul was an artist and he’d been recruited to create war rooms where Gen. Louis Mountbatten could review the intelligence that our agents had sent in from the field. Julia was head of the Registry, where, among other things, she processed agents’ reports from the field and other top-secret papers. They were later transferred to Kunming, China, where they worked for Gen. Albert Coady Wedemeyer.

During her OSS career, she utilized her skills for keeping things orderly by categorizing things. After working on an air-sea rescue unit, she helped develop a signal mirror for downed pilots and a “fish squeezing” department that tried to create a shark repellent.

In his book, ”The Greatest Generation,” Tom Brokaw wrote that the war was a pivotal event for so many members of Julia’s generation:

“As it did for so many women, the war liberated Julia Child, because she had no plans for her life.” Caught in a time when there were not many career choices for young women, she was then thrust into demanding work. As she organized files in the OSS registry and created systems that allowed the secret intelligence work to function, she developed a work ethic that Brokaw writes: “When the United States entered World War II, the government turned to ordinary Americans and asked of them extraordinary service, heroics and sacrifice.”

This site has a wonderful recap of her career, an excerpt of which I’ve included here:

When Julia McWilliams left Newport News, Va., by troop train to travel to California before her assignment in Southeast Asia, she was instructed to tell people she was a file clerk. She had been sworn to secrecy and forbidden to keep a diary. It was February 1944.

After seven days’ travel by train and seven days of orientation in California, Julia and several other women were issued gas masks, fatigues, bedrolls, canteens, and pith helmets. In Long Beach, as these female civilians boarded the ss Mariposa, a cruise ship converted to a troop ship, they were greeted by the loud music of a band and the raucous wolf whistles of 3,000 enlisted men.

At sea the following morning, Julia, ever a leader, organized her friends to spread the word that they were traveling missionaries. (The men never fell for it.) The nine women shared one tub, toilet, and sink and washed out their stockings in their helmets. Stopping once along the way to take on fresh water, “We jumped off in Perth, Australia, and promptly hit the bars, then went looking for kangaroos,” she recalled recently. Their ship was under military escort for the final week of travel, for fear of encountering Japanese submarines.

“Then, right after arriving in Bombay,” Julia says, “we were startled by the sounds of a great explosion - a true snafu!” she chortles. “A ship in the harbor had caught fire and gotten loose from its moorings. The British, who ran everything in those days, were accustomed to taking two-hour lunches. So the unattended ship drifted into an ammunition ship, which then blew up.”

Thus began the service and subsequent adventures of the woman we now know as Julia Child (her married name). Three-plus years in the newly organized Office of Strategic Services (OSS) - the first centralized U.S. spy service - would forever change the life of the late-blooming, 31-year-old Californian.

Here’s a video synopsis of the story: