Julie Child cooked up DOUBLE LIFE AS SPY. Julia worked for Office of Strategic Services, precursor to the CIA. "Julia Child wasn’t always into French cooking. As she famously recounted in her posthumous autobiography, My Life in France, it wasn’t until she was living in Paris in her mid-30s that she learned what good food tasted like. How did Child keep busy before that? By performing equally inventive work as an employee at the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the U.S. government’s PRECURSOR to the CIA. Child joined the SPY OUTFIT in 1942 after discovering that the Women’s Army Corps had a height limit; at 6’2”, she was too tall for military service. Luckily, the OSS ended up being a perfect fit. One of Child’s earliest assignments was to cook up a shark repellant that would protect underwater explosives from being set off by curious underwater creatures. By all accounts, she excelled at her work. Following a stint in the OSS lab, Child was sent to Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) and then to China, where she worked as Chief of the OSS Registry. As such, she enjoyed top security clearance and even a little danger. (The CIA REMAINS MUM about exactly what she did.)" https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/12567/10-celebrities-who-spied-side "Julia was hired in the summer of 1942 for clerical work with the intelligence agency and later worked directly for OSS Director William Donovan, the personnel records show. Details about Child's background and nearly 24,000 other OSS employees are revealed in the newly released documents, withheld from public view as classified records for decades by the CIA. The 750,000 documents identify the vast spy network managed by the OSS, which later became the CIA. President Franklin Roosevelt created the OSS, the first centralized U.S. intelligence operation. The OSS files offer details about other agents, including Supreme Court Justice Arthur Goldberg, major league catcher Moe Berg, historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr., and actor Sterling Hayden. Other notables identified in the files include John Hemingway, son of author Ernest Hemingway; Kermit Roosevelt, son of President Theodore Roosevelt; and Miles Copeland, father of Stewart Copeland, drummer for the band The Police. Some of those like Child have been identified previously as having worked for the OSS, but their personnel records never have been available before. Those records would show why they were hired, jobs they were assigned to and perhaps even missions they pursued while working for the agency. Sterling Hayden ("Dr. Strangelove," "The Godfather") left Hollywood to serve anonymously under the name "John Hamilton" in the OSS's information office during the war.  The release of the OSS personnel files unmasks one of the last secrets from the short-lived wartime intelligence agency, which for the most part was later folded into the CIA after President Truman disbanded it in 1945. "I think it's terrific," said Elizabeth McIntosh, 93, a former OSS agent. "They've finally, after all these years, they've gotten the names out. All of these people had been told never to mention they were with the OSS." The CIA long resisted releasing the records. But a former CIA director, William Casey, himself an OSS veteran, cleared the way for transfer of millions of OSS documents to the National Archives when he took over the spy agency in 1981. The personnel files are the latest documents to be made public. Information about OSS involvement was so guarded that relatives often could not confirm a family member's work with the group." http://www.nbcnews.com/id/26186498/ns/us_news-security/t/julia-child-cooked-double-life-spy/#.Xs2g3tgpBQI