A Woman I Know

The true story of a filmmaker whose unexpected investigation of her film's subject opened a new window onto the world of Cold War espionage, CIA secrets, and the assassination of John F. Kennedy.

Independent filmmaker Mary Haverstick thought she'd stumbled onto the project of a lifetime – a biopic of a little-known aviation legend whose story seemed to embody the hopeful spirit of the dawn of the space age. But after she received a mysterious warning from a government agent, Haverstick began to suspect that all was not as it seemed. What she found as she dug deeper was a darker story – a story of double identities and female spies, a tangle of intrigue that stretched from the fields of the Congo to the shores of Cuba, from the streets of Mexico City to the dark heart of the Kennedy assassination in Dallas.

As Haverstick attempted to learn the truth directly from her subject in a cat-and-mouse game that stretched across a decade, she plunged deep into the CIA files of the 1950s and 60s. A Woman I Know brings vividly to life the high-stakes duplicities of the Cold War intelligence game, a world where code names and double-talk are the lingua franca of spies bent on seeking advantage by any means necessary. As Haverstick sheds light on a remarkable set of women whose high-stakes intelligence work has left its only traces in redacted files, she also discovers disturbing and shocking new clues about what really happened at Dealey Plaza in 1963. Offering new clues to the assassination and a vivid picture of women in midcentury intelligence, A Woman I Know is a gripping real-life thriller.

‘Fascinating ... Haverstick distills a prodigious amount of research into a fast-moving story ... As a fresh history of US espionage, A Woman I Know is an absorbing read.'
-The New York Times

‘A cat-and-mouse search for a woman's identity opens onto a shadowy corner of the assassination of John F. Kennedy ... Jerrie Cobb's fascinating life reveals her to be "a spy, an explorer, a gambler, an astronaut, an illusionist, a narcissist, and a con" - and, to say the least, a puzzle. Assassination buffs and students of spycraft will find this intriguing and endlessly enigmatic.'
-Kirkus Reviews

'An anxious, furious, forensic contribution to the study of the assassination of US president John F Kennedy ... Haverstick is in earnest here, and has a memory like a filing system and a filing system like a vice. The least this book could possibly be is a compelling real-life thriller, full of passion, free of writerly fuss, woven from the most intractable archival cat's cradle imaginable. That's what you've got, even before you think to take it seriously - and I'll bet the farm that you will.'
-Simon Ings, The Telegraph