The inspiration for my books

Small objects of desire

Dog tags

In WW2, British Army dog tags were made of a pressed fibre, kind of like cardboard. There were two tags, one red, one green. If a soldier was killed the red, round disc stayed on the fallen soldier’s body. The green octagonal disc hung below the red one and was taken by the fellow recruit/person who found the body. They were collected to update official records and to inform the next of kin. Each tag was stamped with the soldier's name, service number, blood type and religion. Officers also had their rank listed. Some soldiers were worried that because they were essentially hard cardboard, the tags wouldn’t survive the harsh conditions and the rain and the mud—so they had their names engraved on metal tags too. Fibre tags were phased out in 1960 and replaced by stainless steel discs on nylon cords.

Truth can be Stranger than Fiction

Elizabeth Betty McIntosh was part of the OSS Morale Operations branch, Far East Division, in WW2. Fluent in Japanese, she dealt in rumours, clever blends of truth and fiction. Propaganda was her forte, white, black and in between, every imaginable shade of grey. One day, she wrote a script, for an Allied radio station. It was performed by a well known Chinese mystic, seer and fortune teller. It read…

‘Something terrible is going to happen to Japan. We have checked the stars and…it is so dreadful…’

The segment aired on August 6th, 1945. She had written a piece of fiction. Hours later, the US dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. It was a complete coincidence. “We just made it up…that’s the sort of thing we did.” Truth is much stranger than fiction.

Betty wrote Sisterhood of the Spies to make sure that history would not forget the daring stories and exploits of the women of the OSS, the forerunner of today’s CIA. ( CIA.gov )