Hey, history lovers, I'm Mike Rosenwald with RetroPod, a show about the past, rediscovered.

In these last few days of women's history month, we're going out with a bang.

We're sharing the stories of forgotten women from the past, who made amazing contributions to their countries during wartime.

Today, we're going behind enemy lines.

In the early 1860s, at the height of the Civil War, Confederate President Jefferson Davis

suspected a mole somewhere close to him was leaking information.

His army was struggling against the Union, which was getting mysteriously better and better at predicting his moves.

Davis was right.

There was indeed a mole, a servant at the Confederate White House in Richmond, a freed slave, with a photographic memory who, in addition to caring for his wife's dresses, slipped the north valuable secrets from Davis's own desk.

Her name was Mary Bowser.

Her story is one of the great but infrequently told spy tales in American history.

A shame, say those who have written about her and other brave women who helped take down the Confederate Army,

including Elizabeth Van Lue, who ran Bowser's spy operation.

I remember studying the Civil War in high school and a bit in college and never had read

anything about women's roles in the Civil War. And it was, it's sort of a travesty to me that

Elizabeth Van Lue and Mary Jane Bowser aren't household names like, you know, Stonewall Jackson or Robert E. Lee or Ulysses S. Grant.

And, you know, I just think that people should be aware of who they are and what they did.

That's Karen Abbott, whose best-selling book, Liar, Temptress, Soldier Spy,

tells the story of the daring intelligence operation that infiltrated

the highest levels of the Confederate government. How Bowser became a spy is a story so good

that it almost defies belief. As University of Virginia historian Elizabeth Varen put it,

This is a hum, dinger of a tale.

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