Across the UK, across continental North America, and around the world on the internet by webcast, and by podcast, my name is Howard Hughes and this is the unexplained.

Thank you very much for all of your emails. Please keep those coming if you'd like to make a donation to the show to help it to continue.

Then you can do that at the same place that you can send me emails that is my website, the unexplained.tv.

I'll leave the links for both of those things there and thanks to Adam, my webmaster of many years for his hard work on the site and getting the show out to you.

Thank you for your emails. When you get in touch, please tell me as ever who you are, where you are, and how you use this show.

I just want to say hello to Pete at Hive in Southampton. Sean got in touch with me, Pete, and just asked me to give you a mention apparently, Pete, you introduced Sean to the unexplained.

I think you both work for the post office there and apparently Pete is a big fan of the show and the podcast has helped both Pete and Sean get through cold winter mornings by listening presumably on ear buds, which I found one of my local post people doing recently.

He'd been listening for ages to the show and it was only when he turned up at my front door rang the bell that I realized that that was the case.

He said, I'm listening to you. How bizarre is that? But also gratifying. Now very special and different edition of the unexplained here featuring Natalia Holt and her book Wise Gals and her research into this particular story.

She's a New York Times best selling author, wrote books like Rise of the Rocket Girls.

This is about the very early days and indeed before the foundation of the Central Intelligence Agency, the CIA America spy agency.

And it would not exist in the form that it exists and what not be as efficient as it is.

Were it not for the efforts of five people whose work is detailed in this book?

Jane Burrell, the first CIA operative killed in the line of duty, Adelaide Addy Hawkins, the high school graduate turned code breaker and communications mastermind,

Eloise Paige, the southern socialite who would become the CIA's first female station chief, Mary Hutchison, the spy master who,

shaped as being seen as merely a CIA wife and Elizabeth Liz Sudmire, the intrepid officer who single handedly ran Iraq when her colleagues were forced to leave in the wake of revolution in the late 1950s.

It is a story that spans many decades and many stories and a lot of bravery both internally and externally dealing with America's foes.

The western world's foes, let's put it that way. So it's a fascinating tale.

Beautifully written is also serialized at the moment on BBC domestic radio in the United Kingdom.

So I've also had a chance to hear it as well as see the book a hard back copy of which I've got.

The book is called Wise Gals, The Guest is Natalia Holt, and we'll be talking about espionage and some of the ground breaking women who were involved in it.

I love to tell stories. They're the best stories I think of people who may be after a fight or a struggle, get their just desserts, their Jews in this world.

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