Written by Mary Haverstick, "a film director, writer, and cinematographer" (book jacket), this non-fiction book is--if nothing else--a remarkable piece of research strething over several years and requiring dozens if not hundreds of FOIA requests. The book has over 80 pages of notes documenting her sources. What started out to be a documentary on the first woman to pass all the astronauts tests at NASA, it evolved into an in-depth examination of a woman who lived multiple lives within the CIA. I cede the floor to Kirkus for a summary of the book:
"A cat-and-mouse search for a woman’s identity opens onto a shadowy corner of the assassination of John F. Kennedy.
Filmmaker Haverstick’s title is ironic, for the woman in question—Jerrie Cobb—is essentially unknowable. An unsung participant in NASA’s Mercury program, she was trained as an astronaut along with a dozen other women volunteers: “She’d been the first to ace the physical exams and had then gone on to tackle flight simulators, endurance tests, and spatial orientation studies, something the others hadn’t done.” When NASA scrubbed the women’s program, deeming men alone to be potential astronaut material, Cobb faded into the woodwork. Not quite: She logged time in Cuba as a supposed confidant of Fidel Castro, turned up in Mexico at the same time as Lee Harvey Oswald, explored the headwaters of the Amazon and advocated for its Indigenous peoples, spoke Spanish fluently—and was a CIA agent. Or was she? Cobb, a skilled pilot, was also on the tarmac at the Dallas airport as Oswald was making his way there, apparently to be transported elsewhere. Complicating the picture is a chain of false identities, pseudonyms, and the possible existence of another woman of the same skill set and physical appearance named June Cobb. “If Jerrie’s life was intertwined with June Cobb’s as a CIA cover,” writes the author, “then Lee Harvey Oswald was a covert player in intelligence, too.” Haverstick takes a few speculative steps into the engineers of the assassination—maybe Castro, maybe the Mafia, maybe renegade intelligence insiders. No definitive answer emerges, of course, but meanwhile, 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."
The New York Times opens their review this way: "In 'A Woman I Know,' Mary Haverstick discovers that the subject of her documentary may have once been a key player in Cold War espionage. Near the beginning of her new book, Mary Haverstick quotes James Angleton, the head of the C.I.A.’s counterintelligence division during the Cold War. Angleton described the world of spycraft as a 'wilderness of mirrors,' where no one could be trusted and nothing was quite what it seemed." And they conclude, "As a fresh history of U.S. espionage, “A Woman I Know” is an absorbing read. As a smoking-gun investigation into the Kennedy murder, it’s less convincing. Even Haverstick admits that, after years spent in the wilderness of mirrors, she still wasn’t sure what to believe. Of Jerrie Cobb’s life story — or stories — Haverstick writes: 'She has still eluded me.'"
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