FOIAWEAR — JULIA CHILD / Cooking Up Spy Ops Tee

FOIAWEAR / ARCHIVE SERIES 012

Before she taught America to cook, Julia Child was an intelligence officer.

Born in Pasadena on August 15, 1912, she stood 6'2" — too tall for the military when the United States entered World War II. So she volunteered for the Office of Strategic Services, the wartime forerunner of the CIA, and became one of 4,500 women who served in the OSS.

At OSS headquarters she worked directly for General William J. Donovan, typing thousands of officer names onto little white note cards in the Secret Intelligence division — the index that tracked the spy service in the days before computers. Then she moved to the Emergency Sea Rescue Equipment Section, shoulder to shoulder with the officers who developed shark repellent: a coating for the explosives aimed at German U-boats, because curious sharks kept bumping into the mines and setting them off.

From 1944 to 1945 she served overseas in Ceylon (today's Sri Lanka) and Kunming, China, rising to Chief of the OSS Registry with top security clearances — which meant every classified message coming in and going out passed through her office. She handled the highly classified papers on the planned invasion of the Malay Peninsula.

It was the OSS that gave her the rest of the story, too: she met fellow OSS officer Paul Child, the man who would open her eyes to French cuisine. They married in September 1946, and in 1948, posted to France, Julia enrolled at Le Cordon Bleu — and the rest is television history. She died in 2004 at 91, two days before her 92nd birthday.

The artwork is a stylised tribute — the chef's toque meets the shark she helped keep away from Allied explosives. It is not a portrait.

The QR code on the front opens the CIA's article on Julia Child, the source for everything above: https://www.cia.gov/stories/story/julia-child-cooking-up-spy-ops-for-oss/

This shirt is offered in both dark and light garment colours — the artwork in its light print on Black, Graphite, Espresso, and in a matching dark-ink print on Butter, Blossom, Ivory.

Garment: Comfort Colors 1717 garment-dyed t-shirt. Heavyweight 6.1 oz/yd² (206.8 g/m²), 100% ring-spun US cotton, pre-shrunk, relaxed fit, double-needle stitched with no side seams and a sewn-in label. Offered here in Black, Graphite and Espresso, sizes S–4XL. Printed on the front at 300 DPI; plain back. The main artwork prints at 10 × 10 in and the QR at 1.8 × 1.8 in.

Care: machine wash cold, inside out, with like colours. Tumble dry low. Do not iron directly on the printed area.

FOIAWEAR is an independent brand and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to the Central Intelligence Agency or the United States government.