FOIAWEAR — BETTY McINTOSH / Spy Girl Tee

FOIAWEAR / ARCHIVE SERIES 021

A Washington journalist who became one of the few women in the OSS Morale Operations branch — the people who made up rumors the enemy would believe. Elizabeth "Betty" McIntosh wrote black propaganda: false news reports, forged documents and radio scripts designed to sap Japanese morale.

Fluent in Japanese, she was recruited in 1943 and sent to India, where her team forged a Japanese surrender order and had a Burmese agent slip it into the knapsack of a dead courier so the enemy would find it and conclude it was real. Then she flew "the Hump" over the Himalayas to Kunming, China, alongside Julia Child, to script a secret "black radio" station broadcasting into China and Japan.

Late in the war, her station's on-air fortune teller — "the seer" — told listeners the stars revealed "something terrible" was about to befall Japan, something so dreadful it would erase an entire area. Betty had made it up. That same day, the United States dropped the atom bomb on Hiroshima. When Colonel Richard Heppner demanded to know how she had learned of a top-secret operation, her answer was simple: "We just made it up."

After the war she wrote the memoir Undercover Girl, served the CIA for decades, and in 1998 published Sisterhood of Spies: The Women of the OSS so the women of "Donovan's Dreamers" would never be forgotten. She died in 2015, age 100.

The artwork is a stylised tribute — the fortune-teller's crystal ball over the black radio, and the rising sun inside it. It is not a portrait.

This shirt is offered in both dark and light garment colours — the crystal ball in copper on Black, Espresso and Navy, and in a matching dark-ink print on Blossom, Chambray and Ivory.

The QR code on the front opens the CIA's article on Betty McIntosh, the source for everything above: https://www.cia.gov/stories/story/spy-girl-betty-mcintosh/

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. 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.