Biography
Gulovich was born in Litmanová, Slovakia, in Stará Ľubovňa in 1921. She was the blue-eyed daughter of Edmund Gulovich who was a Greek Catholic village priest and Anastasia who was an elementary school teacher. [2] She attended the Greek Catholic Institute for Teachers in Prešov. She became a school teacher in Jarabina in 1940 and later in Hriňová. [1]
After Slovakia was occupied by Germany in 1939, Gulovich continued to teach. In early 1944, a Jewish friend asked Gulovich to hide his sister and her five-year-old son. She later recalled, "I never intended to hide anyone. My sister brought the woman's brother and he was crying and I'm a softie. And he said, 'Would you hide her just for a few days until she finds something else?' She never did. I was stuck with them." [3]
From April through June 1944, Gulovich hid the woman and her son in the Hriňová schoolhouse where she taught, allowing them to stay in the living quarters while she slept in the classroom. [3]
Her concealment of the Jews was reported to the Slovak authorities, and a Slovak Army captain was sent to question Gulovich about her actions. Fortunately for Gulovich, the Slovak officer sent to investigate was part of the anti-fascist resistance. Gulovich later recalled, "Lucky for me. Otherwise we wouldn't be here." [3]
The Slovak officer offered to find a new hiding place for the woman and her son if Gulovich would become a courier for the resistance. Gulovich reluctantly agreed and moved to Banská Bystrica, where she was employed as a dressmaker for an underground sympathizer. [1]
Her first mission required her to smuggle a short-wave radio in a suitcase on a train. She had a close call when the Gestapo stopped the train and began methodically checking all the passengers' luggage. In a 1989 interview, she recalled the incident as follows:
There was a bunch of Wehrmacht officers sitting in a compartment and one started flirting with me -- which I gladly returned. They said, 'Fraulein' -- I spoke German at the time -- 'would you sit with us?' They made a seat for me in the compartment and the officer carried my suitcase into the compartment with him. The Gestapo came by, saluted, and went on." [3]
Because of her fluency in five languages (including Russian, Hungarian, Slovak) as well as speaking a little English, Gulovich was assigned to work as a translator for the resistance. When the Slovak National Uprising began at end of August 1944, she worked in the rebel headquarters translating documents from Slovak into Russian for Soviet military intelligence. [1]
During the summer of 1944, Gulovich was introduced to American OSS agents who had been sent to assist the Slovak uprising and rescue downed American airmen. [1]
In October 1944, the Germans crushed the uprising, and Gulovich fled to the mountains where Soviets, Americans and several thousand rebel troops evaded the German Army. [1] The OSS mission in Slovakia was led by a South Carolina cotton magnate, Holt Green, and included a dozen OSS agents, 18 airmen, and an Associated Press correspondent Joe Morton. [1] [2] The Americans asked Gulovich to join them as their translator and guide as they sought to escape from German-occupied territory. Gulovich agreed and helped the Americans obtain provisions, shelter and intelligence as they moved through the Slovak countryside. [1] Gulovich later recounted how she would concoct a cover story on entering a new village: "I would say I was looking for my brother or we had had to evacuate ... And depending on the answers, I would know whether to keep talking or say, 'thank you,' and move on. Ironically if someone was a communist, I knew I could trust them." [3] On several occasions, Gulovich had confrontations with German soldiers, and one of the OSS agents later recalled that "she got by through wit and guile" and her ability to speak German. [1]
As the Americans sought to evade capture, an elite German intelligence unit was sent to the area to track them down. According to one historic account, "SS units prowled the countryside, executing whole villages of suspected partisan sympathizers and families sheltering Jews while looking for the Allied mission." [2]
As the winter arrived, Gulovich and the Americans were caught in a blizzard on Mt. Ďumbier, the highest mountain in the Low Tatra range in central Slovakia. She later recalled that "the wind blew so hard that it turned people over. Our eyebrows and hair changed into bunches of icicles." They kept moving forward, passing 83 partisans who had been frozen stiff on the mountain. [1]
In late December 1944, Gulovich and the Americans stayed at a hunting lodge for two weeks. [3] The group had planned to leave the lodge on Christmas Day, but stayed an extra day waiting for an overdue airdrop of provisions. [2] On December 26, 1944, Gulovich and four others from the group (two American and two British) left the lodge seeking food and medical supplies. While they were gone, the Germans raided the hunting lodge. [1] The Americans were captured and later executed. [3]
Gulovich and the four others who were away from the lodge avoided capture. It took the five of them nine more weeks to get to the Eastern front lines. [1] She recalled that they never felt safe for a minute. To avoid capture, they often moved each night to new locations, including a mine and a barn, and suffered through lice and frostbite. [3] Gulovich's foot became seriously frostbitten, but she declined to seek medical attention. She later explained her rationale for avoiding hospitals: "It never occurred to me to go, because I knew I would never come out. The Germans had my number. I thought, better to die on my feet than in a concentration camp." [3]
Gulovich arrived in Bucharest on March 1, 1945, and was flown to OSS headquarters in Italy. She was put "on Army status" so that she could be paid for her service. She was later assigned to Prague as an interpreter, where she met Allen Dulles, an OSS officer who later became the director of the Central Intelligence Agency. [1]
To reward her for her service, Dulles and OSS chief William Donovan arranged for Gulovich to immigrate to the United States with a scholarship to Vassar College. [1] She recalled that she felt out of place at Vassar and was astonished by the waste of food she saw there: "My first night there, I broke down and cried when I saw the food they were throwing out. I saw in my mind the millions of hungry, starving people -- my family included." [3]
In 1946, Donovan personally awarded Gulovich with the Bronze Star at a ceremony held at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, New York. [1]
In September 1946, the Los Angeles Times published an article about Gulovich's work with the OSS. The Times wrote: "Vivacious Maria Gulovich, 25, Czechoslovakian schoolteacher who arrived here yesterday, is the essence of what fictionalized women spies should look like." [4]
Gulovich became an American citizen in 1952 and moved to Oxnard, California and worked for many years as a real estate agent in Ventura County, California. She was married twice and had two children, Edmund E. Peck and Lynn S. Peck, with her first husband, attorney Eugene C. Peck. She later married Hans P. Liu. She had one granddaughter, Elisabeth Maria Peck. [1]
In 1989, Gulovich and other women who had served the OSS were honored with a black-tie dinner for "The Ladies of the OSS" in Washington, D.C. Gulovich was interviewed by a reporter for The Washington Post at the time of the event and was the subject of a feature that drew attention to her story. [3]
The Office of Strategic Services (OSS) was the intelligence agency of the United States during World War II. The OSS was formed as an agency of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) to coordinate espionage activities behind enemy lines for all branches of the United States Armed Forces. Other OSS functions included the use of propaganda, subversion, and post-war planning.
The Special Operations Executive (SOE) was a secret British World War II organisation. It was officially formed on 22 July 1940 under Minister of Economic Warfare Hugh Dalton, from the amalgamation of three existing secret organisations. Its purpose was to conduct espionage, sabotage and reconnaissance in occupied Europe against the Axis powers, and to aid local resistance movements.
Maria Krystyna Janina Skarbek,, also known as Christine Granville, was a Polish agent of the British Special Operations Executive (SOE) during the Second World War. She became celebrated for her daring exploits in intelligence and irregular-warfare missions in Nazi-occupied Poland and France. Journalist Alistair Horne, who described himself in 2012 as one of the few people still alive who had known Skarbek, called her the "bravest of the brave." Spymaster Vera Atkins of the SOE described Skarbek as "very brave, very attractive, but a loner and a law unto herself."
Operation Jedburgh was a clandestine operation during World War II in which three-man teams of operatives of the British Special Operations Executive (SOE), the U.S. Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the Free French Bureau central de renseignements et d'action and the Dutch and Belgian armies in exile were dropped by parachute into occupied France, the Netherlands and Belgium. The objective of the Jedburgh teams was to assist allied forces who invaded France on 6 June 1944 with sabotage and guerrilla warfare, and leading local resistance forces in actions against the Germans.
Lt. Col. Duncan Chaplin Lee (1913–1988) was confidential assistant to Maj. Gen. William Donovan, founder and director of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), World War II-era predecessor of the CIA, during 1942–46. Lee is identified in the Venona project as the Soviet double agent operating inside OSS under the cover name "Koch," making him the most senior alleged source the Soviet Union ever had inside American intelligence.
Noel Haviland Field was an American communist activist, diplomat, and spy for the NKVD, whose activities before and after World War II allowed the Eastern Bloc to use his name as a prosecuting rationale during the 1949 Rajk show trial in Hungary, as well as the 1952 Slánský show trial in Czechoslovakia.
Virginia Hall Goillot DSC, Croix de Guerre,, code named Marie and Diane, was an American who worked with the United Kingdom's clandestine Special Operations Executive (SOE) and the American Office of Strategic Services (OSS) in France during World War II. The objective of SOE and OSS was to conduct espionage, sabotage and reconnaissance in occupied Europe against the Axis powers, especially Nazi Germany. SOE and OSS agents in France allied themselves with resistance groups and supplied them with weapons and equipment parachuted in from England. After World War II Hall worked for the Special Activities Division of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).
Elizaveta Yulyevna Zarubina was a Soviet spy, podpolkovnik of the MGB. She was known as Elizabeth Zubilin while serving in the United States. Another alias was Elizaveta Gorskaya.
Haviva Reik was one of 32 or 33 parachutists sent by the Jewish Agency and Britain's MI9 on military missions in Nazi-occupied Europe. Reik went to Slovakia in fall 1944 and worked with local Jewish people to resist the German occupation there. She established a camp for Russian prisoners of war who had escaped, and helped organize a Jewish resistance unit. The Germans organized forces to put down the Jewish resistance, and Reik and the other parachutists escaped with about 40 local Jews into the mountains. In November 1944, however, Reik and the other parachutists were captured, killed, and buried in a mass grave.
Cloak and Dagger is a 1946 spy film directed by Fritz Lang which stars Gary Cooper as an American scientist sent by the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) to contact European scientists working on the German nuclear weapons program and Lilli Palmer as a member of the Italian resistance movement who shelters and guides him. The story was drawn from the 1946 non-fiction book Cloak and Dagger: The Secret Story of O.S.S. by Corey Ford and Alastair MacBain, while a former OSS agent E. Michael Burke acted as technical advisor. Like 13 Rue Madeleine (1947), the film was intended as a tribute to Office of Strategic Services (OSS) operations in German-occupied Europe during World War II.
Lucien Emile "Lou" Conein was a French-American citizen, noted U.S. Army officer and OSS/CIA operative. Conein is best known for his instrumental role in the November 1963 coup against Ngô Đình Diệm and Diệm's assassination by serving as Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge Jr.'s liaison officer with the coup plotters and delivering $42,000 of the known cash disbursements.
Lise Marie Jeanette de Baissac MBE CdeG, code names Odile and Marguerite, was a Mauritian agent in the United Kingdom's clandestine Special Operations Executive (SOE) organization in France during World War II. The purpose of SOE was to conduct espionage, sabotage, and reconnaissance in countries occupied by the Axis powers, especially Nazi Germany. SOE agents allied themselves with resistance groups and supplied them with weapons and equipment parachuted in from England.
"Jane" Ebba Charlotta Horney, was a Swedish woman, believed to have spied in Denmark for the benefit of Nazi Germany, and to have been killed by the Danish resistance movement on a fishing boat at Øresund, but it has never been confirmed for which nation she actually worked. The Gestapo in Denmark believed that she was an agent for the British or Soviet Union, and after World War II it was denied that she had been a Gestapo agent. Abwehr officers likewise denied, when asked by Säpo, that she had been their agent.
Ursula Kuczynski, also known as Ruth Werner, Ursula Beurton and Ursula Hamburger, was a German Communist activist who spied for the Soviet Union during the 1930s and 1940s, most famously as the handler of nuclear scientist Klaus Fuchs. She moved to East Germany in 1950 when Fuchs was unmasked, and published a series of books related to her espionage activities, including her bestselling autobiography, Sonjas Rapport.
During World War II, Slovakia was a client state of Nazi Germany and a member of the Axis powers. It participated in the war against the Soviet Union and deported most of its Jewish population.
Joseph Morton was an American war correspondent for the Associated Press (AP) in the European Theater during World War II. On December 26, 1944, a Nazi counter-partisan unit named "Edelweiss" stormed a log cabin high on Homolka Mountain in today's Slovakia which housed 15 Allied intelligence officers, a Slovak officer, a Slovak-American interpreter, two Slovak civilian resistance fighters, and Morton himself, covering an OSS operation in the country for a story. Although the Allied officers were duly uniformed and Morton had a war correspondent ID in order to be treated as prisoners of war according to the Geneva Convention (1929), the SS headquarters, in compliance with the Commando Order—which stated that all Allied commandos should be killed immediately without trial, even those in proper uniforms—ordered the summary execution of Allied officers and others caught in the act. On January 24, 1945, Joseph Morton, along with 13 Allied officers, was executed at the Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp. He was the only Allied correspondent to be executed by the Axis during World War II.
The Slovak National Uprising was a military uprising organized by the Slovak resistance movement during World War II in central Slovakia. This resistance movement was represented mainly by the members of the Democratic Party, but also by social democrats and Communists, albeit on a smaller scale. It was launched on 29 August 1944 from Banská Bystrica in an attempt to resist German troops that had occupied Slovak territory and to overthrow the collaborationist government of Jozef Tiso. Although the resistance was largely defeated by German forces, guerrilla operations continued until the Red Army, Czechoslovak Army and Romanian Army occupied the Slovak Republic in 1945.
Micheline Aline Dumon, , was a member of the Belgian Resistance during World War II with the Comet Line. Her surname often appears misspelled as "Dumont" in historical sources. She was awarded the British George Medal and United States Medal of Freedom for helping allied airmen shot down over Belgium and France evade capture and imprisonment by Nazi Germany. As a member of the Comet Line, founded by Andrée de Jongh, she aided in the escape of more than 250 allied airmen. She guided downed airmen from Belgium and France to the border of neutral Spain from where they could be repatriated to Great Britain.
Hilde Purwin was a German journalist. She was exceptionally talented as a linguist and had an unusually powerful memory.
Jeannette Guyot was a French Resistance operative who went on to become one of the Second World War's most decorated women.
