Late in August 1939, just before Germany invaded Poland, the Chicago Daily News broke an ironclad policy to make the American reporter Helen Paull Kirkpatrick its first and only woman correspondent abroad. She was nearly 30 and had been living in London since 1937 after two years in Geneva, circulating with patrician ease among the native and expat upper classes. With two English colleagues, she had cofounded The Whitehall Letter, a successful weekly digest of world affairs with a strong antifascist bent, and on her own wrote two books: one about Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain and the prewar Munich Agreement, the other about the British after the war began. She also started an American edition of the newsletter run by her younger brother, Lyman Bickford Kirkpatrick Jr., whose eventual experiences in the American intelligence apparatus would figure heavily in her own working life.

Helen Kirkpatrick’s start date in the Daily News London bureau could not have been better timed. The Duke and Duchess of Windsor had just returned to England after a period of semi-exile in France. By way of Helen’s frequent weekends with Waldorf and Nancy Astor at Cliveden and with Ronald and Nancy Tree at Ditchley Park, she happened to know something most others did not: that the Windsors were staying at South Hartfield House, the grand home of Edward Dudley Metcalfe, the duke’s former equerry, whom she also happened to know. Bill Stoneman, the Daily News London bureau chief, thought her foolish to trek the 40 miles south to Sussex in what was sure to be a failed attempt to interview the Duke of Windsor—the man who had been the nation’s king until abdicating the throne in 1936. But off she went. She arrived at twilight, buoyed with anticipation until it emerged that the duke had already declared that he would not give interviews during his stay. And yet, struck by the dismay on the face of this visitor, the duke devised a gallant way to both keep his word and salvage Helen’s hopes for a triumphant debut in the Daily News—and the many other papers that subscribed to its well-regarded foreign news service. “He seemed to have decided that even though I was not to be allowed to interview him, he would interview me,” she wrote. Her story appeared on page two, September 18, 1939, under the headline, “Duchess of Windsor to Run Hospital, Duke May Join Army.”

This flashy little royal scoop became the first of scores of exclusives during Helen’s seven years with the paper, most of them far more substantive in news value. For her first anniversary on staff, the editors featured her in a five-column promotional house ad titled “War and a Woman,” which called her articles “clear as crystal, accurate as a radio beam, prompt as the crashing impact of the happenings they record”; her dispatches arrived in Chicago by cablegram at “machine-gun tempo”—three, four, sometimes five times a day. Her beat was all of England and Ireland and General Charles de Gaulle and his London-based Free French Movement. Later, there would be lengthy forays to Algeria, Italy, France, Germany, and elsewhere in Europe—wherever war news flowed.

Least known to the public among her journalistic virtues, the ad disclosed, was how often her stories had to be “splashed across eight-columns, front page headlines, without a hint of credit to the razor-edged intelligence that rifled them home.” For example, eight days before the German blitzkrieg of May 10, 1940, Helen was alone among correspondents to report that King Leopold III of Belgium had privately informed the U.S. government that the Germans were sure to invade his country next. Clearly to avoid linking the news to Helen or revealing how or where she had obtained the information, the story ran buried in a column of items under someone else’s byline, attributed only to “private sources in Chicago.” The point was, the impeccable confidential sources cultivated by “Our Helen,” as Daily News headlines would sometimes dub her in the years to come, were either newsmakers themselves or those just as likely to know of what they spoke. “Not even now,” the ad went on, “—not until war and war’s tongue-stilling offspring, strict censorship, have lifted—can the complete story of Helen Kirkpatrick’s incredible war coverage be told.”

The siblings’ connectedness casts a hazy light on how the realms of intelligence-gathering and major media reportage have sometimes intersected in times of war and tyranny.

It is fair to say that as a class, American women correspondents during World War II were not held in particularly high regard, so Helen Kirkpatrick’s outsize ability to garner not only respect but also major governmental and military awards does conjure up questions. Of the more than 1,600 U.S.-accredited World War II correspondents, only 19 received the coveted U.S. Medal of Freedom—and of those 19, Helen was the only woman. This despite similar barrier-breaking reportage by Margaret Bourke-White, Ann Stringer, Lee Carson, Lee Miller, Iris Carpenter, Marguerite Higgins, and others, none of whose names even appear in archived military lists of suggested nominees. How did she manage to have so much swift, direct access to so many top-line political, diplomatic, military, and intelligence sources? Was it just her keen reporting, or did the close social relationships she developed with important men set her apart?

Lyman Kirkpatrick’s time in Europe during the war either ran parallel to hers or was intertwined. And yet in her lengthiest latter-day interviews, references to her brother are few and casual. In his books, Lyman’s mentions of his sister were similarly spare. Both of their names appear in the wartime memoirs of friends and colleagues, but never in the same account. Only a careful rereading of the Washington Press Club Foundation’s oral history of Helen revealed an offhand mention of a brother in the CIA. Did Lyman’s rapid rise through the U.S. intelligence ranks figure in her successes, and if so, how? Had Helen broken with journalism’s established codes of conduct and crossed the line into espionage? In a more general way, the siblings’ connectedness during the war years casts a hazy light on how the realms of intelligence-gathering and major media reportage, meant to be strictly separate, have sometimes intersected in times of war and tyranny.

In interviews, Helen’s answers to questions about how she achieved such high recognition were veiled, self-deprecating. Sometimes she’d deflect. Did she do anything heroic? No, she’d reply, adding that she could not remember why she was honored by the French and with a U.S. Medal of Freedom or if she ever even knew the reasons. Check her papers at Smith College, she would suggest. They offer little. The questions lingered. For even her nearest living relations, they linger still.

The Kirkpatricks of Rochester, New York, were a prominent family, albeit no
longer monied by the time Helen and Lyman’s parents married. (They later divorced, then married each other again.) On their father’s side, the siblings were mindful and proud of a Scottish lineage that pre-dated Robert the Bruce; I Mak Siccar (“I’ll make sure”) was the family motto. Their maternal heritage came via the Paulls of Wheeling, West Virginia; they often spent holidays at the family home in Hawthorne Court in Woodsdale, on Wheeling’s outskirts. Their ancestors included Virginia unionists like Colonel James Paull, a soldier in the Revolutionary War, and Colonel Joshua Fry, who, alongside the father of Thomas Jefferson, created the original map of Virginia. A long list of judges, lawyers, military men, and other public servants followed.

With tuition help from grandparents and scholarships, and after a couple of time-outs for Helen for financial hiccups, both siblings completed their education with prestigious degrees. Helen attended The Masters School in Dobbs Ferry, New York, and then studied history at Smith, graduating Phi Beta Kappa in 1931; Lyman went to Deerfield and Princeton, where he majored in politics and graduated in 1938. Helen looked after Lyman like an ambitious other mother. In letters home, she lovingly mocked her parents’ adoration of him, which she shared, referring to him as “Little Man” or “Son.”

To intimates, Lyman went by Kirk; Helen, they called Pat. Seven years apart in age, they were as tall as they were driven, smart, and talented. Lyman was a handsome six-foot-five; Helen, a stately five-foot-10. Both were appealing in style and manner, always commanding notice. Her friend and colleague Ben Robertson found her “extraordinary” and “beautiful” with “a first-class mind” that she put to use, he later wrote, in “taking up matters with people at the top, with cabinet ministers and the like.” Her only known detractor in print was General Raymond E. Lee, a U.S. military attaché in London whom she met in December 1940. He found her “rather clever,” his journals record, but “far from being as attractive and alluring as she thinks she is.”

It was during her student days that Helen first spent time in Geneva, which fed her fascination with the comings and goings of the crowd that convened around the still-promising League of Nations. “There were all kinds of operators around,” she once said, “people whose jobs were a little obscure as to what they were. They were oil merchants or they were spies for one side or another. It was a very exciting place to be.” In the summer of 1935, she returned to the city as a tour leader for a group of high-school girls, but really to flee an unhappy marriage. “Not returning,” read the two-word transatlantic cable she sent to Victor Polachek Jr., the husband of two years she’d left behind in New York City. She found work writing policy papers for the Geneva Research Center, an affiliate of the Foreign Policy Association, and as a newspaper stringer who covered the League of Nations for the New York Herald-Tribune and a few other American and British papers. That she spoke French was an enormous advantage, she said, but not monetarily. She lived on Brussels sprouts and cottage cheese.

By 1937, Helen was 28. Most journalists of her era and caliber would have advanced to staff positions with journeymen status by that age, but she had not yet hit her stride. Her working life had zigzagged a few times before she settled in Europe: There was the year she spent with her mother in a management training program at Macy’s; her nondegree graduate study on a fellowship in Geneva; the marriage to Polachek, during which they lived in a charming but oh-so-narrow three-story townhouse in Greenwich Village, once rented for a couple of years by Edna St. Vincent Millay and her husband. Through the Polacheks’ next-door neighbors, Osgood and Alice Field, Helen had taken a job helping to organize an exhibition on Soviet education at the Museum of Natural History. This was under the auspices of the Soviet All-Union Society for Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries, also called VOKS. However, the Communist Party affiliation of many of its members left her dubious and made her steer clear of any further involvement with the organization.

In Geneva, her stringer status meant that her copy appeared unsigned. Newspaper archives yield her name only once from those days: She is quoted in other reporters’ stories about the July 4, 1936, suicide of Štefan Lux, a Czech journalist who shot himself in the assembly room of the League of Nations to protest the League’s inaction on Germany’s treatment of Jews. Of the League’s reporters, only Helen—“an American girl attached to the Geneva Research Center,” The New York Times called her—was within sight of Lux and within earshot of his last words: “C’est le dernier coup.” To have no outlet that would publish her firsthand report, she later said, was especially frustrating.

Victor Gordon-Lennox, a well-born diplomatic correspondent for The Daily Telegraph, often reported from Geneva. It was he who persuaded Helen to join him and Graham Hutton of The Economist in the Whitehall Letter venture in London. For Helen, this was a fresh and appealing opportunity. In part, she owed her swift entrée into London’s sought-after social circles to “V.G.L.,” as letters home so often refer to him in reports of her weekends and glittering evenings out.

Meanwhile, the timing of Helen’s move to London coincided with intensified familial concern over young Lyman’s professional prospects. Helen was in the best position to help. The summer after his graduation from Princeton, he went biking in England with a college mate. This was when the siblings’ adult lives began to converge. Helen introduced Lyman to Kermit “Kim” Roosevelt, son of Theodore by his second marriage, who was seeking a summer tutor to prepare his son, Dirck, for admission to Groton. Helen would later say Lyman’s fine manners got him the position over several Rhodes scholars. Living with the Roosevelts meant that Lyman needed the right clothing—a tux, for example, which would have taken too long to arrive from home. Helen arranged to borrow one from someone at the U.S. Embassy. “The name escapes me,” Lyman wrote years later, “but my foggy recollection is that it might have been a tuxedo of the ambassador himself.” And yet, Ambassador Joseph P. Kennedy stood five inches shorter than Lyman, so perhaps not. Helen also sent her brother new white flannels and tennis shirts. “He’s coming to town one day soon [to] be fitted for a suit and have some tweed he got in Scotland made into another jacket,” she wrote home. Once Lyman was back in the United States that September, a Princeton connection recommended him to David Lawrence, who hired him for his company, United States News, the eventual publisher of U.S. News & World Report. Lyman edited the U.S. edition of The Whitehall Letter on the side, with typing and administrative help from his wife, the former Jeanne Barclay Courtney, whom he married in February 1939.

In London, Helen knew both William “Wild Bill” Donovan and David K. E. Bruce well. Donovan headed up the Office of the Coordinator of Information, known as the COI, which evolved into the Office of Strategic Services, the OSS. He once tried to recruit her to the agency, but as she later told an interviewer, her response was, “To do what?” Donovan said he didn’t know, but he would find a spot for her. She declined, telling him she thought she was as useful to the war effort doing what she was doing as she would be in the OSS. Bruce, whom she met when he first arrived in England as chief representative of the American Red Cross, served both the COI and OSS as London branch chief and deputy executive director. Published entries from his diaries mention Helen innocuously only a couple of times, but his biographer described her as Bruce’s old friend, who often joined him at the home of Nancy and Ronald Tree.

In August 1940, Bruce, then still with the Red Cross, would go with Helen and other correspondents to Shakespeare Cliff, facing the Dover Strait, to watch the RAF fighters confront the invading Luftwaffe overhead. The memoirists among them later name-dropped their colleagues in passages about these deeply affecting days. “We lived in expectation of a full German attack any night,” Vincent “Jimmy” Sheean wrote, “and the nerves of some of our friends grew so exacerbated by suspense that they actually said they would welcome it.” Not Helen; she was steely, and was in fact first to suggest the Dover vigils. Ben Robertson said that by then she had already become one of the best American journalists, woman or man, “and in the weeks that were to follow she was to add to her already established reputation.”

Another crucial contact of Helen’s was David Gray, the “openly pro-British” U.S. minister plenipotentiary to Ireland. She stayed with the Grays whenever she was in Dublin, which was often. It was Gray who told her, as she reported on June 12, 1940, how much evidence there was of German infiltration in Ireland. She mentioned the tide of fifth columnists who secretly wanted a British defeat, although she does not attribute her source. To avoid Irish censorship, she filed the story with a Dublin dateline once she got back to England. Ireland’s minister in Washington, Robert Brennan, wrote to the editor, conveying his country’s ire and calling out what he said were misstatements in the story. The Daily News published his missive promptly, adding this note: “Miss Kirkpatrick’s article was based on careful investigation in England and in Eire, and, The Daily News has no reason to doubt the accuracy of her reports. It is obvious that a diplomat in Washington cannot be better informed on London opinion than a resident correspondent in London.”

For Helen, breaking stories for the Daily News enlarged her already formidable social standing and long list of contacts and sources who cultivated her as eagerly as she cultivated them. What she gleaned during a Christmastime weekend at Ditchley Park in 1940 about secret negotiations between Britain and Vichy France almost got her thrown out of England. Another guest told her that Vichy had said it would not aid the Nazis in attacking Britain; Helen reported it, enraging Winston Churchill. “Miss Helen Kirkpatrick should be shipped out of the country at the earliest moment,” the prime minister’s minutes record. “It is very undesirable to have a person of this kind scouting about private houses for copy regardless of British interests.” Duff Cooper, the British minister of information, whom Helen considered “a great close personal friend,” vouched for her; the prime minister reconsidered.

In Dublin late in the summer of 1941, David Gray tapped Helen to take a secret message to London and hand it to Britain’s cabinet minister for the colonies. It concerned a scheme devised by Gray and Sir John Maffey, Britain’s chief diplomatic representative to Ireland, to force the Irish into the war or at least to give up some rights. Helen obliged, despite the line-crossing this involved. By Gray’s mistake, however, a copy of the memo ended up in an envelope sent to Joe Walshe, the secretary of the Irish Free State’s Department of External Affairs—Gray had meant to send him only a copy of one of Helen’s articles from Dublin. “Well, the fat was in the fire,” she recalled. Even in wartime, for a correspondent to be seen as engaging in the trading of unpublished information or in espionage of any sort was and is a clear violation of every established journalistic code of ethics. Especially in conflict situations, any insinuation of such a sideline, even a comment tossed off in jest, could be as destructive to a reporter’s reputation inside the press corps as it was potentially lethal outside it.

Gray, knowing his telephones were bugged, traveled to Belfast to call Helen about what had happened and then wrote to her to apologize for putting her in such a terrible position. He offered to resign or do whatever she suggested because, he wrote, “I never can square myself for this stupidity.” She told him she was the expendable one, not he. In the end, nothing came of the episode beyond the doubt it sowed in the minds of Dubliners that Helen “was at least an intelligence officer or a spy. And,” she recalled, “I was treated that way.” The British, she said, were especially dubious of Americans who traveled often between England and Ireland, and the IRA went so far as to accuse her of being the harbinger of an American invasion of their country. “But I continued to go regularly,” she said, “and I became quite good friends with the man in the Foreign Office.”

It remained Helen’s style, at every opportunity, to share with officials among the Allies whatever she had learned that they might be able to make good use of, sometimes preparing lengthy unrequested written memos about hard-won information, reports that just as often went nowhere. The Americans were invariably unreceptive—“We have our own sources” was the official attitude, Helen would later say—but the British and French were keen to learn whatever they could. Years later, she would reflect on the “strong feeling” she and Lyman shared about “the importance of intelligence, of knowing what’s going on, and finding out from people, asking what they’ve seen, what they’ve heard. Then you evaluate it as to whether it’s of real interest or not.”

Especially in conflict situations, even a comment tossed off in jest could be as destructive to a reporter’s reputation inside the press corps as it was potentially lethal outside it.

Given these predilections, it is not surprising that Helen would see intelligence as a career route for Lyman, if not for herself. Once again, she flung a handful of sisterly pixie dust onto her brother’s job prospects. “I’ve cast a few flies in [the COI’s Bill] Donovan’s direction with no results so far,” she wrote to her brother in Washington early in January 1942, just weeks after Pearl Harbor was attacked and after the Naval Reserve Air Force rejected his enlistment because he was red-green colorblind. “Everyone in the service branches of the [U.S.] embassy has suddenly blossomed into uniform, etc., and our English friends have ceased to be polite. … Most of us here wanted to get home—or into some job other than our present ones.” However, she went on, the U.S. Ambassador, John G. Winant, “asked us all to sit still and keep on with what we’re doing for the time being.” Helen felt out David Gray to see whether he could make use of her in Dublin, but he demurred, affirming her own growing sense that she was better off where she was. From Colonel Frank Knox, her publisher, came cajoling affirmation. “I can think of no war work in which a courageous and intelligent woman could be engaged that would be more valuable to the country in the present circumstances than that you are doing for us,” he wrote. “Us” in this case seems to have meant more than the foreign news service of the Chicago Daily News: In 1941, Knox had also become the secretary of the U.S. Navy.

Two months later, Lyman, still at his publishing job in Washington, got a call from Helen’s friend David Bruce, whom Lyman had met back in 1940. Bruce offered Lyman a post with the COI. Lyman later wrote of some “flattering and undeserved attention” that had come his way, at about the same time, from Colonel Knox himself, the Navy secretary–cum–Daily News publisher. This happened via Bill Stoneman, Helen’s London bureau chief, who mentioned to Knox the Navy’s rejection of Lyman. Knox then called Lyman into his office and offered to rescind the decision, but by that point, Lyman had accepted the job with the COI. Knox cautioned Lyman against “that crazy outfit” but did not convince him otherwise. Knox further offered to help if Lyman changed his mind.

That, in essence, is how their world worked.

Lyman was soon deployed to London and later to the continent as the COI became the OSS. He was considered a master at postmortem assessments, a specialty that years later would include a seminal report on the failed Bay of Pigs invasion of 1961. Among his wartime assignments was the task of traveling with the 12th Army as General Omar Bradley’s briefer. He also worked in close liaison with the French and Belgian resistance, serving as a conduit for intelligence reports on the resistance and from OSS agents to the 12th Army Group.

His duties included giving the enemy order of battle at morning briefings each day. According to Helen, General Bradley marveled at Lyman’s ability to reel off—from memory, without notes—the entire litany of intelligence gathered about German operations across and up and down the continent from one day to the next. One of Lyman’s favorite memories, meanwhile, involved General George S. Patton, who was often at Army group headquarters. Shortly before Christmas 1944, Patton asked for a briefing on when the Russian forces would be able to resume their offenses in the East, thus taking some pressure off the western front. The Russians shared little, despite repeated requests from SHAEF, the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force. As Lyman explained in his memoir, most information came from listening to German and Russian communiqués about the battles in the East “and then plotting the map based upon what seemed most plausible from what they were both saying and then balancing this with what was known from our own intelligence sources.” The intelligence team prepared an answer, which they provided close to New Year’s Day, when the generals had time to hear it. As the briefing concluded, Patton asked one question: “When do you think the Russians are going to launch their next offensive?” Lyman gave the reply. The second week in January, he said, based on the case study the team had prepared of the time lags between Soviet offensives, coupled with knowledge that in Poland, the Russians were along the bank of the Vistula and that they would want the river frozen to a sufficient depth to allow tanks to cross.

The Russians indeed launched on January 11. “The next time General Patton came to a briefing,” Lyman recalled, “he marched into the room, pointed directly at me, and said, ‘Brad, you’d better watch that fellow—he must be a Communist. He knew when the Russians were going to attack!’ ” Sometime later, Lyman learned of a pair of high compliments: that Patton asked Bradley to transfer Lyman to Patton’s staff and that Bradley declined.

For the D-Day invasion, 1944, Lyman and most of the OSS did not get to Normandy until “D-Day plus 17,” or June 23. That day, the Daily News carried a story from Helen datelined “Normandy Beachhead, June 21.” It appeared on the front page with an editor’s note above it, saying that she was among the first 10 women correspondents permitted to make an in-and-out visit to Normandy. Throughout the war, women reporters were forbidden to go closer to any front than the nurses were allowed to venture, although unauthorized breaches did occur. (Martha Gellhorn, for example, stowed away on a hospital ship to report the beginning of the D-Day invasion and lost her military privileges as a result.) In this case, the women arrived on an unarmed Douglas transport to pick up the American wounded. Throughout most of the days leading up to and after the invasion, Helen’s datelines were either London or some version of “Supreme Allied Expeditionary Force Headquarters in England.” Gossips passed word, and the Daily News reported that Helen “plays bridge with Eisenhower and Churchill calls her ‘The Kirk.’ ”

Not until July 11 was she more permanently in France. Above her first Cherbourg dateline, July 19, her editors trumpeted in italics that she was the “first war correspondent”— woman or otherwise—to be assigned to the headquarters of General Marie-Pierre Koenig, commander of the French forces of the interior. All that coverage of de Gaulle and the Free French had paid off. That day, she wrote home to say she “went up” to see Pete Quesada, the commanding officer of the Tactical Air Command, and that they called Lyman to join them for dinner. Lyman had grown a mustache that she mistook for dirt on his face but otherwise looked tanned and well. “We had fun,” she wrote, “just the three of us, and the mess wasn’t hard to take …”

Helen told in interviews of how, when on the continent, she would often attach herself to OSS teams “because even in Normandy and Brittany, they would go into Gestapo headquarters and pick up stuff.” In 1945, when the military authorized a group of reporters to cross the Rhine on a glider, Helen was on the list to go. That is, until Lyman, “of all the interfering characters, somehow got wind of it and saw that my name was taken off. Now you could say that was brotherly-sisterly or male-female, but I must say later I was awfully glad because they all got shot down.”

On the night of August 24, Helen rode behind General Jacques-Philippe Leclerc’s tanks as they entered Paris to liberate the city. The following day, she left the luncheon table of Ernest Hemingway, holding court at the newly liberated Ritz, to cover the parade, which culminated at Notre Dame with a memorial service reserved for the families of those who had died in the Resistance. There, inside the cathedral, she was alone among reporters who witnessed the failed assassination attempt on Generals de Gaulle, Koenig, and Leclerc. Years later, for an oral historian, Helen recalled how she had positioned herself standing up and hanging off a grille fence for a better view, when somehow the teeming crowd shoved her into the cathedral, just as the lights went out and the organ music stopped. “Suddenly there was some shooting and a man near me was hit,” she said. “They were shooting from the clerestory balcony. A Dominican monk appeared at the altar. Well, I am not a Catholic, but I knew that monks are not cathedral priests, and he led them in the Magnificat. Then they turned around and marched out.” The day after that, she reopened the Paris office of the Daily News as its new chef de bureau.

Lyman, for his war service, received the U.S. Legion of Merit, the Bronze Star medal, the European Theater Ribbon and five battle stars, and both the French and Belgian Croix de Guerre. For Helen, her U.S. Medal of Freedom covered the period from June 6, 1944, to May 8, 1945: D-Day to V-E Day. She also earned a European Theater Ribbon. From France, she won the Médaille de la Reconnaissance in 1945 and the country’s highest award, the Légion d’Honneur, in 1947—along with three men and Janet Flanner, the Paris-based New Yorker writer known in print as Genêt.

Why, of all the women who distinguished themselves as World War II correspondents, was Helen the only one singled out for the U.S. military’s highest recognition? It could be that her consistent access to solid, privileged information and her “I-was-there” reporting are the only explanations. All of the Medal of Freedom honorees were cited “for exceptionally meritorious achievement, which aided the United States in the prosecution of the war against the enemy in continental Europe.” Helen’s citation went on to describe her courage, how she “never hesitated to face danger in the pursuance of her profession,” and how her “objective interpretation of military operations and particularly of the renaissance of occupied France not only contributed to understanding of the problem in the mind of the American public but also went far to promote good Allied relations, thereby meriting the praise and recognition of the United States.” How so exactly? Is there more to what Helen did than her citation describes?

Once asked by an oral historian about the awarding of the French Légion d’Honneur, Helen remembered the luncheon at the Quai d’Orsay, hosted by Suzanne Borel Bidault, the wife of Foreign Minister Georges Bidault, a figure in the Resistance, and the first French woman to become a diplomat. But Helen said she did not know why she had received it. “I suppose because I had been reporting on the Free French and de Gaulle was president at that point,” she said. “I was known as a strong advocate of France during the war and was in France then, had been there as a correspondent; they gave a number of them to correspondents,” she said. “It was sort of handed out, you know. An awful lot of French have them.” She said she suspected that her friend the baron Louis de Cabrol might have initiated the Médaille de la Reconnaissance because she “plucked him out of a British hospital” and got him into an American one, where a surgeon “saved his knees so that he was able to walk and ride horseback thereafter. I don’t know. I never knew, and, as a matter of fact, I don’t recall it being presented. Maybe it was.”

Lyman, after the war, returned briefly to his postcollege job in magazine publishing but then joined the CIA at its formation in 1947. In time, he would become the agency’s inspector general and after that, executive director, its number-three position, despite the polio that left him paralyzed from the waist down in 1952. When he left the agency at age 48 in 1964, he received the President’s Award for Distinguished Federal Civilian Service and the CIA’s Distinguished Intelligence Medal, an honor that had been conferred at that point no more than a dozen times. The letters of nomination, although considerably more restrained in style than the praise lavished on his sister in the Chicago Daily News, are comparable as indications of the respect and admiration he commanded. “Of all the recipients of this medal known to me,” one nominator wrote, “none has given to the CIA and the intelligence community the dedicated, selfless devotion to duty over such a long period of time as Kirk.”

The Daily News foreign service started to decline in the period after Colonel Knox’s death on April 28, 1944, so Helen and others from their Europe-based team went to the New York Post, starting late in 1946. During the transition, Helen traveled to Moscow with her good friend and the new U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union, Walter Bedell Smith, and his wife. A long memo followed but nothing publishable, since any reporting could be tied too closely to the new ambassador. Two years later, in 1950, Smith became Lyman’s boss as director of the CIA, succeeded by Allen Dulles.

For Helen, the New York Post of 1947 could not have been a worse fit; the lighter assignments favored by editors annoyed her, as did the way they handled and displayed what she wrote. And yet, despite her stunning résumé, repeated efforts to land another newspaper job failed. No one seemed to have a place for Helen Kirkpatrick. She went to work for the U.S. State Department, first at Voice of America, then as communications director in France for the Economic Cooperation Administration, which administered the Marshall Plan. In Paris again, she worked first for her old friend David Bruce, and then for Barry Bingham when Bruce became the U.S. ambassador to France.

Back in Washington, as a since-declassified document of April 17, 1951, records, then–CIA director Allen Dulles had lunch with “Miss Helen Kirkpatrick, State Department DD/P and Mr. Lyman Kirkpatrick.” Days later, she had a new post in Washington as public affairs adviser to the U.S. assistant secretary of state for European Affairs, a job that involved frequent travel abroad.

Helen left the State Department in 1953—her appointments were always temporary, although she tried several times for civil service status—to become assistant to the president of Smith College and soon the second wife of Robbins Milbank, a widower and Smith College trustee. She continued to lecture and appear on panels about the war, staying in touch with her legions of contacts, just as she had been doing since her first of many U.S. speaking tours in 1937.

Lyman, after leaving Washington, accepted an academic appointment at Brown and wrote two books about the CIA, examining his own experiences and the agency’s structure, strengths, and weaknesses. He died at 78 in 1995, two years before Helen, who lived to 88.

A genealogical search has led me to several living Kirkpatrick descendants. Among them, John Pitner, Helen’s great-nephew and one of Lyman’s grandsons, has the greatest sense of the family’s history and lore. He remembers well his grandfather’s study with its many photographs of Lyman posed with the famous, especially the one with General Patton. Although Lyman never shared his career experiences with Pitner directly, the grandson sensed his grandfather’s august personal history all the same. Lyman’s demeanor, Pitner said, was “stern,” almost the opposite of “Aunt Pat.” He recalled a trip to Jackson Hole she organized with him and another grandnephew, both preteens, when she was about 77. Both boys were in the back seat as she careened into the passing lane of the main two-lane road into town and whizzed past an interminable line of stalled traffic as the oncoming cars came perilously close. “You’re not going to make it,” the fly-fishing guide in the front passenger seat said. “Yes, I am,” she replied.

From his grandfather’s books, Pitner knew well the paramount importance Lyman placed on “keeping secrets secret. I’m certain [Helen] would have been of the same mind,” he said. “Also, her character was such that she didn’t brag or otherwise bring up her numerous exploits and connections unless specifically asked.” His mother, one of Lyman’s four children, had the same sense. Was his Aunt Pat a spy? She never spoke of the matter, and neither Pitner nor his mother has any knowledge about the question one way or the other. However, he said, neither of them would be surprised to learn that she was.

“I do see the potential for an interesting Hollywood story,” Pitner mused. “Given the lack of factual proof (thus far), it might include ‘based on a true story’ in the opening credits. At any rate, maybe you can send me an extra ticket to the premiere!”