Unfortunately, Mary Haverstick’s mesmerizing A Woman I Know: Female Spies, Double Identities, and a New Story of the Kennedy Assassination was overshadowed on its release in the fall of 2023 by the competing memoir from former Secret Service agent Paul Landis, The Final Witness. And that’s a shame, because A Woman I Know is required reading not only for those within the JFK research community, but also for the intellectually curious, who care about our fading past as a country, and for anyone who simply desires spending time with well-written nonfiction prose.
Mary Haverstick did not embark on her decade-plus journey to tell the story of aviatrix phenom Jerrie Cobb by intending to write a story about the assassination. She knew next to nothing at first about what the book became — a story of spies, their codes, their alter egos, culminating in Dealey Plaza on November 22, 1963 — and it is that refreshing perspective that first hooks us into what she is compelled to share. Haverstick is a born storyteller; she is an independent filmmaker based in Pennsylvania who wanted to tell Cobb’s story as an aviation pioneer as a narrative feature film (something not unlike the 2016 Oscar-nominated hit Hidden Figures). Cobb nearly became the first woman in space decades before Sally Ride, and an aged Cobb cooperated with Haverstick on supporting the filmmaker’s plan to bring Cobb’s story to the screen.
Their friendship, a cat-and-mouse game with sometimes frightening moments, is the emotional core of the book, and continues even after Haverstick suspects not all is what appears to be when it comes to Jerrie Cobb. Gradually, Haverstick’s focus changed, and we are brought along for what Haverstick finds.
This may be the most important work on the assassination to come out at least this decade.
After strange encounters with a “high ranking woman from the Department of Defense,” who went so far as to warn Haverstick about the film project, Haverstick informally looked into any possible ties between Jerrie Cobb and the CIA. The more Haverstick googled, the more shadowy light flickered from a wilderness of mirrors: the names June Cobb, Fidel Castro, William King Harvey, Lee Harvey Oswald, and a highly mysterious intelligence operative whose moniker is enshrined in assassination lore — QJWIN.
But before jumping into all that jargon, it should be mentioned that this is a story by a woman about women; Haverstick fixes her attention not on the usual suspects but the movement and motivations of certain women. This puts characters like Syliva Duran, Ruth Paine, Marilyn Murret, and Judith Campbell in new light. Haverstick joins the litany of women investigators who sensed all was not right with the murder of the nation’s 35th president in his own country and delved into the deep to expose it: Dorothy Kilgallen, Sylvia Meagher, Mary Ferrell, Mae Brussel, Joan Mellen, Lisa Pease, Leslie Sharp, Elizabeth Gould and hosts of others. Not to mention all of the archivists and librarians the world over. The female voice is integral to the narrative of A Woman I Know — it enabled Haverstick to develop a relationship with Jerrie Cobb in the first place.
And through this point-of-view we see how integral women are in the JFK case, and Haverstick wonders if someone like an Elena Garro de Paz, who claimed to witness Oswald in Mexico City in the company of others — not the lone wolf as the Warren Commission would paint him — would not have been so disregarded because of her gender (Garro’s treatment during the HSCA investigation as detailed by Haverstick is particularly crushing).
And the most integral of all is the one capable of disappearing behind identities, countries, codenames, and cover stories: Jerrie Cobb…or shall we call her June Cobb? June, the CIA agent who, like Jerrie, like David Ferrie, like Lee Oswald was a Civil Air Patrol veteran, and like Lee Oswald entangled herself within the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, and who like Jerrie, was an Oklahoman native. Haverstick lays out remarkable timelines arguing that the two Cobbs were the same person. Only reading the book will do justice to what Haverstick implies through documents, timelines, checklists, phone logs, skin markings, and above all, what Jerrie tells Haverstick — and what she does not.
It is an explosive book, painstakingly researched, with implications that incite rage at our nation’s intelligence apparatus, its fixation on Cuba, and its tragic tendency to resort to assassination to achieve its clandestine goals.
Haverstick does not necessarily exonerate Oswald, however, in the murders of the president and Officer Tippit. She does argue, though, that QJWIN not only positions Oswald as the fall guy, but that QJWIN, alias June Cobb, alias Jerrie Cobb, participated in the killing at Dealey Plaza — in the form of the mysterious Babushka Lady, positioned thirty-three feet from President Kennedy when the fatal shot struck him in the head.
Haverstick spends the last of the book on this supposition, and carefully lays out her argument. It is not a haphazard proposition. She posits the Babushka Lady fired upon the president from a weapon concealed in her camera. This may seem outrageous, and is certainly the bulk of the talk of the book online, but it’s really the logical conclusion to the high strangeness and idiosyncrasies that precede everything leading up to it. After all, Jerrie Cobb was in Dallas on the day, which she admits, June Cobb was in Mexico City when Oswald was purportedly there, and QJWIN was working under the CIA’s William King Harvey at Division D — the department under which ZRRIFLE was carried out: the top-secret plan to carry out nothing short of assassination (“executive action” in Harvey’s terms).
To accomplish this, Harvey ostensibly looked to his underworld crony Johnny Roselli and his mob associates, Sam Giancana, Tampa godfather Santo Trafficante, and eventually Meyer Lansky, who had been banished from Cuba, and were eager to resume shoring up the lucrative take from Havana casinos.
But that’s only a cover story, Haverstick argues. Roselli and Giancana certainly factor into the narrative of A Woman I Know, but not without the guidance of QJWIN. Another cover story — the identity of Judith Campbell, supposedly paramour to both Giancana and JFK. Is Jerrie Cobb again at the heart of the matter? And besides, from whom was JFK speechwriter Richard N. Goodwin, the “one man state department on Latin America,” getting his information, if not his speeches? Haverstick puts forth an entirely reasonable argument that June Cobb managed sway to influence policy in both the Nixon and Kennedy campaigns.
It’s quite simple, really. Masked in the labyrinth of Cold War espionage, under the guidance of “America’s James Bond,” W.K. Harvey, layered with codes (i.e. Baden-Baden, Germany for Dallas, Texas), all under the additional cover of a witting media (Life) versed in concealing stomach-churning covert actions by selling the public American pie sweetness.
“The one sure way to do it, or at least the only one close to having a chance at secure success, was to simply appoint a single senior officer to do everything: to run the operation, kill the person, bury the body, and tell no one.”
— William King Harvey, Church Committee interview, 1975
Haverstick writes, “ZRRIFLE was born on January 26, 1961.” If this pertained to JFK, as Haverstick implies, then plotting happened even before the Bay of Pigs.
Finally, Haverstick makes mention throughout of Harvey’s “The Magic Button,” which Haverstick described as a “pistol-like contraption with a triggering mechanism shooting something forward.” Was this the weapon the Babushka Lady/QJWIN/June Cobb/Jerrie Cobb fired at the exact moment the president’s head exploded?
We can go on. The book deserves serious consideration. Will anyone stand up and dispute the claims? Is the very real possibility that a rogue element of the CIA decided that our chief executive could not and must not steer from the hardline anti-communism that was the intelligence community’s chief existence — the existence of the Cold War in general — and relied on a woman to carry it out? Is this what has been at the root of the coverup for six decades?
And is there any significance to Lee and Marina Oswald naming their first daughter June?
It’s a question Mary Haverstick admits will forever haunt her.