Fiction Addiction Book Club: A Woman I Know by Mary Haverstick

Fiction Addiction Book Club will be discussing A Woman I Know: Female Spies, Double Identities, and a New Story of the Kennedy Assassination by Mary Haverstick.

The true story of a filmmaker whose unexpected investigation of her film’s subject opened a new window onto the world of Cold War espionage, CIA secrets, and the assassination of John F. Kennedy.

Independent filmmaker Mary Haverstick thought she’d stumbled onto the project of a lifetime — a biopic of a little-known aviation legend whose story seemed to embody the hopeful spirit of the dawn of the space age. But after she received a mysterious warning from a government agent, Haverstick began to suspect that all was not as it seemed. What she found as she dug deeper was a darker story — a story of double identities and female spies, a tangle of intrigue that stretched from the fields of the Congo to the shores of Cuba, from the streets of Mexico City to the dark heart of the Kennedy assassination in Dallas.

As Haverstick attempted to learn the truth directly from her subject in a cat-and-mouse game that stretched across a decade, she plunged deep into the CIA files of the 1950s and 60s. A Woman I Know brings vividly to life the duplicities of the Cold War intelligence game, a world where code names and doubletalk are the lingua franca of spies bent on seeking advantage by any means necessary. As Haverstick sheds light on a remarkable set of women whose high-stakes intelligence work has left its only traces in redacted files, she also discovers disturbing and shocking new clues about what really happened at Dealey Plaza in 1963. Offering new clues to the assassination and a vivid picture of women in mid-century intelligence, A Woman I Know is a gripping real-life thriller.a hero, but somehow she and her father bring about just the kind of miracle the town needs.

Mary Haverstick is a director, writer, and cinematographer. Her most notable work as director was for Home, 2009, which starred Oscar winner Marcia Gay Harden. She is currently chronicling the turbulent political landscape of her home state, Pennsylvania, for her documentary, Tipping Point, PA.