A Woman I Know: Female Spies, Double Identities and a New Story of the Kennedy Assassination

Filmmaker Haverstick’s head-spinning debut recounts her investigation of Jerrie Cobb (1931–2019), a celebrated aviatrix and one of the 13 women who passed NASA’s qualification tests in the early 1960s but were never admitted to the space program. After befriending Cobb while prepping a movie about her life, Haverstick became convinced that Cobb had a secret identity as June Cobb, a CIA asset with a remarkably similar biography—they were from the same Oklahoma town, undertook similar aviation training and travels in Latin America, and even had similar clavicle scars. (Pictures of the two women look nothing alike, but Haverstick chalks the discrepancy up to CIA deception.) Among other exploits, Haverstick credits Jerrie—as June—with spying on Fidel Castro while working undercover as his secretary, orchestrating assassination plots against Castro and Congolese leader Patrice Lumumba, and being the mysterious figure known as “the Babushka” seen in film footage of John F. Kennedy’s assassination, where she supposedly fired the fatal head shot with a camera-pistol. (Complicating things further, Haverstick suggests that Jerrie was also Kennedy’s mistress.) Haverstick presents exhaustive timelines showing that Jerrie and June were never in two different locations at once, and her narrative is full of captivating intrigue—she suspects Jerrie once served her a bowl of poisoned strawberries—but it creates more puzzles than it solves. The result is a colorful but far-fetched account of the Kennedy assassination. (Nov.)