Nothing in Mary Bancroft's privileged but conventional background hinted that during World War II she would work for Allen Dulles--then head of OSS Switzerland and later director of the CIA--or that she would become romantically involved with him, and act as a special contact with a group of Germans who were plotting to kill Hitler. Nor could she have known that she would study and work with Carl Gustav Jung, the eminent psychoanalyst. Indeed, as a teenager at the end of World War I, Mary Bancroft feared that she might lead a dull life. She needn't have worried.
Daughter of a Boston Brahmin father--a publisher of the Wall Street Journal--and an Irish-Catholic mother, she left Smith College after one year and began an unhappy marriage to a childhood sweetheart. The couple moved to New York, where they became immersed in the worlds of Wall Street finance, journalism, and the arts. After a divorce Mary Bancroft settled in Zurich with her daughter and second husband, and wrote for Swiss newspapers.
Fascinated by the then unfamiliar theories of Dr. Jung, she began to attend his lectures, and embarked upon a friendship with him that later proved invaluable in her intelligence work.
After the United States entered World War II, Allen Dulles asked her to analyze articles published in the German press. Her work became considerably more sensitive when Dulles made her a speical agent and put her in touch with Hans Bernd Gisevius, the representative of the "20th of July" plotters against Hitler.
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