Tangled Webs: Knitting for espionage During Times of Conflict

When people think about espionage, the James Bond archetype usually comes to mind – mysterious aliases, cool cars, cold indifference, and nifty gadgets. What they don’t think about are the more mundane ways in which real spies have conducted operations throughout history.

Knitting for a Cause

During both World Wars, knitting was a popular form of espionage among female spies, allowing them to transmit messages under the guise of a seemingly benign activity. This was at a time when society largely perceived women as meek and subordinate to their male counterparts.

Intelligence organizations were quick to exploit the public’s underestimation of women, however. Throughout World War I, European powers employed elderly Belgian matriarchs to transmit valuable information about the adversary. These women would intentionally alter their knitting patterns—such as dropping a stitch or creating a bump—to encode messages about enemy troop movements. The women would then pass these coded garments to resistance fighters, who could decipher the information and use it to their advantage.

The simplicity and universality of knitting made it an effective medium for encoding messages in binary, where a dropped stitch might mean a zero and a textured bump might correlate to a one. Spies of the past were known for incorporating these simple patterns into garments and textiles to convey details about positions, combat plans, and other operational intelligence.

Famous Knitting Spies

No story would be complete without its characters. During each World War, a handful of women stood out for the unique tactics they utilized while knitting as spies. History has recognized these individuals as truly exemplary in their efforts and courage.

Phyllis Latour Doyle

Phyllis Latour Doyle was a British secret agent during World War II. She spent her time in service knitting as a cover, passing code in secret. But her journey was more than a walk in the park. She parachuted into occupied Normandy in 1944. Once there, she would ride about on a bike, flirting with German soldiers and covertly collecting intelligence. Then, she would take to her needlework, etching what she learned into fabric for recipients in morse code.

Elizabeth Bentley

American Elizabeth Bentley built up quite a post-war reputation as a knitting spy. Her actions, however, were not on what many would call the “right side” of history. She operated two, separate espionage rings that would regularly relay damaging information about the United States back to officials in Moscow. She even went so far as to smuggle sensitive documents in her knitting bag to and from drop points connected to the Kremlin.

Madame Levengle

A third maven of the craft went by the name of Madame Levengle. Her ruse involved a more complicated method of espionage. Levengle would sit at her window watching troop movements while knitting, her children would listen for their mom’s foot taps, as they pretended to engage in schoolwork. These taps would indicate troop movements, which the children would then translate to writing, and subsequently pass off to the Allies. 

Historical Recruiting Efforts

Many nongovernmental organizations promoted knitting as a patriotic pastime during both wars. The American Red Cross promoted an intense marketing campaign, calling upon women to take up knitting as a way of creating clothes for soldiers on the front lines. In reality, these calls to action were nothing more than clever ways to recruit mothers, sisters and wives as spies against the Germans. 

Concealed Communication Today

The practice of using knitted goods to convey codes and signals is an example of steganography, the word used to describe hiding messages within innocuous-looking items. Steganography is still used today when traditional communication channels are compromised or under surveillance. 

In more modern applications, steganography is used regularly on the digital frontier. Cyber hackers today use “covered” communication to transmit malicious code, tunneling protocols or display instructions, sight unseen. A simple example might look like one terrorist sending attack coordinates to another using an image instead of text to avoid detection.

Conclusion

Like knitting, any humdrum task can be used to disguise espionage in plain sight. While modes of communication have grown increasingly sophisticated, sometimes the simplest ones remain the most effective, especially among spies.

To read more about knitting agents of the 20th century, click here: https://getpocket.com/explore/item/the-wartime-spies-who-used-knitting-as-an-espionage-tool?utm_source=firefox-newtab-en-us

To learn about codes and signaling still in play today, check out this article from the Central Intelligence Agency: https://www.cia.gov/stories/story/smoke-and-mirrors-the-magic-of-spycraft/