WOODBRIDGE, Va. (WUSA) --- They can still keep their mouths shut, these two women who were among the few females working in the spying Office of Strategic Services, The OSS, in World War II.
Ask what they did after the war, and 96-year-old Elizabeth, "Betty" McIntosh and 88-year-old Doris Bohrer will say they worked for the CIA, but that's about it.
"I'm afraid that's still, well, can't talk about it," McIntosh told 9News Now.
"I think its still rather sensitive and it wouldn't be fair to the people I worked with,"she added.
Although the two women each worked for both spy agencies, they didn't meet until they ended up in the same retirement community here.
"It helps when you've got somebody who knows what you're talking about," said Bohrer.
"We compare what we've done, not bragging but just remembering," said McIntosh.
McIntosh was in Hawaii, working as a journalist, when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, and a photographer called to give her the news.
"So we went into Honolulu and all the way in people were walking their dogs and it was all just a normal, beautiful Sunday Morning. And we got into Honolulu and then you began to get the tenseness of it.
"The trucks had already put stuff over their headlights and things like that.
"I was not able to go out to Pearl on the first day because I was a woman, but the next day I did get out and I saw the ships that were turned over, upside down, and all those men were in there and they still are, some of them, and it was so tragic a thing to see," McIntosh told 9News Now.
Months later, after she joined OSS, it was Japanese soldiers who were in the water because of one of her missions in Burma.
"I used to do errands for other people, besides writing operations material, and one time a chap came up and said he wondered if I would take a piece of coal to this station and give it to a certain Chinese who would come up to me.
"So, I went down to the station and waited around and some Chinese came up and nodded to me and held his hand out and I gave him this piece of coal. It was about just the size that I could it in my fist, and he took it and turned and left. ...
"This piece of coal had dynamite in it and the Chinese took it to a place where Japanese troops were going across a large lake, and there were a couple of hundred of them on this boat, and the fellow that had the coal got on the boat and put the coal --- it was a kind of a furnace where they powered the boat--- It was coal-burning, and the boat exploded with all of the soldiers in it in the middle of the lake. Meanwhile, the Chinese had jumped out before it went up," McIntosh said.
Bohrer has a less explosive explosives story that followed the annoying tricks played on her by men who wondered what a "girl" was doing abroad in a time of war and who, she says, often treated her as if she was 12 years old.
"They used to give me a hard time. They were just great, like a big gang of brothers and I loved them all," she said, as she spoke of getting revenge.
"There were a lot of Partisan females north of us a little bit," she said of her time in northern Italy.
"General Tito had a camp in that part of Italy and these great big Partisan women would walk around with these bandoliers, or whatever they call them, with grenades, and they were really big, rough-looking women and I thought, you know, I was very curious about the grenades. What are they doing? What happens if they fall down or something?
"Oh, they won't go off, you have to pull the pin ( the men) told me."
"They treated me sometimes like I was 14 or 12 years old. I mean, I knew what a tank could do. I knew a battleship. I could identify them by types. I knew a lot about armaments and stuff, but they would always treat me like i was just a child and (as if ) I didn't know much about anything.
"So, I had a friend who was an engineer and I said 'Buddy, could you dismantle a grenade and fix it so it will click when I pull then pin and it won't blow up?' He said "Sure, that's not any trouble at all.'
"I said I just wanted to fix these guys. They've been laughing at me for a long time now."
"He says "OK" and he gave it to me I hooked it on my belt, on my pants, and went to lunch and sat down.
"I took this hand and pulled the pin with the other and sat it down in front of them and they went out the windows and doors and I'm sitting there laughing my head off, eating my lunch.
"And I said "Where have you guys been? You're not afraid of a little grenade are you?... I thought it was hilarious. 'It's funnier than some of the tricks you pull on me,"' she said.
It was welcome comic relief from work that was deadly serious.
"I was trained to be a photo interpreter, and using photographs was a new tool that they developed on the desert for tactical purposes, and it worked very well.
"Instead of wondering how many tanks were over the sand dunes, they could fly out there and take pictures of them and have them and it was very helpful on a campaign in North Africa .
"My classmates were all majors or captains who had been architects or engineers, so I had a bit of work to do since I was only 19 years old. Add to that that the colonel wasn't really happy to see me and my companion. The two of us were sent up there ( to a training facility in Pennsylvania).
" He said, 'I don't know how you got here or why but if you're going to be in my school you're going to do everything everybody else does. If you're some politicians daughter who is here for kicks you're mistaken.
This is very serious business that we're doing.'"
"So, I went through the course and he called the two of us in when the course was over. He said 'I owe you an apology. You've done very well here in school. I would be glad to have you on my staff anytime."'
"When I got over to Italy I was working primarily for the 15th Air Force, and they flew missions and they flew airplanes to take pictures after the missions, and ... the photographs came back to headquarters, to the intelligence section where I worked, and we a had to look and see what had happened, what they hit, what they didn't hit. Did they get the bridge today or whatever. You were pretty much aware of how successful you had been," Bohrer said.
Bohrer left intelligence work after Word War Two, but the new Cold War left the American community in need of her skills.
"The Pentagon got a trainload of photography that they had captured from the Germans, photography of the Soviet Union. We didn't have much of that photography so they called anybody who had training back to active duty to look at this stuff and see what was going on," she said.
The two women live on the same street and visit each other frequently, talking on the phone every day and dining together often.
McIntosh's home has the American flag flying just outside her door.
"I'm so proud of it. I just want it to be there. It stands for everybody I've known, worked with, and loved, and it's part of my life," she said.