A Woman I Know

December 18, 2023
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.

December 15, 2023
A cat-and-mouse search for a woman's identity opens onto a shadowy corner of the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Filmmaker Haverstick's title is ironic, for the woman in question--Jerrie Cobb--is essentially unknowable. An unsung participant in NASA's Mercury program, she was trained as an astronaut along with a dozen other women volunteers: "She'd been the first to ace the physical exams and had then gone on to tackle flight simulators, endurance tests, and spatial orientation studies, something the others hadn't done." When NASA scrubbed the women's program, deeming men alone to be potential astronaut material, Cobb faded into the woodwork. Not quite: She logged time in Cuba as a supposed confidant of Fidel Castro, turned up in Mexico at the same time as Lee Harvey Oswald, explored the headwaters of the Amazon and advocated for its Indigenous peoples, spoke Spanish fluently--and was a CIA agent. Or was she? Cobb, a skilled pilot, was also on the tarmac at the Dallas airport as Oswald was making his way there, apparently to be transported elsewhere. Complicating the picture is a chain of false identities, pseudonyms, and the possible existence of another woman of the same skill set and physical appearance named June Cobb. "If Jerrie's life was intertwined with June Cobb's as a CIA cover," writes the author, "then Lee Harvey Oswald was a covert player in intelligence, too." Haverstick takes a few speculative steps into the engineers of the assassination--maybe Castro, maybe the Mafia, maybe renegade intelligence insiders. No definitive answer emerges, of course, but meanwhile, Jerrie Cobb's fascinating life reveals her to be "a spy, an explorer, a gambler, an astronaut, an illusionist, a narcissist, and a con"--and, to say the least, a puzzle. Assassination buffs and students of spycraft will find this intriguing and endlessly enigmatic.

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