Born: 5 February 1923, United States
Died: 8 August 2016
Country most active: United States, International
Also known as: Doris Sharrar
The following is republished from the Central Intelligence Agency. This piece falls under under public domain, as copyright does not apply to “any work of the U.S. Government” where “a work prepared by an officer or employee of the U.S. Government as part of that person’s official duties” (See, 17 U.S.C. §§ 101, 105).
Doris Sharrar was still a teenager when her family moved from Basin, Wyoming to Silver Spring, Maryland where her father had accepted a government job with the Veterans Administration. She graduated from Montgomery Blair High School in 1940. Following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Doris took the Civil Service exam, and then found herself in the typing pool of the newly-created OSS.
Doris was assigned to clerical work typing intelligence reports, where many newly-minted OSS female employees started, but Doris wanted to do more and quickly advanced. She was selected to attend photo reconnaissance school and was soon posted to Egypt. There she helped to create balsa-wood relief maps of Sicily as the Allies prepared to invade Italy.
Doris continued working in aerial intelligence, gathering information about German military movements and locations of arms factories. She was posted to Bari, on the Adriatic coast, working jointly with the 15th Air Force.
Surrounded by military men with side arms, who teased and mocked her for being a female “spy”, Doris asked to carry a side arm as well. At first the military turned down her request, but eventually relented and issued her a weapon. She also asked to carry a hand grenade, as many of her military cohorts did at the time. When her request was denied, she had an engineer friend fashion a dud grenade, which she displayed while eating in the mess hall one day. An officer who happened to see the dud grenade demanded that she turn it over to him. Doris refused, and slammed it on the table while reaching for the pin—making all the men in the mess hall jump out the windows. Smiling, Doris sat back and continued eating her lunch in peace.
Doris met her husband, OSS officer Charles Bohrer, while serving overseas, and after the war the couple joined the newly-created CIA. After many years of dedicated service, she retired in 1979 as deputy chief of counterintelligence. In the 80s and 90s, she switched gears and sold real estate in Old Town, Alexandria. She also bred and raised prize-winning poodles on the side. Charles passed away in 2007, and two years later, she moved to the retirement village of Westminster at Lake Ridge—where she would meet a fellow widow and OSS alum Elizabeth “Betty” McIntosh.