The Associated Press: Spy tales: a TV chef, Oscar winner, JFK adviser

Read More Here: "WASHINGTON (AP) — Where do you look when you want to recruit spies? Just about everywhere, judging from the formerly top-secret records of the World War II agency that became today's CIA.

There was the young woman who became TV chef Julia Child. And labor lawyer Arthur Goldberg who became a Supreme Court justice. And young scholar Arthur Schlesinger who became a presidential adviser.

Not to mention a codes enthusiast who later ran CBS, an Oscar-winning Hollywood director and the sons of Ernest Hemingway and Teddy Roosevelt.

Names and details on nearly 24,000 one-time intelligence workers are included among 750,000 formerly top-secret government records released Thursday by the National Archives. The documents describe a worldwide spy network during World War II managed by the Office of Strategic Services, the intelligence outfit that later became the CIA.

The personnel files, long withheld from the public, provide insights into young agents now known for other careers. For instance, when Julia McWilliams, later the ebullient chef, applied to work for the spy agency, she admitted at least one failing: impulsiveness.

At 28 as an advertising manager at W&J Sloane furniture store in Beverly Hills, Calif., she clashed with new store managers and left her job abruptly."