Eileen Glover Whitlock worked in mysterious ways.
She never lectured her children about the dangers of drugs, but instead left studies around the house on the effects of drug abuse on adolescents.
She quietly bought an acre of property on Cape Cod, thinking decades ahead to when she could use it as a vacation home.
Oh, and she didn’t really do contract work with battery manufacturers.
Eileen Glover Whitlock (Photo: Family Photo)
As the Washington Post reports in a recent obituary, Whitlock, a Teachers College alumna who died in May and a Black, single mother, was a technical advisor to the Central Intelligence Agency.
Eileen Grover Whitlock, who was born during the Depression and adopted as a child, earned her bachelor’s degree from Virginia Union University and her master’s degree in psychology from TC. She began a grant-funded project at what is now the New York State Psychiatric Institute and later worked at the Creedmoor Psychiatric Center in Queens and a drug research facility in Brooklyn. She became a CIA technical adviser in 1978, training as a biochemist.
She always had a plan. She was always pulling the strings in our lives, whether we knew it or not.
— Warren Whitlock, in The Washington Post
Whitlock died at age 90 from complications related to COVID-19.
“She always had a plan,” recalls her son, Warren Whitlock, a former deputy assistant secretary of the U.S. Army, in the Post piece. “She was always pulling the strings in our lives, whether we knew it or not. She planned, she thought things out, she embraced everybody and valued honesty and fairness. She’s in everything I am and do now.”