Her SOE report showed that instructors at various stages of her training had described her as having “current knowledge of French conditions, knows the reality of war; tough and committed; always enjoys nothing better than the use of weapons and explosives; says stabbing through the ear with a pencil is a good way to kill a German when he sleeps.”
While Atkins lit another cigarette, she told Jepson that now that Churchill had decided that women agents would combine the roles of wireless operator and courier, Borrel was ideal for the Physician network, which was being set up to replace Autogyro, a Paris-based network that had been penetrated by the Gestapo earlier in the year.
As F Section’s new intelligence officer, Atkins had read the SOE file on Francis Suttill, the agent Buckmaster had chosen to run Physician. Born to a British father and French mother, he had been educated at Stonyhurst College in Lancashire and studied law at the University of Lille in France. In 1931 he moved to London to continue his studies and eventually became a barrister. Buckmaster had met him in the French Club in Mayfair, where he was a member. Buckmaster used the club to find recruits. Buckmaster had decided that Suttill had “a clear intellectual vision and logical perspicacity,” and asked Suttill if he would join the SOE and after training would be prepared to return to France as a link between F Section and the Resistance.
Atkins told Jepson that Suttill’s file described him as “outstanding in all he does.”
Borrel would have a cover story that would give her a key role in the Physician network. She would be the assistant to an agricultural salesman traveling through the departments of central France marketing equipment to farms. Her role would cause no comments in the farming community, where women generally did all the bargaining. She would recruit resisters and identify railway lines that could be sabotaged and places where arms could be dropped.
She had been given the code name Denise. Her identity card listed her as the sister of her employer, Francis Suttill. His code name was Prosper, the fifth-century theologian who preached predestination.
Atkins picked up Borrel’s file, looked at her photo again, and said: “When I first saw her, I knew she had something special to offer.”
It was late evening when Atkins and Jepson continued discussing the remaining files of female agents. Lise de Baissac was born in Mauritius. Vera Leigh was born in Leeds, England, but had been adopted by an American racehorse trainer with stables near Paris. Diana Rowden had been born in London and raised on the Italian Riviera, where her mother had a villa and a yacht named Sans Peur (“Without Fear”). Yolande Beekman was Dutch with a Swiss father. Maureen Patricia “Paddy” O’Sullivan was born in Dublin, the daughter of a French mother who had died of Spanish flu; her father was the editor of the Freeman Journal, an Irish republican newspaper. Denise Bloch was the daughter of a Jewish family in Lyon, France. Violette Szabo was a French national. She had met and married a French Foreign Legion officer who was killed in action. She had written to the War Office saying she wanted to enlist so that she could “avenge my husband’s death.” Each had received a letter inviting them to be interviewed by Jepson.
All had faced a final test near the end of their course at Beaulieu. In the early hours of the morning, an agent would be manhandled to a cellar by two men in Gestapo uniforms. Waiting there were more men in Gestapo uniforms, standing around a table. The agent was shoved to stand at the table. In the corner of the cellar a powerful spotlight would focus on her face. From around the table questions came in harsh German voices, picking apart her cover story, which she had memorized during the course. Any unlikely answer was treated with a slap in the face and threats of torture. The questions came faster, leaving her little time to think. She was told she could have an easy way out if she would tell what she knew. This seemed to go on for hours.
Suddenly the spotlight switched off and the black-out curtain across the window was opened, allowing daylight to flood in. The Gestapo men took off their caps and smiled. They were instructors. One was Kim Philby. Often he told the agent that she had passed the test but should avoid the mistakes made during the interrogation. “The test was designed to save your life in occupied France,” he would say.
After the excitement of Poland, Betty Pack found herself back in Chile with her husband, Arthur, who, after recovering from his illness, had been posted to run the embassy’s commercial section. The Foreign Office felt his old patch in South America would be a good place for him to complete his convalescence and hopefully rebuild his marriage. Betty Pack was listed as what the SIS called a Contact and Source in Place, a CSP.
Initially she passed the time playing with their daughter, Denise, and writing reports on Chile’s German community and on the many prominent Chileans who were supportive of the Nazi cause. These were passed to London with the ambassador’s dispatches. With Arthur busy in his own role, Betty wrote a series of anti-Nazi articles under the pseudonym Elizabeth Thomas for La Nación and the South Pacific Mail. During a visit to New York to see her mother, she met and had an affair with an Irish American officer in US Naval Intelligence, Paul Fairly. She told him she felt very removed from the war in Europe and wanted to get involved. On her return to Chile she told Arthur he could use evidence of her adultery to obtain a divorce. He said there would be no divorce until after the war but agreed they would be free to live their own lives. Betty left him and their daughter, who was now five, to return to New York.
An SIS agent was waiting for her when she arrived. John Pepper was a tall, good-looking Englishman who had been recruited by William Stephenson to work for the British Security Coordination. Pepper had been in the United States since June 1940, working on BSC’s objectives of persuading Americans to join the war and identify those inside America who may be pro-German.
Pepper quickly formally recruited Pack and told her that BSC would give her money to rent an apartment in Washington on O Street, where she would mix with the cream of the city’s diplomatic and political society and write a weekly report on their attitudes, which she would deliver to a BSC contact in a prearranged meeting at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel on Madison Avenue in New York. She was given the codename Cynthia.
Her first mission may well have been a test of her skills; if it was, she passed with flying colors. She was asked to uncover a female agent from a neutral country who was on her way to Britain to make pacifist propaganda for the Nazis. Pack followed the woman, noting her movements and contacts, and the agent was arrested in Bermuda while making her way to Europe onboard a Spanish steamer.
Pack carried out a number of low-grade intelligence-gathering missions until, during the spring of 1941, a man arrived at her apartment and introduced himself as Mr. Williams from the New York office. Pepper had never mentioned him and so Pack was immediately suspicious. She was aware that the FBI had taken an interest in her work, although she did not know that it already had a rapidly expanding file on her social life. Mr. Williams, a small, wiry man who she guessed was in his early forties, knew all about her and her family, as well as about Chile and Poland. He told her “the chief” was very pleased with her. Intrigued, Pack asked Mr. Williams if he knew the chief. “I think I know him well,” said Mr. Williams, with a smile. “He is a terrible chap.”
It was not until she met with Pepper again that she learned her visitor had been none other than William Stephenson himself, Britain’s spymaster in the United States.
Stephenson’s visit had been to size her up for a new and extremely difficult job. It had its seed in a memo Churchill had sent to the SIS outlining his concern with the volume and quality of information received from both the occupied and unoccupied areas of France. “So far as the Vichy Government is concerned, it is not creditable that we have so little information,” Churchill wrote, and asked if SIS agents in the United States could be put to better use. Could Pack be the answer?
Since the fall of France the southern area of the country had been governed by a council of ministers, based in the town of Vichy. The Nazis per
mitted it to retain some diplomatic representation abroad and, as the United States had not yet entered the war against Hitler, Vichy France had a mission in Washington. For the British, standing alone against the tide of Nazi victory, the decisions of the Vichy leaders, Marshal Pétain and Premier Pierre Laval, could be vital.
Churchill was particularly concerned about whether Pétain would hand over the French Mediterranean fleet to the Germans, and about the 300 million dollars worth of gold reserves that the French were holding in Martinique in the West Indies. Stephenson had decided the Embassy of the Republic of France in Washington might be a soft target from which to discover this information. Pack was told to find out everything she could about the people who staffed the embassy, and to ascertain if any of them were suitable for helping her to find out deeper secrets.
Using her maiden name, Elizabeth Thorpe, Betty posed as a journalist and arranged an interview with the ambassador, Gaston Henry-Haye. Her meeting with him also brought her into contact with his press attaché, Charles Brousse. Brousse was a charming and good-looking forty-nine-year-old from Perpignan, who had been married three times. He was attracted to Pack immediately and they arranged to meet again. Pack discovered that he disliked the British but was far from pro-Nazi.
Over a period of months their affair developed with Pack reporting back everything that Brousse told her and even copying the entire contents of his address book. Brousse talked about his hatred of Laval and his fears for his family holdings in southern France, where he was co-owner of a major newspaper group. With his wealth tied up in these assets, he had little cash to spend. He had fallen in love with Pack while trying hard to keep the relationship from his American-born wife, Catherine. The strain was taking its toll. By the end of July, Pack had persuaded Brousse of the importance of providing small bits of information, and he began providing daily intelligence reports, which she sent to the BSC in New York.
Pack worked hard to keep Brousse motivated as a subagent, using Vichy support for Japan in the Pacific to persuade him to pass her in-clear copies of all cipher telegrams dispatched and received by the embassy. When the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor on December 7, she won him over completely to the Allied side. From then on, Vichy cables obtained by Pack arrived on Roosevelt’s desk within hours of their transmission.
Soon Pack would have a new contact in the OSS itself, and her relationship with Brousse would be key to an upcoming operation that would help protect thousands of American lives.
In March 1942 Betty Pack, SIS agent Cynthia, received an urgent call from her BSC handler, John Pepper, and rushed to meet him at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in New York. He told her London wanted the Vichy French naval ciphers and asked if she could get them. The request startled her, but the urgency in Pepper’s voice told her the only answer would be that she could.
The mission meant so much to London because of Churchill’s urgent need to find out what Laval planned to do with the French fleet. Defensive action by the French fleet under Vichy orders would endanger an invasion of North Africa and could cost thousands of American lives—Americans would provide the vast majority of the invasion force. The French naval ciphers were now a target for the OSS as well as the SOE. The two services quickly decided to pool resources.
Since Churchill had returned from visiting Stalin, the Soviet leader had continued to press the prime minister to open a second front to ease the pressure German forces were putting on the Soviet troops. Roosevelt’s military commanders had favored a landing in occupied Europe “as soon as possible.” Britain’s military leaders had convinced Churchill that such an invasion at that stage of the war could end in disaster. In the arguments between London and Washington it was finally agreed that an attack on French North Africa would drive out Axis powers from the region, improve Britain’s naval control of the Mediterranean, and prepare the way for an invasion of southern Europe, which would satisfy Stalin. Roosevelt had reluctantly agreed. It would be called Operation Torch.
Knowing what the Vichy French would do would require intelligence gathering. The secret code books in the Vichy government embassy in Washington were the key to unlocking their actions. Obtaining them fell to Pepper as Stephenson’s assistant in New York, and he enlisted the help of Betty Pack, “a spy with no morals,” as he later described her.
Pepper told Pack she would now have a new permanent liaison with the OSS, a Mr. Hunter. His real name was Colonel Ellery C. Huntingdon, a former Wall Street attorney with a confident, paternal manner and a soft Tennessee accent. Through Huntingdon, Pack’s new American chain of command led to James R. Murphy, head of the OSS branch of counterespionage, and then to Bill Donovan, who was Huntingdon’s squash partner as well as his boss.
Pack moved into an apartment in the Wardman Park Hotel in Washington, where Brousse and his wife were staying. It was close to the Vichy embassy. She quickly shared the details of her mission with Brousse, who told her getting to the naval ciphers was impossible. Only the chief cipher officer, a man named Benoit, could get into the locked code room, and the room containing the cipher book was always locked when not in use. Brousse had no access to the rooms, and a watchman guarded the embassy premises. Benoit, Pack discovered, was nearing retirement and was confused about his loyalties to Vichy. She approached him, but he refused to help. When Benoit retired, she assumed a false name and approached his replacement, a young aristocrat known to be anti-Nazi. But he too refused to cooperate.
Now her mind turned to burglary. She had walked near the embassy a number of times and had worked out that the safe in which the ciphers were kept was in a room on the ground floor. It had a window overlooking a small stretch of lawn that was shaded by trees. Pack went to New York, where she told Pepper and Huntingdon that she could enter the window via a ladder placed against the wall. She could pass the cipher books out to an accomplice who could photograph them and return them. On a dark night, it would be easy, she told them. The plan seemed crude but simple enough to work. It fell in line with what the OSS was calling “black bag” jobs, targeting diplomats and pilfering code books, and Huntingdon also knew that accessing the codes had been made even more urgent by events in France; Marshal Pétain had been replaced as head of the Vichy government by pro-Nazi Pierre Laval, whose stated aim was a “reconciliation between France and Germany.”
Huntingdon said Pack’s room at the Wardman Park Hotel would become the base for planning, and he had it swept for listening devices by an OSS operative, who turned up unannounced in the disguise of a pest control worker.
Over the following days Huntingdon, Brousse, and Pack spent hours going over a floor plan of the embassy and honing the plan. Huntingdon rented another room in the hotel for an OSS security team; they brought camera equipment to the apartment to rehearse copying the ciphers and made sure an OSS safecracker would be available for the night of the burglary. A former jailbird, he would receive $1,000 for the job. Brousse checked out the window in the code room to see how easily it could be opened. Pack began to “stroll home” at the same time each night and call a friendly hello to the night watchman. She was looking to establish a reason for being in the area on the night of the burglary, but her actions helped Brousse form an amendment to the plan. Brousse decided to confide in the guard that Pack was his lover and that they had nowhere to meet. He easily persuaded the man that they could spend some evenings together in Brousse’s office in the embassy. Each night as they left they gave the guard a cheery merci for allowing them some time alone. They would not need to burgle the embassy after all; copying the documents would be an inside job.
Late in the evening of June 19, 1942, Brousse and Pack arrived at the embassy with two bottles of champagne and something to celebrate. It was the anniversary of the day they had met, they told the friendly guard, and invited him to join them in a drink. The couple then headed happily to a ground-floor room where they had been spending each evening. After a while Brousse checked on the guard and found him fast asleep. The champagne had conta
ined a dose of Nembutal, which would keep him asleep for six hours. His dog had been drugged too. Everything was going according to plan.
Brousse went to the front door and let in the safecracker. He unlocked the naval attaché’s office door and began work on the safe. Before he started, Pack made a note of the original settings so the dial could be returned to its place. The safecracker started work at one in the morning, but by the time he opened the safe it was almost four. There was not time to get the books to Wardman Park, have them copied, and returned before the arrival of the embassy’s early morning cleaning staff. A dejected Pack held the two code books for a moment before returning them to the safe.
Two nights later they tried again, but this time the safecracker was unavailable and Pack had to try to open the safe herself. She had a note of the combination, but the door would not open. The ciphers again remained beyond their reach. Pack was brought to New York, where the safecracker told her what had happened. She had the correct combination but had failed to wait for the tumblers to fall into place before moving the dial again. It was a trick of the trade she could never have known.
Shadow Warriors of World War II Page 14