The Last Goodnight
Page 1
Contents
Dedication
Epigraph
A Note to the Reader
Part I STORMING THE CASTLE Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Part II “A TERRIBLE RESTLESSNESS” Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Part III “HIDDEN IN MY YESTERDAYS” Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Part IV ENIGMA Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Part V THE LONG WAY HOME Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Part VI WASHINGTON Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Part VII BIG BILL AND LITTLE BILL Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Epilogue
A Note on Sources
Acknowledgments
Bibliography
Index
About the Author
Also by Howard Blum
Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher
“Army Offers Its Fairest Daughter to Society: Miss Betty Thorpe, beautiful daughter of Colonel and Mrs. George Thorpe, who will be the loveliest of the army set to be presented to Washington society this season.” (August 29, 1928)
Reprinted with the permission of The Baltimore Sun Media Group. All rights reserved.
Dedication
For Lynn Nesbit and Bob Bookman
Friends, wise counselors, and magicians who never failed
to pull rabbits out of the hat
Epigraph
The last person to whom you say goodnight is the most dangerous.
—WARNING PASSED ON TO CIA TRAINEES ABOUT THE PERILS LURKING IN THE BEDROOM
Using the boudoir as Ian Fleming’s hero uses a Beretta, she was described by her wartime boss as “the greatest unsung heroine of the war.”
—“A BLONDE BOND,” TIME MAGAZINE’S OBITUARY FOR BETTY PACK
A Note to the Reader
IN THE MAIN BUILDING OF the CIA’s sprawling Virginia campus, past the security guards and the detection machines, up a staircase and at the end of a winding corridor that doglegs to the left, is a windowless conference room. There is no name or number on the door. Inside, it has the feel of a space that might be used for a graduate seminar; there’s a whiteboard on one wall and a table long enough to sit a dozen or so intelligence analysts. But there were only two other people seated at the table on the June day when I was there—a distinguished agency historian and a press officer to watch over both of us. I had come with the hope of picking the scholar’s brain about Betty Pack, the British and American secret agent who had done so much to help the Allies win World War II.
It was, for me at least, a tense conversation. The CIA official knew, I suspected, a lot more than he was revealing, and I had the difficult task of trying to pull the information out of him. But he was a shrewd man who had spent a lifetime guarding secrets; he was not about to make an indiscreet revelation to me. Nevertheless, we both seemed to be enjoying the game until he took offense at something I had said.
I had announced that the book I intended to write would be a true story.
He laughed dismissively, and then launched into a lecture on the epistemology of espionage. Even nonfiction spy stories, to his way of thinking, were a search for ultimately elusive truths. The best that can be hoped for is a reliable hypothesis. No spy tale is ever the whole story; there are always too many unknowns, too many lies being passed off as facts, too many deliberate miscues by one participant or another.
I listened; argued meekly and defensively; and then did my best to move the conversation along to another hopefully more fruitful topic.
And now, having finished writing the nonfiction book that had prompted my visit to the CIA, I want to reiterate to its readers that this is a true story.
I have been able to draw on a treasure trove of information to tell Betty Pack’s story: her memoirs, tape-recorded reminiscences, childhood diaries, and a lifetime of letters; the Office of Strategic Services Papers at the National Archives; Federal Bureau of Investigation files; State Department records; the British Security Coordination official history; Foreign Office archives at the Public Record Office; and interviews with members of both the British and American intelligence services.
And yet I am also forced to acknowledge that there is a cautionary kernel of truth in the CIA scholar’s warning. There are, among the official sources, contradictory versions of events. And another caveat—governments, even more than half a century later, hold on to their secrets. Betty’s sixty-five-page FBI file is heavily redacted; tantalizing files at the National Archives are marked “Security Classified information, withdrawn at the request of a foreign government”; and the files assembled by H. Montgomery Hyde, Betty’s wartime colleague in the British secret service and her first biographer, which were bequeathed to Churchill College, Cambridge, have been edited. Parts of this collection are “closed indefinitely”; individual documents have been removed by intelligence service “weeders”; and some papers have been officially “closed until the year 2041.”
Nevertheless, I reiterate: this is a true story. The narrative, a spy tale and a psychological detective story as well, is shaped by the facts I discovered. When there were two (or more) versions of an incident, I stuck with the one that made the most sense. When dialogue is in quotation marks, it has been directly quoted from a firsthand source. And when I share characters’ internal thoughts—what they’re thinking or feeling—these insights are culled from their memoirs, diaries, or letters. A chapter-by-chapter sourcing follows at the end of this book.
H.B.
Part I
Storming the Castle
Chapter 1
BETTY PACK HAD PLANNED HER escape from the castle with great care. Too often impulsive—her greatest fault, she would frequently concede—she had deliberately plotted this operation with the long-dormant discipline acquired during her dangerous time decades ago in the field. Yet on the blustery morning of March 1, 1963, Betty, otherwise known in the tiny village in the French Pyrenees that lay just beyond the stone walls of the ancient castle as Mme Brousse, the American-born chatelaine of Castelnou, and who in a previous life had been known to an even smaller circle as the agent code-named Cynthia, was having doubts.
Betty had spent diligent months baiting the hook, then repeatedly recasting until it was firmly lodged, but now, just as the time had come to reel in her prey, she was suddenly anxious. She stood at the edge of the castle’s battlement as if on guard, a solitary figure, her gaze absently fixed on the pine forest in the distance, the raw wind charging in from the northwest with the savage shriek of an invading army. But Betty ignored the elements. The mighty wind—the tramontane, as the awed lo
cals called it—was nothing compared to the turmoil that must have been going through her mind.
She was out of practice. She had lost her charm. At fifty-three, she was too old. Worse, she looked too old. It was a delusion, a pathetic, self-indulgent foolishness, to believe that a middle-aged woman could cast the same captivating spell that she had at twenty-nine. Her self-incriminating list went on and on, every charge in its way a pained reiteration of the same fundamental and unimpeachable truism: life, real life, always yields to age.
Then, all at once, Betty found the will. Was it simply a sharp burst of her old courage? A renewed realization that, as she had once written, “happiness never comes from frustration”? Or perhaps she told herself that too much had already been set in motion. There was no turning back.
Betty, Charles, and their driver without their beloved Rolls.
Churchill Archives Center, Papers of Harford Montgomery Hyde, HYDE 02 007
Whatever the reason—or, just as likely, reasons—Betty, as she recalled the energized moment, was suddenly on the move. Without hesitation she made her way down the well-worn stone steps, strode in her long-legged, athletic way across the terrace, where the almond trees were already starting to bloom, and continued through the cobblestone courtyard to the waiting Rolls-Royce. The chauffeur was at the wheel. Her husband, Charles, was already in the back seat, his presence an inspired bit of cover, giving a pretense of legitimacy to the rendezvous that, if all went as she had so painstakingly designed, would soon happen.
Once she’d taken her place on the soft maroon leather back seat next to Charles, the huge old car—it too a well-polished relic of another era—moved slowly forward. The Rolls threaded its way through a narrow stone archway built centuries ago and then headed downhill, away from Castelnou.
Picking up speed, the heavy car bounced along a winding dirt road where back in 1289 the troops of His Majesty James II of Majorca had charged in their bold assault on the seemingly impregnable fortress. Despite the apparent futility of their quest, Betty had heard time after time in the reverential account of the ferocious battle her husband was so fond of telling, the invaders had stormed the castle and won the day.
And now on this windswept morning, as she traveled on the same road as that undaunted medieval army, any lingering anxieties, any troubling uncertainties, any precombat jitters, turned to sand. It was once again wartime, and Betty, the veteran field agent, knew from experience that doubt was one more enemy that must be beaten back. Her confidence returned. Her spirits soared; it was as if she could already see herself rising from the depths and being lifted high above the confining castle walls. Her great escape. Another old spy would come out of his retirement to save her.
WHY WAS THIS OPERATION SO vital? Why was her determination so fierce, her decision to flee so entrenched? Why, in fact, did she want to run? It was a mission with many objectives, some of which Betty could articulate, while others remained beyond her grasp, part of a murky and instinctive logic. Although she could, if pressed, point to key events as catalysts, in truth the impulse had been brewing for a while; and no doubt it had been quietly taking shape for even longer than Betty realized.
Part of what was pushing her was quite simple: she had grown tired of her small, stagnant life. At first the move to the fairy-tale castle sitting so majestically on its lofty perch in the French Pyrenees had loomed as a new adventure. No less appealing to someone so deeply susceptible, it had offered a future sweet with the intoxicating thrill of romance. Charles, suave, gallant, mature, and so very French in his devotion to his passions, had swooped her up after the war and led her out of a staid America.
The castle, she discovered with a childlike delight, was a honeycomb of large, lofty rooms softly lit by candles and warmed by tree-size logs burning nearly year-round in hearths as dark and deep as caves. The adjacent village, a quaint cluster of red-roofed houses, contained a church built when the Holy Roman Empire ruled, presided over by a rotund priest who seemed old enough to have laid the cornerstone, and the obligatory café served up carafes of a cheap, deliciously sweet red that was smuggled in oak barrels across the border from nearby Spain. It would be, Betty told herself, all the community she’d ever require.
After her “vagabond years,” as she called them, and her busy, tense war, she’d persuaded herself, she confided in breezy letters home, that the time had come to slow down and at last settle in. And after a loveless marriage to a dour, thin stick of a man constrained by his rigid British soul and his diplomat’s sense of propriety, life with Charles would, in its unique way, be lush and brimming. Betty had moved into Castelnou with a newlywed’s optimistic excitement.
Yet after having lived day after long day for nearly two decades as mistress of this isolated, anachronistic domain, she had come to see things from a different, troubling perspective. The castle had become a prison of cold, unyielding stone. “I would give anything to leave this castle and go to a small, manageable flat. Fifteen years ago it was a joy, but today it is a great burden,” she wrote to her former sister-in-law.
Château de Castelnou, perched in the French Pyrenees.
Churchill Archives Centre, Churchill Archives Centre Miscellaneous Holdings, MISC 86
The village too had lost its charm. Now it was simply narrow and provincial. And with the passing of the years, Charles had moved on from an appealing maturity to a burdensome old age.
Charles was almost twenty years Betty’s senior by the calendar, and several lifetimes older in his stoic acceptance that the only course left to him was to putter along until the inevitable end of his journey. “We are always here, and never in London or Paris as Charles, now seventy-one, dislikes postwar life in cities,” she moaned in another of the aching, frustrated letters she sent during her captivity.
Their love, too, had evolved with the passing years. Betty’s marriage, as guests to the chateau observed, was comfortable and familiar, an alliance warmed by a cozy and attentive devotion; she’d prop a pillow behind Charles’s back if he was reading on the sunny terrace, or tenderly arrange a shawl across his lap as he sat before the cavernous living room hearth as the night wind blew down the mountains from Spain. It was friendship, and it was companionship. But at the same complicated time, Betty couldn’t help feeling it was no longer enough.
She missed the giddy, electric, all-consuming joy of high passion. Its absence gnawed away, constant and relentless, keeping her on edge, intruding into and disrupting her world. Unsatisfied, she began to think her fairy tale needed a new ending. She prayed for a handsome prince to storm the castle and rescue her.
AND THIS WAS NOT ALL. Her roiling emotions had been further unsettled by two deaths. Each at its time had been unexpected, and each in its tumultuous way had churned up memories and sensations that left her nearly shaking. Betty thought she had successfully suppressed her past, but in the mournful aftermath of these two losses she came to realize that this was one more bit of wishful thinking. Her history, her choices—they were, she understood for the first time, her lingering mysteries.
One death was her mother’s. It was one thing, Betty painfully learned, to understand that your elderly mother will someday die; it was something else entirely to experience her death.
It wasn’t that she had loved her mother, or, for that matter, even liked or respected her. In fact, the lessons Mrs. Cora Thorpe, a shrewd, calculating, rosy-cheeked Washington socialite, had taught Betty were all negatively prescriptive. Betty had lived in a constant state of rebellion against her mother’s ambitious social agenda and prissy maxims about how women of a certain class and born with certain advantages should behave.
Cora Wells Thorpe, Betty’s mother, just before her death.
Churchill Archives Center, Papers of Harford Montgomery Hyde, HYDE 02 011
Initially Betty had felt liberated by Cora’s death, at last free of the pull of her manipulative grasp. With glib detachment, she attempted to consign their combative relationship to the annals of ancient
history. “She disapproved of me, and I disapproved of her,” she confided to a wartime colleague with a seemingly resigned candor. “You might say that she was a Persian cat and I was a Siamese.”
But no sooner had she decided she had come to terms with her mother’s death than it overwhelmed her. Scenes from Betty’s childhood, a glossy world of boarding schools, debutante parties, country clubs, and grand European tours swirled through her mind. In their wake, old wounds were once again raw. From the grave, Cora was still battling with her daughter, and at the end of each round Betty was at a loss. For the first time in their long-running war, Betty felt pangs of regret.
It was her son’s death, though, that pushed Betty to despair. Three months after having won the Military Cross for conspicuous gallantry while leading an assault on a starless night against an enemy position deep in the Korean hill country, Lieutenant Tony Pack had been cut down as he commanded his platoon in another bold charge. He died almost instantly, a twenty-two-year-old hero.
Betty, though, could find little solace in her son’s brave death. Her boy, as handsome in her eyes as a “young Rupert Brooke,” was suddenly gone forever. And with his death, it was as if the carefully constructed walls that had been holding back her maternal guilt for so long came tumbling down too. She could no longer repress, no longer rationalize, what she had done.
The truths were searing: just weeks after Tony’s birth, she and her husband had cavalierly left Tony with a foster family. In all the years that followed, as she flitted to adventures all across the globe, she had made time to visit her son on only three occasions; she had written him only a handful of letters. Now that it was too late, she mourned as though stricken by an immense and powerful remorse.