by Howard Blum
Why had she behaved that way? How could she be so passionate in her feelings about so many things, and at the same time so heartless? How could she betray all that she should have cared about so easily? Why were her allegiances—to Tony, to her first husband, to Charles, to her mother, to the life she had made at Castelnou—all so fugitive, so ephemeral? The answers to this sudden storm of questions hovered beyond her grasp.
Betty decided she needed clarity. The time, she felt, had come for her to find the reasons for the life she had led, the things she had done, the choices she had made. For her own peace of mind, she needed to discover why she had so routinely let down those she had loved, while serving her spymasters with such loyalty and devotion. She wanted to understand why she had been such a flawed wife, daughter, and mother—and yet such a perfect spy.
The knowledge was out there, she felt. But first she would have to escape from the confines of the life she was living. She just needed her chance.
Chapter 2
HER OPPORTUNITY APPEARED WITHOUT WARNING, and Betty, now that her mind was firmly set, did not hesitate. At the same time she also realized that she could not rush things; she would need to play the operation long. And here her tradecraft was impeccable. Betty, always so artful when it came to seduction, kept things casual, offhanded—until the moment came to pounce.
In the fall of 1962 the daughter of a wartime colleague had sent her a clipping from the London Sunday Times. It was an extract from a just-published biography of her cunning old boss, Sir William Stephenson, the director of Britain’s then largely unheralded intelligence activities in America during the tense years leading up to the attack on Pearl Harbor, as well as after. And tucked prominently into this news-making exposé was a glimpse into the derring-do exploits of a tenacious female agent, a woman who in the name of king, country, and the Allied cause had nearly single-handedly won the war in one bedroom after another. The agent was primly identified by only her code name—“Cynthia.”
The author was Harford Montgomery Hyde, and Betty knew him too. On a sticky August afternoon in 1941 she had arrived to meet one of her handlers for her weekly debriefing in a bleak midtown Manhattan hotel room, and Hyde, another British agent, had appeared as an observer. He didn’t talk much; this was the handler’s show to run. But despite his silence he made an impression: a tall, confident man in a captain’s uniform with piercing dark eyes, a ready smile, and an Irish lilt to his voice that he seemed intent on disguising.
After the meet, her handler remained behind, and Betty and Hyde had walked together up Madison Avenue. Hyde was staying at the Ritz-Carlton before he shipped off on a new mission that, constrained by a veteran fieldman’s sense of operational security, he avoided mentioning. As for Betty, she had a flight to Washington to catch; she too had her own covert assignment. When they parted at the hotel entrance, he said, “I expect we shall see each other again soon.”
They never did; wartime had its own unpredictable demands. But she had never forgotten the young intelligence officer, or the almost dizzying pull he had exerted on her in that single encounter.
And now, a lifetime later, he was writing about her. She was astonished.
With a shock of recognition, Betty read on. There were, she’d marvel, “direct quotes from some of my reports.” Hyde, she realized, “must have had direct access to my dossiers.” It seemed impossible to her that “official secrets” could be so wantonly shared with the public. But then again, she asked herself, was it any less improbable that a corner of her secret life would become so very public just as she was struggling to understand it?
By the time she had finished reading the excerpt in the Times, the course of the entire operation she would launch had sprung fully blown into her mind. She hunted for the address of the book’s London publisher and went to work. Her initial pass at her target was a brief, seemingly innocuous letter.
15th November 1962
Dear Mr. Montgomery,
I have received from a friend a clipping about your book . . . I am already filled with nostalgia for the happiest days of my life. . . .
As for our meeting that August afternoon in 1941, I recall it well. . . . It would be a great pleasure to see you again. You belong to that happy period that even in wartime exists for those who have a common cause. . . .
Yours ever, most sincerely
“Cynthia”
(Mme Charles Brousse)
When a surprisingly quick reply came in the post, Betty’s confidence undoubtedly soared: the operation was moving forward. The one obstacle to her plan was Hyde’s suggestion that she and her husband might meet him on their next trip to London or Paris. It was an inflexible precept of fieldwork that the agent running the show set the terms of the meet, and Betty was determined not to lose control. She promptly laid down the law, but at the same time also shrewdly ratcheted up the promise of what she had to offer.
December 12, 1962
Dear Mr. Montgomery,
As it is a long time ago, I may perhaps be allowed to make a confession now. After our meeting, I wanted very much to see you again. . . . I have thought of you many times since. . . . Can you imagine, therefore, how happy I am to be in touch with you again? And how happy I should be to see you again? For the most part we are always here, and never in London or Paris. . . . The only hope I have of seeing you rests with you. If you should come to the Pyrenees, we would give you a happy time and would take you to S’Agaro (Costa Brava) for a day of pure paradise.
I cannot tell you how much I would like you to come, because I want to be with you, listen to you, absorb your presence.
Always yours,
“Cynthia”
Three long, anxious weeks passed before she received his reply, and when it came it offered the heady possibility that Hyde would not only meet on her turf but also work with her on “a series of articles that might later be expanded into a book.” But there was a warning, too, and it carried with it the hint that Betty might’ve overplayed her hand: Hyde sternly reminded Betty that he was married, and her letters must not give his wife any reason for concern.
Every operation has its moment when the agent alone in the field realizes that everything hangs in the balance: it could go one way, or more perilously, another. Betty had reached this juncture: her approach had been too direct, clearly. Clearly, she was rusty; she had been out of the game too long. Still, she did not panic but set out to make things right. And she took some comfort from the realization that Hyde’s admonishment had been very specific: it was her letters that must not cause his wife to worry.
January 28, 1963
Dear “you”
(Mr. Montgomery puts me off by its formality!)
I had worried about your silence thinking that my outspokenness in my last letter . . . has annoyed you. . . . I may have overstepped myself with you in recent letters and . . . should have kept my thoughts . . . and feelings within bounds. Please, please do not worry for I will not let you down or add to your worries. . . .
As ever your
“Cynthia”
It was a struggle, but Betty did not mention either their possible collaboration or, more tellingly, his visit. She had learned her lesson. Though she was undoubtedly longing to coax him forward, to shove him into action, she remained aloof. If the operation was to succeed, she knew the target couldn’t feel he was being coerced; he had to believe it was entirely his own decision to take the next fateful step.
Her strategy worked. There were no complaints in Hyde’s next letter. Instead, rather plaintively, he wondered if she had given any thought to his idea about a series of articles. If she were interested, “I would gladly make the journey to the Pyrenees and discuss it.”
The next day by return post, she assured him that his suggestion was “100% acceptable”; “I will tell you and only you anything and everything.”
After a confirming phone call from Hyde in London, the meet was set. She would be waiting at the small train station in nearby
Perpignan when the express from Paris arrived on the morning of March 1. From there, she promised, it was only a couple of hours’ drive to the warming sun and the lulling blue Mediterranean waters of S’Agaro; they should arrive at the Hotel Gavina in time for broiled lobsters and a chilled bottle of Sancerre on the hotel terrace.
In a follow-up letter Betty made it clear that she would be ready to get down to work. “I am taking my NY briefcase with the following items: 4 big blocks of paper, several pencils, a package of carbon paper.” But still calculatingly flirtatious, Betty gushed, “What heaven to be with someone like you . . . I can’t wait.” Her training taking hold, she concluded by sharing the recognition signals: she would be wearing a blue headscarf and a fur coat.
IN HER TIME BETTY HAD orchestrated enough meets to know that the agent in the field must always be prepared for something to go wrong. And in the days leading to her rendezvous with Hyde, she’d recall anticipating a hundred disasters. He would catch the grippe and stayed in London. He would miss the train in Paris. The French rail system would choose that day for one of their spontaneous work stoppages. Calamities loomed with increasing certainty as the day of the meet drew closer.
But on the morning of March 1, as the Rolls pulled up to the train station and the chauffeur hurried to open her door, Betty was suddenly struck by a new, nearly paralyzing fear: He won’t recognize me. I’ve changed too much. I’ve grown too old.
AS IT HAPPENED, HYDE WAS at that precise moment having very similar thoughts. When he first met Cynthia twenty-two years earlier, he had been captivated. He’d come to the hotel room ripe with expectations; Cynthia’s exploits, her success in charming secrets out of men who should have known better, were already legendary in the clubby covert world he inhabited. In his feverish imagination, he would write, he’d conjured up a seductress with a pinup girl’s sultry curves and a tantalizing come-hither stare. The woman he met was an entirely different sort.
Cynthia was tall, slim, and patrician. With her sensible amber-blond hair swept back off her broad forehead and a single strand of pearls around her graceful neck, she would have looked at home on a country club terrace or hosting a dinner with a banker husband holding court at the other end of the table. Her green eyes sparkled, and she flashed a wide, enthusiastic smile. But Hyde felt a small pang of disappointment; there was nothing that suggested anything more than an attractive “wholesome All-American” young woman.
But once Betty started talking, her voice soft as a whisper yet authoritative, her laugh uninhibited, even naughty, her eyes fixed on him like a marksman’s, all his oversimplifications, all his stereotypes, were quickly undone. “She had a force, or magnetism to a terrifying degree,” he discovered. “What,” he wondered, “is this pacing tiger doing . . . in this conventional disguise?”
He had spent little more than an hour with her, but that was enough. It was engraved in his memory. She locked on to him with her radiant smile and her shining emerald eyes, determined, it seemed, to bore into his very being, and he was hooked. “The trick of making a man feel he is her entire universe,” he knew only too well, “is an old feminine wile, but Cynthia had it to the nth degree. . . . I felt the impact at once,” he wrote.
Yet as he stood with his valise in his hand in the train station waiting room, Hyde could not help soberly thinking how long ago that had been. And he knew that those first impressions were undoubtedly heightened by the romantic veneer of wartime, of intense days spent in life-or-death struggles. Besides, he had certainly changed over the past two decades.
He was fifty-six now, and the image reflected back at him in the waiting room window was that of a moon-faced middle-aged man with the beginnings of a paunch pressing against his tweed waistcoat. And while he took a disproportionate pride in the fact that the brilliantined hair brushed straight back on his head was still reassuringly thick and dark, there was no denying the gray at his temples. No, he told himself with a measure of philosophical resignation, decades had passed since anyone who recognized the rep tie of the distinguished Oxford college he was wearing could mistake him for an undergraduate. Why should he expect that Betty would have escaped unscathed by time’s mischief? He could not help hoping, though, that the damage inflicted had not been too cruel.
And then he saw her. She was bounding through the waiting room door, wrapped in her fur coat, blue scarf tied over her champagne-colored hair, tall, puckish, and extraordinarily alluring. “The electric force,” he realized at once, “was undiminished.”
Betty approached with long, brisk strides until she came to an abrupt stop directly in front of him. Neither moved. Only a foot or so apart, the two stared at one another, appraising. Hyde finally broke the silence.
“You haven’t changed,” he said.
Betty had been schooled in the university of espionage. She knew a spy’s words were often hollow, and the larger the deceit, the greater the apparent sincerity. But this time, how could she not believe him?
Chapter 3
THE HOTEL GAVINA RESTED ON a long, rocky peninsula that stretched out into the Mediterranean. It was a stately Spanish resort, with heavy silver on the dining room tables and well-starched sheets with impressive thread counts on the roomy double beds. But the old dowager also had a temptress’s soul.
By day a placid Mediterranean lapped rhythmically against the shoreline, a bright sun warmed the terrace as generous carafes of a surprisingly potent sangria were served, and the incredibly blue pool shimmered like a crystal in the sunlight. At night, the mood was the same, only more so. Candles flickered on tables, aromatic logs burned in hearths, a flamenco guitarist strummed soft melodies, stars sparkled on the calm, dark sea, and the moon lit a wide path to the sandy beach.
Betty was in her element. Like a general going into battle confident that the terrain was all to his advantage, Betty set off on the next stage of her mission.
Her “New York briefcase” was just another bit of cover, and a flimsy one at that, but during their first day together she was all business. She acted as if she was totally absorbed in their proposed literary collaboration as she let the sun and stars and sangria work their silent, lulling magic.
On their second day together they became lovers. Who reached out first to touch the other’s hand? Who planted the first coaxing kiss? The answers to these questions have remained part of the forever-classified history of this operation. But in truth the specifics were largely irrelevant. The seeds of their affair had been planted on a sultry August afternoon back in 1941. Their correspondence had been their courtship. And once Betty took control, the outcome was inevitable.
They spent two more precious days at the hotel, making love in Hyde’s room with a businesslike punctuality at 10:00 a.m. and 3:00 p.m. daily. Bursting with a satyr’s pride, Hyde described their couplings to a friend as “torrid.” Betty, the happy seductress, would later send Hyde a newspaper clipping reporting a messy divorce case that had for no particular reason caught her eye, adding her own coy handwritten note in the margin, her code to stir his memory: “S’Agaro . . . 10 am and 3 pm.”
And where was Betty’s husband while their passion ran its hot course? He could not have been very far away; the hotel was a small enclave. Didn’t Charles suspect anything? Or was he simply complacent enough to accept things with a stoic passivity? Perhaps he had decided it was a small price to pay for the larger joy of knowing that Betty would return to their room and share their bed each night.
Neither Betty nor Hyde apparently suffered any regrets for their duplicity. There was certainly no hesitation, no misgivings about the vows they were breaking or the heartbreak they might inflict on their spouses. Their moments together had their own logic, their own morality. Both had lived the spy’s life for so long that lies and betrayals came easily.
THE DIE HAD BEEN CAST. Betty could proceed to the next stage of her mission. But even as she made her move, it undoubtedly never occurred to her that she too was being played.
It is a universal co
nceit of players in the Great Game that every spy believes he’s the one doing the manipulating. It is the rare agent who considers that his target might have his own covert agenda. Or that the victim might purposefully let the noose drop over his head. Despite all her cunning, Betty must never have suspected how deeply the old spy needed her—and what she was offering.
Money had been Betty’s initial lure, a golden carrot she had enticingly dangled. She’d hoped this would get his attention. Who, after all, she’d told herself, doesn’t like the prospect of a bit of extra cash? But she had not imagined the desperate straits Hyde was navigating. If not broke, he was certainly in over his financial head. Each fretful month, more bills came in than his diligent earnings could cover.
After the war, Hyde had left MI6 and embarked on an eclectic and impressively accomplished professional life. He had in rapid succession been a barrister; the private secretary to the seventh Marquess of Londonderry; an Ulster Unionist member of Parliament representing his native Belfast until he was deselected by his party after his outspoken campaign for the decriminalization of the draconian laws against homosexuality; a prolific author whose titles included three books on Oscar Wilde (whose wood-paneled rooms at Magdalen College had been Hyde’s Oxford digs several generations later); and a professor of history and political science at the University of the Punjab in Lahore, Pakistan. Hyde left Lahore at the urging of spymaster Sir William Stephenson, who agreed to pay Hyde a stipend while he researched and wrote Stephenson’s biography. It had been a varied and accomplished life, but the one common thread was a persistent shortage of cash.
As an Irishman making his way in London society, Hyde was a bit insecure about his humble roots. He thought a bit of flash—bespoke clothes, a flat in tony Knightsbridge, membership in a rarefied London club, and, after his first wife ran off with a dashing brother MI6 officer at the tail end of the war, a well-bred second wife with expensive tastes—would provide the cover to help him pass as a British gentleman of the military class. The letterhead of his parliamentary stationery proudly proclaimed “Lt. Col. H. Montgomery Hyde, ret.” But the image he strived to maintain came at an onerous price. Hyde was perpetually scrambling to pay his bills.