by Howard Blum
It was on one of those evenings, as they lay satisfied, still entwined in one another’s arms, the room illuminated only by the bright flames rising up in the fireplace, that their talk turned to politics. It was as inevitable, as natural, as their making love. Just days earlier Germany had marched into and occupied Austria, and Betty asked if Poland’s turn would come soon.
Soothing and considerate, Edward quickly allayed her fears. Czechoslovakia, he assured her, would be Hitler’s next target. The deal had already been made. A secret agreement had been signed. He had seen the papers in the embassy. “What’s more,” he added offhandedly, “Poland intends to take a bite of the cherry.”
Betty’s mind snapped to attention. She might not have even realized that she had been searching, but she had at last found precisely what she was looking for. It wasn’t companionship. It wasn’t love. It was something her wayward soul could believe in. This nugget that Edward had so casually offered was the gold that would give her a purpose—perhaps even buy her redemption.
THE PASSPORT CONTROL OFFICER AT any British embassy, as Betty and nearly everyone else in the diplomatic community knew, was the thin bit of cover assigned to the local fieldman representing His Majesty’s Secret Intelligence Service. In Warsaw, he was Lieutenant-Colonel John Shelley, and as luck would have it, this tall, charming Irishman from Cork was Betty’s only friend at the embassy.
Or maybe it wasn’t luck at all. During her time in Spain, Betty, who was a natural watcher, had now and then passed on bits of information, interesting things she had seen and heard in the course of her travels around the country with her well-connected friends. The impressed local MI6 station head had sent many of these tidbits on to London, and in return, word had come back to Madrid that he should encourage her efforts. In that way she became what those in the trade call a semiconscious asset: she was playing the game, but not officially part of the team.
When Betty’s husband was posted to Warsaw, Jack Shelley had received word to keep an eye on her; here was a woman perhaps worth cultivating. For her part, Betty, as manipulative as any spymaster, went out of her way to ingratiate herself with Shelley, making him the target of her considerable charm. She suspected it was a friendship that would come in handy.
First thing on the morning after Edward unwittingly divulged his valuable secret, Betty rang up Shelley. Feel like a round of golf? she asked. It was a blustery March day, the Nazi army was mobilizing, and golf was undoubtedly the last thing on his or anyone’s mind. But the MI6 man knew a cover story when he heard one; and at the same time he must have silently congratulated Betty for coming up with a pretext that would allow them to talk without worrying about being overheard.
Brilliant, he told her. Wasn’t looking forward to being cooped up in the office today.
The golf course was just outside the city. The fairways unkempt, and a bleak, wintry brown. But they gamely played a few holes to keep up appearances before Betty told the spy what she had learned. She had a strong memory, and she did not embroider. She simply repeated what she’d been told, word for word. In the same straightforward way, she related the circumstances that had led to this disclosure.
Shelley was immediately excited. “Go right back and get any more stuff that you can,” he ordered. “It is going straight to British intelligence.”
Betty grasped the opportunity without hesitation. The ambiguity of what she was being asked to do—the tacit instructions to continue to betray her husband and their marriage by sleeping with her source—did not concern her controller. Nor did it bother Betty. She had already decided she would do whatever she had to do, take whatever risks were required. At last she’d found the purpose and excitement she needed to save her own floundering life.
That winter the long, low divan in Kulikowski’s apartment became Betty’s operational headquarters. In the spring, her mission took her to the grassy banks of the river Vistula. As a bottle of vodka chilled in the lazy water, the couple would make love on a blanket spread across the new fresh grass. And Betty, the resourceful secret agent, would keep her unsuspecting source talking.
“Our meetings were very fruitful,” Betty said with a perfunctory candor to Hyde. “I let him make love to me as often as he wanted, since this guaranteed the smooth flow of the political information I needed.”
After each of these liaisons, Betty, following the rudimentary tradecraft Shelley had taught her, typed up her conversations with Kulikowski. Then Shelley would rush them off in the diplomatic pouch to London, where they were avidly read.
It was not long before Shelley’s impressed superiors sent word that Betty should be officially recruited as an agent. She was not to return to England to join her recuperating husband. Rather, she would stay in Poland, ostensibly waiting for him.
Her new assignment: Betty was ordered to spread her wings, to fly higher in Polish diplomatic and political circles. Kulikowski’s usefulness was played out. She was instructed to find new and more important men to captivate. Get them to share their secrets—and, in the name of king and country, do whatever was necessary to win their devotion and their trust.
Betty was also told that she had to keep her job with the intelligence service a secret. Even her husband, an accredited diplomat at the Warsaw embassy, could not be informed. To ensure that she would not have to pester him for spending money as she made her calculating way through the upper reaches of Polish society, London gave her a monthly allowance of twenty pounds; Jack Shelley would be her paymaster.
Without any fuss, she broke off with Kulikowski as instructed. Their affair had been, she would say with cool detachment, “simply a job I had to do.”
“My big Polish romance came afterwards,” she explained to Hyde. It would be the first of many romances. And of many missions.
Betty was now a spy.
Chapter 7
YET EVEN AS BETTY SHARED the circumstances of her recruitment, she knew that this was only part of the story of how she’d found her way into the dangerous business of intelligence. And a small part at that.
Hyde was an authority on Oscar Wilde, and in preparation for their trip Betty had, with a professional’s pre-mission diligence, done some homework. That was how she had come across Wilde’s complaint that “people have a careless way of talking about a ‘born liar,’ just as they talk about a born poet.” This was utter foolishness, Wilde insisted. “Lying and poetry are arts . . . and they require the most careful study.” Betty, who knew a bit at least about lying, agreed. She was also convinced that espionage was no less of an art, and one that had its own long and demanding tutelage.
If she was to understand what had led the burgeoning spy to that weather-beaten golf course in the Warsaw suburbs, she would need to dig deep and recall her own years of “careful study.” She would need to call up memories of times and places she had tried long ago to bury. After a lifetime of dissembling, of putting on so many masks, it was as if she was determined to strip away all the inessential versions of her biography and get to the core. She would look at her life for the first time and put the record right at last.
In the meantime, though, Betty had no illusions about the urgency of the task she’d set for herself. Her time was running out. The pain medicine she’d brought from France was no longer sufficient, so she’d asked the front desk at the Shelbourne if they could recommend a dentist. A bothersome toothache, she had casually explained. But the dentist across from Grafton Square had taken one look inside her mouth and, clearly shaken, gravely recommended that she return home without delay. She replied with one of her high-spirited laughs. “Of course I have no intention of doing that,” she told him. “At least until I’ve seen a bit of old Ireland.” She might just as well have added, And completed the mission that brought me here in the first place.
Her mind was set. She’d churn up the past in her search for clues, and see where it took her. She’d let Hyde, the conscientious researcher, lead her down one trail, while her memories led her down another
, more hidden path. To understand the woman she’d grown up to be, she’d first have to reestablish connection with her childhood self, the girl Betty Thorpe had been.
THERE SHE WAS, AT THE tender age of ten, already a covert watcher. It was April 1921, a great occasion in the Thorpe household, a day when no less of a personage than Calvin Coolidge, the vice president of the United States, was coming to dinner, along with his wife.
Hiding on the bedroom landing, flat on her stomach, her head wedged between two of the staircase spindles that ran along the upstairs balcony, she had a perfect view across the entry hall at all the activity fluttering about the dining room. A glistening white cloth from the Canary Islands had been spread across the long table; one maid was fitting jade-green candles into the two ornate candelabrums that rose like sentinels on either end, another was laying the freshly polished silver, and a houseman had come in from the greenhouse with a basket of fresh-cut red and yellow tulips that he would arrange in a forest of crystal vases. And there was her mother, already dressed in a black lace gown, pacing about like a stern commander, shouting out one terse order after another, observing every detail with her penetrating gaze, making sure everything was just so.
Since the family arrived two years earlier from Cuba, where Colonel George Thorpe had been chief of staff of the Second Marine Brigade, and settled into the comfortable house on Woodley Road in the nation’s capital, the Thorpes had hosted many lavish dinners, garden parties, and dances. Each night, or so it might have seemed to the neighbors, a procession of cars pulled up to the front door, and the lights inside the big house burned brightly.
The 1920s had just come roaring in, but Cora Thorpe was not another hostess caught up in the high jinks; her bluestocking soul was firmly intact. Hers was a pragmatic agenda, one sparked by pure ambition. Entertaining, Betty’s mother believed, was essential if the Thorpes, newcomers to Washington, were to meet the right families, be admitted into the best clubs and schools, and find themselves welcomed into the upper echelons of what passed for society in this very hierarchical and strait-laced southern city. Beside, she had the money.
CORA’S FATHER HAD LIVED A real-life Horatio Alger tale. He had arrived penniless from Canada to take a clerk’s job in Minnesota; married the boss’s daughter; and then shrewdly parlayed that connection into a small empire of lucrative businesses, a bank presidency, and ultimately his election as a state senator.
As his fortune grew and grew, his beloved only daughter developed into a blunt, formidable, and already matronly young woman. Her looks were the sort that family friends would politely call handsome. But there was no embarrassed hemming and hawing over her intelligence. It was universally agreed that Cora was her father’s astute daughter; “That girl has a good head on her shoulders,” people around town had a habit of observing. In an era when many young midwestern women from good families would aspire to a husband rather than a college degree, Cora not only earned her BA from the University of Michigan but went on to do graduate work, taking courses in literature at Columbia, the Sorbonne, and the University of Munich.
The local Minneapolis boys, though, seemed intimidated by this brainy, apparently mirthless heiress. As she approached thirty, Cora was resigned to her spinsterhood. Then she met a gung-ho young marine lieutenant, a poor farmer’s son but also both a hero and a scholar.
Betty’s father, George Cyrus Thorpe, photographed c. 1914 as a major in the United States Marine Corps.
Churchill Archives Center, Papers of Harford Montgomery Hyde, HYDE 02 011
George Thorpe had served in the Spanish-American War, soldiered with the American expedition in Syria, fought in the Philippines, commanded a marine expedition to Abyssinia, suffered battle wounds on two occasions—and, not slowing down during extended leaves from active duty, had earned both bachelor and law degrees from New York University and a master’s from Brown. After a whirlwind courtship, George and Cora married in 1908. Betty—christened Amy Elizabeth, but neither of those names stuck—was born two years later.
Not long after Betty’s birth, George was appointed commander of the naval prison at Portsmouth, Maine. Six all-too-quiet years in the pine woods and deep snows followed. Cora, itching for something more consequential, grumbled that it was like being stuck again in Minneapolis, only smaller. But she persevered and, as she told friends, found a measure of contentment in being a wife and running a home. And young Betty soon had company, a sister, Jane, and a brother, George Junior.
Then in 1917 George was summoned to lead the Second Marine Brigade as they chased bandits through the Cuban countryside. It was combat duty, but Cora couldn’t wait to get out of the Maine woods and head to sunny and exotic Cuba to join her husband. She set up house with the three kids on the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base, and stayed there even after George was transferred to South America.
Finally in 1919, to Cora’s delight, George was posted to the General Staff College in Washington. And Cora’s time had come at last to build the sort of busy, gregarious social life she’d always coveted. One of the first things she did when she settled into the house on Woodley Road was to order a copy of the Social Register. “The Good Book,” many impious Washington matrons called it, and Cora with no less deference placed the black-covered volume by the hall phone. Inside, she solemnly confided to Betty, were the names, addresses, and phone numbers of all the people she’d ever need to know. In the days that followed, a curious young Betty would thumb through the book, trying to make sense of all the puzzling abbreviations for schools, colleges, and clubs in the alphabetized listing for each family’s name. It was her first attempt at cracking an operational code.
And soon a flurry of parties began to brighten the house. Her husband’s fellow officers at the Staff College could not have mapped out a more careful campaign. Each fête lifted Cora another rung higher up the Washington social ladder. When her “red dinner”—red roses, red candles, even a fiery red tablecloth—for Maud Howe Elliot, the Newport grande dame who had won a Pulitzer for her biography of Julia Ward Howe, brought three princesses to the house and, no less a tangible sign of success, was reported with a deferential awe in the Washington papers, Cora was beside herself with delight. She thought she’d reached the summit of all her aspirations. But this was before the vice president and his wife accepted the invitation to dinner.
The Harding administration had taken over the reins of government just two months earlier, and the evening with the new vice president at her table, Cora must have hoped, would be her inauguration too. She’d be anointed the town’s ruling hostess—if it all went well.
She devoted weeks to planning the evening. Everything from the menu to the wines to the flowers was mulled, debated, and then reconsidered once again before the final instructions were given to the household staff. The days leading up to the great event were a time of high anxiety for the Thorpe family.
THEN THE AUSPICIOUS EVENING ARRIVED. There was Colonel Thorpe in his freshly pressed dress uniform, the creases in his trousers as sharp as the saber that hung by his side, medals and ribbons decorating his chest, standing in the entry hall at martial attention. He usually wasn’t too enthusiastic about Cora’s soirées or her feverish social ambitions, but that night was different: the vice president was coming to his home. Yet his sense of the occasion was nothing compared to his wife’s. Although she wore black lace, Cora stood ramrod-straight too; she too might have been an anxious soldier waiting for the bugler to blow “charge.”
Once the Coolidges arrived and the initial greetings were exchanged with all the necessary formality, the Thorpes began to relax—at least a bit.
The dinner proceeded without a hitch. The food was delicious, the wines were memorable, and the conversation around the table kept moving happily along. By the time dessert was served, Cora was convinced that she’d pulled it off. The evening had been a great success.
Carried along by her triumphant mood, when the festivities moved from the dining room to the front parlor, she sudd
enly decided that her oldest child should be brought downstairs to shake hands with the vice president. It would be an event Betty would surely remember all her life, something she could tell her children.
A maid fetched Betty. The ten-year-old, with her blond curls and those burning green eyes, looked adorable in the party dress the family dressmaker had sewn for special occasions. With her voice raised to a fawning pitch that must have struck even a ten-year-old as absurdly obsequious, Cora introduced the honored guests.
Betty found herself staring into the black eyes of Mrs. Coolidge.
For some reason as yet unknown to her, her thoughts still inchoate, she hesitated. Her mother prompted, “Come now, Betty.” At last Betty executed a much-practiced perfect curtsy.
The young girl turned to the vice president. As if soliciting her vote, the vice president stuck out his hand. Betty stared at the short man with the bright red hair, and then at his beefy, outstretched hand. Once again she hesitated. And again Cora coaxed, “Please, dear.”
Betty tried. But this time she couldn’t do it. She just couldn’t find the will. In a gesture that was more instinct than a reasoned decision, she turned her back on the vice president, on her mother, on the entire evening and all the other deliberately orchestrated evenings that had led inexorably up to this moment. And she ran from the room.
Four years older and many more years wiser, she gave a hint about the early lesson learned on that rebellious night, and which she had incorporated into all her rebellious nights ever after. She described in her diary—the incipient secret agent using flawless French as a rudimentary code—a mind-set that would have become a deeply ingrained article of her operational faith. With a raw contempt, the nearly fourteen-year-old Betty observed, “Life is a game where one plays one’s role—where one always hides the true emotions.”