by Howard Blum
When Arthur’s new assignment was announced, it was not, as he had been given good reason to believe, to some diplomatic backwater. His new post was Warsaw, Poland. Just as Hitler was flexing his muscles, as the Führer’s menacing intentions were becoming frighteningly clear, Arthur was being sent into the midst of the gathering storm. It was certainly not the sort of posting the Foreign Office would give to anyone “temperamentally unsuited” to deal with sensitive issues. But it was a sufficient bit of cover to get Betty and her unique talents into the thick of things without raising too many suspicions. She’d be the dutiful wife accompanying her diplomat husband, not the secret agent being put into position right at the Nazis’ front door.
At the time, though, Betty did not understand the full significance of Arthur’s new orders. She was more excited by the glorious news she had received from Spain: not only had Carlos been released, but so had the seventeen airmen on the list she had given Prieto. It was that triumph that filled her head when, along with her daughter and a Spanish nanny, she boarded the Warsaw Express in Paris on an autumn evening in 1937. As the night train chugged east, Betty had no inkling of the future that awaited her in Poland.
Part IV
Enigma
Chapter 24
DRIVING DOWN THE WINDING ROAD that twisted through the green Wicklow hills, the steep valleys below dotted with brilliantly blue glacial lakes shimmering in the high spring sun, Betty was enchanted. It was their fourth day in Ireland, and Betty was must have thought that her instincts had been right: this was her spiritual home. “How lovely it all is,” she told Hyde. “I would love to have a cottage here and come for several months of the year.”
Later that afternoon, they stopped at the ancient churchyard in the even more ancient village of Drumcliffe. Hyde had insisted. When you come to Ireland, you must pay homage to Yeats, he explained.
William Butler Yeats’s grave.
Alain Le Garsmeur/Getty Images
The poet’s remains had been brought over from France after the war, and he had been reburied with honor in a simple grave. On a stark gray tombstone quarried from the local Sligo limestone an epitaph was carved. Anticipating his own imminent death, Yeats had himself composed it:
Cast a cold Eye
On Life, on Death.
Horseman, pass by!
She stood by the grave and read the poet’s words in a low, soft voice. Then she repeated them.
At that somber moment, her jaw throbbing, it was impossible to avoid the realization that her own death loomed. The dark horseman, she must have known too well, would soon stop beside her. He would not pass her by. She would never fulfill her blissful fantasy of settling into a quaint cottage nestled in the green Irish countryside. She had been deluding herself.
All she could do was complete her mission. While she still had the time, she could cast a cold eye on the life she’d lived and look for the answers she so deeply desired.
She walked in silence away from the graveyard. It was as if she was determined not to reveal her true thoughts. These were her secrets, her challenges.
Hyde, too, had, he would say, felt the epitaph speaking to him. He too was struck by Yeats’s words. For him, they were an admonishment to put aside his own lingering regrets about the many turns his life had taken. He had one more chance. He could cast a cold eye on the recollections Betty was sharing and see where they led him, how they helped him understand his own predicament. There was much more to learn. It was not yet time for him to pass by.
Finally, he asked her to pick up the story where she’d left off days ago in the Shelbourne bar—her liaisons with the moody young Polish diplomat Edward Kulikowski, the romance that would be her first official operation for the Secret Intelligence Service.
Chapter 25
IN THE AFTERMATH OF HER christening on a Warsaw golf course, Betty, now a full-fledged British secret agent, continued to cajole secrets from the still-unsuspecting Edward Kulikowski. But as the winter of 1938 drew to an end, both Betty and her superiors realized that this operation had outlived its usefulness. The young Polish Foreign Service officer had no new information to share. Betty’s reports had grown thinner and thinner. It was time for a new assignment.
After consulting with London, Jack Shelley, her case officer and a modern man, gave it to her unembroidered, without hesitancy or embarrassment. The Service wanted her to spread her graceful wings, fly high into the upper air of Polish society, and, if the opportunity presented itself, seduce a more valuable source than Kulikowski, the ardent piano-playing minister’s assistant.
Committed to the cause, and schooled by a lifetime of misbehaving, Betty went to work. Her colleagues in her new profession, trying to put a circumspect spin on things, called the liaisons in which secrets were whispered in bed “honey traps.” The jargon helped them to remain untroubled by the morality of what they were asking a married woman—the wife of a brother Foreign Service officer, no less—to perform for the realm.
In Betty, they quickly discovered, they had recruited a queen bee.
She was very busy. In the uncertain spring of 1938, Poland, squeezed between Germany and Russia, was desperately trying to rustle up support for a “Third Europe,” a confederation of continental nations that could shore up its small army when push inevitably came to a mighty shove. Great Britain was trying to convince the endangered Poles they’d stand by them, while at the same fawning time, they were scurrying to assure the Nazis that they’d gladly cut a deal to ensure “peace in our time.” Each day there were new secret political developments, and Betty, after a night out on the town, and often a morning after, would deliver informative reports to Shelley.
Her husband was still recuperating in England from the debilitating stroke he had suffered on New Year’s Eve at the end of their first year together in Poland. After taking him to England, Betty had traveled back two weeks later to Warsaw. Her return was Arthur’s idea; he wanted the ambassador to believe that his illness was insignificant, and that he’d soon be joining his wife. But by now Arthur had been in a rehabilitation facility on the Isle of Wight for over ten months. His every day was filled with his own battles, his own struggles. He knew nothing about his wife’s recruitment by the Secret Intelligence Service. He had no idea that while he lay in a nursing home, while his recovery dragged on and frustratingly on, a world away a procession of besotted diplomats passed through Betty’s life.
Yet even as Betty threw herself into the task, she never expected that the matchmakers on Broadway would soon send her off to meet the next great love of her life. Nor, for that matter, had the spymasters in all their initial scheming imagined that their orders would lead to pillow talk that would help change the course of the coming war.
For Betty and her controllers, it began as one more routine assignment.
“Do you know Count Michal Lubienski?” Shelley asked at the end of one their debriefings.
Betty said she did not.
“We’d like you to get to know him.”
THE OP WENT INTO PLAY with a little help from the American ambassador. Anthony J. Drexel Biddle Jr. was the son of a mainline Philadelphia society baron who would be immortalized on both stage and screen as “the Happy Millionaire.” And Tony was, among other accomplishments, a chip off the old good-time-loving block. Before joining the staid diplomatic corps, he had famously hosted a bash at the St. Regis Hotel in New York for the Belgian boxer he managed that ended with truncheon-wielding cops struggling to restore order as black-tied guests giddily wheeled pianos out of the lobby and fled down Madison Avenue carrying cases of champagne in their arms. And with vast and artful expense, he had opened the Casino in Central Park, only to have this freewheeling nightclub too raided by the police and padlocked. Tony Biddle knew how to throw a good party, and he loved doing it.
When the ambassador and his second wife, Margaret, the heiress to a mining fortune, heard their good friend Betty Pack ask over cocktails whether it wasn’t about time they hosted anoth
er of their dreamy dinner dances, the couple immediately decided that it was a splendid idea. And when Betty coyly added that it would be divine if she could be seated next to Count Lubienski, the ambassador did not need further explanation. A little mischief was just the thing to get any party roaring.
On the night of the party, it was as if the strategists on Broadway had choreographed every perfect detail: the bright moon glowing in the calm summer sky; silver and crystal glittering in the candlelight on the tables; gardens of colorful flowers arranged in cut-glass bowls and vases; mounds of caviar and icy bottles of vodka. Champagne corks popped, and flutes were filled and refilled. The orchestra played soft, romantic melodies. The men were dapper and distinguished in their dark evening clothes. The women sparkled in their long gowns and jewels. And there was Betty in a dress that seemed sculpted around her every curve. Graceful, confident, and incredibly radiant: an elegant and resourceful spy.
With customary diligence, she’d done her homework before going off on her mission. It did not require much digging to understand why the Service was interested in the count. He was the chef de cabinet to Poland’s foreign minister, Colonel Josef Beck, the perplexingly moody, stiff-necked diplomat who was the dominant force in negotiating Poland’s political future. Lubienski would have access to all the confidential documents and the minutes of every secret conference that passed through the office. If Great Britain wanted to know what Poland was up to with the Nazis, or how the beleaguered country, despite all its dogmatic posturing, truly intended to find a way through the looming war, a look into Beck’s office would be invaluable. Its files were a repository of diplomatic treasures. Betty fully understood the importance of the operation, and went off that glittering evening prepared to do whatever was necessary to ensure its success.
When she sat down at the dinner table next to the count, she was surprised by the man to whom she was introduced. He was a presence: a saber-thin aristocrat with a relaxed, easy charm, his eyes a languid Mediterranean blue, his hair thick and yellowish, a wheat field lit by the sun. Betty, always candid about such matters, told Hyde, “When I heard what his job was, I would have made a dead set at him, even if he had been as ugly as Satan. But happily this wasn’t necessary.”
After dinner when the party moved into the ballroom, the count, executing a rigid bow, asked Betty to dance. They danced together for most of the evening, and with each new melody he held her closer in his arms. They glided slowly across the dance floor, and Betty let herself be trapped by his tight embrace.
A portrait of Colonel Josef Beck, the Foreign Minister of Poland, taken on Sept. 1, 1939—the day Nazi Germany invaded Poland.
© CORBIS
“Something is happening to me,” he whispered into her ear as the band played on. “I must see you again. May I call you tomorrow?”
“I’d like that,” Betty promised.
The next morning a large bouquet of pink roses arrived at her apartment. Attached was the count’s engraved card.
At this juncture in any operation, it was standard tradecraft for the agent to apply the brakes. Let the target make the next move; let him believe he’s in complete control, making all the decisions. But Betty was having difficulty following the rules. She didn’t care how suspicious her ardor might seem. She knew she wanted to see Lubienski again, and the sooner the better. She made up her mind to call him; thanking him for the flowers would be a sufficient excuse. But before she could, a maid came into her bedroom to announce that there was a Count Lubienski on the telephone, asking to speak with her.
They went out to dinner that night. When they finished one bottle of wine, with a flick of the count’s hand, another immediately appeared. Betty paid little attention to the food or the drink. They talked and talked for hours. It was as if they were a couple who had known each other forever.
As they were leaving the restaurant, the count told Betty that his wife and children were away. Off in the mountains on a summer holiday, he explained. Betty said that she was on her own, too; her husband was in England, recuperating from a stroke.
They agreed that they did not enjoy being alone. They pretended to be complaining about some annoying inconvenience their inconsiderate spouses had inflicted on them.
But each understood what the other was really saying.
Hand in hand, they went off to Betty’s apartment. That night the count shared Betty’s double bed. By dawn, when he sneaked off before the arrival of the maid, the operation had been launched. And so had Betty’s next great romance.
BETTY HAD NEVER KNOWN SUCH a glorious summer. She felt as if she was doubly blessed: in love with a handsome, debonair aristocrat who loved her back, and at the same time inexorably devoted to the righteous cause she was serving. Her allegiance to the Service required her to betray the man she loved, but that was a duplicity on which she refused to dwell. The inherent conflicts in her behavior were, in Betty’s mind at least, nonexistent simply because she refused to acknowledge them.
It was, she felt, the romantic honeymoon she had never had. “Nightingales are not born from owls,” Lubienski had proudly told her, quoting the Polish proverb the nobility liked to trot out as sufficient justification for their entitled, gilded lives. Betty discovered that elegance was not just his inheritance but also his instinct: a way of life. Effortlessly, the count made each new day float by with grace and beauty.
Decades later, small, random moments would still be sweet memories in Betty’s mind. There was a walk along the Vistula as the setting summer sun ignited the water with its red glow. A table for two at a small café on a cobblestone street in the Old City, a bottle of white wine chilling, platters stacked high with pink freshwater crayfish. Mugs of rich, thick mead in a dark, boisterously jovial tavern in the Painted Square. A night spent dancing slow and close across a nightclub floor, both of them completely content, each wishing the music, like their summer together, would never end.
The count would accompany Betty home, stay for a while, and then leave; he could not go into the ministry wearing the previous day’s clothes. Yet as the dawn light lit up the Warsaw streets, he would return, letting himself into her flat with the latchkey she’d given him. He would undress, climbing back into the warm bed he had just left a few short hours ago.
Entwined, he would talk to Betty about the day ahead, about the stiff challenges he and his minister would be facing. As attentive and consoling as a priest in a confessional, Betty listened to his every word.
Beck was a difficult man to work for, gruff and sinister, and Lubienski needed someone to confide in. The count was candid and open-hearted with his secrets, quick to air them and eager to vent his anger. As he lay next to Betty, even as his hands caressed her, the stories poured out.
His own deep sense of honor affronted, Lubienski railed to Betty about the two contradictory paths Beck was simultaneously pursuing. The minister was in secret negotiations with Hitler, hoping he could forge an arrangement that would prevent a war, while at the same time he was working with Britain and France to finalize a treaty that guaranteed Poland’s borders. Lubienski knew every detail, and he offered these without restraint. The ministry’s contacts with Berlin, communiqués to the Foreign Office, the daily top-secret message traffic to and from the prime minister’s office—Lubienski, a punctilious reporter, routinely shared it all. And there was more. Whatever else he might have come across during the course of his hectic day at the center of power—troop deployments, industrial outputs, economic indices, office feuds, even the latest gossip about who was sleeping with whom—he recounted to his confessor.
Lubienski knew he was revealing too much. And Betty was a foreigner; no, worse, the wife of a British diplomat. But any sense of caution, of discretion, had abandoned him. He wanted to tell her things, to open his heart to her. It had become important to him. By the time he left each morning at eight, he felt, Betty believed, unburdened, a man ready to face the new day’s battles.
And no sooner would he be out the do
or than Betty would hurry to her typewriter. She would fill page after page with all she’d heard. Her instructions were to report everything. No remark was to be considered too banal, no gossip or rumor too irrelevant. The agent in the field simply gathered the raw intelligence. It would be the job of the wise old owls on Broadway, Shelley had firmly told her, to see where all the pieces fit.
As Betty’s lengthy reports arrived twice a week in the diplomatic pouch, the analysts in London read them with excitement. They were elated. The Service had a source that was putting them directly inside the highest level of the Polish government. Now, when the Foreign Office played poker with Beck, they already knew what cards he held. They knew precisely what he was thinking, and what his next move would be.
And just when both Whitehall and the Service felt that their agent in Warsaw couldn’t deliver intelligence more valuable than what she was regularly dispatching each week, Betty fooled them. It got better. Much better.
Chapter 26
HIDDEN DEEP IN THE BASEMENT beneath the army command post in the tenth-century city of Poznań was a room known, to the select few who shared its secrets, as the Black Chamber. It was here that a handful of students carefully selected from the Mathematics Institute at the University of Poznań, the school’s best and brightest, worked under the demanding direction of Lieutenant Maksymilian Ciezki, the young officer who headed the Polish Army Cipher Bureau’s German section.