The Last Goodnight

by Howard Blum

  The history of Enigma offered many heroes—from the ingenious young Poles who first decrypted messages from the machine, to the British seamen who sacrificed their lives to rescue Enigma machines from sinking German U-boats, to the hundreds of bright minds like Alan Turing who labored at Bletchley Park, a Victorian country manor fifty miles north of London, to improve the rudimentary Polish bomba, keep pace with the many German adaptations to the machine, and decipher the nearly constant flow of German message traffic.

  Yet Betty too played a crucial role. In the increasingly uneasy late 1930s, when the Service was desperate to learn whatever it could about the machine and the Polish attempts to crack the code, Betty, resourceful, persistent, and manipulative, provided invaluable intelligence. She was, Hyde realized, the spy England needed; and, as always, the woman she wanted to be.

  Chapter 27

  IT WAS FIVE O’CLOCK ON a September afternoon in 1938 as Betty, running late, hurried across Warsaw’s crowded Central Station to the Nord Express. Clouds of steam puffed from the locomotive, but just in time she scampered up the small steps to the first-class sleeping car. The train started to lurch forward, and she followed the porter down the narrow corridor to the compartment where Count Michal Lubienski was waiting. She was on her way to Berlin, and her next mission.

  Two weeks earlier, the day’s first light slipping through her bedroom curtains as they lay together, the count had told Betty that he would need to go to Germany. Hitler had requested that Poland send a representative to the annual Nazi Party rally at Nuremberg on September 13.

  But Beck, the count went on with mounting rancor, had decided that it would be inappropriate for the country’s foreign minister to attend. For him, or for that matter any senior government official, to be in the cheering throng waving their red-and-black swastika flags could be construed as Poland’s endorsement of Hitler. At the same time, Beck did not want to offend the Führer by sending an inconsequential representative. He had, however, hit upon a solution.

  By solution, the exasperated count explained, Beck means me.

  The foreign minister’s chef de cabinet would be of sufficient stature to placate Hitler without antagonizing Britain and France.

  I have no choice, said the count. It’s all been arranged. I’m to have a private audience with Hitler after the rally. I leave for Berlin in ten days.

  Then he turned petulant. He didn’t want to go; he would miss Betty too much.

  Betty at once recognized the opportunity being dangled in front of her. She wouldn’t, of course, be in the room when Michal met Hitler. She couldn’t even accompany him to the rally. Her appearance at his side—the wife of a British diplomat!—would set tongues wagging in both London and Warsaw. And no doubt the Nazis, masters of hypocrisy, she judged sourly, would also find a silly reason to be offended by the count’s showing up with his mistress.

  Still, for a secret agent a trip into Nazi Germany would be a coup. Shelley’s latest marching orders had been to get a handle on what the Poles thought Hitler was really up to. Last month Germany had mobilized 750,000 more men for military service. Maneuvers were already taking place along the Czech border. Were these only bold threats, designed to convince the British and French to yield to Germany’s demands? Or were they the opening moves in an unstoppable battle plan—a dash into the Sudetenland, followed by a charge west across Europe? Here was Betty’s chance to give London some answers. She’d put an ear to the ground in enemy territory, chat up a few Nazi bigwigs, and, not least, get the count talking about his meeting with Hitler while it was fresh in his mind.

  “I’ll miss you too,” Betty told him. Thinking quickly, she proposed a solution. She would go with him to Berlin. When Lubienski went on to Nuremberg, she’d head to Prague. Wilbur Carr, the American ambassador, and his wife were old friends. They’d been begging her to visit. After meeting with Hitler, Lubienski could join her in Prague. They’d take the train together back to Warsaw.

  The count hesitated. He was traveling to Germany on official business, a representative of the Polish government. Besides, he was a married man.

  “The sleeping cars on the Nord Express are quite comfortable, I’ve been told,” Betty suggested.

  And so it was settled.

  Betty informed her handler that afternoon, and Shelley was on board right away. It was an operational godsend. He’d be able to insert an agent into the heart of Nazi Germany. And she’d have bulletproof cover: her lover was on his way to see Hitler.

  Yet at their scheduled debrief later that week, Shelley seemed on edge, Betty noticed as soon as she sat down. He went through the usual opening catechisms—Anyone follow you to the meet? Are you in any immediate danger? How long before you’re expected somewhere else? Then, with that out of the way, Shelley gave her his news: since Betty was going to Prague, London wanted her to assist on a little job that was already in the works.

  And now it was days later, and a steward was carrying champagne in an ice bucket into the compartment. With well-practiced skill, the count began to uncork the wine, and as the train chugged west through the autumn night to Berlin, he filled Betty’s glass. She clinked her flute against his, but her mind was elsewhere, and speeding along as fast as any train. Betty was thinking about what she would need to do in Prague.

  WAITING IN THE SHADOWS, NOT too far down from the unlit entrance of number 4, Betty surveyed the street. Her time in Germany had been brief, and offered disappointingly little operational intelligence. Now she was in Prague, it was after midnight, and the city was dark and quiet. No one would be out at this hour, Shelley had said. The job should be easy: a simple, uncomplicated burglary.

  Yet now, on Hybernská Street, Betty was having a hard time accepting her handler’s logic. The boulevard was too empty, too still. There was no sign of life. A policeman on patrol would take one look and wonder why this woman wasn’t tucked in bed like the rest of the city.

  Betty had a cover story ready, but it was perilously thin: she’d stormed out of the hotel after a quarrel with her husband; downhearted, she was aimlessly wandering about. How long would it take a suspicious policeman to poke that shaky tale full of holes?

  But there was no turning back now. The operation had been launched. If all was going as planned, upstairs her accomplice had picked the lock on the front office door and was already making his way to the back room.

  It didn’t matter that her nerves were stretched thin, or that she imagined every dark shadow was cast by an approaching policeman. She had her assignment: Make sure no one enters number 4. Use your charm, or your guile, but keep any intruder on the street. And if that fails, if someone starts up the stairs, sound the alarm that the world was about to come to an end. Make sure your partner knows he’d better run for his life.

  THE BACK ROOM ON THE second floor of 4 Hybernská Street was the private office of Karl Henlein, the head of the pro-Nazi Sudeten German Party (SGP). A small but rising star, Henlein was a former gym teacher who had found his true calling as a particularly nasty right-wing politician. He’d had a minor brush with scandal after a close friend was convicted of homosexuality, and for a while it seemed inevitable that he’d be charged too. But as concerns about Czechoslovakia’s autonomy grew, Henlein had shrewdly catapulted himself to center stage. Almost overnight he had become too important a politician for the local authorities to dare to question his morals. One week Henlein would be meeting with Churchill, insisting that he alone could dissuade Hitler from annexing the Sudetenland. The next, he’d be conferring with Ribbentrop, contradicting with a politician’s easy practicality all the assurances he’d blithely given to the British.

  Henlein—MI6 knew from an informant they’d bought inside the party—kept his most valuable papers, including his secret correspondence with the Germans, in a locked drawer of his desk in the back room. It was that drawer—bottom right-hand side, keyhole in the center—that was the target of the operation.

  AS INSTRUCTED BY SHELLEY, BETTY had rendezvouse
d with her accomplice—to this day, no matter how much Hyde pushed, she steadfastly guarded the agent’s identity—on the afternoon she arrived in Prague. She offered the prearranged word code, and with that formality out of the way, they quickly got to work.

  With a flippancy that was all disguise, the agent briefed Betty on the mission. He sketched the layout of the second-floor SGP offices—front door with only a half-hearted lock; then a couple of biggish rooms where the party hoi polloi slaved; and finally, behind another locked door, was the private office of the great man himself. His desk was shoved close to a far wall plastered with a map of Europe. The lock on the drawer shouldn’t give me too much trouble, he said with confidence. All Betty would have to do was babysit.

  He took Betty for a stroll down Hybernská Street. They walked arm in arm; young love was always good cover. As he leaned in to give her a small kiss, he whispered into her ear that the squat building behind them was number 4.

  Only one operational question remained: When to strike? A rally was scheduled in a couple of days, the agent explained. The headquarters would probably be crowded day and night as party loyalists prepared. Better to let things settle down, get back to normal. He’d send word to Betty at her hotel when he thought the time was right. There was no rush, he said lightly as they parted.

  BUT SUDDENLY THERE WAS A rush, and the plan had unexpectedly been set in motion.

  Two days after Betty arrived in Prague, as a desperate Neville Chamberlain, the British prime minister, met with Hitler at the Führer’s mountain retreat at Berchtesgaden, hoping to negotiate a peaceful solution to the Czech crisis, Henlein decided to reveal his true allegiance. Speaking at a feverish party rally, he thundered that Germany must take immediate control of the Sudetenland. The border territory, home to three million Germans, had been stolen from the Fatherland after the First World War, he said. It had to be returned.

  With the crowd’s cheers still ringing in his ears, and knowing the Czech police would arrest him for treason, Henlein immediately left for Berlin. He arrived wearing the black uniform of an SS colonel, and received a hero’s welcome.

  That evening, as the American ambassador hosted a dinner in Betty’s honor, she was summoned to the phone. A doctor from Warsaw calling about your daughter, the butler explained.

  It wasn’t a doctor. It was her contact, and he reported that Henlein had unexpectedly fled to Germany just hours before. We have to move quickly, he said, before he asks one of his henchman to clean out his desk.

  They were on for that night.

  AND NOW BETTY, STILL IN her evening clothes, was waiting on the pitch-black street, ears straining for every stray sound, eyes searching about warily. What was taking him so long? She glanced at her watch, and then reprimanded herself. Instead, she tried to think of Michal. Or Arthur. Yes, Arthur; that’d take her mind elsewhere. She wanted to think about anything but the agent upstairs in the dark, struggling with his tools as he crouched by a desk across from a map of Europe.

  She wanted a cigarette. Never had she wanted one so much. But the glowing red tip would signal her position like a beacon. How much longer? she kept asking herself. How many more minutes?

  But just when she was certain she couldn’t stand the tension one more moment, a hand grabbed her arm.

  Come along, her accomplice whispered. Remember, we’re a happy couple making our way home after a night on the town.

  Which, a relieved Betty felt, was true in its way.

  Arm in arm they strolled down the boulevard, oblivious to the thin drizzle that was beginning to fall on the old city.

  “I WILL TELL YOU SOMETHING,” the count said to Betty as they sat together a few days later in the seclusion of a first-class compartment on the train back to Warsaw. “I know we are going to part, you and I. And one day I feel we will meet as enemies.”

  Sadness choked his words. It was as if he was suddenly unable to talk. He had been drinking for a while.

  In a moment he continued: “You must wear a white carnation on that day to show me that you won’t kill me.”

  “What do you mean by that?” Betty asked, suddenly angered. “Do you mean that you are going to be on the German side?”

  “I don’t know,” he said morosely, “but that is the way I see it.”

  He went on in this fatalistic way. In their meeting, the count revealed, the Führer had promised to support Poland’s demands on Czechoslovakia. But Lubienski told Betty he believed it wouldn’t end with that. Hitler had set his sights on Poland too. And when he struck, Poland would have no choice but to become part of the Reich.

  As the train rumbled toward Warsaw, Lubienski continued telling Betty about his troubling conversation with Hitler. He spoke at first with a genuine venom, but his anger was quickly spent. He went on listless and resigned.

  Betty silently committed every word to memory for the report she would send to London. She wanted to offer solace, but her heart wasn’t in it. The sad truth, Betty believed, was that Lubienski had only an intimation, and a small one at that, of how bad things would soon get.

  In her suitcase, packed among her negligees—that, she hoped, would be the last place even an officious border guard would look—were the documents from Henlein’s desk. Among them was a map illustrated in bold colors. Each color represented another stage in Germany’s three-year plan for the annexation of middle Europe.

  In another newspaper tell-all, Betty detailed her seduction of Beck’s chef de cabinet, Count Michal Lubienski.

  Churchill Archives Centre, Churchill Archives Centre Miscellaneous Holdings, MISC 86 / ©Mirrorpix

  Chapter 28

  WHEN BETTY RETURNED TO WARSAW, she discovered that her own world was about to be upended, too. The count’s wife had returned from her summer holiday. Now Betty and Michal’s time together was curtailed; every rendezvous became a challenge. Already brooding over his country’s future, Lubienski slid into a deeper despair. And Betty found herself worrying about the stability of her lover, as well as his continued usefulness.

  In his agitated state, Lubienski decided there was only one honorable course. Life had to be lived honestly, or it was nothing! He could not remain captive to a loveless marriage. Driven by his passion, emboldened by his conviction, the count confronted his wife.

  He was in love with Betty, he announced. He needed a divorce so they could marry.

  Then, exhilarated by his display of courage, Lubienski hurried off to complete the next part of his redemptive mission. He informed the foreign minister of his intentions.

  Beck listened. With a diplomat’s instinctive courtesy, he let his aide ramble earnestly on. But his silence did not mean agreement, or even sympathy. He could not be bothered to try to understand Lubienski’s anguish or his self-justifications. Who had time for love, for fatuous adolescent ardor, when Poland was on the brink of being crushed under Hitler’s heel? When the count’s monologue had finally run its course, he spoke.

  Beck’s words were not a chastisement but an ultimatum. His chef de cabinet could not become entangled with an American woman, the wife of a British diplomat. Either the count would abandon his plan to marry Mrs. Pack, or he would resign from the Foreign Office.

  Lubienski was stunned. He had acted with honor, with a chivalry inspired by his love for Betty. In all his wishful rationalizations, he had never anticipated such a stern rebuke.

  Nevertheless, he was prepared to sacrifice his career—and along with it his reputation—for Betty. Her presence, each new day, each new night, would be more than sufficient consolation. Once they were together, their love would be a refuge from a world careening out of control.

  With a soldier’s pride, he went to tell Betty what he had done. He imagined it would be a time for celebration, for toasts to their shared future. Instead, he discovered that he had been deceived. He did not know Betty at all.

  To her credit, Betty did not pretend. She did not suggest distant possibilities or tantalize with false promises. After their time toget
her, she felt she owed him candor. She wanted him to understand the woman she really was.

  “I don’t know what I’m capable of,” she confessed flatly. “I’m a loner really. I come and I go. No bones broken, and no hearts either, I hope. I don’t like broken hearts. I’m not sentimental at all.”

  Lubienski did not know what to say. He had never before seen this impenetrable side of Betty. He had believed their passion was love. And love was a full-pitched commitment—or it was nothing.

  “Does that shock you?” Betty asked with a cruel bluntness. “Can you understand that? I have to be free. That you must accept.”

  Still, even while Betty, the hard-hearted lover, was telling sharp truths to the count, Betty the British agent was desperately trying to hold on to a valued source. It would be an intelligence disaster if Michal was forced to leave the Foreign Minister’s office. The flow of the important secrets she was passing on to London must not be interrupted.

  When the count, his imagined life with Betty collapsed in ruins, suddenly asked for a favor, she felt she had to agree. It was utter foolishness, the worst sort of mawkish sentimentality, but the spy in her overruled any objections.

  Later that evening, when it had been arranged for Mme Lubienski to be out, Betty appeared at the count’s apartment. As he led the way through his home, he pointed out his cherished possessions and asked her to touch them. He wanted Betty’s fingers on his books, his chair, his pipe. He wanted to feel her presence on all that he cared about. Even if she was not with him, he wanted her to be part of his life. “There will be something of you always here,” he said, wanting to believe it.