The Last Goodnight

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The Last Goodnight Page 20

by Howard Blum


  Betty, for her part, was also trying to believe in something: that they had still an operational future. She wanted to believe that in spite of all that had happened, her mission had not been blown to smithereens.

  IT DID NOT TAKE BETTY long to realize she’d been deluding herself. The messenger was Peta Norton, and she was only too glad to deliver the news. From Betty’s first days in Warsaw, the wife of the counselor at the British embassy had had it in for her. Was she offended by Betty’s promiscuous liaisons? Envious of the younger woman’s startling beauty? Whatever drove her animosity, she arrived at Betty’s apartment determined to enjoy her victory.

  Foreign Minister Beck has written to Sir Howard Kennard, complaining about “your behavior,” she explained with a restraint that struck Betty as more gleeful than decorous. “The ambassador wants you out of Poland. Immediately.”

  My behavior? Betty wanted to scream. What would this prissy witch say if I told her my “behavior” has been encouraged, ordered in fact, by the Secret Intelligence Service? It took all her professional discipline not to share that truth and enjoy a satisfying last laugh.

  Instead, Betty played the scene as defiant. She could not possibly leave, she insisted. She needed to pack. And what about her child and Denise’s nanny? Arrangements had to be made for them too. Confident that the intelligence service would quickly rush to her rescue, Betty marched Mrs. Norton to the door.

  Then she rang Shelley, and used the code word for a crash meeting.

  Her handler was enraged. “London thinks you’re a star!” he declared. It was absurd. Ridiculous. How could they kick his best agent out of Poland when she was continuing to deliver prize material? Don’t worry, he assured her. He’d have a talk with Sir Howard and work things out.

  The next morning, a sullen Shelley delivered the verdict: there would be no reprieve. “I begged the ambassador not to let you go,” he said, “but he is adamant.”

  Shelley went on grimly. “There is more in this than meets the eye,” he suspected, and so he had asked some questions. It didn’t take him long to discover that Beck’s angry letter wasn’t the only problem. Something else was solidifying the ambassador’s resolve.

  There was a story going around the embassy, he explained, that Betty was leaking secrets to the Poles. That was why Lubienski was so chummy: he was using Betty to get British intelligence, then passing it on to his pro-Nazi friends in the Foreign Office.

  And, continued Shelley with apparent frustration, there was no way to refute that story without revealing the truth—that Betty was a British spy. And that, of course, was impossible.

  The Service’s hands were tied, he concluded. Betty had to leave.

  Twenty-four hours later, on the morning of September 27, Shelley drove Betty to the airport. Tears in her eyes, she boarded the plane to Helsinki, the first stop on her way to London.

  Once in the air, Betty, with her usual gallows humor, felt almost like laughing. “It was a fantastic situation,” she told Hyde. “There I was, getting hold of top secret information which the ambassador himself couldn’t obtain, and I was being banned from the country apparently on account of my association with the very man who was the principal source of that information.”

  Yet years later, as she told Hyde about her sudden expulsion from Poland, another realization struck her. It seemed so logical and so obvious that she could only wonder why it had not occurred to her at the time. The unknown source of the rumor buzzing through the embassy that branded her as a Polish operative? It had to have been, she now saw, Jack Shelley.

  With Beck’s letter stirring the pot, MI6 must have suspected that things were getting too hot for Betty in Poland. Even if her cover had not been blown, how long before Beck put two and two together and realized what was behind her attraction to the count? And if Polish intelligence brought her in for questioning, how long before she confessed or, worse, spilled the names of other agents, other ongoing operations? Betty now understood: the longer she remained in Warsaw, the greater a liability to the Service she became.

  But—and this was the inspired part of Shelley’s double-cross, as Betty now realized—if the Firm could find a plausible excuse for her suddenly leaving Poland and at the same time tar her as a Nazi sympathizer, her cover would survive without a scratch. In fact, in the eyes of the enemy, it would be reinforced. And Betty, whose husband’s diplomatic posting to Poland would anyway soon come to an end, could go on to spy another day.

  It was masterful, Betty now told herself. But at the time, her swift expulsion struck her as painful rather than shrewd. And even all those years later, knowing how things would work out, the missions she would have, she still couldn’t find it in her heart to forgive Shelley or the Service for what they had done.

  IT WAS A SHAKY BETTY who arrived in England. She felt unhinged. She had lost both her lover and her opportunity to help the Service. She could not imagine anything ever taking their place. Desperate and uncertain, she decided to reach out to her son. She wanted to believe that the boy, her flesh and blood, could make up for all she had lost.

  Her trip to Dorrington to see Tony at the Cassells’ was just one more disappointment. It had been three years since her last visit, and as soon as she arrived, she understood why she had been so lackadaisical: she felt nothing. She was Tony’s mother, but that had created no tie, no inexorable bond. She had brought him into the world, and that was the start and the end of her involvement. Her son, she decided, could not fill any of her empty spaces.

  With no place else to go, she returned to Arthur. Her husband was convalescing at the low-ceilinged white house they had shared in Saint-Jean-de-Luz. The temperate climate, he’d hoped, would be a balm while he waited for the Foreign Office to give him a new assignment.

  Arthur was surprised to see Betty, but not nearly as surprised as she was by his reaction to her arrival. He knew about the count, but expressed neither indignation nor rage. Instead, he focused his anger on the way the Foreign Office had treated his wife. He viewed Betty’s expulsion from Poland, particularly its unseemly speed, as a personal insult. Affronted, he cabled the ambassador.

  “Why do you not allow my wife back in Poland?” he asked testily.

  A terse reply swiftly came back: “It is in the interest of the Service that she does not return.”

  But Arthur, with time on his hands and perhaps also looking for a way to channel his repressed resentment over Betty’s latest affair, persisted. He badgered the Warsaw embassy with a flurry of telegrams, each one another acerbic demand that his wife be allowed to return to Warsaw to pack up their furniture and possessions before his next posting.

  Finally his pounding away brought a grudging response. “Mrs. Pack can return to Warsaw for a week provided she promises not to see anyone.”

  “ALL AGENTS LIE,” BETTY GLIBLY rationalized, having sent word to the ambassador that she would accept his terms. She repeated the same flip justification when she shared the details of her return to Warsaw with Hyde.

  Lubienski welcomed Betty at the airport, and in high spirits they went off to dinner to celebrate her arrival. But by the time she returned to her apartment—“with Michal, of course,” she offered offhandedly to Hyde—the festive mood had soured. The brevity of their time together loomed over their reunion. The count would not let Betty sleep; each moment together was too precious to squander.

  The next day, as Betty went through the motions of packing up, the count made a sudden decision: they must run off for as long as they could. They must make each day they had left theirs alone. It would be as close to forever as they would get.

  It did not matter that the embassy had insisted Betty remain sequestered at the apartment until she left Warsaw. So what if someone was scheduled to come by each day to check on her? When Lubienski announced that he was taking her to the country, someplace where they could be alone, an inn with a big feather bed, Betty agreed at once.

  But all too quickly their slow days in the countryside and t
heir long nights in the big feather bed came to an end. Lubienski was in tears as he waited for Betty to board her plane. “Someday I will find you, even if it takes me twenty years.”

  Betty did not reply. She knew she would not wait twenty years for the count, or for any man, but there was no point in sharing this truth. She gave him a final embrace. Then, brisk and practical, a woman who had said many good-byes in her life, she turned and walked off without another word.

  “And that,” Betty told Hyde, “was the end of my first secret service mission and also the end of my big Polish affair.”

  But it would not be the end of her career. Before boarding the plane, she had met with Shelley. “Don’t worry,” he told her, “the Firm will contact you again no matter where you are.”

  This was the lover’s embrace she truly craved.

  BACK IN QUIET SAINT-JEAN-DE-LUZ, BETTY waited. She waited to hear where Arthur would be posted, and she waited to hear her next mission. The two were intertwined; Arthur, for better or worse, provided her cover. The wife of a British diplomat, she could travel nearly anywhere in the world without raising suspicions.

  To help pass the long, empty days in the quiet fishing village, she spent a good deal of time with the new chargé d’affaires, Owen St. Clair O’Malley. He was the scion of an ancient Irish family, a roaring bull of a man with a rascal’s contrarian charm; “swimming against the tide,” he’d write with a mischievous pride, was how he made his way through both life and the Foreign Service.

  Of course Betty loved him. But for once it was a pure, unencumbered friendship. O’Malley’s wife was pretty, talented, and close at hand—that was one impediment. But another obstacle was her double life in Poland had left her exhausted. Nearly as much as her convalescing husband, she needed to recover, to prepare herself for the danger that lay ahead.

  When the news came that Arthur was being posted back to Chile to run the embassy’s commercial department, Betty felt betrayed. Santiago was an ocean away from the momentous events that had already begun to surge across Europe. Santiago would be an exile. All her loyalty, all her devotion to the cause, and this was her reward? She was inconsolable. The world was rushing to war, but she was a spy without a mission.

  Part V

  The Long Way Home

  Chapter 29

  AS IT HAPPENED, JUST AS Betty had finished telling Hyde about her easy, restorative days spent walking along the rocky strip of beach in Saint-Jean-de-Luz with Owen O’Malley, they found themselves in the seaside town of Mulranny. We’re only a few miles from Rockfleet, Hyde suggested.

  Rockfleet, Betty knew from all of the elaborate stories she’d heard in these strolls, was the O’Malleys’ ancestral home. In its time buccaneering pirates, pugnacious nationalists, and esteemed peers of the realm had walked through its grand rooms. It was a house with a long, rich history, and she instinctively felt that because of her relationship with O’Malley, it was somehow tied to her own past too. Betty couldn’t help but be curious.

  May 13, 1963

  The enclosed posy [Betty wrote to O’Malley, now in Oxford, later that day], I picked on the lawn of Rockfleet this morning. . . . The housekeeper kindly let us in and I had the joy of sitting on your bed and looking out your front and side windows and imagining you there, as I have so often imagined you over the years. . . .

  The house is lovely in every way; the weather was wild Irish with mist and drizzle and white wavelets on Clew Bay. A brown hare hopped in the wind across the green grass outside the library, and the wind blew hard and strong. But spring was there too, in the apple blossoms trellised against the wall near the front door and in the early flowers in the lawns. How glad I am to have seen it all and to share this part of your life with you, too.

  Back at the old railway hotel in Mulranny in the evening of that cold, wet, and gusting day, they sat in silence over dinner. She was, she’d later write, sorting through the day, linking it back to her own past and inevitably bringing it all full circle. She’d come to Ireland to search, to find the lucidity she needed, and despite the jauntiness of her letter to O’Malley, an introspective shadow now stretched across all she had observed.

  In time, she shared a little of what had been filling her mind.

  The element in her relationship with O’Malley that she so deeply cherished, she tried explaining to Hyde, was the complete absence of intrigue. It was as it appeared to be and nothing more—a friendship. So much of her life had been calculation and deceit. In the name of love, she had betrayed her husband. And in the name of duty, she’d betrayed her lovers.

  She wanted to know why they both, a pair of old spies and unfaithful spouses, had made the expedient and amoral decisions that had shaped their untidy lives. She asked why they had thrown away their scruples.

  There were many answers Hyde could have given. He might have suggested that confusing passion for love was, in its too human way, an honest mistake. He might have turned defiant, making the specious case that their spouses were not harmed by their philandering. Or, taking the lofty road, he might have argued that moral ambiguity be damned. The work they did in the war was invaluable, and wars are not won by playing by the rules.

  Instead, Hyde chose to be more honest: “We are who we are. It is our nature.”

  It was not the explanation she had probably been hoping for. She might have preferred something more exculpatory, an insight that would’ve allowed her to forgive herself for the many acts she now regretted. Still, Betty gave his words some thought. And the more she considered Hyde’s terse pronouncement, the more she’d later acknowledge she suspected he was right.

  It’s time for bed, she said at last.

  Tomorrow, he reminded her, we’ll need to pick up where you left off. You had just returned to Chile.

  Chapter 30

  THE ART OF BUILDING A convincing cover, the MI6 spymasters knew, had a single Golden Rule: Take what’s already there and add more of the same. Done right, it was a long-running process. The deeper the layers of disguise, the more credible the new identity, and the smaller the likelihood it would raise suspicions once the agent was off in the field.

  Yet there was one operational drawback: such deliberate invention required patience. For an agent like Betty, a woman whose restlessness was a constant ache, the passive discipline required was excruciating.

  At the end of April 1939, when Betty arrived in Chile, she was already disappointed. Not only was it a return to a too-familiar turf where a high-spirited game of polo was her only chance for action, but she was consigned to this limbo just when Europe was about to explode. She yearned for more consequential sport.

  Betty tried fitting in with the embassy crowd, but once again she was quickly raising eyebrows. A catty story—small, yet one of many that chronicled her unbridled streak—was soon being whispered at cocktail parties. Betty was strolling through downtown Santiago with Leslie Doublet, the wife of the local manager of the Bank of London, when a dress in a store window caught her eye. She went in to try it on. Mrs. Doublet followed her into the changing room, only to discover that, as Betty pulled the dress she had on over her head, she was naked. Shaken, Mrs. Doublet crisply suggested that Betty “ought to wear some underclothes.” Betty dismissed the admonishment with a bemused laugh. “Phooey! There’s a war on. I haven’t got time to worry about things like that.” That’s our impish Betty, the gossip mongers had tittered, as a member of the embassy crowd cattily remembered decades later.

  For Arthur, though, the return to Chile was just what he needed.

  “Things do not look very hopeful in Europe,” he wrote to his family in England not long after he received his new post, “so perhaps it is just as well for my health that I am going to the end of the world. . . . Denise and Betty are both very well and we are all together again for the first time in over a year.”

  But while Arthur might truly have had no inkling of the discontent building up in his wife, the Service was more realistic. They suspected that Betty’s unhapp
y days with Arthur were drawing to a close (how indeed had the couple lasted this long?), and when the marriage collapsed, so would Betty’s diplomatic cover. They would use this interlude in Chile to fashion Betty’s new identity. Only when it was complete would they send her back into the fray.

  Arthur Pack, left, in Chile, with Leslie Doublet—the wife of the local manager of the Bank of London, who stuffily told Betty she “ought to wear some underclothes.”

  Churchill Archives Centre, Churchill Archives Centre Miscellaneous Holdings, MISC 86

  AMONG BETTY’S MANY TALENTS, IT was duly noted in the offices on Broadway, were her literary skills. Her reports from first Spain and then Poland had generated nearly as much praise for their narrative precision and style as for their content. In the flood of dispatches streaming into headquarters, Betty’s always found an audience: they were a good read. Plus, her background file also included the intriguing fact that she was an author—or at least had been, as a young girl. And so the plan was conceived to reinvent Betty as a reporter. Journalistic cover, after all, was as tried and true—and nearly as bulletproof—as a diplomatic posting.

  When the details of this scheme were shared with Betty, she jumped at it. She had been sitting on the sidelines in Chile for too long. Here was the chance, she explained to Hyde, “to do something for the war effort actively, wholeheartedly, and practically.” Even better, it held out the promise of future important missions. Her desire to do something useful had taken on a new urgency: on September 1, 1939, the Wehrmacht had goose-stepped their way into her beloved Poland.

  In Chile, most people read either El Mercurio or La Nación. Since El Mercurio was a conservative sheet, its articles and editorials sympathetic to Germany’s expansionist ambitions, she contacted Carlos Prendis, the editor of the more liberal La Nación.

 

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