by Howard Blum
The tradecraft in her approach was well conceived. She appealed to the editor’s sense of journalistic fair play: “We must have one paper in Chile on the side of the Allies,” she suggested. And—her argument’s clincher—she was willing to write her articles “for nothing, simply for the privilege of getting into print.”
Prendis listened; considered; and then turned Betty down. There was a large German community in Chile, and many were wealthy manufacturers and store owners. It wouldn’t make much business sense to antagonize such a deep-pocketed crowd, especially when his paper looked to them for advertisements and circulation.
“So,” Betty confided to Hyde, “I set out to persuade him. I did it personally. I flirted with him, of course.”
HER FIRST ARTICLE APPEARED UNDER the pen name of “Elizabeth Thomas”—Betty could no longer remember whether that was a caution the embassy insisted on to distance itself from the strident pro-Allied arguments she’d be making in a neutral country or whether the work name was her controller’s invention—and it was headlined “The Polish Corridor.”
“The frontiers of Poland became intolerable to Germany,” Betty thundered, “not only because they were those of a strong independent state (any independent state with tempting territory is ‘intolerable’ to the Third Reich) but also because those frontiers were an obstacle to the Nazi program of world domination.”
The piece ran on September 4, 1939. It was the day after Great Britain had declared war on Germany, and Betty felt like she was rushing into battle too.
Articles with the Elizabeth Thomas byline rolled off the presses of La Nación, and soon they were being picked up by the local English-language paper, the South Pacific Mail. “Hitler’s Excuse for Latest Theft,” ran the feisty headline on a typically dogmatic piece.
With the Service’s approval, she reproduced the map she’d stolen from Henlein’s office a year before. Betty never, of course, shared with her growing readership how she’d obtained the secret document, but that didn’t matter. The story the map told was more than sufficient to grab their attention. It was a timeline for the proposed Nazi march across Europe: 1940—Yugoslavia, Rumania, and Bulgaria; 1941—France, Switzerland, Luxembourg, Holland, Belgium, and Denmark; and 1942—the Soviet Ukraine.
Making facile use of an “eyewitness” account the Service had passed on of the sinking of a German battleship, she wrote a long, impassioned article that built up to an anti-Nazi roar: “Today all that is left of the Admiral Graf Spee sticks up out of twenty-five feet of water in mute testimony of a government that does not know the meaning of either courage or honor.”
“Elizabeth Thomas” was making quite a name for herself. And in the heated process she was also, to her combative pride, making enemies. The angry German community decided to fight back. Thomas Kreiser, a local journalist whose laborious sentences bulldozed on and on like a Panzer attack, was recruited to rebut her pieces. “The whole thing,” Betty snickered, “mushroomed into an exchange of polemics. I would write and Kreiser would reply, and I would reply to his reply.”
This war of words, to Betty’s dismay, seemed as close to a fighting war as she would get. But at least it gave her a reason to get a gun.
The Elizabeth Thomas pseudonym was only a thin veil, and evidently a transparent one too. It wasn’t long before both Betty and the British embassy were receiving anonymous letters warning that she’d better “stop writing or else.”
Or else what? an increasingly frustrated Betty felt like shouting. You’ll give me the chance to get into a real fight? Still, that was all the excuse Betty needed. She cajoled the naval attaché into giving her a revolver. With the acquiescence of the Service, he agreed. Now she filled her empty afternoons taking practice shots out the Chancery windows at imaginary targets and, even more fun, deliberately annoying the embassy staff in the process.
But taking potshots at nonexistent Nazis was only a small and rapidly fading pleasure. Trading barbs in print with the maddening Kreiser offered even less sport. Determined, Betty made up her mind to get back into the game.
THE PARQUE FORESTAL WAS IN the heart of Santiago, a rich green oasis with paths rambling through stands of tall trees. The park’s turn-of-the-century design was precise and formal, more Gallic than Latin in its inspiration. And as a homage to the parks in Paris, its landscapers had shaped a leafy allée that twisted along the Mapocho River. Over the years this had become a favorite trail for equestrians who enjoyed starting their day with an early morning ride.
It was here on a glorious fall morning, not long after the sun had risen above the Andes, that Betty cantered along. She was a natural rider, her seat perfect, her back straight, and her hands comfortable with the reins. Her riding habit—the fitted jacket, the tight jodhpurs—had been snugly tailored. She was a wonderful sight.
Betty continued at a decorous canter until at last she saw that the moment she’d been waiting for was at hand. She broke into a gallop. Her horse surged ahead effortlessly. Then, her timing perfect, she kicked him sharply with her spurs. The horse shied, and Betty tumbled to the ground. Exactly as she had planned.
Full of concern, Colonel Montagu Parry-Jones galloped over, dismounted, and offered his assistance. He was the military attaché at the British embassy, but Betty, who knew a bit about how things worked, had pegged him as the intelligence service’s liaison in Santiago. Their paths had crossed at several parties, and she’d made a few well-practiced assaults. She’d sidle up close to the old Etonian, and Parry-Jones, every taut inch the soldier, would merely nod politely. A week earlier, though, after she’d blatantly confided to the colonel that she’d like to get to know him better, she detected a slight thaw in his military demeanor. Encouraged, wanting to believe that she’d found an avenue back into the secret world, she had devised this scheme to move things along.
And now here was Parry-Jones gallantly extending his hand as Betty sat on the ground, laughing her rich, throaty, uninhibited laugh and pretending she was embarrassed. “Well, we are getting acquainted,” Betty said as she took his hand. In one strong motion, the colonel lifted her to her feet.
WITH THE COLONEL’S CONSENT AND encouragement, as well as the acquiescence of the spymasters in London, Betty began, as she would later coyly put it, to “snoop a little.” Chile was brimming with cells of Nazi sympathizers, a fifth column of bankers, mine owners, and landed gentry who brashly schemed with the Abwehr. The government remained officially neutral, but these men were covertly working for the day when Germany could get its hands on Chile’s treasure chest of oil and mineral deposits. They hatched plots galore, many fanciful, but some that sent shivers through the British embassy. It was Betty’s job to infiltrate this nest of renegades, and to keep London informed about who they were and what they were up to.
There Betty would be at diplomatic dinners, country-club dances, and polo matches, always glamorous, always charming, always the sparkling focus of every man’s attention—and always listening. She trained herself to remember every word she heard, and in the aftermath of these outings she’d return to the embassy. With Montagu-Parry’s consent, she’d been given access to the windowless code room, where she’d hunker down at a desk and type out her reports.
Each one was, in its formal way, a model of the professional fieldman’s laconic art; Jack Shelley had taught her well. She clearly identified sources, weighed their reliability objectively, and then pithily summarized what she had gleaned. If she had an insight about how a specific piece of intelligence fitted into the big picture, she’d offer this up too. But she made it clear that this was her own assessment, and even then she never guessed; she never—sin of sins in intelligence work—tried to oversell the product.
Betty kept at it. But all the time she kept wondering if London had decided to let her stand in the wings, only a bit player, if that, in the great drama that was unfolding. The dismal month of June 1940 saw a swift series of Allied catastrophes. Holland, Belgium, and France had fallen. England was now prepa
ring to make a last stand, rallying its forces and its people for what its new prime minister insisted would be Britain’s “finest hour.” Yet there she was, writing her articles and typing her reports in the netherworld of Chile.
Then she received a letter from London. The official crest of the War Office was at the top of the stiff page, and the single-spaced sentences were perfectly typed and centered:
Should Mrs. Pack return to England, a representative of this Office would be interested in meeting with her and discussing how she might be of assistance in the war effort.
The crisp tone was guarded. There was no acknowledgment of her past services and, more disappointing, no guarantee of future employment in intelligence activities. Betty reminded herself that during the year since her arrival in Santiago she had begun to stake out a new life. Her husband was on the mend, and without the nearly constant operational demands that she had in Warsaw, she was able to spend time with her six-year-old daughter. Now she was being told to abandon her family and travel across the world to a besieged London, to meet an unnamed factotum in the War Office—a recruiter? a pencil pusher?—for a conversation whose subject had been left annoyingly vague.
“This was a good enough excuse for me,” Betty told Hyde. Despite her renewed relationship with Denise, it did not trouble her to leave her daughter; she felt little maternal pull. And as for Arthur, she simply told him that she was going. It would be useless to persuade her to stay, she warned. Her mind was set.
Using some of what remained of the modest sum she’d inherited upon her father’s death, Betty immediately booked a ticket on a steamer bound for New York. Once she arrived in America, she’d figure out how to get to London.
Chapter 31
BETTY WAS REBORN. SHE WAS now, according to the story she made it her business to spread about the ship, a reporter traveling to New York for a new job. If anyone doubted her credentials, she had a hefty scrapbook of clippings in her valise to prove it. But Betty’s past caught up with her when, as much to her disbelief as to her indignation, the British minister to Peru tried to rape her.
She had sailed on the Orbita, a British ship that left Valparaíso’s harbor on July 4, 1940. For many of the passengers, it was an apprehensive voyage. A force of German U-boats, the Gruppe Monsun (Monsoon Group), was aggressively patrolling the Allied trade routes that crisscrossed the Pacific, and the slow-moving Orbita would be an easy target for an enemy torpedo. But Betty, the eager spy, had other concerns on her mind: she spent the voyage trying to prove her worth.
It had been suggested to Betty—after all these years, she explained to Hyde, she’d forgotten who at the embassy had passed along the message, which, he knew, might or might not be true—that she book passage on this particular crossing. It’d offer a few choice opportunities for discreet reconnaissance. A stint as a watcher, she’d been advised, could be a first step in her return to the field.
On board was the Chilean delegation to the Pan-American Conference. They were traveling to Havana where an anxious Cordell Hull, the US secretary of state, had hastily convened the gathering to get a sense of whether the Nazis’ blitzkrieg through Europe had created new support for Germany in Latin America. Betty’s assignment was to cozy up to the delegates on the ship, play the guileless reporter, and let London know before the conference began what they were thinking.
A sea cruise—the long convivial dinners, the open bar, the lulling rhythm of the ocean, the starry nights, plus the large operational advantage she held simply because there was not a single woman delegate—was a bread-and-butter assignment for Betty. Nevertheless, her diligence was extraordinary. Ready to show off her skills, she threw herself into the job.
Was any spy ever more productive in such a short time? Her thick report included informative sketches of each of the forty-five delegates, but she zeroed in with special acuity on the six men who, she had discovered, were in Hitler’s camp. The six of them had already begun covert discussions with German intelligence and were determined to persuade the government in Santiago to abandon its neutrality and support the Nazis. And in addition to this coup, she’d somehow got two of the senior delegates to divulge in expansive detail Chile’s entire agenda at the conference.
An agent who delivered product like that was certain to get noticed. From Lord Halifax, the foreign secretary, to the British ambassador to Chile, to the civil servants on the Latin American desk, Betty’s report made the rounds. As one anonymous Foreign Office reader scrawled in the report’s margin, “Mrs. Pack is a forceful American lady.”
It would not be long, though, before the British minister to Peru would be able to give his colleagues firsthand testimony on just how forceful the American lady could be. If he dared.
COURTENEY FORBES, HIS MAJESTY’S MINISTER to Peru, was a paunchy, acerbic, self-important Eton and Oxford man, a tyrant with an annoyingly booming voice. Since his opinions were the only ones that mattered, he bellowed whatever was on his mind for everyone to hear. He also, in his self-confident way, considered himself a benevolent God’s gift to womankind.
Given the constant swirl of diplomatic parties and receptions, it was only natural that now and again Betty would have crossed his path. He had liked what he’d seen. More intriguing, he liked what he’d heard: Mrs. Pack was not quite a lady.
It was a normal courtesy when a fellow British diplomat of sufficient rank or his wife arrived in any city for the local ministry to send a junior staffer to assist them, but when the Orbita docked outside Lima, Forbes decided he’d be the one to show up. The legation had been informed that Betty, en route to New York, would be on board, and he figured this would be his chance. He’d greet the glamorous Mrs. Pack in her cabin; and then, if the many whispered stories were true, anything might happen.
Betty, with the steady calm of the never-ruffled fieldman, described to Hyde what did happen:
I was wearing a diaphanous nightie when the ship docked and was still in my cabin. Suddenly there was a knock on the door and thinking it might be the stewardess I got up and opened it. To my surprise there stood His Britannic Majesty’s minister. He came in, carefully locking the door behind him. Evidently the sight of me in my nightie was too much for him, since without saying good morning he proceeded to catch hold of my waist and throw me on the berth. He then attempted to rape me.
“I struggled for a few moments and then told him I would ring for the steward, which I promptly did. Fortunately for him, by the time the steward appeared Mr. Courteney Forbes had recovered himself sufficiently to invite me to lunch at the Legation in Lima.
She accepted. The hardworking spy gamely told herself that in the course of their lunch, there was no telling what morsels she might be served. And Forbes had, somewhat convincingly, promised “to behave myself.” Besides, intelligence, she told herself, was a trade where you must on occasion sup with the devil. Her spoon would be long; she felt she’d able to hold him off.
Forbes was docile enough—at first. When Betty trotted out the cover story that she was “on her way to the United States to work as a journalist,” he seemed to buy it. In fact, Forbes said her articles had been reprinted in the Lima papers, and he’d read them with interest. Next thing Betty knew, he was offering her a job. Stay in Lima and write in the legation’s information section, he said. Her starting salary would be a munificent $480 each month—about as much, Betty realized, as the Foreign Office paid Arthur. Still, Betty perfunctorily turned him down; she had more pressing ambitions. And as she griped to Hyde, “Anyhow, I had a shrewd idea that the task Mr. Forbes had in mind for me included a stint in the bedroom as well as the office.”
Yet while the conversation at lunch was merely bothersome, what followed would be an all-out disaster. When Forbes learned that she was on her way next to the Hotel Bolivar to meet Señor Paradol, a Peruvian diplomat she’d known during her happy days in Madrid, he insisted on accompanying her. Forbes knew Paradol, too; he’d like the chance to say hello. After he shrewdly reminded that he ha
d a car and driver waiting, Betty acquiesced.
Later that afternoon they walked into the narrow lobby of the hotel. It was, as usual, hopping; when Lima’s old guard went out for a cocktail, the barroom at the Bolivar was where they gathered. Waiting to greet them, stationed by the busy entrance so Betty wouldn’t miss him, was the courtly Paradol.
In his booming, assertive voice, Forbes called to Paradol. He was loud enough for everyone in the lobby to hear, as well as, a cringing Betty imagined, the rest of Lima too.
“Well, here’s your girl!” he bellowed in a surprisingly fluent Spanish. “You know I think she is a spy. She has left Chile, the Germans are after her, and she is on her way to the United States to do newspaper work, she tells me. But if it’s newspaper work, she could perfectly well stay here with us, couldn’t she?”
Betty laughed bravely and loudly. What a card! she announced to Paradol and everyone else who was now listening, she feared, with rapt attention. Gaily she took Paradol’s arm, and they went off to have a jolly time, dining and dancing the night away.
Yet all the time, the carefree, smiling mask she’d put on concealed her utter panic. How could Forbes—a ranking British official!—have been so careless, so destructive? With a sinking heart she considered the consequences. All she’d worked for, destroyed in one reckless, fatal moment.
“One hardly likes to have one’s cover blown before one even begins,” she complained to Hyde, her cool understatement made possible only by the passing of the years.
ONCE BACK ON BOARD, BETTY did her best at damage control. She worried that Forbes’s outburst had been passed on to her targets in the Chilean delegation, and she immediately went to work to assuage suspicions. She made sure it became well known that the minister had a mean-spirited motive to lie: Betty had spurned his aggressive advances, and he wanted revenge.