by Howard Blum
Astor would detail his findings in meticulously organized reports, all designed to reinforce the personal nature of his small triumphs. But for optimal effect—and no doubt because proximity to power was a cherished part of the adventure—he made it his business to have frequent one-on-one debriefs with his controller. He’d meet with Roosevelt in Hyde Park or at the White House. The president would listen attentively, often offer words of encouragement, and, most gratifying, from time to time suggest new missions. Astor would jump at these presidential commands. And it wasn’t long before the controller rewarded his agent’s diligence.
A presidential directive appointed Astor area controller for intelligence activities in New York. It was by design a secret post; Astor was to remain on inactive naval duty, and his title was known only to the upper ranks of military intelligence. Still, he had an office and a staff in the Naval District Intelligence Office down by the Battery in lower Manhattan. And best of all, the gentleman spy now had official authority to play the game.
New York had always been Astor’s playground, but he found it an even better place to be a spy. He rushed about the city, looking for new opportunities—and he made it his business to get acquainted with Bill Stephenson.
He had known the previous British passport control heads, Sir James Paget and Walter Bell. Both had been invited to speak at the Room. Afterward, always the fieldman, he had written to Roosevelt: “It occurred to me that Paget and Bell might from time to time obtain leads useful to us.” As soon as he had heard Stephenson was coming to New York, Astor urged him to be his guest at his hotel, the St. Regis; “my broken-down boarding house,” he called it with a millionaire’s hollow self-deprecation. Then when Stephenson, a stranger to the bewildering corridors of American power, was looking for guidance, it was Astor who helped him find his way. All it took was one telephone call—and there was Stephenson sitting across from the president of the United States in Hyde Park and having a cozy chat.
It was only a matter of time before Stephenson and Astor, two well-heeled and keen neophytes in the secret life, developed their own special relationship. Working together, they launched what became officially known as the “Ships Observers’ Scheme.”
AN ADMIRING MEMO FROM THE chief of US naval operations detailed the official operational scope of their plan: “In cooperation with the British Intelligence unit in the Third Naval District, New York, New York, a plan for placing ship observers on American merchant vessels has been in effect for several months with excellent results. The plan involved cooperation between the British Intelligence and Naval Intelligence whereby certain ship observers placed on American vessels by British Intelligence were put under control of Naval Intelligence and certain additional observers were placed on American vessels by Naval Intelligence. Provisions were made for the mutual exchange of information.”
And so when the Excalibur, an American Export Lines ship, sailed from Portugal for New York in October 1940, a quick-witted naval lieutenant was on board as an undercover observer. His name was Paul Fairly, but his officer’s rank was part of his cover. He was a yeoman assigned to naval intelligence.
An experienced operative, Fairly had received high marks for his previous shipboard work as a watcher. He was also young, handsome, and oozing with confident charm. After mulling over several possible candidates, Vincent Astor had decided he was just the man he’d been looking for.
This mission, Fairly had been told, would be different from previous watcher assignments. It wasn’t the usual eyes wide open, report anything on board that catches your attention. This op had a specific target.
The target had originated with Bill Stephenson. There was “a person of interest” to the Service sailing on the Excalibur, he had told Astor. She’d done a few things in Poland that had first brought her to his attention, and now he was thinking she might be of use to the BSC. Before he made the offer, he thought it’d be prudent to have someone look her over. He had big plans for her, but he didn’t want to rush in without getting a better sense of who she was. He was a businessman by training, and he’d learned that due diligence was always a wise precaution.
Stephenson gave Astor a name, and Astor made sure it was passed on to Fairly.
The target was Mrs. Betty Pack.
The S.S. Excalibur manifest with Paul Fairly’s name. Stephenson, via Astor, had sent him to keep an eye on Betty during the voyage from Lisbon to New York.
National Archives Microfilm Publication T715, roll 6506; Records of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, Record Group 85; National Archives Building, Washington, DC.
Chapter 33
BETTY HAD NO IDEA SHE was being watched. But her operational lapse might be excused; she had other matters on her mind as the Excalibur sailed west across the Atlantic. An American millionaire had fallen in love with her, and after just two besotted days at sea had proposed marriage.
There were many good reasons why Betty might have discouraged this shipboard romance, why when he caught her by surprise with the first long kiss as they walked together on deck she should have thrown back her pretty head in indulgent amusement and, making sure there were no hard feelings, neatly extricated herself. One, of course, was that she was married. Another was that she had no time for diversions: Betty had to get back to Chile, tie up the loose ends of her life, and hurry back to Europe to fight a war.
But Betty couldn’t help herself. Norman Whitehouse was a dashing cosmopolitan socialite, a man who shuttled between his homes in Newport and Paris, served with distinction from time to time on State Department commissions, played a fast game of squash, and danced like a stalking panther. “We had a mild flirtation,” she confessed demurely to Hyde.
Yet the larger truth, she was beginning to understand even as she instructed Hyde to use a decorously expurgated version for his book, was that she needed to be in love. If she continually convinced herself that she was falling in love, then one day, she wanted to believe, it would actually be true. She would be at peace and would finally settle into an imagined happiness. Her restlessness would vanish.
Years later, older and growing wiser, she would understand her predicament. She hadn’t had romances; she’d had adventures. But at the time, trying to believe in what she now knew was quite impossible, she did her best to convince herself that this shipboard encounter was something special. Once the Excalibur docked in New York, she let Whitehouse sweep her away to his redbrick mansion with the mansard roof in Newport. It was a comfortable household of chintz, fine china, and attentive servants, a setting where it was understood that evening dress would be worn at the dinner table. It was, she told her host, the sort of proper, gracious life her mother would’ve wanted for her.
Whitehouse, unaware of the long-running antagonisms that had kept mother and daughter at each other’s throats, did not hear the bite in Betty’s words; a stranger to her sarcasm, he took them as a compliment. Eager for any support he could find to reinforce his marriage proposal, Whitehouse quickly suggested Betty invite her mother up for a weekend. Perversely, Betty complied; she was looking forward to her mother’s wide-eyed envy.
Like most of Betty’s naughty schemes, it all went as she’d planned. A glance about the mansion set Cora’s covetous heart beating. Suddenly full of maternal concern, she counseled Betty to divorce Arthur and marry this “divine man.” If Betty had qualms about breaking the news to her husband—and this reminded Betty how little her mother knew her—then Cora would travel down to Chile and deliver the grim news herself.
Betty demurred, saying she was still uncertain. She needed time to think things through. Yet her daughter’s hesitancy only added fuel to Cora’s eagerness. “Just think of all the wonderful things you could do for me,” she pleaded.
Her mother’s raw logic brought Betty to her senses. As soon as the words were spoken, any possible long-term relationship with Whitehouse died. She was “talking like a madam,” Betty snapped at Cora. Then Betty went off to thank Whitehouse for his hospital
ity and tell him it was time she returned to Chile, and her husband and daughter.
Betty and a deflated Cora left Newport the next day.
As the porters loaded Betty’s luggage onto the train to New York, Paul Fairly watched from across the platform. He had been keeping an eye on Betty for a while now, and what had started as a simple stint of talent-spotting, a routine surveillance of a target his masters were considering for recruitment, had turned into something else. Something personal. He could not get Betty out of his mind. He looked at her, and he wanted to come out of the shadows and hold her very tight.
STILL, IT WAS WITH THE dispassionate control of a professional that Fairly finally made his approach. Mother and daughter were staying at the Ritz-Carlton in New York—Cora sullenly footing the bill—as Betty waited for the ship that would take her back to Chile, and he chose the hotel lobby for his initial pass.
Good tradecraft held that a crowded place was always fertile ground for an “accidental” meet; the proximity of bystanders helped the target to feel unthreatened. So when he saw Betty charging through the busy lobby in the resolute way he’d come to admire, and after a quick reconnaissance ascertained that her mother was nowhere in sight, Fairly decided the time had come. He bumped into her.
Fairly had worked out what he’d say days in advance, and he delivered the lines from his carefully memorized script: Oh, excuse me. Wait. Don’t I know you? Yes, you were on the Excalibur. Small world. So was I.
Now that the words were spilling from his lips, he couldn’t help feeling that they sounded absurdly transparent, the sort of coincidence that would send any experienced agent running at once for cover. But he improvised with a friendly grin, explaining that he was a lieutenant in the US Navy to show that he was harmless enough. When he asked Betty to join him for a drink, with hardly any hesitation, she agreed.
In the darkness of the cave-like bar, as he sat across from Betty in a booth in the rear, Fairly obeyed his orders. He told Betty the truth, or at least the version of the truth that his superiors had instructed him to share.
He confessed that their meeting was not an accident. He was a Naval Intelligence agent based in Washington. He was in New York on a mission: he had been sent to assist Betty. He would stay in touch with her while she was in Chile, and he would make sure she knew who to contact when she returned to New York. He’d been assigned the task of delivering Betty back into the secret life.
Once the official business was out of the way and the gin was flowing, Fairly moved closer to Betty. He looked directly into her vast green eyes and began to speak. This speech was unplanned and unrehearsed. But his message was clear: watching her from afar, he’d fallen in love with her.
Why was Betty so taken with his ardor? Was it his sincerity? His brash schoolboy’s charm? Or was it—as she now suspected when she conjured up the barroom scene in her mind after so many years—that while everything else in her life had left her unsatisfied and confused, Fairly was offering her a path back into the one calling she desired above all else? He had come to give her another chance. He was summoning her back into the clandestine life. That was why his words, she now understood, had left her so susceptible, why she’d felt such a dizzying sense of rightness and well-being. He was her savior.
And that was why they became lovers.
THREE DAYS LATER FAIRLY ESCORTED Betty onto the ship that would take her back to her husband and daughter. Since they had met they had hardly left each other’s side. For Fairly, it had been double duty, and he’d served both his masters—the navy and his heart—with devotion. For Betty, who’d been traveling helter-skelter around the world, lurching from one caper to another, the interlude was a godsend. The promise of new horizons had quieted her uneasiness. At last she felt secure, released from the need to grasp at every stray opportunity or desire.
Even their farewell was more hopeful than sad. They’d agreed that it would be only a brief parting: Betty would return in a month, unencumbered and ready for duty. In the meantime, Fairly would make sure to keep his bosses in intelligence informed of Betty’s travel plans. And they’d worked out a fallback procedure: if for any reason Fairly was unavailable—there was no knowing where his next mission might take him—then he’d let the right people know they could always reach out to Betty by leaving word at her mother’s home in Washington. He knew his superiors, a socially well-connected clique, would be comfortable using that address as a mail drop; in fact, the sparkle of Cora Thorpe’s pedigree would reinforce the rightness of the entire operation in their minds.
Betty, reassured, shipped off. Her future, she felt, was in good hands. Fairly had handled things the way Jack Shelley would’ve, and in Betty’s world there was no greater compliment.
Her faith was confirmed by a cable that arrived as her ship passed through the Panama Canal. “Our friends have contacted your mother and wish to communicate with you,” Fairly had written. It was, she decided, the first genuine love letter she’d ever received.
When her ship docked in Balboa, she hunted down the British consul and after a good deal of persuasion convinced him to send a message to the Special Intelligence Service in London. I’m coming as soon as I wrap things up, she cabled. It was very important to her that the Service know their love was not in vain.
Then it was on to Chile. She tried to use the voyage to work out some way to give Arthur and Denise the hard news, but after writing a half dozen speeches in her mind, she rejected all of them. None seemed right. She’d just say whatever came into her head at the time; nothing, she understood, was going to make things any easier.
But first she had to stand by her husband’s side and play the radiant diplomatic hostess. It would be her swan song in that role, and she put everything she had into her performance. As if they were the happiest of married couples, she accompanied Arthur to a swirl of receptions. Betty was always the dazzling charmer, the secret fantasy of many of the men who stared at her across the room or the dinner table. Arthur received the official praise for the success of Lord Willingdon’s visit, but he knew that Betty’s presence, her sheer, intoxicating glamor, had made it all possible.
When she broke her news, Arthur was devastated. “Why do you want to do that,” he cried out as if in genuine pain, “now that we have come together again?” He was truly bewildered. He had assumed that Betty had had her “holiday” and had gotten “all this nonsense out of your system.” After their many years of marriage, he still had no understanding of the strength of her demons, or of the ambitions that he competed with for her allegiance.
Betty listened, and turned cold.
“I have been unfaithful to you and I will give you a letter admitting it,” she announced. “You can do what you like with it. You know that no two people could be more temperamentally incompatible than we are—in every way.”
Arthur listened in silence; he understood that her mind was set.
Betty, relentless, continued: “I won’t break up your diplomatic career. I’m not taking anything with me except my clothes. But I must go. I have a life of my own to lead.”
She did not try to offer an explanation to her daughter. How could she say that while she cared about Denise, she loved the prospect of leading her own life, having her own adventures, more?
When she left Santiago at the end of the week aboard the train to Valparaíso, Arthur could not bring himself to go to the station to say good-bye. Six-year-old Denise remained home with her nanny too.
Betty had the spy’s gift for never allowing guilt to interfere with self-interest. She felt only a sense of release as the train headed to the coast. Her old world slipped away, and she escaped.
A NAVAL LAUNCH SIDLED UP to Betty’s liner as it entered New York Harbor. To her surprise, she watched as Fairly climbed onboard. This was the sign she’d been praying for during the long voyage north: her future was about to unfold.
He whisked her through customs with great authority, and then into the waiting naval car.
“Why all the VIP treatment?” she asked as they clasped hands in the back seat. She was impressed, and also suspicious. For a lowly lieutenant, Fairly seemed to have a good deal of official clout.
“It’s British intelligence,” said Fairly. “Seems they want to get ahold of you fast.”
Betty was immediately excited. “Can you get in touch with some of your people and find out where this British intelligence outfit is located? I am getting tired of chasing around the world.”
“That will probably not be necessary,” Fairly said. Reaching into his briefcase, he extracted a thin sheet of paper and handed it to Betty.
She unfolded the page and read:
New York City
November 25, 1940
ATWATER 9-8763
Dear Mrs. Thorpe,
I wish to thank you for seeing me last Saturday in connection with your daughter, whom I am sorry to have missed.
Should you have any news from her which you wish to communicate to me, would you kindly ring the above number in New York City.
Yours sincerely,
J. Howard
Part VI
Washington
Chapter 34
MONEY WAS ON HYDE’S MIND as they drove back to Dublin. Perhaps it was their visit the previous day to Rockfleet, the O’Malley homestead, that had brought the anxiety on. In the high-spirited aftermath of their walk through the house and around the ample grounds, he’d scribbled a quick postscript to Betty’s letter to O’Malley: “We were entranced by Rockfleet and want nothing more than to take a long lease of it and settle there together.” It had been a pretty thought the day before, but now reality kicked in. It wasn’t just that he couldn’t afford to lease a grand home like Rockfleet. As he drove along, the truth that pierced even the thick rain clouds gathered above Clew Bay was that he didn’t know how he was going to live anywhere. He was nearly broke.