by Howard Blum
“It’s me, Alberto,” Betty heard when she answered the phone one morning.
“How did you get my number?” she wondered, genuinely surprised. And she kept her larger astonishment to herself: He had called! The operation was back on track!
“Never mind,” he said. “I want you to listen to me. I have been thinking very hard over our conversation the other day, and I have come to the conclusion that it will be all right for us to meet after all.”
Betty knew better than to interrupt.
The admiral continued: “But it must be done very discreetly and without anyone knowing. Of course, it cannot be at the embassy or my own house or even a hotel, as it would be immediately known. Have you any suggestions?”
Have I any suggestions? Betty felt like shouting. But instead, as if it were a random idea, the last in a long list of possibilities, she said, “Well, you can come over to my place.”
Lais considered while Betty prayed, not for the first time, to the operational gods.
“Yes,” the admiral finally said.
“Well, that’s fine,” Betty said, her calm all artifice. “Come tomorrow night after dinner. My maid is going out and I shall be alone.”
Chapter 38
BETTY HAD CAREFULLY SET THE stage. A fire burned in the sitting room grate. A well-chosen bottle of full-bodied red wine had been uncorked to breathe; two crystal glasses flanked it on the bar table. After sorting through her closet for what had seemed like hours, she’d put on an off-the-shoulder black cocktail dress, neither too tight nor too low-cut. She did not want the admiral to think this would be too easy, yet at the same time she wanted to encourage his attentions. She wanted to look elegant, but not distant.
Just after nine o’clock the doorbell rang, and the op went into play.
“It’s my Golden Girl and she hasn’t changed a bit,” the admiral lied as soon as Betty opened the door. He wrapped her in a warm, paternal embrace and kissed her on both cheeks.
He held her longer, though, than a father might. And Betty let him.
When he released her, she looked him up and down in a thoughtful appraisal. “You don’t seem to have changed much either,” said Betty, who also knew a good deal about lying. The truth, she silently observed, was crueler: balding, portly, and in his sixties, the admiral showed the passing years.
She linked her arm merrily in his. “Come along in,” she said as she led the way into the sitting room, “and tell me everything. It seems ages since we met. My wedding, I think, was the last time.”
“TELL ME EVERYTHING,” BETTY HAD commanded, but what does a long-married man confide to a young woman? Invariably he pours out his heart, revealing a wife who doesn’t understand him and a life of disappointment and unhappiness.
Over the next month, appearing two, sometimes three, times a week at Betty’s home, Lais shared his version of this common middle-aged complaint. His wife Leonora was a good mother to their two children, he was grateful for that; but he “had never really loved her.” He had married Leonora because she was “suitable,” but after nearly three decades together this was small consolation. He was, he moaned, a very unhappy man.
Betty in turn shared a melodramatic and self-serving version of her own unfulfilled life. Her marriage to a cold-blooded man had been a failure from the start. It had taken her years to find the will to escape, and in retaliation Arthur now held their six-year-old daughter hostage. She rearranged the facts to present an image of a woman who was not just alone, but lonely. She wanted Lais to know that she needed a friend, a confidant, just as desperately as he did.
As she told her own sad story, Betty, thinking several operational steps ahead, began to unfurl a false flag. She made sure Lais believed that she had turned not just on her English husband but on Britain too. She had returned to Washington because she was an American. Her loyalty was to the Stars and Stripes, not the Union Jack.
She was certain this was exactly what Lais would want to hear. He had spent many convivial years in the United States. His wife was an American. It caused him great pain that Mussolini seemed determined to drive a wedge between Italy and the country that had become, he had told her with a gushy sentimentality, “my second homeland.”
But England—that was an island for which he harbored a steely, unmitigated hatred. He still bitterly remembered how Britain had reneged on the promise it made in 1915 to grant his nation sovereignty over the Italian-speaking districts on the Istrian Peninsula and Dalmatia in return for Italy’s entering the war on the Allied side. As did many of his countrymen, he found it an unforgivable betrayal. It was this enmity that Betty, casting herself as a patriotic American, the proud daughter of a distinguished family from the heartland, hoped to exploit when the time was right.
Between their shared problems, their mutual unhappiness, and their political sympathies, it did not take long for their renewed friendship to move into the bedroom.
THE DOUBLE BED WAS A battlefield where Betty had fought many engagements. An experienced veteran, she was rarely taken off-guard and rarely unwilling in the heat of combat to make whatever sacrifice was necessary. Nevertheless, the admiral’s demands left her puzzled.
He’d have her sprawled naked on her bed, or for variety occasionally the sitting room sofa, lush and provacative like Manet’s Olympia come to life in soft pink flesh. And where would Lais’s fancy take him? He would cuddle, stroke, and fondle her for hours.
Perhaps she remained in his mind’s eye the adolescent “Golden Girl,” and intercourse was taboo. Or maybe age had trumped desire. But whatever the reason, Betty found this chaste routine as bewildering as it was unexpected.
Years later, it was all still a mystery to her. “Technically we weren’t lovers,” she told Hyde, barely concealing her astonishment. “All that we would do would be to sit on my sofa or lie on my bed. He would kiss and fondle me and whisper to me and pet me and hold me close and say that I was the only thing he had left in America. This was as far as our physical relations went. Although no doubt it could be called intimate, our relationship was sentimental and even sensual rather than sexual.”
She never thought, though, to judge Lais. “Men can want very different things at different times,” she explained to Hyde matter-of-factly. “It was my job to know what and when to do whatever would make them feel happy and comfortable.”
All that mattered was the mission. No sacrifice was too great, too unseemly. As long as she succeeded, she had no regrets. Even today, Betty realized, she’d still throw everything over for something she believed in.
VALUABLE INTELLIGENCE, THOUGH, FROM THE Lais operation was slow in developing. The admiral was also a spy, and Betty was beginning to fear that he was too much of a professional to reveal any secrets.
Her handler, however, proved masterful. Pepper was encouraging and patient, two qualities that were essential in any case officer who sends his agent out into the field. Betty would show up for her weekly debriefings at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Manhattan—now that Lais was the target, Pepper had largely taken over from Marion—and he’d listen with rapt attention to summaries of her inconsequential conversations with the admiral. When she finished, glum and a bit defensive, Pepper nevertheless always had a word of praise. You’ve made contact, that’s the important thing, he’d insist. These things take time. Espionage, he’d repeatedly lecture, his metaphor inspired by the weekends he’d spent gardening in Surrey in a previous life, is like tending a seedling. You keep watering and pruning, and wait and wait until it bears fruit.
Pepper also made sure to keep Betty focused on the prize. Before sending Betty back to Washington, he’d reiterate that the goal of this entire op was the ciphers. Where they were stored, who had access to them, how they could be smuggled from the embassy—the answers to those questions were her primary assignment.
In the meantime, his instructions were “to play along.”
BETTY WAS TOUCHED BY THE admiral’s gift. It was a silver trinket box, decorated with a del
icate hand-carved filigree. The craftsmanship was exquisite. But even more affecting was the small, heartfelt speech the admiral made when he gave her the present.
They were in her sitting room one evening when, without prelude, he reached into his pocket and offered the shiny silver box. He wanted Betty, he said, to have something he treasured. He spoke earnestly, as a lover does to his beloved.
“I will treasure it with all my heart,” Betty said, and at that moment she genuinely meant it.
But she was also a professional, and every instinct told her to take advantage of what had just occurred. The admiral’s vulnerability was too promising an operational advantage to squander.
“But there is something else in your power to give me,” she began cautiously, “which I would treasure equally, if not more so, my dearest Alberto.”
“What is that, my dear?”
Betty rested her head on his shoulder; she wanted him to feel her warmth before she proceeded. Still, she hesitated. And when she finally spoke, the tremor in her voice, she’d tell Hyde, was not contrived. She was scared. The entire operation had been building to this moment.
Dusting off the cover story she’d prepared weeks earlier, she said an American friend in the Office of Naval Intelligence needed a favor.
The admiral looked at her quizzically, but said nothing. Betty suddenly wondered if his vaunted friendship for America was a ploy, one spy throwing a bit of disinformation at another. But she had gone too far to turn back.
The Americans badly need the Italian naval ciphers, she announced. She tried to make the words sound reasonable, but once she heard herself, she realized that was impossible.
Lais was stunned. His Golden Girl had asked him to commit treason.
“It will be a great help to my American friends,” she tried again. “And so, I feel sure, to Italy in the future.”
The admiral said he thought he should leave.
“Will I see you on Wednesday?” Betty asked.
He walked off without answering, the front door slamming behind him.
AT NINE WEDNESDAY EVENING BETTY made all the usual preparations. The fire burned. The wine was uncorked. But she did not know if the admiral would appear.
As she waited in the overheated sitting room, Betty found it easy to believe that he would not come. Perhaps, she feared, she would never see him again. Or, no less a possibility, he might send around a couple of gorillas from the embassy. They’d offer their own version of “discreet entertaining” as they demanded who she was working for, who really wanted the ciphers. Maybe, she began to worry, she should go to New York, get out of Washington.
Yet she sat on the sofa, waiting for the doorbell to ring.
When she heard the bell, a shiver of fear rushed through her. But she rose and went to the door.
Admiral Lais was standing on her doorstep. Alone.
They were in the sitting room, and Betty still was uncertain how things would go. The admiral was distant, even detached. He had not even kissed her cheek in greeting when he’d arrived. But he had come, Betty told herself. She found confidence in that. That surely meant something.
“I will try to do anything you want,” the admiral, she repeated to Hyde, told her at last, his voice low with surrender. But, he explained, he could not give her the ciphers. It would be too large a betrayal.
Betty knew better than to argue. She just sat across from him looking gorgeous and desirable, his fantasy come to life.
What I can do, the admiral said finally, is give you the name of the cipher clerk in my office. He has daily access to the code books. What you do with his name is not my responsibility. The rest will be up to you.
Betty smiled sweetly. Then she rose from the sofa, took the admiral’s hand, and led him into the bedroom.
Chapter 39
SEATED IN AN ARMCHAIR IN the sprawling Art Deco lobby of the Shoreham Hotel across from the woods of Rock Creek Park, Betty waited. The admiral had given her the cipher clerk’s name—Giulio (she could no longer recall his full name, and the case history has been sealed). Then the BSC boys had done their part: they had identified Giulio as a third secretary in the naval attaché’s office, tracked down his apartment in the Shoreham, and provided Betty with a head shot of a somber-looking dark-haired man in his forties, courtesy of the US State Department files. The rest, they told her, would be up to her. And so now she waited.
There is an art to looking as if you’re doing nothing when all the time you’re on high alert; every watcher learns the skill, or else he doesn’t survive. Betty, a natural spy, had the gift. She sat for hours in the Shoreham lobby, her face buried in a newspaper, and yet no one passed through the hotel’s wide front doors without coming under her scrutiny. She was searching for a face that matched the State Department photograph hidden in her pocketbook.
Betty hadn’t decided what she’d do after she made Giulio. She’d worked out several possible ploys, but in the end decided to take a good look and size him up before she settled on her move. All her experiences as a spy had taught her to follow her instincts, and before she could go down that path, she’d need to see Giulio in the flesh.
Then there he was, walking through the lobby, the somber, slightly world-weary man of the photograph. Up close he seemed even more washed out, already old beyond his years. One look told Betty he was not a bottom pincher. So much, she knew at once, for any fortuitous encounter in the hotel bar. And she immediately jettisoned any schemes to win him over in bed. She’d have to find another itch, another repressed yearning bubbling under his skin.
When in doubt, standard tradecraft holds, a direct approach is the card to play. “Direct,” of course, like everything in the shadowy world of intelligence, is relative. Betty’s quickly improvised scheme was to wait until Giulio was up in his apartment, knock authoritatively on his door, and announce that she was a journalist, writing a piece on the people behind the scenes at the Italian embassy. It was part of a series on the foreign service staffs in embassies throughout Washington, the people who did the nuts-and-bolts work while their bosses went to luncheons that lasted all afternoon and hurried off to parties as soon as the sun set. She’d close the deal by telling Giulio that Admiral Lais had suggested Giulio as the perfect person to interview. After that, she’d see how things developed. When the moment felt right—and she knew better than to make an operational timetable at this juncture—she’d steer the conversation around to the ciphers.
After waiting long enough for Giulio to settle in, Betty took the elevator up to the sixth floor and rapped on his apartment door. It opened, and all at once her plan fell apart—a woman stood there.
Somehow the BSC diggers had missed the fact that Giulio was married. The presence of a third person made things trickier; she’d need to dim down her usual flirty charm. But it was too late to retreat or devise another play. Soon Betty was sitting in the living room, making her earnest journalistic pitch to both Giulio and his wife.
As she’d hoped, he was intrigued. It was time, he agreed huffily, that the work he did was appreciated. After he heard that his boss, the admiral, had given Betty his name, any lingering reservations vanished. He’d be glad to answer all her questions.
Betty’s next move was delicate; all that had occurred since she had entered the apartment had been leading to it. She realized that what she had to do could backfire, and then any hope of getting the ciphers would be lost. Yet she had to find a ploy to get Giulio alone.
And forget the bedroom, she once again told herself. Wife or no wife, Betty was convinced that sex wasn’t one of Giulio’s appetites. No, she decided, he craved another sort of attention. He reminded her of Arthur, a man seething with resentment, the civil servant who felt he’d never received the rewards or the recognition he deserved. Betty had never been able to summon up the will—or the kindness—to flatter her husband’s yearning ego. But for the Service, and the cause, she’d gladly make this striving little man feel like one of the world’s secret heroes.
As soon as Giulio’s wife left the room, Betty made her pitch. It might be more useful, the conscientious reporter suggested as if it were a perfectly natural idea, if we could talk in private. Just the two of us, one on one. That way I could interview you in detail, and you could answer freely. I’m sure you have a lot to say. We wouldn’t need to worry about being interrupted.
Giulio nodded noncommittally. But Betty chose to focus on the fact that he hadn’t said no. So she took the next step:
I’d like it if you came to my house tomorrow night. We could continue the interview there. Then she wrote down her address on a piece of paper and handed it to him.
Giulio took it without a word, furtively stuffing it into the pocket of his trousers before his wife returned.
The next evening at the house on O Street, he talked and talked, and his audience’s attention never faltered. Giulio was delighted; after all the dreary years as a bit player, he was finally at center stage. He looked forward to sending the finished article to his relatives in Italy, he told Betty. At last they’d recognize the important contribution he was making.
He returned later in the week, and Betty, in a moment of sudden inspiration, decided to cook dinner. It was nothing elaborate, just bowls of spaghetti and a bottle of red wine, but Giulio was appreciative. No one had ever focused such attention on him. All his life he’d been weighed down by self-doubts and insecurities, and now a glamorous reporter was treating him as if he were someone special. “E la vita!”—This is the life!—he exclaimed.
“How I wish I could live like this,” he said, almost dreamily. His eyes traveled around the comfortable, well-appointed sitting room—a world forever beyond his reach.
Betty recognized his covetousness. She could feel the sting of his ungratified ambitions. And at that moment she knew she had him.
“It’s perfectly simple to arrange,” she said mildly. “You only have to do what I ask.”