by Howard Blum
Front pages were filled with banner headlines announcing the confiscation of the Axis ships. Incriminating photographs of the wantonly damaged Italian vessels illustrated nearly every outraged story. Readers across the nation picked up their newspapers and stared at the somber, pudgy face of the Italian naval attaché, the man identified as the mastermind of this destruction.
Americans were seething. Here was proof of illegal activity on US territory by a foreign diplomat, documented sabotage by alien operatives in the nation’s harbors. A furious nation took one more step toward the decision that would bring them into war on the Allied side. Prime Minister Churchill had made pointedly clear that this was the BSC’s primary mission. And working from her bedroom, secret agent Betty Pack had set it all in motion.
But at the same bittersweet time, Betty had also effectively put an end to her own long-running operation.
“Your Excellency,” the US secretary of state wrote to the Italian ambassador,
I have the honor to state that various facts and circumstances have come to the attention of the Government of the United States connecting Admiral Alberto Lais, Naval Attaché of the Royal Italian Embassy, with the commission by certain persons of acts in violation of laws of the United States.
The President has reached the conclusion that the continued presence of Admiral Lais as Naval Attaché of the Embassy would be no longer agreeable to this Government. . . .
Cordell Hull
It was agreed that Lais would leave the country a month later, on April 25. Still unaware of the part Betty had played in his expulsion, still needing the comforting presence of his Golden Girl, the admiral asked Betty to come to New York with him. He wanted to spend his last night in America with her.
Betty agreed. It was more a sentimental than an operational decision. Given the circumstances, she felt she owed him that much.
FOR PROPRIETY’S SAKE, THEY HAD separate but connecting rooms in the hotel. During the day, when Lais went out for some last-minute shopping in Manhattan, Betty snuck into his room. She made a careful inventory of his luggage, describing each piece. Color, size, manufacture, even the type of lock—all was meticulously recorded. She’d pass the list on to her handler, who would cable it to the BSC agents in Bermuda. When Lais’s ship stopped in Nassau on its way to Portugal, the admiral would be kept busy while his luggage was covertly searched. It would be the last op Betty ran against him.
That evening Lais snuck into Betty’s room. He lay next to her, kissing, stroking, petting. It would be his last chance, too, with his Golden Girl.
In the morning Betty left the hotel and took a cab to the pier where Lais was preparing to board the S.S. Marqués de Comillas. She walked toward the admiral but then came to a sudden halt. His wife and nineteen-year-old daughter stood next to him; they had unexpectedly traveled up from Washington to say good-bye. Betty stayed back, offering only a small, almost surreptitious wave of farewell.
But Lais could not be bothered with discretion. He hurried across the dock to Betty. And, as Hyde read in the official BSC history and Betty confirmed with a bemused shrug, “the lovesick Admiral spent his final minutes with her and ignored his tearful family.”
And there was a coda to the operation. Betty handed the silver box Lais had given her to John Pepper, telling him to give it to his son. The trinket, Lais—none of it meant anything to her anymore. Unencumbered, Betty was already looking for a new adventure.
Part VII
Big Bill and Little Bill
Chapter 41
ONCE AGAIN SITTING ACROSS FROM Betty in a booth at the Horseshoe Bar of the Shelbourne Hotel, Hyde realized that he had nearly come to the end of his complicated journey. He had spent an intense, exhausting week driving Betty around Ireland as she led him on a tour of her past lives. Now they were back in Dublin for one last night before their flight to London.
Yet there still remained one corner of Betty’s wartime memories he needed to explore, and this would likely be his last chance. His tale would be incomplete without an account of the adventure that had prompted Stephenson, usually as parsimonious with his praise as he was with a pound, to christen Betty “the greatest unsung heroine of the war.” It was a mission that had also left her American handler marveling that she had “changed the whole course of the war.” Hyde, the enterprising author, knew he had to get Betty talking about her long-running operation against the Vichy French embassy in Washington.
But Betty seemed to hesitate. She had come to Ireland to get an understanding of her own life. But perhaps she was now feeling that some parts of her past should remain buried, thought about only with a secret pride. And there was her husband to consider, too. Charles had been very much a part of this episode. Betty had to have wondered whether he would appreciate the attention. She had betrayed him by running off with Hyde, but she still would have wanted, in her often contradictory fashion, to protect him too.
Hyde, however, had come too far to retreat. Yet he did not insist. Instead, he shrewdly led her down what seemed like a different path. He picked his words carefully. “In spite of the very dramatic incidents in your life,” he began, “I think you will agree that there is a great deal of hard work, a great deal of very anxious work and a great deal of planning before you can undertake any successful intelligence operation.”
“Yes indeed,” Betty said. “In this type of work you must forget yourself and simply live for your work and nothing else. I had put aside all thoughts of my two children. I could not allow myself to feel tired or ill. My whole being had to focus on the project.”
Hyde listened, and then asked, “Would you take up this kind of work again?”
“Like a shot!” she exclaimed.
In these words, Hyde heard “an almost rapturous note in her voice.” Hoping to take advantage of her complex feelings—a heightened introspection about what was now beyond her grasp? a passionate pride in what she had done?—he turned to a clean page in the notebook on the table.
He asked again about her Vichy operation. It was a memory that would put her back in touch with a time when she had lived in a deeper, more purposeful way. A time she still missed, and still deeply desired.
Now she talked without hesitation.
Chapter 42
BETTY DID NOT HAVE TO wait long for her next mission, or, for that matter, her next romance. They came, as they so often did for her, in tandem. And it was all set in motion, Betty explained to Hyde in the resolute tone she unconsciously adopted when talking about her wartime work, late one unseasonably warm April afternoon in 1941, after her maid announced there was a gentleman to see her.
“A Mr. Williams, ma’am. I’ve shown him into the living room.”
Betty did not know a Mr. Williams, and the sudden arrival of a stranger so soon after the Italian op put her on guard. The FBI had clearly taken an interest in her—Betty nearly stumbled over their amateurish watchers whenever she went out—and perhaps now they were ready to ask some hard questions. This possibility, though, was followed by a more terrifying thought. She’d made a lot of enemies in her work, only they’d start in with the rough stuff and save the questions for later, when she’d be begging for the chance to answer if they’d just stop. A hasty escape through the garden door seemed suddenly appealing. It had worked for Admiral Lais. But, she reminded herself, it had only bought him some time, and not much at that. No, she decided, she’d brazen this out. She’d confront the mysterious Mr. Williams, put on a show of implacable confidence, and see what happened.
She went downstairs and shook hands with a short, fit, late fortyish, rather dapper man in a well-cut tweed suit. He smiled at her confidently, and a small scar she hadn’t previously noticed at the corner of his mouth twisted his face into something sinister. Who was this little man with the lopsided grin?
“How do you do, Mr. Williams,” Betty said, gesturing for him to sit in a chintz-covered chair. “To what do I owe this honor?”
He brushed away her sarcasm with another
lopsided smile. Then he said genially, “I’m from the New York office.”
Betty decided he was lying. She had never heard anyone in New York mention a “Mr. Williams.” And certainly her handlers would’ve alerted her to the arrival of a new contact. Either Williams was a G-man trying to trap her, or he was with the opposition, and neither alternative calmed her jangling nerves. She kept a loaded revolver in a drawer in her bedroom dressing table, and she cursed herself for not having brought it down. Betty decided she’d make up some story that’d allow her to scoot upstairs, and when she returned she’d at least have the gun in her purse.
She was just about to ask Williams to excuse her for a moment when he took her by surprise. “May I have a dry martini?” he asked. A mutual friend had raved about her martinis, he explained. Said you served a drink that packed a real punch. And once again he flashed his odd smile, but now it struck her as more coy than sinister.
As she mixed a pitcher—although less shaky than she had been moments ago, she too needed a drink—Williams went to work soothing whatever apprehensions lingered. “You did a good job of work with the Italian admiral. You may be interested to know that we got the naval ciphers all right. The chief is very pleased.”
Betty listened and relaxed. She no longer doubted that Williams worked for the BSC, but she was beginning to suspect something else. She had the cunning, though, to keep this thought to herself.
After she handed the drink to Williams, she mentioned that it was her mother’s recipe, and then trotted out her well-used line that it was the only thing she’d learned from Cora.
Once again he ambushed her. With a mock severity, Williams chastised Betty for not giving Cora her due. After all, he pointed out, hadn’t she studied at the Sorbonne? Then there was another flash of the coy smile.
That clinched it for Betty. Only a few people in the organization would be privy to her personnel file, or, for that matter, would’ve gone over it with such a fine-tooth comb as to know where Cora had been educated. Besides, Williams didn’t act like any handler she’d ever known; he wasn’t trying to pass himself off as her best friend or win her approval. Williams treated her cordially, but with a certain distance. It was a remoteness, she judged, that came with rank. Betty was certain she knew exactly who he was. But if he wanted to toy with her, well, she’d play with him too.
“What is our chief like?” Betty asked, doing her best to make the question sound like one operative talking shop to another. “Do you know him well?”
“Yes,” he answered, “I think I know him well,” and—enjoying her game, and knowing she’d seen through his—added, “He is a terrible chap!”
“You can’t mean that. I think he must be a rather wonderful person,” she chided, but not as playfully as she’d imagined. In truth, it was what she wanted to believe. She needed the man she served to be worthy of her respect.
The banter continued, but when his glass was drained, Williams got up to leave. “I have a plane to catch. I must get back to New York tonight.”
“Must you?” Betty nearly begged. The words rushed out before she’d thought about them. But she truly did not want him to go. She very much wanted him to like her. And now, recalling the unsettling exchange for Hyde, she had a further realization: she’d been once again searching for the father she deeply missed.
Williams, though, was suddenly all business. “John Howard will be in touch with you about another job we want you to tackle for us. I can’t give you any details now, but it is something really big this time. It will certainly be a feat if you can bring it off.”
A moment later he was gone. Betty had no doubt that she’d spent the past hour drinking martinis with the master spy who ran British intelligence in the western hemisphere. And that William Stephenson had felt it was important enough to check her out himself, to do some personal talent-spotting, before he approved her next assignment. Betty hoped she’d passed the test.
“SO YOU HAD A VISIT from the chief,” said Pepper when he came to see her several days later. “I gather you got on quite well.”
Betty responded with a gratified smile: her suspicion had been correct. And even more heartening, Stephenson had inspected the goods and given his approval.
Then, just like that, the small talk was abruptly over. Pepper put on his wartime voice and proceeded to give Betty her next assignment. She was to penetrate the Vichy French embassy in Washington. The operational plan—admittedly vague, he conceded—was for Betty to do what she’d done time after time in the past: get close to key embassy personnel, then exploit these friendships. Rumors, gossip, secrets—especially secrets, Pepper emphasized—Betty was to collect it all.
As Betty struggled to get a handle on this unwieldy new mission, Pepper told her a bit about why it was so important. And in the process, he filled in the blanks of a story she’d previously known only in its broad strokes.
With the collapse of France in the summer of 1940, the country had been divided. Paris and the surrounding northern districts were placed under the harsh administration of the conquering Nazi forces. The central and southern provinces functioned, under Germany’s ever-watchful eye, as a quasi-independent version of the former French state; it was known as Vichy France, after the town, celebrated for its palliative mineral water, that was now the seat of government. Marshal Henri Philippe Pétain, the military hero who creaked about as if he’d won his fame fighting with Napoleon rather than in the previous world war, was the ostensible leader of Vichy France, but he had no actual power. His job was simply to look like a sage, white-haired head of state, while all the time nodding with benign consent to whatever the Germans dictated. The real day-to-day authority rested with Admiral Jean Darlan; he had a finger in every pie, and he always made sure the Nazis were well served.
While Vichy behaved in every discernible way as a Nazi puppet state, Germany nevertheless allowed it to maintain France’s overseas diplomatic missions and to continue to administer the country’s far-flung colonial empire. A besieged Britain balked at the prospect of the Nazis using the cover of a Vichy embassy to get a foothold in London; His Majesty’s government refused to establish diplomatic relations with Vichy. But the United States, still a neutral country, sent its representatives to Vichy and, in turn, gave accreditation to its legations. Vichy ran a consulate in New York and a busy embassy in Washington.
The BSC’s hope, Pepper continued, was to get a look inside the Washington embassy and in the process find out what Vichy was up to in America, as well as elsewhere in the world. But the real coup, he said, his voice stiffening, would be to discover what plans Vichy had for the French fleet and the nearly $300 million in gold reserves it had sent for safekeeping to its Caribbean island colony of Martinique. If the French battleships were to be handed over to the Germans, the Service needed to scuttle those plans. And if the gold would be made available to the Nazis, an invasion of Martinique should be considered.
But there was also a part of the story that Pepper held close. He wanted Betty well briefed, but she didn’t need to know that the prime minister had personally reached out from Downing Street to give this mission its initial operational push. In a sharp, testy memo to C, the head of the Service, Churchill had complained: “I am not satisfied with the volume or quality of information from both the occupied and unoccupied areas of France. . . . So far as the Vichy Government is concerned it is not creditable that we have so little information.” C had passed Churchill’s displeasure on to Stephenson, and the BSC head, searching for a solution, had found himself drinking a strong martini in Betty’s living room. Once back in New York, he’d ordered Pepper to give the spy code-named Cynthia the mission.
“Will you try to do it for us?” asked Pepper firmly.
Betty did not hesitate. “You know I will.”
BUT HOW? HOW WOULD SHE make her approach? And who in the embassy would she target? So much depended on her initial pass. The United States was not in the war. If she got burned, if an indignant Vichy dip
lomat filed a protest with the US State Department reporting that a British spy had cozied up to him, it wouldn’t merely put an end to the operation; she’d wind up in federal jail, prosecuted as a foreign espionage agent. Or, no less likely, the Gestapo-trained Vichy goons who handled embassy security would come calling.
Questions and concerns filled her mind as soon as Pepper left. And as she juggled them, another realization stopped her short: this operation would be significantly different from all her previous assignments. In the past, Betty had set out to seduce someone she knew, and more often than not her prey was already smitten. Now she’d have to work her magic on a stranger, casting a spell so strong that he’d be willing to prove his love by committing treason. That was asking a lot, she feared, from a night or two of bouncing around in a double bed.
But, she reprimanded herself, there was no point in running through all the what-ifs before she’d even started. She was determined, Betty told Hyde with the willful pride she’d never lost, “not to let the side down.”
With a professional’s focus, Betty plotted her first small steps forward. She set out to get a sense of her potential targets.
The BSC files Pepper shared offered a quick history of the key embassy personnel. Gaston Henry-Haye, the ambassador, was—and here the Service happily quoted Secretary of State Cordell Hull—“a little man with ruddy cheeks and a truculent moustache who arrived with the taint of association” with the Nazi sympathizers who ran Vichy. George Bertrand-Vigne, the counselor, was a stuffy minor aristocrat who, the BSC analysts speculated, could be counted on to look at the world with a lawyer’s deliberative caution. And Charles Emmanuel Brousse, the press attaché, was a much-married—the exasperated file had the marriage count somewhere between three and six—World War I flying ace who was the co-owner of an influential newspaper with a sizable readership throughout France’s southern departments.