by Howard Blum
Betty pulled away from his embrace. She tried to find her operational voice, the one she used when she addressed Brousse as his case agent, not as his lover. “But it is not for that I need you, but something else,” she said flatly. Then she explained how “our American friends”—the lie came easily—had asked her to obtain the naval ciphers, and she’d agreed. But as soon as she spoke the words, she realized how absurd they were. It was a mission without any realistic hope of success.
“You can’t be serious, ma cherie,” Brousse answered. “Or else they are lunatics. C’est de la folie.” It really wasn’t worth discussing, and anyway he had other things on his mind.
“Listen to me,” Betty said with surprising force. The anger that suddenly spilled out was aimed not just at Brousse but also at her handler and, not least, herself, for foolishly accepting the assignment. “I have never been more serious in my life. There’s a war going on, and if you, who swear you love me, will not help me, then I will either work alone or with someone else who will help me.”
Brousse chose to ignore her outburst; his mind remained fixed on other matters. “It is plain that you are tired or ill. You should go to bed,” he tried. “Yes?”
“Bed!” Betty, who knew a bit about seduction, snapped. She wouldn’t be so easily diverted. “I am talking about the naval ciphers. And I will tell you straight that if I find anyone who will help me, I will pay any price and you must not blame me afterwards.”
Whether his patience had worn thin, or by now he’d come to realize that there was little chance of leading Betty to the bedroom, Brousse finally exploded. “But you are asking the impossible of me,” he bellowed. “You don’t understand the precautions that are taken to guard the ciphers.”
The code room, he explained, was a stronghold. He couldn’t simply walk in and “borrow” the naval code books unnoticed. There were two thick books, each about the size of a Washington telephone directory; it would be impossible to slip them casually into his suit jacket pocket, as he did with a cable.
Besides, he wouldn’t be allowed into the code room. There were strict rules restricting entry. Even the cipher clerks could only get into the facility when it was necessary to decode an incoming message or encode an outgoing one—and then only with the supervision of the chief cipher officer. Except for the ambassador, the naval attaché, and the embassy counselor, the room was off limits to the rest of the embassy staff.
At night, he continued wearily, the cipher books were locked away. The diplomatic ciphers went into a safe in the code room; the naval ciphers, in a safe in the naval attaché’s office. There were impressive locks on the doors to both rooms, and an armed night watchman accompanied by a snarling dog patrolled the floors. And if that were not sufficiently discouraging, there was the Vichy secret police force, and they were a ruthless and very professional squad, he reminded her. One never knew when they might send a team to check up on things, or, for that matter, what alarms they might have covertly installed.
“I can tell you right now that you have promised to do the impossible,” an exasperated Brousse concluded. “Mon dieu! Ah, les femmes!”
“Les femmes,” Betty shot back at him, but without her previous sharpness. She was wise enough to realize there would be no easy solution, and for the time being she might as well step away from her role as the demanding case agent.
“That may be your trouble, darling,” she said brightly, suddenly playful. “If you had not had so many women in your life, you might be able to discriminate and recognize in this one a woman of good sense who does not admit the impossible.”
Betty wanted to make sure he recognized what made this woman so different. She stuck her hip out jauntily, a pinup’s pose. It was an ironic gesture, but not entirely.
Brousse looked at her with new attention.
“Why, it’s even impossible for me to be angry with you,” she purred. “Though you refuse me this small thing and look at me with those reproachful brown eyes of yours.”
Brousse smiled, and then he kissed her. This time Betty returned his passion. And now that she had concluded the briefing, when he took her hand she could not think of any reason not to follow him into the bedroom.
BY THE TIME BETTY ARRIVED in New York for her next scheduled meet with her handler, she still had not come up with a plan. But she did bring some news. With the lease on her Georgetown house about to expire, she’d decided to move to an apartment across town in the Wardman Park Hotel. It had many operational advantages: a short stroll away, just over the Connecticut Avenue bridge, was the Vichy embassy; there were several exits, one onto Woodley Road, another onto Connecticut Avenue. The FBI’s watchers had grown increasingly attentive since the United States had entered the war, so these would come in handy when she needed to sneak off; and while this was not entirely a professional concern, Brousse and his wife lived in the hotel, which meant her asset—and her lover—would be just an elevator ride away.
Pepper, without any further discussion, approved the move; he’d arrange to have the rent money paid to Betty each month. And with that bit of housekeeping swiftly out of the way, it was Pepper’s turn to share his news. He had to spend several months in Europe, and therefore Betty would be assigned a new handler. Yet before she could digest this development, Pepper in the same breath revealed an even greater surprise: her new handler would be an American. His name was—and Betty, of course, knew this was a work name—“Mr. Hunter.” Then, sounding like a reprimanding parent, Pepper instructed Betty to remain in her room. Mr. Hunter, he added as if suddenly realizing an explanation was necessary, would appear shortly. And then, with only a perfunctory good-bye, Pepper left.
Alone in the hotel room, Betty tried to make sense of what had just happened. She knew that the Americans, with a good deal of guidance from Stephenson, had five months before Pearl Harbor set up their own gung-ho intelligence organization, its name deliberately as bland as the BSC’s—Coordinator of Information (COI). Her reports from the Vichy embassy, she had been told, were routinely passed on to them. But were the Americans also interested in the naval ciphers? Would this mission still be a priority? And “Mr. Hunter,” what would he be like? An agent alone in the field, Betty had to be able to turn to her handler with confidence, to call on a mentor’s wisdom or, if the situation demanded, a friend’s reassurance. In a dangerous business filled with deceptions, her handler was the one person she needed to trust.
A knock on the door interrupted these anxious thoughts. It was Betty’s way to make snap judgments, and, always mercurial, dismiss them just as easily. But that afternoon, as soon as she opened the door, her doubts were set permanently to rest. One long, appraising look at Hunter—his real name, Betty would learn in time, was Ellery C. Huntington—and she decided he’d do.
Standing in the doorwell, illuminated by a shaft of light from the hallway, Huntington looked tall, broad, and formidable. He had a commander’s presence. In one former life, he had been a star quarterback at Colgate. In another, he’d moved on from Harvard Law School to Wall Street, enjoying a lucrative career dispensing wisdom to corporate clients, many of whom had gotten into particularly sticky jams. And although he was a relatively ancient forty-eight, as soon as America had entered the war he appealed to his squash-playing buddy General William Donovan, the head of COI, for a job. He’d been accepted immediately, just as swiftly given the rank of colonel by the War Department, and then sent for a crash course in the dark arts of espionage at a secret training camp in Virginia, the facility modeled by Donovan after the one the BSC ran deep in the Canadian woods. Now he was chief of the newly established security branch of the COI. Betty was his first asset, and the operational linchpin of his first assignment: the Americans too wanted the Vichy naval ciphers.
In October 1941, two months before Pearl Harbor, Donovan—once again influenced by Stephenson—had met with the president and presented a bold plan for US spies to infiltrate North Africa. Roosevelt, despite his genuine fondness for cloak-and-d
agger missions, hesitated; America was still neutral. But only weeks after the nation committed itself to war, the president, no longer seeing any reason for restraint, gave his approval. Covert operatives infiltrated sandy beachfront towns, ordered to gather intel and prepare sabotage ops in readiness for the moment the Allied invasion of North Africa—soon to be rechristened with the new code name of Torch—got the green light. And in the same week that the BSC asked Betty to obtain the ciphers, Donovan received a similar communiqué from “the highest possible military level”: “We have reason to believe they [the Vichy embassy] are handling information for the enemy. We want to be able to read their cables.”
Yet as the leaders of America’s military and burgeoning espionage establishments began clamoring for the ciphers, one prudent voice counseled for some operational caution. Donald Downes, head of the COI’s rough-and-tumble Special Activities branch (a position he’d continued to hold when by presidential directive the COI in June 1942 morphed into the Office of Strategic Services), warned of “the calculated risk” in a mission that blithely targeted the embassy of a still officially neutral nation.
“An embassy is foreign territory,” he sternly reminded his masters. “Entering a foreign embassy clandestinely and ‘borrowing’ code books was full of risk for everyone concerned. . . . If we failed, if someone was caught inside the embassy and talked, an international incident of great moment would result.”
But rather than let his cautionary words rein in the operation, Donovan and his counselors came up with a plan designed to give America cover—“plausible deniability” was the spymasters’ phrase—if the entire mission came crashing down in scandal. The two Bills huddled—Donovan was universally known as “Big Bill,” Stephenson as “Little Bill,” and they were of such like minds on most things that wags speculated that the Creator no doubt had fashioned the lumbering Irish American first and then used whatever was left to assemble the scrappy Canadian—and they quickly formulized the shared operational scheme. From the shadows, an American would pull the strings, while out in the field, ready to take sole blame if the Vichy security forces caught them in the act, would be the British operative and her asset.
Huntington, who had the lawyer’s skill of dancing around troubling facts, gave Betty the big picture without dwelling on the background details. A Tennessee native, he had, despite his years up north for college and then on Wall Street, a soft southern lilt; Betty liked to hear him speak. He made sure that his agent understood that although she had a new handler, her mission had not changed. In fact, he emphasized, her assignment was, if anything, more crucial than ever. As if arguing to a jury, he kept repeating the same summation: she’d now have the noble opportunity to serve the two countries to which she was inextricably tied—Great Britain, the land she had married into, and America, the country of her birth.
Betty listened, but in truth what he said that afternoon was of little consequence. Huntington had her allegiance as soon as he’d entered the room. In his balding, middle-aged way, she confided to Hyde, he reminded her of another military man and lawyer she adored: her father. “I knew right away,” she said to Hyde as they sat in the Shelbourne bar, “that I’d follow him anywhere. He had my complete loyalty from the start.”
Chapter 46
WITH A RENEWED SENSE OF purpose, Betty returned to Washington. Huntington’s briefing was still ringing in her ears, and she was more determined than ever to snatch the ciphers. She decided, for no apparent reason other than it suited her purpose, that Charles had been too pessimistic; there had to be a way into the embassy. And on the morning of her first day back, she confidently set off to do reconnaissance.
She had already worked out her fallback in case she drew the attention of the Vichy security guards or, no less an enemy, the FBI. She’d explain that she was on her way to her mother’s apartment—the address, conveniently, was just doors away—and the prospect was so troubling that she found herself dawdling. But all the time, of course, she’d be studying the building. Charles had drawn a rough layout of it, and now she’d try to see with her own eyes how the pieces fit. It was with a professional’s scrutiny that Betty began to circle around the embassy block.
As she approached from Connecticut Avenue, Betty spotted what had to be, if Charles’s sketch was accurate, the code-room windows. They were off to the building’s side, and even better, away from the street. The location of the naval attaché’s office window, however, was more of a mystery. According to Charles’s diagram, it too was on the ground floor. But where it was supposed to be, at the rear of the building, there was now an addition. The only window she saw was high above this new wing, a daunting ten feet off the ground at least. Still, this had to be the attaché’s office, where he had his safe. But how would she get up to the window? Jump? Climb? Either would require a lot more dexterity, Betty suspected, than she could muster.
Continuing her stroll, she discovered a gravel path that stretched back from the street, parallel to the rear addition. It led to a rickety building used, a glance told her, as both a garage and a toolshed. In the dead of night, she wondered, would someone carrying a ladder down the path attract attention? Would it seem plausible that the ladder was being returned to the shed? Would anyone walking down the nighttime street take it into his head to wander down this dead-end path? And if he did, in the pitch-dark would he notice a ladder leaning against the side of the building?
Yet even as she asked herself these questions, part of Betty already knew the answers. Climbing up a ladder into the attaché’s office would be, she firmly told herself as she completed her recon and headed toward her mother’s apartment, entirely too insecure. Even if she got lucky and no one spotted the ladder, what about the alarms that would undoubtedly start clanging as soon as she jimmied the window? And she still would somehow have to break into the safe. No, there had to be a way that offered a better chance of success and less risk. The operation might have the tacit endorsement of one faction of US military intelligence, but if she was caught climbing in through a foreign embassy’s window, the FBI would make sure she spent the rest of the war in an American jail. If, that is, she survived the Vichy security force’s interrogation.
Disappointed, Betty concluded that she had to find another plan. Her mind wandered, and as she reminisced over her conversations with Charles, something snagged her attention. He had named the embassy personnel who had access to the ciphers, and now she reviewed this small list once again in her mind. One by one, she summoned up the names, and one by one she swiftly dismissed them. To attempt to persuade any of them to commit an act of treason would, her instincts shouted, lead to disaster. Neither her charms nor a bankroll of cash would be enough. And these were not merciful men.
But as she grappled with this discomfiting fact, a new possibility floated up into her mind. Perhaps there was a man who not only had access to the ciphers but also might very well want to help the Allies. Yes, she tried hard to believe, her thoughts spurred on as much by desperation as conviction, he might very well feel he had a good reason to cooperate.
Betty abruptly decided she’d visit her mother some other time. Instead she hurried off to find a telephone. She needed to call Brousse.
“HE IS A BEAR WHO has lived for the past twenty years with his work,” a testy Brousse argued as soon as Betty brought up her plan to approach Charles Benoit, the recently retired chief cipher clerk. “He arrives in the chancery, says good morning to no one, and goes straight to the code and cipher rooms.” Brousse was nearly pleading. He wanted Betty to understand that this was not only a futile idea; it was a dangerous one. A crusty longtime bureaucrat like Benoit would run straight to the ambassador to report her approach.
But Betty had convinced herself that there was reason to be hopeful. In April, the doddering Marshal Pétain had been shoved up a notch in the Vichy hierarchy to the purely titular position of chief of state. Pierre Laval, a Nazi sympathizer in his heart as well as in his deeds, became the new premier, and
life in Vichy France began more closely to resemble life in the Reich. With this ominous shift, five members of the embassy staff resigned; they could not in good faith work for a state, even one run by Frenchmen, complicit in the Nazis’ dirty work.
Charles Benoit had been one of these. But although he no longer officially worked at the embassy, he remained the expert who was summoned from time to time to deal with problems in the code room. He still had access. And, with only his recent resignation to support her eager theory, Betty believed she could persuade Benoit to take his moral convictions a step further.
Brousse, however, dismissed this as pure folly. “No arrangements could be made with Benoit,” he said decisively. But Betty was adamant, and finally he surrendered. With an audible sigh, he announced that he’d find the clerk’s home address; the talk around the embassy was that Benoit had retreated to his downtown Washington garden. In retirement, Benoit was tending roses with the diligence he’d once devoted to the ciphers.
Betty liked the idea of calling on Benoit at his home. Though her arrival would be unexpected, it would still be less threatening than if, for example, she bumped into him on the street and started up a conversation. He’d at least feel in charge, able to control the situation. Always let the target think he’s running the show—that was the rule. If Benoit felt reassured, that could only work to her advantage.
But first she had to get past the front door. The next afternoon, taking care to dress primly and turn down her usual dazzle as much as possible, Betty arrived at a snug multifamily house at the end of a shady block on Chesapeake Street. She had rehearsed what she’d say when he opened the door, but the words that earlier in the day seemed dramatic and enticing suddenly struck her as contrived. Floundering, she tried to think of another opening that might convince him to invite a stranger into his home. But no idea came to her. Anyway, she told herself, it was too late to deviate from her script.