The Last Goodnight

by Howard Blum

  Pepper didn’t like it. If the Cracker was caught, he’d eventually be tied to the BSC. The last thing he—and Stephenson, as well as, for that matter, Churchill—wanted was a scandal involving British spies in America. Still, Betty was adamant, and the good case officer always lets the agent in the field be king (or, he silently corrected himself, in this case, queen); the agent taking the risks decides the safest course. Pepper was still not enthusiastic, but he ultimately agreed. The Cracker would handle the safe.

  Later on the night of that same seemingly never-ending day, Betty was back in Washington, meeting with both Huntington and Brousse. On the plane ride from New York she’d rehearsed her arguments, but she never had to use them. When Huntington, who had spoken earlier with both Pepper and Donovan, announced to Brousse that there would be “one final attempt” tomorrow night, the Frenchman greeted the news with stoic dignity. In the last war he had flown many perilous missions; it was as if he thought it would be inappropriate, shameful, and demeaning to refuse the American colonel’s order. He merely nodded in acquiescence.

  Then Brousse turned to Betty. “Never a dull moment with you,” he teased. “I am probably the only man alive who spends both his days and his nights at his office in order to satisfy his lady love.”

  IT WAS SHORTLY AFTER MIDNIGHT on a warm, starry twenty-fourth of June when the two lovers walked from the Wardman Park toward the embassy. The Washington streets were empty and quiet at this hour, and the only sound in the night was the staccato click of Betty’s high-heeled shoes against the concrete sidewalk. But as soon as they turned the corner of Connecticut Avenue, Betty decided that things were not right.

  A car was parked down the block from the embassy. Its lights and engine were off, but there were two people in the front seat. In the darkness, it was impossible to distinguish anything other than vague outlines. Lovers, Betty tried to believe. But if they were, they had chosen an odd spot for their date, particularly when the more secluded tree-lined roads of Rock Creek Park were nearby. And as she continued, she saw another car parked across the street. More lovers? What were the odds of that? Now she was certain. She knew, as any agent about to go into enemy territory would know, that it was a trap.

  The passengers in the two parked cars must be FBI agents, she whispered to Charles. As soon as we have the ciphers, they’ll swoop down. Nothing would make the G-men happier than catching a pair of BSC agents in the act.

  Brousse argued that this was an American operation, too. But Betty dismissed that quickly. Hoover would love to embarrass the OSS.

  “What do you want to do?” Brousse asked gravely.

  Betty took a quick look at the two parked cars, and then at the front door of the embassy just yards away. “Let’s proceed,” she said uneasily.

  Brousse used his key to open the embassy door; this might convince the FBI teams in the cars, if in fact that was who they were, that he was a diplomat authorized to enter the building.

  But once they were inside, Betty grew even more certain that they had walked into a trap.

  There was no sign of the watchman or his dog. That was very unusual. Chevalier must have heard them enter; they had deliberately not lowered their voices, keeping up a pretense of gay chatter, and had made a point of walking noisily to the divan in the front hall salon. He normally would have come to investigate or, if he recognized their voices, simply to exchange pleasantries. And what about the dog? The Alsatian should’ve begun barking as soon as they’d opened the door. The silence was unnerving.

  They sat on the divan and waited. Perhaps Chevalier was busy or in some distant part of the building. Could he possibly not have heard them? But the longer they waited, the longer the sounds of their merry, contrived conversation filled the empty embassy and the watchman still did not appear, the more Betty grew convinced that he was part of the plot. The plan, she decided, was for Chevalier to burst in after she opened the safe. He’d signal the FBI agents, and then they’d come charging through the door and catch her with the code books in her hands.

  Her mind was racing. She had to do something, or the mission would end in disaster. And she had to do it now.

  Suddenly she jumped up from the divan and began pulling her dress over her head. She tossed it on to the floor.

  Brousse stared at her with astonishment.

  Now she had wriggled out of her silk slip. She hurled it away, and it landed next to the discarded dress.

  “Have you gone mad?” Charles asked, anxious and confused.

  She continued to undress, pulling down her stockings. “I don’t think so,” she said as the nylons were added to the pile on the floor. “But we shall see.”

  “Suppose someone should come in!” Brousse pleaded. “What are you thinking?”

  “I am thinking just that,” Betty answered as she unhooked her brassiere. “Suppose someone does come in!”

  She pulled down her panties, and with one foot gracefully kicked them toward the rest of the clothes.

  She stood naked except for the strand of pearls around her neck. She held herself easily and confidently. She had no modesty, no inhibition.

  Now that she had undressed, she explained her strategy more fully to Charles. “What are we here for?” she demanded rhetorically. “We are here to make love. Yes? All right. Who makes love with clothes on if they can be taken off?”

  He still did not understand, so Betty tried to clarify things further. “I am not suggesting that we actually make love, God help us, only that we give the impression. If you wish to help me, you will get up and start undressing yourself too!”

  Her voice was sharp. She needed him to understand that every moment mattered. If her instincts were correct, Brousse would have to hurry.

  Brousse still had not grasped Betty’s plan, but he trusted her. He took off his jacket, undid his tie, and removed his shirt. He was unfastening his belt when the door opened.

  A bright cone of light scanned the room, coming to a sudden halt when it focused on Betty. The light held steady, illuminating her nakedness.

  “Oh là-là,” said Betty in a voice more playful than shocked. She tried to cover herself with her hands, but her modesty was halfhearted and careless. She wanted the watchman to get a good long look. Whatever suspicions had been brewing in him, it was important that he now understood the couple had entered the embassy with only one thing on their feverish minds.

  “I beg your pardon a thousand times, madame,” muttered the watchman uneasily as he finally extinguished the flashlight. “I thought . . . didn’t rightly know . . .” Flustered, he hurried off, closing the door behind him.

  Betty waited a moment to let her eyes grow accustomed to the darkness. Then, a peal of triumph in her voice, she told Charles, “There was method in my madness.”

  IT WAS ALMOST LIKE HER dream. There was the ladder leaning against the windowsill, but now it was the Cracker who was climbing in.

  As soon as she’d been convinced that the embarrassed watchman had fled to his basement office, Betty had put on her slip—nothing more; she wanted to be able to undress in a hurry if he reappeared—and made her way to the code room. She removed the lock and followed the now-familiar path to the attaché’s office. The window opened easily, and she pointed her flashlight out into the darkness. One short burst. Then another. And minutes later the Cracker was standing next to her.

  The safe opened on the Cracker’s first try.

  She looked inside and saw the two code books. “Thank you,” was all she could say. She spoke to the Cracker, but she was also offering her gratitude to all the gods watching over her from their operational heaven.

  The books firmly in one hand, the Cracker scurried down the ladder, and Betty watched him disappear into the night. One of Donovan’s men hurried to remove the ladder, pausing only to flash Betty a thumbs-up, before he too vanished.

  And then the waiting began.

  According to Huntington’s plan, it would take three hours for the books to be photographed; a
lab had been set up in apartment 215B at the Wardman Park, and a team of specialists was standing by. By 4:00 am—no later, he promised—they’d be delivered to the front door of the embassy; so close to dawn, that’d be more secure than using the ladder. Then Betty would return the volumes to the safe. But for now all she could do was wait.

  Betty smoked one cigarette after another. She stared out the window, and when she thought she saw a shape in the bushes, she tried to believe it was an OSS babysitter and not an FBI agent getting ready to sandbag the code books before they could be returned to the safe. Hearing the watchman’s radio playing downstairs, she tried to lose herself in the music. But when it stopped shortly after two, she couldn’t make up her mind whether this was a reason to relax, a sign that Chevalier was going to sleep, or if he’d turned it off because the embassy security thugs would now be crashing through the door. She even considered making love to Charles; at least it would help fill the time, distract her from looking at the clock. But in the end, all she did was wait. And wait.

  Then it was 4:00 a.m.; the sun would soon rise. She had dressed, and now she stood by the front door waiting for the OSS operative to deliver the two volumes. She searched the street. There was no sign of the two cars that had been parked when she’d entered the embassy a lifetime ago. That gave her some encouragement. But then she began to wonder if the G-men had departed only to carry out a raid on the team in the Wardman Park. She had no answers, only anxieties.

  It grew later, the thin daylight strengthening. Soon, Betty knew, the cleaners would arrive, and then there would be no chance to replace the ciphers. If the books weren’t back in the safe—if, in fact, there were any reasons for suspicion—the Vichy admirals would immediately order that the codes be changed. And then the two books would be worthless, as irrelevant as yesterday’s discarded newspapers.

  At 4:30 Betty asked Charles if they should leave. If something had gone wrong, they would accomplish nothing by remaining in the embassy. They should flee before they were arrested. If they stayed clear of the Wardman Park, the OSS would put them up in a safe house, she suggested. Brousse listened, but said nothing. He knew she was talking without conviction; she was simply trying to keep herself occupied. He knew she would never leave.

  Ten minutes later Betty saw a man hurrying up the embassy steps, the books clutched under his arm. He handed them to her without a word, and she softly closed the door. It was crucial not to wake the watchman. They had come so far, but everything still could be lost. She rushed back to the attaché’s office, the prize clutched tightly in her hands.

  Betty was about to put the books back into the safe when she hesitated. Spontaneously, she held one of the volumes up to her lips and kissed it. She repeated the gesture, pressing her lips quickly against the other book. It was a solemn moment, the gratifying fulfillment of a promise she had made. Carefully she laid the books on their proper shelves, making sure they were facing the same way as when they’d been removed. Then she closed the safe.

  It was just after 5:00 a.m. when Betty and Brousse, hand in hand, lovers in love with each other and the world, walked down the embassy steps.

  When they arrived at the Wardman Park, they did not think about going to sleep. There was something they had to do first. Betty knocked on the door of apartment 215B.

  To her surprise, Paul Fairly, the naval intelligence agent who had helped engineer her recruitment, and a man who had once been her lover, opened the door. Yet the coincidence provoked not a stir in Betty’s heart; her partings were always resolutely final.

  Fairly welcomed them with great ceremony. They had, he exulted, pulled off quite a coup. Then he explained his presence: he was in charge of the photographic team.

  The small apartment was packed with equipment—lights, cameras, tripods, and a mess of cables. Technicians and operatives were busily roaming about. And drying on tables, on the cushions of chairs, and down the length of the sofa, spread across the carpet in orderly rows, everywhere Betty looked, it seemed—were the photographs of the ciphers.

  She had done it. They had the codes.

  She stared at the pages, unable to speak.

  Her thoughts were interrupted by a tap on her shoulder. Betty turned, and for a moment didn’t recognize the man standing in front of her. Then she realized it was Huntington, now wearing a US Army colonel’s summer uniform. She had previously only seen him in his spy’s mufti of suit and tie, but in honor of their victory, he felt he should abandon his disguise.

  He too seemed overwhelmed by the moment, unable to find anything to say that expressed the magnitude of all that he was feeling. At last he announced rather helplessly, “Colonel Ellery Huntington is at your command.”

  Betty answered instinctively. “And I am at yours, sir.”

  They both laughed with embarrassment, realizing how formal their words sounded. But the sentiment was heartfelt, a pledge between loyal comrades-in-arms.

  And then John Pepper appeared. He had come down from New York so that he could personally deliver a copy of the ciphers to Stephenson. “Good work,” he said officiously. “You are a credit to us all.”

  Betty did not answer. She stood there mutely, as if at attention, swelling with the powerful pride that came with the knowledge that she had accomplished something of great importance.

  The cover and an interior page from the Vichy Naval Cipher Book, which Betty stole from the Embassy in 1942.

  Churchill Archives Center, Papers of Harford Montgomery Hyde, HYDE 02 011

  TWO DAYS LATER THE CIPHERS were in the hands of the wranglers at Bletchley Park. They quickly put them to good use: they were the missing pieces of a complicated puzzle that in time would help the Enigma team decipher the entire Vichy code system. And while the cryptologists labored in England, the OSS immediately employed the code books to unlock Vichy naval communications throughout the world. Vichy messages to the German high command, to their diplomatic missions throughout the western hemisphere, to their warships at Toulon, Casablanca, and Alexandria—all were read by American intelligence hours after they had been dispatched. The Vichy intercepts—as the thousands of collected messages became known to the busy wranglers—were a trove of classified secrets.

  But arguably the stolen ciphers’ greatest operational use was in the days leading up to and during the invasion of North Africa. Cloak-and-dagger teams of undercover OSS operatives took up their positions behind enemy lines before the first assaults, aware of what the Vichy forces knew—and, just as valuable, didn’t know—about Allied operations. Thirty-three thousand Allied troops landed on the beaches east and west of Algiers, guided by intelligence gleaned from Vichy’s top-secret messages. Allied bombers and warships pounded the French fleet at Casablanca and the coastal batteries with devastating accuracy, in large measure because the attacks’ planners could read enemy communications. American soldiers poured down from the dusty hills of Saint Cloud to drive nine thousand French defenders out of Oran in a bold assault that would have been much more difficult without the codes. The entire Allied force, in fact, charged into North Africa fortified by the reassuring strategic knowledge that the Vichy government and the French intelligence service had no idea of the impending invasion.

  A grim year earlier the Axis forces, seemingly unstoppable, had been advancing on all fronts. But after the exhilarating success of the North African invasion, as Churchill would write, “There was, for the first time in the war, a real lifting of spirits.”

  “Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end, but it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning,” he told the House of Commons. In North Africa the course of the war had dramatically changed.

  And what role had Betty played in these events?

  Not quite five months after the night when Betty stood naked in the parlor of the Vichy embassy and opened the naval attaché’s window to the Georgia Cracker, she found herself sitting next to Huntington on a train heading to New York.

  The newspapers that we
ek, in early November 1942, had been filled with jubilant dispatches from North Africa. Huntington picked up his copy of the Washington Post and handed it to Betty solemnly, as if bestowing a medal. She glanced at the paper, and then back at him, perplexed. So he explained.

  “American and British troops have landed in North Africa, and have met with practically no enemy resistance,” he said. “The reason there has been no resistance is a military secret. But I think that you should know that it is due to your ciphers. They have changed the whole course of the war.”

  Chapter 52

  BETTY WANTED A NEW POSTING. She still had the Vichy op going; Brousse was delivering product regularly, and she continued to bring it to her handlers in New York; but her operational heart was set on a European assignment. And she figured now, in the heady aftermath of her coup with the ciphers, was the time to get it. With espionage chiefs in London and Washington singing her praises, Betty believed this would be as good a moment as any, maybe better in fact, to renew her request to be sent into occupied France.

  There was also a tactical reason spurring her on. She needed to get out of Washington. The FBI was closing in. Betty was convinced the Bureau had tapped her phone; she could hear a telltale echo whenever she picked up the receiver. Their watchers, too, had grown increasingly aggressive. She couldn’t leave her apartment without spotting the somber men in fedoras. And it wasn’t just the paranoia that creeps up on a spy stirring these suspicions. Her FBI file—Bureau No. 65-43539—grew thicker each day with new and often perplexed reports:

  “Confidential information has just been received that Mrs. Pack is now using the name of Mrs. Powers”; “The Military Intelligence Division is presently conducting an investigation on MRS. PACK . . . and has a plainclothesman staying at the hotel in connection with her present activity”; “She has moved to a room [at the Wardman Park] other than formerly occupied and is now living under an assumed name”; “very well dressed and well groomed and . . . well educated”; “It appears there is something fishy about the whole matter.”