by Howard Blum
Betty, of course, had not read the Bureau’s dogged surveillance reports, but after her agitated sister Jane called to complain that two men had asked questions about her, she felt the persecution had gone on long enough. Weren’t they all on the same side, fighting the same enemy? Furious, she telephoned the FBI’s Washington field office, introduced herself, and snapped that if they had any questions, she’d be glad to answer them. She would be at her mother’s apartment at ten the next morning. I’m sure you can find the address, she said with an icy sarcasm, and then hung up.
The next morning two special agents drank coffee from Cora’s china cups and listened with astonishment to Betty’s carefully expurgated story. Her mood had now steadied, and it was with her customary charm that she revealed a small corner of her professional life. She explained that she was a British agent attached to the Office of Strategic Services and provided the G-men with the names and telephone numbers of high-ranking officials who could confirm this improbable assertion. “I am working in America’s interest just as you are,” she concluded, confident that her candor would put an end to the Bureau’s unnecessary harassment.
Betty was wrong. In her naïveté, she did not understand the petty jealousies and institutional antagonisms swirling around wartime Washington. Hoover, who before America’s entry into the war had treated Stephenson as a comrade, now viewed him and his BSC operatives as foreign agents illegally usurping the Bureau’s charter. “Does J. Edgar think he’s fighting on Bunker Hill against us Redcoats or hasn’t he heard of Pearl Harbor?” an exasperated BSC official complained after a testy meeting with the FBI chieftain. And Big Bill was no better than Little Bill in Hoover’s envious eyes. Donovan was another enemy, another specious claimant to the intelligence throne that should be his alone.
Hoover’s hostility toward these competitors—which, deep in his angry soul, was precisely how he viewed both Stephenson and Donovan—was reinforced by the State Department. “Why should anybody have a spy system in the United States?” challenged Adolf Berle, assistant secretary of state, as the BSC activities grew more aggressive. And the OSS, although authorized by the president, was no less an irritant to the pin-striped suits at Foggy Bottom. “One of the most important things to be controlled is Donovan,” a senior State Department official fumed. “He is into everybody’s business, knows no bounds of jurisdiction, tries to fill the shoes of each agency charged with the responsibility for a war activity.”
Caught up in this raging internecine political war, intelligence fiefdoms battling each other for ascendancy, Betty didn’t have a chance. She remained a casualty, a hapless victim of collateral damage. Her earnest—and ill-advised, her superiors admonished—confession to the FBI had no effect on the Bureau’s surveillance. Her telephone still echoed, the stolid watchers still lurked in the shadows. She grew convinced that she might very well wind up in a federal jail, convicted under the uncomfortably broad statutes of the Espionage Act of spying for a foreign power. She needed to hightail it out of Washington. Her chances for survival behind enemy lines in a shooting war, she told herself, might actually be better than if she stayed here much longer; and even if that was a bit of an exaggeration, she was certain she’d have a better time. With renewed determination, Betty intensified her lobbying for an overseas posting.
STEPHENSON WAS NOT ONLY WILLING but had a plan. He contacted Donovan and laid it out to his fellow spymaster. He wanted to send Betty to England, give her a short course in radio while at the same time brushing up her small-arms and hand-to-hand combat techniques, and then parachute her into France to work with the Resistance. Behind the lines, with her faultless French and her wiles, she’d be just the sort of daring and accomplished agent the OSS Special Operations could use.
Donovan agreed—but after giving it some additional thought, he told Stephenson he had another idea. On her own Betty would undoubtedly be a valuable asset, he conceded. However, Betty and Brousse working together in France would be even better. His R and A—research and analysis—boys had gone through the files, and he excitedly shared what they had found.
Brousse had unique access to the upper echelons of both the Vichy authorities and the Nazi occupational forces. In the south, his family’s chain of newspapers gave him widespread contacts in business and politics, and, in another stroke of luck, he had a network of reporters on the family payroll to do the digging if the Allies needed specific operational information. He had also lived in Paris for thirty-eight very social years; he knew nearly everyone who mattered in the city, and those he didn’t know, it wouldn’t be hard for him to meet. His pedigree was impeccable: his father had served in parliament, and twice been minister of finance. And not least, his loyalty to Vichy and the Nazis could not be questioned. While other diplomats had resigned, he had, despite a reduction in pay, continued to serve the Pétain-Laval government. The grateful Vichy leadership would enthusiastically welcome Brousse upon his return home.
With worldly Betty at his side, with all her charm, all her cunning, all her daring, Brousse could accomplish great things. As a team they could uncover important secrets, provide incalculable support for the inevitable Allied invasion. They’d be agents-in-place in the enemy’s well-protected citadels, spies who could saunter through the corridors of power. It would be an unprecedented intelligence coup for the Allies.
Stephenson agreed, but he couldn’t help pointing out one not very small problem: Betty needed a bulletproof cover. Brousse’s return to France would seem plausible enough, but how would he explain Betty’s presence at his side? It was well known, of course, that Brousse was married; however, that was not what was troubling Stephenson. A mistress would not, in itself, raise any eyebrows; despite the Nazis, some things would never change in France. But Brousse arriving hand in hand in wartime with an American mistress, who was married to a British diplomat to boot—that would set off alarms. The Gestapo would immediately put Betty under the microscope, and their surveillance would undoubtedly be a lot more intensive than the FBI’s. Could Betty withstand such scrupulous scrutiny while at the same time functioning as a spy?
Possibly, Stephenson suggested without enthusiasm. But in the end both spymasters glumly agreed it would be a long shot. With so much at stake, it was not a gamble they could prudently take—unless Betty was protected by a more imaginative biography, a history that hid her American roots and her British husband.
The discussion then turned to an evaluation of Betty’s French. Just how good was it? It was one thing to be fluent, but that did not guarantee that Betty could pass as a Frenchwoman. And even if she could, they’d still need to invent a convincing explanation for how she’d met Brousse and how she’d happened to find herself in America. But since this was the most promising pretext they could come up with, the OSS Special Operations (SO) unit was asked to concoct such a cover story.
Working out of their E Street offices on Washington’s Naval Hill, a stone’s throw from the Lincoln Monument, the SO strategists racked their brains, and when they still weren’t satisfied they brought the inventive R and A eggheads into the discussions. Several busy weeks passed. By the time they threw up their hands in frustration, they had invented over a dozen detailed legends, as cover biographies were known in the profession. Yet when each of these histories was held up to the light of intense analysis, holes became apparent. Each seemed more transparent than the next. The Gestapo would swiftly rip apart Betty’s legend, and then they’d gleefully get to work on her.
It was at this low point, just when the general feeling was that it might be wiser to dust off the original plan, to insert Betty into France as a solo operative, that an idea popped up. In all the subsequent excitement, the identity of its originator was lost; in time both the SO and R and A units would claim credit. But regardless of the source, it was universally agreed that it’d been inspired by a casual, rather mean-spirited observation: Betty was young enough to be the old goat Brousse’s daughter.
When the catty laughter stop
ped, the operational significance of the barb began to sink in, and they hurried off to search the files. The confirmation they were hoping for was there, more or less: Brousse was fifty, and Betty almost thirty-two. Chronologically, it would be a stretch, and a long one at that, for Brousse to have fathered a daughter in his late teens. But, as was quickly pointed out, Betty didn’t look thirty-two. She had the trim, athletic figure and smooth skin of someone much younger. She could easily pass for a woman in her mid-twenties. And now the math came out right: Brousse could indeed have a twenty-five-year-old daughter.
Encouraged, they scurried back to the files and found real gold. Brousse’s wife Kay had been married before—several times, actually. When wed to Shaw Waterbury, she had given birth in 1913 to a daughter, Catherine. And in a genuine stroke of luck, the kind that every successful op needs, the burrowers learned that Catherine Waterbury had died as a child. If she had lived, she’d have been twenty-eight. And Brousse’s stepdaughter. Now that, they cheered, was certainly a role Betty could convincingly play.
Betty had recently been assigned a new OSS handler, Donald Downes, a well-connected Yalie who had knocked around the Balkans and the Middle East for naval intelligence before the war and was now moving up fast in the hierarchy; Huntington had been sent off to North Africa to direct a network of penetration teams. It was Downes’s job—ironically, a year earlier he’d been the loudest voice against Betty burglarizing the Vichy embassy—to run this scenario past Betty. When he did, she jumped at it. She asked no questions. Betty simply made it clear she’d do whatever was asked, and more, for that matter, to get an assignment in occupied France.
Next, with a chorus of conflicting feelings singing in his head, Downes girded himself for his meeting with Brousse. Yet to his credit, it was with an impressively impassive face that Downes informed the Frenchman that he’d need to pretend that the woman with whom he was head-over-heels in love was his stepdaughter. And by the way, simply as a matter of operational security, Downes continued with rigid self-control, Brousse would also need to convince his wife that the glamorous woman playing their child was an American secret agent and not his mistress. When he had finished, Downes happily pretended that the scenario made perfect sense. It’s just a matter of careful tradecraft, he said, of making sure you act with fatherly restraint in public with your stepdaughter.
“Tradecraft,” Brousse echoed back, indignant. He saw things differently. He had to ask his wife to let an American agent assume the identity of her dead child; and at the same time conceal from her the fact that this woman pretending to be her daughter was actually his mistress. He wouldn’t do it. He couldn’t approach his wife, and even if he found the nerve, Kay would never go along with anyone posing as her beloved and deeply mourned daughter. The entire scheme, he flatly declared, was “impossible.”
Downes tried to argue, but his heart was not in it. He knew how absurd it sounded. He had run his share of ops in his time, but this one was an impossibly long shot. It was tough to convince Brousse of its feasibility when he could hardly convince himself.
But Betty had more arguments, and more resources, at her disposal than any OSS man, no matter how many years he’d spent slinking around the world orchestrating sinister plots. She went to work on Brousse, and after one night together he grudgingly agreed “to think about it.” After their next night together, he went off to speak to Kay.
Brousse had already been authorized to reveal to his wife that he’d been working as a US agent; the hope was that, since Kay was an American, she’d take comfort from the fact that her husband was not the Nazi stooge he pretended to be. And when she expressed joy and relief at this turn of events, the plan was for him promptly to roll out everything else—the entire scheme to infiltrate an American agent into France as his stepdaughter. Then, if Kay seemed intrigued, he could bring her too into the operational loop; that is, offer her the role of a subagent in the “family” network. Which would mean, he grumbled to himself, his wife would be taking orders from his mistress.
But it was wartime, and Betty was urging him on, and so he worked up the nerve to make his pitch to Kay. And just like that, she came on board. To Brousse’s total surprise, she had no qualms about her daughter’s name being used. And as for the prospect of becoming a spy, she immediately decided that was precisely the jolt her boring life needed; she’d even accompany Brousse to France if necessary. Brousse listened with a stunned bewilderment, yet finally found the presence of mind to praise Kay for her patriotism. And, more importantly, he found the discipline not to imagine what would happen if Kay ever discovered that the woman from whom she was taking orders was sleeping with her husband.
Once Kay was conscious, as they say in the trade, the operation picked up steam. A key plot point in the legend the OSS was concocting was that Catherine had been living in California with her husband, but he’d just died; that would explain why the Brousses’ Washington friends had never met her, and why she’d suddenly returned to her mother’s home. To sell this story—and it would need to pass muster not just at DC cocktail parties but also for the Gestapo—they needed a name, a real name, of someone recently deceased, a man about Catherine’s age who’d been living across the country. The R and A burrowers went back to digging, and once again they unearthed a rich vein: Lieutenant John Gordon, US Navy, thirty-two, a resident of northern California, had been a recent combat casualty. The SO forgers quickly produced a slew of genuine-looking documents—wedding license, passport, driver’s license—that identified Betty as “Mrs. Catherine Waterbury Gordon.”
Now the rest would be up to Betty, the new war widow.
IT CAUSED BETTY GENUINE PAIN, but she had her wonderful blond hair cut short and then styled into a simple, severe cut. When Downes was still not satisfied, she gave in and had it colored a dark, leathery shade of brown. The finishing touch was a pair of horn-rimmed glasses. “I wore no make-up, a simple black dress and made myself look as plain as possible,” she told Hyde, as if still amazed at her sacrifice.
But the mousy disguise served two important and, at the same time, complementary purposes. It reinforced the legend that she was in mourning, still laid low by her husband’s sudden death. And, of no less operational significance if this mission was not to blow up in their faces, it established Betty in Kay’s eyes as a drab and rather pathetic young thing, all the glamor and fun long ago squeezed out of her. She was certainly not the sort of female to whom her husband, despite his notorious womanizing, would ever be attracted.
As further cover, Catherine Gordon rented an apartment across town at the Roosevelt Hotel. Her brother-in-law, who owned the hotel, was too discreet to ask any questions. He simply found Betty a suite of rooms and apparently kept his thoughts about her new name and look to himself. At the same time, Mrs. Pack, also known to the staff as Miss Thomas, kept her place at the Wardman Park.
The Brousses did their part too. They took Catherine in tow, shepherding her around town and introducing their daughter to their wide circle of friends and acquaintances. Each new cocktail or dinner party filled Betty’s handlers with trepidation; it seemed very likely that someone would notice that the sullen young widow had a striking resemblance to the vivacious Betty Pack. But no one ever did. And the reviews for the trio’s performances were consistently raves: That poor young girl, so terribly sad. And yet what a comfort it must be to have such a caring mother and such a doting stepfather.
Brousse, in the meantime, had efficiently worked things out with Henry-Haye. He complained to the ambassador that he could no longer afford to live on his diplomatic pittance. He and his wife would be returning to France, and since she was at odds and ends, taking his grieving stepdaughter with him. Henry-Haye was solicitous; he understood Brousse’s predicament and thanked him for his faithful service. As for the decision to bring Mrs. Gordon along, that only further demonstrated, the ambassador observed with admiration, just how loyal and honorable a man Brousse was.
Everything, then, appeared set
to plant this family of spies in France. Betty was excitedly counting the days when she’d be an ocean away from a city full of people who knew her, and she could safely shed her lackluster disguise, morphing out of her chrysalis into the resplendent butterfly she’d been in a previous incarnation. But just as Stephenson and Donovan were congratulating themselves, just as they were anticipating the intelligence rewards they would soon reap, events intervened that decisively put the operation on hold.
And the irony was not lost on the two frustrated spymasters that it was the Allies’ possession of the Vichy ciphers—Betty’s great triumph—that was responsible, in many large ways, for this mission’s falling so precipitously apart.
Chapter 53
IN THE FIRST GRAY LIGHT of dawn on November 8, 1942, as US warships steamed close to the shore of North Africa and tense troops huddled on deck waiting to storm the beaches, the distinctive patrician voice of President Franklin Roosevelt suddenly blared over the public address system.
“We’ve come among you solely to destroy your enemies and not to harm you,” the president informed the surprised inhabitants of the Vichy-controlled territories about to be invaded. “Do not obstruct, I beg of you, this great purpose.” In a hesitant French he concluded, “Vive la France éternelle.”
But the president’s imploring words did not persuade many of the 120,000 Vichy soldiers pledged to defend North Africa to throw down their arms. And as German divisions moved in to bolster the besieged French positions, Pierre Laval realized he could no longer maintain any pretense that his government was not totally aligned with the Reich. He promptly broke off Vichy’s diplomatic relations with the United States.