by Howard Blum
In retaliation, Secretary of State Cordell Hull brusquely announced that he had “sent Henry-Haye back his passports.” The Vichy diplomatic corps would no longer be welcome in the United States. And Roosevelt, in a radio address the next day, made sure the nation understood how contemptible the Vichy crowd were. “Laval is evidently speaking the language prescribed by Hitler,” the president said scornfully.
Yet the more the US officials castigated the Vichy diplomats, the louder their promises to roll up the welcome mat, the more Betty felt like rejoicing. The punishment a stern secretary of state was dishing out—expulsion from America—was precisely what she wanted. It would provide even better cover than the earlier tale the OSS had dreamed up. Brousse’s suddenly taking it upon himself to return to France would’ve worked. But now, with the fresh imprint of Uncle Sam’s boot on his bottom, he’d get a hero’s welcome when he returned—and have a hero’s access to power. Best of all, it would undoubtedly speed things up. She imagined it’d only be days before Hull’s minions rounded up the senior embassy staff, shoved them onto a boat, and with good riddance sent them off to France. And there she’d be, the mournful stepdaughter standing by her parents’ side at the liner’s railing as America faded into the horizon. It would all be happening very soon.
Brousse, the seasoned diplomat, however, saw things differently. He warned Betty that the successful invasion would have further repercussions. And he was right. With the Allies entrenched in North Africa, Germany needed to shore up its southern flank. On November 10, waves of gray-uniformed Nazi infantry marched as if on parade into Vichy France and announced they were taking control.
One immediate consequence of this sudden occupation was that the members of the American diplomatic mission were now stranded behind the lines in enemy territory. And the vengeful Nazis made it clear they were in no hurry to send them home. According to their realpolitik, in a world at war, diplomatic immunity offered only a tin shield at best. The Americans were rounded up, interned in Lille, and treated more like captured prisoners of war than accredited representatives of a foreign power who happened to get caught in the wrong place at the wrong time.
By the end of the week there was no longer any talk from Hull or anyone else at the State Department about swiftly giving the Vichy diplomats the boot. Rather, these Frenchmen had become valuable bargaining chips. Not a single Vichy diplomat would be allowed to leave the United States, the State Department announced, until a deal for an exchange—our emissaries for yours—had been worked out between the two governments.
At a hastily arranged meeting held at Catherine Gordon’s apartment in the Roosevelt, Downes counseled patience. Six months at the most, he promised, and the exchange would be concluded. Cover intact, you’ll be operating in France. Brousse, who knew only too well how even the simplest of diplomatic negotiations could wind laboriously on and on, was less optimistic. But his misgivings were nothing compared to Betty’s. She was devastated. And now when she moped about as the doleful Mrs. Gordon, there was no need to act.
PERCHED ON A GREEN HILL above Pennsylvania’s Lebanon Valley, the Hotel Hershey was, millionaire candy maker Milton Hershey proclaimed, his “proudest achievement.” He ruled the seemingly feudal town of Hershey as magisterially as any lord, and when at the height of the Great Depression the idea popped into his head that a hotel should be built to house visitors to his domain, he handed his architect a postcard of a cozy, thirty-room Mediterranean seaside resort. “I want this,” he demanded. He got something much grander—a hundred and seventy rooms, tall towers anchoring each flank, a cupola sitting like a crown on the massive roof, and a gurgling interior fountain as well as stables, lush gardens, and a nine-hole golf course, all surrounded by acres of woods crisscrossed with riding trails.
When the State Department began hunting for a place to store the entourage, three hundred or so strong, of Vichy diplomats and their families until the time came to show them the door, the Hotel Hershey was high on the list. It had, the Foggy Bottom search committee decided, a lot going for it. The hotel was not the sort of pricey big-city establishment that would infuriate the taxpayers who’d be picking up the tab; a cyclone fence could be erected around its distant boundaries and guards discreetly posted so that the internees would not feel like they were captives in a prison; and (in what turned out to be spurious logic) the comfortable accommodations would persuade Vichy to treat the interned Americans with similar consideration. There was also something else: the Hotel Hershey was one of the few places in the country willing to open its doors to the vilified French families. “I shall be very happy to have these people as our guests,” Joseph Glasser, the hotel’s general manager, assured “my dear Mr. Secretary” in an effusive letter just days after he was approached by the State Department.
There was no need for much additional negotiation. The US government swiftly agreed that the taxpayers would pay the hotel $7.50 a day for each adult, and $4.00 daily for each child and the thirty-eight guards. The price included both room and meals; alcohol was prohibited.
The restriction infuriated Henry-Haye. It was an unnecessary cruelty to deprive his staff of wine with their meals, he said. State, however, held firm, more or less: the Vichy oenophiles could order from the hotel’s extensive wine cellar, but they would have to reach into their own pockets for any bottle that caught their fancy.
Nevertheless, even with access to the hotel’s cave, Brousse didn’t want to go. He didn’t want to leave Betty, and he didn’t want to postpone his mission to France.
Now it was Downes’s turn to lay down the law. Finally losing his temper, he found the steely voice he’d used in a previous life to send his overseas assets off on dicey missions. Everything depended on Brousse traveling with the rest of the senior embassy staff to Hershey, he snapped. All the credibility Brousse had earned by refusing to resign would be squandered if he and his wife evaded internment. Here was an opportunity to reinforce his cover.
Downes had spent time in the perilous Balkans, and from this hard-won knowledge he reiterated the wisdom every agent in the field took to heart: operational security is always a wise investment. Six months spent at Hershey, he said, will pay dividends when you’re in Paris and some Gestapo thug is giving your dossier the once-over. You’ll be congratulating yourself for not having been impetuous, and me for stopping you.
But once Brousse had finally resigned himself to spending six tedious months at Hershey with his wife at his side, Betty demanded that she go too. Her argument made sense: Catherine Gordon would also benefit from being carted off by the vengeful Americans; when she arrived in France, her internment would be a badge of honor. What made less operational sense, Downes realized, was the possibility that Ambassador Henry-Haye, who Betty had interviewed two years earlier, might after seeing her day after day begin to wonder why Mrs. Gordon looked so familiar. Another cause for concern: Betty, Brousse, and his wife stuck in a hotel for months on end seemed like a ménage à trois destined for an unhappy ending.
Downes, though, kept those fears to himself. Instead, he simply raised a very real problem: Catherine Gordon would need to make a formal request through the State Department to join her parents. She couldn’t just show up; she wasn’t a member of the embassy staff and while she was the Brousse’s child, she was also an adult.
Preempting what he knew would be Betty’s next argument, he forcefully made the case that it would be unwise “to pull some strings.” Another rule he had learned during his time in the cold was that everyone talks. If the OSS asked a favor of State, he lectured, it would be bound to leak. Someone would inevitably say something about how the spooks had infiltrated an agent into Hershey. No, he concluded firmly, file the proper papers and let them work their way through the system. The process, he said with his customary reassuring optimism, would move swiftly along. Even Cordell Hull would not be so uncompromising as to keep an impoverished and grieving American war widow from her parents.
On November 17, under a br
ight autumn sun, a cavalcade of black limousines loaded down with luggage and families made the three-hour drive from Washington to the hotel. A report in the Washington Evening Star observed that “among the group was Charles Brousse, Press Attaché, and his Georgia-born wife. In his lapel Mr. Brousse wore the rosette of the Legion of Honor awarded him with gold leaves for valor in World War I.”
Their daughter Catherine Gordon was not with them. And as for Betty Pack, she had her own problems. She had just discovered she was pregnant.
AS THE BROUSSES SETTLED INTO their suite at the Hotel Hershey, Betty lay in a room in Washington’s Garfield Hospital. Only days after she’d realized she was pregnant, she had started bleeding profusely. She had miscarried. Rushed by ambulance to the emergency room, Betty needed multiple transfusions. She spent the next eight days in the hospital.
Weak and pale when she was released, she nevertheless immediately resumed her efforts to join her “parents” in Hershey. During the long, vacant days lying in her stiff hospital bed, she had thought of little else. She genuinely missed Brousse, but at the same time she also wanted to shore up her Catherine Gordon identity. Taking up residency at the Hotel Hershey, all her instincts told her, would be the first crucial step in her long journey to France.
Dutifully, she filed the necessary application to the Department of State:
MOTHER Catherine Calhoun Graves Brousse
FATHER Shaw T. Waterbury
DATE OF BIRTH January 28, 1913
PLACE OF BIRTH Washington D.C. Columbia Hospital
I have been widowed and have also lost my mother and foster-father through their internment at Hershey. We have always been very close and this separation has come as a great shock to the three of us. My mother is not in good health, depends on me for many services that I have long been accustomed to do for her. I, in turn, depend upon my parents for maternal and moral support.
After composing this sentimental piece of fiction, she sat back and waited. But Betty was never a woman who could summon up much patience, and with so much hanging in the balance, she was particularly antsy. She pestered Downes, and when he only dished out his usual platitudes about the virtues of discipline, she decided to go over his head. She dexterously cajoled her way into a meeting with William Kimbel, Donovan’s personal assistant. And like many men before him, Kimbel swiftly melted under the glow of her charm. The next day a tactfully worded letter went out from William J. Donovan, director of the Office of Strategic Services, to Frederick B. Lyons, executive assistant to Adolf Berle, assistant secretary of state.
December 22, 1942
Dear Mr. Lyons:
At my request, I understand that Mr. Kimbel had discussed with you a matter concerning a certain young lady to be permitted to go to Hershey and later to proceed with the French to France in the diplomatic exchange. I should greatly appreciate your making it possible for this to be accomplished.
Sincerely,
William J. Donovan
But the letter, despite its guarded tone, was read as a threat, and more significantly, an impotent one. The imperious State Department, chafing at the swashbuckling OSS chieftain’s intrusion onto their turf, curtly let it be known that the process had its rules: Mrs. Gordon’s application would be dealt with in due time.
When an embarrassed Kimbel shared this disappointing news with Betty in an awkward meeting in his office, her reaction was to sulk. But by the time she’d returned home, she was once again thinking like a professional. She decided the time had come to take the initiative. She packed her bag and drove north to Pennsylvania.
At seven on a cold, dark December evening she arrived at the gates to the Hotel Hershey. Edgar Innes, the special agent in charge of the guards, was summoned, and he sat with Betty in her drafty car as she poured her heart out. And what a poignant story she told! She was the lonely, pregnant widow of a US naval officer who had been killed in action in the Pacific, and she desperately needed the warm support of her parents. And if that wasn’t reason enough to let her in, she concluded by pointing out that tonight was Christmas Eve. Had the agent no compassion? Could he really say “Bah humbug” to a pregnant widow who just wanted to be with her family during the holidays?
Innes could. He had his orders, and at this late hour on Christmas Eve he couldn’t reach anyone in Washington with the power to countermand them. Betty was refused entry.
But in this Christmas story there was a room at the inn—the Hershey Community Inn. Holed up in her room for the holidays, she had nothing to do but make telephone calls. Betty reached out to anyone she could think of—in the OSS, the BSC, the State Department. She even managed to have a brief conversation with a sympathetic but powerless Ambassador Henry-Haye.
Finally, on December 27, all her beseeching had some effect. Special Agent Innes brought a visitor to the Community Inn—Kay Brousse. Betty spent the next two hours talking to her lover’s wife.
BETTY RETURNED TO WASHINGTON BRISTLING with frustration. She was unaccustomed to things not going her way, and she’d always been restless. Fueled by this volatile mix, she continued knocking on official doors and writing imploring letters. And Brousse now joined in too. He missed Betty, but his resentment was also stirred by what he perceived as ingratitude for all his dangerous covert service to America. His letters—to State, to the OSS—not only revealed too much about secret operations, but were also, in the bewildered assessments of many ruffled government officials, a bit loony. “The fact that I cannot speak with her,” railed Brousse, referring to his stepdaughter, in one of his many impassioned appeals to the State Department, “drives me furious! I ask only one thing: to have Catherine Gordon here or to be free . . . I have reached the last limits of suffering.”
And finally State surrendered, although whether the avalanche of emotional letters had broken their stony resistance or the wheels of bureaucracy had simply finished spinning was never made clear. All a grateful Betty knew was that on February 8—three long months after the embassy officials had been hustled off—she received the permission she’d been demanding. A memo was issued granting Mrs. Gordon the right to join her parents in Hershey, but, it emphatically also pointed out, all hotel expenses would be her own responsibility, and like the other internees, she could not leave the premises without authorization.
Betty—now calling herself Catherine Gordon-Brousse—did her best to settle into the hotel’s languid routine. She kept up her disguise, dialing down her glamour and playing the sorrowful widow. She played her role so skillfully that Henry-Haye never had any second thoughts about the Brousses’ sad child. But, as Downes had presciently feared, the tricky situation was a bomb waiting to go off. And then Betty, who needed danger to keep her spirit alive, lit the fuse.
One morning in June, Kay wandered unsuspectingly into Catherine’s room—only to discover her husband and his stepdaughter lying naked together in bed.
Kay rushed at Betty, determined to kill her. In her rage, she might have succeeded if Brousse had not somehow managed to push Kay, still kicking and screaming, out into the hall. As he anxiously propelled his wife down the corridor toward their suite, Kay, in a voice loud enough for everyone in the entire town of Hershey to hear, or so it seemed to an agonized Brousse, continued to yell. “My daughter is not my daughter,” she bellowed. “She’s a spy!”
Naturally, the State Department took notice:
“Mr. and Mrs. Brousse”—according to the official memorandum filed—“had a bout which lasted for several rounds. Unlike most French arguments, it was more than verbal. Rocks were hurled. Apparently it was scandalous. The noise . . . was heard throughout the hotel. If only rocks and bits of furniture I would not worry but I have fears that real weapons might possibly be employed and we are apt to have something serious on our hands.”
And a shocked Ambassador Henry-Haye heard too. He summoned Brousse, and while he didn’t know whether he should charge his aide with incest or merely espionage, he certainly knew something was not right. Brousse, re
membering how he had handily deflected Grandville’s accusations, hoped that a distraction strategy might work a second time. Even as the ambassador asked his questions and demanded answers, Brousse went on the offensive. He charged that Henry-Haye’s loyalties were “to a traitorous extent” pro-American. And he kept punching away, accusing the ambassador of “machinations with American officials to the detriment of France.”
It was a long and heated row. As the two men continued to go at it, the State Department received a frantic report: “The Ambassador and Mr. Brousse are in the midst of a violent personal controversy in which Mr. Brousse is the aggressor . . . there are lots of antagonisms and animosities and some rather lurid details which appeared.”
But this time it was an argument that Brousse could not win. There was too much to explain. Betty, full of a weary resignation, had begun packing even before Brousse returned from the meeting. She knew her cover had been blown.
That afternoon a still seething Kay Brousse was driven to the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York. Mrs. Gordon—or whoever she really was—was ordered by the agent in charge to return home. Betty drove off, but she had no intention of going back to Washington. She checked into the nearby Community Inn. Their future as a covert team in France might be finished, but she still wanted to be close to Brousse.
For the next several nights, as stealthily as any agent sneaking into enemy territory, she’d creep past the guards and then scurry through the woods. Protected by the dense shadows that stretched over the hotel’s golf course, she’d meet up with Brousse. The countryside alive with the buzz of night noises, the two lovers would lie in each other’s arms on the fairway’s freshly cut grass.
One evening after she had slunk past the guard post, an agent stepped out of his hiding place in a stand of trees.
He had no idea who he had caught. He suspected the woman was just down on her luck and looking for a place to sleep for the night. He threatened to arrest his captive and throw her in jail for vagrancy.