by Howard Blum
“I have ten dollars in my purse,” Betty insisted. “I am not a vagrant.”
“What are you then?”
“Simply a naughty girl.”
He let her go. The next morning the naughty girl and former spy drove back to Washington.
STILL, BETTY TRIED TO GET back into the game. She appealed to Stephenson, who always had a soft spot for Betty; courage mattered a great deal to him. On November 22, 1943, Mrs. Catherine Gordon was granted a visa to leave the United States.
Betty arrived in London believing that she was on the road back into the secret world. She yearned to be sent into Nazi-occupied Europe as an assassin. She was assigned to one of the Service’s cloak-and-dagger units run out of a small house on London’s Dorset Square, and for a while the SOE strategists gave her infiltration into Europe serious consideration. But as the plans proceeded, the word came from several sources that Betty’s cover was irrevocably blown. The Vichy diplomats had made a full and very incriminating report on her activities at Hershey.
Deeply disappointed, Betty returned to America. The negotiations between France and the United States had been completed, and the diplomats had been freed months ago. The Frenchmen had returned to their homes. Brousse, however, was waiting in a New York hotel for Betty.
Betty and Charles moved into the spare bedroom in Cora’s apartment. Betty now proudly wore, as her impressed sister would recall, “a fabulous bracelet made of huge stones.” It was an engagement present from Brousse, but their wedding date remained vague, since both of them were still married to other people. Their divorces, they told themselves, would come to pass once the war was over. The Allied troops had landed in Normandy and were now marching relentlessly toward Berlin, but precisely when the hostilities would finally stop was anybody’s guess. In the meantime, the couple made plans to travel to Europe. Brousse dreamed of returning to a liberated Paris.
It was just after they had booked passage on a Spanish ship sailing from New Orleans for Portugal that Betty received a call from the White House. President Roosevelt wanted to meet her. Whether the president had heard about her adventures from Stephenson or Donovan, or perhaps both, was never made clear. But Betty passed a pleasant hour in the Oval Offices sipping martinis with the president. He liked a good spy story, and she certainly had plenty to tell.
Chapter 54
WHEN THE COUPLE ARRIVED IN the French border town of Hendaye in the last week of October 1944, Betty could not help but feel that her life had come full circle. It was here, after all, that her adventures in the secret world had begun to gather speed. Yet despite this momentary pang, she refused to concede that those adventures had run their course. The fighting in Europe had not officially concluded; the Service, she told herself, might once again call on her talents.
It was not until a month later, when the couple was living in Paris, the newly liberated city slowly shaking itself back to life, that Betty finally came to terms with her retirement. Brousse’s sister-in-law—“a flashy woman, a gypsy type, very beautiful,” she told Hyde—had come up from her home in the south, and they met her for lunch at the Ritz.
Betty had not wanted to go; Charles had confided that this sister-in-law had been the mistress of the Gestapo officer in charge of the Pyrénées-Orientales region. Only after he explained that he hoped to use her contacts to speed the release of his younger brother from a concentration camp did Betty relent.
The Ritz was a sorry place, with none of the splendor that Betty remembered. There were no flowers on the table, the menu was woefully limited, and there wasn’t even a carte des vins, just an apologetic waiter who offered only a choice of “rouge ou blanc.” Yet, paradoxically, the cellar was well stocked with champagne—the Germans had apparently insisted it must always be available—and Brousse ordered bottle after bottle. That helped lift Betty’s spirits.
So perhaps it was the free-flowing bubbly that led the sister-in-law to make her revelation. Or maybe she’d intended all along to give Betty a warning.
“You are the woman who was posing as Kay’s step-daughter,” she blurted out. “You were a spy. We know all about you. I even had your description. You fit it exactly, eyes, hair, everything else.” Then she continued on with a slow precision. She knew “the whole story”—how Betty had seduced Charles and coerced him to infiltrate her into the Vichy legation. She had heard it from the Gestapo. They had Betty’s photograph, and had been looking for her.
At the end of their conversation, Betty had to inhale deeply. There was no possibility of her being any use to the Resistance; all doors back into the secret life had been slammed shut. She finally understood that her war was over. Betty returned to the apartment on rue des Marroniers filled with the uneasy realization that she would now need to live in the real world.
IN THE YEARS THAT FOLLOWED, Betty tried to adjust to peacetime. But it was not in her nature. She could handle danger, but the banal demands of everyday life, of running a home, of being a wife and a mother, left her reeling. Still she tried. She kept making promises, to herself and to others. But in the end she could not find the will—or any reason, really—to keep them. Without a cause she could believe in, Betty was lost. Everything seemed insubstantial. And much worse, in her own eyes she, too, seemed to be less than she’d once been. She deeply missed being Cynthia.
In November 1945 Arthur Pack committed suicide. He had planned to remarry once his divorce from Betty was finalized, but as he’d explained with calm logic in a letter to the Foreign Office, “It would be unfair to any woman to allow her to marry a man of 55 years whose health is liable to crack up at any moment and leave her stranded with a paralytic husband.” He was also unhappy with his recent posting to Buenos Aires, and while he’d been told he could return to his former job in Santiago, he declined. The new ambassador was John Leche, one of Betty’s old lovers, and the prospect of serving under him was too grim. Convinced he’d run out of alternatives, he held the muzzle of a revolver against his right temple and pulled the trigger.
Betty tried to remember her husband with affection. “I will always love him,” she wrote his sister Rosie. “He was a great man.” But by the time she sat down to write another letter to Rosie, her mood had hardened. “Arthur was a taker and not a giver,” she stated. And she’d settled on an explanation for having left him: “I was finally obliged to take account of myself and decided that unless I did something positive to remedy the situation both Arthur and myself might disappear and leave our two children orphaned.” It was not the truth, or even close to the complexity of feelings that pushed her into a procession of betrayals, but Betty did her best to convince herself it was that simple.
With Arthur’s death, she had no choice but to deal with another circumstance the war had given her a convenient excuse to ignore—her children. She made arrangements for Denise, now ten, to live with her in Paris. “I will never leave her. She will never be alone,” Betty pledged. As for her son Tony, now fifteen, whom she had not seen for eight years, she would let the Cassells continue to raise him. “It would be a disservice to Tony to bring him here,” she wrote Rosie without further explanation. Years later she offered a bit more to Hyde: “A wholesome, happy life with his foster parents should not be shattered. The emotional stability that Tony had was more important than my own emotional longings.” Although no longer in the trade, Betty could still transform rationalizations into truths.
Tony Pack, photographed in 1951.
Personal collection
Denise was a sullen, unhappy child who was convinced she was tormented by ghosts. She lived with Betty and Charles in Paris for two strained years. When Brousse’s divorce was finalized, and the couple, after a small and deliberately muted wedding, moved into their storybook castle, Denise came along. But Betty’s patience for her difficult daughter had run out. She dismissed the young girl as “selfish, ruthless, and completely hard-boiled.” Despite the assurances she’d given, Betty could find no reason to put up any longer with the responsibili
ties of motherhood. Without remorse, she sent Denise off to America to live with Cora.
Tony finally came to Castelnou. The visit had been put off for years; either the castle’s renovations were not completed, or Betty had the flu, or now was simply not the right time. At last he took the initiative. He was a newly promoted lieutenant, on leave from some tough service in Korea, and he was spending his holiday traveling through France. He made it seem like an accident, as if he’d just happened to find himself down south, and when he telephoned his mother, she agreed to meet him at the train station.
It was an unsentimental reunion. He stayed on for a few days, but he could find little in common with the stranger who was his mother. “Her idea of enjoyment,” he observed with censorious bewilderment, “was to drive into Perpignan every evening and go from club to club where there were loud jazz bands and parties.” He also had the suspicion his mother was “slightly odd in the attic”; after all, she’d confided to him that she conversed with the two huge hunting dogs that followed her devotedly about in a “dog language” that she alone among humans knew.
His mother was no less judgmental. She found her son to be narrow-minded and introverted, the stuffy personification of a stodgy middle-class Englishman. But it wasn’t Tony’s fault, she said graciously. She blamed the Cassells, and doubted whether she could ever forgive them.
Then suddenly, or so it seemed to a stunned Betty, “it was later than one thinks.” Arthur had committed suicide. Denise lived in America and, now married, was largely out of her life. Tony had been killed in action. Cora was dead. Her old lovers had moved on. And she was dying.
The castle, as well as her steady life with Charles, was no longer a refuge. It had become something small, and she was beginning to believe, quite mean. She felt imprisoned.
Then, miraculously, along came Hyde from out of her past to rescue her. She ran off with him hoping to understand herself, to pierce through all the deceptive layers that overlaid her tumultuous journey of the past half century. She needed to make sense of it all, or she’d never find peace, either in this world or the next. “You don’t bargain with death,” she told herself. But nevertheless she found herself pleading, begging to be allowed to complete this final mission.
Betty Pack, photographed at Castelnou the year before her death in 1963.
Churchill Archives Center, Papers of Harford Montgomery Hyde, HYDE 02 007
Epilogue
Return to the Keep
RETURNING TO LONDON, HYDE CONTINUED to set their schedule. Betty was swept up in a swirl of almost constant activity. There was a trip to the Victoria and Albert Museum, a long stroll through a springtime Hyde Park, lunches and dinners where he invited his many friends, and, on Betty’s insistence, several afternoons devoted to shopping. But although their time was crowded, Hyde had his priorities. On their second day in the city, he brought Betty to a lunch with his literary agent Iain Thompson. Hyde, the wary professional, wanted to make sure that the details of Betty’s collaboration with him were carefully established.
Betty went with some trepidation. As she had told her stories to Hyde, she could not help feeling that her tales would be of little interest to anyone else. She feared that her memories were like the faded photographs in the family album Cora had been so fond of trotting out: possibly intriguing to relatives, but tedious to those who had no personal connection to the faces and places in the snapshots. But sitting in the restaurant, she listened with mounting excitement as Thompson reiterated what he’d previously told Hyde: readers, he predicted, would be eager to relive Betty’s wartime exploits. The proper format, the agent suggested after a few moments’ thought, would be a series of articles in the popular Sunday press; either the News of the World or the Sunday People would be possibilities.
Betty was unfamiliar with the English papers. She was not aware of how the feisty mass circulation sheets relished putting a provocative, often colorfully sensationalistic spin on the news. But sitting in the restaurant, she was carried along by both men’s enthusiasm for the project. Without much consideration, she matter-of-factly agreed to the arrangements Hyde and his agent outlined. She’d write her memoirs as a series of newspaper articles, Hyde would rewrite them, and they’d split the income equally. If the articles provoked interest, and there was sufficient material, Hyde would then rework her memoirs into a short book. And when he shared his idea about forming a company to protect the potential profits from taxes, Betty went along with that too; “a stroke of genius,” she’d subsequently write Hyde.
A few days later, at a lunch with Sam Campbell, an editor at the Sunday People, a deal negotiated by Iain Thompson was quickly finalized. The paper would publish a series of six articles based on Betty’s memoirs and then “polished” by Hyde. The fee, a stunned Betty learned, would be an extraordinary 12,500 pounds, the money to be paid upon publication into the soon-to-be-established Cynamont corporation. This windfall was undoubtedly additional confirmation of the seemliness of the mission that had taken her to Ireland, even if she had to leave her husband and run off with another man to fulfill it.
The following day Hyde arranged one more lunch. Colonel Howard Ellis—known as “Dick” to members of the espionage establishment on both sides of the Atlantic—had been both his and Betty’s wartime boss, the nuts-and-bolts professional MI6 had sent to America to assist William Stephenson with the operational details of running the BSC. Ellis was now retired from the Service, but he had once worked as a “weeder” for MI6—one of the men who decided what secrets in the files still needed keeping—and he’d given Hyde’s manuscript of the The Quiet Canadian the bureaucratic shove it needed to get around the Official Secrets Act and be cleared for publication. Hyde hoped Ellis, although he no longer had that job, could offer advice on how Betty’s articles could be published without the Service raising any objections. Hyde worried that any mention of ciphers, even those used decades ago, would put the secretive spymasters on high alert.
Hyde chose a French bistro in South Kensington not far from the tube station. He wasn’t particularly fond of the food, but they knew him, and he could always get a table in a quiet alcove in the rear. He hoped to get down to business quickly and extract some practical advice from his former colleague. But as the talk turned to the old days, and both Ellis and Betty seemed so glad to be once again in each other’s company, he realized this would be more a reunion than a working lunch.
He listened as Betty and Ellis chatted happily, the two of them reminiscing about a time when they had lived with a level of intensity that they’d never achieved again. And sitting there quietly, feeling the odd man out as the two relived the wartime missions they’d mounted together, Hyde’s mind wandered.
He thought of what he had learned about Betty in the course of their travel and talks in Ireland. Betty had found her path—inevitably, he genuinely believed—into the secret world because it had offered her a way to subordinate the mercurial passions that ruled her life. She had needed something to steady herself—her “vast restlessness,” she had called it—and then had the good fortune to stumble into a profession she could fully embrace. And it had been a perfect match; she lived easily with all the ambiguities of her adopted trade.
As the lunch went on, Hyde found himself thinking how much he enjoyed Betty’s company—the simple pleasure of being with her. But he also realized the attraction was tied to their memories of a dangerous and vital time when they had both worked to help the Allies win the war. Now what was he doing? Shuttling halfheartedly from one hastily conceived project to another simply to cover his pile of bills? Giving excuses to his wife as he went off to Ireland with another woman?
He was beginning to understand that if he were to reclaim the lofty ambitions of his youth, he’d need to refocus his life before it was too late; he was, he reminded himself, fifty-six. And hand in hand with that self-knowledge, he also realized that it was time Betty returned to France. Their time in Ireland had served as a bridge to their common pa
sts, a time when they both had lived in the covert world. But it was a relationship that had no future.
As it happened, Betty came in her own way to a similar conclusion several days later. Concerned about whether the articles could use the names of Betty’s lovers, or whether pseudonyms would be necessary, Hyde had begun to track down some of the men who had played a role in her life. In his investigation, he discovered that Michal Lubienski, the count with whom Betty had shared a passionate romance in prewar Poland, was living in London with his wife. When he informed Betty, she immediately picked up the telephone.
Count Lubienski, Betty was told by the servant who answered, was out of the country on business. Betty swiftly put down the receiver, not bothering to leave a message or even her name. And as soon as she did, she felt relieved. In that instant she understood that it would be better to leave the past in the past. Her mission had been completed. It was time to go home.
On their final morning together, Hyde accompanied Betty to the airport. They walked through the terminal toward the departure gate where the plane to Barcelona would be boarding, and Hyde recalled another walk they had taken, down Madison Avenue in wartime Manhattan. When they’d parted, he had said, “I expect we shall see each other soon.” It had been two decades before he’d fulfilled that expectation. But today he knew better than to make any predictions. He had come to suspect that Betty’s health was more fragile than she pretended. And in that moment Hyde, while sorrowful, at the same time felt an uplifting appreciation for what she had shared with him, and how she had reconnected him to his own memories of his service in the shadows during World War II. He looked at her and was suddenly reminded of something Stephenson had said: Betty was “the greatest unsung heroine of the war.”