by Howard Blum
When he said good-bye, Betty simply nodded. Then she turned and, without a word, walked off. Hyde was not insulted. He knew that was her defense, the resigned way, time after time, she had concluded every chapter in her life. He watched her walk purposefully down the runway leading to the plane, until at last she had disappeared into the crowd of passengers, in his eyes still the bewitching spy.
ON THE FLIGHT TO BARCELONA, and then in the hired car to Castelnou, Betty had time to think, and the solitude to focus. She looked back at her trip through Ireland and the journey she’d simultaneously taken back into her own past. She had revisited a lifetime of experiences, and now even if everything she had done still did not make sense to her—she would say she knew better than to trust solutions that were too tidy—she had arrived close enough to the truth.
There had been a continuity of purpose in all her experiences. She had not cared what anyone else had thought. She had not worried about what seemed appropriate or acceptable. It was a way, a nature, that had left her with many regrets; there was, after all, no justification for the mother she’d been, for the damage she’d inflicted on her children. The most she could say in her own defense was that she’d succeeded in channeling her wayward character into something substantial, into a cause she believed in. And looking back, it was a commitment, Betty now recognized, that still filled her with pride. Her final mission had restored her faltering faith in the life she had lived.
As the car began to climb the winding road leading up to the castle, Betty wondered how Charles would greet her; would he even be waiting for her when she returned? She had betrayed him, but she hoped he’d realize it was insignificant. She didn’t expect that he would understand what compelled her to leave, but she very much wanted him to forgive her. She needed him, and she found that realization very comforting.
Yet when the car pulled into the courtyard and she saw Charles standing there, she was afraid to let her spirits soar. He, too, seemed uncertain, staring at the vehicle as if trying to decide whether he should approach. But as Betty got out of the back seat, he was there to take her hand.
She held on tight to him, and they walked to the heavy wooden door. Betty stepped over a stone threshold worn flat by the centuries, and as she entered the dark castle, the aromatic scent of burning logs in the hall fireplace welcomed her back. Grateful, she disappeared into her home.
HYDE BELIEVED IN DUTY. AND now he had come to Washington to pay one last debt to Betty. As he had feared, he never saw her again after their afternoon together in London. Betty’s cancer had spread viciously. Just weeks after she’d returned to Castelnou, she had sent a grave yet sober assessment: “I do hope I can live another year before the pain gets too bad. Anyhow I will stick it as long as possible before becoming a screaming nuisance.”
Despite her illness and nearly three arduous months spent in a cancer clinic receiving chemotherapy, she had continued to work on her memoirs. She wrote by hand from her hospital bed, and a secretary typed the drafts of the chapters and sent them on to Hyde. As her illness progressed, she reluctantly decided she’d be unable to send Hyde anything more than notes for the introductory article the paper wanted and the remaining chapters. When the series ran in October 1963, she had misgivings. “The articles have all been rewritten by ‘The People’ to conform to their style,” she complained in a letter to a daughter of a wartime colleague. “I never wrote anything so bragging and conceited . . . it makes me blush.”
Betty died less than two months later, on December 1, 1963, in a clinic in Perpignan. She was buried in the park just beyond the castle’s stone walls, under the shade of a cedar tree. “I am crushed to death,” Charles wrote to Hyde.
With Charles’s consent, Hyde went ahead and turned Betty’s memoirs into a book. Cynthia was published in March 1963, but it was a slapdash work, eviscerated by the Official Secrets censors, filled with pseudonyms, and based on little more than Betty’s incomplete memoirs and her cursory notes. It never proved to be the financial success Hyde had hoped. But the experience, in an unanticipated way, served to refocus his life. He married again, settled into a cottage in Surrey with his new wife, continued writing, and, now happy and productive, enjoyed greater commercial success. He was working in 1972 on a book about Soviet espionage when he learned that Charles Brousse had died. A fire had raged through Castelnou, and Brousse was discovered in the charred remains of his bed. The authorities suspected that he’d fallen asleep without turning off his electric blanket, and a spark from the blanket had set off the fire. But this was only a theory; the cause of the fire that destroyed the castle was never firmly established. Denise’s death, Hyde also had learned, was another mystery. She had married, worked at Newsweek for a while, and then suddenly died. Colleagues at the magazine suspected suicide.
Brousse’s letter to Hyde, sent December 9, 1963, conveying the news of Betty’s death.
Churchill Archives Center, Papers of Harford Montgomery Hyde, HYDE 02 007
And now, nearly two decades after Betty’s death, Hyde stood in the dim light of the bar at the Wardman Park Hotel. The hotel had been renovated many times since Betty lived her clandestine life here. Yet the new corporate owners were proud to acknowledge the hotel’s moment in history: Betty’s portrait hung on a dark red wall. It was the photograph that had been snapped moments after the twenty-three-year-old curtsied before King George V at the Buckingham Palace New Year’s honors ceremony.
There was, however, no identification. Most revelers in Harry’s Bar assumed it was simply a photograph of a glamorous woman, a model with a tiara nestled in her hair. Which was precisely how the professionals who had fought their own secret wars, who had also served in the shadows, wanted to keep it. In tribute, they would come to drink a silent toast to Betty’s memory.
Hyde ordered a martini. He must have smiled as he remembered how proud Betty had been of the ones she poured. He raised his glass toward the photograph, but hesitated as he brought it up to his lips. Yes, she had flaws. And yes, her life had been very messy; there were boundaries she had crossed, acts that he would not even try to explain away or condone. But at a time when the world was in peril, she had joined the battle, fought bravely for the cause she believed in, and had a hell of a time doing it. What more can anyone ask out of life? He took a long, satisfying sip of his drink.
A Note on Sources
CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY’S CONNECTION TO ESPIONAGE is notorious. Staining its long, high history is the well-documented ring of Trinity College graduates who had served as long-term penetration agents—“moles,” in the jargon of the intelligence trade—for the Soviet Union. And as someone whose reporting life has been largely spent peering into the covert world, I had read my fair share of the many admonishing accounts detailing the treacheries of Kim Philby and his co-conspirators. However, it wasn’t until I walked through the formidable Great Gate and onto the grounds of Trinity College that the magnitude of their betrayals became something real, almost tangible.
Standing by the fountain in the Great Court, my eyes swept from the Clock Tower toward the Gothic chapel and around a Tudor panorama of turrets, towers, and ancient stone. What a rarefied world of privilege and tradition! As I continued on, ambling with a wide-eyed awe through the college’s gilded spaces, the motives and perhaps even the depths of the Cambridge spies’ treason became less remote. Their decisions, I began to suspect, owed as much to aesthetic judgments about a way of life as to philosophical and political arguments.
These empirical insights were still filling my mind when later that afternoon as a dusting snow began to fall I walked out of Trinity and headed across the River Cam to Storey’s Way. My destination was the concrete and brick modernist halls of the university’s Churchill College. I was going to the college’s Archives Centre to forage through the extensive papers and documents another spy, Harford Montgomery Hyde, had left to the university upon his death in 1989.
His bequest included personal papers covering his war-time service in M
I6, the British Security Coordination, and the mountains of research material he had gathered for his many books on espionage. But even more tantalizing, Hyde had left the college what has become known in intelligence circles as “the Cynthia Papers.” He had amassed this collection while he was writing his breezy 1964 biography of Betty Pack, the spy who had operated under the code-name Cynthia, and it has remained largely an unmined treasure trove. There were the crinkled foolscap typewritten pages of the memoirs Betty had dictated as she knew she was dying, her earnest and thoughtful childhood diary, the archly sentimental book she’d authored as a young girl in Hawaii, boxes filled with the candid, often blunt letters she’d written and received over the years, and even her address book, the neat entries all in her elegant cursive script.
In the long days ahead as I made my way through this archival mother lode, a literary ambition that had first begun to take form in my mind as I had walked through and looked about Trinity College became clearer. I would use these splendid riches to shape a spy story that was not confined simply to biographies, clandestine activities, and the background thunder of world historical events. I would dig deep into this firsthand source material and in the process make my narrative into something less remote. I’d use my characters’ own words—their own private thoughts, in fact!—to reveal human motives and the chaos of the interior reality of their lives. I would write a book that told, in part, a story about the decision to become a spy and what it was like to live in such perilous psychological territory. I had, after all, the source material.
I would not write an academic history; that sort of narrow, tightly buttoned narrative held no attraction for me. And yet I would tell a true story. I had the evidence; there were memoirs, letters, diaries, transcribed interviews, government documents, and contemporaneous newspaper articles. There would be no inventions in my account. I had the goods to write a non-fiction spy story where I could relate what my characters were saying, doing, feeling, and even thinking accurately as well as vividly.
Therefore, when quotation marks bracket any dialogue in this book this is an indication that at least one of the principals was the source. Further, when a character reveals what he is thinking or feeling, I found this too in a memoir, diary, a letter, or a previously published interview.
And yet even as I read with mounting interest the papers in the Churchill College Archives, I understood that Betty and Hyde were fallible. Memories—all memories—are prey to evasions and self-exculpations and spies are just like us—only more so. It seemed likely that people who lived with subterfuge and deceit would play fast and loose with the historical record and would not think twice about subjectively tinkering with the events, large and small, in their own lives. And so when I left Cambridge, I dug deeper.
Particularly valuable were the National Archives in Washington, DC, and their collection of OSS Papers and Diplomatic Records; the Federal Bureau of Investigation files on Mrs. Elizabeth Pack and Vincent Astor; Columbia University’s Butler Library which houses W.J. Donovan’s “A History of Espionage”; the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library, Hyde Park, N.Y., and its files on Vincent Astor, Adolf Berle, Ernest Cuneo, and wartime intelligence matters; the U.S. Army Military History Institute, Carlisle, PA, where the William J. Donovan Papers are stored; and the Public Record Office, Kew, England, whose files further revealed the activities of the British Foreign Office leading up to and during the war.
I found additional objective reporting and analysis about the far-ranging events shaping my narrative in the small library of books that focused on female spies and on World War II—its battles, intelligence activities, and diplomatic maneuverings. Again, since this is not an academic account, I don’t find it necessary to mention in this source note all the volumes that helped inform my narrative; a somewhat more extensive bibliography follows. Any reader, however, who is intrigued by Betty, both her life and the turbulent times in which she lived, would, I believe, enjoy settling in with the following works I found invaluable:
Cast No Shadow, Mary S. Lovell’s meticulous account of Betty’s life, published in 1992, tells a comprehensive story while also offering intriguing interviews with Arthur Pack’s family and his friends; I am deeply indebted to her original and tenacious research. Another key resource was H. Montgomery Hyde’s, Cynthia. It’s a bit breathy, reading more at times like a bodice-ripper than a spy’s operational biography, but nevertheless it offers compelling insights into both Betty and Hyde. And two other of Hyde’s books—The Quiet Canadian (published as Room 3603 in America) and Secret Intelligence Agent—provide firsthand accounts about wartime intelligence work in America as well as his own revelatory and frequently affecting reminiscences. Further, Elizabeth P. McIntosh in Sisterhood of Spies gives a gripping view of what it was like to be a woman working as a spy in wartime, historical territory also diligently covered by the more workman-like Women Who Spy, by A.A. Hoehling.
Another primary resource was the British Security Coordination’s Official History. Written in 1945 at the request of Sir William Stephenson as the war was winding down, it used the extensive top secret BSC operational records to create an intentionally dramatic and often purposefully aggrandizing account of the organization’s inventive and wide-spread intelligence activities. It remained classified—although a few purloined photocopied versions had been circulated among intelligence professionals—until 1998 when it was published in England and then the United States. It’s a revelatory, often entertaining read—its BSC agents/authors included the English writer Roald Dahl and the Canadian journalist Tom Hill—and it helped inform as well as encourage an unfolding sense of drama in my tale.
There are shelves of books on intelligence activities in the Second World War, but of all the volumes I consulted let me offer a few to which I kept returning. Thomas F. Troy, a staff officer in the CIA, first wrote about the British Security Coordination and Sir William Stephenson in a classified 1974 issue of the CIA’s journal, Studies in Intelligence. This long essay became the basis twenty years later for his book, Wild Bill and Intrepid. It’s a wonderful read—scholarly, argumentative, and full of an intelligence insider’s perceptions. Also valuable was Joseph E. Persico’s Roosevelt’s Secret War, a groundbreaking study of the president as case agent-in-chief. And although filled with extravagant claims and adventures that owe more to the imagination than the historical record, A Man Called Intrepid by William Stevenson offers an engaging (albeit often speculative) account of Betty’s adventures. Further, a very readable and comprehensive account of British intelligence is told in Nigel West’s MI5: British Security Service Operations 1909-1945 and MI6: British Security Operations 1909-1945.
I also found myself returning to several newspaper and journal articles as I wrote this story. David Ignatius, a longtime Washington Post writer on intelligence issues (and a gifted novelist to boot), wrote a 1989 article for that paper, “Britain’s War in America: How Churchill’s Agents Secretly Manipulated the U.S. Before Pearl Harbor,” that I found essential. William Stephenson’s aura as Intrepid was roundly punctured by H.R. Trevor Roper’s caustic essay, “Superagent,” in the New York Review of Books, John Le Carre’s essay, “England’s Spy in America,” in the New York Times Book Review, and Timothy J. Naftali, “Intrepid’s Last Deception,” in the journal Intelligence and National Security. Also, the History News Network’s hyperlinks on its website, The Honey Trap: The True Story of Madame Elizabeth Brousse was a most rewarding resource, and its investigation into the role of U.S. Naval intelligence operative Paul Fairly was particularly valuable.
Finally, my writing and research was shaped by conversations with intelligence agents, some serving, the majority retired, on both sides of the Atlantic. Thanks to my discussions with men who knew Hyde and had read the still classified operational case files on Betty, I was able to get closer to my characters, and to the truth about what actually happened.
The primary sources for each chapter of this book follow.
Chapter One
Cynthia Papers, Churchill Archives Centre, Churchill College [CP]; H. Montgomery Hyde, Cynthia (New York: Farrar, Staus, and Giroux, 1965) [Cynthia]; Mary S. Lovell, Cast No Shadow (New York: Pantheon Books, 1992) [Shadow]; Elizabeth P. McIntosh, Sisterhood of Spies (New York: Dell, 1999) [Sisterhood]; Castelnou.com; Château de Castelnou official site; Ina Caro, The Road from the Past, (New York: Mariner Books, 1996); Thomas N. Bisson, The Medieval Crown of Aragon: A Short History (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000); Citation of Award of Military Cross to Lieutenant Anthony George Pack, King’s Shropshire Light Infantry Archives.
Chapter Two
CP; Cynthia; Hyde Papers, Churchill Archives Centre, Churchill College [HP]; Correspondence with Kathleen Cockburn, first quoted in Shadow; H. Montgomery Hyde, The Quiet Canadian (London: Constable, 1962) [Quiet]; The Sunday Times Magazine (London), October 21, 1962, p. 25; H. Montgomery Hyde, Secret Intelligence Agent (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1982) [Agent].
Chapter Three
CP; HP; Shadow; interview with Nigel West; Hotel Gavina official website; Hyde, Secret Intelligence Agent; Thomas F. Troy, Wild Bill and Intrepid (New Haven, CT.: Yale University Press, 1996)[Wild Bill].
Chapter Four
HP; CP; Cynthia; Shadow; Sisterhood.
Chapter Five
Cynthia; HP; CP; Michael O’Sullivan, Bernard O’Neill, The Shelbourne and Its People (Dublin: Blackwater Press, 1999).
Chapter Six
CP; HP; Shadow; Cynthia; Public Record Office at Kew [PRO]; Quiet; William J. Donovan Papers, Carlisle, PA, “British Recruitment and Handling of Agents”[DP]; Richard Deacon, Nigel West, Spy! (London: BBC,1980)[Spy]; Nigel West, introduction, The Secret History of British Intelligence in the Americas, 1940-1945 (New York: Fromm International, 1999)[BSC]; F.H. Hinsley, E.E. Thomas, C.A. Simkins, and C.F.G. Ransom, British Intelligence in the Second World War (London: HMSO, 1988)[Hinsley]; Frank C. Roberts, ed., Obituaries from the Times (London: London Times, 1951); Nigel West, MI5: British Security Service Operations 1909-1945 (New York: Stein and Day, 1982) [MI5]; Nigel West, MI6: British Secret Security Operations 1909-1945 (New York: Stein and Day, 1983) [MI6].