A Covert Affair

by Jennet Conant

  It did not take Jane long to become a popular figure in Kandy. She had a special faculty for making friends in high places, so that almost at once she seemed to know all sorts of important people in both the American and British commands. She was the only female member of their OSS unit to be honored with an engraved invitation to one of Mountbatten’s elegant dinner-jacket affairs. Lord Louis and his staff had taken over the King’s Pavilion, a delightful miniature white palace that had been the summer residence of the colonial governors. The royal residence had originally been built in 1829 for Mountbatten’s godmother, Queen Victoria, in the event she graced the island with a visit. (She never did.) Famous for its airy style and the graceful proportions of its architecture, from the regular colonnades to the wide, graveled drive that led to its imposing arched entranceway, it was said to be the finest structure in all Ceylon. The manor house was surrounded by ornamental gardens and extensive grounds, including a golf course that went down to the sea, and save for an array of flags and a few military trappings appeared to be a throwback to the heyday of British colonialism. The fast-growing HQ was informally laid out along roads named Fleet Street, Ludgate Circus, Times Square, and Broadway to reflect the Anglo-American spirit of the enterprise, with a lavish array of thatched messes, clubhouses, and living quarters situated along the banks of a river. The supreme commander—“Supremo” in the local shorthand—had arrived at his idyllic new headquarters that April, and he had immediately decreed Kandy “probably the most beautiful spot in the world.”

  The OSS bashas were just beyond Mountbatten’s gardens. The juxtaposition of the two headquarters provided a ready-made drama for Jane quite apart from the war itself, and she reveled in the expertly contrived entertainment. The admiral’s fledgling command was already earning quite a reputation for luxury and high living and had come under fire from the home office for its extravagance. There was the small matter of carving an airstrip out of Kandy’s misty mountains, and the staff—Mountbatten had originally planned to make do with 4,100—was reportedly growing by leaps and bounds. (The final tally would be nearly 10,000.) Drawn mostly from British aristocracy, they were an impossibly well-groomed lot in their trim khaki uniforms and could be seen coming and going in their shiny staff cars or saluting in stiff parades worthy of Buckingham Palace. “Lovely Louis,” Jane recalled, using the American general’s nickname for him, “liked to be surrounded by handsome men and beautiful women.” The women, many of them titled, were mostly WRNS or FANNYs—members of the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry Corps. The latter outfit, according to Jane, was ostensibly an aid organization dating back to World War I but had, over the years, become an auxiliary of British intelligence. Hence, beware of beautiful FANNYs!

  Despite her anticolonial prejudices, which shone through in her constant mocking of the declining empire and her Marxist cracks about “the mangy British lion,” Jane was allowed entrée into their social enclave. She was the only American invited to join their Shakespeare group, and at their amateur theatricals the British would roll in the aisles at her pronunciation of words like “clerk” and “Berkeley.” She met Mountbatten on several occasions and considered him the most charming man she had ever met, recalling, “He had the great and wonderful gift, during conversation, of making you feel that all his life he had been waiting for your pearls of wisdom, and he was sincere, for the moment at least.” Perhaps it all came down to her being such a determined flirt, but as a result of her close contacts among the khaki-clad set she knew more about what was really going on than almost anyone on the island. Guy Martin, another Donovan lawyer turned OSS lieutenant, was not surprised at Jane’s progress. She was “the jolliest girl on land and sea,” he said, and “the only Communist with a sense of humor.”

  Every morning at eight sharp, Paul, dressed like a British major in shorts and an open-neck bush jacket with rolled sleeves, herded them into a weapons carrier outside the Queen’s Hotel, which ferried them to the OSS camp. Their little group usually included Jane, Julia, her roommate Peachy, Cora, Ellie, Gregory Bateson, and a gaggle of secretaries. Bateson, whom Jane once accused of “having a genius for making the obvious obscure,” was a rather batty, absent-minded English academic. Moose-tall and gangly, he had a huge head and sparse hair, and went about in a pair of abbreviated American shorts, his sadly inadequate wool stockings bunched around his ankles. He was not only an Oxford PhD but had lived for years in remote regions with native tribes, and had absorbed altogether too much of their habits and cultures. He was forever urging them to go crocodile hunting, and spoke with nostalgia of this great sport, having last indulged in it in some far-off section of Sumatra. He reminisced about “bagging the beasts” in very deliberate, richly accented English, which Paul described as a cross between “an Oxford don and the-visitor-from-Mars.” Julia had quite a crush on him, but it may simply have been because at six foot six he was one of the few men who towered over her.

  While in Ceylon, Bateson came up with the bright idea of turning the great Irrawaddy River in Burma a putrid shade of yellow. The Irrawaddy, a mighty river some thirteen hundred miles long, was a way into Burma and of great strategic importance. He had stumbled across a Burmese legend that, roughly translated, promised, “When the waters of the Irrawaddy turned as yellow as the pongyis’ [monks’] robes, the foreign enemy will leave Burma.” While the “foreign enemy” in the legend was almost certainly the British, Bateson was confident that the term could apply to the Japanese as well. Used as part of an MO whisper campaign, he argued, the ghostly yellow river would be a sure sign to the superstitious Burmese that the Japanese had to go and would incite insurrection. He applied for and received permission from P Division (originally the Paranormal and Psychic Phenomena Division of Naval Intelligence, it became the covert psychological unit of OSS, code-named “Delta Green”) and with great difficulty procured several cans of a yellow oil designed to create “slick smears” for downed planes trying to attract rescue teams. Just before arranging for the Air Force to drop the dye into the river, he tried pouring a sample of the stuff into his bathwater to see how it worked. It immediately sank to the bottom of the tub, producing no telltale smear. Unfortunately, on closer inspection, the instructions on the can read: “For use in salt water only.”

  Bateson was by no means the only “mad scientist” who cooked up disruptive schemes and noxious weapons to use against the enemy. The OSS brains in the Department of Research and Development produced a glossy magazine devoted to the subject, which personnel in Ceylon received on a monthly basis. Jane could not help poring over each new issue, which had “the fascination of a repellant object.” One of the nastier weapons, she recalled, was packaged in ordinary cans of pork and beans, which the Japanese would find in a bundle of rations and presume had been dropped into the jungle for American soldiers. When the Japanese tried to open them, however, “the cans would explode in their faces.” Studying this catalog of wicked devices, Jane observed herself beginning to undergo that change from rookie to hardened field veteran, barely flinching at the sound of ack-ack guns coming from next door, where soldiers practiced shooting at a towed target.

  Jane’s office cadjan was a palm-thatch hut, a tropical version of army prefab, with a cement floor. Each room merited one 25-watt bulb hanging from the ceiling; as Paul drily observed, they affected the afternoon gloom about as well as a birthday candle. From her open door she could see papaya trees and coconut palms and up the hills to the green rice paddies. The hut’s windows were bare, with wooden shutters that were never closed except when the rain was too heavy. This was just as well, as she heard that the previous week a young British naval commander who saw a six-foot-long cobra in his cadjan dove out his open window and escaped with only a sprained thumb.

  Her hut contained her desk, for Indonesian and Malay affairs, and the desk of Captain Howard Palmer, a twenty-seven-year-old Harvard Law School graduate who represented Thailand. A large, jovial fellow, Palmer had been born in Bangkok to missionary parents, had
lived in Thailand until the age of nine, and spoke fluent Thai. Off in one corner, surrounded by charts, was the MO desk for Burma. They shared the space with Liz Paul, their assistant, a pretty twenty-five-year-old graduate of a secretarial school in New York. This close cohabitation resulted in a confusion of noises from typing and dictation to snatches of overlapping conversations, all of which was hugely distracting, as was the presence of vociferous coolies, engaged in some mysteriously unending construction work, who just stood outside and stared and stared at her until someone shooed them away.

  Paul Child’s cadjan was the best in the compound. He called it his “palazzo.” He had the large center room to himself, and he had made it comfortable and quite attractive, with big maps covering the walls and bulletin boards with up-to-date news clippings and radio monitorings as they came in, so that everyone went there to visit or just to sit and relax. The two side rooms were occupied by Heppner’s deputy, Lieutenant Colonel Paul Helliwell, and Ellie, who did Paul’s secretarial work. Paul was in the midst of designing and building an elaborate war room for SEAC but was so swamped with presentation work—such things as operational phase charts, diagrams and military models for the OSS, and, for Mountbatten, a large decorative map of his command—that he was way behind schedule. After months of complaining, he had been assigned additional staff, and in late June, Jack Moore had arrived from Washington. Paul had also found himself blocked at every turn by the Royal Engineers, who were in charge of all construction on the island and had not been informed of OSS’s plans. The Royal Engineers controlled access to all the necessary materials, and the carpenters and electricians, and despite being a royal pain had to be placated. Paul eventually discovered the fastest route to their heart was “by drinking a lot of weak whiskey and slapping a lot of weak backs,” and as a result his new building was finally under way.

  Jane settled down to her MO work as best she could with the limited means at her disposal. Their OSS unit in Kandy, joined by other bases in Ceylon, was responsible for mounting operations in Thailand, Malaya, Sumatra, and the part of Burma not covered by Detachment 101’s Kachin Rangers. The Japanese occupied Burma, posing a threat to India, as well as Malaya and Holland’s Indonesian empire. Thailand was a nominal Japanese ally under Japanese military occupation. India and Ceylon remained under British control, and while they more or less cooperated with the Allied war effort, there were aspects of the old colonial rule that were unpopular. A sore point for OSS personnel stationed there was that Britain had yet to renounce its imperial claims on any part of Asia. Jane’s assignment was twofold: “to undermine the Japanese army and, second, to turn the native populations against the Japanese and their collaborators.” After seeing the “excellent examples” of subversive leaflets and cartoons she had done in Washington, Heppner had specifically requested Jane be assigned to Ceylon to expand their output of MO materials discrediting the Japanese.

  She began by scouring all the latest intelligence reports from occupied territories, looking for anything she could use to deceive, mislead, or frighten the enemy, such as the names of Japanese military personnel or their Malay and Indonesian collaborators. She enlisted the help of Julia, who had assumed her duties as head of the Kandy Registry and was responsible for keeping track of all the intelligence reports. Blessed with “a phenomenal memory,” Julia dug out everything they had in the archives, but it was “unfortunately scanty” and unpromising. Relying on her own ingenuity, Jane tried devising schemes that might stir up native hostility against the enemy. “I would look into space, sometimes for hours,” she recalled, “and dream up a leaflet, a pamphlet, or a broadcast, saying perhaps that certain collaborators were lining their pockets while their wives were sleeping with the Japanese.” To her dismay, some of the early leaflets she had printed up were not as effective as they might have been because there were no native Japanese speakers on the staff. Their two nisei translators had such flawed grammar and old-fashioned idioms that their efforts did not fool anyone, least of all the enemy.

  The distribution of the black propaganda in the occupied territories was carried out by agents working for Detachment 404 and the Americans. The best agents, Jane decided, were the Chinese Communists. They were devoted to their cause—defeating the Japanese and Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists—but as the former were the greater immediate threat, they were perfectly willing to help finish them off first. Whereas the natives, either the Malay or the Indonesians, “could have cared less. One colonial power was like another to them.” As a result, the Americans secretly employed the Chinese Communists, all the while remaining scrupulously anti-Communist. Jane regularly used Communists to carry MO leaflets into the Malay jungles or to penetrate the coast of Java, because the British subs did not want to get in that close and none of their people would touch it for fear of detection. “We would parachute to the Chinese guerillas, when we could, printing equipment, radio transmitters and, sometimes, the finished product”—including, in once case, Jane’s own “crudely printed pamphlet on how to derail trains.”

  Nothing about the work was easy—from producing the fakes to making sure the deceptive materials were properly disseminated. Every thing in Kandy was messy, opportunistic, and too fluid. After several frustrating weeks, in which Jane began to wonder if her efforts had succeeded in harming the Japanese in any way, she voiced her doubts to Alec Peterson, her opposite number in Mountbatten’s command. “Why don’t we just give them guns?” she blurted out, thinking how much easier it would be if the guerillas could just shoot the Japanese.

  “Because we’ll only have to fight them after the war to take the guns away from them,” he replied with the maddening we’ve-been-through-this-all-before composure of a seasoned campaigner.

  Feeling that all her efforts had come to nothing and that she was “wasting the taxpayers’ money,” Jane dashed off a letter of resignation to her boss in Washington, effectively firing herself and her staff of two. She got back “a blast” by return mail, reminding her that she was subject to the Articles of War and that resignation was “tantamount to desertion.” (It was not the first time she was thus threatened, nor the last. Jane maintained that she was probably the “most-threatened-with-court-martial person” during the war.) After that incident, Liz Paul would often try to put the brakes on Jane’s excesses, asking gently, “Are you sure you want to say that in your report?” or “Is that really the way you want to put it?” Jane’s blunt retort never varied: “What do you think?”

  Jane was hardly the only one increasingly skeptical about the prospect of an effective OSS show in SEAC. At the Monday morning staff meeting on August 14, Heppner gave them all a pep talk about operations and then brought up the array of obstacles that blocked them—the lack of personnel, supplies, and transport. Everything was in short supply, almost laughably so. They scrounged for everything from fuel to office supplies and were reduced to carefully saving their paper clips. Things could only get better because they could not get any worse. Carleton Scofield left the meeting feeling completely “disconcerted” and complained to his diary, “What’s wrong—too many people here, yet not enough really to do anything. How would I change it? I don’t know!”

  Then there were the many personality conflicts and Allied policy differences, along with London’s failure to articulate its policy toward Thailand, as a result of which the OSS had to try to guess the British attitude to Thai independence from cables and the casual remarks of various officials. In a memo to Washington, Heppner complained of constant meddling by the British intelligence—“SOE [Special Operations Executive] is getting in our hair more and more”—and warned of the dangers of being vulnerable to “the wiles of the British”:

  The point should be made unequivocally to all involved that all British endeavors in Thailand up to the present time have resulted in complete failure. These operations were carelessly devised and hopelessly executed. We, ourselves, were not connected with these attempts. As for our own activities, we are conducting oper
ations there which have much better propects for success.

  There were rampant suspicion of SEAC’s actions and a fear, shared by General Stilwell, that the OSS would succumb to what Ed Taylor termed “the contagions of Western colonialism.” The primary concern was that their British rivals would shut off OSS links to high-level contacts in Bangkok and then isolate the leaders of the Thai resistance from any liberalizing U.S. influence, rendering them “little more than native mercenaries of British imperialism.” Taylor even worried that the hostilities might reach the point where OSS’s role would be reduced to “a single head or coordinator responsible to Delhi (Stilwell) instead of Kandy (Mountbatten),” thereby dooming Detachment 404. After an aborted mission to bring the Thai regent, Pridi Phanomyong (known by his OSS code name, “Ruth,” after Donovan’s wife), out of the country, a failure blamed on adverse weather as well as a blatant lack of British cooperation, Scofield lost all patience with the conflicts of empires. “Damn it, why are we here?” he ranted to his diary. “The Dutch are afraid, and the British haven’t given us a break yet. Sometimes I can’t be sure who the enemy is. Almost every British officer or civilian I’ve dealt with has been OK, but institutionally they seem to want to get us out. All right, I’m for pulling out.”

  Echoing his frustration, Cora DuBois, the head of Research and Analysis and the most senior OSS woman in Ceylon, fired off a cable to her chief in Washington on August 24 complaining about being “poorly staffed,” adding pointedly, “It may be an impertinence to tell you that SEAC is the largest unexploited colonial region in the Far East and therefore a potential bone of contention between us and colonial powers in the future.” Her focus was Thailand, which she argued was strategically of vital importance to Japan, as the crossroads for its troops traveling overland between Burma, Malaysia, Indochina, and China, and would be politically of equal importance in postwar Southeast Asia. She was a lean, owlish-looking woman whom Jane persisted in calling “Herr Doktor DuBois” behind her back because of her odd way of peering over her glasses and asking about arcane facts and figures during meetings, as if the others were in the front row of her lecture room and had not come prepared.