A Covert Affair

by Jennet Conant

  Clearly pleased she had agreed to go, Coughlin got down to the details. Jane would have three principal duties: first, to help supervise the repatriation of American military and civilian prisoners of war; second, to make a formal record of their war crimes testimony; third, and most important, to file daily reports on the domestic political developments in Indonesia to OSS headquarters in Washington. With the war over, Coughlin had formulated a plan by which the organization would continue to operate and begin phasing into a “peace-time covert intelligence agency.” His OSS field teams were expected to begin “covert development of contacts productive of political and economic intelligence essential to the State Department and other federal agencies faced with future responsibilities in Southeast Asia.” Once in Java, Jane would continue cultivating agents, observers, and other valuable sources of information.

  Major Robert Koke, head of the OSS station in Batavia, would be heading up her team. He and his men would be stopping in Singapore before continuing on to Batavia. The American military mission, headed by Major Frederick E. Crockett, would be traveling directly to Batavia on a Royal Navy cruiser. Once again, because of her sex, Jane would be barred from joining them on the ship. Instead, she would bring up the rear and fly in on the first American plane into Java.

  “Here’s luck!” the colonel told her as he refilled their glasses, adding blandly: “In Java, you’ll have to go in uniform and carry a pistol.”

  He would cut her orders in a few days, and she would have to get outfitted. She might also want to brush up on her shooting skills. In the meantime, after she had cleared her desk, she was entitled to ten days’ leave.

  Dazed and happy, Jane lifted her glass. She had missed out on her “cherished wish to see the liberation of Paris,” she told herself, but she could still see “the liberation of Indonesia.”

  Coincidentally, Jane already knew Bob Koke, along with his wife, Louise. Before the war, they had run the popular Kuta Beach Hotel in Bali, and she had stayed with them for a month while waiting for her divorce decree. Bob was a tall, lanky American from Santa Barbara whose bronzed skin and laconic manner disguised a real intelligence. He had worked for MGM studios in Hollywood and had the odd distinction of having introduced surfing to Bali. Louise, an artist, was rumored to have run away from a rich husband to be with him, and the couple had been an amusing addition to Bali’s tiny expat community. Because he was fluent in Malay, Bob was now with the OSS; he had been on a number of missions with Manly.

  Warmed by the alcohol, Coughlin became almost chatty. Some OSSers considered the thirty-seven-year-old, six-foot-five West Pointer “a martinet” for being such a stickler for army protocol—“He made the GIs wear their caps on the way to the latrines”—though Jane considered him a fair and intelligent man. Dropping his usual stiff demeanor, he spoke candidly about the postwar power struggle.

  Since the Japanese occupation, the major resistance movement in Indochina had come from the Communist guerillas, whose members were mainly Chinese and who the Americans had been all too happy to aid in their efforts to pin down the Japanese. In exchange for this uneasy alliance, the United States had agreed to help establish decolonized protectorates, or “trusteeships,” after the Japanese defeat, with the hope that these would eventually evolve into independent democratic nations. But Roosevelt’s distaste for colonialism—prompted in part by his fear that “1.1 billion enemies are dangerous,” as he told one reporter after Yalta—had faded in the last months of his life as the British became increasingly obdurate about not sacrificing their interests in Southeast Asia.

  After FDR’s death, and faced with the Soviet Union’s rising influence, Truman decided to reverse the policy. The New Deal idealism of Roosevelt and Donovan, which viewed the struggle against colonialism as part of the struggle against tyranny, was out of vogue. Doubting that the Indonesians were ready for independence, Truman took a hands-off approach that yielded control to the colonial nations. The American Chiefs of Staff approved the idea that United States would be released from the responsibility of “mopping up” the Japanese forces in the area. At Potsdam, it was decided that Allied authority in Indonesia would be shifted to Mountbatten’s command, which would be widened to include Thailand (formerly Siam), the Netherlands East Indies (Java), and the southern half of Indochina. Mountbatten was expected to restore order, begin the arduous task of rebuilding the devastated territories, and prepare their return to the old order.

  In practice, this meant Truman was now tacitly supporting the Dutch and French efforts to regain their overseas territories, and the United States would look the other way while the British attempted to make Thailand a disguised colony. These activities went directly against the various new nationalist movements that had sprung up in the occupied territories and were even now gathering force in the immediate postsurrender excitement and confusion. Coughlin confided that only that morning he had received a coded message from Jane’s buddy Howard Palmer concerning “the Draconian Thailand peace treaty drafted by the British,” which the Thai emissaries were being pressured into signing at a luncheon at Mountbatten’s headquarters. This was particularly frustrating, as the Americans viewed Thailand as a fairly progressive, orderly little country, capable of running its own affairs and contributing to the political stability of the region. Coughlin had made straight for the governor’s palace, where he had little difficulty persuading the Thai emissaries to hold off signing anything until Washington was consulted. (Jane later heard that the result of Cough-lin’s intervention was “a protest” by the American government and “the quiet shelving of the treaty.”)

  There was also the very real concern that if the British attempts to reassert their influence went badly, the Soviet Union, which had no direct role, might try to woo the Communist rebels. In French Indochina, the Communist leader, whose nom de guerre was Ho Chi Minh, had declared himself head of an independent Vietnamese republic. Regardless of their personal feelings about the rights of these colonies to control their own destinies, and the aspirations of their peoples, the Americans were there in a severely limited capacity, and were responsible to the British. The best hope was that the former imperial powers could be encouraged to accept the fact that these territories were on the road to self-government, and further American pressure would help improve the treaty terms. Either way, America was determined to remain outside the negotiations. It was a messy, muddled situation, to say the least, one that was bound to make Jane’s OSS mission that much more complicated.

  The ten days’ leave was a gift. It was the end of summer, the end of her sojourn in Ceylon. Jane and Manly took full advantage of their last few days together, escaping to an elegant British government rest house on a pristine stretch of beach on the southern coast of Ceylon. “There we swam, sailed, bronzed ourselves, lazed, and collected exotic shells,” she recalled. “It was a bittersweet parting between me and my lover, as we knew it was all over.” They had made a pact; the only problem was that she had not counted on falling in love with him.

  When the time came for him to leave, she prided herself on not making a scene, unlike the night she threw the pot de chambre at him. For once out of clever things to say, she walked him to his jeep in silence and bid him a stoic farewell. The State Department had offered him the prestigious post of general counsel to the Foreign Liquidations Committee, so he would be around for a few more months arranging the sale of its military surplus to the Indian government. In his usual easygoing way, he quipped that he only took the job so he could get a ride home on an airplane instead of a slow boat. Then it would be back to his law practice and his wife in White Plains. There was something about the calm, unharassed way he laid all this out that made it hurt more. After he left, feeling badly in need of inspiration, she “sat on the beach and read Buddhist literature in English translation.”

  He sent a chasing note of farewell from Burma, asking her to stay in touch. “Well, kid, I guess this is it,” he wrote, laying it on in his best hackneyed GI s
tyle. “It’s goodbye, then, to the things we’ve always dreamed of, you and I. Makes a fellow kind of wonder, don’t it? … Things have been dull indeed since you left the jeep last Saturday but are due to liven up plenty without any further delay whatsoever. You may not hear from me for some little time, but don’t forget that mail gets through to him very easily indeed…. We fighting men appreciate a word of cheer from the home folk now and then, let me tell you; makes us think what we’re coming back to—and with me that’s Scott tissue, when, and in the quantities, I want it…. Goodbye, Lotus Flower.” He signed the note “Love, a Friend of the Republic.”

  A few days later, a GI drove over from Kandy with Jane’s travel orders. On September 15, she flew from Columbo to Calcutta, landing at an airport with the disturbingly suggestive name of Dum-Dum, where she transferred to a huge four-engine C-54. It turned out the only other passengers were the newly appointed prime minister of Thailand and two of his cabinet ministers, fresh from exile in India. The plane landed in Bangkok long enough for them to get off and then continued on to Singapore with Jane as its sole passenger. The empty cabin was somewhat eerie, and she took frequent swigs of the cheap Indian gin she had poured into her canteen for just such exigencies.

  Bob Koke, his brown surfer’s body as trim and elegant as ever in wartime khaki, met her at the airport and took her to a large house that served as the OSS headquarters. She was not in the least prepared for what happened next. Saying he had “a lovely surprise” for her, he led the way upstairs. “There, under a mosquito net, was a naked male body with only a sarong over him,” Jane recalled. “I could not see his face, but, when Bob shook him and he turned around, there was Don Hubrecht.” A close friend of theirs from Bali, Don was the scion of a wealthy Dutch family—his father was the Dutch ambassador to the United States—and he had been picked up by the Japanese before he could slip away. She had heard he was in a prison camp in Central Java along with her former husband. She had assumed that Don, not blessed with Leo’s keen instinct for survival, had died long ago, succumbing to malnutrition and dysentery like so many others. She hugged his thin shoulders, exclaiming, “Don, I’m so glad you’re just alive.”

  “Jane, those are the nicest words anybody ever said to me,” he replied.

  They had gotten Don out only that morning, rescuing him from an internment camp in Singapore. He told her that Leo had been held in the same location until the Japanese ordered him to work on the Burma–Thailand railroad as an interpreter. As far as he knew, Leo was still alive. He suggested she look for him in Bangkok or Saigon. It seemed that her ex-husband was a natural leader and had proved “something of a hero” to his fellow prisoners. They had made him their “spokesman,” and he had used his Japanese to ingratiate himself with the camp commander and help secure them extra rations and other privileges. Leo had showed them all how to weave hats out of palm fronds and insisted everyone wear them as protection against the tropical sun. “Jane, if you could have seen him in that damned hat,” Don said, doubling up painfully with laughter. “How could you have married him, with your exaggerated sense of humor?”

  Koke would tell her later that another acquaintance from her Bali days, a cantankerous hotelier called Manxy, was also rumored to have escaped the hands of the Japanese. Manxy’s real name was Muriel Pearson, and she always claimed to have come by the nickname because she was from the Isle of Man. Don had bankrolled her small Beach Hotel (“merely because he found her so amusing”) and had even bought her a bright yellow Rolls-Royce, the only one of its kind in Bali. “She was pure Celt,” Jane recalled, “with periwinkle blue, slightly crossed eyes, short and dumpy.” According to Koke, Manxy had recently resurfaced in Surabaya in East Java, where she was broadcasting for the radical guerilla armies under the name of K’tut Tantri, though the Allies had dubbed her “Surabaya Sue.” There were all kinds of rumors that she had survived the occupation by offering herself as one of the so-called “comfort women” to the Japanese officers, but no one knew if there was any truth to the stories. Perhaps whatever abuse she had suffered at the hands of the Japanese had sparked her revolutionary fervor, for she was known for her bloodcurdling speeches for the cause. No sultry Tokyo Rose, she was a passionate and committed player in the propaganda war, her nightly broadcasts rallying opposition to the Dutch and British colonial rulers and support for the Indonesian revolution. It was a weird, improbable metamorphosis for the plump, gypsy-like woman with long batik dresses and dyed-black hair Jane had last seen arguing with impecunious guests on Kuta beach.

  The flight to Java the next morning proved to be another of one those trips that wreaked havoc on her nerves. It was not exactly reassuring when the navigator emerged from the cockpit carrying a map and asked if she could help them locate Batavia. The Japanese still controlled the airport, so there was no radio contact, and consequently they were “flying blind.” Her extensive travels in Indonesia during her married days had done nothing for her grasp of aerial geography, so in the end they had to resort to the rather primitive method of staring out of windows on opposite sides of the plane. When they finally sighted land, the navigator announced his intention of buzzing the Allied POW camp to buck up the prisoners and let them know the cavalry was coming. With a little effort, she was able to help him pinpoint the location with information she had from captured enemy documents. He flew in so low that it terrified her, but she quickly realized his instincts had been right: “We could distinctly see the poor men, naked from the waist up, barefooted, wearing ragged shorts, waving and screaming and jumping up and down.” Afterwards, one of them said to her, “Ma’am, we never saw anything as beautiful in our lives as that big bird with the U.S. Air Force insignia.”

  There were scores of armed Japanese soldiers roaming the airfield. They looked “surly” but did nothing but stare as she hurried past. She took a jeep to the Hotel Des Indes, which was guarded by more Japanese soldiers. It was September 16, a month and a day after the capitulation of the Japanese emperor, yet to all appearances nothing had changed. The Japanese military, which had been in control during the wartime occupation, was very much in control of the peace. Japanese patrolled the streets, imposing “security measures” against the rebellious natives and insisting that all Allied personnel remain within the Des Indes and its eleven-acre enclosure. If they left, they had to be escorted by the Kempeitai, “the dreaded Japanese Gestapo.” The Japanese attempted to further restrict their activities by stating that they, the Japanese, could not be held accountable if Allied personnel ventured into certain “unsafe” areas. The ambiguous nature of this warning opened the way for all manner of mischief on the part of the Japanese, who, as far as Jane could tell, “occasionally seemed to forget that they had lost the war.”

  If it had been possible immediately upon Japan’s surrender to send the British occupation force to Java, the Allies would not have been in quite such a mess. As it was, the shortage of available ships delayed the landing of troops for six long weeks, leaving the conquered Japanese temporarily in control and providing the Indonesians with the perfect opportunity to seize the reins of power. As a result, much of the internal government of the country, especially the services, was now being run by Sukarno’s Indonesian republic. The only thing that seemed clear to Jane was that the situation in Batavia was dangerously confused and bordering on “explosive.”

  HMS Cumberland had dropped anchor in Tanjung Priok harbor the day before, carrying the first postwar Allied Military Mission to Java. The military mission, totaling fifty in all, including a small force of Royal Marines and civilians and headed by Rear Admiral W. R. Patterson, deputy to Mountbatten, was to negotiate with the Japanese for the carrying out of the surrender terms and to disarm the Japanese as soon as British reinforcements arrived. Also aboard the Cumberland was Dr. Charles van der Plas, representing the Netherlands and chief of the Netherlands Indies Civil Administration (NICA), organized to administer the colony. Major Crockett, who led the four-man OSS team, made up the U.S. part of
the mission.

  The major had no command function and had a carefully defined humanitarian mission: to see to the release and repatriation of American personnel. Freddie Crockett, a trim, alert man of middle age, was tough, very self-assured, and a good raconteur. He was classic OSS. As a twenty-one-year-old Harvard graduate he had become an expert sled-dog driver and joined Admiral Byrd’s famous expedition to Antarctica. Predictably, in Donovan’s pipe-smoking old-boys’ club, he was a long-time pal of S. Dillon Ripley, the Harvard zoologist who had been Jane’s intelligence chief in Colombo. Crockett had gotten rich prospecting for gold in the southwest, and he and his anthropologist wife had organized a series of expeditions (with Ripley) to the islands of the South Pacific and western Pacific in the mid-1930s, concentrating on New Guinea. He had spent most of the war building runways in Greenland. He knew little about Java, did not speak the language, and was more than happy to give Jane a free hand in negotiating with the Japanese. He was especially tickled by the fact that the Japanese officers felt that dealing with a woman was beneath their dignity, saying each time he sent her in, “That’ll l’arn ’em.”

  Their first task was to get the four to five hundred American POWs—including army, navy, and air force personnel, along with some two hundred civilians—out of Java. Most of them were from the 2nd Battalion, 131st Field Artillery, the so-called Lost Battalion, or were survivors of sunken cruisers from battles in the Java and Coral Seas. Twice a week, a U.S. Air Force plane would make the trip to Singapore, each time carrying as many people as it could hold. American POWs had priority, followed by American civilians. The British took care of flying their own people out in their own planes. Jane’s unit had no authority to fly out non-U.S. personnel, which unhappily left the Dutch internees stranded until their government sent planes. While the Japanese, who still controlled the airport, did not interfere actively in the evacuation efforts, small, unexplained problems cropped up with suspicious regularity. “The pilots had an unusual amount of trouble, with the engines sputtering and misfiring all the time,” she recalled. Later, the Americans found out that the Japanese had “the nasty habit of putting sugar in the gas tanks.”