For these and other reasons, OSS was increasingly out of step with the current climate and out of favor. Senior advisors and policy experts were being repudiated or reassigned to obscure posts. “The term Communism, applied in any sly, subversive manner to an individual or group, could become the kiss of death, the way America is thinking today,” Jan told Betty, his tone no longer trifling. “I sometimes think that Moscow wanted to try for a split in our country over and above party lines when the Russian government gave its tacit blessing to the liberals in the Democratic party. Politics, of course, is a fine spawning ground for MO.”
This was too much for her. She could not bear to think of the consequences of power-hungry nations unleashing “such forces of evil as MO” on the world at large. Suddenly, she wanted to go home to Hawaii and “sit under a coconut tree.” Life was simpler there, everyone got along, and “the climate was just enervating enough to preclude fiery ideological clashes.” She left for an early lunch and went to the nearest ticket office to book a flight for Honolulu.
By early 1946, Betty and Jane were roommates again, sharing an apartment in New York and trying to resume life as it had been before the war. They had corresponded over the holidays and agreed that it was impossible to sort out their futures while living under the same roof as their parents. (Even though, in Jane’s case, the roof in question belonged to the elegant Fairmont Hotel.) They were both officially “severed” from the OSS and for the first time in three years free to do exactly as they pleased. It was both intoxicating and a little overwhelming. “It was hard to face up to things,” explained Betty. “During the war, you made absolutely no decisions, they were all made for you. You did as you were told. The OSS was like a big wartime family—we all lived together in a house, ate all our meals together, and traveled together. It was not a normal way of living as an adult…. In the aftermath of the war, it was hard to get organized again and figure out where to live and find a way of living.”
Leave it to Jane, with her myriad contacts and abundance of well-heeled friends, to know the son of William E. Dodd, the former ambassador to Germany, who happened to have a mansion-sized dwelling on Central Park West that he was happy to sublet. This suited Betty, who wanted to write and had lined up a job at Glamour magazine. She had also begun work on a book about her adventures as one of Donovan’s operatives in the Far East.* Since there was no longer any need for secrecy, Donovan had no objection and even offered to read her manuscript at regular intervals and make suggestions. She frequently went to see him at his office at 2 Wall Street, and their relationship evolved from that of boss and employee to one of devoted friends. Donovan knew she was in love with a member of his firm and that she and Dick Heppner planned to marry as soon as they had obtained their divorces.
Betty and Jane shared the apartment with Heppner’s cocker spaniel, who had been relieved of his duties as a member of the K-9 corps guarding the OSS installation in Kunming and shipped home with a formal letter classifying him as “K-9 First Class Sammy.” Having spent his youth in the company of GIs, the pup had developed a taste for gin. Betty, who was besotted with the golden ball of fluff, catered to his every whim. In the evenings, when she and Jane had their dry martinis, she made one for Sammy, too, serving his in a saucer. On the nights she expected to be out late, she always left Jane a note: “Please be back early this evening and fix the martinis. Sam does not like to drink alone.”
For her part, Jane was too preoccupied with trying to decide what she wanted to do with the rest of her life to worry about getting a job. She did not need to work, as she had managed to save quite a lot of her overseas pay. Her old friends had taken her up on her return to the city, and she was so busy reconnecting with people and running around that the months slipped by in a convivial, cocktail-infused blur. “Jane never seemed to have any money problems,” said Betty, recalling that she had plenty of ready cash for fashionable clothes and restaurants and weekend getaways. “She was very social and hosted continual parties,” Betty added. “Those were happy, happy days. Everybody came to visit us. The apartment was huge, and we had rooms to spare. OSS people were flowing in and out.”
Jane still intended to write her book on Indonesia, but unlike Betty could never seem to find the time. Not that it kept her from complaining about the contemptible actions of the Dutch government to anyone who would listen. When she first got back to San Francisco, she was still boiling from her State Department debriefing, and more than a little of her outrage had spilled over into a December 31, 1945, interview she gave to her hometown paper. Under the headline “Trigger-Happy Dutchmen Started Shooting,” Jane had provided what the San Francisco Chronicle called one “San Francisco woman’s version of the uprising in Java.” The paper quoted her at length on the atrocities—“an automobile’s back-firing was enough to set off Dutch guns”—and noted that “Miss Foster believes the Indonesians’ fight for freedom will continue to be bloody until the Republic is recognized.” Even the traditionally liberal Chronicle felt that perhaps Jane’s comments were a bit too contentious and took the precaution of including an opposing view from an official from the Netherlands Information Bureau, who blamed the ongoing violence squarely on “terrorism by extremist Indonesian groups.”
Seizing the chance to stir the pot, People’s World, a West Coast Communist newspaper, ran an exclusive interview with Jane repeating her charges that the Dutch had “forced the war” in Java. “JANE FOSTER of the U.S. Office of Strategic Services made this statement on her return to San Francisco from the East Indies,” the paper trumpeted. “‘Until the Dutch came, law and order was strictly enforced by the Indonesian republic. Then the Dutch ranged the streets, shooting anything that moved. They would throw Indonesians out of their homes and tear down the red-and-white republican flag.’” The paper quoted her as predicting insurrection: “‘Now there will be plenty of fighting. Five million Indonesians are ready and able to fight. Another 45,000,000 will refuse to work at anything that helps Dutch rule. There will be a boycott of the Dutch…. Unless a settlement can be reached some way—through the United Nations perhaps—guerilla warfare will continue to rage.’” To make sure the press understood the seriousness of the story, Jane supplied copies of her report on Indonesia to one and all. Although the OSS had labeled it “Top Secret,” she “did not attach any importance to that fact.” Surely in peacetime those rubber-stamp restrictions no longer applied? Besides, it contained only her “own experiences and observations,” along with information Sukarno and other Indonesian officials would want her to make public.
In a small city where everybody knows everybody, the outspoken statements made by the daughter of one of the Nob Hill swells were big news. After all, Harry Emerson Foster was from one of America’s oldest families (a tenth-generation Mayflower descendent). An eminent conservative, he sat on the board of a number of hospitals and charities. As one of their own and an OSS officer just back from the war zone and POW camps, Jane was in demand. On January 11, 1946, she was persuaded to give a lecture at the Institute of Pacific Relations providing “an eyewitness account of the revolt in Indonesia.” In her talk she argued passionately that the Dutch would never be strong enough to keep seventy million Indonesians under martial law indefinitely and the only viable alternative was that the old colonial power begin negotiations in good faith. A summary of her lecture was printed in People’s World, along with her recommendation that the United Nations probe the situation to prevent more violence. Her remarks were sufficiently persuasive to give impetus to the formation of the San Francisco Committee for a Free Indonesia, as well as picket lines outside the British and Dutch consulates in San Francisco on several occasions.
Jane was scheduled to give a similar talk in February at the First Unitarian Church of Berkeley but had to cancel after the State Department raised holy hell about her remarks concerning the war in Indonesia. The State Department considered the public airing of those events, which Jane had observed while an employee of the U.S. governm
ent, and while on “confidential assignment” in Java, “a gross and embarrassing breach of security regulations.” Not only that, but the Dutch government deemed her remarks at the Institute of Pacific Relations “offensive” and had lodged an informal protest. (Jane’s FBI file reveals that her superiors at the OSS also suspected her of being the possible source of “classified information” contained in the article “Secrets of Siam,” written by Edgar Snow and published in the January 12, 1946, issue of The Saturday Evening Post. The Foreign Office was so outraged by Snow’s article that it arranged for two British officials to write rebuttals. It was felt that the publication of this information was “unfortunate” and might “jeopardize negotiations with the British.” However, an internal investigation “failed to fix the responsibility for the leak” on Jane. While it was true that she and Snow were both in Bangkok at the same time, he had clearly obtained information from “numerous sources.”)
Jane was not displeased to learn of the trouble she had caused. She was no longer a government employee, and no one in the State Department could stop her from speaking out about the injustices she had observed. From then on, she made Indonesia her mission. She took personally America’s refusal to live up to the foreign policy promises of the war years. It hurt her to think she had failed all those people in Indonesia and Vietnam who had trusted her and believed in her and her country. They had listened to the speeches about freedom and democracy that had been broadcast all over the world from the newly formed United Nations Organization in San Francisco. Representatives of fifty countries had convened in her hometown to draw up the UN charter, which had been signed in June in the Garden Room of the very same Fairmont Hotel her parents now called home. It was too ironic for words.
She had made many of those same brave-new-world speeches, repeated the same promises—and for what? She could not believe America meant to deliver the Indonesian and Vietnamese to the race hatred and enslavement of the repellant colonialists and their puppet regimes. In Saigon, she had left behind any illusions she might have had about the possibility of peace or progress without America’s active intervention. She was haunted by the last lines of Ed Snow’s report from Indochina: “This is one of the reasons why some observers out here keep saying that America ended the war with greater prestige than any nation in history—and is losing it more rapidly than any nation in history.”
That summer, her disgust at Washington’s studied noninvolvement in Indonesia prompted her to write a long, irate letter to The New York Times. Taking issue with the paper’s July 1 editorial “Danger in Indonesia,” which blamed the failure of recent negotiations between the Netherlands authorities and Indonesians on the “divided character” of Sukarno’s government, she wrote, “The Netherlands has refused to recognize the independence of Indonesia. It is on this point that negotiations have broken down.” After a painstaking but concise analysis of events leading up to the present crisis, she reiterated that Sukarno’s government had the full support of seventy million Indonesians and concluded tartly, “The real obstacle to peaceful settlement is the intransigence of a few politically powerful Dutchmen.” She then took the Times to task for running such a misinformed article in the first place, closing with this parting shot: “The press of the United States has done a disservice to the cause of democracy by consistently presenting one-sided facts regarding Indonesia.”
August presented Jane with a problem that left her so preoccupied she had to temporarily abandon her book on Indonesia, which still had not progressed beyond the outline stage. “The problem,” as Betty put it delicately, “was trying to decide what to do about George.”
For two years, Jane had managed to keep a tight lid on her private life. Now, suddenly confronted with the past, all her efforts to keep the personal and professional carefully partitioned no longer seemed to matter. She poured out the whole story to Betty in a rambling, un-apologetic monologue—how she had had a lover before the war, a Russian Jew she had met during her radical phase, who had begged her to marry him before his regiment left for Germany. She had not wanted to at first, but he was sure he was going to die fighting for his country. In the end, she had relented, “weak creature” that she was. There was the ridiculous last-minute city hall ceremony, with just the two of them giggling while exchanging vows before a staid Washington justice of the peace. Jane never told anyone about the marriage, not even her parents. She had never changed her single status on the OSS records, noting that she had lied “if only by omission.”
As the war went on, it was hard to believe it had ever really happened. When she fell in love with Manly, she had no guilt feelings. George was somewhere “on the other side of the world” and, if true to form, was probably not “sexually deprived.” At one point, when she had not heard from him for a long time, she began scanning the casualty lists from the German offensive in the Ardennes and wondering if he was dead. Later, she learned he had survived the Battle of the Bulge and that his regiment of army engineers had helped to build the first bridge over the Rhine at Wesel, allowing Allied forces to cross with their tanks and trucks of supplies. When she finally reached San Francisco, she realized that after so much time apart he had grown rather “misty” in her memory. Looking at her elderly parents, she decided it was time to rectify her mistake while they were still none the wiser. She sat down then and there and wrote him a Dear John letter. George was very decent about the whole thing and sent her a release by return mail.
Only now he was in New York, fresh off a troopship, and had rung up and asked to see her. After receiving her letter, he had sent a terse reply explaining that with no one waiting for him at home he had decided to stay on in Europe. He had responded to an army circular looking for Russian-speaking officers to volunteer for liaison duty in Berlin or Vienna but instead had been assigned to the Military Intelligence Service and sent to a training school in Oberammergau in Bavaria. After months of silence, he had dropped her a line stating that he would be coming to the States in the fall. Jane, in another moment of weakness, postponed her trip to Reno.
Betty could still remember the first time she met George Zlatovski. Jane had brought him by the house for a drink, and they were both pretty well lubricated by the time Betty joined them in the library. George was of medium height, wiry, with a narrow face, high cheekbones (Jane described them as “Mongol”), and a thin, aquiline nose. He had a slightly lopsided mouth that in repose made him look somewhat churlish. He wore his clothes well, with a certain Continental élan, and knew how to turn on a courtly Old World charm. Betty could appreciate that he might appeal to the ladies, but it did not take long for her to see that he had an enormous chip on his shoulder. “There was something about him,” she said with an ambivalent shrug. “I had a feeling he wasn’t quite up to her level.”
Jane later told her that her husband had been born Alexander Mikhail L’vovich Zlatkovski but had opted for the more American-sounding name George Michael Zlatovski when his family moved from Russia in 1922, when he was twelve. (His family also dropped the first k in their last name.) The offspring of a doctor to nobility, he and his younger sister had enjoyed a life of privilege in prewar St. Petersburg; they had been raised with servants, dachas, private tutors, and music lessons. When the Russian Revolution began in 1917, his family fled to the Ukraine, returning to their devastated home three years later. His father was no Communist, but because he was deemed a “socially useful element” he was treated fairly well for a while. When he eventually fell afoul of the new Soviet authorities, the family followed the example of their cousins who had earlier settled in Duluth, Minnesota. George clearly held the decision to emigrate against his father, blaming him for a youth blighted by misery, poverty, and prejudice. Adapting to a new country and culture had been difficult. His mother retreated into silence and depression and died of tuberculosis a few years later. George became an angry, disaffected teenager who suffered the humiliation of being called “Trotsky” by classmates and was forced to dress up and play
classical recitals at the local Rotary, Kiwanis, and Lions clubs for pocket money. His mother had wanted him to try for a scholarship to the Juilliard School of Music in New York, but in a desperate attempt to fit in with his midwestern peers he opted to study engineering at the University of Minnesota. He regarded it as the biggest mistake of his life.
Jane made no attempt to gloss over his left-wing politics. George had graduated in the midst of the Depression and with no chance at a job had drifted into various labor organizations, several of which were affiliated with the Communist Party. He quickly became radicalized and spent the next few years as an agitator, street-corner orator, and union organizer, mostly trying to enlist the support of unemployed immigrant steel workers.* In 1937, imbued with revolutionary ardor, he ran off to the Spanish Civil War to be a hero and fight the fascists with the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. He returned to New York one year later, disillusioned and broke. Like Jane, he had been married before, to a dancer he had met in Duluth named Kathleen O’Brien.
Jane met him shortly after she moved to New York in 1941, introduced by mutual friends at an antiwar rally sponsored by the American Peace Mobilization, the liberal answer to America First. Jane was immediately attracted to his dark, brooding looks, and to catch his eye she began attending various antiwar meetings and Communist Party fundraisers. A child of the Depression, she, too, had dabbled in left-wing politics after college but had succeeded mostly in infuriating her father. In 1938, while attempting to eke out a living doing political caricatures for Bay Area publications including People’s World, she had joined the local chapter of the Communist Party. At the time, it had seemed to her like a way to take “a strong, uncompromising stand against the economic crisis, war, Fascism, Nazism, and colonialism.” Her fellow travelers were almost all artists, most of whom were working for the Works Progress Administration (WPA), set up by Roosevelt’s New Deal administration to put unemployed painters and sculptors to work decorating public buildings. Even though some of them were not very good artists, Jane thought it was a grand idea.
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