The Torch Betrayal

by Glenn Dyer

  Thorn stood behind Lee and noticed that the man’s ears protruded to the point where they looked like they were trying to fly off the sides of his head. “And that would be about?”

  “To put you back to work, I imagine.”

  “Ahh. No rest for the—”

  “Wicked,” Emily said, a glint in her eyes.

  “I was going to say weary. But wicked works,” Thorn said as the elevator doors parted.

  Entering Bill Donovan’s office, Thorn saw that neither of the two men present was speaking. Donovan sat behind his desk holding a saucer and sipping from a steaming cup. Another man, dressed in a blue pinstripe suit, had his back to the group, looking out the window behind Donovan’s desk.

  “Emily, Conor. Good to have you back,” Donovan said as he rose and came around his desk to shake hands. “Please sit. Can we get you anything?”

  “No, sir,” Thorn said as he reached into his pocket and pulled out a roll of film and passed it to Donovan. “Colonel, we took some shots of us burning the diary page. Just thought someone would want proof that it was destroyed.”

  “That wasn’t necessary, but thanks,” Donovan said.

  Pinstripe turned around and moved toward Donovan’s desk. It was C. His face was less ashen than when Thorn had first met him.

  “Conor, you remember Stewart Menzies, head of MI6,” Donovan said.

  “Yes, sir. I do,” Thorn said. “Hello, sir.”

  Menzies wordlessly recognized Thorn with a nod and a soft grunt as he placed his cup and saucer on Donovan’s desk. He approached Emily and shook hands, lingering and sharing a warm smile. “Emily, you have my undying gratitude.”

  Menzies was dressed as if he were going to a coronation. Thorn watched him stroke his impeccably trimmed mustache as he returned to his position beside the desk.

  “Would you prefer to sit, Stewart?”

  “No, Bill, I will stand, if you don’t mind. Too much time behind my own desk. My legs are rather creaky today.”

  “Fine. I echo Stewart’s appreciation for your efforts. As does General Eisenhower.”

  “And the prime minister,” Menzies said, with a couple of sharp nods for emphasis.

  “Your success fills many key people associated with Operation Torch with the confidence they need to strike a decisive blow against the Germans and the Vichy French,” Donovan said.

  “Thank you, both. But can I bring up something that has been bothering me? Emily begged me not to, but I have to,” Thorn said.

  Emily glared him.

  “What about?” Menzies asked.

  “Why we left the head of the Abwehr on that bridge when we could have either taken him with us or put a bullet in him, like we did to his friends.”

  Menzies, his mouth pinched, folded his arms across his chest.

  “It makes no sense to me.”

  “It doesn’t have to, Mr. Thorn. It only has to make sense to me, who gave the order. And . . . it does.”

  “So, let me get this straight—he’s either the most incompetent head of an intelligence service, or he is an asset that—”

  “I refuse to discuss this matter any further, Colonel,” shouted a red-faced Menzies.

  Emily took a deep breath as she gripped the armrest of her chair, her knuckles turning white.

  “Very well, Stewart,” Donovan said.

  That’s it? No more discussion? Just because this guy throws a tantrum, we can’t discuss why we left the head of the Abwehr alive?

  “But,” Donovan continued seemingly unfazed by Menzies’s childlike stubbornness, “I do want to discuss something in your report, Conor—the statement from Longworth about not being the only one working against the Churchill government? Did he say anything that is not in your report?”

  “No, sir. I didn’t let him,” Thorn said. “Things needed to move along, given where we were.”

  “I understand,” Donovan said.

  “But I have been thinking about what Longworth said, and I have some . . . concerns,” Thorn said. I don’t work for C, so I don’t have anything to lose.

  “As in?”

  “Lisbon was a mess when we got there, and we almost didn’t make it out. Why the hell Soviet agents were there to stop us and how they knew about us being there is something I can’t figure out. We weren’t only dealing with Longworth. Something, someone, else was trying to trip us up.”

  “Just what are you implying, Thorn?” Menzies asked.

  Emily held up a hand. “Conor, not now.”

  “No, Emily, I think now is a good time,” Menzies said as he clasped his hands behind his back and rocked back and forth on his heels.

  Thorn leaned forward. Here goes. “I’ll just say it. I think someone inside MI6 was working against us. I think someone from Section Five—Philby’s section.”

  “Wait a damn minute here.” Menzies sprang forward and stopped at the edge of the desk. “With all due respect to Colonel Donovan and his organization, you, sir, an agent for all of six months in an organization less than a year old, has no right, no right at all, to accuse one of my top operatives of working against the Allies. Have you considered the possibility that someone inside the OSS might be to blame? Have you considered that?”

  “Stewart, Thorn was there. He was on the ground,” Donovan protested.

  “I don’t care. Emily, do you share in this . . . mad theory?”

  “I . . . I can’t help but think that something, some information, made it into the wrong hands. Those Soviet agents in Lisbon could be working both sides. We’ve all seen that happen. I just know that it’s…unsettling.”

  “Emily, you disappoint me. You are both far off base. And, Thorn, you should be . . . cautious before you make outlandish claims against MI6.”

  “So are we done here?” Donovan asked as he rose from his desk chair, seemingly anxious to short-circuit the tension.

  “There is one more item, Colonel, if I may?” Menzies said.

  “Certainly, Stewart.”

  “In order to quell any probing from Fleet Street newspapers that might sow uncertainties about the Churchill government and to explain Longworth’s absence, there will be a funeral service in two days for Longworth, who, it will soon become known, suffered a devastating heart attack on a trip up north. It will be held at Westminster Cathedral and presided over by Cardinal Massy and Father Sullivan. Colonel, your presence is requested. But I do not think it wise for either of you to be there,” he said, looking at Thorn and Emily.

  “You’re kidding. You have no body,” Thorn said as he looked at Donovan and Menzies.

  “First, Mr. Thorn, MI6 does not kid. Second, do not concern yourself. We have already found a body.”

  #

  Outside Donovan’s office, Thorn and Emily put on their coats and stood silently looking at each other. Thorn shoved his hands in his pockets and shrugged.

  “That was the strangest meeting I’ve ever been in. What about you?” he asked.

  “If I said that I’d been in stranger, you wouldn’t believe me. If I said I didn’t see it as strange, you wouldn’t believe that either,” Emily said as she took his arm.

  “Ever the diplomat,” Thorn replied as he looked intently at a broadly smiling Emily. “You know, the fate of Canaris aside, we did a pretty good thing in Rome.”

  Emily smiled and squeezed his arm tightly.

  He spied a calendar on the wall behind Lee’s empty desk. “In four days, task forces set sail.”

  “And, it’s my hope, in as much secrecy as they’ll need to be successful.”

  “Well, that sounds like something to raise a glass to,” Thorn said.

  Emily suddenly grabbed his arm with both hands. “There is one matter that I haven’t brought up about our time on the bridge.”

  “What’s that?” Thorn asked. He felt the warmth of her hands through his shirt.

  “Your quick actions saved the life of that mother and baby. She and her child are alive because of you. You realize that, don’t you?�
� Emily asked.

  “Yeah, I’ve been thinking about that. A lot.” He drifted for a moment in his own thoughts, an image of Grace appearing, this time as his beaming, pregnant wife—the happiest she had ever been. It was her happiness that stoked the fires of his own happiness, but those fires had long since been doused by loss. Would that be the last time he would allow himself to be happy? Maybe he needed to lay the groundwork for it to happen again.

  Maybe it was time to let her go.

  “Let’s head over to the Savoy,” he said. “Maggie and Dad are waiting for us. A ‘welcome-home bash’ I believe Maggie called it.”

  “A wonderful idea. We’ll toast to a young Italian mother and her baby, alive and well.”

  “Yes. A wonderful idea.”

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Being a work of fiction, much was imagined in The Torch Betrayal, but much in the way of real people, events, and locations were incorporated into the story as well. What follows details some of the more significant factual elements.

  The inspiration for The Torch Betrayal was found in the book My Three Years with Eisenhower: The Personal Diary of Captain Harry C. Butcher, USNR, published in 1946. The entry for Monday, September 7, 1942, cited that, during the microfilming process of documents that were to become General Eisenhower’s personal war diary, one document was lost. It was “the page of the first TORCH directives to Ike to clean up the North African coast.” After exhaustive searches, the missing page was never found. This piece of unsettled history sent my mind racing, which led to The Torch Betrayal—my story about what happened to that missing top-secret document. For purposes of elevating the dramatic tension, I took liberty with the discovery date of the missing document, placing it closer to the dates that were set for the embarkation of the Eastern Task Force on October 22 and the Western Task Force on October 23.

  For the setting of Tangier and the activities of agents in chapter 2, I relied on the enthralling work by Hal Vaughn titled FDR’s 12 Apostles: The Spies Who Paved the Way for the Invasion of North Africa (2006). Over a year before Pearl Harbor was attacked, FDR sent twelve vice consuls to North Africa, specifically, to Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia. One of these vice consuls was a World War I veteran named Colonel William A. Eddy. Their official task was, with the Vichy government’s permission, to supervise the delivery of US goods at ports in North Africa, which gave them the needed freedom to monitor shipping, the French order of battle, and enemy agent activities. The group reported to Robert D. Murphy, who worked closely with “Wild Bill” Donovan. The informant Tassels was a real-life character who was a Moroccan leader that provided valuable information regarding French military activities.

  Dean’s Bar, the setting for chapter 3, was a celebrated nonconformist watering hole opened in 1937 by Joseph Dean, who was compared to Rick, the Humphrey Bogart character in the classic film Casablanca. It was frequented by the likes of Ian Fleming, Errol Flynn, Ava Gardner, Barbara Hutton, Samuel Becket, and many other notable characters.

  The Bureau Central de Renseignements et d’Action (BCRA) was an intelligence organization created by the Free French government-in-exile and was headed by Major Andre Dewavrin. In 1942, the level of distrust of the Free French, particularly Charles de Gaulle, held by the Americans and the British was extremely high. Great efforts were made on the part of the British and the US to keep any information from the Free French, as they believed that it would make its way back to Vichy France and then into the hands of the German Abwehr. In Anthony Cave Brown’s biography of Bill Donovan, The Last Hero: Wild Bill Donovan, he cites an investigation by Donovan in the summer of 1942 that discovered the BCRA had established an “inquisitorial chamber” at their No. 10 Duke Street headquarters in Mayfair, London. In chapter 17, Bright mentions rumors that circulated through the intelligence services in London about torture and even the murder of suspected traitors carried out at No. 10 Duke Street. This information was gleaned from Douglas Porch’s The French Secret Services: A History of French Intelligence from the Dreyfus Affair to the Gulf War. Toward the end of chapter 5 in the Torch Betrayal, Toulouse mentions the British attack on the French fleet at Mers-el-Kebir, French Algeria, which took place on July 3, 1940. The British launched an air and sea attack to keep the fleet from falling into the hands of the Nazis after the French signed an armistice with the Germans following the defeat of the Allies in the battle for France.

  Flight 777 from Lisbon to England’s Whitchurch Airport was a regularly scheduled British Overseas Airline route, staffed by crews from Dutch airline KLM. At the time of the German invasion of the Netherlands in May 1940, there were several KLM airliners that were en route to various destinations. Some of these crews escaped to Britain. Respecting the neutrality of Portugal, during the early stages of the conflict, both Germany and Great Britain left each country’s civilian aircraft unmolested. As the war progressed, Germany changed their policy. When Flight 777 left Portella Airport on its way to Whitchurch it was shot down by eight German Junkers JU-88s on June 1, 1943. British actor Leslie Howard was among the passengers on that flight.

  Hedy Lamarr, the Austrian born actress whose Hollywood career spanned the late 1930s to the 1950s, was proclaimed by the MGM Studio to be the “world’s most beautiful woman.” Lesser known is the fact that she, along with her friend George Antheil, invented a frequency-hopping system that, when employed, would make the jamming of radio-controlled torpedoes impossible. However, the US Navy did not adopt the technology during World War II.

  The air crash that Conor Thorn recounts to Lamarr happened on September 22, 1922. Air shows were a popular form of entertainment in the 1920s and 1930s. This particular air show attracted a crowd of approximately 25,000.

  In chapter 7, Bill Donovan speaks of Conor Thorn’s service aboard the Reuben James. The destroyer USS Reuben James (DD 245) was a four stack, Clemson class ship that was torpedoed and sunk by U-552, commanded by Erich Topp, on October 31, 1941, while on convoy duty in the North Atlantic. Casualties numbered 115, including the ship’s full officer complement.

  In this same chapter, Churchill first mentions the name of Emily Bright. The character of Emily Bright in The Torch Betrayal is inspired by a woman named Joan Bright, who, according to William Stevenson’s book A Man Called Intrepid: The Incredible WWII Narrative of the Hero Whose Spy Network and Secret Diplomacy Changed the Course of History, “typified the adventurous, emotionally stable, selfless youngsters attracted to dangerous work without the reward or encouragement of public acclaim.” Joan Bright, with a high security clearance, toiled deep below Whitehall in “the hole in the ground” where Churchill conducted the day-to-day planning for the fight against the Axis. (A tour of the Churchill War Rooms is a must for any student of World War II.) She worked with the Joint Planning Staff and the Joint Intelligence Committee. In the 1930s, Joan Bright was offered a job teaching English to the family of Rudolf Hess, which she turned down. She also dated Ian Fleming, who, according to her obituary in the Independent (January 28, 2009), she found to be “awfully attractive and fun, but elusive.”

  Also in chapter 7, during the October 4 dinner scene between Eisenhower and Churchill, reference is made by Churchill to a letter sent by Joseph Stalin to AP correspondent Henry Cassidy on October 3. The quote is taken from the letter verbatim.

  We first meet Kim Philby in chapter 8. Philby, NKVD code name “Sonny” (later changed to “Stanley” in 1944), headed MI6’s Section V with the responsibility of counterintelligence on the Iberian Peninsula. The wily Philby managed to navigate the labyrinth of British intelligence as a Soviet spy undetected from the late 1930s to 1963, when he boarded the Soviet freighter Dolmatova in Beirut bound for Odessa, but not before admitting that he was a member of the spy ring known as the Cambridge Five. It’s a bit of an understatement to say that much has been written about the enigmatic Kim Philby and the organization he betrayed—MI6—and the organizations he loyally toiled on behalf of for nearly three decades—NKVD and the KGB. I referred often to Be
n Macintyre’s A Spy Among Friends: Kim Philby and the Great Betrayal and strongly recommend this well-researched book to anyone with a thirst for understanding the double agent Kim Philby.

  Conor Thorn and Bobby Heugle head to MI6 headquarters to meet Emily Bright in the bar deep in the bowels of MI6 headquarters located at 54 Broadway (chapter 11). The revelation of the existence of a bar in the headquarters of a major power’s spy agency was, at first, too difficult to be believed, until I learned, from Macintyre, that the “most secret drinking hole in the world” regularly entertained the spies of MI6. According to Macintyre, “the spies were spectacular boozers. Alcohol helped blunt the stress of clandestine war, serving as both a lubricant and a bond.”

  Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, head of the German intelligence, fought a valiant battle to save Germany from total destruction at the hands of the Allies. He recognized early that Hitler was leading his countrymen down a deep, dark path of annihilation unless Canaris and other similarly committed Germans could find a way to convince the Allies that it was possible to depose Hitler and take steps to sue for peace. Richard Bassett’s Hiller’s Spy Chief: The Wilhelm Canaris Betrayal: The Intelligence Campaign Against Adolf Hitler was an invaluable resource regarding the role that Canaris played as the clock on the Third Reich ticked away. Staying in place at the top of the Abwehr was crucial to allow Canaris more time to pull together the necessary support for an attempt to depose Hitler.

  In chapter 18, we learn of Otto’s demise. Otto, code name for the Soviet’s chief recruiter in Great Britain, was Philby’s first handler. His real name was Arnold Deutsch and his fate is shrouded in mystery. Stalin’s paranoia-driven purges were notorious for the rounding up of anyone with foreign ties who was serving the Soviet cause. According to Ben Macintyre’s A Spy Among Friends, while some Soviet agents defected, many willingly complied with Stalin’s orders to return to Moscow to their bleak fates.

  The composition of Churchill’s war cabinet fluctuated during the war. In Churchill’s The Second World War, Volume IV: The Hinge of Fate, Churchill wrote, “I have solved the problem of representation of the Upper House in the War Cabinet by the device, already introduced, of having several ministers who, though not formally members, were actually in practice ‘Constant Attenders.’” Feeling strongly that I couldn’t make an actual cabinet member a spy or traitor, I created Henry Longworth, a fictional character, but one that represented an actual ministry—the Ministry of Works and Planning (later changed in 1943 to Ministry of Works).