A Covert Affair (15 page)

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 operations 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.

DuBois was both brilliant and highly competent, qualities not always found in OSS officers. In a sharply worded memo to the camp's young CO, Dick Heppner, she faulted the unit's bureaucratic waywardness and went so far as to suggest that integrating her branch into every phase of operational planning might improve matters:
“At present I feel that each branch operates in relation to any one project as though it were an isolated abstraction. The tendency for responsible people to gallop madly all over the countryside should be controlled administratively.”
Heppner responded by noting sulkily in a progress report to Washington that, despite her many talents, DuBois could be
“tactless”
and “overbearing” and that her manner resulted in “the usual problems with army officers being placed under a woman's command, which causes trouble.”

Far from leading a coordinated effort with the Dutch and the British, the Americans were, Jane liked to joke, completely
“uncoordinated.”
As she explained in a letter to Betty, Ceylon was an Elysium so far removed from the realities of war that while everyone had an academic interest in what was happening, they found life far too pleasant to do anything too drastic about it.
“To those red-blooded Americans who signed up to fight somebody and arrived in Ceylon to find themselves pinioned beneath P Division directives, the SEAC situation was just another form of British tyranny—frustration without representation,”
she wrote. “But to the Americans with a planning-staff mind-set and a penchant for major and minor intrigue, Ceylon was the palm-fringed haven of the bureaucrat, the isle of panel discussions and deferred decisions.” On the more trying days, she would quietly sing a parody of
“Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin'!”
written by two war correspondents, which included countless ribald stanzas: