A Covert Affair (20 page)

Wheeler, who liked to go exploring, frequently organized weekend trips with his daughter and Jane. He would forgo his big staff car for a smaller model, still helmed by his driver, Tex, and sporting pennants with three stars. Whenever their sightseeing sorties took them near one of Ceylon's secret airfields—there were a surprising number—he would insist on making a detour so he could inspect the layout and workmanship. He would stride out across the landing strip, survey the length and breadth of it, then get down on his hands and knees and sniff the ground like an old hound dog trying to pick up a scent. After a few good whiffs, he would stand up and pronounce his opinion of the runway. The problem with most of the makeshift airfields in the CBI was that they became unusable during the monsoons, the planes just sank into the mud or slippery red clay. The Americans sometimes used pierced-metal plates to surface a portion of the landing strips, but the plates were heavy and loud and still needed proper drainage. The best all-weather airstrips were made of bithess, a locally made burlap soaked in tar that made it both waterproof and durable, but even those were uncertain in heavy rains. Whenever the tarmac met with his approval, Wheeler would clamber back in the car and tell Tex,
“Get the Commander. I want to congratulate him on the quality of this airfield. A very professional job.”

By March 1945, the entire Ledo Road was open to Allied traffic, which was critical to opening the way for future victories in the last campaigns of the war in Burma. In the weeks that followed, U.S. troops
recaptured Bataan in the Philippines, Corregidor, and finally Manila. Meanwhile Lieutenant General W. J. Slim and the British Fourteenth Army, together with combined SEAC forces, pulled off a series of daring maneuvers, recapturing Meiktila, Ramree, and then Mandalay. The rest of the Burma coast was easily taken all the way down to Rangoon, with the Japanese retreating rapidly to the southeast into Thailand. It had been a race with time all the way to beat the Japanese before the spring monsoons turned the roads back into a sea of mud. In the interior, the OSS Detachment 101, made up of 300 OSS officers and 3,000 Kachin natives—mostly naked and armed with everything from knives to obsolete U.S. Army rifles—engaged the enemy in fierce guerilla warfare. These Kachin Rangers finished the Japanese army, routing a force of 10,000 and killing 1,246 while losing only 37 of their own. In recognition of their outstanding record, the heroic Kachin Rangers were awarded the U.S. Army Distinguished Unit badge. Alex MacDonald, who had been serving with Detachment 101, shared in the presidential citation.

Mountbatten, Wheeler by his side, came up from Kandy to lead the elaborate celebration to mark Burma's official Liberation Day. The Burmese public gave the magnificent military procession, complete with seventeen-gun salute, a polite if restrained reception, understandably unsure what designs their “liberators” might still have on their country. Unfortunately, the march past included a goose-stepping contingent of the Burma National Army—created by the Japanese to fight the old colonial rulers—led by the Burmese nationalist hero Aung San, still sporting the uniform of a Japanese general, which sent a decidedly mixed message about Burma's political future. On a dais erected in the shadow of the huge gold-leafed Shwedagon Pagoda, a Buddhist temple whose glistening spires dominated the skyline of Rangoon, Mountbatten delivered a formal address that was read out simultaneously throughout the whole of the SEAC command, lauding all the troops who had fought in Southeast Asia. Halfway through his speech, the monsoon struck. The loudspeakers just managed to carry his voice above the rain, but the Royal Air Force flyover was ruined. The planes, barely visible above the clouds, were prevented from passing directly overhead for fear of clipping the top of the pagoda.

Jane spent most of the spring of 1945 commuting back and forth between Kandy and Calcutta. Much to her dismay, she had been promoted and reassigned to the MO station in India. The triumphant end of the Burma campaign passed in a blur of work and travel. There was a tremendous sense of exhilaration among the uniformed boys in Kandy—victory was in sight, in the Pacific as well as in Europe. Germany was finally faltering, caught between the advancing Russians on one side and General Eisenhower's armies on the other.

The dramatic pace of events made it hard to stay focused. Jane was bored by her administrative chores, and she found Calcutta wretched beyond belief,
“a sad, ugly city.”
It deserved its reputation as the
“cesspool of the world”
and was hotter than any place she had ever known and rank with contagion. “The Americans were strictly forbidden to eat in any Indian restaurant and the MPs enforced this regulation,” she recalled. “Nor was this prohibition unreasonable, because there were
roughly 3,000 people dying in Calcutta each week from cholera, typhoid, and other diseases.” It did not help that the OSS had leased a house for their headquarters in the Kallighat district, not far from the place by the Ganges where the bodies were cremated. The staff would go to lunch at the Great Eastern Hotel with all the well-dressed Brits, stuff themselves silly, and then on the way back to work would be “confronted with all the dead, swollen bodies in the street.” Despite the unbearable stench and misery of the city, she dreaded the return flight to Ceylon even more. She dated her fear of flying to those terrifying eleven-hour trips across the flat red plains of India.
“Something was always happening to the ‘war wearies,' either an engine or a wing was apt to fall off.”
She lived to tell the tale, but “many others didn't.”

Jane had been on her way to the OSS headquarters in Calcutta when the driver of her command car had turned to her sorrowfully and said,
“I'm sorry that your president is dead.”
She had dismissed him sharply, certain he must be mistaken. It was not until she reached her office on the afternoon of that early spring day that she heard the stunning news: the commander in chief had died of a cerebral hemorrhage at his retreat in Warm Springs, Georgia. “Roosevelt had been president practically since I could remember,” Jane recalled. She could not “imagine another.”

She was also in Calcutta the following month when Germany submitted its unconditional surrender to General Eisenhower. The next day, May 8, 1945, was V-E Day. A group from the office had organized a party for that evening. Giddy with excitement, they carried on noisily late into the night and got rather loaded. Jane and a Russian-born colleague began a tipsy rendition of “The Internationale”—the Communist anthem—belting out successive choruses in the original French, followed by German and English, with her colleague finishing with a rousing solo in his mother tongue. Their performance outraged John Archbold, who turned to them
“purple with rage”
and demanded, “How dare you sing that subversive song?” On sober reflection the next morning, Jane recognized that it had been perhaps less than diplomatic to choose that particular clenched-fist salute to serenade “an heir to the Standard Oil fortune.”

The end of the war was in sight, but much of Asia was still in the
clutches of Japan's large, well-equipped military machine. Malaya, Singapore, Thailand, and Sumatra were all still under Japanese occupation. The elation at OSS headquarters was also tempered by news of the grievous losses incurred in taking Iwo Jima and Okinawa. It was a grim indicator of the hard fighting to come. It was impossible to know how long the Japanese would continue to resist. Prime Minister Kantarō Suzuki had announced that Japan would fight to the very end rather than accept unconditional surrender.

Back in Kandy, Jane resumed her MO work and continued to run the Indonesia desk. She was sorting through a stack of routine intelligence reports handed over by the British, most of which were unimportant (which was why they were handed over in the first place) when she stumbled on a message concerning their Batu agents. At present, OSS had five men operating in the Batu Islands, off the coast of Sumatra, whose job consisted mainly of radioing local weather updates to their bombers based in India. The message, in Malay, was scribbled across the back of a report on rice supplies in Sumatra, which had been lifted from a sunken Japanese patrol boat. After translating it, Jane realized that the author appeared to have knowledge of the capture of three of their native agents. Once she had verified the report—two of the agents had managed to escape and were thought to be in hiding—she immediately brought it to the attention of their colonel.

Jane had expected the OSS to send out a rescue party at once. Instead, Colonel Coughlin took the matter-of-fact line that little could be done at this late date. It was the view shared by the rest of her colleagues, who reasoned that
“the war would be over soon and nobody was anxious to risk his life at such a time.”
Always quick to identify with lost causes, Jane could not leave it there. She felt “a strong sense of responsibility for the fate of two agents being hunted down somewhere in the Batu Islands.” Her feelings, a potent mixture of self-righteous anger and remorse, came to a head when she discovered that the reason their plight had not been discovered earlier was due to the
“negligence and/or stupidity”
of the major in charge of monitoring their radio communications, who had failed to report their coded distress call. “Knowing him,” she wrote furiously, “he was simply drunk at the time.”

Galvanized by her sense of outrage, Jane mounted a second charge on Coughlin. She finally convinced him to take action by arguing that the OSS would never get another native agent to work for them if they made no effort to recover the missing men.
“Rumors were already rife in the Trincomalee camp,”
she added, “that we were abandoning agents to their fate.”

Jane assumed responsibility for organizing the operation, which took a bit of doing. No American ships were available for the mission, but the British were finally persuaded to send a destroyer to transport the American landing party. Jane petitioned to go with them, badgering her boyfriend, their chief of operations, for permission. He wisely passed the buck to Coughlin, who refused to authorize having a woman join the dozen American commandos aboard ship. Apparently there were strict rules about such things. In the end it was decided that Gregory Bateson, the only other Malay speaker, should head the landing party. While Jane did not doubt Bateson's genius (his Irrawaddy scheme had been “on a par” with her condom caper), she was not convinced he was the best man for the job.

The landing party took off, and Jane was left in Kandy to wait and worry—an absurd, unendurable state. After ten of the longest days she could remember, the unit received a radio flash that the ship had come under fire from a Japanese patrol plane. Jane suffered paroxysms of guilt at the idea that she was the one who had sent them all to their deaths. Fortunately, a short time later the destroyer “limped back” to Colombo. Jane was in the officers' club when Bateson loped in, dirty and unshaven but otherwise no worse for wear. Jane threw her arms around him. After planting a big kiss on his bristly cheek, she gushed.
“Oh, Gregory, you don't know how glad I am to see you back.”

“Of course you are glad,” he replied gruffly. “You did not want
me
on your conscience for the rest of your life, did you?”

They never did track down their missing agents. The landing party managed to locate the charred remains of their camp but then lost their trail. When Bateson's photographs were developed, Jane was thoroughly annoyed to discover they were
“mostly devoted to the defecation and nursing habits of the natives.”
It was nice to see that the rescue mission
did not get in the way of his real work. “Gregory, ardent anthropologist that he was, would go ashore at every possible place and take pictures. It was important to him, it seems, to find out which breast the mothers used for nursing and with which hand the natives wiped themselves!”

On the morning of August 6, Jane was in her MO office, where she now shared a desk with Bateson, when a voice announced over the army loudspeakers that “an atomic device” had been dropped on Hiroshima. They were having coffee at the time, and they both just froze, cups in midair, and stared at each other in mute astonishment. There were no whoops of joy, no jubilant slapping of backs or pounding of shoulders. The voice, crackling and distorted, went on to describe the earlier secret trial explosion in Alamogordo, New Mexico. As she listened, trying to absorb the news, Jane tried to picture in her mind
“a vast eyeball-searing yellow desert with huge orange suns blazing and, in a corner, a small steel structure, twisted, crumpled, and torn, and not a living thing around.”
It was a terrifying image—one she knew she would “never put on canvas.” All the while, in the background, she could hear Bateson banging away on his portable typewriter. Finally, unable to stand it another minute, she snapped, “Gregory, what in God's name are you typing?”

“I'm writing about the future of life insurance in the atomic age,”
he replied, and went back to typing.

Two days later, the Soviet Union declared war on Japan and invaded Manchuria. The next day, they heard that a second atom bomb had been dropped on Nagasaki. On August 14, Japan accepted the Allied terms of unconditional surrender. Jane picked V-J Day in the betting pool and won a case of scotch.
“How we celebrated on that case of whiskey,”
she recalled. Later, she lay awake in her bed at the Queen's Hotel listening to the drunken revelry of the British and American troops, the occasional “shrill whistles” of the MPs piercing the night.

On August 20, Colonel Coughlin sent a message summoning Jane to his bungalow at six that evening. That worried her. Usually when the colonel made an appointment to see her it meant she was going to be hauled over the coals.
“I quickly made my
examen de conscience
as I had learned to do at the convent,”
she recalled. “What sin or breach of
discipline had I committed now?” Expecting to be “bawled out,” she felt a flutter of trepidation as she stepped onto his veranda. She relaxed as soon as she heard the reassuring
tink
of ice cubes and spotted the coffee table laden with drinks.