A Covert Affair (28 page)

When the Japanese army captured Hankow in 1938, Chiang Kai-shek had moved the seat of his government to this city in the remote western province of Szechuan, and it had effectively become China's
wartime capital. It was teeming with soldiers, diplomats, and members of the international press. Paul had done in Chungking exactly what he had done in Kandy—scrounged for men and materials, bossed coolies, and somehow built a war room—before being pulled away and asked to construct three more war rooms in the same theater. Leave it to the army to punish a man for doing the impossible. Still, Wedemeyer had apologized for pushing so hard, assured him he had “a terrific reputation” among all the generals—American and Chinese—and recommended him for promotion.
“Balm in Gilead, by God,”
Paul wrote his brother. “I stand modestly to one side, swollen head slightly averted, awaiting a wreath of laurel.”

After four months in China, it was still the stench of the country that Paul minded most, a mixture of mud and sweat and shit that permeated the air. (Human feces were used to fertilize everything from crops to neighborhood vegetable patches.) The Chinese looked like dolls in their heavily padded coats and straw sandals, only their bright red apple cheeks visible beneath snug caps bearing the blue-and-white Kuomintang star over the visor. The living and working conditions were beyond terrible, made worse by the scores of rats that infested the city. They ate his paints and modeling clay, and regularly chewed through the telephone lines at night. Because of the time pressure, Paul had spent most of his time jumping back and forth between job sites, his army jeep plowing through bomb-battered roads of liquid mud and spraying the oozing slush on the local populace, who crowded the streets with their rickshaws, black pigs on ropes, varnished parasols, and steaming baskets of noodles. With the approach of spring, the top layer of muck had begun to dry and turn to dust, and they were all covered from head to toe in the brown filth, the grit clogging their nostrils and coating their faces and the roofs of their mouths.
“It's dirty beyond belief, utterly inconvenient, full of disease, misery, corruption, and mystery,”
he wrote Charles, “but I love it.”

The workload was as unrelenting as the rain. One of Paul's assistants cracked under the strain and took to
“bawling like a baby”
at the first cross word. He was too young and too green for the job. Washington had to be scraping the bottom of the barrel to be sending kids
like that into the field. Despite being desperately shorthanded, Paul had been forced to send him back to the States. At times, he was so tired that he himself entertained childish fantasies of faking a breakdown or illness—
“of becoming magnificently and continuously sick”
—in order to get shipped back with a Section 8. Though back to what, he did not know. He had “no home, no dame, and no dough to speak of.” Where would he go? What would he do? It was silly in more ways than one. The average rotation overseas was eighteen months, which meant his time would have been up soon enough except that Wedemeyer had decided he was indispensable. There was nothing to do but slog on and get the job done. One of the few ways to relieve the pressure was to indulge in the local firewater, a home-brewed gin made by a White Russian named Morisov. The stuff was sold in two-and-a-half-gallon crocks, and it was “not too bad.” At any rate, it warmed the blood.

Chungking offered precious few diversions, but it had one chief attraction in the form of Rosie Frame. She was OSS, a “mishkid” (child of China missionaries), and had traveled over on the
Mariposa
with the rest of the gang. Frame had been involved in various black propaganda work in New Delhi along with another young OSS recruit named Joy Homer, the granddaughter of the famous painter Winslow Homer and a roommate of Betty MacDonald. In the winter of 1944, one of their operations—aimed at identifying an enemy agent in the Chinese diplomatic community—had taken a violent turn. When the suspected agent was identified as a beautiful nineteen-year-old Chinese woman who was betrothed to an American army major, Rosie and Joy were assigned the job of infiltrating the Chinese Embassy. As they were both fluent in Mandarin, they were asked to attend the girl's engagement party and eavesdrop on the guests to see if the bride was close to anyone on the Chinese delegation staff. Almost immediately after the party, the bride-to-be “disappeared,” and OSS relations with the Chinese community in New Delhi became strained.

Fearing for their safety, both Rosie and Joy asked to be issued handguns but were refused, even though their MO chief, Oliver Caldwell, endorsed their request and was armed himself. Then, one night on her way home, Joy was run down by a car on a narrow New Delhi street.
When she regained consciousness, she was able to state positively that the driver was Asian, which convinced Caldwell that she had been deliberately targeted by the Chinese Embassy. So-called taxi accidents had been arranged before to discourage foreign interference. In the end, the OSS succeeded in exposing two embassy officials who had been transmitting secrets to the Japanese, but the investigation had to be abandoned to avoid embarrassing an ally. Joy's injuries proved so serious she had to be sent home for further medical care.
*
Rosie was transferred to Chungking, where she discovered that General Tai Li's secret police had her marked down as a
“dangerous thinker.”
Rosie handled the arrangements for all the meetings between the Chinese government and the American ambassador Patrick J. Hurley, an unpopular figure she and her OSS colleagues dubbed “the albatross.”

Paul was immediately taken with the bold, spirited Rosie Frame. She was a most alluring spy, with her pert nose, dark glossy hair, and inviting smile. He felt her to be a natural sensualist,
“with an eager mind and an eager body.”
This was a woman to be both admired and desired. He threw himself into a “passionate friendship” with Rosie, writing his brother that she had “real brains,” and “many elements” he would want in a wife. He filled pages and pages with rhapsodic descriptions of her “Juno esque figure” and “wonderful and complex personality.” At twenty-seven, she was too young for him and not as completely formed as he might wish an intimate companion to be, yet she was a woman of “real taste and interesting ideas, untrammeled by tradition.” He pursued her doggedly, knowing it would probably not lead anywhere, as she was seeing an OSS captain named Thibaut de Saint Phalle, the scion of an aristocratic French family that was now penniless. However, she glimpsed him only occasionally between highly secret missions behind Japanese lines, and Paul took advantage of his rival's absence to press his suit. When she finally spurned his advances, Paul was disappointed but not destroyed. Julia, who had just arrived in Chungking, was as always
“a great solace.”
“Paul Child was a rather curious man,”
recalled Thibaut de Saint Phalle. “He could be very difficult and dour. And sometimes he was not very nice to Julia, but she was always very nice to him.”

In early April, Paul was sent to Kunming, the old capital of Yunnan province in southwestern China, where it seemed he was to spend the rest of the war in
“the underside of the world.”
In a country rich in cultural delights, Kunming was by all reports as barren and depressing a place as could be imagined, little more than a dreary American supply depot. The U.S. Fourteenth Air Force under Lieutenant General Claire L. Chennault was based there for operations, and planes came and went from the busy “Roger Queen” airport (Kunming's code designation) day and night, ferrying American equipment to the Generalissimo's army in training, as well as to OSS teams at guerilla outposts and airstrips across the China theater. When he deplaned at the airfield, one of the first things that he saw was a sign that read, “China is no place for the timid.”

Given the lousy advance billing, Paul was completely unprepared for the beauty of the medieval fortress city and, visible in the distance, the blue-rimmed mountains, which were
“incandescant and dreamlike.”
Like frontier towns in the Old West, Kunming was a crossroads, the end of the Burma Road and the beginning of the unknown, and there was a wild quality to the place and the people that Paul found exciting. He loved “the look of China,” the bustling confusion of local characters and color that passed through the stone gates: “the Mongolian ponies, with loads of dust-laden vegetables, that plod along with their eyes shut”; the tall, shaggy Tibetans and brightly costumed tribal outlanders, “their babies' heads done up in silk scarves like melons in exotic bags.” He and his staff were warned to take care when wandering beyond the city's heavily guarded gates into the countryside and vast fetid fields of millet and rice. OSS personnel had been attacked repeatedly by Chinese government troops posing as bandits and stripped of everything they had on them, from money and documents down to their shoes and wristwatches. The winding alleyways of Kunming's “Thieves' Row” were full of stolen American gear for resale alongside the usual tawdry black-market goods.

The OSS compound consisted of a fenced-in area with a half-dozen
two-story buildings scattered on a dirt parade ground. A number of people from Paul's old mob at Kandy had preceded him there, including Dick Heppner, who looked
“slightly disintegrated”
from overwork and fatigue, along with Betty MacDonald, Peachy, and Ellie. Julia was on loan from Chungking to help set up the new Registry, containing reports of the OSS's current and planned guerilla operations. The place was as primitive as any cavalry outpost and certainly as poorly equipped. They lacked almost everything they needed to function, including such basic necessities as tables and chairs. He held his first morning conference sitting on the floor. Six coolies in blue uniforms persisted in hollering at each other through a hole in the ceiling as they attempted to hook up the electric wiring. Because of the Chinese carpenters' passion for Ningbo varnish, all the rooms were submerged in a damp Victorian gloom that was singularly depressing.
“The atmosphere is rather like a party which has gone sour,”
noted Paul in his daily letter-cum-diary. “The guests are sitting bored stiff, far apart, sticking it out until it becomes possible to leave and go home.”

The mood was not helped by the realization that the war, only a few mountain passes away, might descend upon them long before the bureaucratic gridlock eased sufficiently for anyone to issue the order to retreat. Recent Japanese troop movements indicated a possible drive toward Kunming and other points along Chiang's southern flank, but Heppner, lacking anything resembling a clear policy, had his hands full trying to figure out exactly what the OSS should—let alone could—do about any of it.

The China theater was a tangle of internecine international political struggles and divergent war objectives. Wedemeyer's primary mission was to assist the Generalissimo's ragtag peasant army in fending off the advancing Japanese. But as the war progressed and the Pacific became the primary theater, China was becoming increasingly important as both an intelligence base and a launching ground for covert operations in Indochina. Chiang wanted more support to combat a feared Japanese offensive; the retreating French in Tonkin were clamoring to be rescued; and Mao Tse-tung's Communists in the north were demanding a coalition government and greater cooperation in fighting a common enemy. Was the OSS supposed to help the French escape into
China? Was it supposed to assist the Communist guerillas, as many of them had done in the European theater? And what to do about the many rumors of the widespread corruption of Chiang's Kuomintang government and persistent whispers that Chiang had entered into negotiations with the Japanese to restrain his military forces in exchange for permission to hold Chungking and concentrate his strength in southwest China for postwar purposes?

Julia's Registry “bulged with reports about the incompetence of the Chinese military command.” OSS demolition teams reported finding large ammunition dumps that held tons of arms and supplies, all being secretly hoarded by the bungling Chinese troops even as Japanese troops camped less than twenty miles away. The OSS teams were forced to destroy large stores of the valuable equipment only hours before the advancing Japanese could stumble on the treasure trove and use the equipment against the Americans.

Mr. Ma, a refugee from the Shanghai literary set who had been recruited by MO, lectured them about the deteriorating military situation. He explained that the Chinese government troops were losing control over the country and that various minority factions, backed by warlords, were threatening insurrection. Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek's popularity was fading. People were losing faith in the Kuomin-tang because of the increasing government monopoly of all business and the extreme corruption and inflation. According to Ma, their resident philosopher,
“appeals from the Kuomintang were sometimes like ‘whispers in the willow trees.'”

From time to time, OSS teams would report armed clashes in the area as local factions jockeyed for position.
“The warlords were always shooting at each other,”
recalled Betty. “But we never really felt scared. We had pretty good protection, and the Flying Tigers [Chennault's fighter planes] kept the Japanese at bay.”

As Betty soon observed in her MO work,
“the Chinese never followed the rules.”
Smuggling was a way of life. They brazenly peddled state secrets and were equally overt about trading everything from information to arms with the Japanese. Everything was for sale. Itinerant merchants, passing from Japanese to Chinese territory, paid a fixed tariff to both sides. This underground economy “knitted all factions together
in common trade and exchange of necessary commodities,” Betty noted, “and only the Americans seemed to disturb this odd status quo when they became too inquisitive observers, too energetic saboteurs.”