The Irregulars (27 page)

Fleming and Bryce were opposites in almost every way: Ian, intense and industrious, was regarded by his colleagues as something of a workaholic, while Ivar was supremely indolent and saved from complete inertia only by his instinctive, lightning-quick grasp of facts and events, which lent him an air of command in any situation. His linguistic dexterity, the result of an ill-spent youth cavorting around Paris, São Paulo, Kitzbühel, and Capri, covered the languages of the principal European powers and made him exceptionally well equipped for espionage work. He was well connected in New York and Washington and was recently married to Sheila Byrne, who brought to the union a hefty trust fund and Walter Lippmann as a brother-in-law. Bryce, who moved in fashionable circles on both sides of the Atlantic and seemed to know every girl with a private fortune, was without doubt one of the BSC’s most aristocratic and elegant operatives.

While they generally observed the traditional taboo of not talking shop, Bryce had a hilarious store of tales from the early days of his apprenticeship in the intelligence service, which he later described as “misfires in the cloak-and-dagger machinery.” Early in his tenure at the BSC, he had received orders from London to “make contact” with an agent who was due to arrive in New York the following day. His instructions were to be at the bar at Delmonico’s at noon, and he was told he would be able to spot his man because the fellow would be carrying a folded copy of the
Daily Express
in his left hand. “In traditional spy-story style, I was to accost him with, ‘I always think November is the best month in New York.’” Bryce recalled. “To which he would reply, ‘The only time I came here before was March.’” After they had gotten these pleasantries out of the way, all Bryce had to do was escort him to the BSC’s headquarters, and mission accomplished.

Needless to say, nothing went according to plan. Bryce made his way to the rendezvous spot, only to discover to his horror that his cousin, Bunny Phillips, a member of the Coldstream Guards, whom he had not seen since his escape from Dunkirk, happened to be at the bar. Terrified that his cousin would recognize him and that he would, in expressing his delight and surprise at seeing him again, completely blow his cover, Bryce made an elaborate effort to avoid eye contact. He sidled awkwardly up to the counter as his cousin moved to the far end. At six foot five, Colonel A. M. Phillips was hard to miss, but Bryce studiously looked past him. It was several minutes before he noticed the newspaper in Phillips’ hand, and “the penny dropped.” Not knowing what else to do, Bryce went up to him and, wearing a sheepish grin, said, “Hullo, Bunny. New York is wonderful in November, isn’t it?” Mortified, Phillips said, “March, you fool,” and they made a hasty exit.

It turned out Phillips had been temporarily posted to Stephenson’s staff in New York. A few months later Bryce moved to Washington, where he was attached to the British Embassy and the Combined Chiefs of Staff. By a stroke of luck, “the Rabbit” was assigned to Donovan, and he and Bryce took a lease on a Georgetown house at Volta Place that belonged to a distinguished American general who was doing a tour in Europe. As Bryce soon discovered, his baptism by fire into special operations was not over. Soon another set of orders arrived, under top-secret seal, together with a small pill box and a thin cardboard packet. As Bryce recalled, the decoded instructions read: “To be opened by G140 or G142, when alone in secure quarters together.” Filled with curiosity, the cousins hurried back to Volta Place and emptied the contents of the two packages onto the kitchen table. They contained one ampoule full of a yellow viscous liquid, one hospital syringe, and a set of directions for their use:

You are to run a test between you to familiarize yourselves on the effectiveness of the accompanying drug: a drug newly developed by London Science Section which, when properly administered, is capable of causing the subject to answer questions addressed to him, truthfully, immediately, and with complete frankness.

 

There followed some complicated instructions about how to administer the drug (to be injected in a fatty substance, such as butter or bacon, just prior to being consumed by the unwitting subject); how to gauge the correct dosage according to the size, age, and health of the subject (a half gram was recommended); and a list of expected side effects. Under normal circumstances, five minutes after ingesting the drug, the subject should begin to exhibit increased animation, excitability, laughter, and uncontrollable hilarity accompanied by tears, followed ten minutes later by a relaxed, sometimes even affectionate, state. This final phase, known as “co-operative humour,” was the prime period during which the subject should be interrogated. As the duration of this state was uncertain, and varied from subject to subject, time was short and no questions should be wasted.

Phillips was enthralled with the potential of the top-secret drug. He theorized that just as some German general was snuggling up to his mistress at the Ritz, she would feed him the stuff and then extract the organization plan for the whole German garrison in Paris. “What we could do with that!” he mused aloud. “Just think.” They tossed a coin to see who would be the victim, and Bunny lost. Bryce filled the syringe with a demigram of the truth serum and injected one of the bacon and egg sandwiches the housekeeper had left for their supper. Preparing to play the interrogator, he gathered up a notebook and pencil. He watched his cousin swallow the doctored food, and then studied him closely for the first sign of the giggles. After a few minutes, Bunny was shaking with laughter and soon seemed on the verge of revealing the deepest secrets of his love life—he was in the midst of a prolonged affair with Lord Mountbatten’s wife, Edwina—when he suddenly turned white as a sheet and collapsed. Bryce was sure he had poisoned him with an overdose. As he watched, his cousin’s face became “lettuce green,” and he did not appear to be breathing.

Terrified, he frantically felt for a pulse and tried to work out what to do: “Running to the telephone to make an emergency call was out. Security. Even unearthing the most reliable and security-checked medical man in Washington was out of the question. The drug was top secret and could under no circumstances be observed or described by anyone but us.” The night passed, “filled with horror.” Finally, around dawn, his cousin regained consciousness. He woke up with a splitting headache but otherwise seemed to suffer no adverse effects. Dutifully following their orders, they told no one but Stephenson about their ill-fated experiment. Stephenson informed them that the wartime drug was a prototype of the “wonder anaesthetic pentathol” and was being developed as a useful tool in extracting secrets from the enemy. Not long thereafter Phillips left to do intelligence work in the Far East.

While none of Bryce’s exploits with his cousin compared to the “map affair,” these wild adventures were by no means unusual. No idea was too crazy or too far-fetched to be considered useful by the BSC in its dirty tricks campaign against Britain’s Nazi and fascist foes. The fact that a great many of their provocative efforts amounted to nothing, and that some even went terribly awry, was no deterrent. Some of the tactics seemed lifted straight out of a fraternity house handbook on freshman hazing. Bryce, who helped to set up the Camp X training facility, would have been familiar with BSC’s preferred methods of harassment, as outlined in this how-to memo suggesting that it should be possible to invent “at least 500 ways of persecuting a victim” without the persecutor compromising his identity:

[The individual] can be telephoned at all hours of the day and night and when awakened can be apologetically assured that it is the wrong number; the air can mysteriously disappear out of his motor car tyres; shops can be telephoned on his behalf and asked to deliver large quantities of useless and cumbersome goods—payment on delivery; masses of useless correspondence can reach him without stamps so that he is constantly having to pay out petty sums of money; his lady friend can receive anonymous letters stating that he is suffering from mysterious diseases or that he is keeping a woman and six children in Detroit; he can be cabled apparently genuine instructions to make long, expensive journeys; a rat might die in his water tank; street musicians might play “God save the King” outside his house all night; his favorite dog might get lost.

 

If the U.S. State Department and FBI had winked at the BSC’s undercover activities during its first year, by 1943 they had become a major point of tension. Berle wanted Stephenson’s organization, which was an amalgamation of at least nine different branches of the British secret services, curtailed. The previous winter he had pushed for the McKellar Bill, which would outlaw the BSC’s counterespionage and propaganda activities in the United States and require the registration of all its foreign agents, effectively placing them under the supervision of the Justice Department. The bill was aimed directly at Stephenson and kicked off what Berle described as “no end of a row, though it was all covert.” Berle provided a summary of the ensuing disturbance in his diary:

Briefly, the British Intelligence who maintain a lively if not too creditable spy system (masked under the name Security Coordination Police) don’t want any such act because they don’t want their spy system interrupted. They intervened with the Embassy but the Embassy said they could do nothing about it. Thereupon they intervened with Bill Donovan, who promptly put in a memorandum to the President asking him to veto the bill which was on his desk. I am impressed by Donovan’s courage though I don’t think much of it in terms of national wisdom. Why should anybody have a spy system in the United States? And what will anyone look like a little later when someone finds out about it?

 

Much to Berle’s dismay, FDR chose to modify the bill, adjusting it to allow agents of foreign powers allied to the United States to operate within its borders. In the weeks that followed, however, Berle’s antagonism toward the BSC chief deepened to a grudge after he received a tip from the FBI that their people had discovered that a British intelligence agent, Denis Paine, was out to “get the dirt” on him. If the information was then leaked to the press, it could be used to force Berle’s removal from the State Department. According to the FBI, they had accumulated sufficient proof of Paine’s sleuthing to call in Stephenson, who, as Berle recounted in his diary, professed “surprise and horror that any of his men should do such a thing.” The FBI told the BSC chief that they wanted his spy out of the country by six o’clock “or else,” and after some mild protestations Stephenson put Paine on a plane for Montreal. As Berle noted in his diary, the only dubious information the British had succeeded in digging up was an old newspaper clipping reporting that he had “twin bath tubs” in his house, which had long since earned him the absurd nickname Two Bathtubs Berle.

Incensed by the BSC’s blatant meddling in domestic affairs, Berle was determined to see Stephenson taken to task. His outrage may have stemmed in part from his simmering antagonism toward the British, which some colleagues traced back to the grudge he bore Britain for its harsh treatment of Germany at the end of World War I. A Harvard prodigy, he had attended the Paris Peace Conference as a delegate at the age of twenty-four but resigned over the terms of the treaty. Berle’s family was of German origin, and he had been tormented during his student years for having the same christian name as Hitler, and for his refusal to sign manifestos denouncing the Hun. The experience had left lasting scars. He remained bitter and convinced that the British saw him as “the easiest mark.” Berle believed that the legacy of British intelligence in the United States, from Wiseman through Stephenson, was one of “half truths and broken faith.” This latest incident involving the BSC’s trickery only illustrated “the precise danger which is run from having these foreigners operate”:

I plan to call the British Embassy and tell them that I am sufficiently experienced not to be influenced by this sort of thing, but that I think they should take it up with Lord Halifax and arrange to have this kind of thing stopped.

 

As promised, Berle raised a fuss about the BSC’s attempts to discredit him and complained that Stephenson and his subversive agents were giving British intelligence a bad name. Having caught Stephenson in a rare blunder, Berle was determined to make the most of it. He demanded that the British ambassador informally provide “his personal word” that the BSC would never undertake such an action again. He subsequently met with Halifax; Sir Ronald Campbell, the embassy counsel; Hoover; and Attorney General Francis Biddle to review the regrettable situation. Afterward he noted with satisfaction that Hoover had indicated that “the President and the Cabinet were unhappy about Stephenson’s activities and presence in their country.” Their conclusion was that British intelligence in the United States should be confined to liaison and that they probably “needed a different type of man to head it.”

When the press got wind of the dispute, the controversy escalated dangerously. As the undercover debate threatened to boil over, the BSC chief dropped out of sight for a while and avoided his Rockefeller Plaza office. The embassy and State Department spent the next few weeks dickering over the future of British propaganda and intelligence organizations in the United States. Ultimately Halifax—reportedly on orders from “C” and possibly even Churchill—backed Stephenson up. The British took the line that everything Stephenson had done had been duly submitted to Hoover and that he had at all times operated “with the direct authority and cooperation of the American officials.” To mollify the indignant Berle, Halifax agreed that Stephenson’s position should be “liaison, pure and simple.” He also agreed that none of the 137 British intelligence agents (or so he claimed) in the United States would carry out any operations without passing them by Hoover first. In the meantime, Donovan had continued to defend the BIS and BSC, and Roosevelt was ultimately persuaded not to sign the bill. A watered-down version, one that the British could live with, was reintroduced as the Foreign Agents Registration Bill and several months later was signed into law. After the dust settled, Stephenson resurfaced, and took up exactly where he left off, with the slight inconvenience that his agents would now be working for (however nominally) the OSS. The overall effect of Berle’s new measures was to drive Stephenson even further underground.