A Covert Affair (10 page)

There were
“other complications,”
as Jane put it, having to do with the growing professional rivalry between generals. The OSS was allowed to operate in Sumatra but not the rest of Indonesia—although it did so surreptitiously—because the bulk of the archipelago was under the command of MacArthur, who loathed Donovan
“with a monumental hatred.”
The antagonism between the two was so deep that MacArthur had even sworn to court-martial any OSS member caught operating in what he considered his exclusive territory. Rumor had it that the feud had its roots in the fact that Donovan had won the Congressional Medal of Honor during the World War I, for capturing a German machine-gun nest single-handed, while MacArthur had been twice nominated for the award and twice denied, in the early days of World War II, probably because of the lasting controversy caused by his use of excessive force in dispersing the destitute veterans who had gathered for the Bonus March on Washington in the worst days of the Depression. His reputation was not helped any, according to Jane, when he left Corregidor in the Philippines for Australia but insisted on running the battle long distance, which resulted in commander Lieutenant General Jonathan “Skinny” Wainwright and his troops being captured by the Japanese. MacArthur meanwhile landed safely in Melbourne,
taking with him on the PT-41
“his wife, his child, two Chinese amahs, and several trunks of personal belongings.”
While he eventually got the medal for his defense of the Philippines, it did nothing to lessen his antipathy for the much-decorated Donovan.

The situation in China, which America jealously guarded in the same way Britain did India, was even more of a tangled mess. The War Department had committed itself to a policy of
“keeping China in the War”
and providing the Chungking government, with Chiang Kai-shek as its president, with a major portion of lend-lease supplies. The OSS was officially committed to working with Chiang Kai-shek, but it was not clear which enemy the Generalissimo was more committed to fighting—the Japanese invaders who had laid waste to his country for seven years or his Communist compatriots in the north. As a result, the head of the Chinese secret service, General Tai Li—an infamous character who, legend had it, was
“a blend of Himmler and the once-popular movie villain, The Insidious Doctor Fu Manchu”
—was not exactly rolling out the welcome mat. Donovan had given Tai Li pretty much the same warning he had given Mountbatten, to the effect that the OSS would be coming in one way or another. But backing up that bluff was another matter.
“We must take orders from the Chinese,”
Major Little told Betty, “and they are not too happy to have us snooping around behind the lines, possibly uncovering certain things about Communist and central government relations that would prove embarrassing.” Frustrated by the separate, and at times incompatible, agendas that were holding up OSS operations, the major conceded that the waiting was hard on everyone. All he could do was ask that they “have faith.” Progress was being made, and people would soon be shipping out.

He told Betty that they planned to send a small unit to Burma, where Colonel Carl F. Eifler had managed to establish an OSS base—Detachment 101—in Assam, on the northern border of the country. Eifler's outfit had already developed an effective field operation and was producing vital intelligence for Stilwell's north Burma campaigns. The 101 was also working with the British army staging counterattacks against the Japanese occupying forces, and training a guerilla band, the Kachin Rangers, to sabotage Japanese lines of communication
and supply dumps. Major Little would be among the first to go, tasked with trying to smooth the way for MO in China. He was taking their MO colleague Charles Fenn, a thirty-six-year-old former Associated Press war correspondent who had covered the fighting in Burma and who would be sent into French Indochina to launch rumor campaigns against the Japanese. Tokie Slocum was leaving with another group to help organize and train the first contingent of Japanese interpreters, writers, and technicians going to India.

It was impossible not to be envious of the dear departing. Hungry for any news of MO personnel movement, Betty and Jane took to monitoring two listening posts—the 10:00 a.m. coffee line at the cafeteria and the ladies' washroom—both of which functioned as gossip clearinghouses in the Washington headquarters. By lingering in either of these two key locations, it was possible to pick up all kinds of extraneous bits of information. Most of the scuttlebutt tended to focus on the latest activities of the Hollywood director John Ford, head of the Field Photographic Unit, as well as other famous personalities who were moonlighting for the OSS. There were regular sightings of the actor Sterling Hayden in the building, usually at lunch with another VIP. And everyone, it seemed, had a Marlene Dietrich story. While gossip was strictly against the rules, it was inevitable, Betty observed, that with so much emphasis on responsibility and security the employees would find some way to release all the pent-up pressure. The occasional shared tidbit was their only vice. Jane put it best when she said that the OSS reminded her of a Quaker meeting she had attended where everyone was
“bursting to blab.”

Of all the chatty young stenographers, secretaries, and file clerks they befriended, their favorite was the immensely tall, exceptionally lively Julia McWilliams, even though she had what Betty termed a
“highly developed security sixth sense”
and never let anything slip. Julia, they both agreed, was the sort of “sensible, high-minded” woman who could be counted on to keep mum about the reports that crossed her desk. She worked in the Registry, a special office that functioned as the OSS “brain bank,” the repository of all manner of highly classified information. She revealed little about her job, but Betty subsequently
discovered that she held the keys to the OSS secrets that enemy spies would most like to get their hands on:
“the distilled reports from the Research and Analysis branch; the real names of agents operating behind the lines; itemized amounts of expenditure for agent work, payoffs, and organization of undergrounds; locations of OSS detachments around the world, and implemented plans of operations of all branches bearing the Joint Chiefs of Staff stamp of approval.”
Julia always downplayed her position, admitting only that she had developed a “top-secret twitch” from handling so much sensitive material.

In the coffee line they learned that Julia was equally desperate to go abroad. Unlike Betty and Jane, Julia had never had the chance to travel outside the United States, with the exception of an afternoon jaunt over the border to Tijuana. At thirty-one, she was older than most of the other OSS girls and had been working toward her goal of “high adventure” since the war began. She was from an affluent, conservative California family much like Jane's, and her life after graduating from Smith in 1934 was filled with that pleasant whirl of social activities—golf outings, ski weekends, country club soirees, and balls—that is supposed to lead to a wedding. Julia, however, obstinately avoided marriage to the boy next door, Harrison Chandler, a wealthy heir to the Times Mirror publishing fortune, who was as handsome and decent as he was boring. She held on to the dream that something bigger lay in store for her, later admitting that her height might have given her an exaggerated sense of her own destiny.

Dreaming of a glittering literary life as a
“lady novelist,”
she moved to Manhattan with two fellow Smithies in hopes of getting her start but never managed to interest
The New Yorker
in any of the reviews or short human-interest pieces she submitted. After a failed romance and faltering resolve, Julia returned to Pasadena and to what she termed her
“social butterfly”
years. An ill-fated stint as an advertising copywriter at the Beverly Hills branch of W. & J. Sloane—she was fired after only a few months—put paid to her ambitions for a high-flying career. Devastated by her mother's death at the age of sixty, Julia resigned herself to keeping house for her father and playing the part of dutiful daughter. She still dabbled in writing, penning plays for the Junior League and a
monthly fashion column for a small California magazine called
Coast
, bankrolled by family friends, but it had become an occupation rather than a calling.

The war gave Julia a second chance to make something of her life. From an early age, a strong sense of civic duty had been drummed into her by her father, a major landowner committed to California's prosperous future, and she was immediately caught up in the patriotic frenzy that seized the country after Pearl Harbor. Everyone was being called to action—even women. Here was the opportunity to make a real contribution. She volunteered for the Aircraft Warning Service in her hometown of Pasadena, and then for the local arm of the American Red Cross. Determined to do more, she took the civil service exam. When all her married friends headed to Washington with their husbands, who had commissions waiting for them, Julia tagged along. She made up her mind to enlist. Tall, robust, and athletic, she judged herself to be exactly the right type for the Army or Navy Reserve. She was crushed when first the WACs (Women's Army Corps) and then the WAVES (Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service) rejected her. The official explanation, according to the checked box on the standardized application form, was a “physical disqualification.” While she joked that at six foot two she was apparently
“too long”
to serve her country, her unfailing good humor masked her deep disappointment.

By August 1942, she had settled for a job at the Office of War Information, arranged for her through family connections. At first the idea of working in the wartime capital seemed incredibly glamorous and exciting, and compensated in a small way for the fact that she was employed as a typist for Noble Cathcart, her cousin Harriet's husband. Bored stiff by the job at “Mellot's Madhouse,” named for its maniacally hard-driving director, she persevered, furiously typing her way through ten thousand file cards in a two-month period out of sheer frustration. She told friends she would keep on hammering away, hoping her drudgery would be rewarded. She interviewed for a job at the OSS and made a
“good impression,”
according to the unnamed officer, who described her as “pleasant, alert, capable, very tall.” Four months later, her reputation for hard work won her a place on Donovan's staff
as a junior research assistant. After she started, she often heard it said that the colonel's idea of the ideal OSS girl was
“a cross between a Smith graduate, a Powers model, and a Katie Gibbs secretary.”
Julia could not help thinking that if she had only known that earlier, she could have saved herself a lot of trouble.

She was not in Donovan's office long before she got her first taste of the OSS's idea of “research,” an elastically conceived job that covered hundreds of strange and esoteric occupations. Julia was loaned out for a year to the OSS's Emergency Sea Rescue Equipment Section, which she dubbed the
“fish-squeezing unit”
because of the series of stinky experiments they were running in an effort to develop a shark repellant to protect fliers downed at sea. The brainchild of Harvard zoologist Harold Jefferson Coolidge, a blue-blooded descendant of Thomas Jefferson, the Information Exchange of the Emergency Rescue Equipment Section (ERE), despite its more far-fetched investigations, managed to come up with some useful ideas for agent paraphernalia. (It helped speed the development of signal mirrors and exposure suits for floundering pilots.) Happy to be liberated from her typewriter, Julia threw herself into the inventive work of designing rescue kits, rising at the crack of dawn for her drive to the fish market to pick up the “fresh catch” for their tests.

For the first time in her life, Julia found a place where she fit in. Far from being a curiosity in her flat men's loafers and leopard coat, she had precisely the kind of social background and sophistication OSS recruiters looked for, along with a private income (from her mother's inheritance) that made her above reproach. Her height gave her an air of natural authority that, along with her ringing voice, helped her hold her own when dealing with her military colleagues. Always something of a tomboy, she impressed Lieutenant Commander Earl F. Hiscock of the Coast Guard Reserve—which eventually took over the unit—with her down-to-earth attitude, once turning over a wastebasket to serve as a chair in an impromptu meeting to discuss the frequent sinking of merchant vessels ferrying supplies to Europe.
“Julia was a woman of extraordinary personality,”
recalled Jack Moore, an army private she met while in the rescue unit, who worked for Paul Child's graphics
department. “She was not any kind of an American stereotype. By virtue of necessity—I mean, here is this six-foot-two-inch-tall American woman looking down on all the males she ever meets—she had to evolve a sense of herself that was different from the person who is a physically standard specimen.”

In the fall of 1943, Julia returned to Donovan's staff and quickly progressed up the office ladder. In December she was promoted to administrative assistant in the Registry, supervising forty clerical assistants, typists, and stenographers. While she had worked her way to a position of greater responsibility, she was still no closer to her goal of active service. Unlike Betty and Jane, she had come into the OSS as
“a plain person,”
and had “no talents” and no languages that would recommend her for an overseas position. Just when she began to fear she would spend the war as a glorified file clerk in Washington, she heard through the rumor mill that Donovan was looking for bodies to help organize and run the new OSS bases in India. Julia immediately volunteered.
“The idea of going to the Far East appealed to me very much,”
she recalled. “The only way I could go was to go over in the files again, so I said, ‘Well, I'll do the files again,' even though I had finally gotten out of them for a better position.”