A Covert Affair (11 page)

A few weeks later, she was handed a folder with her mimeographed travel orders for India. She was scheduled to leave on February 26, on a troop train out of Newport News, Virginia, for a weeklong cross-country trip to Wilmington, California, their port of embarkation. She would be accompanied by two OSS colleagues: Dr. Cora DuBois, a distinguished forty-year-old anthropologist, with the face and bearing to match, who would be heading up the Research and Analysis Division; and Eleanor “Ellie” Thirty, an eager twenty-two-year-old secretary. A petite, dark-haired beauty with wide-set eyes, Ellie had left the family farm in Rock Creek, Minnesota, to join the thousands of other young women who flocked to Washington after Pearl Harbor to work in the wartime agencies. Despite her youth, Ellie was surprisingly independent and resourceful. Against strict orders, she decided to keep a detailed diary of her overseas tour of duty with the OSS, writing in her own custom shorthand to safeguard its contents. She began by noting
that she, Julia, and Cora made for an incongruous traveling party—they varied so greatly in size and age that they attracted amused stares from the soldiers packing the train.

By her own admission, Ellie had
“never been anywhere,”
and she was thrilled when Julia offered to take her home to Pasadena for a few days of sightseeing in California before they left the country. When the trio reached Wilmington, they were joined by six other OSS women: Virginia “Peachy” Durand, Rosamond “Rosie” Frame, Jeanne Taylor, Virginia Pryor, Louise Banville, and Mary Nelson Lee. The women underwent a week of orientation, which consisted of training films, lectures, and “boat drills”—so that if they ever had to abandon ship they would not think twice about going over the side, via ropes—and farewell parties in town every night that left them absolutely exhausted. On March 8, 1944, to the jaunty sound of band music, they boarded the SS
Mariposa
, an elegant luxury liner that had been used to run tourists from California to Hawaii before being requisitioned as a troopship, and set sail for India.
“We presented a picture beyond description,”
Ellie wrote, referring to the ridiculous amount of military gear they were expected to wear or strap to their bodies, everything from fatigues, gas mask kits, and musette bags to steel helmets, “which, I must say, on one's head, are the latest thing in chic!”
*

The nine OSS women—“crows” in GI slang—were “a source of curiosity” on the tight ship with more than three thousand men, Thiry noted in her diary. “We are also occasionally the object of wolf calls and whistles. Julia launched a rumor that we are missionaries, which has helped curb some of the outbursts.” Of course, it did not help that Ellie, Peachy, and Rosie took to spending the dull afternoons lolling on the deck, their oiled limbs glistening in the sun. In the end, the bathing beauties created so much pandemonium that the captain had to cordon off a section of the deck exclusively for the girls. They all had
“man trouble” of one kind or another—thirty-one days is a long time to spend at sea with few distractions. All the same, Gregory Bateson, who was on the boat with them, and as an anthropologist was an expert in the mating habits of various species, declared Rosie Frame a practiced tease and “a little minx.” Frame was the daughter of missionaries in Peking; she had grown up in China and spoke ten different dialects fluently. She had been working in the research department of the OSS in Washington and was in a hurry to get back to the country of her childhood and help the Chinese drive out the despised Japanese. Before the trip was over, she had caught the eye of Thibaut de Saint Phalle, a Franco-American naval officer recruited by the OSS to work behind enemy lines in France, who at the last minute had had his travel orders changed to the Far East. Rosie spent the month tutoring him in Mandarin and beating him at bridge, and in the process completely bewitched him.
“Julia, Rosie and I played bridge all the way to India,”
he recalled. “I thought they were both wonderful.”

Ellie, who was the oldest of nine, had no trouble keeping the boys in line. She quickly became one of the most popular girls on board, joining the ship's band, entertaining them all in the evenings by playing the piano and singing, and even occasionally performing in programs broadcast over the ship's “mikes.” She also took the discomforts of their cramped living quarters in stride, writing that their cabin reminded her of her bedroom back home:
“I never would have believed that 9 women could live together in a room that small—but we do and get along beautifully. We sleep in triple-decker bunks. There are 3 sets, with 3 bunks in each. I have a lower one, and Peachy has the one above. We each have 11/2 drawers in the bureau—the rest of our junk we keep in suitcases under the lower bunks. Works all right.”
They all shared one bathroom and one john, and had to make do with a few cups of salt water for bathing, which made it difficult to get really clean. They washed their undergarments in the tub, stomping on them with bare feet, and then hung the dripping bras and panties on string all across the ceiling of their cabin, making it almost impossible to move. After two weeks, Ellie and Peachy were so desperate to get their hair done that they raided the men's barbershop and demanded service—a bold move that only
two months before would have “sounded fantastic” to them. “We were watched by many GIs as we sat with our heads over the sinks, being scrubbed with Fitch shampoo and ice-cold water. Worked beautifully though—and hair got clean. We even persuaded that man to wash our faces and necks.”

Julia, bored and restless after only a few days, offered to work for the
Mariposa
's daily newspaper and soon knew more about what was going on belowdecks than anyone. She saw to it that each of them got a little write-up in the paper, along with a flattering sketch by one of the GIs. When they all got together in the evening, usually in various stages of dressing for dinner, they would smoke and chat, and try to pry the latest ship gossip out of their lanky girl reporter, whom Ellie Thiry described as “their representative” to the paper.
“The times when we all get together in the cabin usually turn out to be quite hilarious,”
Ellie wrote. “Someone is always losing or misplacing something—and the main phrases used are ‘I wonder where this or that has gone?' and ‘Have you seen my comb?' or ‘While you're up, will you pass me that ashtray?'” Those were the moments Ellie knew she would always remember when it came time to leave the ship. “We have almost gotten used to it as our normal way of living for the time being, and getting off will change everything, and we'll be starting over again. And we will miss a lot of new friends we have made.”

As was usually the case when OSS colleagues went overseas, Betty and Julia were frustrated by the slowness of the mail deliveries and the fact that censorship meant they learned almost nothing of real interest from their friends' letters. By early April, they had it on good authority that after evading Japanese submarines, and a nauseating zigzag crossing, the group had landed safely in Bombay. There the women learned that during the month they had spent crossing the Pacific their fearless leader had changed his mind and decided to send them somewhere else.
“Easter Sunday: Off the ship to encounter a real snafu,”
Ellie wrote. “Our orders were cut for Calcutta, but overnight our destination was switched to Ceylon. The Bombay U.S. military had not been notified, and to add to the confusion, they did not know we were women!” Temporary accommodations were hastily arranged, and the group spent
the next ten days sightseeing and shopping while their new paperwork was pushed through. Rosie Frame left for New Delhi, where she would have to bide her time, as the American ambassador to China—who, rumor had it, did not want his wife to accompany him—had declared China too dangerous for American women. After what Julia described as
a “killing train ride across India,”
tormented by the cinders and grit that poured in through the open windows and left them covered with dirt, they arrived at the Adam's Bridge Ferry linking India with Ceylon. The eight remaining women reached Colombo on April 25, wiring Washington of their arrival.

Fortunately, Betty and Julia did not have to wait long for their own marching orders. Mountbatten had decided to shift his headquarters from New Delhi to Ceylon, moving from the heart of India to the pear-shaped island at its southernmost tip. The OSS had to follow suit. The British, in a new spirit of cooperation—no doubt based on the calculation that American money, equipment, and manpower would come in handy—had approved the establishment of an OSS intelligence-gathering base in New Delhi, as well as a plan to operate a small MO unit in Ceylon under the jurisdiction of a joint Dutch, British, and American psychological warfare board. Betty and Jane arrived at the office one morning to find a cable with their assignments waiting for them. Major Little had sent a wire stating that he had received approval for
“number three air priorities for MacDonald to New Delhi, Foster to Ceylon.”

Betty, who had managed to get her husband recruited by the OSS—which had jumped at the chance to get a Japanese-speaking naval officer—had to break the news that she was leaving again. Major Little had told her to expect a short stay in New Delhi before pushing on for Kunming. When Betty told Alex about her orders, he pointed to his own assignment papers, which had also come in that morning. He was to report to Detachment 505 in Calcutta. They embraced, then stood there looking at each other awkwardly, not knowing whether to be happy or sad. They had enjoyed only a brief reunion while Alex underwent his OSS training. Staff policy did not permit husbands and wives to serve in the same theater, so there was no chance of their being together. It was a hard-and-fast rule; any exception required a special
dispensation from Donovan. By the time he got to India, she would be in China.
“Just think,”
Alex told her, “we'll have only the Himalayas between us.” They had no way of knowing when they would see each other next. Even this did not dampen Betty's spirits.
“We were just so excited,”
she would recall. “After all the holdups, it was a tremendous thing to finally be going overseas.” On his last night in town before leaving for an OSS training facility on Catalina Island in California, they went out and celebrated. When he bemoaned their long-distance relationship and lugubriously quoted
“C'est la guerre,”
they both laughed and drank to the future.

All the activity in the Washington headquarters shifted to getting people into the field. Every week, new appointments were announced, plans were approved, and the necessary equipment—agent radio sets, mobile presses, as well as weapons and ammunition—was acquired. The huge bureaucracy of the wartime agency was gearing up for action. A notice came through stating that diaries and journals must not be kept, that there had already been
“problems,”
and this kind of “carelessness” could be a real danger to the war effort. Personnel were instructed to report for medical checks and begin the usual round of immunization shots for those headed to the Far East. Typhus, typhoid, smallpox, tetanus, yellow fever, and cholera—it was a Whitman's Sampler of deadly germs, courtesy of the OSS dispensary. They were warned that the injections would hurt like hell, and would probably be accompanied by swelling, aching, fever, chills, and, in some cases, wild, vivid dreams. They did not care. It was the first concrete evidence that they were actually on their way.

In the midst of frantic last-minute arrangements to rent out their apartments, have passport photos taken, and draw up wills, an adjutant informed them that they were being sent “back to school.” They were expected to report to Richmond, Virginia, for a top-secret training course
“designed to test students in operations of actual value in the field including cipher, clandestine meetings, tailing, interrogating, opinion sampling, and residence search.”
They spent the next three weeks in what Betty called the “never-never land” of secret OSS training schools, a series of safe houses scattered all over the Virginia area where they were taught how to make false documents, skulk around
corners while following people, arrange secret meetings, and question suspects. At the end of the course, they were tested on their ability to successfully carry out these sorts of operations in the manner of an “active agent.” Loosely speaking, the tests were designed to get the students into trouble and then see how they well they could keep out of it. Betty and Jane both thought they turned in dismal performances, though they fared better than some. In one final exercise, a group of young men led by Dr. James A. Hamilton, a Stanford School of Medicine psychiatrist working for MO, was supposed to break into a defense factory and then leave the premises undetected. Unfortunately, they were detected, arrested, and thrown into jail by the irate local police, who had not been notified of the war games.
“It took all of Donovan's considerable influence to get them released,”
Jane recalled, “after they had spent a few uncomfortable days.”

They still had to go through a Far East orientation seminar, extracurricular classes in everything from military protocol to sex, as well as a three-day crash course in small arms and OSS mechanical weapons. Standing on the country club fairway, pointing at the number three green, a ballistics expert patiently demonstrated the correct way to shoot a Colt .45 pistol
“from the hip at a crouching position.”
Then he showed them the correct way to handle a Thompson submachine gun. With some fifty years of experience under his belt, the instructor, Lieutenant Norman Sturgis, made it look easy. In Betty's hands, however, the Thompson behaved “like a bucking fire hose.” As soon as her finger hit the trigger she found it impossible to let go, and the force of the gun spun her around in a half circle so that by the time she had emptied the clip the entire fairway was “chewed with bullet holes.”