A Covert Affair (17 page)

The condom caper became Jane's claim to almost
“instant fame”
in the CBI theater, according to Betty, who happened to be on temporary assignment from Calcutta to help coordinate the black propaganda campaign in Burma. Naturally, the story got better as it made the rounds, in part because of an incident that had occurred a few days before Donovan's visit. Jane, at a loss as to where to find the necessary waterproof containers to float her MO materials, had as a last resort
turned to the OSS camp's resident doctor. Navy Commander Willis Murphy had met her for what he understood to be an office visit. When she indelicately requested that he issue her a large quantity of prophylactics, his eyebrows shot up,
“Jane, really!”
At her cheerful “Yes, Murphy, about five hundred,” he had dropped his stethoscope and looked at her in complete disbelief. She loved telling people it had taken several minutes to persuade him they were not for her “personal use” and repeated the story vivaciously at endless cocktail parties.

Betty was gratified to see that six months in the jungles of Ceylon had done nothing to diminish Jane's incorrigible flamboyance. When the Calcutta intelligence chief suggested someone go on an “errand-boy visit” to check out the neighboring MO operation in Kandy, Betty had immediately put her name forward in hopes of seeing her friend again. They drew straws and she won. Looking out of the C-47's window as they taxied down the tiny Colombo landing strip, she immediately spotted Jane, flouncing along the hot tarmac in a light gingham dress and sandals,
“the same freckled, friendly face, the same broad grin.”

Before they were even out of the terminal, Jane rounded on her, accusing Betty of being a spy from the Calcutta office
“on a boondoggling hejira to the Land of the Lotus Eaters.”
Was Betty planning to expose their MO staff as “a bunch of charlatans,” Jane demanded, “taking their ease in thatched bungalows by the sea and sleeping the war away under the influence of siren songs?” Had it not been for the familiar mocking twinkle in her blue eyes, Betty would almost have thought her serious.

Jane filled Betty in on their suspicious little island community as they drove to the Colombo MO-tel, skirting the main part of the city, which appeared to Betty, after filthy, overcrowded Calcutta,
“so clean it had a freshly washed feel to it.”
They settled in the main lounge, looking out on the sparkling Indian Ocean while two beautiful Singhalese boys in orange-and-green sarongs served tea. Jane told her she would learn everything she needed to know the next day when they drove up to Kandy to meet with their acting chief, Carleton Scofield. He was temporarily in charge, since their handsome young boss, Dick Heppner, had departed for Kunming. Heppner had been designated strategic officer for China and promoted to the rank of colonel. His replacement, Colonel John
Coughlin, a West Pointer, was expected any day. A new contingent of OSS secretaries had come from Washington, which meant people were finally getting the help they needed. Julia's new assistant, Patty Nor-bury, had arrived in the nick of time. The Registry was booming, the file cabinets were full to bursting, and poor Julia, in her own words, had
“reached the saturation point.”
Because of a hitch in schedules, Jeanne Taylor, the graphics designer Paul had so eagerly awaited—for both personal and professional reasons—had not arrived until December 29. Instead of being welcomed by Paul, all she got was a nine-page memo with instructions because he, too, had been ordered to Kunming.

Jane's main purpose in gossiping about all the personnel changes was to gauge Betty's knowledge about the altered situation in China and the future of the OSS mission there. Everything was very uncertain and unsettled. In October, Chiang Kai-shek had repeated his usual imperious demand for Stilwell's removal but this time made sure he got his way
“by holding a dagger at Roosevelt's back,”
threatening to make a separate peace with Japan unless Stilwell was removed and the control over all the booty—in the form of the guns, gasoline, wireless sets, and supplies—coming into China was turned over directly to him.

Vinegar Joe had never hidden his contempt for the greedy warlord, whom he derisively called “the Peanut” and loathed for pocketing American money and doing nothing to throw his deteriorating Kuomin-tang armies against the Japanese while keeping his best divisions in the north to blockade the Chinese Communists. All the while, the Allies were spending vast sums in support of the Generalissimo, constructing air bases for bombing the Japanese mainland and building a road from Burma at the cost of a million dollars a mile. According to Jane,
“Stilwell knew Chiang was completely corrupt and was selling supplies to the Japanese to enrich himself, his family, and his clique, and hoarding the rest to use against the Communists.”
It got to the point where Stilwell could not stomach Chiang's procrastination, lies, and shams, especially as the supplies being flown into China over “the Hump,” a treacherous wind-battered stretch over the Himalayas, came at a terrible price in terms of American lives. So many planes went astray that there was a mutiny in the Air Force, as pilots balked at taking their “101
boom-booms” over the Hump when they knew perfectly well where their cargo was headed.

In the end, Stilwell was sent packing, with the small comfort that it took three men to replace him: General Albert C. Wedemeyer was moved to Chungking, Lieutenant General Raymond A. “Speck” Wheeler replaced him at Kandy, and Lieutenant General D. I. Sultan took over the Burma campaign. Jane rather sympathized with
“the old sourpuss,”
as she called Stilwell, who stormed around Ceylon in his scruffy jeep like a bald, scrawny John Wayne character. She had even let him twirl her across the dance floor at a couple of big functions at the Queen's Hotel. There was a wonderful story that the first time Stilwell flew over the Hump into China he was napping on a lilo (inflatable mattress), but when the aircraft climbed to eighteen thousand feet and the cabin pressure dropped, the lilo suddenly burst. Vinegar Joe hit the deck hard, woke with a start, rolled over, and drew both revolvers. He was ready to shoot the first thing that moved. Fortunately for his fellow passengers, a second later he passed out from lack of oxygen. For all his hell-for-leather cowboy zeal, Stilwell was a Yankee and an intellectual, who had first gone to China as a young military attaché and had learned both Mandarin and Cantonese. Jane believed he had a genuine liking for and understanding of the Chinese—no one in his command was allowed to use the common military slurs “gooks” or “chinks”—but he just could not come to terms with the Peanut.

Jane and Paul had spent a sad little early Christmas together, knowing that they were about to go their separate ways. His affection for “the chipmunk chaser” had deepened over time, and her name was a happy constant in letter after letter: Janie was helping him to organize a party, had accompanied him on a visit to the studio of a local artist, was just up from Colombo full of gossip about the triangular affair of close friends. She had been asked to decorate the enlisted men's mess hall for the holidays and as usual had gone the extra mile, painting a fabulously tongue-in-cheek mural over the bar in their club depicting half-naked native women waiting on a soldier lazily reclining on a mound of pillows. She had devoted all her spare time to the project, and Paul was unabashed in his admiration.

He was not in love with her, but she assuaged his feelings of loneliness
and emptiness more than any other woman he had met since coming to Ceylon. She was simply
“fantastic,”
he wrote his brother, and would always remain a dear friend. He added that he had whipped out a little “jewel” of a watercolor as a birthday present for one of the other OSS girls but on second thought decided to keep it as it seemed too good to part with simply
“as a casual, friendly gesture.”
Then, in a letter five days later, he noted, “gave the little painting to Janie, as a Christmas present.” In a remarkably complacent aside, he mentioned that Julia had given him a Zippo lighter,
“though where she ever got it,”
he wrote, “I don't know.” He seemed far more impressed with the coveted bit of GI paraphernalia than with the woman who had procured it for him.

Paul spent his last evening in Ceylon with Jane, and after dinner they went back to her hotel in Colombo and talked long into the night. He felt “shaky” about his new assignment. It was not the prospect of building another set of war rooms for Wedemeyer so much as the proximity to danger that filled him with apprehension. He worried that once the Allies opened the Ledo Road, a vital supply road connecting Assam to Kunming for the first time, the Japanese would have to act to knock out the American wartime base. He did not understand the logic (
“of course, I am not a military man”
) of setting up an establishment in a place that was so obviously and one-sidedly threatened and feared they would all be “running like hell within 60 days.” It had all combined to make him more tense and fretful than usual.

That night, he shared thoughts and feelings he probably never would have
“except that all the elements of the time and place bent themselves toward sympathetic understanding, and even to bits of self-revelation”
:

Janie's hotel, a strange place, far out of town and once the seat of a certain colonial elegance, no doubt—but now distinctly mouldy and passé. However, Janie's room is in what was probably once a cellar storeroom and it has a little corridor outside leading directly onto a grassed and balustraded terrace shaped like a piece of pie…. We took two chairs and a little table out there and sat, facing the sea (only 50 feet away) with a strong wind in our faces, most grateful after a sweaty day, and drank
gin and fruit juice. There was a brilliant new crescent accompanied by the evening star hanging like a lamp just above it. For an hour or two I felt really relaxed and smoothed out and fine and was able to forget the fox gnawing my entrails.

After Paul's departure, Jane was delighted to have Betty with her. The morning after she arrived, they drove up to Kandy in a jeep, along with “the Black Tulip,” her MO colleague Howard Palmer, and Julia's new assistant, Patty Norbury. On the three-hour drive up to OSS headquarters, Jane played tour guide and kept up a bantering commentary on the local sights:
“And there's a famous footprint at a pilgrim station near here. The Brahmins say it's the footstep of Siva. The Buddhists say it was made by Buddha; the Mohammedans, Adam. And now that the Americans are here in Ceylon,”
she continued, “the gag is, of course, ‘George Washington
stepped
here.'” It was Jane at her silliest and most fun, and Betty laughed in spite of herself.

During the long ride, Patty Norbury told them the reason she had volunteered to come to Ceylon was to try to find her fiancé, Lieutenant Roy Wentz Jr., who had been stationed with the Tenth Air Force in Burma. He was reported missing after his plane was shot down in a bombing mission over Rangoon. Everybody had told her he was dead and to move on with her life, but she would not give up hope. She was determined to find him or, failing that, to at least learn with certainty what had happened to him.
“I took this job with OSS to be as close to Burma as I could,”
she told them. “I watch every report that comes over my desk from our men in the field. One of their jobs is to report on Allied prisoners of war. Some day, someone will pick up Roy's trail.” She added softly, “You see, no one ever saw his plane go down, no trace has ever been found of the crew.”
*
Her honesty and good cheer in the face
of tragedy was like an unspoken rebuke to all their petty complaints and discomforts, and quite silenced the party for the remainder of the trip.

By the time they reached Kandy, it was starting to drizzle. Jane deposited Betty at Scofield's office and went in search of one of her Thai agents. The boy, nicknamed “Chop,” weighed only eighty-five pounds and had been smuggled out of Bangkok in a rice basket.
“Chop says he has worms again,”
Jane told Betty. “He's something of a hypochondriac. Doc Murphy slips him an aspirin, and he's fine again for weeks.”

Over their afternoon tea the previous day, Jane had explained that one of her more time-consuming duties was
“the care and training”
of a half-dozen native agents—Batak, Malay, Thai, and Karen—used in OSS intelligence-gathering missions. She and Howard Palmer looked after them as best they could, catered to their various needs and whims, and attempted, with varying degrees of success, to
“shield them from the cruel white light of reality.”
This was more complicated than it might seem, as they suffered from all kinds of fears, superstitions, and complexes. Her two Malay agents, Hadji Muktar and Abdul, a former university student and a village schoolteacher, were particularly sensitive and rank conscious.

To bolster their esteem, Jane went to great lengths to obtain special privileges for them, including the right to eat in the officers' mess. She came to regret it. When she went down to work in Colombo, the officers there refused to eat with her “zoo,” as they called the various native agents. Moreover, each of her charges had different dietary habits and taboos (
“Hindus no beef, Moslems no pork, Buddhists no meat at all”
) that resulted in “culinary chaos.” For that matter, Bataks had a quaint habit of practicing cannibalism, roasting the enemy for religious ritualistic reasons, but human flesh was definitely not on the canteen menu. Jane was appointed the Muslim agents' “official taster,” but no matter what she said, Hadji persisted in badgering her about the possibility that this or that dish contained pork fat. Finally, they were forced to eat in an area of the mess hall that was cordoned off from everyone else. Even though Jane and Howard would have much preferred to dine with their friends, they always made a point of sitting with their agents
“so no one's feelings would be hurt.”