A Covert Affair (18 page)

The youngest of the group was Danny, a seventeen-year-old Karen student who had been captured by the British in Burma after he had fallen during a desperate attempt to flee. He had sustained a concussion but was convinced the headaches and dizziness were a sign that he was going crazy. Nothing the OSS camp psychiatrist said would persuade him he was sane. Further complicating matters, Danny was unaccustomed to wearing Western-style clothes and at the first opportunity tended to strip off his shirt, cap, and tie. Once, according to Jane, he had showed up at the open-air movie in Kandy and began to remove his pants in front of an amazed audience. They had quickly bundled him off to the camp, and they kept a close eye on him after that. Howard had hopes of one day employing Danny as a radio announcer for the Chittagong black radio station, but the young man still had a long way to go.

A Batak agent who was presented to Jane shortly after she arrived in Kandy also proved to be a handful. “Nick” (his real name was Chabudeen) had been captured by a British submarine off Sumatra and was turned over to the Americans after being interrogated at Trincomalee. The questioning seemed to have wounded his soul, and thereafter he
“wilted whenever anyone spoke sharply to him.”
He, too, developed a variety of physical and mental ailments, and Jane, the only one fluent in Malay, was kept hopping between doctors and dispensaries. On one occasion, after Nick collapsed, she tried to translate his strange affliction for Dr. Murphy:
“He says he's emptying out blood.”

“Which end?” the doc inquired without interest.

Nick was admitted to the British hospital for observation in the event that he might have ulcers. With her usual disregard for protocol and procedure, Jane snagged him a bed by claiming he was an American sergeant, filling out the forms herself, and made him promise not to speak to anyone. The ruse backfired when a nurse at the hospital rang her in the middle of the night—
“the mute ‘sargeant' had written her name on a piece of paper and must see her at once.”
Jane had to throw her clothes on and jeep the seventeen miles out to the infirmary. It turned out that Nick thought that the hospital was some form of house arrest and had become extremely agitated.
“They don't like me here,”
he
insisted, almost falling into her arms. “They want me to die. They are starving me to death. They are feeding me only milk.” Jane managed to settle him down after explaining that no wanted him to die and that milk was the prescribed treatment for ulcers. Three days later, he was back on his feet and begging Jane to drive him to a mosque so he could pray and give thanks for his recovery. That was the second OSS jeep she had to requisition on a shaky pretext to keep Nick contented. Theoretically the OSS boys were going to launch him deep into enemy territory with a handset to spy on the disposition of Japanese troops, but Jane thought he would be terrified at the very idea of such an assignment.

The majority of their native agents were obtained by British submarines during “snatch sorties.” Snatching, according to Jane, was a method of collecting intelligence:
“The subs go over to the mainland, wait around for a native fishing junk to appear. It's a case of sighting ship, sinking same, and snatching survivors.”
The captors were brought back to Trincomalee for questioning. If they were deemed of value, they were trained as agents. If not, they often ended up doing odd jobs and living in internee camps.

In general, she continued, the native agents in Southeast Asia did not have a
“subversive bone in their bodies”
and could not understand why OSS involved itself in such elaborate black propaganda schemes. “They favor the direct approach to propagandizing their own people. They can't understand why we just don't drop leaflets into occupied zones telling the natives how bad the Japs are.” For example, Sam, one of Howard's agents, a high-ranking official in the Thai government in exile, was hopelessly obliging. He had been brought in with the idea that he could provide advice on how to slant propaganda targeting the Thai population, but he had “a sweet habit” of agreeing with every proposed program, so that it was impossible to determine which ideas were more promising than others. Jane told Betty that the boys who taught Sam to play poker discovered this habit the hard way because
“they never knew when he was bluffing. With every hand he drew he smiled and muttered: Good—good-good!”

During her meeting with Scofield, Betty learned that Alex was making progress at Chittagong. The small, 5-kilowatt radio station had
been erected just outside a Royal Air Force (RAF) camp in the Burma bush, but with their technical staff recalled to Delhi to run the powerful All India Radio, the British had offered the antenna to OSS. Alex had immediately been dispatched to check out the site's possibilities for black radio warfare. The plan was for their MO-SEAC black radio station to operate under the cover of the Japanese radio station JOAK, going on the air just seconds before and only a hair's-breadth turn of the dial from the Tokyo team's frequency. They hoped that if they slipped their black broadcast in so close to the Japanese one, listeners in Thailand searching for news would accidentally pick up their signal and mistake it for the real thing. In the beginning, they would go on twice daily. They had no idea how big an audience they might net:
“It could be just a few listeners; it could be thousands.”
Alex decided to make their young Thai Harvard student their announcer. He was a mere waif, but he had a strong, confident voice that was tailor made for counterprogramming, and he would boast arrogantly in his perfect Thai of Japan's ultimate goal of subduing all of Asia.

Their first trial broadcasts succeeded in duping British direction-finding units in Burma, which reported picking up the signal of a “Jap” station operating in the jungle. Their black radio propaganda also paid dividends: a Bangkok newspaper reprinted part of the test news program that had been beamed to Thailand. The fake story described damage inflicted on Japan by Allied bombing raids and the resulting instability of Japanese markets. The Bangkok paper had swallowed it whole, crediting the report to the “Siamese Hour” over JOAK Tokyo. Scofield told Betty that she would need to start churning out ideas for radio scripts.
“When the station starts operating,”
he added, “we'll broadcast all hours of the day and night.”

It was not until months later in Bangkok that Alex MacDonald would learn how effective his “sneak broadcasts” had been:
“The Thai foreign minister told [him] that one day the Japanese ambassador in Thailand had come storming to him to report the ‘enemy' operation and called on the Thai government officially to expose and denounce the airwaves intruder.”
The minister assured him that this would only serve to make the broadcasts that much more popular with the Thai people.

When Jane took Betty back to the Queen's Hotel, they ran into Julia McWilliams and Gregory Bateson having drinks on the porch. Betty had always liked Julia. She admired her dedication and absolute discretion but had always wondered at someone her age, and with her obvious capabilities, being stuck behind a file cabinet. Looking at her now, Betty immediately saw that running the Kandy Registry had injected Julia with a new self-confidence. Julia, with her high security clearance, was in charge of the OSS camp's
“nerve center,”
according to Fisher Howe, who headed the maritime unit and was privy to virtually every top secret, including “highly sensitive” plans and operations. “You can be an able and effective intelligence officer but not be under-cover, and we were not,” recalled Howe. “But she was very effective in the job she had.”

The job itself was laborious and, at times, maddeningly dull—accessioning, cross-indexing, circulating, and filing the thousands of dispatches, orders, and espionage and sabotage reports that flowed in from Washington and OSS field operations all over Southeast Asia—but it carried with it a grave responsibility. In September alone, Julia plowed through 365 pouches from Washington, which were broken down into about six hundred classified intelligence inputs that had to be filed and then stored under lock and key in the Registry. After much trial and error, Julia developed what she hoped was a
“fool-proof locator system,”
with master cards on each current field operation including the names of all the agents and student recruits, and their various code names. The nightmare was that the theater commander, Air Force, OWI, and other branches all had their own systems. Julia vigorously campaigned for them to settle on one uniform procedure so their documents could be related and communications streamlined.

She was known to relieve the tedium by making fun of OSS's obsession with opaque codes, once writing to the Code and Cipher Branch to air-pouch a little black book,
“one of those you have giving people numbers and funny names like Fruitcake #385,”
and adding, in a deprecating tone, “frequently we find references to them here and no one knows who on earth is being referred to.” In case the paranoid denizens of the Cipher Branch mistook her flippancy for a lack of caution, she
concluded solemnly, “This document will be kept very securely in a fireproof Mauser safe, and will be available to no one except Col. Heppner.” Over time, her droll style became immediately recognizable to her OSS colleagues, as did her refreshing attempts to cut through the red tape. One urgent request for information from headquarters in Washington contained this memorable postscript:
“If you don't send Registry that report we need, I shall fill the next pouch to Washington with itching powder and virulent bacteriological disease, and change all the numbers, as well as translating the material into Singhalese and destroying the English version.”

Thinner and browner, Julia exhibited a new directness and ease—especially around men. The nervous giggle that had once punctuated her sentences had been replaced by a loud, whooping laugh that was contagious. Always warm and engaging, if a bit awkward at times, she had morphed into the social butterfly of Detachment 404. To Guy Martin, she appeared
“exuberant and extraordinary socially outgoing—if you put her with a hundred people, by the end of the afternoon she would know fifty.”

During the time Betty spent in Kandy, she, Jane, and Julia went on a number of sightseeing trips around Ceylon. One afternoon, they went elephant riding, and it transpired that the large male pachyderm carrying Julia got a three-foot erection.
“Julia was so embarrassed,”
recalled Betty. “She was just beside herself. It was her time of the month, and she didn't want anyone to know. We all thought it was hilarious—who knew elephants had such sensitive noses! But whenever anyone mentioned it she would blush and get terribly flustered.” It did not stop them from teasing her relentlessly, but Betty remembered thinking that “in some ways Julia was not as mature as she might have been.”

Betty could see by the way Julia lit up around Paul Child that she liked him.
“It was already obvious,”
she said. While it was true that Julia found him extremely intelligent and attractive, she also confided to her diary that he was taciturn and remote, “not an easy man.” Much as it pained her, she also knew she was not his type. She had watched him flirt with Jane and Peachy and was aware that he liked “a more worldly Bohemian type.” She had learned enough about him to know that he
was widely traveled and highly cultivated, and that he sought out similarly capable, adventurous companions. With her, Paul was chatty and chummy. They often went to dinner and the movies and on occasional day trips with others from their little group. But that was as far as it went. She was afraid that was as far as it would ever go.

While she commiserated with herself (
“Wish I were in love, and that what I considered
really attractive
was in love with me”
), Julia was not one to mope. She hid her disappointment and soldiered on. Perhaps hoping to be seen in a new, more alluring light, she gave Paul a photo of herself posing on her cot in an elegant dress and pearls, smiling up into the camera, one bare leg coquettishly crossed over the other. If there was any implied invitation in the photo, Paul missed it. He sent the picture straight on to his brother with the explanation that it was an interesting interior shot of their quarters. Identifying the female as
“Julia, the 6′2″
bien-jambee
,”
he continued in a pedantic tone, “The room is a typical 10 × 18 with its coir matting, woven cadjan walls, wooden shutters, and army bed with folded-up mosquito net above.”

Julia was not wrong in surmising that Paul did not reciprocate her romantic feelings. He thought of her as
“a warm and witty girl”
with long legs and a good if relatively unexercised mind. The perfectionist in Paul found much to analyze and to critique, as was his habit when describing available women to his married twin. He cringed at her uninformed, simple-minded pronouncements—
“She says things like this, ‘I can't understand what they see in that horrible little old Gandhi'”
—and mannered, “overstressed” way of speaking that led to “gasping when she talks excitedly.” He saw Julia as the typical product of her Pasadena childhood, “safely within the confines of her class and station,” with the predictable limitations in terms of knowledge, culture, and sophistication. He also saw how badly she wanted to break away from the controlling influence of her father. He theorized that she was “in love” with her father in the classic Oedipal formulation (if in an entirely unconscious and harmless way) and had spent her life deferring to him “for much of her thinking and acting.”

At thirty-one, Julia was “a grown-up little girl.” He was genuinely fond of her, and he empathized with her predicament, but only up to
a point. “She is trying to be brave about being an old maid,” he told Charles, adding that he felt sure she would marry him “but isn't the ‘right' woman from
my
standpoint!” Her virginity put him off. Her “wild emotionalism” and “slight atmosphere of hysteria” got on his nerves. He could sense her sexual shyness, the neophyte's frustration: “I feel very sorry for her because while I see clearly what the cure is, I do not see clearly who will apply it.”