A Covert Affair (25 page)

Early one morning, woken by the sound of gunfire, she crouched on her small balcony, pistol in hand. Peering down through the pearly dawn light, she saw a
“fat Dutch sergeant”
raise his gun and take aim at boy on a bicycle. The shot echoed in the empty street and rocked Jane back on her heels. It was cold-blooded murder. The senselessness of the act filled her with rage. “What a boy was doing on his bicycle at that time of the morning, I do not know,” she recalled. “The boy fell off, twitched for a few seconds, and lay still in a spreading pool of blood. I have never in my life come so close to killing someone. I aimed at the back of the sergeant's thick red neck, only a few feet below me so that even I could not miss it, but somehow I could not squeeze the trigger.” She went back inside and curled up on her bed, feeling very small and “an awful coward.” The next morning, the boy's body, lying by his bicycle, was still on the road bordering the canal.

In late October, a cable came from Washington ordering Jane out of the country:
GET FOSTER
OUT OF JAVA
. The gist of the message was that she was to be evacuated from the danger zone because the State Department was concerned that it would make “an unfavorable impression” on the U.S. public if an American woman was killed in Indonesia.

That got her back up.
“Public opinion be damned!”
Jane fumed after the radio officer had finished reading her the message. “What kind of an impression do they think it will make on
me
?” She made some more noisy objections, but Bob Koke cut her off, stating that he was the top-ranking American officer in Java and she had no choice but to obey orders. She would have to leave for Singapore with him that afternoon. In a conciliatory tone he added that she could always come back later “when things quieten down.” Jane laughed and pointed out with a kind of amazed bitterness that things were not likely to “quieten down for years.” Annoyed and exasperated, Koke threatened her with court-martial. Jane just laughed again. She had been threatened with that before, she replied, and—this last with a sneer—“by bigger brass than you.”

“OK, Jane,”
he said, sounding pained. He knew her too well to try to argue. “But come to Singapore for my sake or I'll be in trouble.”

As soon as they landed, she fired off a furious cable to headquarters
in Kandy:
HAD NOT
BARGAINED FOR SIT-SESSION IN SINGAPORE
.

The reply was designed to put her in her place:
PEACE OF WORLD
WILL NOT—REPEAT NOT—BE ENDANGERED BY YOUR REMAINING IN SINGAPORE FEW HOURS
.

Jane had scarcely enough time in Singapore to catch her breath before receiving orders to go to Saigon. She had done good work in Java, and OSS Washington wanted a comparable report on the revolution under way in southern Indochina as the French scrambled to pick up the pieces of their old empire. Jane spoke French but knew none of the local languages, and she had no background in the region and no expertise to fall back on. Coughlin had confidence in her, however, and felt she knew how to get on in that part of the world. Not that she objected to going to Saigon, far from it. She loved the jolly provincial town, the capital of the richest of all French colonies, with its beautiful green parks, open-air cafés, and famous Cercle Sportif, where the smart set had gathered on the terrace to sip
citron pressé
and watch the tennis. She had expected to find the city in ruins, based on what she had heard, and was surprised to find it much the same as she remembered, if “slightly shabbier.” The airport was an absolute shambles,
but Jane was so relieved to be on the ground she hardly noticed. It had been another appalling flight. The C-47's engines had shuddered and coughed alarmingly (
“the remnants of sugar in the gas tank”
), and they flew very low over the flat country the whole way, the plane just skimming the brown-and-green-counterpane squares of the half-drowned paddies below. It would have been picturesque if not for the prospect of going nose first into the rice.

From the little Jane knew about the situation in Saigon, she had a depressing feeling of déjà vu. It seemed that nationalistic fever was catching. Unrest was spreading across the old imperial territories of Southeast Asia—Thailand, Ceylon, Malaya, Burma, Java, and onward. In Indochina—actually encompassing Annam in the east, Tonkin in the south, and Cambodia and Laos in the north—French rule was threatened. The native peoples had heard about the coming Philippine independence and were less than happy about returning to the yoke of colonialism.

Sensing a power vacuum after the sudden Japanese surrender, the Viet Minh had rushed to declare its sovereignty by staging what it called the August Revolution. On August 22, 1945, the Viet Minh organized an Independence Day celebration in Saigon, mirroring the uprising in Hanoi the week before, which would lead to the establishment of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam by Ho Chi Minh. The Viet Minh, which had forged close links with the OSS during the war by providing information about Japanese troop movements, were hopeful of American support because of FDR's rhetoric about self-determination and the United States' promise to liberate oppressed peoples. But as far as Truman was concerned, the die had been cast at Potsdam, where it had been decided to temporarily partition Indochina at the 16th parallel. The British, always willing to play the heavy in matters of the Crown, had agreed to occupy southern Indochina until the French could send forces to reclaim it and reestablish the monarchy. North of the 16th parallel, Chinese forces under Chiang Kai-shek would assume control from the Japanese. To Jane, it seemed like another confusing mess. For better or worse, her assignment was to observe the French reconquest and report on the political trends.

In the beginning of September, British Major General Sir Douglas David Gracey and his crack Indian 20th Infantry Division had arrived in Saigon and immediately ordered the provisional nationalist Viet Minh government to suspend business. Gracey enlisted the surrendering Japanese to help keep the peace, allowing them to resume their posts and take back their guns in the process. Once again, this struck the natives as the worst kind of double-cross. Gracey also released and rearmed the French POWs, who promptly went on a rampage. The violent reprisals quickly led to all-out conflict with the Viet Minh. The native Annamese, professing their willingness to die for liberty, retaliated, shooting up homes, burning shops, and ambushing foreigners. The depth of their sentiment was reflected in their slogan: “Death to all Europeans.” In the Saigon suburb of Tan Dinh, a frenzied mob attacked residents in the French-Eurasian district of Cité Hérault, taking more than three hundred white and Eurasian men, women, and children hostage. Approximately half the hostages were slain during the predawn hours, while the remaining half were released after being beaten and tortured.

The next day, September 26, the OSS chief, Lieutenant Colonel A. Peter Dewey, was shot and killed at a roadblock after reportedly being mistaken for a French officer.
*
The roadblock, a barrier of tree limbs and brush, had been erected just five hundred yards from the OSS headquarters at the Villa Ferrier. Dewey, who was driving, had slowed down in order to maneuver around the barrier when without warning a hidden light machine gun opened fire. Dewey took a bullet to the left temple and died instantly. Another OSS officer, Captain Herbert J. Bluechel, managed to escape from the overturned vehicle and made it back to the OSS headquarters. During the fierce exchange that ensued, six Viet Minh were killed by the OSS pinned down inside the Villa Ferrier. After several hours, the Viet Minh called a truce and attempted to negotiate an exchange of the dead. The exchange was about to take place when two British Gurkha platoons arrived to save the day.
The Viet Minh grabbed their dead comrades and fled in Dewey's jeep. His body was never recovered.

Before his death, Dewey had managed to air-pouch a comprehensive report of the complex political maneuvers in southern Indochina. He had been sent to Saigon on September 4 to head an eight-man POW evacuation unit charged with taking care of American prisoners and CIs (the critically ill), investigating war crimes, and carrying out other OSS instructions. While there, he had radioed the first account of what had happened in Saigon on Independence Day. Dewey was sympathetic to the Viet Minh's aspirations for independence, and in the days that followed he had been deeply disturbed by the French troops' provocative attacks on the Viet Minh, which he believed had most certainly led to the shocking Tan Dinh massacre.

He and his OSS team had witnessed savage French reprisals—gangs of French troops roaming the streets searching for Viet Minh to set upon and thrash with sticks and bare fists. Viet Minh sentries had been shot execution style. Too outraged to let it pass, Dewey attempted to lodge an official complaint with General Gracey, whose forces stood idly by
“apparently enjoying the sport.”
Gracey responded to the American's protest by declaring the OSS officer persona non grata and ordering him out of the country. Dewey was on his way to the airport to catch his flight to Kandy when his jeep was ambushed. His last prophetic report, received two days before he died, described the beginning of a war:
“Cochinchina is burning, the French and British are finished here, and we [the Americans] ought to clear out of Southeast Asia.”

News of the brutal murder flashed around the world. Dewey was a bona fide American hero and had been handpicked for the Saigon mission. He was the ideal OSS man: the son of an Illinois congressman, he had majored in French at Yale and seen action in France against the Germans before being recommended to Donovan by a family friend. As head of an OSS team, he had parachuted behind enemy lines in southern France and spent six weeks transmitting crucial intelligence on German troop movements before escaping by way of a six-hundred-mile trek through enemy territory. Dewey was in Saigon representing “American interests,” and hard questions were asked about how he
came to be shot in the head at point-blank range after only three weeks in the country.

There were rumors of plots and subplots. The twenty-eight-year-old Dewey, who had no previous experience in the East, had reportedly exceeded his mandate and, acting independently, made contact with the extreme left-wing leaders of the Viet Minh independence movement—activity the British had repeatedly warned him against and perceived as nothing short of subversive. Suspicions about who ordered his killing led to bitter recriminations, with everyone pointing the finger at someone else: some Americans blamed the British Special Operations Executive (SOE), the British blamed the Japanese, and the French naturally blamed the Viet Minh. After a period of diplomatic turbulence—Mountbatten threatened to recall Gracey but never did—Dewey's death was officially blamed on a case of
“mistaken identity.”
If the jeep he had been driving at the time of the incident had been displaying an American flag, per General Gracey's instructions, then “the shot would not have been fired.” In an attempt to mollify the Americans, Ho Chi Minh sent a letter to President Truman expressing his condolences and making it clear that he disapproved of the killing.

By the time Jane reached the wartime capital on October 22, Gracey's troops were embroiled in a protracted guerilla war with the Viet Minh. There had been a series of violent incidents in recent weeks and British troops had retaliated, with orders to punish the offenders on the spot. General Gracey had decided that the Japanese were
“not doing their stuff”
and declared his men would “take strong concerted action and shoot armed Annamese on sight.” The only result had been considerable casualties and loss of Allied prestige. The French forces had started to arrive and had brazenly occupied all the major buildings in Saigon, but were not yet strong enough in number to completely disarm the Japanese and take control. Meanwhile, the French colonials blamed the Japanese for stirring up trouble and accused them of arming the natives, inciting them to riot, and even joining in posing as Annamese.

“Basically, the situation in Saigon was like that in Batavia,”
Jane wrote. “The British were in control of the city but the Viet Minh held
the countryside and the roads. The French had been let out of the camps and, after internment, deprivation, fear and undernourishment, were not normal, any more than the Dutch.” Why exactly the top brass thought she would be safer in Saigon than in Batavia, she would never know.

The British were now in the position of having to help the French forcibly subdue the natives—the same Viet Minh who had allowed them to land without bloodshed only a short time before. As Jane reported to Abbot Low Moffat, head of the Division of Southeast Asian Affairs at the State Department, the British botched the job. According to a memorandum of that conversation,
“[Miss Foster] felt that General Gracey had acted with much less circumspection at Saigon than General Christison had demonstrated at Batavia.”
Furthermore, Gracey “admitted that he had violated his early promise not to intervene politically in the affairs of Indochina, giving as his excuse that when he made the promise he did not appreciate the strength of the Annamite movement.”

Jane spent ten days reporting on conditions in Saigon and came away convinced that the nationalist sentiment of the Annamese was far stronger and more widespread than previously believed.
“It was apparent that the nationalist movement in South Vietnam was less well-organized than it was in the north,”
she observed, adding that the nationalists nevertheless had “an administration of sorts functioning outside of the areas held by the British and French forces.” The Viet Minh were nationalists first and foremost, though they were buttressed by Communist support. Both professed to be pro-American but were really just virulently anti-French and were hoping the United States would help them gain their independence. Moreover, it was clear that the Chinese were enjoying their newfound importance as a world power and were backing the nationalist movements in both northern and southern Indochina. The British and French were trying to reassert military control but with little success. At present, there was an impasse between the Allies and the Viet Minh, with time and numbers on the side of the native forces. It was shaping up to be another prolonged, bloody struggle.
“Boycotts and guerilla operations against the French
could easily continue for years to come,” Jane noted, “and guerilla warfare is in the prospect for an indefinite period.”