A Covert Affair (27 page)

Just before she left Java, OSS brass had advised her that the organization was being restructured into oblivion and would limp along as the Interim Research and Intelligence Division until its wartime function ended on the last day of business in December 1945. The news had thrown her for a bit of a loop. Who exactly was she working for, or, more to the point, whose eyes would be perusing her eyes-only intelligence reports? Was it all going straight to the State Department, or would it be crossing other desks along the way?
“We are all slightly confused as to where our stuff will eventually land,”
Jane had radioed Lloyd George. In the meantime, there was a serious shortage of personnel in the intelligence sections. With Cora DuBois recalled home, there would be no one left in Kandy to receive their reports and translate them into a usable form. Jane had “slews of material” to pouch to Washington, but it was all in Malay or Dutch or French, and she was afraid it would never get read.

Unable to extend her pleasant interlude in Bangkok any longer, Jane packed her meager belongings—she had given away almost all her clothes to the female POWs—and made plans to return to Calcutta, where she would make arrangements for her transportation to the United States. Her last days were caught up in the social whirl of victory celebrations. Pridi gave a lavish dinner party featuring a full
orchestra and the Royal Siamese Ballet. The Thais were generous hosts: the liquor flowed freely, the food was plentiful, and scores of waiters danced attendance. No one seemed to notice the absence of the prima ballerina, who, in a diva display worthy of Nijinsky, pulled a no-show at the last minute.

Jane felt rather detached from the festivities but could not hide her amusement at the ceremony in which the regent decorated General Stratemeyer with the Order of the White Elephant, Third Class. For some reason, the name of the award struck her as hilarious—
“it was so fitting.”
Suddenly she was laughing uncontrollably. The effort to choke back the mirth that came fountaining forth earned her a reproachful glance from Howard,
“although he, too, was turning pink.”
Then it was Howard's turn to be honored. Jane watched with something akin to motherly pride as the general awarded him the Silver Star and the regent bestowed another medal, both of which she judged “richly deserved.” Still, she could not help thinking they were all white elephants now and there was nothing the Thai people—or, for that matter, most of the old empire's inhabitants—wanted more than to see the back of them.

Waiting on the runway of the Bangkok airport after several failed attempts to gain sufficient altitude, Jane was doing the complex figuring on the odds of her surviving another run on one of the “war wearies.” It was a relatively short flight to Singapore, but the prospect did not look promising. After some debate, the crew decided to inspect the engines and discovered a dead raven in one of them. Sure it was a sign, Jane refused to get back on board. Howard had to
“physically push”
her onto the plane. Once she got to Calcutta, she put her foot down. She declined a priority flight to Washington and instead took the first troopship headed for New York. It would take a month, but at least she would make it home in one piece. Shortly after they set out, the ship's captain, on hearing she was an artist, asked her to paint a large canvas to serve as a kind of banner when they pulled into New York harbor. The USS
A. W. Greely
would be one of the first ships returning from the China theater, and he wanted to make an entrance. She submitted a series of sketches, and inevitably he chose the one she liked least:
“It showed a huge G.I. in a rickshaw pulled by an Asian in a conical hat
.
The G.I. had a cigar in his mouth and had his feet up. Around the rickshaw were little Japanese soldiers running in all directions, with the flag of the Rising Sun lying in tatters.”

For most of the thirty-day crossing, Jane worked on the enormous painting, which covered a six-hundred-square-foot stretch of canvas. When they reached New York harbor on December 6, the captain draped it triumphantly over the side of the ship. The phalanx of photographers on the dock captured it in all its glory, and it received more publicity than any other painting Jane had ever done. It made her “shudder” just to think of it.

A handful of friends were at Pier 88 to meet her. She could tell by their raised eyebrows and slightly dismayed expressions that she must look a sight. It was an icy mid-December morning, and she was dressed in her threadbare tropical uniform—a khaki shirt and skirt, tightly belted because it was now two sizes too large, WAC shoes, and no stockings. One of the Red Cross girls on the boat had lent her a sweater. As soon as she could, Jane telephoned her parents in San Francisco. When the exclamations of joy had subsided, her mother, who always had her priorities straight, asked,
“Darling, do you have clothes?”

Over the next few days, Jane went on a shopping binge using her mother's charge accounts at Bergdorf Goodman, Bonwit Teller, and Henri Bendel. On December 11, armed with a new Mark Cross bag, she took the train to Washington. She reported to the old Q Building, where the remaining operational part of the OSS was still located. Much had changed since she had left for Ceylon. Most of
“the heavy-duty thinkers”
in the R & A divisions had been assigned to the State Department, while the so-called “thin rapiers of steel” in the operational units had been transferred to the War Department.

A wave of nostalgia hit her as she negotiated the familiar maze of corridors and peered into offices filled with cardboard boxes, and she stepped blindly into one long room only to find herself suddenly face to face with a group of her old colleagues:
“No longer in khaki outfits with sleeves rolled up and with black sweat stains under the arms and on the backs, but in beautifully tailored winter uniforms. Each chest was displaying rows and rows of ribbons (‘fruit salad,' as it was called then)
and each shoulder was sporting a shiny new eagle of a full (or ‘chicken') colonel.” Even Bob Koke, who had scarcely bothered with shoes when she first knew him on Kuta beach, was all spit and polish. She felt a great rush of affection for them—her “comrades-in-arms.” In the difficult, sometimes dangerous times over the past two years, they had been her blood brothers, her closest friends, “her family.” To cover up her unaccustomed sentimentality, she leaned against the door, folded her arms, and announced in a droll voice, “Well, well! As the Chinese say, the sky is black with chickens coming home to roost.”

Jane handed in her assessment of the situation in Indonesia—a fat document that she had labored over for many hours on the ship, writing and rewriting it until she was satisfied. She had always been given free rein in expressing her opinions about the military and political disarray she had witnessed, and she felt no need to hold back now, despite the wider distribution that her final report would probably receive. The long voyage had given her time to summarize the trend of developments and crystallize her thoughts about the lessons of the U.S. experience there. The Allied victory over Japan had not restored the prewar order in Indonesia or, for that matter, in most of Southeast Asia. Dutch rule was most likely doomed, and the French were under attack in Indochina. The Philippines and Burma were preparing for independence, and even India, with all its explosive potential, was on the road toward a similar goal. It spelled the end of European domination in that part of the world.
“The Japanese had planted a time bomb in Southeast Asia, which was nationalism, through showing that the white man could be defeated by a yellow people,”
Jane wrote. “All the troops, shipping, arms, and supplies would be unable to suppress the nationalist movements.” This thesis was supported by some thirty pages of research consisting of a chronology and her detailed analysis of day-to-day events. What she could have added, but did not, were these lines from a Kipling ballad: “Then, underneath the cold official word: / ‘This is not really half of what occurred.'”
*

The minute her report landed on the desk at headquarters, it was stamped “Top Secret.” It struck her as laughable that anything so painfully obvious could be considered confidential.

She was asked to stay on in Washington for another day, as Under-secretary of State Dean Acheson wanted a chance to debrief her. Jane found Acheson to be
“a gentleman of the old school”
—conservative, European-oriented, but very competent. He listened to her attentively, questioned her closely, but did not argue. After spending several hours with him, she was asked to report to the State Department's Abbot Low Moffat, head of the Division of Southeast Asian Affairs, an anti-colonialist who was a holdover from the Roosevelt/Donovan years. Also present was John F. Cady, a Burma analyst for OSS during the war who had been transferred to the Office of Intelligence Research for South Asia, and Richard Allen, representing North European Affairs. As by that time departmental personnel from the European side determined policy—the Russian threat had clear priority—while the old CBI hands were comparatively unimportant, Allen's was the loudest voice in the room.

Jane again described the situation in Indonesia and Vietnam as it appeared to her and patiently answered their questions. It soon became clear that Allen had an issue with the whole idea of Indonesian independence and found it suspect. He argued that Indonesia could never be a unified nation (
“there are about a thousand islands and they all speak a different language”
) and was still very much a Dutch colony. Jane politely pointed out that she had traveled through all of the larger islands and that all the inhabitants spoke a lingua franca—Malay.

“Sukarno is a traitor and a Japanese collaborator,”
Allen objected.

Jane tried to explain that it was not as black-and-white as that. It was not at all clear that Sukarno deserved to be classified simply as a puppet quisling of the Japanese. He had a long prewar record as a champion of Indonesian independence. It was true that the Japanese, once they saw that they could not win the war, had tried to turn the Indo-nesians—along with other colonial Southeast Asian peoples—against the Allies, including the United States. This shift in policy had changed the Japanese propaganda complexion. The Japanese had actively encouraged
the anti-Dutch nationalist movement led by Sukarno, but their endeavors had met with relatively little success. Jane knew that some nationalist leaders in other countries—Dr. Ba Maw of Burma, for one—had collaborated with the Japanese more than they had any excuse for doing, but in her view Sukarno did not fit that mold. She firmly believed he was anti-Japanese at heart and that he had had no choice but to cooperate with the occupying Japanese army. “Sukarno has always been a nationalist, who has agitated against the Dutch his whole life,” Jane said heatedly. “To him, Dutch and Japanese overlord-ship is the same thing.”

It came to her that this man Allen was not befuddled, as she had first thought, but obstinately wedded to his own view of America's strategic links in the Pacific. Moreover, he did not share her moral reservations about America acting as a handmaiden to the mercenary colonial powers. It was clear to her that the State Department view was that American interest lay in the maintenance of the British, French, and Dutch colonial regimes, especially if that meant those regimes would be better and more cooperative allies to the United States. The State Department was in favor of liberalizing the regimes only insofar as it made them easier to maintain and would check Soviet influence in stimulating revolt. In the meantime, nothing would be said or done that might compromise relations with the Europeans at such a sensitive time.

After a series of back-and-forth exchanges that escalated into a sharp disagreement, Jane lost her temper.
“I've just come back from there,”
she snapped. “Are you interviewing me because you want me to tell you something or do you just wish to be confirmed in your preconceptions?”

That sour note ended the interview and brought her OSS career to a close. She had typed a letter of resignation and submitted it with her report. A few colleagues tried to convince her to stay on, but she would not hear of it. Her duty to her country was over, and she wanted to get back to painting and her “real life.” Bob Koke even offered to put her name in for a meritorious service decoration, but Jane just snorted in disbelief.
“Don't you remember that afternoon in Batavia?”
he prompted, referring to her heroic plunge through the OSS headquarters window in a hail of bullets.

“If medals are being awarded for stupidity,” she replied with a wry grin, “I'll accept one.”

Even as she said it, at the back of her mind she was already thinking that she might write a book about the revolution in Indonesia. She pictured the bloodied bodies of the two boys slumped in the front seat of the jeep. Her exposure to the indignities and miseries underlying the confrontation with the Dutch had made an indelible impression. It would take time to absorb fully, yet she was aware she had registered with dismay a kind of arrogance in the State Department's view of Southeast Asia that was in itself a form of imperial droit du seigneur. She felt weary and unaccountably sad. All she wanted to do was to get home to San Francisco in time for the holidays. Even though she had sworn never to take another airplane as long as she lived, she crossed her fingers and caught a flight to the coast.

Chungking reminded Paul of Paris in winter, only without the amenities. The first few weeks of 1945 were bone-chillingly cold, the sky was a relentless gray, and the rain never stopped. He slept in long underwear and socks beneath three wool army blankets and could not get warm. He arose at dawn
“more icicle than man”
and sat huddled in his overcoat, his breath fogging in the raw morning air, blinding himself working on charts, maps, and diagrams by the light of a feeble Chinese candle, which consisted of a small cup of water and fat with a string in the middle. The electricity was intermittent at best due to the pitifully short supply of current produced by the power station, which ran on Szechuan brown coal and could not begin to keep up with the demands of the large and growing U.S. military contingent.