A Covert Affair (30 page)

As the night wore on, they found themselves in the same long room—separated by a pink silk screen—as a Chinese general and his party of friends. The Chinese got very drunk, particularly the general.
“It was fortunate our two gals were tough and worldly,”
Paul noted in his first cheerful letter home in weeks. “There's something about a Chinese
general vomiting a few feet away that might otherwise have taken the fine edge off the bowl of eels and garlic we were eating.”

A few days later, Paul reported that he, Julia, and Jeanne, along with two other guys, had spent a pleasant weekend together. They had all packed into a jeep and driven forty miles up the Burma Road, where they turned off and headed up into the mountains to a tiny hotel with hot spring that had been built by Governor Long Yun of Yunnan province in 1943. The resort was called Wenjen and was a favorite of off-duty GIs as well as high-ranking members of the Kuomintang, who came to partake of the curative benefits of the radium baths. They all soaked in the steaming water that bubbled up from an underground stream, meekly choosing one of the more temperate baths after the moon-faced manager warned that only hardened veterans—those who stayed for more than a week—could brave the premium pools. These, he boasted in his incongruous English, were “hotsy totsy.” Afterward, Jeanne recalled a glowing, pink-skinned Julia declaring:
“Do you realize that if everyone in the damned war had a Sani Hot Springs bath every day, it would be over by now?”
That night, Paul and his two male colleagues piled into one bedroom, while Julia and Jeanne shared another. The next day they all went for a long walk in the pouring rain along fields of ripening rice and up through a trail of thick pines to a monastery. The mountains looked magnificent cloaked in a heavy mantle of gray mist. Looking down on the emerald green valley, Paul again felt inspired by the beauty and drama of China.

Paul did everything with Julia that other couples did without acknowledging that they were one. They planned their days off together and went on hikes in the hills, jeeped to the Black Dragon Pool temple to collect rare stone rubbings, and went sampaning at twilight on the lake. They went on shopping trips, explored the crowded flower markets, and visited out-of-bounds Chinese restaurants where they sampled the different cuisines—Fukinese, Pekinese, Annamese, Szechuan, and Cantonese. He applauded her adventurousness in bypassing the flown-in American chow available at the Red Cross canteen to join him in these forbidden feasts, in which they binged on steamed dumplings, crisp duck, mixed green vegetables, and succulent baby frog legs
swimming in sweet-and-sour sauce. Invariably, the outings were followed by bacillary distress (dysentery), which might as well have been on the menu and was, as a consequence, a major topic of dinner table conversation among Chinese and Westerners alike. Paul took pleasure in helping to educate Julia's meat-and-potatoes palate, and he looked on with real pride as she became a champion chopstick wielder.
“They were an odd couple, but it turned out to be a very good match,”
recalled Thibaut de Saint Phalle. “Julia did not feel she was very beautiful and was delighted to be with someone like him. Paul felt he was in charge of her, and she let him think that, and they were very good together.”

Over the course of these outings, Paul began to see Julia in a new light. He was impressed with her competence in riding herd on a staff of ten assistants and
“running a very complicated operation with great skill.”
He also liked that she was gutsy; he observed in a letter to Charles that she was
“a wonderful ‘good scout' in the sense of being able to take physical discomfort, such as mud, leeches, tropical rains, and lousy food.”
She seemed completely “unflappable,” as in Betty's account of their white-knuckle flight over the Hump—when the lights began to flicker and the plane bucked and rolled through lightning and icy rain, and she looked over to see Julia calmly reading a book as though she had made the Himalayan run a million times.
“The China theater was a lot rougher than Ceylon,”
acknowledged Betty. “Julia rose to the occasion. It brought out the best in her.”

All the time Paul and Julia spent together did not go unnoticed.
“They were always together,”
recalled Betty, laughing. “We were all rooting for a romance. We watched their relationship develop day by day.” They lived in very close quarters, and everyone could see exactly what was going on, even though the couple in question remained clueless. Most evenings after dinner, Paul would head to Julia's room, taking his artwork, along with favorite novels and volumes of poetry. Though he had earlier complained to his brother that part of his problem was that he
“never liked the idea—which is so appealing to many men—of Man the Sculptor, molding and shaping a woman to his desire,”
Paul had made rather a project of Julia.
“He sort of took her on like one of the trainees in his design section,”
mused Betty. “He would read aloud
to her for hours. Everyone knew she was completely mad about him. I don't know why it took him so long to get it.”

Recent experience, however, had taught Paul caution. He had opened his heart to Marjorie only to be ruthlessly cut down. In retrospect, he realized that he had taken too much for granted. He had been so sure that he recognized her as “the one” Bartleman had promised that he had forged ahead too quickly, and the intensity of his feelings had probably frightened her off. Never again would he
“plunge head-first into the Pierian Spring.”

In the meantime, everything in Kunming was in flux. The rice harvest had begun in anticipation of the approaching monsoons. A late summer crop of peace rumors had everyone riveted. Rosie's intelligence team was trying to track down the source of
“a great whisper campaign”
that the Japanese had put out peace feelers. With the tide turning against Japan in the Pacific, it was believed that a handful of Japanese officials in Switzerland were attempting to negotiate for an end to hostilities through the OSS organization in Europe. Even their OSS detachment in Kunming was in transition. They appeared to be headed for one of those dreaded periodic reorganizations that sent people whirling off in all directions never to be seen again. Jack Moore, the faithful assistant who had been with Paul since Washington, was being sent to another part of China. Already several people had come by to bid Paul farewell, apparently taking for granted that his present position had also run its course. He found himself trying to pare down on belongings in order
“to be light for any eventuality.”

As if that were not enough to deal with, they were all a little on edge due to the cholera epidemic that was upon them. The summer rains had brought flooding of dramatic proportions, and with it disease. The overflowing canals immersed low-lying roads and submerged the paddy fields, in some areas creating small islands where the peasants continued
“placidly hoeing crops, amid the rushing brown waters.”
The new restrictions prevented OSS personnel from going into town, and brought Paul's regular forays to Chinese restaurants to an abrupt end. It was the glorious sense of freedom as much as the flavorful food that he missed. It was only the communal mess hall for the foreseeable
future, and SPAM in all its many incarnations, but he would
“rather stay alive and be bored.”

Betty's MO group had been working for months on leaflets warning the Japanese that
“something terrible was going to happen in August”
—all part of an effort to soften the enemy's morale prior to the American invasion—so that when it actually happened it came as a shock. One of the MO teams, allowing for no cease-fire in the war of subversion, decided to capitalize on the news by putting an extra out on in the streets of Hengyang trumpeting a bomb so powerful that it had blown away the city of Hiroshima.
“Until that time the people of Hengyang had accepted every MO fabrication as gospel truth,”
Betty recalled. This time, however, they just shook their heads. Such a weapon was simply not to be believed.

They scarcely had time to absorb the terrifying reality of the atom bomb when Mother Nature, in a demonstration of her own terrible power, brought torrential rains down on their heads for days on end. The canals and marshes burst their banks and turned the rice paddies into dark, threatening lakes. The boiling brown water swamped Kunming and, thanks to a well-fortified surrounding wall, turned the OSS compound into a three-foot-deep lagoon. They were forced to commute from building to building in bright orange inflatable life rafts taken from the airplanes, rowing past floating office equipment and assorted military bric-a-brac. In some places, the engineers managed to rig rickety pontoon bridges out of gasoline drums and planks, but about half the time people slipped and fell into the drink. At first, the absurdity of the situation inspired a certain sense of adventure and hilarity. Betty and Julia were intentionally “dunked” more than once by gallant colleagues extending a helping hand. When the water level rose, GIs in hip boots were brought in to rescue secret documents and perishable gear and carry it to higher ground. After a few days, it ceased to be fun. Everything they owned was soggy, dank, and mildewed.
“All the toilets and cesspools are flooded, of course,”
Paul noted dolefully, “and the amenities of life are impossible to preserve.”

The rising tide drove colonies of large, voracious rats out of the ditches and up into their compound and workrooms. Nothing was safe
from their ravenous jaws. One morning Paul discovered that the pack of Lucky Strikes he had left on his desk the previous evening had been devoured. All that was left was a few strips of silver paper and a scattering of rat turds. A young major took to hunting the vermin
“as a purely sporting proposition”
and knocked off fifteen to twenty a night with his .22 rifle. After days of putting up with Paul scoffing at his stories of the rats' formidable size, the major brought in proof in the form of a bucket of rat carcasses, soaked in gasoline per the medic's orders to kill the fleas and lice. Paul measured the biggest one and found that it was, incredibly, twenty-two inches long, not counting the tail.
“That's a big rat,”
he wrote Charles, “as big as a beaver, damn near.”

It was the worst flood in a generation. The dislocation experienced by OSS personnel was nothing compared to the havoc the deluge wreaked on the surrounding countryside. Betty recalled Chinese villages of mud huts
“melting like chocolate,”
the owners looking on helplessly as their few humble belongings were swept away by the current. Farmers drowned in their own paddy fields. Corpses drifted by on the swollen river. Everyone who could fled to the hills, carrying what they were able to in bundles slung on shoulder poles or dragging their belongings on overburdened carts. It was only when the rains stopped that the full horror of the disaster became clear. As the water seeped away, the edges of town filled with washed-out refugees. There were long lines of coffins in the street. Many had been built crudely and with such haste that they were too short for the occupants, whose pale, waxen feet stuck out. Sturdier models boasted a live rooster tied to the top or even K rations, to help speed the departed on their way. Paul was struck by the resilience of the Chinese,
“a tough people who never know when they're licked.”
As soon as the sun peeked out, they were busy laying wheat and rice on their roofs to dry and digging under the muddy water for cabbages and onions.

The flooding had scarcely begun to subside when the second atom bomb brought the capitulation of the Japanese.
“The sudden ending of the war was taken in stride, with no noise, and work going on as unremittingly as before,”
Paul wrote Charles on August 16. “There is work for us to do, of a less violent kind than before, although some violence is still ahead.”

The cataclysmic events of the previous week had completely altered the situation in China. Two days after the Hiroshima bomb, Russia had declared war on Japan and launched a massive offensive into Manchuria. The incoming Russian soldiers only added to the Pandora's box of pressures and factions in a country torn by years of fighting among the Japanese, Chinese Nationalists, and Chinese Communists. As both the Nationalists and the Communists began moving in to take over the towns and cities formerly occupied by the enemy, tensions escalated. The warlords, many of whom had been playing both sides against the middle, now saw which way the wind was blowing and quickly realigned themselves with the Kuomintang against the Communists. The confusion and uncertainty led to sporadic fighting. Determined not to be drawn into the middle of a civil war in China, Washington instructed the OSS to avoid getting involved in the internal conflict. At the same time, however, Wedemeyer's troops were ordered to help “sustain” Chiang's government and aid it in establishing its authority over the countryside. More significantly, U.S. forces were to allow Kuomintang troops to accept Japanese surrenders. It was all too clear to the many OSS intelligence officers scattered throughout China and Indochina that this dream of American “neutrality” was an impossibly fine line to walk and was doomed from the outset.

In the days that followed, OSS headquarters in Kunming went into overdrive. Eight mercy missions were launched to protect the twenty thousand American and Allied POWs and the roughly fifteen thousand civilian internees being held in camps from Manchuria all the way to Indochina. The immediate concern was for the safety of the prisoners in the event that the defeated Japanese chose to ignore the imperial cease-fire order or, worse, chose to inflict reprisals on their captives. Betty's MO unit began churning out leaflets advising the Japanese that the OSS teams parachuting in were there “for humanitarian reasons only.” All the frantic preparations—for rescue operations, food and medical drops, and evacuation—had to be undertaken despite further flooding, sodden runways, and weather delays caused by low ceilings and poor visibility. Adding to the drama was the uncertain fate of the six-man OSS team dispatched to Mukden in Manchuria to rescue General “Skinny” Wainwright, who along with his men had endured more
than three years of brutal captivity since the surrender at Corregidor in May 1942. After thirteen nerve-wracking days filled with wild rumors that the Japanese had murdered Wainwright, the OSS team flashed the news that they had plucked Skinny from the POW camp at Hsian and were bringing him back to safety.