A Covert Affair (31 page)

The chaos in the countryside was spreading. There were reports of Soviet troops raping and looting. The OSS “mercy missions” in Mukden were treated very badly, and OSS officers were held up by Chinese troops and robbed of all their arms and valuables by drunken soldiers whose leaders claimed they were “out of control.” There was no redress of any kind and no apologies, and then they were unceremoniously kicked out. The mood in China was changing fast. Even in Chungking, the Chinese troops were becoming increasingly antiforeign and uncooperative. For the past six months, the Soviets had had secret agents in China working hard against U.S. propaganda and intelligence activities and clearly intended to do whatever suited their own interests. The Chinese attitude was that the U.S. presence had served its purpose but now they wanted to be in control and to put the Americans in their place.

By late August, OSS field teams were facing growing conflict with Communists in North China. One rescue party, including a young intelligence officer named John Birch, a Georgia Baptist missionary fluent in several Chinese dialects, encountered a belligerent Communist detachment, which Birch may have further inflamed by addressing the soldiers in what his men later described as a harsh manner. He was warned by his Chinese deputy that this was a dangerous approach but reportedly snapped in frustration,
“Never mind, you don't know what my feelings are. I want to find out how they intend to treat Americans. I don't mind if they kill me. If they do they will be finished for America will punish them with Atomic bombs.”
When he later squared off with one of the Communist officers, who refused to allow the OSS team to continue on to the Allied POW camp near Suchow, a furious Birch attempted to force his way. The Communist officer ordered his men to disarm the OSS team. Birch resisted and he was shot and the rest of the party taken prisoner. Birch was then brutally bayoneted to death, his face mutilated beyond recognition. While many at OSS headquarters
in Kunming believed Birch that overzealous—the official investigation concluded that his conduct had shown
“a lack of good judgment”
—his senseless death after the war was deeply disturbing to the American personnel stationed in China.
*

Heppner, just back from a quick trip to Hanoi, informed them that OSS was beset with problems there as well. Thousands of still-armed Japanese soldiers were
“keeping order”
in French Indochina, Paul reported to his brother, adding that Heppner expected there would be civil war there soon, too. The French refused to recognize the new Republic of Vietnam, and because they suspected that U.S. policy was tacitly favorable to the independence movement, they were working with the British to push hard for “the restoration of white supremacy in the Orient.” The French were more and more openly anti-American and were using agents, wearing stolen U.S. army uniforms, to provoke brawls and disorder to discredit the OSS teams. British agents near Saigon were illegally dropping arms to French guerilla forces, which were using them to pummel the Annamese and put down the independence movement. As a result of the British and French propaganda, U.S. prestige in French Indochina had deteriorated rapidly since VJ Day. If OSS activities in that region were to be curtailed as rumored, the situation would get worse.
“It discourages the Hell out of me,”
Paul concluded. “The people behind these sorts of activities have learned nothing about the necessity of cooperative efforts along international lines—only how to be more and more skillfully bastardly.”

The streets of Kunming were littered with red paper victory signs and exploded firecracker casings. Some of the signs were in English and bore inscriptions which read “Thank you President Roosevelt and President Chiang!” and “Hooray for Final Glorious Victory!” and “Let us now fight for Peace as we fighted [
sic
] for War!” Paper dragons sixty feet long were whirled through the alleyways, followed by civilians with flutes, gongs, and drums. For the first time since all the
“victory hullabaloos”
had begun, the sight of the happy crowds and cheerful cacophony of the firecrackers and instruments gave Paul the feeling that
“perhaps the God damned war is really finished.”

The handing out of medals, by both the Chinese and American military, added to the feeling of finality. Paul was unexpectedly pleased with the parachute wings—embossed gold embroidery worn on the right breast of his new wool uniform—that he was awarded by the general of the Chinese Commandos in gratitude for the part he had played in helping to train the first unit of Chinese parachutists. Heppner presented Julia with the Emblem of Meritorious Civilian Service for her service as head of the Registry of OSS Secretariat, citing her
“important work at registering, cataloging and channeling a great volume of highly classified communications. Her drive and inherent cheerfulness, despite long hours of tedious work, served as a spur to greater effort by those working with her.”
Morale in her section could not have been higher.

After the high excitement of those early days, the weeks that followed were a letdown. Most of them were emotionally unprepared for the abrupt end of the war.
“There was a sudden vacuum which peace had brought,”
recalled Betty. “Up to now there had been purpose, urgency, importance in doing what we were doing. Now things suddenly had no meaning.”

The OSS staff would soon go back to their drab civilian lives. They would go back to ordinary desk jobs they barely remembered after years of excitement and adventure abroad. And back to wives who seemed like strangers and children they scarcely recognized. The long months of separation had left Betty estranged from her own husband. Alex had written from Bangkok to say that he wanted to remain in Thailand to start an English-language newspaper there. Betty knew she would not be joining him and would have to break the news that their marriage was over. Dick Heppner had been away from home for years. What would he be returning to? And, more to the point, what did the future hold for their relationship? Betty could not help feeling dazed by the turn of events and more than a little depressed.
“I was in love,”
she admitted, “and we didn't know what we were going to do.”

Everyone was making preparations to leave. Tommy Davis had come back suddenly and announced he was returning to the States. He was in a very bad way. A burst ulcer and the subsequent hemorrhaging had nearly done him in, and he was being sent home on a special plane. The OSS brass had decided to
“pitch-fork out most of the dames,”
so Betty, Julia, and Jeanne were all awaiting their travel orders. Marjorie was staying on, however, and joining the staff of
Fortune
in Chungking. Al Ravenholt, who was one of the four reporters assigned to cover the signing of the surrender and peace talks (“the lucky dog”), would also be staying on to cover the China theater.
*
For his part, Paul was determined to stay in China. He had turned down a job with the Pentagon and was hoping he could wangle another year with the OSS as it continued its postwar patching up with Chiang's government. That would give him a chance to see some more of the country and, he hoped, get to Peking, which he had to visit before he left or he would never forgive himself.

Of their old gang, he would be saddest to see Julia go.
“Over the 18 months or more that I have known Julia I have become extremely fond of her,”
he reflected in a letter to Charles. “She is really a good friend, and though limited in relation to my concept of
la femme intégrale
, she still is understanding, warm, funny and darling. I hope you will meet her sometime as I believe that even in a U.S.A. context she will show up very well.” She was so “companionable” in so many ways, and he counted her as a “real friend.” He also felt deeply indebted to her. She had been such a comfort and had helped him over many a rough spot by dint of her “simple love and niceness.” Her birthday was on August 15, and Paul had presented her with a sonnet penned in her honor:

How like the
Autumn's warmth is Julia's face

So filled with Nature's bounty, Nature's worth.

And how like summer's heat is her embrace

Wherein at last she melts my frozen earth.

Endowed, the awakened fields abound

With newly green efulgence, smiling flowers.

Then all the lovely riches of the ground

Spring up, responsive to her magic powers.

Sweet friendship, like the harvest-cycle, moves

From scattered seed to final ripened grain,

Which, glowing in the warmth of Autumn, proves

The richness of the soil, and mankind's gain.

I cast this heaped abundance at your feet

An offering to Summer, and her heat.

Touched as she was by Paul's poetic tribute, Julia found it disheartening that “sweet friendship” was what he had in mind. For all his fine words about “heat” and her embrace melting his “frozen earth,” he was still expounding in a platonic vein. Julia had done all she could to fashion herself in the mold of the “worldly” women Paul professed to admire. She had persevered, partly out of the desire to win him and, partly, just hopeful curiosity. She had looked to him as much more than a mentor, hanging on his every word with the intention of both becoming more cultivated and cultivating his interest. To that end, she had read what he read, had eaten what he ate, and had suffered what he suffered—commiserating with all his aches and pains, ups and downs, heartbreaks and setbacks. She had done all she could to impress him with her appreciation of art, music, and food, even to the point of convincing him she was a “gourmet”—a stretch for a woman who could barely fry chicken without starting a grease fire.

Still, at heart she worried she was
“not the woman for him.”
He was a connoisseur and clearly found her lacking. Try as she might, she was “not intellectual.” She did not excite him. When they finally went to bed, it was an act less of passion than of
com
passion. It was almost as if Paul, in his role as tutor, wanted to make sure she completed the lesson plan. Betty recalled Dick jokingly pointing out one evening that the poetry and novels Paul usually had tucked under his arm when he went to see Julia had given way to books about sex.
“Perhaps he's catching her up?”
he had quipped at the time.

Julia, always a realist, described what they shared as a
“friendly passion,”
a mutual enjoyment of each other's company that fell somewhat short of Paul's lofty standards for love and marriage. He saw their affair as a natural expression of their close camaraderie, a condition inextricably rooted in
“the limited and highly concentrated context of Kunming.”
It was an end-of-the-campaign fling. They were hardly the only couple that came together in those last crammed weeks of victory celebrations and drunken farewell dinners. In a snowstorm of confetti and swaying candy-colored paper lanterns, all differences of background, character, and expectation had been shoved aside for one imprudent night. As evidence of this, their clumsy lovemaking had not been a great success. In a letter to his brother, Paul admitted that he was so
“exhausted”
he doubted he “could even get an erection” even with the most seductive Chinese girl.

Julia was sufficiently disconcerted by his lackluster performance that it led her to wonder if she had made a mistake and they were, after all, a badly mismatched pair.
“He is probably not the man for me as he is not constant nor essentially vigorous enough—which is hard to explain,”
she wrote in her diary, searching for a way to explain the feeling of inadequacy, though whether it was his or hers she could not be sure. “Perhaps it is his artisticness that makes him seem to lack a male drive. But his sensitiveness and the fact that we can talk about anything and there are no conventional barriers in thought communication make him a warm and loveable friend.” Beyond everything, they had that bond, that deep sense of “companionship,” and she knew only that she felt an overwhelming desire to protect it and nurture it. Wherever it led.

Meanwhile, the general state of confusion in the China theater delayed both their travel orders for several more weeks. Paul was headed to Peking for a little R & R. After that, barring any-last minute opportunities to stay on with the State Department in China, it was home to Washington. Julia, along with Rosie and Ellie, was scheduled to fly to Calcutta, where she was booked on a troopship for New York. It was just a matter of hanging on for their Hump clearances from Wedemeyer. Planes were few and far between, and there was nothing to do but wait.

With everyone gone and little work to do, Julia and Paul spent whole days together, just talking and trying to make sense of the past and
the future. Neither of them had a job waiting or, for that matter, any clear idea where they would be living on their return. Julia very much wanted to know if their relationship had what OSS memos at the time termed “peacetime potentialities.” Paul protested that he was too tired to even think about what came next.
“I feel washed-out, and almost incapable of facing a new set of circumstances, people, responsibilities, and urgencies,”
he wrote Charles in mid-September. “The war's ending, the rapid change of plans, the slowing down of our pace … combine to let much gas out of my balloon. I feel suspended in a vacuum, with few plans, few interests, and no exuberance.”

Julia persevered. She could see that he was worn out, and her sympathy and solicitousness in the weeks that followed endeared her to him more than ever. By the end of the month, a more serene-sounding Paul reported to Charles that he was benefiting from another sojourn to the Wenjen resort.
“I'm sitting on a little knoll on top of a hill, above Hot Springs,”
he began, adding contentedly, “Julie, in pale blue slacks and dark blue sweater, is sitting beside me.”