A Covert Affair (32 page)

She was always by his side, a soothing presence, coaxing him out of his isolation and sadness. She was good for him. He had to admit he felt better about life—better about himself—when he was with her. Paul tentatively gave in to the idea of being with Julia. He agreed that the only way to measure the depth of their affection was to spend time together when they got back to the United States. They were mature adults—he was forty-three, she was thirty-three—and needed to make a mature decision. He wanted to see how they got on in a more quotidian setting, without the noisy, dramatic backdrop of the war as a distraction. He also wanted to meet her family in Pasadena (i.e., her father). If she immediately sank back into her old life and provincial level, it would never work. After Marjorie had broken his heart, Paul had sworn to his brother that he would never again rush headlong into another relationship.
“Love,”
as he now conceived of it, involved “slow growth, many slowly formed bonds, tests by vicissitudes as well as pleasure, mutual sharing of esthetic experiences, humor, sensory things from food through music to passion, etc.” Any truly lasting relationship, he concluded, would necessitate “a lengthy apprenticeship.”

On October 8, Paul wrote Charles one more letter from Kunming. His departure date had been delayed again. There had been considerable excitement that last week as a minirevolution had broken out between the Generalissimo and Governor Long Yun, resulting in various Chinese soldiers taking pot shots at each other with the remaining OSS contingent caught smack in the middle. They had woken up at five in the morning to the sound of
“machine guns hammering outside, artillery thudding, excited Chinese voices yelling, and running feet.”
Three fully armed Chinese soldiers invaded the girls' living quarters, giving Betty and Julia quite a scare. They heard later that afternoon that the Generalissimo had given orders to General Tu Li-ming “to reorganize the government of Yunnan,” reported Paul. “So this is Chiang's party.”

The uprising was carried out with surprising secrecy and efficiency and was mostly over by midday. Despite Long's surrender, there was a noisy battle that night at the governor's north barracks and more than five hundred Chinese soldiers were killed, with two hundred Americans pinned down in the cross fire just outside the city walls. After two long, boring days punctuated by random shooting it was announced that people could venture back into town, though there was a strict 8:00 p.m. curfew. He and Julia took the opportunity to enjoy a final feast at their favorite Peking restaurant in town. They had spring rolls, long-leaf cabbage and Yunnan ham, winter mushrooms with beet tops, and Peking duck. They topped it all off with a soup, which Paul, ever pedantic, explained was the traditional Chinese way to finish a meal. If there was anything bittersweet about this farewell banquet, he made no mention of it, noting only that the “eats” had been good.

Betty arrived in the capital on a chilly autumn afternoon, the first one from their Kunming detachment to reach home. Heppner had been so concerned for her safety that he had arranged for her departure on a Number 2 priority, unheard of for returning OSS personnel, and he took the extra precaution of sending along two paratroopers as an escort. Perfectly aware that this special treatment could only have been accomplished through some
“substratum chicanery,”
she asked no questions and basked in the luxury of the full-service cabin with its reclining seats, drinks trolley, and hot meals. With the smug indifference of an old China hand, she experienced only the mildest guilt pangs upon learning that she was warming the seat of some poor colonel whose Number 4 priority meant he would be bumped at every stop along the way to Washington and would probably be en route for weeks. She soon got her comeuppance, however. After a brief layover in Karachi, she was informed they would be switching planes and making the rest of the trip on a lumbering hospital transport that had been on the Hump run for the last eighteen months and stank of stale cigarette smoke and disinfectant.

After allowing herself a day to get acclimated to civilian life, Betty took a cab to OSS headquarters. As soon as she stepped past the familiar security guard at the door, she noticed that something was wrong. Q Building was as squat and ugly as she remembered, but once she was inside it seemed like a shell of its former self. It took a few minutes before she realized it was the absence of noise and activity. The place was as hushed and still as a
“mausoleum.”
She passed groups of men and women still in uniform, but all the swagger and urgency of old was replaced by the weary tread of returnees who had just flown across the Pacific and were waiting to be discharged. The executive order to terminate the OSS had taken a hammer to morale. Most OSS veterans had volunteered to go overseas and had performed above and beyond the call of duty, and their drawn faces bore the impact of their sudden dismissal. Betty could not help feeling like
“the returning Confederate soldier looking over the burned-off ground that had once been his home.”

A brisk, beautiful blonde named Kay Halle, apparently known to one and all as “Matta Halle,” directed Betty to an interim office with a sleek desk, three phones, and a
“new, noiseless typewriter.”
Whatever form the new intelligence agency was going to take, it was certainly a step up in office furnishings from the early days when she had shared a drafty room with several colleagues and fought over a single phone and battered Remington. While still in Kunming, Betty had been assigned to write the history of their OSS detachment in China, and she still had to put the finishing touches on it before turning it in. Before being issued her own walking papers, she was expected to write a report on the peacetime role of MO, though she had no idea what that encompassed. She only knew she planned to argue against throwing away all the foreign intelligence networks and contacts established during the war at great expense and loss of life. Given the speed with which the higher-ups were dismantling the organization, her recommendations would probably be filed away with scarcely a second glance or relegated to “some special OSS incinerator.” It was like whistling in the wind.

Back in the familiar building, once filled with the echoing footsteps of colleagues on their way to war, she found it impossible not
“to mourn the passing of the OSS.”
As for Donovan, he was already in
pinstripes, having returned to his private law practice on October 1, reportedly let go in a letter from President Truman with little more than a pat on the back. “I felt a growing sense of loyalty to a brave and brilliant, if occasionally erratic, organization which had suddenly been disinherited by the government,” Betty recalled. “I tried to be practical and tell myself that nothing is quite so moribund as a government agency suddenly shorn of its budget.” Truman had announced that he wanted “a different kind of intelligence service,” but she could not help thinking that scuttling the OSS was a terrible waste of valuable people and expertise. The war might be over, but anyone who had served in the CBI knew that the trouble had only just begun.

She was snapped out of her melancholy reverie by Matta Halle's repeated query: Did she know Jane Foster? When Betty nodded in assent, she was handed Jane's dossier. Thumbing through the stack of documents, she quickly realized they were all Jane's reports from the field to OSS headquarters. The last Betty had heard, Jane had been scheduled to drop into Java as soon as the declaration of peace was official. She had a vague recollection of seeing a leaflet advertising “Janey's Javanese Junkshop,” requesting contributions of food and clothing for American women interred in Japanese prison camps in Batavia. Reading her description of the first secret meeting with Sukarno—
“a handsome, dignified gentleman who spoke perfect English and invited visitors to set down to a dish of sherbet as soon as they arrived”
—gave Betty a “vicarious thrill.” It was vintage Jane, down to the last keenly observed detail. Her artistic friend had been brought into the OSS only because of her knowledge of the country and language skills but had acquitted herself with honor, carrying out an important assignment with great care and sensitivity. Her theater service record noted that she had done “an outstanding job on her specialty.”

Betty felt a burst of pride: “Jane had done a first-rate job of reporting. Between the lines of formal reports I realized how much the return to her beloved Indonesia had meant to her”:

She wrote fervently of the tension which was growing between the Dutch Indies Civil Affairs group and the Indonesians. She
insisted that there was no master plan by Russians or defeated Japs to overthrow Western imperialism in Asia, but it was rather a natural eruption of the volcanic discontent which had been rumbling for decades. The Asiatic countries were in a state of ferment, and she found that throughout French Indo-China, Burma, Malaya—and on a larger scale in India and China—the people were following similar patterns of revolt against Western economic and political imperialism.

Betty was struck by the suggestion in some of Jane's reports that MO tactics were being used by the United States' allies to try to influence public opinion in favor of the colonial prewar policy. Jane had sent along a sample leaflet of the alleged declaration of war by the new Republic of Indonesia, which had reportedly been distributed by native extremists on the night of October 14, 1945, when the Allied military administration was set up.
The leaflet
was “distributed clandestinely along the Batavia waterfront,” and a small native boy had brought a copy of the declaration to the Hotel Des Indes, where Jane was dining with a group of newspaper and magazine correspondents. Jane had immediately translated the leaflet, which called upon the Indonesians “to declare a holy war against all Europeans, beginning with the Dutch.” It was signed “Republic of Indonesia.” On hearing this, the assembled journalists immediately hightailed it back to their offices, and the next day the represented news outlets reported that the Republic of Indonesia had declared war. To Jane, the whole story seemed fishy, particularly as
“the Dutch press was strangely silent on the subject. Nothing was mentioned the next morning in the Batavia papers.”
No one was ever able to find out who had issued the declaration, which was quickly discredited, though never retracted in the press. When Jane finally confronted Sukarno about “who might want to give Indonesians a bad name,” he declined to answer her question directly, but hinted that the Dutch had the most to gain by spreading fears of a religious uprising.

The “phoney” declaration of war was a classic MO ruse. Betty recognized it as the same kind of tactic used by the Russians in propaganda posters and other psychological warfare material in their effort
to make inroads into Eastern Europe, Greece, and even Chinese Turkestan. Such incendiary leaflets were an ideal method of “propagating the faith,” particularly when it would appear that they were Nazi-produced, when all along it was a Communist cover organization fomenting trouble. It was, Betty noted grimly, the same tried-and-true pattern that the OSS had perfected—create discord, then divide and conquer. Thanks to the war, everyone had received a crash course in subversion and was now playing the same game.

She inquired after Jane's whereabouts, excited at the prospect of a coffee-line reunion in the cafeteria, only to learn she was taking the slow route home aboard one of the “USS Unspeakables,” as the overcrowded troopships were known. Still brooding over her second cup of coffee, Betty recognized Jan, the suave German-American agent who had been one of her first instructors. She asked his advice about the final report she was supposed to prepare on the postwar potential of subversion as a means of persuasion. Could he paint a scenario in which MO could be used to influence people's opinions and actions in peacetime? A ghost of a smile flickered on Jan's lips.
“Well, let's see,”
he mused. “Want to start a whisper campaign about a hidebound Republican Wall Street lawyer [Donovan]? We can begin by sending, at absolutely no cost to him, copies of the
Daily Worker
. We shall also place his name on the mailing list of
The New Republic
.”

In answer to her raised eyebrows, he continued. Did she want to cause trouble in Japan, maybe upset the military brass serving under General MacArthur in occupied Japan? “Think of the fun you could have by sending a cable to some American government clerk at SCAP (Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers) headquarters in Tokyo electing him president of the ‘MacArthur is
Not
a God Club' in Peoria.”

His point was not lost on her. In spite of his playful tone, Betty detected the undercurrent of concern. There were ominous rumors floating around Q Building that State had closed its mind to the warnings of OSSers, some of whom were being identified as too biased—as in, too sympathetic to Mao and Chou En-lai in the civil war in China, as well as toward Ho Chi Minh and his efforts to unite Vietnam. The OSS had invested months of planning for greater cooperation with the
Communists in both countries, and in the end it had come to nothing. Now, with the policy concerns of Western Europe dominating Washington's interpretation of policy worldwide, OSS reports indicating the revolutionary ferment, the growing strength of Mao and Ho, and the dismal political and economic situation in both countries, were not well received.

Anti-Communism had become the dominant theme in world politics and the overriding policy issue. All other relevant political considerations had been put to one side. So it followed that it was much more important that Bulgaria and Rumania be ready for self-government and free elections than that the struggling republics of Southeast Asia be, even though the latter had never sided with the Axis powers. The fear was that, except for the atom bomb, there was nothing to stop the Russians from marching straight through to the Atlantic. If the new West German government were to falter economically, and if the Communist parties managed to gain entry into the governments of France, Italy, and the Netherlands in the next elections, the Russians would have a formidable stake in Western Europe.