A Covert Affair (41 page)

When Jane told her father what had happened, he just scowled.
“Well, what did you expect?”
He had never approved of her liberal ideas, and his stony expression told her he thought she was about to pay the price for her poor judgment. By mutual agreement, they did not tell her mother until she came home from the hospital. Even then, she took the news badly.
“[Her] only thought was for her own,”
Jane wrote in her memoir. “Communism, Schmomunism, she did not care.” Her mother had no time for politics and stopped voting after the 1928 election when Al Smith, the first Roman Catholic to seek the presidency, lost to Herbert Hoover. There was never any question that both her parents would stand by her. She might be a problem child, but she was their only child and they would do everything they could, spend any amount of money necessary, to help her get back her freedom and return to Paris.

Once she had recovered from the initial shock, Jane consulted Abe Fortas, a prominent attorney with the influential New Deal firm of Arnold, Fortas & Porter, whom she had gotten to know during the war. Fortas explained that the State Department had essentially extended its customary discretion over issuing passports, which was confirmed by a 1926 law, to control all international travel by Americans. In 1941, it was made illegal to leave or enter the country without a passport, a law that became permanent with the passage of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952. With the advent of the Cold War, the State Department had begun asserting this traditional control as a way of denying passports on the basis of individual political beliefs. What's more, the Internal Security Act of 1950 explicitly prohibited the issuance of passports to members of the Communist Party, and the State Department had taken to denying a passport to anyone who refused to file an affidavit denying Party membership. In short, Jane would have to sue the State Department to get her passport back.

Fortas, much in demand in those days, was already busy representing Owen Lattimore, who was the most visible of the China hands accused of being “pro-Red” and who had been singled out by McCarthy as
“the top Russian espionage agent in the United States.”
Fortas referred her to another capable attorney, and Jane arranged to meet with him in Washington. Loath to take yet another plane, she opted to travel by train. To break up the journey, she planned to spend a few days in Chicago at the home of George's older sister, Helen, who was married to Michael Tenenbaum, a brilliant metallurgist, and had two daughters, Susan and Anne. Jane had never met them before, but there was nothing like disaster to drive you into the arms of family.

Shortly after the train left the Oakland station, Jane fell into conversation with a U.S. Air Force captain who was seated in the compartment directly across from her. She accepted his offer of a drink, and they passed a few hours in casual conversation. They talked about the usual things—what they had done during the war, people they might know in common. Jane prattled on about her friend Paul, a painter, who was now working for the State Department in Germany. She was well into her second whiskey and soda by the time she realized that her
companion was not making idle chitchat but methodically working his way through what had to be the standard FBI template for interviewing a potential subversive. He was asking what she later came to think of as
“the four liturgical questions”
as she heard them repeated over and over again, always in the same order, like a schoolboy catechism: (1) “What do you think of God?” (2) “What do you think of Communists?” (3) “What do you think of China?” (4) “The last question (and why did the silly asses never change their order of questions?) was always ‘What do you think of Alger Hiss?'” After dinner, while sitting and smoking, she was joined by a group of Italian air force officers who were overjoyed to find someone who spoke their native language and knew their
bel paese.
As they chatted away in Italian, Jane saw the friendly FBI agent hovering nervously in the doorway, until he lost his composure and burst out, “What are they saying? What are they telling you?” He was desperate to know what to put in her file.

When Jane got off the train in Chicago, George's sister took in the attractive group of uniformed men in her compartment and looked ready to salute.
“Really, Jane,”
she murmured, “you do pick them up. You must have loads of sex appeal.” In no mood to play the femme fatale for her midwestern in-laws, Jane brutally tromped on Helen's harmless quip. “It's not my sex appeal nor my beauty nor my charm,” she said through clenched teeth. “The American is a
Spitzel
(German for informer or spy) and his mission is tailing me.”

While Helen was naturally distressed to hear of Jane's political problems—the family already knew more than they wanted to about George's ideological baggage—this did nothing to dispel her view of Jane as her wealthy, glamorous relative fresh from Europe.
“My mother was more than a little in awe of her,”
recalled Helen's daughter, Susan Tenenbaum. “Jane was terribly elegant compared to what we were used to in Flossmoor, Illinois. Her clothes were fabulous, all bought in Paris, and she was petite and wore them well. She had all these scarves and hats and went around looking very pulled together. We thought she was terribly chic. She used to always say to me, ‘Give me a thousand dollars of your father's money, and I will make a woman of you.'”

While in Chicago, Jane announced she was going to see Su-Lin.
Helen generously offered to drive her, saying that she would love to meet Jane's friend.
“You can't,”
Jane told her dramatically. “She's stuffed.” Su-Lin was the small, burping panda cub she had babysat in Shanghai in 1936 before it was smuggled to America. Sadly, Su-Lin had not thrived in captivity and had succumbed to pneumonia at the age of two. An autopsy later revealed that she was really a he, but Jane persisted in thinking of Su-Lin as a doomed little girl, tragically torn from a hollow tree in China's Szechuan province by greedy American collectors. The family accompanied Jane to the Field Museum of Natural History, where the popular panda's body was on display.
“Jane just stood there, staring at Su-Lin behind the glass case,”
Susan recalled, “sobbing her eyes out.” Even as a young girl, she sensed Jane's tears were as much for herself as for the dead bear.

When Jane got to Washington, she learned that her new lawyer had arranged for an informal hearing before Ashley Nicholas, deputy director of the Passport Division of the State Department. Nicholas was
“a hideous creature who looked like a tarantula,”
she told Julia and Paul, and then, just
“to show the nightmarish quality of it all,”
she cited all the nefarious activities he suspected her of:

They accused me of such things as being an active communist at Mills College in 1934–35, and of having joined the Communist Party in the Indies … although I didn't go to the Indies until 1937! They also accused me of having circulated a Communist petition in India! Can't you see me circulating a petition around the Queens Hotel! Anyway, you get the drift. They accused me of
nothing
in all the years I've been in Europe, and told my lawyer they had absolutely nothing against me since I've lived in Paris.

She maintained that of the seven charges they came out with “only two” were factually correct: she was a member of the Washington Bookshop, now apparently suspected of being a Communist front, and in 1941 she had once picketed the White House with the American Peace Mobilization, also now on the attorney general's list of Red organizations.
According to Jane, all they had dredged up was her youthful flirtation with radicalism, now fifteen years out of date. The Catholic Church and the Communist Party—they were the only two organizations she had ever belonged to, and she had pretty much abandoned both by the age of thirty. Despite all the inaccuracies and unsubstantiated charges, they denied her application.

Feeling defeated and dejected, Jane returned to the coast to wait for the formal hearing before the Board of Passport Appeals of the State Department, better known to penitents as
“the Holy Office.”
By then, Jane told Julia and Paul, she was
“a physical and mental wreck.”
Her father suggested a family vacation in La Jolla, as he thought the sea air might do her some good. As the weeks dragged by, Jane became increasingly isolated and depressed. She avoided getting in touch with any of her old friends. She knew she would not be doing them any favors by showing up at their door trailing the “keystone cops,” as she referred to her various shadows. While she was detained in the United States, George was summoned to the American Embassy in Paris, where officials demanded he surrender his passport. He refused, but as it had expired some months before it was a somewhat empty gesture. In any case, it meant that he could not join her. She had been desperately afraid he would try to rush to her rescue only to end up having his passport withheld as well. Then they could have begun deportation proceedings against him, but as the only place he could have been sent back to was Russia—and that was clearly impossible—he probably would have ended up a stateless citizen in detention.

There were gaps in her narrative—events that she omitted, in part out of embarrassment, in part from
“unadulterated horror.”
One sorry episode was when, out of sheer desperation, she, George, and their lawyer in Paris cooked up a plan for her to slip across the border into Mexico, get a quickie divorce, and marry a French friend who was single and willing. If all went well, she would for a brief time even have had the title of
comtesse
.
“It would have been what the French call a
mariage blanc
(unconsummated),”
she recalled later. “We would have been divorced afterwards and I would have remarried George for the
third
time. Oh God!” It was a sign of how bleak things looked that her
father agreed to go along with the scheme. Jane met her parents at the Biltmore Hotel in Los Angeles, and they spent countless hours reviewing the different ways she could slip unnoticed into Mexico. Finally, it was decided that they would take a family holiday in La Jolla, and her parents would proceed from there to Ensenada and retain a local lawyer on her behalf. Inevitably, the over-the-border gambit blew up in their faces. They later worked out that the hotel room must have been bugged, because the men
“with mirrors on the rims of their glasses”
were on to them from the start. The FBI must have had the last laugh when her parents, in their naïveté, hired a complete shyster to obtain her divorce—they paid a five-hundred-dollar retainer, with the promise of another five hundred—only to have him turn around and try to blackmail them for more.

Things went rapidly downhill from there.
“Then the Nightmare really began,”
as Jane informed Julia and Paul.

We were all, separately and collectively, followed around by the Secret Police … whether it was FBI or McLeod's boys I don't know. The young men, all looking like instructors in English Lit. at some fourth rate college, in sports jackets and gabardine topcoats. Thank God they did it to my mother and father—one funny thing was my reactionary father's rage at the thought that his not inconsiderable taxes were going to support his harassers—otherwise everyone would have said I'd just gone off my rocker. Anyway, from then on, for five solid months they never left me alone—day or night.

No longer making any attempt to disguise their assignment, the agents broke into her hotel room repeatedly and searched its contents, reserved rooms adjacent to hers, and left tape recorders lying out on their windowsills in plain view. Once, when she was sitting on the beach, four men in a parked car began calling her names—yelling
“Spy! Spy!”
at the top of their lungs. On another occasion, she was in a coffee shop when a square-jawed navy captain sauntered over to her table with studied ease and offered to give her a lift to Tijuana in his huge,
brand-new Buick. Talk about too good to be true! That was when she realized the game was up. They were just waiting for her to run. The minute she committed a criminal offense—as opposed to a political one—they could snap on the cuffs and call it a day. They wanted to destroy her morale, to push her over the edge. The only thing that kept her going was her anger and her determination not to let them win.

In March, she took the train across the continent again for her hearing before the Board of Passport Appeals. At nine o'clock in the morning, she and her lawyer entered the State Department building together and were ushered into a large room decorated with the requisite American flag. Assembled behind a long table were three men. At each end, young attorneys representing the appeals board sat poised for action, a thick stack of documents in front of them. Jane and her lawyer were seated at a table clear across the room, as far from the others as possible. She stood up and took the oath, swearing before God to tell “the whole truth and nothing but the truth.” Then she lied.

Was she
“a member of the Communist Party”
? “

No.”

Was she “ever a Communist”?

No.”

She admitted, according to court records, that during a brief period between May 1941 and January 1942 she had embraced with enthusiasm what she then
“conceived to be the Communist ideology”
and that she had attended “all manner of meetings, particularly because [her] own abhorrence of war coincided with the then expressed views of those espousing the Communist cause.”

At one o'clock, they adjourned for lunch. Jane and her lawyer scrambled over to the Willard Hotel, where Jane fortified herself with two martinis. The questioning continued all afternoon. Her interrogators produced a list of names of former friends and acquaintances and demanded to know if any of them were Communists: Martha Dodd Stern? Her brother, Bill Dodd? Before the war had she rented a room in Georgetown from the Dodds' friends Susan B. Anthony (grandniece of the famous suffragette), an editor for the
Washington Star
, and her husband, Henry Hill Collins, Jr., a political activist? Was she aware that they
were Communists? Jane maintained that she knew nothing of the sort. She was hardly going to inform on her friends, who might or might not be card-carrying members of the Party, for all she knew. Moreover, it was clearly a trick. The slightest admission that she had consorted with known subversives would drive the last nail into her coffin. There was nothing to do but assert her ignorance over and over again.