A Covert Affair (43 page)

Two days later, she left for Paris. After all she had been through to get that “damned” passport, the Air France official barely gave it a second glance. As soon as she was safely home, she cabled Julia and Paul:
ARRIVED PARIS
YESTERDAY LA VIE RECOMMENCE
.

In the fall, Julia and Paul made another sojourn to “
La Belle France
” and had a chance to see Jane, fresh from the wars of loyalty review. She had been shaken to the core, but was still defiant. They had been vastly relieved when they received her telegram telling them she was safely back in Paris. It stood to reason that the U.S. authorities would never have let her leave the country if they had anything on her, so Jane was probably in the clear. As much as they were dying to hear all about what she had been through, Julia and Paul did not pester her for details. She was still a bit fragile and protested that she did not want to spoil their visit with her sad
histoire
, but promised to send a blow-by-blow account of her battle with the state department.

Jane's epic, single-spaced four-page letter describing all that had transpired reached Julia and Paul in Bad Godesberg in late October.
“Forgive me for probably boring you with such a lengthy saga but I
thought you'd like to have the story,” she wrote in conclusion. “I hope you don't mind, Paulie, if I loathe your employer, the U.S. State Department, with a towering and terrible loathing. They took practically a year out of my life, uselessly and senselessly—wrecked my health, I am still under a doctor's care—and for what? My dear, grateful country. The only decent thing about it is that I appreciate now how much I love our life here…. I go around grinning like a Chessy cat with sheer joy.” Striving to end on a positive note, she added, “But there are some really wonderful Americans and you are right on the top layer.”

One of the last things George told them that August afternoon at Les Deux Magots was that he planned to apply for French nationality. His lawyer had advised that it might take four to six months. As soon as the paperwork was finalized, Jane was going to apply for it, too. By becoming his little French wife, and giving up her American citizenship, she hoped to evade the long arm of the law and put her passport problems behind her once and for all. As Jane put it to them,
“then I can really say—
J'ai choisi la Liberté.
”

Only days after Jane's letter arrived, Paul received official confirmation that he had been cleared. On October 25, 1955, Charles M. Noone, chief of the Office of Security at the USIA, wrote to inform him that after his interview with the special agents Sanders and Sullivan in April, his
“case had been considered”
and “a favorable decision reached under the provisions of executive Order 10450.” That was it—six months of fear and tribulation dismissed in a six-line memo. Still, Paul was grateful to have the documented proof of his innocence. It wasn't much, but it might help him sleep more soundly. His own vivisection at the hands of the FBI had just begun to fade from memory when Jane's missive had come, and her frightening description of her ordeal had brought it all back, along with the anxiety and fitful nights.

Try as they might, Julia and Paul were never really happy in Bad Godesberg. The best that could be said about their last year there was that they were boringly productive, with Julia toiling over recipes for “the Book,” as she had taken to calling her ever-expanding manuscript, and Paul traveling more than usual while overseeing seven major international exhibits. After his triumphant return from Berlin, still glowing from the stellar reviews for his show on the U.S. Space Program, Paul heard he was being transferred back to Washington. They had not expected to be uprooted again so soon but were secretly elated to be getting out of Cold War Germany. They were tired of Bonn and the USIS mission, which was a
“dumping ground”
for the worst sort of career diplomat and beset with office intrigues and personnel woes. Julia could not wait to see the back of Paul's alcoholic boss, old “Woodenhead,” who had given him
“poor marks”
for administration in his latest efficiency review. After all Paul's hard work, it seemed particularly petty and disappointing.

Julia, who was proud of her husband, as well as fiercely protective, believed his superiors' grudging attitude revealed the residual doubts that still lingered in the wake of his loyalty hearing. Even though Paul
had been exonerated, the stain on his record was permanent—those “unremovable smirches” he had rightly feared when he first realized he was under investigation. The very suggestion that he might be a “treasonous homosexual” irked him still. In a pointed repudiation of his cowardly accusers, Julia and Paul posed gloriously naked in a tub of suds for their 1956 Valentine's Day card, with only a mound of bubbles covering her breasts. The tongue-in-cheek inscription read:
“Wish You Were Here.”

It was a bold gesture, and it revealed just how dissatisfied they had become with the narrow constraints of government life. They “despised” John Foster Dulles and his crony, Scott McLeod, for driving the ablest men out of the State Department and stunting, if not destroying, the careers of so many of their friends. Sadly surveying the evidence of disarray all around them, they could not help feeling they had stayed in the Foreign Service too long. The world had changed. No one seemed to have any sense of purpose anymore. The only people who seemed to get ahead in the increasingly polarized political climate were the
“brainless bureaucrats,”
the kind Paul said could be relied on to “never rock the boat.” The Woodenheads always survived.

At the end of October, Julia and Paul headed back to the United States, stopping off in Paris for a last hurrah. They booked into the Hôtel Pont Royal, where they had lived when they first arrived, and spent ten days running around frantically trying to see all their friends and fit in  their many favorite restaurants. It was a bittersweet time, full of wonderful dinners, warm memories, and difficult farewells. No matter how busy they were, Julia and Paul would almost certainly have called on Jane before leaving the country, if only to check on her progress and try to cheer her up. There is no record of their visit, in part because Paul's diaries for that period were lost.
*
By all accounts,
it would have been a disheartening visit. Jane was in terrible shape. The last two years had not been kind to her. Nothing about her situation was any clearer. She could not banish her private fears about the FBI's intentions and the feeling that the bureau was still after her. She was convinced she was being followed again, though by which agency she did not know. The “Wheyfaces,” as she called the agents trailing her, seemed to be French, but
“that did not mean anything as the CIA had a number of ‘natives' in their employ.”
Her marriage had suffered during her long absence, and George's increasingly brazen womanizing was a constant source of arguments and upset. She was nervous, depressed, and drinking too much.
“She and George had always had a pretty well-lubricated lifestyle,”
recalled her niece, Susan Tenenbaum. “But with all the pressure she was under, I think she really hit the bottle. From what I understand, she was in a very bad way.”

Just before Christmas, Jane attempted suicide. She swallowed a handful of Nembutal pills and washed them down with whatever she was drinking that night. She was rushed to the hospital, her stomach was pumped, and she spent a month in care. In her memoir, she noted bleakly that an attempted suicide is
“a cry for help, but no help was forthcoming.”

Julia and Paul were unaware of the depth of Jane's despair. They were worried about her and empathized with her misery and frustration but had no reason as yet to believe the crisis would not pass. The State Department had furnished her with a new passport and permitted her to return to France, and there was every indication her case could be resolved in the near future. There were even signs that the acrimonious political climate at home was beginning to improve. Ever since the nationally televised Army-McCarthy hearings, when counselor Joseph N. Welch famously called the senator to account—“Have you no sense of decency, sir?”—McCarthy and his nasty sidekicks, Cohn and Schine, had been finished. Finally embarrassed by McCarthy's excesses, the Senate had voted overwhelmingly to censure him, 67 to 22. These days, he was drunk by noon, his mad rants recognized for what they always had been—the ravings of a crazy, dangerous fanatic. With his reign of terror at an end, the reactionaries in Congress were quieter and
their Red-hunting activities somewhat curtailed. Even Jane's nemesis, the dreaded Mrs. Shipley, had retired.

In the meantime, the French authorities had given Jane
une carte d'identité
, which allowed her to function perfectly well within the country. And there were worse places to be marooned indefinitely than Paris. It was hard, at times, for them not to feel a bit weary of Jane's dramatics, especially when they were always left with the uneasy sense that there was more to it all than she was saying, that she was concealing the worst of her sins. They did not know what folly she had committed and could only hope for her sake that it fell short of anything Dulles and his posse would feel obliged to pursue across the ocean.

Preoccupied with their homecoming and the busy holiday season spent back in the bosom of the Child clan, they had little time to ponder Jane's fate. They had settled back into their former home at 2706 Olive Avenue, in Georgetown. The old three-story house looked rather neglected after being rented out for eight years, and they were determinedly whipping it into shape. Betty MacDonald, who dropped by to see them shortly after their return, sat in the kitchen and watched in amazement while Paul drew on the wall precise outlines of every one of Julia's polished copper pots and iron skillets in an effort to impose order on her unruly mass of equipment. Inside each penciled circle, he wrote: “Please Replace.” Laughing at the memory, Betty said,
“Julia was awfully messy, and that was something he couldn't stand.”

They spent a pleasant afternoon talking and exchanging bits of news about old friends. In the course of catching up, Julia and Paul told Betty about Jane's trials and tribulations. Betty was sorry to learn of Jane's ongoing FBI investigation but was not surprised. The FBI had questioned her about Jane's politics back in 1948 and Betty had told them that while her OSS colleague was a
“liberal,”
and had gotten into trouble for her outspoken support of the Indonesian revolutionary government, Jane was “entirely loyal.” Like many OSS veterans, Betty and her husband had also had their share of problems with the FBI.
“Hoover was no friend of Donovan's and did his best to destroy what was left of his reputation after the war,”
she recalled. “The FBI hounded all the people that had worked for him in the Far East. Lots of people recruited by the OSS had been Communists or socialists at one time.
Donovan and Dick spent days throwing out papers and going through the files to get rid of things that might be incriminating. They destroyed the records to keep them out of the hands of the FBI.” Betty had been home working one afternoon when two agents in dark suits and fedoras knocked on the door of her New Jersey home and announced they had orders to search the place. “They went through the library and removed two books:
Mein Kampf
and
The Little Red Book
, full of quotations from Chairman Mao.” She was never questioned by the FBI but remembered all too well “the feeling they were watching you.” Thinking of Jane, she added, “Those were horrible days, not knowing why it was happening or what they were after.”

Julia reassured herself that post-McCarthy Washington was a somewhat saner place. The country was on the mend after a virulent period. It was
“now the land of Nixon-lovers, ‘Elvis the Pelvis,' and other strange phenomena.”
Perhaps that was why she was not more disturbed when the FBI came around to Olive Avenue that winter asking about Jane. Unflappable as always, Julia answered their questions; she was polite but firm. A brief note in her date book on February 14, 1957, reveals that when they asked if she thought Jane could be engaged in subversive activities, she told them she did not
“think someone that funny and scattered could be a spy.”
Her cool self-possession was such that she took the agents' house call in stride, dismissing the visit as perfectly “pleasant.”

A few months later, while Julia and Paul were still trying to become acclimated to Washington's tropical heat and humidity, they awoke on a sultry July morning to stunning news. Splashed across the front pages of all the newspapers were pictures of Jane and George along with giant headlines proclaiming them to be Russian spies:
“U.S. COUPLE ACCUSED OF SPYING FOR RUSSIA: Linked to International Ring.”
“2 EX-AIDES OF U.S. INDICTED AS SPIES,”
proclaimed
The New York Times
, “Former Intelligence Officer and Wife, Once in OSS, Named as Soviet Agents.”

The opening lines of the
Washington Post
's lead story took their breath away:
“An American couple was indicted today as alleged members of a global spy ring personally organized in the Kremlin by Stalin's late secret police boss, Lavrenti Beria.”
The story went on to say that on
July 8 a federal grand jury had accused George and Jane of transmitting secret information on American intelligence and U.S. installations abroad to Moscow intelligence. A dozen Russian nationals were named as coconspirators in the case. Although espionage was not an extraditable offense, the U.S. Attorney's Office was working to convince the French government to return the Zlatovskis to America to stand trial. It added that the pair faced “a possible death penalty under the charges.”