A Covert Affair (5 page)

Paul had cooperated fully. He had told them everything he knew, which amounted to precious little at the end of the day. When he finished, he requested that a written clearance be placed in his permanent record. When informed that it would take time to process his clearance because of the thirty-day requirement for Special Inquiries, he went straight to the head of the USIS Office of Security and demanded that the rule be waived. He was advised that it would be wiser to wait and stick to protocol “so it wouldn't look strange.” Paul assured the security chief that it could not possibly look any stranger than it already did. He also told him that if they kept him in Washington another month with nothing to do, then “by God everybody and his mother would know what was going on.”

As soon as he received a copy of his clearance, Paul wired Julia:
INVESTIGATION CONCLUDED SUCCESSFULLY FOR ME
. He told friends he believed he had “weathered the storm.” He was “almost a virgin,” he wrote Julia, “a monument of innocence.” No apology was forthcoming, nor did he expect one. Perhaps to make it up to him, the powers that be had decided to send him to Brussels so that he could pick out the site for the American exhibition in the upcoming 1958 World's Fair. It was a minor perk, given what they had put him through, but it was nonetheless a token of their esteem and Paul appreciated it. On April 26, he wrote Julia of his Brussels assignment, fairly crowing with triumph. Furthermore, he had applied for, and received, permission to fly back via Paris. If everything went according to plan, he would meet her there at the end of the month. At which time, he added, “I shall allow myself to be congratulated by a thoroughly prejudiced woman of my acquaintance.”

As far as Julia and Paul were concerned, that put an end to the Jane Foster affair. They had no way of knowing then that it was far from over.

“Look, just what kind of organization
is
this?”
Jane Foster was standing in the fingerprint room of the OSS's Washington headquarters, wiping her hands on an ink-stained towel. It was the fall of 1943, and the secretive new agency was only months old. She readily proffered the towel along with a conspiratorial we're-in-this-together smile that seemed to invite indiscretion. Her question hung in the air, the slightly mocking twinkle in her blue eyes daring anyone to answer. She was a slim, stylish blonde, her expensively tailored suit a cut above the boxy tweeds sported by the serious, efficient young women who typically populated Washington's wartime agencies. With a furtive glance back at the OSS personnel officer in charge of taking their prints, she confided in a low voice that it was her “first day, too,” and then proceeded to pry all kinds of information out of Elizabeth “Betty” MacDonald, another fresh recruit, who had only just been warned not to discuss her new job with anyone.

“That was Jane,”
recalled Betty years later, with a shrug. “We weren't supposed to be talking, so of course we did. She had a great sense of humor, and was a bit irreverent. Well, more than a bit. Especially when
it came to anything to do with military protocol. She was always saluting the wrong people, or not saluting anyone at all. I liked her straightaway. Everyone did.”

Jane had the Irish knack for instant intimacy. Her vitality and charisma drew people in, and before they knew it she had involved them in some compromising situation or mischief of her own making. Betty recognized her at once as “an unreconstructed rebel,” attributing both her charm and obstinacy to her Celtic blood. Jane was the classic Catholic schoolgirl gone off the rails. An air of naughtiness clung to her like an exotic scent. Everything about her was fresh and provocative, from the way she walked, talked, and dressed—a careless elegance that together with her mussed curls always gave the impression of a late night—to the way she picked a teasing fight with every man she met.

She impressed Paul Child, who was introduced to her at a party in Washington earlier that fall, as
“a wild, messy girl, always in trouble, always gay and irresponsible.”
Her spontaneity was part of her appeal, an excess of energy and exuberance saved from the debutante cliché only by her intelligence. From the nuns, she had learned to be deceivingly modest. Conscious of always being the center of attention, she would deflect it with a stream of wry, funny, self-deprecating stories that only confirmed that she was the most fascinating person in the room. She never stopped talking, making sly, hilarious observations about people and then, as if to prove her point, dashing off devastating little cartoons of them on whatever was handy, from a scrap of paper to the corner of a tablecloth. Her caricatures were disconcerting. She would fix someone with her baby blue eyes, and the subject would feel pinned to the wall—pierced—exposed for all to see with a flick of her pencil. It was all part of the performance: she liked to flaunt her cleverness. Boredom was the only unpardonable sin. Avoiding it made her adventurous. And drove her to extremes. Her snobbery was reserved for the dull or predictable. She brought a heady air of playfulness to the most prosaic of gatherings, whether it was the morning staff meeting or the line at the lunch counter. Her attitude always seemed to be “As long as we're here, we might as well
enjoy
it. And anyway, it's never too early for champagne!”

She was impossible to resist. When Jane leaned in confidentially,
Betty found herself revealing more than she had intended. Jane quickly got her to divulge that she had been recruited by
“whispered overtures,”
through a third party, who had expressed interest in her background. Betty had grown up in Hawaii, the daughter of two journalists, and just happened to be
“on the spot”
when a really big story came along on December 7, 1941. Her father was a veteran newspaperman named William “Bill” Peet, a sports editor with
The Honolulu Advertiser
, and her mother had been a columnist in Washington, D.C., prior to becoming an English teacher. A tawny, hazel-eyed brunette, with the lean athletic frame of an avid tennis player, Betty had worked her way up to society editor at the rival paper,
The Honolulu Star-Bulletin
, and had recently begun stringing for the Scripps Howard syndicate, writing feature stories about local events. The Sunday morning the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, she was still in bed. Her husband, Alex MacDonald, a police reporter, was barely awake and nursing a hangover. It was shortly after eight o'clock, and they were drowsily listening to the Mormon Tabernacle Choir on the radio when a voice broke in and announced:
“This is not a drill. Pearl Harbor is under attack. This is not a drill.”
The news flash was quickly confirmed by a call from a local photographer, who told Betty he was heading out to check on the damage. As she and Alex hurriedly dressed, they heard the rumble of bombs and guns coming from Oahu's southern coast.

She told of driving fast toward Hickam Field, the largest army airfield in Hawaii. She could remember registering the lush green countryside flying past, the people strolling to church or out walking their dogs, when a bend in the road suddenly revealed the first signs of carnage. An open-air market had taken a direct hit. The horrifying tableau would stay with her always: flames and smoke pouring from the ruined shop stalls, the Hickam Field firemen pulling out the injured, and the badly burned bodies of the dead and wounded scattered all over the ground. A small girl stood dazed, still clutching a jump rope; all that remained were the charred ends in her hands. She died a short time later. What was weird, Betty recalled, was that in the middle of all the chaos there was a little boy sitting in a pile of Christmas presents, boxes and rolls of wrapping paper all around him, having what looked like a wonderful
time. Her photographer, camera at the ready, yelled at her
“to do something about the kid.”
The child's incongruous smiling mug was ruining the shot. On impulse, she leaned down and gave the boy a quick pinch, which started him crying. The poignant photo ended up running in
Life
magazine.

That was the beginning of her war. Betty was immediately assigned as a volunteer at a field hospital, where she saw the worst of the human toll—
“terrible, terrible things.”
Her husband, who had been in the Navy Reserve, was in uniform by the end of the week. It was a frightening time. No one knew what was going to happen next. There were wild rumors the Japanese would be coming by sea. Then they heard that an invasion force might be coming in over the mountains. Betty helped string barbed wire along the sunny beach in Waikiki to keep them out. Martial law was declared. There were an immediate blackout and complete censorship. She had not been able to get a story out for weeks. Ironically, at the time of the attack she and her husband had been living at the home of a Japanese professor, Saburo Watanabe, and studying the Japanese language with the idea of going to the Far East as foreign correspondents. But instead of their going to Japan, Betty noted,
“the Japanese came to us.”
As soon as things calmed down a bit, she started filing stories from America's first war zone.

Impressed with her work, Scripps Howard offered her a job in Washington covering Eleanor Roosevelt and the White House, and writing a weekly column called “Homefront Forecasts.” Could she start right away? Betty was thrilled. This was the national press corps—the big leagues. At the same time, it meant leaving home and her husband. Sensing how much she wanted the job, Alex gamely agreed that it was too good an opportunity to pass up. He had accepted a commission from the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI) and might be called up at a moment's notice and
“sent off somewhere.”
Odds were, the war was going to separate them one way or another. Betty took the job, and a week later she left for Washington.

To her dismay, Betty found life in the capital pretty tame compared to wartime Hawaii. During an interview with a prominent Honolulu businessman, who was at a Department of Agriculture event she was
covering for the paper, she admitted to being bored with the humdrum stories about food shortages and rationing. They got to talking about where they were on the day of infamy, and she told him about reporting on the aftermath of the devastating attack. When she mentioned in passing that she had been studying Japanese, he suddenly stiffened and his whole attitude changed. He demanded to know whether she had
“ever considered working for the government.”
Would she like to make “a great contribution to the war effort”? When she nodded in the affirmative, he fumbled in his briefcase and brought out three government forms. Pressing them on her, he urged her to complete the paperwork and send it in at once. Muttering apologetically that he was not able to say more, he hastily departed.

Several weeks later, Betty was recruited by the OSS. All she was told in the initial interview was that because she had some Japanese she could be of help to them in their work in the Far East. Specifically what that work would entail, however, they were not willing to reveal. The only thing they could say with any certainty was that she would be going overseas. Betty told Jane this was the first time in her experience that an employer
“hadn't described the kind of job [she] was being hired to do.”
That had started her wondering exactly what kind of organization it was, too. From the moment she entered the building on Twenty-third and E that brisk December morning, everyone had been very formal and closemouthed. Given that she needed to be issued a special pass to get in, she guessed it was not just another New Deal alphabet agency but was perhaps
“something like the Pentagon.”

Jane snorted, then shot a cautious glance at the fingerprint matron to make sure her outburst had gone unnoticed. She refrained from commenting on Betty's account of her “accidental” recruitment, but her eyes were bright with amusement. She arched her eyebrows theatrically, silently acknowledging what they both already knew: this mysterious crew had to be a secret service organization of one stripe or another. Jane was enjoying herself. She got a kick out of the shadowy agency's quasi-military methods and aura of clandestinity. The experience seemed comparable to an extremely elaborate sorority initiation, although she could not possibly imagine what they were looking for
in the way of new pledges. She was terrible at following orders. She insisted she had to be one of the least likely, least disciplined females in all of Washington to mobilize for war. Jane proceeded to explain rather flippantly that she had been working at the Netherlands East Indies desk at the Board of Economic Warfare (BEW) when the OSS came calling that fall. She had immediately quit her job and joined up,
“overcome by a great curiosity to find out how her knowledge of the Malayan language, her art training in France, Germany, and New York, and her four years in Java could change the Allied war effort in the Far East.”

Jane was all breezy unconcern and coy asides, but underneath there was a confidence born of money and education. She was the only child of a wealthy San Francisco family, and, in spite of her travels and bohemian pretensions, it showed. Her father, Harry Emerson Foster, was a pillar of the community, a distinguished physician who was for forty years the medical director of Cutter Laboratories in Berkeley. Her mother, Eve Cody Foster, was a pampered fashion plate who found the demands of everyday life taxing, was frequently incapacitated by migraines, and depended on a phalanx of maids, cooks, and assorted servants to cope. After losing her devoted Chinese houseboy, Ming, to immigration authorities early in the war, she decided to give up any claim to domesticity, put all her antiques in storage, and moved into the Fairmont Hotel. Jane admitted to having been “outrageously” indulged as a child. She attended convent schools, supplemented by dancing classes, art classes, and horseback-riding lessons. Only the art took. She attended Mills College, where San Francisco's well-to-do sent their daughters, though her mother always maintained that too much education only
“caused trouble”
—which, in her case, Jane noted in a memoir, “was probably right.”