A Covert Affair (6 page)

Eager to break away from her doting parents, Jane took off for a grand tour of Europe immediately after graduation, with the announced intention of staying on afterward to
“study painting in Paris.”
She sailed for the Continent in June 1935, with a gorgeous new I. Magnin wardrobe provided by her mother and a generous allowance of one hundred dollars a month from her father. Together with a small inheritance from her grandfather, it meant she could do pretty much as she pleased.
With typical bad timing, she picked that moment to go to Germany. Berlin was
“silent and nobody laughed. Everyone looked worried and frightened and had reason to be.”
But she had an invitation to stay with a college friend, a German student named Anne-Marie, who had since married, as it turned out, an SS colonel. At first, Jane had found him and his officer friends, decked out at dinner each night in their full Nazi regalia, ghoulishly fascinating. As the weeks went by, however, she was increasingly appalled by their racist comments. Alarmed by the black-booted soldiers goose-stepping down the Kurfürstendamm, she cut her visit short. She and a girlfriend signed up for a ten-day In-tourist tour of the Moscow Theatre Festival and hopped a train bound for Russia. They feasted on
“three kinds of caviar for breakfast,”
saw plays morning, noon and night, and thought it was wonderful. Moscow was very dirty and poor, but at least people did not have the
“wide-eyed haunted look”
she had come to recognize in the streets of Berlin. Realizing that she could not remain in Nazi Germany—after an argument about Hitler, Anne-Marie's husband had hit her and locked her out of the house—Jane went to Paris and enrolled in art school.

Paris was heaven. It was everything she had hoped it would be and more, and she cursed herself for not having gone there directly. She stayed at the Cité Internationale Universitaire, Fondation des États-Unis, and studied under the French painter and sculptor André Lhote. Of course, it was impossible to escape the Nazi threat. In early 1936, Hitler marched into the demilitarized Rhineland in defiance of the Versailles Treaty. The French began to mobilize. Filled with sadness, Jane sailed home in May and resumed her art studies at Mills's summer school.

Still chafing at the familial bonds, Jane chose the time-honored route of romance to flee the nest. At a reception at the Institute of Pacific Relations, a foreign policy council favored by the local business and political elite, she met a handsome Dutch diplomat eight years her senior named Leendert “Leo” Kamper. Jane promptly fell in love, though, as she ruefully told Betty, it was unclear if it was with the strapping six-foot-two-inch Leo or some
“romantic idea”
of life in the exotic
Dutch East Indies. When his six-month leave was up, Leo returned to Java, and they made plans to meet in a few months' time and marry.

In October 1936, at the age of twenty-four, Jane sailed for Shanghai. A friend from convent school, Mary Minton, was married to an American naval officer stationed in China and had agreed to accompany Jane from China to Java. After several weeks on a small freighter in Southeast Asia, the two woman made their way to the port of Batavia, in Java. After a chaste betrothal period of three weeks (Leo's idea, not hers), Jane and he exchanged rings in Singapore and celebrated with a lovely lunch at the Raffles Hotel. Jane was not in Batavia long before it became apparent that she had made a mistake. She was not a good match for her conventional Dutch husband, nor did she fit in with conservative colonial Dutch society. She scandalized the neighbors by fraternizing with the natives, learning their language, and objecting to the harsh treatment of household servants. Homesick and unhappy, Jane returned to America after only eighteen months. Her excuse was an invitation from the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art to attend an exhibition of her paintings, but both she and Leo knew the marriage was over.

The divorce was tricky. In those days, both parties had to remain in Dutch territory for five months until the decree was final, so Jane decided to sit out her sentence in a popular artists' colony in Bali. She took a room by the beach, painted, and enjoyed the idle, sybaritic life of the other rich expatriates on the island. The enclave was a fantasy of freedom and a refuge for utopian romantics, aristocratic homosexuals, nudists, discontents, and runaway neurotics of all kinds. Most drank themselves into a stupor every night, and the small band of Anglo settlers earned a reputation for sexual promiscuity and low morals. Jane thought it was paradise—or at least everything the narrow-minded, stifling colonial Dutch outpost in Java was not. Five months quickly became nine, and she would
probably have
never left had the British not declared war on the Third Reich in September 1939. At her father's insistence, she once again headed home.

When her boat docked in San Francisco, her frantic parents were there to meet her. Once they had her safely back in their embrace, they
were not about to let go. They expressed pride in the successful exhibition of her paintings but adamantly opposed her attempt to take a studio in the city. Taking a job was out of the question. Jane went back to school, beginning work on a postgraduate thesis on Java at the University of California. She found living at home suffocating, however, and it was not long before she felt reduced to being a child again, asking permission to go out for the evening.
“My mother did not mind my going to the ends of the earth,”
Jane observed sardonically, adding that what she could not bear was any show of independence on her own turf.

When Jane heard that her friend Mary Minton was also back living with her parents (her husband had been transferred to Greenland), she got in touch and the two captives planned their escape together. In the winter of 1941, they moved to New York. A few months later, Mary went to Washington, and shortly afterward Jane followed. She scraped by doing freelance artwork until a friend from Java arranged for a job with the Library of Congress representing the Netherlands Information Office of the Dutch government in exile. She and her colleagues accumulated a vast amount of information on the customs and socioeconomic life of Indonesia but did relatively little with it. In time, the entire department was taken over by the Board of Economic Warfare and she became a newly minted economic expert (the war created a lot of overnight experts) and was expected to crank out analytical reports. She was put in a section called Reoccupation and Rehabilitation of Liberated Territories, where she wrote reports on such pressing issues as rice production in Indonesia and cheese production in Greece. When the OSS whispered in her ear, she, too, jumped at the chance to go overseas.

All this Jane sketched briefly between the fingerprinting and the swearing in. At the security office, where they had reported as directed, a grizzled second lieutenant, seated behind a large desk and sucking an unlit cigar, intoned,
“You girls please raise your right hands and solemnly swear …”
A large wartime propaganda poster of a huge pink ear hung on the wall behind him warning: “The Enemy Is Listening.” They promised never to reveal what went on in the name of the OSS.
With that duty out of the way, the second lieutenant launched into a canned lecture on the need for constant vigilance. They were not to tell anyone, not even family or loved ones, where they worked or what they did. The security officer was very dramatic and to Betty sounded like he was reenacting something from the movies: there were enemy agents everywhere, you never knew who might be listening, one slip of the tongue could cost a dozen lives. “OSS is an undercover organization authorized by the Joint Chiefs of Staff,” he continued. “We are anonymous. If people ask you what you do here, tell 'em you are file clerks. People aren't interested in file clerks—not enough to ask questions.” He looked them over with distaste, as if pegging them as bad risks from the outset, and then dismissed them with one last weary exhortation: “Girls, for my sake, see if you can't set a good example.”

They were both assigned to Morale Operations—the propaganda branch. The OSS initially comprised three branches: Special Operations (SO), the sabotage branch, which covered everything from blowing things up to carrying out irregular warfare in Axis territory; Secret Intelligence (SI), which dealt with espionage, i.e., infiltrating enemy lines and obtaining information; and Research and Analysis (R & A), which developed intelligence studies for operational groups and devised new methods of spying. As the organization grew in size and scope, other departments were appended, including Counterintelligence (X-2). Morale Operations (MO) was created in January 1943, and by March was ready for action.

Betty and Jane were told to report to their new CO at once, but, as they quickly discovered, this was more easily said than done. The first room they were sent to turned out to be an empty suite of offices that had been stripped of everything save for the telephone wires dangling from the walls. A passing workman explained that this was par for the course. The place was in a constant state of upheaval, and offices were always being moved from the Q Building to the M Building, and then moved again the next month. Staffers were always packing and repacking. Because the storerooms were also constantly being relocated, they took everything that was not nailed down. As Betty and Jane soon discovered, in the short time since its birth the wartime
agency had ballooned in size to become a vast organization, filling five large office buildings that from the outside resembled ramshackle plywood sheds and were connected by a maze of stairs, passageways, and underground tunnels. The sprawling operation was scattered across a steep hill between the Naval Hospital and an old abandoned brewery, which explained the tantalizing aroma that wafted down the hallways. Q Building, where MO had recently been relocated, was at the foot of Foggy Bottom.

While they searched in vain for the MO offices over the next hour, wandering down long corridors lined with offices identified only by number and trudging past the Administration Building, where Colonel William J. Donovan had set up his command post, they compared notes. Between the two of them, they tried to form a picture of the organization that had plucked them from their safe but boring civilian jobs. They needed to know what they had gotten themselves into. Their new boss, the dashing Colonel Donovan, had received a great deal of flattering attention in the press. He was a much-decorated hero of World War I, holder of the Medal of Honor, millionaire Wall Street lawyer, and personal friend of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. “Wild Bill,” as the newspapers had dubbed him, was a handsome bull of a man in his late fifties, with a swaggering self-confidence and intense personal magnetism that had helped propel his career. A great admirer of the British Secret Intelligence Service (MI6), he had spent time in England studying its organization and methods, and he managed to convince FDR that America, which had little expertise in espionage, would benefit from having the same kind of agency in the event of war. This led to the creation of the Coordinator of Information (COI), just five months before Pearl Harbor. Then, after eleven months of bureaucratic squabbling that was petty and protracted even by Washington standards, some of COI's functions were folded into the Office of War Information (OWI), and the OSS was formally established under the Joint Chiefs of Staff in June 1942. Donovan's ambitious plans for the OSS were doggedly opposed by OWI chief Elmer Davis and Foreign Information Service director Robert Sherwood, and it took a presidential executive order in March 1943 to clarify that OWI would be responsible
for “white,” or official, propaganda, leaving OSS nominally in charge of “black” propaganda.

Much of this had been outlined during Betty's and Jane's indoctrination early that morning. The OSS was authorized to collect and analyze strategic intelligence, and to plan and operate overseas. Their work would be used to support actual military operations and planned campaigns, as well as in the furtherance of guerilla activities behind enemy lines. They would be focused primarily on gathering pertinent information about enemy countries—everything from the character and strength of the armed forces and troop morale to internal economic organization, principal channels of supply, and relationship to allies. Their main job would be to collect intelligence, either directly or through various government agencies at home and abroad, and transmit it to the proper authorities. They had been assured that the heavy lifting—organizing guerilla resistance, arranging secret air drops, sabotage of enemy installations, and other forms of irregular warfare—would be left to those naturally inclined to and specifically trained for hazardous duty. This was fortunate, Betty wrote in an account of her wartime adventures, as they were both terrified
“at the very thought of jumping out of an airplane.”

It was widely known that the OSS was made up of a great many members of Donovan's high-powered firm, Donovan, Leisure, Newton & Irvine, along with what Jane termed
“a large proportion of socialites,”
meaning Smith girls with gumption who could also type. There was also a wide variety of PhDs—everything from psychologists, anthropologists, linguists, and mathematicians to ornithologists—as well as an assortment of creative types, including artists, writers, journalists, inventors, and advertising men. Donovan had a penchant for hiring from the Ivy League and the Junior League, on the grounds that the well-off were harder to bribe, and a reputation for poaching talent wherever he could find it. He was
“hardly beloved”
by people in other government agencies because he was always raiding them for personnel, which was why Jane had taken the precaution of resigning from the BEW before jumping to Donovan's agency. The result was that the OSS had legions of critics, particularly among the old-timers, who were
jealous of its power—Donovan reported directly to the president—and unlimited funds. They regularly derided his staff as a bunch of dreamers and bluebloods, and, as Jane put it,
“sneeringly said that the initials stood for ‘Oh So Secret' or for ‘Oh So Social.'”