A Covert Affair Read online

  ALSO BY JENNET CONANT

  The Irregulars: Roald Dahl and the British Spy Ring in Wartime Washington

  109 East Palace: Robert Oppenheimer and the Secret City of Los Alamos

  Tuxedo Park: A Wall Street Tycoon and the Secret Palace of Science That Changed the Course of World War II

  Simon & Schuster

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  Copyright © 2011 by Jennet Conant

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  First Simon & Schuster hardcover edition April 2011

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  Photo credits appear on page 397.

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  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Conant, Jennet.

  A covert affair: Julia Child and Paul Child in the OSS / Jennet Conant—1st Simon & Schuster hardcover ed.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  1. Child, Julia. 2. Child, Paul, 1902–1994. 3. World War, 1939–1945—Secret service—United States. 4. United States. Office of Strategic Services—Biography. 5. Intelligence officers—United States—Biography. 6. Child, Julia—Homes and haunts—Europe. 7. Child, Paul, 1902–1994—Homes and haunts—Europe. 8. McCarthy, Joseph, 1908–1957. 9. Anti-communist movements—United States—History—20th century. 10. United States—Politics and government—1945–1954. I. Title.

  D810.S8 C3863 2011

  940.54'85092273—dc22 2011002875

  ISBN 978-1-4391-6352-8

  ISBN 978-1-4391-6850-9 (ebook)

  To Betty

  for all her stories

  Thanks to the human heart by which we live,

  Thanks to its tenderness, its joys, and fears,

  To me the meanest flower that blows can give

  Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.

  —William Wordsworth

  CONTENTS

  1 Special Inquiry

  2 Initiation

  3 Late Start

  4 A Fine Sort

  5 Instant Fame

  6 The Great White Queen of Bali

  7 Chickens Coming Home to Roost

  8 Whispers in the Willow Trees

  9 Incurable Romantics

  10 Open Season

  11 The Nightmare

  12 The Taste of Ashes

  Epilogue

  Appendix

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Acknowledgments

  Index

  A COVERT AFFAIR

  1

  SPECIAL INQUIRY

  It started with the arrival of a telegram. Ever since the war, the thin slip of a letter had become permanently fixed in people’s minds as a harbinger of death and disaster. Why Julia believed for one moment that it would be good news she could not recall—just that she had been so sure. The cable, which reached them in Bonn on Thursday, April 7, 1955, was addressed to her husband, Paul Child. The cursory message took the form of an urgent summons to Washington: REPORT SOONEST FOR CONSULTATION.

  Julia had been over the moon. She knew exactly why Paul was being called stateside. They were going to make him “head of the department.” She had even told him as much, her voice brimming with confidence and pride. Incapable of containing her excitement, she had been ready to celebrate then and there. It was silly of her, but characteristic, too. She had gone on happily speculating about the telegram the rest of the evening. Paul had eventually gotten caught up in her mood, his reluctant, mock impatience giving way to anticipation. This, at last, was his promotion, long deserved and long overdue. Then again, when had the State Department ever done anything in a timely fashion?

  She supposed they should be grateful. Paul had never been particularly ambitious and because he had little patience with bureaucracy had remained mired in the middle ranks of the Foreign Service. He had never intended to pursue a diplomatic career and lacked the necessary instincts. He had simply been rolled into the State Department after the war and eventually found himself, along with most of his old department, reorganized into the newly formed United States Information Service (USIS).* His particular field, “visual presentation,” which had once involved designing and running war rooms in such exotic locales as India and China, now encompassed such mundane matters as arranging press and special events for the agency’s European missions. As Foreign Service jobs went, it was a somewhat unglamorous backwater, and it was unlikely he would rise very far. That suited Paul just fine, Julia knew. It meant he would have more time to devote to his artistic sidelines—the writing, painting, and photography that he found infinitely more satisfying. The job was just something he got on with, did well, and left on Fridays at five. Still, it was only right that after years of toiling under a succession of bores and simpletons (his current superiors were known to the staff as “Woodenhead the First” and “Wooden-head the Second,” or WH1 and WH2 for short) Paul was finally going to get his due. Perhaps he would get to run his own show or, at the very least, be allowed to pick the members of his own team. There were few things more demoralizing, in Julia’s opinion, than “working for people you don’t admire.”

  It was just the morale boost they both needed. Six months earlier, Julia and Paul had been forced to leave their beloved France and, crueler still, an adorable apartment in the old port city of Marseille, because of an inane government decree that a diplomatic post in any given country could not exceed a period of four years. The three years they had spent in Paris directly after the war, followed by a fifteen-month stint on the southern coast, meant they had exceeded the limit. They had no choice but to pack up and go where they were told.

  The transfer to Bonn could not have come at a worse time. Julia had been in the midst of testing recipes for a French cookbook she was contracted to write for the Boston publisher Houghton Mifflin with two fellow gourmands she had met in Paris. She knew that the new assignment for Paul not only would take her farther from her collaborators, but would remove her from the country in whose cuisine she should be immersing herself. As difficult as it had been for her to box up her kitchen in Marsailles, Julia understood that the move was infinitely harder on Paul. He had spent his formative years in France, and the language had become second nature to him, as had the internecine squabbling of the locals. The country had captured his heart long before it had taken hold of hers.

  Leaving Paris for Marseilles had been a wrenching experience, but it was nothing compared to the jolt that Julia and Paul experienced upon learning they were being posted to Bonn. Paul was fluent in a number of languages, but German was not one of them. It was a poor use of his skills, and he was beside himself. While he had long since reconciled himself to the fact that few things in their government agency followed the dictates of logic, this yank of the chain was particularly galling. Julia could think of nothing to say to cheer him up. She had never set foot in Germany and was “horrified” at the thought. Her memories of World War II were too fresh for her not to dread the idea of settling in Bonn, which had temporarily replaced Berlin as the official seat of the government because it reportedly had less historical baggage. She coul
d only hope she would think better of the new West German capital for having escaped the brunt of the Nazi boot. “To think of living in Germany,” she grimly wrote Paul’s family. “Will I ever get over the imagined smell of the gas chambers and the rotting bodies of the Concentration camps. Will we ever be able to learn the language in a couple of months?”*

  Their first glimpse of their new home did nothing to lift their spirits. “Woe—how did we get here!” Julia scribbled in her diary on October 24, 1954, the day they arrived in Bad Godesberg, a drab residential district just south of Bonn. Flush with dollars from the Marshall Plan, the entire Rhine Valley had been rapidly rebuilt as part of the country’s economic and industrial redevelopment, and it was full of blocky concrete office buildings and bristling with American soldiers. Julia and Paul were dismayed to find themselves back in the familiar embrace of the U.S. military, assigned to live in a segregated (“no Germans allowed!”) compound called Plittersdorf on the Rhine, which its unfortunate occupants had dubbed “the Golden Ghetto on the Rhine.” They had never cared for this part of army life—the rows of anonymous housing, streets crawling with jeeps and military policemen, and bars crowded with drunken young men in ill-fitting uniforms who wanted to be anywhere but there. Writing to her sister, Julia griped that she had “had enough of that meat-ballery during the war to last her a lifetime.” Still, there were plenty of opportunities for escape. Paul’s Foreign Service salary enabled them to live well, especially as the dollar was strong against the mark. Whenever possible, they fled across the river to Bonn, a picturesque university town that had been occupied by American troops toward the end of the war and had somehow managed to survive relatively unscathed, its medieval battlements and grand boulevards still redolent of Old World charm. There they could sample the solid regional fare, the sauerbratens and sausages, inevitably served with groaning plates of potato pancakes. Afterward, too full to go far, they would stop to recover at one of the pavement cafés along the banks of the river.

  Julia and Paul, like most in their seasoned diplomatic circle, had always been guilty of a certain disdain for GI culture, but what had once been mild distaste had over time developed into a visceral aversion. They wanted no part of the martial fervor that arose in the shadow of the Soviet threat in East Germany. Bonn, the makeshift capital, seemed by virtue of its very impermanence to bring out the worst in its American occupiers, who were so conflicted about their objectives in the divided region that they appeared to be almost paralyzed. Caught between the menacing Soviet Union and Western Europe’s fears of military vulnerability, Bonn was emblematic of the tenuous peace, and of the uncertain prospects for American forces and American dollars to achieve a united capitalist postwar Europe to deter the spread of Communism. Writing in The New York Times, Julia and Paul’s friend Stewart Alsop observed that the U.S. diplomatic mission in Germany was “a peculiarly depressing place for a peculiarly American reason” and, in its confusion and excess of caution, was substituting “dogma for policy and the official line for serious thought.”

  Within weeks of their arrival in Germany, Julia and Paul had picked up on the atmosphere of distrust and unease. The place was rife with closed-door meetings, simmering tensions, and subterranean plots. They were on the front lines of the Cold War in Europe, though Julia could not help feeling that the chill in the air had its origin in the “rampant right wingery” that had seized their own country in recent years. In Washington, the mood was so changed that on her last visit home she had scarcely recognized the city as the same place she and Paul had lived in those first happy postwar years.

  When peace was declared, Americans had celebrated their achievement. The GIs had triumphed over Germany, over Japan, and, in the bargain, over the Great Depression, and in the first glow of euphoria that victory had seemed complete. The United States, with its great economic and military strength, seemed invincible. During the late 1940s, while based in Paris, Julia and Paul had watched as their country’s ascendance as a global power led to a new confidence in its role in international affairs, as well as a greater sense of its responsibilities in preserving the peace and shaping the future, and the corresponding spread of U.S. policy-making agencies and legations around the globe.

  As the rewards of war failed to meet the impossibly high expectations, however, the euphoria had quickly faded. New fears about the nation’s security had gripped the public. The tone of political debate in Congress grew sharply partisan and bitter, with the Republicans making the most of charges of Communist infiltration of the Truman administration, as though that could explain the failure to foresee what had happened with the Soviet Union and China. In the spring of 1947, in an effort to protect his administration, President Harry S. Truman established the Federal Employee Loyalty Program, a broad measure instituting background checks and screening procedures for all incumbent and prospective government employees. But instead of reassuring the public, the program helped legitimize the idea that international Communism posed a domestic threat. By the end of 1950, Alger Hiss was convicted of perjury, Klaus Fuchs confessed, and Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were arrested on espionage charges of passing bomb secrets to the Russians. Inevitably, in 1953, after years of relentless media coverage, the Rosenbergs got the chair. All of this seemed to confirm the existence of spies in every nook and cranny of government. Washington was awash in paranoia and suspicion.

  Even more troubling than the hardening of ideology was the vicious Red-baiting of Senator Joseph R. McCarthy. To Julia, the whole government, spurred on by McCarthy’s unscrupulous zeal, seemed consumed with hunting for subversives. Venting her anger in a letter to her family, Julia wrote that she could not help thinking that most McCarthy supporters, of whom she was afraid her “dear old Pop” was one, were “good-hearted but fat-headed people” who were hopelessly stuck in the past. For twenty years, her father’s animosity had festered under the New Deal and the Fair Deal: “Roosevelt was, to him, the anti-Christ. Roosevelt was socialism. The enemy. He boiled and seethed with hatred.” As far as she could see, McCarthy had tapped right into that source of hatred, fueling people’s fears about the future: “Suddenly the new enemy is also Communism,” she continued. “It is these nasty foreigners with their socialistic ideas, these nasty intellectual egg-heads, who like the foreigners, & who have always caused all the trouble. What we want is to return to 1925, when we had no world responsibility (presumably), and no truck with foreigners. We just want to live alone. McCarthy is the savior symbol.”

  The junior senator from Wisconsin’s rapid rise to power was a recurring theme in the newspapers and Julia and Paul were riveted. They read everything they could get their hands on in Bonn, including the Herald Tribune and an edited version of the daily New York Times, and they beseeched family members to send articles from home. McCarthy had successfully made Communism a potent campaign issue, and he bullied President Truman into implementing an executive order to begin loyalty investigations of government employees. After the “fall” of China in October 1949, when the Communists led by Mao Tse-tung proclaimed the formation of the People’s Republic, McCarthy and his allies had stepped up their ideological attacks. On February 9, 1950, in a speech before the Women’s Republican Club of Wheeling, West Virginia, McCarthy had announced his crusade against government employees suspected of being members of the Communist Party, who were nevertheless “still working and shaping policy in the State Department.” Julia and Paul had seen the headlines that followed, all of which focused on McCarthy’s claim that he had in hand a “list of 205” names of traitors.

  McCarthy’s Red scare became a real cause of concern, alarm even, to State Department personnel. He had made the overseas information agency one of his targets and had vowed to root out “security risks.” Hoping to appease McCarthy, President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s new secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, had dismissed a number of high-level diplomats and had warned that anything less than “positive loyalty” from Foreign Service officers was “not tolerab
le at this time.” Julia and Paul had been en route to Germany when they had heard about the flurry of coerced departures in Bonn. This had been followed by reports of books being removed from the shelves of libraries run by the USIS, known as America Houses, in a number of European cities. Dashiell Hammett’s hard-boiled detective novel The Maltese Falcon was one of the many books McCarthy wanted “deshelved”—a neat euphemism for censored. In Berlin, a book entitled Thunder Out of China, written by their friend Theodore H. White, a Time magazine correspondent during the war, was found to be objectionable; it was removed and burned. Apparently White’s sympathy with Mao and some of the Communist objectives made the book too dangerous for the eyes of impressionable Germans, the citizens of a country America was trying to turn into a unified democracy.

  Julia and Paul learned from friends in Paris that Roy Cohn and David Schine, McCarthy’s young assistants—the newspapers called them “the gumshoe boys”—had paid a surprise visit to the embassy there. Cohn and Schine had nosed around looking for dirt. Inevitably, they had rooted out a handful of employees who were disgruntled and interviewed them. One of Paul’s former colleagues, Larry Morris, the Paris cultural attaché, had happened on the two men in his office one Saturday afternoon, apparently making themselves at home with their feet propped up on his desk. Incensed, he had demanded they remove their feet from his desk and leave. They had gone quietly, but not before holding a press conference during which they made all sorts of unsubstantiated charges—“vague, but dirty,” as Paul put it. Naturally, no official at the embassy was given the opportunity to reply. Then Cohn and Schine announced that the next day—Easter Sunday—they would be questioning the ambassador, and wanted to meet with all the top USIS officers at 3:00 p.m. that afternoon at the library to examine the books on display. Everyone canceled his or her holiday plans and assembled at the library at the appointed hour, but Cohn and Schine never showed. Finally someone called the Hôtel de Crillon and discovered that the “two young bloods” had just risen from their beds and were eating breakfast in their suite. As far as Paul could tell, the only investigating they did was “during most of Holy Saturday night, among the naked showgirls of Montmartre.”