A Covert Affair Page 3

  All of this material, some of it going back more than a decade, gave Sullivan and Sanders ample cause to press their case. They had to ask Paul about his homosexuality, they told him, no matter how embarrassing it might be for all involved. The “Kafkas” resumed their humiliating probe of the most private parts of his life, repeatedly reading something suspicious into his long bachelorhood. Just when he thought the two agents had exhausted the subject of his “homosexual tendencies,” they commanded, without warning: “Drop your pants.”

  Paul just gaped at them. Was he supposed to prove his manhood with some sort of demonstration? He was so outraged, and so adamant in his denials—challenging the flustered agents to take down their own pants to see if it was possible to tell by “just looking”—that they finally let it go. In spite of this, a half hour later they asked unprompted if he had ever sought out psychiatric treatment. When he demanded to know “what in God’s name that would prove,” they said they thought that perhaps, long ago, he might have requested advice about “some little homosexual leanings.”

  Paul later wrote Julia that he had stood up to his interrogators and had assumed from the outset that the homosexual ploy—which he considered “fairly dirty”—was designed to unnerve him and compel a quick confession. He remembered that when their friend Charles E. “Chip” Bohlen was Eisenhower’s ambassador-designate for the Soviet Union in 1953, McCarthy opposed his nomination, and when his attacks on Bohlen’s performance at the Yalta Conference proved insufficient, he got the FBI to leak some suggestive stories raising doubt about Bohlen’s sexual persuasion. Bohlen was confirmed anyway. But to Paul, it showed that McCarthy and his henchmen viewed homosexuality, on their sliding scale of perversions, to be just a hair removed from Communism, and any such admission would have surely sealed his fate.

  And so the questioning had continued, hour after hour. All the places he had lived. All the people he had known. All his colleagues since joining the OSS in 1942 and their names and addresses. There were more questions about his brother and sister-in-law: their interests and activities; the names of organizations they belonged to; the names of their friends and acquaintances. Questions about Julia’s relations, etc., etc. His memory, not particularly good at this sort of detail in the best of times, occasionally faltered. Not that it mattered. He had nothing to hide. “They weren’t brutal,” he wrote Julia, “just very, very thorough.” Their technique “was to take notes (in spite of the secretary), abandon a given subject for fifteen minutes, and then suddenly loop back and ask a question already asked, but in a different form.”

  Ironically, after having to defend himself against charges that he was sexually bent, he then had to convince them he had never bedded Jane Foster, despite the fact that she was an attractive woman—a high-spirited, golden-haired California girl who was reportedly one of the most memorable of the female OSS recruits to be flown into the Eastern theater during the war. Paul had spent an entire year in her company in Ceylon. Did he really expect them to believe that despite being billeted in the same barracks all that time he had never so much as made a pass at her? Paul patiently explained that while he and Jane were “very good friends,” they had never been lovers. She was, in his words, a loose, warm, gregarious, and witty woman. Someone he found “fun to talk to.” A “bold, free spirit” who was not regulated by traditions, the type of person “who might dine at six pm one evening and at eleven the next.” He had escorted her to a number of dinner parties and dances on the post, and they had shared countless meals together, but that was as far as it went.

  In the end, the two agents had just stood up, thanked him, and said goodbye. They were finished for the time being. They gave absolutely no indication whether they believed him or not. Their expressions gave nothing away. Paul, who had maintained his poise for most of the interrogation, finally lost it. He had had all he could take and gave full vent to his fury. The whole charade, he berated them, had been handled in an “amateurish” fashion. All the subterfuge had been for nothing because they had “left him dangling” without information for days, and as a result “practically everyone in the outfit was aware something was screwy.” Bringing him back to Washington, he added bitterly, had been a pointless exercise, not to mention a fantastic waste of the government’s time and money. Looking supremely unconcerned, the two agents replied that, far from being useless, the interview had proved “extraordinarily valuable,” certainly worth the inconvenience and cost. With that, Paul was dismissed. It was 9:00 p.m. by the time he got back to his hotel and his letter to Julia. At the conclusion of his long, harrowing account, he had scribbled wearily, “The shape of the immediate future is—at the moment—totally unclear.”

  At first, Julia was unable to take it in. “Paul is being investigated!” she noted in her diary on April 13, the enormity of what was happening finally beginning to sink in. The very idea of a Special Inquiry was “inexplicably weird.” Although it was utterly absurd that anyone could suspect her husband of being a Communist, she realized they could not afford to take the allegations lightly. Paul was afraid he might be in the “same position” as an old friend and colleague, Leonard Rennie, who was among a group of employees dismissed by the State Department as security risks. Paul had spent the weekend with the Rennies at their country home, and while their sympathy was well intended, it was of small comfort. They knew all too well the damage that even a hint of controversy could do, let alone a full-blown inquiry. He had been advised by a high-level USIS official by the name of Parker May to say nothing and wait. Patience would be in his “own interests.” Meanwhile, he was not to engage in any real work, but to try his best to maintain the fiction that this was one of those run-of-the-mill “government mixups.” If the FBI did not turn up anything incriminating, he would be given a clean bill of health and sent home.

  Paul, of course, had no intention of keeping quiet. “As soon as he got out that first day, he went howling to everyone he knew,” recalled Julia, who had stayed up till dawn on Wednesday reviewing everything Paul had told her with a senior Foreign Service officer whom she knew they could trust. Between them, she and Paul knew a number of important people, and they both spent the next few days working the phones trying to find a way to remedy his situation.

  Although Paul was confident he had acquitted himself well in the security interview and was still a “persona grata,” he was not yet in the clear. He had been given notice that he could be reexamined at any time. He was not to leave town. The standard investigation lasted thirty days, and he had to sit tight until they were done. As a precaution of sorts, he asked Julia to make copies of his long account of his interrogation available to his two supervisors in the Bonn office. He wrote her daily. His affectionate letters, full of his usual chatty badinage about the poor food and soupy heat of Washington’s Indian summer, belied his consuming doubt and anger. He cautioned her to postpone an upcoming trip to Paris in case she was needed in Washington at the last minute.

  In one letter, he enclosed a Washington Post and Times-Herald article about the problems being caused by American postwar “hyper-patriotism,” explaining that the extreme security procedures being put in place to safeguard against espionage were perceived by many leading lawyers and scientists as “harrying and constricting.” The Washington attorney Harold Green, a former member of the Atomic Energy Commission’s general counsel’s office, also pointed to the government’s “wobbly standards” in the present program: “Our criteria, for example, condemn the homosexual and pervert as security risks because of the risk of blackmail, but they are silent as to the married adulterer. We do not yet know who is the greater risk: the paragon of virtue who has a record of carelessness in locking classified material in his safe, or the chronic alcoholic who has a spotless record of security performance.” Another story on the same page reported that the legality of the government loyalty-security hearings was facing a legal challenge in the Supreme Court because the proceedings “did not grant the accused the right to confr
ont or cross-examine his accusers.” At the top of each article, Paul scribbled “Julie! Julie!”

  The waiting was agony, made worse by the fact that they were an ocean apart. She bombarded him with special delivery letters, telegrams, and telephone calls testifying to her unwavering love and support. “You are finer, better, more loveable, more attractive, deeper, nicer, nobler, cleverer, stronger and more wonderful [than other men],” she wrote. “I am so damned lucky even to know you, much less (or more) to be married to you.” Privately, she felt fear bordering on panic. She was on pins and needles all the time. She was terribly worried about Paul’s health. The FBI interrogation had been “a horrible experience for him.” Every day he remained under suspicion was exacting a toll on him, emotionally and physically. He was having difficulty sleeping and was dependent on what he called his “goldfish”—tiny, brightly hued pills prescribed by a local doctor—for the little rest he got. His stomach, weakened by too many bouts of intestinal parasites contracted during the war, was in a dreadful state. She could not help thinking the worst. Paul could be fired or detained or dragged through endless months of loyalty hearings like some they knew. How was it that Jane Foster, of all people—smart, funny, talented Jane—had ended up on McCarthy’s list of “Communists in the State Department”? Jane was a painter. She was not even employed by the government anymore. What, if anything, could she possibly have done to bring this calamity down on all their heads? The whole thing would have been laughable if it were not so terrifying.

  On April 21, Paul was reinterviewed about Jane Foster, this time by one of USIS’s own security officers. Paul again provided a detailed account of all his interactions with Jane while employed by the OSS in Ceylon, as well as every subsequent encounter. He again maintained that although the closest of friends they had never been romantically involved, and had kept up only an intermittent friendship. After the war, he had not laid eyes on Jane again until the spring of 1946, when he happened to run into her on the street in Georgetown and they stopped to have a brief conversation. That was the only contact he had had with her in the United States. He had next seen her in 1952, sometime after he had joined the staff of the embassy in Paris. At that time, he had met her husband, a Russian American named George Zlatovski. Over the next few years the two couples had occasionally met for dinner, though Paul estimated it was probably not more than ten times. He had last seen her and her husband in the fall of 1954, when they had spent a few hours visiting together. Neither she nor George seemed to be particularly interested in politics, nor had they ever expressed any interest in his government post or in USIS policies. They had never even given any indication that they were sympathetic with the Communist Party. No, he had never heard any gossip to the effect that they were Communists or Communist sympathizers. No, he had never seen any Communist literature lying around their apartment in Paris. Paul observed dryly that he had always thought Jane was “too disorganized to become interested in any organization.”

  The only question that gave him pause was the last one: Would he recommend Jane Foster Zlatovski as a loyal American who could be trusted with confidential information? Paul considered this for moment. He felt boxed in by the loaded nature of the question. He wanted to be honest without being incriminating. He had “no reason to question her loyalty,” he ventured, adding somewhat hesitantly that he did not think he could trust her absolutely. When pressed, he explained that Jane was “a glib talker” and “somewhat irresponsible.” As much as he hated to say anything against her, he would not trust her with confidential information because of her “indiscreetness.”

  At all times during his questioning, Paul tried to be perfectly frank, and to show by his attitude that he had nothing to be ashamed of or to conceal. He felt “untainted,” he wrote Julia that weekend, because he was “completely cleared and completely blameless.” Still, he could not let it go. The whole business ate away at him, poisoning his gut. “I’m afraid I hate the system,” he agonized, wondering if he would ever again feel in control of his career, let alone his life. “What the Hell are they investigating Foster for, anyway? Or was that really a dodge to investigate me? Damned if I know.” What he wanted, above all, was an explanation that made some sense of the whole thing, that would tell him what had gone wrong, so he would know how to go on from there. How else was he to avoid the pitfalls ahead? And protect Julia, himself, and his career from further harm? But clearly no such enlightenment would be forthcoming. He was on his own.

  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.

  2

  INITIATION

  “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 ab
out 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!”