A Covert Affair Page 4

  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-r
iding 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.”

  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 fr
om 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.