A Covert Affair Page 5

  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.’”

  Just when Betty and Jane were about to give up and admit they were lost, they stumbled across the large, drafty room that housed the newly formed Far Eastern section of Morale Operations. Their CO, Major Herbert F. Little, was busy securing a large map of Manchuria to the wall, and he regarded them curiously from his perch atop the stool. A tall, balding man with a bemused expression, he was a British-born lawyer from Seattle who had traveled extensively in Asia in civilian life. Adding that they did not stand on ceremony at the OSS, he welcomed them informally by their first names and thereafter usually referred to them as “the girls.” All women in the OSS were “girls,” regardless of their age, rank, or responsibilities.

  The major showed them to their desks amid a jumble of office furniture. He then led the way past a plywood partition to a small inner office, really just a step up from a cardboard box, where he proceeded to unlock a safe and remove a much-thumbed mimeographed document. Entitled “MO Manual, Revised,” it was the handiwork of members of the original European Branch of MO, who had set down on paper the unorthodox means of warfare they had learned the hard way, largely from the German war machine that had applied them so effectively in the early drive into France. During the blitzkrieg, Nazi agents had softened the way for the advancing army by spreading false rumors—often in the form of forged leaflets and faked underground newspapers—proclaiming widespread German victories and forecasting the imminent collapse of England. It was a method of “sapping morale,” they were told, an ancient practice that dated back to the sappers who breached fortress walls in medieval times, and “when done right was more effective than any modern weapon of war.” The major then instructed Jane and Betty to familiarize themselves with the manual’s contents and left for lunch.

  The manual was their introduction to “morale operations,” the art of influencing the enemy by means of psychological warfare, or PW. (Acronyms, they soon learned, were an integral part of the OSS mystique.) It dealt primarily with “black propaganda,” which consisted of subtle lies, indirect rumor, and misinformation designed to deceive the enemy and its collaborators in occupied territories. As the MO bible stated:

  Morale operations include all measures of subversion, other than physical, used to create confusion and division, and to undermine the morale and the political unity of the enemy through any means from within, or purporting to emanate within, enemy countries; or from bases within areas where action and counteraction may be effective against the enemy.

  MO operators, by means of black propaganda, could come up with countless possible ways to confound the enemy. They were constrained only by the limits of their imagination and any vestigial sense of decency. The standard methods included making contact with resistance groups, underground operations, and field agents, and employing them to spread rumors designed to have a demoralizing effect; or initiating the rumors themselves, spreading them via radio stations purporting to belong to the enemy, or putting out pamphlets ostensibly coming from within the enemy’s own ranks. More cunning methods included creating exact reproductions of Japanese propaganda handouts and posters but tweaked ever so slightly to be damaging to, say, Indonesian attitudes or sensibilities. They could also play upon the enemy’s emotions with deceptive reports of a discontented home front or wavering military leadership, or with exaggerated reports of U.S. intentions and capabilities. All this was laid out in the manual, along with the instruction that MO operators should carefully guard their anonymity at all times, should carry no evidence (in the form of documents or letters) that would reveal their true identity, and should always opt for civvies in favor of their uniform. As far as Betty and Jane could tell from their brief perusal of the MO handbook, almost any form of thoroughly amoral activity was condoned when it came to manipulating one’s foe. The only thing that was absolutely forbidden, Betty noted, was to “blow cover.”

  They had just digested the section on “the preparation of incriminating documents” when their
CO returned armed with a half-dozen telephones. Major Little proceeded to give them a crash course in MO work, embracing his subject with the benign enthusiasm of a dentist explaining the latest techniques in molar extraction. One way to disrupt Japanese relations with a puppet country like China, for example, would be to plant evidence of treason. “Our black radio net could send out ‘compromise’ code messages,” he began, and then cheerfully elaborated all the different kinds of deceptive information that could be planted from this single scam. “We’d hint about puppet defection … Tell the Chinese the Japs are going to raze their city in the event of an attack. Tell the Japs their puppet troops are planning to revolt.” Accustomed by now to a skeptical audience, he emphasized that all these ideas, even the most outlandish, were based on concrete intelligence reports. In the end, everything they came up with was run by a board of hardheaded experts—Harvard and Yale scholars, Naval Intelligence specialists, and State Department consultants—who signed off on the various projects before they were put into effect. If even one out of twenty wild schemes really worked, he maintained, “it saved lives.” This was the MO mantra, repeated over and over again with the fervor of prayer: “If it worked, it saved lives.”

  Once he completed the mandatory lecture, Major Little introduced them to their fellow recruits, adding, by way of warning, “It takes all kinds to make an MO team.” “It was an extraordinary cast of characters to be sure,” Betty recalled, “rare, strange personalities selected at grab-bag random from all corners of the world, for many reasons.” A list of those she met that first day included “a Chinese artist, a Thai missionary, a newspaper reporter, a Shanghai businessman, a private detective, the producer of the Lucky Strike Hit Parade, a girl graduate from Hunter with a degree in international law, an Olympic broad-jump champion, a lawyer from New York, a dog fancier, a renegade American in British navy uniform who was also a black-belt holder in jujitsu, a traveling patent medicine salesman, and a Japanese-American who had fought with … Donovan and the Rainbow Division in World War I.”

  While Betty was busy getting acquainted with their new colleagues, Jane was summoned to Room 23 at 2:00 p.m. for a different kind of initiation. When she walked into the room, she found twenty or so officers seated around a long table. In the center of the table there was a large pile of weapons, only some of which she could identify: “pistols, machine guns, hand grenades, limpets, and other horrors.” A young lieutenant, seated at the end of the table, began to disassemble a weapon, explain its function, and pass the parts around the table for closer inspection. Jane “understood nothing,” but as the only woman present she was determined to keep up a brave front and “kept nodding merrily and murmuring, ‘Very interesting, indeed.’”

  As soon as the roundtable briefing ended, they were herded into a fleet of cars and driven to the plush Congressional Country Club, which the OSS had obtained permission to use as proving ground. It was time for a little target practice. Since she was a woman, Jane was issued a .32-caliber pistol and told to get acquainted with it. She was shown the difference between British hand grenades, which had long handles, and American ones, which were round as a baseball and theoretically easier to throw. “The first thing the lieutenant did was to throw me a live grenade,” Jane recalled. She threw it right back at him and then made it perfectly clear she was “not having any part of the rest of the demonstration.”

  The minute they returned to Q Building, Jane sought out Major Little. “I did not join the OSS to handle lethal weapons I will never be able to use,” she told him hotly, adding, “I’m resigning.” When she had calmed down, the major explained that the small-arms session was “standard operating procedure” for new recruits and using a gun would not be a part of her regular job. Although it was small consolation, she learned that Betty had been allowed to skip the introductory course as, like many civilians in Hawaii, she had learned how to shoot in the months after the Pearl Harbor attack. The major also informed Jane that there were more “field trips” to come. The next day, she was slated to undergo three days of tests at Station S, the OSS’s secret assessment station, in an undisclosed location. From guarded comments about S school in the corridors, Jane gathered it was a kind of mental-fitness clinic pioneered by the British War Office Selection Board, which staged similar examinations at country estates all over England in an effort to screen officer candidates from the pool of eligible young men. Persuading herself it would be a kind of fancy country weekend, Jane packed some of her most fashionable clothes to boost her confidence. She reasoned that she would be much less likely to crack under pressure in her favorite skirt, and a flash of leg might help distract the prying shrinks from what was really going on in her subconscious.

  When the army weapons carrier, packed with twenty strapping young men in fatigues, pulled up in front of her little apartment on Second Street, Jane almost lost her nerve. It was with considerable relief that she recognized Betty, the only other woman on board, and she barely managed to repress an absurd show of warmth. They had been told in advance to use assumed names and not to “break cover,” so she tried her best to avert her gaze. For most of the journey, she and Betty observed a nervous silence and gleaned little about their fellow guinea pigs except that they were destined to be parachutists.

  They were driven to a charming old colonial mansion somewhere in Virginia, situated in the midst of a 118-acre estate that they later learned had once belonged to the Willard Hotel family in Washington. They had no time to enjoy their surroundings, however, as waiting for them on the portico steps were their chief instructors, both psychologists by trade. They were formally greeted by Dr. Henry A. Murray, director of the Harvard Psychological Clinic, and Dr. Richard S. Lyman, a professor of neuropsychiatry at Duke University. These two distinguished doctors, along with a team of graduate students, would be putting them through their paces with a rigorous series of tests specifically designed to evaluate OSS recruits’ fitness for clandestine operations. The instructors wasted no time getting down to business, immediately explaining the daily routine, assigning rooms, and handing out schedules. Their days would start at 6:00 a.m. with breakfast; testing would commence at 7:00 a.m. sharp and continue until dinner.

  The business of using pseudonyms presented Betty and Jane with problems right from the start. They were told the staff knew their true identities and had seen their files so that during the tests they could comfortably be themselves. The rest of the time, however, they were supposed to stick to their “student” names and the fake background stories they had rehearsed before arriving. The problem was, Jane had not expected Betty to be on the same course and for the sake of convenience had selected her name as a pseudonym and the cover story that she was a newspaper reporter. For Betty, this switch proved to be an insurmountable “mental hazard,” and she constantly broke cover by responding whenever her name was called. For some reason, she could never remember to remain in character as “Myrtle,” the ridiculous student identity she had adopted, and by the end of the course she had grown to loathe the name.

  Over the next few days, they were given every conceivable test in an effort to chart their personality attributes: emotional stability, social relations, integrity, initiative, and leadership. There were some thirty-two different exams, beginning with the standard IQ and Rorschach tests, followed by Dr. Murray’s own tricky little invention, the Thematic Apperception Test (TAT), a picture-interpretation exercise in which the subject is handed a series of provocative yet ambiguous images and asked to furnish his or her own interpretation, with the idea that telling one’s own version of the story will draw out hidden thoughts and experiences. Jane naturally balked at this. As a trained artist, she lectured the doctor, she was not an appropriate subject for the TAT because, to begin with, she recognized all the pictures and could identify the artists who had painted them. “Besides,” she later recalled arguing heatedly, “such subjects were not meant to tell stories. Painting was painting. Literature was literature. One art doesn’t
interpret another. A picture emphasizes visual qualities!” Finally, Dr. Murray was forced to give in. A compromise was worked out, and Jane’s psyche was probed with five illustrations hastily clipped from a back issue of Cosmopolitan.

  The recruits were also subjected to a series of “live” situation tests designed to evaluate everything from their observation skills to their leadership ability. For example, in one exercise they were told to search a room, then asked to evaluate the occupant based on his belongings. Betty, despite her best efforts, could not summon an image of the missing man from just “a half-consumed pint of bourbon, railroad ticket stubs from Cambridge, a suit from Brooks Brothers, neatly darned socks, and a copy of Harper’s.” In another scenario, they were given what Jane thought looked like an “erector set” composed of four poles and a number of planks; with two sergeants under their command, they were told they had fifteen minutes to build a shelter. Jane immediately begun issuing orders to her two sergeants, who either ignored her or willfully obstructed her at every turn. “After ten minutes, in utter frustration,” Jane recalled, she picked up a pole and “started beating them with it.” There were also physical tests. One afternoon, they were taken to a small stream on the grounds, pointed toward a knotted rope hanging from a tree, and told to swing themselves across the water. At that point, Jane rebelled. Shaking her blond head, she sat down on the bank and refused to move. Next they were instructed to climb the tree and remove some small cans, which purportedly contained explosives. Jane refused to budge. She announced that she was done. She was fully prepared to chalk up her short-lived OSS career as one of her many “brilliant failures.”