A Covert Affair Read online

  The most disturbing aspect of the course was their assignment to compile as much information about the real identities of their fellow students as possible. “It was permissible to ferret out anything we could about our confreres,” Betty recalled. “We could break and enter their rooms, listen at keyholes, question them at meals. At the end of our course we would be asked to evaluate one another in a confidential report to the faculty.” Assigned to the same quarters, “a charming little colonial bedroom furnished with incongruous army cots,” Betty and Jane immediately broke the S-school rule against fraternization and pooled their meager information. They were both so affronted by the idea that their male counterparts, segregated on the top floor, might attempt to snoop around their quarters that they considered “leaving Kilroy messages pinned to their dainties.” The real measure of their naïveté, recalled Betty, was that when awakened later that night “by what sounded like an explosion, followed by a scream,” they thought nothing of it. Jane sleepily dismissed the disturbance as a blowout, adding, with a yawn, “You’d probably scream, too, if your last good tire went blooie.” It was a humbling morning for both roommates when they were informed that the blast was a demolition charge that had been set off in a nearby field to gauge their acuity. Their humiliation was complete when it was further revealed that their bedrooms had been wired for sound and all their whispered confidences recorded.

  At the end of the third and last day there was a “graduation night” party. Some of the masterminds of the torture course came from OSS headquarters in Washington to help them celebrate. Among them was a very brilliant, very tall English anthropologist named Gregory Bateson, who was married to the even more eminent anthropologist Margaret Mead; their presence impressed all the recruits no end. Cases of liquor were brought out for the occasion, and they were told to help themselves to the generous supply of gin, whiskey, and bourbon. The free booze, it turned out, was a last test. “The idea,” Jane learned later, “was to get the students drunk and see how they would react.” If the intention was to loosen their tongues, the experiment proved a complete flop. The handsome parachutists all went straight to bed, and the only ones who stayed up and got drunk were the psychologists, accompanied by Betty and Jane. Needless to say, their covers slipped under the influence of alcohol. In the end, Betty reckoned they probably came through “slightly above par,” since they ended up late that night making sandwiches for everyone, including “the staff, students, and lads on KP who joined the party.”

  When all the course work was finished, the recruits were given their final scores. Betty and Jane discovered they had done surprisingly well on some tests—Jane earned the highest marks for her ability to evaluate people—and very badly on others. The only other woman in the course, who went by the name “Annette,” was the sole student to recognize the midnight explosion for what it was and to inquire about it the next day. (They later learned she was a member of the French Resistance; shortly after the course wrapped she was dropped behind enemy lines in Belgium.) Jane was certain the only thing they could have learned conclusively about her personality was that she was a “neurotic intellectual” and completely unsuited to the role of femme fatale, which she could have told them in the first place. Betty admitted to feeling rather deflated, having been informed by an instructor that she was an “open-face-sandwich” type and not Mata Hari material. They had not exactly covered themselves in glory, and on the ride back to town they could not help worrying that the psychologists’ findings had been carefully noted in their files and would adversely affect their future wartime assignments.

  It was relief to return to the relatively sane world of Q Building. After a few weeks, they started to get more of a feel for the OSS. For a large government bureaucracy, the place was conspicuously clubby, complete with nicknames and backslapping camaraderie. Anyone who showed up more than a few days in a row was hailed like an old fraternity brother. They decided the trick to sounding like a seasoned hand was to master the local lingo, which was easier said than done. To their untrained ears, OSS-speak sounded like a foreign language. As far as Betty could tell, the trick was to pepper your speech with as many obscure references and codes as possible, with the result that you were virtually unintelligible.

  The OSS offices fairly hummed with a barely repressed sense of seriousness and self-importance, which was reinforced by the urgent clatter of the Teletype and the pressing business of the brass, who were usually flanked by aides. There was always the worry that Donovan would honor them with one of his “surprise inspections.” The colonel was a commanding presence whether he was dressed in a Savile Row suit or in his starched army uniform, and for Betty and Jane these visits were always fraught, as they were never entirely clear on the rules for comportment for civilian recruits—“whether to salute or stand with hand over heart or sit quietly like a lady.” Betty usually became so flustered she forgot even to shake hands.

  They gradually mastered the layout of the MO building, but invariably got lost when venturing into one of the other branches. Once or twice they accidentally wandered into a restricted area and wound up being stopped by a guard and sent back where they came from. A wrong turn at the bottom of a stairwell or at the end of one of the long, badly lit corridors left you in uncharted territory. Hurrying to a meeting, Jane blundered into an office with walls covered in enormous maps, where she recognized Paul Child, who was leading a group of designers engaged in the most extraordinary work. One woman was making a series of meticulous drawings showing how to load, arm, and place a railroad booby trap. Another was sketching a series of demonstrations on how to detonate a petroleum arson bomb. A third was painting a series of wash drawings showing how to use an automatic searchlight buoy for shipwrecked sailors. Another three were clustered around a huge illustration of a bomb fuze-head. The far wall was covered with brightly colored diagrams and breakdown charts for combined night bomber operations for the United States Army Air Forces (USAAF) and the Royal Air Force (RAF). No one took any notice of her. Afraid she was on the verge of committing another security violation, Jane backed wordlessly out of the room.

  In spite of all the secrecy attached to the work that went on—there were all sorts of signs on walls and desks reminding them to secure safes, file classified papers, lock doors, etc.—there was an ivory-tower unreality to it all. It had the lenient, idiosyncratic atmosphere of a small college, with the same tolerance for campus radicals, zealots, and oddballs. The OSS, for all its selectivity, embraced right-wing conservatives and Communists alike, as well as what appeared to Jane to be a disproportionate number of Irish Catholics. Every conceivable language echoed in the hallways. To find an adequate number of linguists, the agency recruited from strange corners of civilian life: missionaries were sought after for their language skills, specialized knowledge of remote regions, and network of personal contacts; explorers because they had traveled extensively and were self-reliant; exporters, traders, and journalists because they were men of initiative who felt comfortable in foreign environments.

  The simple fact was that the OSS did not begin recruiting until after all the other services had had their pick of the field, so Donovan had been forced to scramble to find men and women with the very specific skill set the job required: the brains to solve problems on the fly, the street smarts to know when to lose the rule book, an underdeveloped sense of fear, and unlimited self-confidence. Of course, this same combination of qualities could be used to describe any number of dangerous crackpots, and critics charged that Donovan stocked his agency with some decidedly dubious characters in search of power and a draft deferment. There were even stories that the organization had brought in some “specialists” who would give any normal employer pause. “Safecrackers, criminals, people in jail—Donovan would hire anyone if he thought it would give us a leg up,” according to Dan Pinck, who left college for the OSS at the age of nineteen and volunteered to serve behind enemy lines in China. “Why not, if we could use their skills?” Donovan, in P
inck’s opinion, had only one goal—to defeat the enemy. Nothing stood in the colonel’s way. He was not accountable to Congress; so as long as he had Roosevelt’s support, “he could get away with it.” Jane, who made no secret of her leftist leanings—including a brief flirtation with “Cadillac Communism” in her college days—and love of lost causes, fully embraced the OSS’s maverick, eggheaded eccentricity as her own, declaring it “a weird and wonderful organization.”

  As the second anniversary of Pearl Harbor approached and found them still anchored to their desks, Betty and Jane could not help feeling mildly demoralized. When they inquired about their overseas assignments, no one seemed to know anything about anything. It was hard for them to believe, tucked away in their cubbyholes fifteen thousand miles from the nearest Japanese outpost, that the entire Washington organization was dedicated to dispatching agents by sea or air as quickly as possible. The bureaucracy seemed so large and cumbersome, with so many different OSS sections churning out ideas and strategies, and so many people tripping over one another with incoming and outgoing orders, all in support of a few teams, that Betty could not help thinking of it as an “elephant laboring to produce a field mouse.”

  For the rest of that fall, they struggled against the bureaucratic fatigue and cynicism endemic to government agencies, and continued their tutelage in the fundamentals of psychological warfare. Jane was assigned to the Southeast Asia sector and Betty to a cluster of desks that made up the Japan group. They immersed themselves in learning the “blackest of black” MO methods used in the European theater and spent untold hours analyzing the precise problems in deploying these methods against the Japanese, who were culturally very different and would require very different inducements to surrender. The MO staff included a nisei (second-generation Japanese American) named Tokie Slocum, who served as their resident expert, responsible for conjuring up the mind of the typical Japanese soldier and assessing what strategies would be most effective in playing on his emotions and superstitions and undermining his morale. To help produce MO material that targeted the enemy’s weaknesses, they also studied transcripts of prisoner-of-war interrogations from Burma and the Southwest Pacific, where General Douglas MacArthur’s sea and ground forces had had some success pushing back the Japanese. They concluded that the main problem in waging thought warfare against Japan was cracking through the “fanatical indoctrination” the Japanese received as both soldiers and citizens.

  “From a pathetically small amount of intelligence dealing with his ideology and morale,” wrote Betty in a wartime memoir, “we learned that the Jap believed as doggedly in the doctrine of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere as we did in the Atlantic Charter. He believed that Japan was engaged in a life-and-death struggle, and that the armies of the emperor were champions of the downtrodden Oriental countries which, until now, had been exploited by Western Civilization.” The Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, announced in August 1940, embodied Japan’s imperial ambition to create a self-sufficient “bloc of Asian nations”—comprising Japan, Manchukuo and China, and parts of Southeast Asia—led by the Japanese and free of Western powers. The main impetus behind the policy was Japan’s need for raw materials—oil, rubber, tin, steel—to feed its war machine in face of the U.S. embargo and to guarantee its access to new markets and new lands for expansion. As a form of wartime propaganda, it appealed to the Pacific nations’ nationalist resentment of colonial rule and softened the way for Japan’s invading forces.

  Japan had already been at war with China for more than six years, occupying the richest provinces from Manchuria to the Yunnan border in the south; defeating Singapore, Britain’s fortress in the East; driving the Dutch and French out of Indonesia; and in April 1942 chasing the British out of Burma. The army under the British commander-in-chief in the Far East, Field Marshal Archibald Percival Wavell, was defeated and in disarray. The British troops reportedly believed the Japanese to be invincible. As the American commander of Chinese troops in Burma, General Joseph Stilwell was so disgusted with the British that he refused to fight alongside them on the grounds they were committed to a policy of inactivity. One of the few bright spots was the success of Major General Orde Wingate’s long-range penetration units, which had proved that British Indian, Gurkha, and Burmese troops could penetrate Japanese lines and mount guerilla resistance.

  All in all, it was a pretty dismal picture. Psychological warfare, the MO trainees were told, was one of the few ways to reach the people in these occupied territories and to counter the propaganda being sent out by Tokyo. “The Japs, we know, have been telling these people that, under the new Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, they’ve attained independence,” explained Major Little, “that they’ll never again be under the British, or Dutch, or French. They’ve told them that the Atlantic Charter principles are empty words. They’ve told them that Asia is for Asiatics. Now—what can we tell them?” The problem was that the Americans could not simply counter with their own promise of freedom, because the British, Dutch, and French were still dreaming about returning to the “good old days” before the war. In Burma, for example, the “Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere” line was going down a damn sight better than their European allies’ plea to the native peoples to protect the property they had left behind when they fled the advancing Japanese. So, until America and its allies were all on the same page in terms of political warfare, Little explained, they would have to continue to make the Japanese the sole target of all of their countersubversion.

  One method that had proved effective against the Germans in Europe was “black radio,” which involved creating stations supposedly manned by discontented rebels broadcasting from within Japanese-occupied territory and created the impression of resistance where there was none. This could be achieved either by jamming the Japanese signal or by using “ghost voices” to ruin an important enemy broadcast by creating static on the same wavelength. Even more devious were so-called slanted newscasts, slipped in so close to the enemy signal as to be confused with the genuine program but containing the slightest change in tone or emphasis, the ironic pause or well-placed snicker. These subtle jabs could be directed at the lower echelon of the Japanese army or navy, where war weariness had set in and inefficiency and graft were rampant, or against home-front officials, cowardly bureaucrats, and black marketeers. This MO deception, when married to white propaganda, could be especially powerful, explained Jan, a courtly German American who was one of the last remaining members of the European MO branch. He went on, presumably by way of encouragement, to observe how “admirably adapted this technique” was to the feminine mind: “Who knows better than a woman how to use the poison darts of slander—the razor-edged rumor? Break a man with the twist of a phrase!”

  Betty took offense at his suggestion that this was a talent all women had “inherited from Eve.” She still had a reporter’s instinctive suspicion of the high-pressure salesman and recoiled at what she saw as the same “cheap” advertising tactics used to foist products on impressionable minds. She also could not help wondering how well this form of propaganda, packed with hidden lies and verbal trip mines, would work against the Japanese. If the research she had seen was to believed, they were dealing with people who were “exasperated with a Marx Brothers comedy and went into gales of laughter when Clark Gable kissed his leading lady.” Did MO really have any sound idea of what kind of subversive campaign would slow down a force of Japanese soldiers? Such soldiers had proved more than capable of using their own black propaganda when they led a banzai charge on Guadalcanal yelling “Down with Babe Ruth!”

  After devoting two months to mastering the basics of MO work, Betty and Jane were eager to prove themselves ready to launch their own rumor campaigns against the Japanese. They had dutifully applied themselves to their studies; they had absorbed the contents of stacks of background papers. They had been introduced to some of the strangest characters and most harebrained schemes imaginable. The looniest proposal was for
a “snake call,” a small device that made a strangled shhhhh sound that was supposed to convince Japanese soldiers that they were surrounded by snakes, which—to judge by folklore—inspired inordinate fear and would theoretically cause panic, confusion, and surrender. This idea was proposed with utter seriousness by an elegantly suited older gentleman by the name of Mr. Earp, who waved an ivory cigarette holder about as he spoke, had logged time in the Orient, and claimed rare insight into the enemy. He wanted to put the gadgets, which he said could be bought at any sporting goods store for $4.50, into the hands of all Wingate’s Raiders to blow as they “crept up on the Jap positions.” With that, Betty recalled, he picked up one of the small black tubes and, puckering his lips, produced “a singularly unimpressive sound.” Despite being relative novices, she was sure she and Jane could come up with something better for their boys than a whistle.

  The same Mr. Earp was later responsible for one of the more embarrassing episodes in OSS history. He apparently did extensive research on Japanese superstitions and, citing old Inari fables that told of fox spirits with transformational powers and werewolf attributes, came up with the idea of inducing the Japanese to surrender by playing on their purported fear of foxes. His scheme called for American submarines to surface off the coast of Burma and put ashore thousands of foxes, which would then fan out along the beaches, scaring the Japanese out of their dugouts and sending them running for the hills. Earp must have been very persuasive, because Donovan, General Hugh A. Drum, and a handful of State Department officials agreed to observe a demonstration off Long Island Sound. Huddled on a barge and shivering in the predawn December fog, the dignitaries watched as the cage doors were opened and the animals, which had been dipped in phosphorous to make them easier to track, were dropped into the water. Despite Earp’s assurances that the foxes would instinctively head for shore, they promptly swam out toward the Atlantic and disappeared without a trace. “The professor may have been an expert on Japanese superstitions,” Jane noted, “but he was the class dunce on zoology.” A furious Donovan called off the fox project, but it lived on, if only at bibulous OSS gatherings.*