A Man Called Intrepid

by William Stevenson

  CYNTHIA put more pressure on Brousse, who fell back on his original excuse. He was not entitled to go into the code room. Why not forget this insane scheme? CYNTHIA said no more. There was always a danger that Brousse, despite his professed disenchantment with Vichy, might alert his ambassador to this sudden interest in naval ciphers, from which the French government might reach conclusions.

  Old Benoit was retired soon afterward. He was replaced by the Comte de la Grandville. CYNTHIA found that the Comte was poorly paid as a junior diplomat. His funds in France were cut off. His wife was about to produce their second child. She was a petulant young woman, aggrieved because the Comte had failed to win the rank or salary she had anticipated when marrying him. Madame sounded pragmatic. Money would take priority over fidelity: status was more important than sex on the side. On a weekend when this potentially compliant wife was away, CYNTHIA called the Comte at his home. Speaking French, she said that she had something to discuss. Her voice stroked his ego. The Comte suggested she come and talk more. She arrived within the hour. The Comte, resigned to a boring evening alone, brightened at the sight of this stunning lady in distress. When she said she would be brief, he assured her that he had all the time in the world.

  CYNTHIA hung her head. “I feel ashamed. It seems so trivial . . .”

  “Nothing is trivial when one is young.”

  “You do not remember me?”

  He was mixing a drink and paused in surprise. “Mais non . . .”

  “I called on your ambassador once. We discussed Vichy. I am disturbed by this man Laval—”

  “Who is not?” The Comte de la Grandville sat beside her. “The man is a traitor.”

  “Then how do you justify your job?”

  “I am a career diplomat. One learns to perform one’s duties. Not question one’s masters.”

  “But your duties are performed for France, not for individuals.”

  He gave her a long look. “Is this why you came?”

  She shook her head. “You know Washington is full of Free French, loyal to De Gaulle. They have a great deal of money to buy help for the Resistance. I don’t want their money but I would like to help.”

  “How?”

  “They would train me to parachute into Occupied France—”

  “That’s suicide.” He rested a hand on her arm. “You would achieve nothing. Nothing.”

  “You think so?”

  “I’m sure of it. You mustn’t do it. Not because you would be on the wrong side. Because it would be the waste of a beautiful and intelligent woman.”

  She looked around. “You must find it difficult to lead an exciting life on a small salary.”

  “Ah . . .” He smiled. “Money is not important. There is an intensity of the mind, of intellect, of love.”

  That night he walked her back to her hotel. The subject of money came up again, casually and briefly, as a consideration to be dismissed.

  She had to fly to New York next day with her regular weekly collection of stolen Embassy telegrams. When she returned that evening, the Comte de la Grandville was waiting at her hotel. This worried CYNTHIA. The FBI was probably still watching her, and this new friend was not displaying much discretion. Then, too, Charles Brousse might see them together, and she had not told him about approaching the assistant cipher officer. There was the danger that if Brousse bumped into her, the Comte would realize she had a more intimate relationship with the French Embassy than that of a confused young woman who once visited the Ambassador. She decided it best to invite the Comte to her room.

  The phone rang. It was Brousse, on his way up. She made the Comte leave at once. Brousse arrived a few minutes later in a fury, having watched, unseen, his rival. There was a fight. Later, when he was in a mood to listen, she told him that he was to blame. “If you had co-operated in the first place, I would not have tried to win the Comte’s favor.”

  “I can forgive you but I can’t help you,” Brousse insisted.

  “Why not? I’m going to tell him that I work for American Naval Intelligence. I’ll offer him money and say it’s from the Free French, who are sponsored by the Americans. He’ll probably tell your ambassador.”

  “Oh, God!” groaned Brousse.

  “Leave it to me. I know his type. He wants to keep in with the boss. He’d rather win approval and promotion than sacrifice his career for a cause.”

  The Comte de la Grandville announced with a virtuous smirk a week later that he had rejected a large bribe and the charms of a beautiful spy who wanted him to desert Vichy. By then, Brousse was briefed to play his part. He took the Ambassador aside and confided that the Comte was spreading gossip of this sort all over the capital. Even gossip about the Ambassador’s affair with the Baroness de Zuylen, a prominent Washington hostess.

  Ambassador Henry-Haye was startled. He was having an affair, but thought it secret. He was not to know that CYNTHIA, having got the necessary details, was the author of the Comte’s gossip. Comte de la Grandville now appeared in the eyes of his master as an ambitious intriguer. The Ambassador’s first act was to suspend him from code-room duties.

  CYNTHIA reported to BSC that the Embassy could now be burgled. The guardian of the code room had been neutralized.

  “What about Brousse?” she was asked by HOWARD.

  “I can use him. But only for cover. I’ll have to break into the Embassy, remove the ciphers, and have someone wait outside to take them to a lab. They’ll have about an hour to photograph several hundred pages. Is it possible?”

  “That part is. What worries me is you. There are locks to be broken, a safe to be cracked. What do you know about burglaries and safecracking?”

  “I can learn. Look! I made a ground plan of the Embassy chancery.”

  She was recalled to New York a week later and introduced to “Mr. Hunter,” lent by OSS. He would be her liaison officer. This meant that, if CYNTHIA was caught, he would talk her way out of any legal difficulties, and that the FBI was out of the picture. She met another OSS man: The Exterminator. She said later she assumed the worst when he called at her hotel room and announced: “I’m the exterminator.” It was actually a common role to play in Washington at the time. Cockroaches and rodents were providing pest-control companies with a roaring trade—and the OSS Exterminators with a valid reason for searching behind wall panels, under floor boards, and in every nook and cranny for bugs of another variety. After declaring the room bug-free, Mr. Hunter moved in with the Cracker.

  The Cracker was a Canadian, one of several professional crooks allowed to leave jail after volunteering for dangerous assignments. Some, expert in the handling of explosives, were sent to Nazi-held Europe. The Cracker was a peteman, a safecracker with an encyclopedic knowledge of locks. While he studied the Embassy layout, CYNTHIA worked on Brousse, so far into conspiracy now that he could hardly back out. He was to confide to the Embassy night guard that he had a problem about his girl: it was dangerous to take her to a hotel and dangerous to be away from home without reason. He proposed to “work” late at the Embassy. If his wife phoned, she would find him there. Would the night guard help by letting the girl through? The watchman’s co-operation was clinched with a bribe. For several nights he turned a blind eye while Brousse and his girl spent the hours on an elegant sofa in the reception hall. When the watchman had been conditioned to this illicit affair, CYNTHIA brought along a BSC drug, a mild and undetectable soporific that left no aftereffects. Brousse usually had a drink with the guard; one evening, he encouraged the victim to have a couple of extra shots, which would later explain his falling asleep.

  The Cracker slipped into the Embassy. An hour later he was still operating on the safe, grumbling that it was so old that the combination lock was hard to break. Just before dawn, the perspiring peteman swung open the safe. The large metalbound cipher books were there all right, but it was too late to deal with them. The Cracker wrote the combination on a card for CYNTHIA and closed the safe again.

  The group left as dayl
ight stained the sky. Brousse, reporting to work as usual, found nothing untoward. The Naval Attaché went that afternoon to the code room, used the cipher books, and emerged unruffled. No suspicions had been aroused. But Brousse told CYNTHIA it would be pressing their luck to try to drug the watchman a second time.

  “I’ve got the combination of the safe,” said CYNTHIA. “And the Cracker’s made duplicate keys for the code room. We can repeat the lovemaking routine, and if the watchman does happen to make his rounds and finds me missing, say I’ve gone to the bathroom.”

  That in fact is what happened. But then CYNTHIA was not able to release the lock. She checked and double-checked the combination just as the Georgia Cracker had written it down, to no avail. Hot and annoyed, she collected poor Brousse, sweating it out alone on the sofa, and they left empty-handed. What now?

  BSC patiently invited her to catch the next plane to New York. She met HOWARD, and they took a cab through Manhattan, driving to the foot of Wall Street and then back to Broadway. Opposite the 55th Street intersection, he made the cab stop. “See the black Ford over there? Get into it. When you’re finished, come back to my place.”

  CYNTHIA crossed over, slipped into the car, and found the Cracker at the wheel. “Stuck, eh?” He slipped into gear. “Them old locks ain’t easy.”

  “You sure I got the right combination?”

  “Sure. All you need’s practice.”

  The practice took place in the back of the car, away from crowds. The girl and the peteman crouched under a spread of newspapers, fumbling with the combination lock on a safe duplicating the one in the Embassy. “Do what you did the other night,” said the peteman, laughing. “With the lock, that is.” She went through the numbers again. The door opened.

  “What happened before?”

  The Cracker shrugged. “Maybe you were nervous.”

  “I doubt it.”

  “They coulda changed the lock?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Well, practice some more.”

  Back in Washington, CYNTHIA made another attempt. Despite the expert tuition, she failed again to open the safe.

  Brousse was in a state of nervous and physical exhaustion.

  “One more time,” she pleaded when they left the Embassy at dawn.

  “Making love, yes,” said Brousse. “But not on a sofa. Not with burglary on my mind.”

  “We must try. I’ll bring the Cracker. . . .”

  “No. We had him around before.”

  “Leave him outside. If anything goes wrong, bring him in. Please, Charles?”

  “I feel as if I’m having an affair with a damned safe,” he grumbled. CYNTHIA quickly demonstrated that he was wrong.

  Two nights later, Brousse took her back to the Embassy. They parked in the next street, leaving the Cracker in the car. CYNTHIA noticed a black sedan at the next corner with two men sitting inside.

  The night watchman was nowhere to be seen. Brousse let himself into the chancery. They spread out on the sofa. “Darling,” said Brousse, “I can’t continue this way—”

  Suddenly the girl jumped to her feet. Brousse protested, and she shushed him. In the light from outside, he saw that she was tearing off her clothes at a furious speed, tossing them around the floor. She fell back naked beside him and whispered, “Your turn.”

  “What—?”

  “Take your clothes off.” When he hesitated, she hissed. “We’re supposed to be making love. This time, we’d better be seen.”

  Brousse, damp with anxiety, began to strip. He was interrupted by footsteps. A beam of light shot across the hall and focused on the naked girl. It caressed her body and moved over to Brousse, bare-legged and clutching at his shirt.

  “A thousand apologies, m’sieu” The flashlight was switched off. They heard the familiar voice of the watchman. “I—I was worried—please forgive me.” He stumbled away in confusion.

  Brousse collapsed on the sofa. “Jesu!”

  “I think the FBI was outside. Stay here. The way you are.”

  “And you—?”

  She wriggled into her slip. “I’ll let the Cracker in.”

  The peteman was stationed outside a window in the Embassy courtyard, CYNTHIA helped him through. “There was a car outside,” he told her. “It drove off after the watchman talked to one of the guys.”

  “Good.” To CYNTHIA it could only mean the FBI was satisfied with the story of a lovers’ tryst. She wondered what kind of report they would add to her file.

  The Cracker was back at work on the safe. “They never changed the lock,” he muttered. “They just never greased it.” The tumblers fell into place and the door swung open.

  It took five hours to remove the cipher books, pass them to another BSC man outside the Embassy walls, remove each page for photographing in a studio, and return the reassembled books to the safe without leaving a trace. By noon that same day, copies of the ciphers were ready for transfer by courier to Bletchley, where they would provide the keys to a new version of the enemy’s coding machinery. The ULTRA service would now have additional insights into Fortress Europe by matching decoded Vichy messages with those same messages transmitted through German Enigmas working with a new cipher system.

  This was the real significance of CYNTHIA’S coup—one that few outside ULTRA’S most senior guardians could comprehend, ULTRA teams faced a continuously changing challenge because, though they had their own duplicate Enigmas and batteries of computers, they still had to cope with the sudden adoption of new guidebooks by which German operators set the Enigma drums. Each new guide had to be painstakingly reconstructed at Bletchley from scraps of fresh information. The Vichy codes were a windfall.

  A few weeks later, in Stalin’s study on August 12, 1942, Churchill unrolled a map of southern France and French North Africa. He sketched a Nazi crocodile overlapping Occupied Europe and said it would be attacked “in the soft underbelly and on the hard snout” by Allied Forces.

  He was talking about what would be the first Anglo-American amphibious operations, which would secure bases for the return into Fortress Europe—code-named TORCH—made possible through CYNTHIA’S acquisition of the Vichy cryptosystem. TORCH would “set Europe ablaze.” A lot of mistakes would be made; the co-ordination of regular and guerrilla forces would entail unsuspected difficulties. But it gave the French an opportunity to regain their self-respect.

  CYNTHIA remained in Washington. While the FBI still regarded her with cold reserve, they had been assured that her British diplomat husband, Arthur Pack, was giving her a divorce. So she stayed Elizabeth Thorpe, and she stayed on the merry-go-round. She helped visiting BSC agents to cope with what was for them a frighteningly open society after their missions in secret-police states. One Englishman jumped like a shot rabbit when he saw the sign SECRET SERVICE. CYNTHIA explained that on this side of the Atlantic, it referred only to protection of the President.

  One baffled expert on war production was described in her notes:

  The FBI’s reputation for efficiency had already intimidated those whose business in the United States was not for public advertisement. Professor R. H. Tawney had been sent from London as a link on the question of labor relations. Tawney was impressed by the need for discretion. He kept no diary and memorized his engagements. One was lunch with a millionaire in Washington. He arrived on the wrong day. The host, with typical American courtesy, greeted him as if he had come on the right day. During lunch, the host indicated a painting on the wall: “Professor, I think you will find that is the finest Manet to have crossed the Atlantic.” Next day, Tawney was reminded that he was to have lunch with a prominent businessman. Tawney was driven off to the same millionaire. The host again displayed tact. Nothing was said about yesterday’s lunch. The same ritual was observed with regard to the Manet painting: “the finest to have crossed the Atlantic.” Professor Tawney paused with his fork in midair, thought carefully, and said: “Oh no, I’m afraid you’re wrong. I was shown the finest Manet in Ame
rica by my host at lunch yesterday.”

  Nevertheless, CYNTHIA hungered for action. She had a clear picture of conditions in Europe under Hitler’s decree of Nacht und Nebel, which caused victims to vanish without trace. All identity was erased. Relatives knew nothing. The victim disappeared, perhaps to jail, perhaps to the gallows, perhaps to slave-labor camps. The cruelty was in the uncertainty. It applied to victims and to surviving families alike. For those taken away, there was the agony of doubt because no further communication was possible with loved ones. For those left behind, there was the nightmare of unending speculation.

  “Hitler knew very well what he was doing,” CYNTHIA wrote later. “This was psychological terrorism with a vengeance. All Europe was sinking into this night and fog which paralysed the will.”

  To reactivate the will power of those who were able-bodied, acts of violence were necessary. TORCH was still a long way off; full-scale invasion of Europe could not be carried out unless the secret armies grew in numbers and resolve. In 1942, most of the people under Hitler’s and Mussolini’s tyranny were so bullied and worn down by lack of food and shelter that resistance was beyond their energies. They were easy prey for Nazi vultures, like Dr. Gerhard Alois Westrick.

  Westrick had been expelled from the United States after Stephenson exposed his attempts to enlarge American entanglement with Nazi cartels. His activities dated back to ITT’s partnership with Hitler’s industrial supporters in the 1930s. Now he operated among French industrialists in the same way. CYNTHIA had seen references to him in the Vichy telegrams.

  Assassination teams were being sent into Europe. Why not Westrick as a target? She took the proposal to Stephenson. She knew Westrick had gone to Langenstein Castle, in Germany, owned by a Swedish industrialist. And who was the Swede? None other than Birger Dahlerus, who once had British and American statesmen chasing his rainbows of peace. What was the castle for? Nothing less than a meeting ground where Westrick wined and dined the nobility and rich hangers-on from Vichy France and other “neutral” regions whose treasures were needed by Nazi industry.