A Guest of the Reich

by Peter Finn

  For all her swashbuckling, Gertie was in some of her attitudes a creature of her country and class—casual with her prejudice in her private correspondence, comfortable in a segregated America where Jews, blacks, and other outsiders knew who sat, and who didn’t, at the head table.

  The fabulous world she inhabited—precious and exclusionary—was finally upended with the advent of war.

  Sidney was reading the newspaper in the gun room at Medway on December 7, 1941, when the phone rang.

  “Have you got your radio turned on?” his brother Morris shouted.

  “No,” said Sidney.

  “Then turn it on, the Japs are bombing Honolulu and have sunk some of our boats.”

  There were bulletins on every station.

  “Gertrude,” Sidney called out. “The Japs are bombing Honolulu.”

  The news was a gut punch. Like much of the country, Gertie was dumbstruck, even though the flames of war had already been consuming Asia and Europe. The American idyll was over.

  6

  Washington, D.C.

  Sidney was commissioned as a lieutenant in the navy reserve in early April 1942. In his application for an appointment, which was supported by Undersecretary of the Navy James Forrestal, Sidney had emphasized his world travels, including two Atlantic crossings in a schooner. He was assigned to intelligence duties. Initially Sidney worked at an intelligence center on the Battery in Charleston, occasionally going on operations along the coastal waterways of South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida to look for signs of enemy activity. In the early months of the war, there was genuine fear on both coasts of imminent attack. J. Edgar Hoover told the White House that the Axis powers planned to invade along the East Coast. The bombing of Los Angeles was expected to quickly follow the attack on Pearl Harbor, and some feared that the Japanese might even come over the border from Mexico.

  Gertie joined the Red Cross Motor Corps in Charleston—taking first aid classes, greeting troop trains, and feeding soldiers embarking from the city’s port.

  The future of Medway was uncertain as “one by one the plantation Negroes were drafted,” Gertie recalled, until only three men, who didn’t meet draft requirements, were left.

  Sidney was ordered to report to Washington for a course in foreign intelligence, and the house at Medway was closed, the furniture covered in sheeting, and mothballs scattered everywhere. Sidney, Gertie, and their two children left in the family station wagon, “our three faithful Negroes waving a last farewell.”

  The family found a short-term rental in Georgetown.

  It was only a matter of time before Sidney had to ship out to Hawaii, his next assignment. Gertie also wanted to contribute to the war effort and first approached the Red Cross, which rejected her because she had two young children, and the Library of Congress, which told her she didn’t meet the requirement of a completed college education. Gertie decided to draw on her society connections to secure a position.

  In June 1942, she wrote to F. Trubee Davison, a former president of the American Museum of Natural History who knew Gertie from her expeditions on behalf of the institution in the 1930s. Davison was a decorated aviator in World War I and a former assistant secretary of war; he had also supported Sidney’s application for a navy reserve commission. In her three-page résumé, Gertie noted the number of countries she had visited, that she could shoot a rifle and a shotgun, spoke French fluently, and had considerable experience with outdoor photography, including the ability to develop and print her own work. “I am physically fit. Can walk 20 miles a day. Have unusual endurance and exceptional health.”

  In an accompanying letter, Gertie wrote that “possibly due to my traveling experience I might be of some assistance working in a foreign country in either intelligence or some other type of work. I would be willing to go anywhere or remain in America.”

  Davison wrote back that he had one possible lead for her. That was the new spy organization headed by Donovan. (In 1932, Davison had run for lieutenant governor of New York when Donovan stood for governor at the head of the Republican ticket; they lost in a landslide.) Within two weeks, Gertie was writing to David K. E. Bruce, an old acquaintance and the husband of Ailsa Mellon, daughter of the banker and industrialist Andrew Mellon. Bruce was head of the Secret Intelligence branch of the OSS. Gertie told him in a letter that she was already providing his agency with information on Iran and southwestern Africa—locales where she had hunted. “I would stick at a job for the duration,” she promised.

  Bruce, one of Donovan’s senior lieutenants, would prove to be Gertie’s most important patron during the war. “He was the most marvelous man—a connoisseur and collector, a charmer, polished in manner and looks, smooth in every way,” Gertie recalled.

  A prominent “internationalist,” Bruce had advocated support for Britain when the United States remained deeply isolationist. He traveled to England in the summer of 1940 as a special representative of the American Red Cross and witnessed the Battle of Britain from the white cliffs of Dover in the company of American reporters. “All around you anti-aircraft guns were shuddering and coughing, stabbing the sky with small white bursts,” the correspondent Virginia Cowles wrote. “You could see the flash of wings and the long white plumes from the exhausts; you could hear the whine of engines and the rattle of bullets. You knew the fate of civilization was being decided fifteen thousand feet above your head in a world of sun, wind and sky.”

  In October 1941, Bruce had joined the Office of the Coordinator of Information (COI), the fledgling spy service that Roosevelt had created by executive order that July 11 over the objections of bureaucratic rivals at the army, navy, State Department, and FBI. The COI, led by Donovan, had a vague mandate to “collect and analyze all information and data, which may bear upon national security,” and began with a payroll of thirteen employees. But it—and its successor, the OSS—quickly grew, becoming creatures of Donovan’s personality: “intrepid and madcap.”

  “Woe to the officer,” wrote Bruce, “who turned down a project because, on its face, it seemed ridiculous or at least unusual.”

  There were several attempts to kill the new organization by its political enemies, but Donovan, the most decorated American soldier in World War I, had also become an astute Washington infighter. And, ultimately, he had the backing of the president, whose discretionary funds underwrote COI. In July 1942, that organization was reinvented as the Office of Strategic Services, evolving into five branches: Research and Analysis (R&A), Counterespionage (X-2), Special Operations (SO), Morale Operations (MO), and Secret Intelligence (SI), under Bruce—the section that would hire Gertie.

  Her background security check was completed by early August. The investigation report noted that “subject’s family have always been prominent socially and are reputed to have been extremely wealthy.” It stated that Gertie was “married to an American (who was born in England) but whose family like that of the Subject are of old American stock” and described her as being “100% loyal to her country.” The report said she was “a person of unusual ability, energy, courage and resourcefulness. It has been said of her that she can ‘hold her own with any man, in shooting or riding.’ ”

  But there was one caveat. Gertie’s older sister, Jane, was married to an Italian diplomat—and no ordinary one at that. Mario Pansa had been close to Benito Mussolini since his early years in power, when the Italian leader descended on Rome untutored in the social graces, to the horror of the city’s high society. Pansa, according to one Mussolini biographer, took Il Duce in hand and “instructed him in what to wear and how to behave in polite society. Mussolini owed a great deal to this man and gained much in self-confidence.”

  Mario Pansa and Jane Sanford had married in Palm Beach, Florida, in February 1937, despite some qualms within Gertie’s family. They had met through Jane’s brother, Laddie, who had played polo with the Italian. The OSS security revie
w concluded that Jane Sanford “is said to be more American in her sympathies than she is Italian, and is really a victim of circumstances in the sense that she is technically an enemy of this country.”

  A final interview was waived, and Gertie was told to report to an OSS office on the National Mall in early August. Her salary was $150 a month—not even pin money for Gertie. The desire to contribute to the war effort had finally brought Gertie into the ordinary world of work—a place she otherwise would never have experienced.

  The appointment came just as Sidney, along with his brother Morris, received orders to ship out to Hawaii, where they would join the intelligence staff of Admiral Chester W. Nimitz.

  Gertie and Sidney savored their time together before he boarded a military flight out of Washington. “The last day with you seemed so extraordinary,” Sidney wrote on August 10, 1942. “We talked about the war…and other things when we both knew that all we really wanted to say was how much we loved one another and how we dreaded the parting. But I knew if I once let myself go and did, I would remain in tears for the rest of the day. I thought you were wonderful to be able to wave to me as I entered the plane, and to wish me good luck. My throat was so choked and my eyes so full of tears that I could not say anything and only waved and then plunged into the plane.”

  * * *

  —

  Washington was a city transformed by the war. It brought hundreds of thousands of new residents, eventually doubling the District of Columbia’s population, including bankers, lawyers, businessmen, academics, scientists, inventors, hucksters, and draft dodgers who would form a new ad hoc ruling class atop the existing bureaucracy. Washington was also flooded with foreign emissaries—diplomats, spies, and exiles—adjusting to the unbearable summer humidity and winter freezes just as they were to the emerging preeminence of the upstart United States.

  “Wartime Washington, in the view of those most experienced in the field, was socially the most aggressive and most tireless city in the western world,” the journalist David Brinkley concluded in Washington Goes to War. It all gave the American capital a febrile atmosphere, and Gertie dove right in, one of the many thousands of women who were suddenly needed to make the machinery of government turn.

  Gertie found a house on Thirty-First Street in Georgetown for herself, two-year-old Bokara, the child’s nurse, and a housekeeper. Landine, Gertie’s nine-year-old daughter, was sent to the Foxcroft School, Gertie’s alma mater, about fifty miles away in Virginia. Gas was strictly rationed, and public transportation was overwhelmed by the influx of new workers, so Gertie either walked or rode her bike to work. The main OSS campus was on Navy Hill, just off E Street in the Foggy Bottom neighborhood. The agency also occupied offices in a series of large temporary wooden structures built early in the war. These drab buildings, thrown up hastily, lined Constitution Avenue and the Reflecting Pool and surrounded the Washington Monument as the government attempted to accommodate its small army of new workers.

  The OSS buildings were soon teeming with recruits. Donovan hired what he called his “league of gentlemen”—the wealthy, the blue-blooded, and the well connected, including President Roosevelt’s son—but he would also consider anyone with a skill he coveted, regardless of background, which gave the OSS much of its daring and creative energy. Safecrackers, burglars, forgers, Mafia enforcers, and madcap inventors were as welcome as scientists, linguists, chemists, historians, and mapmakers. Those who failed to get into the military and those who didn’t want to get into the military also turned to the OSS. “We get all the crocks working for us eventually, high blood pressure boys, grey bearded professors, young draft dodgers and tired business men,” Gertie told her husband. “It’s quite a group when en masse.”

  Donovan, unorthodox but single-minded and surrounded by competent administrators, was slowly forging an effective espionage service, one that would add a critical, if never decisive, element to the war effort and lay a foundation for the postwar Central Intelligence Agency. Simultaneously, the OSS could be disorganized and harebrained, sanctioning bizarre schemes, including, for instance, a proposal to make Hitler’s mustache fall out and turn his voice soprano by having agents inject his vegetables with hormones.

  At first, Gertie was excited by her work and described her agency as “hot stuff.” Her job was to route all cables in and out of the Secret Intelligence branch, which gave her a broad if glancing view of OSS operations. On her desk was a battery of rubber stamps: “RESTRICTED,” “CONFIDENTIAL,” “SECRET.”

  “My Western Union office life, if you get me, is plenty rushed,” she wrote, not mentioning the OSS by name so she would not fall foul of military censors who might read her letters before they reached Sidney. “It is quite exciting and growing in leaps and bounds.”

  But the struggle ahead still seemed hugely daunting in the summer and early fall of 1942. The Nazis had taken France. They were deep inside Russia, and Soviet troops had not broken out at Stalingrad. German and Italian forces were still ascendant in North Africa. U-boats trawled the Atlantic. Japanese troops had seized Hong Kong, Singapore, and Manila, though U.S. forces were buoyed by the bloodying of the Imperial Navy at the Battle of Midway in June, even if the decisiveness of that engagement was not apparent to everyone back in the United States.

  “We don’t seem to be doing anything anywhere—but then it is hopeless to know what is really going on or what the plans are. I hope there is a plan,” Gertie said. A month later she could only rue that “there are so many damn islands to conquer and so damn many japs to kill. I hope we are equal to it. I bet it takes years.” She confessed that “those sinking burning ships just make me curdle inside.”

  Casualty lists began to be published and with them names they knew. “We heard yesterday that young George Meade had been killed in the Solomons,” Sidney wrote in September. “Terribly sad. He was just 22.” A few weeks later, he told Gertie about meeting an aviator who had fought at Guadalcanal and the man, he said, looked “haunted. He could not have been more than twenty four and yet his face was drawn up like an old man’s…Now he will have to go through a period of nightmares and terrible fits of depression before he will forget and be himself again. He had just arrived and wanted only one thing, a bottle of whiskey. That is all they want, a bottle of whiskey so they can get drunk and forget.”

  Sidney and Morris, on the other hand, landed cushy jobs as essentially uniformed office managers at the navy’s intelligence headquarters in Hawaii. “I know more about paper clips than I do about the armed forces,” Sidney confessed. For all his self-deprecation, Sidney was an excellent officer. At the Joint Intelligence Center in Hawaii, he was the head of an administration section that assembled and disseminated intelligence material to various commands. In his quarterly officer fitness reports he was consistently rated an exceptional officer by his superiors and was described in one as having a “zealous, aggressive and unceasing devotion to duty” and an “intelligent, cooperative leadership.” In April 1944, he was promoted to lieutenant commander.

  Phone calls to and from Hawaii had to be booked in advance and often had to be limited to three minutes because of high demand and the cost—nearly $4 a minute—so the couple wrote to each other almost every day. Sidney’s letters tended to be paeans to the quality of his life in Hawaii, which, he said, “flows along very pleasantly.”

  “I already have the clear eye and pink skin of a monk,” Sidney wrote, describing days of tennis, swimming, and surfboarding interrupted only by his eight-to-five work schedule. He also noted that the “food could not be better and I am fat as a pig.” Rationing was beginning to pinch on the mainland, but Sidney, describing one day’s meals, feasted on a breakfast of “two fried eggs, three pancakes, bacon, papaya, pineapple, juice, coffee, three pats of butter, totaling about a pound of the latter, a pitcher of maple syrup over the cakes”; a lunch of “chicken a la king mixed with lots of green pepper and vegetables, ice te
a, cake, butter, bread”; and a dinner of “steak, cauliflower, potatoes, fruit cup and ice cream.” Alcohol flowed at private gatherings. “Not a worry in the world,” he informed his wife.

  * * *

  —

  Gertie threw herself into the social life of Washington: cocktail parties where nearly every shoulder boasted gold braid and tony Georgetown dinners with senior advisers to the president. “I sat between Harry Hopkins and Nelson Rockefeller the other night at Bill and Anne Vanderbilts,” she told Sidney. “After dinner, Col. Donovan came and sat next to me. He is very dynamic and most attractive.”

  Gertie also hadn’t lost her ability to snarl when the nightlife paled. “Sat beside John D. Rockefeller Jr. (Not so hot),” she noted of another evening. A supper evening at the 1925 F Street Club involved “masses of dreary old people” and “frothy nitwits.” The first blush of her new life began to fade and with it Gertie’s zest for life in Washington. She was desperate to join Sidney in Hawaii and plotted at every turn to make it happen. The issue came to dominate her letters to her husband. But the navy didn’t allow the wives of servicemen to live on the islands, threatening to court-martial anyone who secretly brought his spouse to Hawaii.