by Howard Blum
His biography of Stephenson, published as The Quiet Canadian, met with a reception as tepid as its title; sales were quiet at best. And another worry: he’d rashly abandoned his sinecure at the University in Lahore to write the book. He was now unemployed. The prospect of telling Cynthia’s tale of sex, danger, and important wartime missions offered a way to cut a rapidly growing pile of past-due bills down to a manageable size.
The more Hyde thought about it, the more convinced he was that his financial salvation lay before him. He’d gloss up Betty’s exploits into a series of bodice-ripping yarns that could be peddled profitably to the tabloid press and then, with not much more work, turned into a book. A boozy lunch with his literary agent, Iain Thompson, bolstered Hyde’s enthusiasm; the commercial prospects for such a tale, Thompson agreed, were good. At loose ends, Hyde was raring to get started.
Hand in hand with this motive came another, no less fundamental—he wanted to get Betty into bed. She had consciously exploited this desire, yet here, too, Betty had no idea of the susceptibility of her prey. She had no inkling of how frequently she’d stalked his imagination over the years since their first encounter.
Betty had become an obsession. As her contribution to the honorable Allied crusade against evil, Betty had famously seduced and manipulated a long list of important men. She had persuaded them to abandon prudence and good judgment. Now he wanted the adventure of experiencing her power. He wanted to see what all the fuss was about. If Betty had not sent such clear signals about her availability, he still would have jumped at the slightest chance.
But there was also more at work than either money or sex in the decision that had brought Hyde to this warm and comfortable resort on the Costa Brava. In the months prior to his arrival, his mood had been increasingly despondent. He had come to feel, he’d write, that all his youthful promise had been squandered, and that the many paths he’d taken—eclectic careers, unsatisfying marriages—had all led to dead ends. Like Betty, he was plagued by regrets. Despondent, he too had felt the need to hunt for painful answers.
Betty’s letter was an unexpected gift, bringing with it the prospect of exploring their shared past. Instinctively Hyde suspected that his only path toward a meaningful future lay in reconnecting to the high purpose of his wartime years. And in telling Betty’s story, he would again be able to identify what he had lost, and what he had once so very much valued.
Chapter 4
BETTY HAD PROMISED HYDE THAT S’Agaro would be “a paradise,” and she kept her word. The four days flew by. There was one small annoyance; Betty complained mildly about a toothache, and Hyde, with the attentiveness of a trained watcher, noticed that she was careful to eat only soft foods. But the pain, he was glad to note, didn’t seem to interfere with either her lively mood or the intensity of her passion.
On the fifth day, as Hyde prepared to head back to London, she insisted on first taking him to Castelnou.
Harford Montgomery Hyde, photographed at Castelnou.
Churchill Archives Center, Papers of Harford Montgomery Hyde, HYDE 02 007
She showed off her storybook castle. She playfully posed for photographs with her husband, Charles in a jaunty beret and Betty lithe and long-legged in sleek black trousers, her two large hunting dogs running in and out of the shots. And she waited for the propitious moment.
Betty posing at Castelnou (“with one of her ‘dawgs’,” as noted on the bottom of the original photograph).
Churchill Archives Center, Papers of Harford Montgomery Hyde, HYDE 02 011
There was none because what she intended to propose was at best outrageous. But finally she couldn’t keep it bottled up inside her any longer, and simply blurted it out. It was the final part of her escape plan: she wanted Hyde to accompany her to Ireland.
Ireland had always exerted an almost mythological pull on Betty’s imagination. She had been born in Minneapolis, Minnesota, but without too much proof she’d convinced herself that her father’s Scandinavian grandparents also had some Londonderry ties. Her impetuosity, her unbridled sense of fun, even her eyes, as green as a county Clare meadow in springtime—all were traits, Betty was certain, inherited from her Irish forebears. Her logic was as intuitive as it was unshakeable; Ireland—a country she had never visited—was, she felt, her “spiritual home.”
As her plan formed in her mind, Ireland had always been the final destination. It was the one place, she believed with a typically heartfelt ardor, where she could find the serenity and the inspiration to confront the troubling questions she needed to ask herself.
With her husband standing by mutely, Betty asked her new lover if he would swoop her off to Ireland. For propriety’s sake, she unconvincingly assured Charles that the trip would give her a chance to work with Hyde on their book without any distractions.
Hyde agreed at once—with one caveat. He needed to go to New York first; his American publisher wanted him to do some publicity when their edition of the Stephenson book was launched in the States in April.
Their itinerary was set with equal speed. During the first week of May, Betty would fly to London, and Hyde would be waiting at the gate in Heathrow. The next morning they would fly to Dublin. And, Betty told herself with a professional’s pride, she would have finally escaped from the castle—just as she’d planned.
Charles walked Hyde to the car waiting to take the visitor to the train station. He shook his guest’s hand and politely wished him a safe trip. Then he walked back up the wide, well-worn stone steps to the castle’s thickly timbered front door. Even if he did not acknowledge it, in the course of a few days, his world had been entirely transformed.
ON A BRIGHT MORNING IN the first week of May, Charles accompanied Betty on the long drive to the Barcelona airport. He led her to the gate where the flight to London was boarding, kissed her good-bye, and then returned to his lonely castle.
Only when the plane was high in the clouds did Betty doubtless allow herself a few moments of triumph. She had escaped from her ancient, high-walled prison. She was confident that in the course of the adventure she was setting out on, she would find the answers she needed. In Ireland, she would discover the reasons for the complicated life she had led.
But her joy was short-lived. No sooner had she celebrated the launch of her operation than she was forced to acknowledge why it was so vital. There was one more secret she had kept from Charles and from Hyde. More than anything else, it had prodded her to act.
The pain in her tooth was much worse than she had admitted. And it had spread maliciously to her lower jaw. After the oral surgeon recommended by her local dentist examined her, he had sat her down and explained with grim certitude that a biopsy would be just a formality. She had cancer. It would keep attacking until, before long, it killed her.
This would be, Betty knew, her final mission.
Part II
“A Terrible Restlessness”
Chapter 5
DUBLIN HAD ALWAYS BEEN A good city in which to settle in with a pint and share a bit of craic, as the hard-drinking locals call the tall tales and brash gossip that buzz about a convivial Irish barroom. And in this hospitable city that was home to so many lively watering holes, a favorite destination, at least among a crowd of politicians, journalists, actors, musicians, and others cut from a similarly raffish cloth, was the dark recesses of the Horseshoe Bar in the venerable Shelbourne Hotel.
For over a century the Horseshoe’s walls had been painted a deep bloodred, the distinctive tarry smell of burning peat had mingled with clouds of tobacco smoke, and the expert barmen could pull a Guinness from the tap with—presto!—a shamrock magically sculpted in the creamy foam. And, oh, the stories that had been told! The secrets those bold red walls had heard! So it seemed fitting, if not inevitable, that it was here, seated shoulder to shoulder with Betty on a black leather banquette, that Hyde decided to begin his interrogation.
They had arrived from London that May morning and, more like giddy lovers on a honeymoon than tw
o spies embarking on their own secret missions, settled into the hotel. Cocktail time, though, brought them out of their room, and against all odds they managed to find an unoccupied banquette. Then once the drinks were brought—Hyde, more Anglo than Irish, was a single-malt man; Betty, more cosmopolitan, believed a glass of champers was an auspicious start to any evening—without much preamble Hyde pounced.
Suddenly officious, shifting abruptly into the role of the inquisitive writer diligently gathering the research he needed for his book, he pulled a small notebook out of a tweed pocket and placed it on the table. And then a pen appeared in his hand, Betty must have felt it as menacing as a cocked revolver.
Perhaps it was because he wasn’t sure where to begin that he decided the best possible course would be to start in at every spy’s Rubicon, the crossing point between what came before and all that would ever after follow. It was the defining moment, the irrevocable bite of the apple, he knew from hard experience, that set in motion an agent’s operational life.
“Tell me about your recruitment,” he coaxed Betty. “How exactly did you become a spy?” She snuffed out the remains of one dark Capstan cigarette, only to quickly light another. “When and where did it all begin?” Then, having thrown out the questions as a challenge, he sat back, sipped his drink, and no doubt hoped that Betty would reach deep into her Irish soul and share some good craic.
Chapter 6
POLAND,” BETTY WROTE IN A letter home about the country where she found herself living in the tense years before Hitler’s troops began their fateful blitzkrieg across Europe, “is a sad, gray place.” And to understand the excitement Betty was seeking on that eventful March afternoon in 1938 when, on a golf course outside Warsaw, she offered her services to His Majesty’s Secret Service, or what empty spaces she was trying to fill, it would first be necessary, she told Hyde, to understand the bleakness, the thick monotonous gloom, that had wrapped around her life. She was suffocating.
She had arrived in Warsaw a year earlier, the twenty-six-year-old-wife of a minor functionary of the British diplomatic caste. Arthur Pack was the British embassy’s new commercial secretary, a man twenty years older than his American bride—though some cruel observers smirked that the age difference might just as well have been twice, or even treble, that. He was a stuffy, haughty, forever-striving relic of a bowler-hatted England whose days of ruling the world were rapidly dwindling, if not already a memory. Deeply insecure, he did not dare yield to the changing times; an outsider like Arthur Pack—no family connections, no Oxbridge degree—had to observe a rigid formality if he were to make his way in the Foreign Office. As a further complication for his young, fun-loving wife, Arthur was sickly to boot; the last war had permanently strained his heart and constitution. Betty had married Arthur out of desperation; in fact, she had engineered the entire courtship. But now she was beginning to realize she’d made a colossal mistake.
Arthur Pack in uniform, c. 1930.
Churchill Archives Center, Papers of Harford Montgomery Hyde, HYDE 02 011
Prior to the couple’s posting to Poland, they had been in Spain. Betty, forever passionate, a woman who only either loved or detested, had adored the country. From the start, she had been swept up in the hot-blooded Latin land and its gay fiesta spirit.
But Poland, she quickly learned, was an entirely different place, and a dispirited one. Surrounded by enemies, a razor-sharp sword of Damocles hanging threateningly over the nation. The anxious Poles lived in brooding fear of the day when the blade would inevitably come swooping down, at the same time wondering whether it would be wielded by the Germans or the Russians or, no less inconceivable, both invading armies. Geography was fate, and with Hitler and Stalin as neighbors, today was tense and tomorrow uncertain.
In this problematic time, as darkening war clouds filled the sky, the British diplomatic corps, out of desperation as much as necessity, bonded together. Theirs was a very narrow social world, and yet nearly from the day of Betty’s arrival, it was clear that she wasn’t welcome. Perhaps tales of her free-spirited escapades in Spain had made their way from one embassy to another. Or maybe it was simply Betty’s very presence—so shiny, so glamorous, so ripe, so eager—that raised the eyebrows of graying senior staff in disapproval and provoked catty envy in their dowdy wives. Whatever the cause, it was quickly made clear to Betty that she was not appreciated. She was not welcomed into the cozy circle of embassy wives. They did not invite her over for tea or ring her up to join committees. Yet she was a fighter; once pushed into a corner, she didn’t try to accommodate. She snarled back.
Betty dismissed the ambassador, Sir Howard Kennard, as “a real sourpuss who disapproved of any kind of gaiety.” She had also swiftly locked horns with snotty Peta Norton, the embassy counselor’s wife and the reigning hostess in this clique of stolid British diplomats. “Mrs. Norton took a strong dislike to me, and I must say that the feeling was reciprocated on my side,” she’d write with no attempt at apology in her memoirs. Still, the ostracism stung. Despite her bounding, vivacious energy, Betty was alone in a foreign and somber land.
Then on New Year’s Eve, as she and her husband waited with the other revelers at the French embassy for the clock to strike midnight, Arthur collapsed. He was carried home unconscious. The doctor’s diagnosis was discouraging: Arthur had suffered a serious, possibly permanently debilitating stroke.
At last Betty had found her mission: she would direct all her pent-up spirit to the task of getting Arthur well.
Warsaw
January 24, 1938
Dearest Family,
Please do not worry. ARTHUR IS GOING TO GET WELL. I am a demon of determination. I’ve never yet failed in something I really wanted and I’m so determined about him. I’m giving him everything I have in me. . . .
Your loving daughter,
Betty
A month later, still happily playing the dutiful nurse, still convinced she had at last found the role she was meant to play in this previously empty marriage, Betty brought Arthur back to England. She settled him into a rehabilitation facility on the Isle of Wight; did her best to squeeze some of the dread out of his fatalistic mood; and then, after only two weeks in England, returned to Warsaw. It was Arthur who insisted that she leave; despite his fragile condition, he hoped to convince the embassy staff that his stroke was trivial, that he was already on the mend, and it wouldn’t be long before he’d be returning to his wife and his job.
Obedient, still trying on for size the new, soberly responsible character she’d chosen to play, Betty agreed to be Arthur’s accomplice in this disinformation operation. After all the deception ploys she had run against him over the years, she could hardly protest.
BETTY RETURNED ALONE TO AN icy Warsaw, the city frozen solid with a wintry gloom. She bravely tried to make light of her predicament, joking that she was now “a grass widow.” But while life with Arthur had been lonely, this new situation had her completely cut off, as if marooned on some distant island.
Once she was on her own, the logic that had convinced Betty just a month earlier to take on the unfamiliar role of the loyal wife was doomed. Not only did she not want the part, she also realized; she wasn’t cut out for it. It wasn’t in her nature.
After she’d unfastened the tight restraints that had been holding her back, life at once looked different. She was free. There was no stodgy husband around to rein in her spirits. She no longer had to kowtow to a frumpy British embassy crowd who’d apparently decreed that any giddy high jinks, or even a telltale smile, would be an embarrassment to His Majesty’s government. She could let loose and follow her own bold and restless heart.
Betty soon began to spend her evenings with a fast and lively crowd of young Polish intellectuals—artists, writers, diplomats, men and women deeply caught up in the building drama of the tense times in which they were living.
Always a quick study, Betty became one of them. Their passions became hers. These long, loud nights fueled by vodka and tobacco,
as opinions and theories were aggressively hurled about the room like spears tossed by opposing armies, became her university, her political education.
And toward the end of one of these nights, Betty found a lover. It was a decision she made without thinking much about it, with neither guilt nor regret. Edward Kulikowski was a soulful young romantic who, as Europe was careening toward war, had remained focused on trying to mend his own broken heart. While serving at the Polish embassy in Washington, he’d fallen in love with a well-connected American woman. But after she gave birth to his child, she not only broke off the relationship but also denied that he was the father. Now he worked in the Polish foreign office, holding a senior position on the America desk. His job, however, held little interest for him; it was an almost irrelevant corner of his mournful, self-involved life.
In one another, Betty and Edward sought a way out of their predicaments. “I was never in love with him,” Betty would say to Hyde. “I like to think he felt the same about me.” They were both adrift, and together they helped one another make their way.
Their evenings together in his apartment, conveniently across the street from Betty’s, were a shared comfort. Lying on the tiger-skin rug, with caviar and vodka to help the mood along, Betty would listen with her eyes tightly closed as Edward played Chopin with the grace and authority of a virtuoso on the grand piano. He’d hit the final ardent chord, and with the nocturne still echoing in her mind, he’d take her hand, lift her to her feet, and lead her effortlessly to a low, wide blue divan across the room.
