by Howard Blum
Only she didn’t want any part of that kind of life at all. She wasn’t willing to shake the hand of anyone—even the vice president of the United States—unless he caught her fancy.
SO BETTY HAD KEPT RUNNING—LITERALLY. She was by nature a restless and solitary girl. And now when she looked back at the history of her formative years, she understood that the cultivation of those traits was her next complicated lesson in preparation for the secret life.
Most children find a best friend, even if it has to be an imaginary one. Betty had neither the instincts nor the desire for any sort of companionship, real or invented. There was no pal, no playmate, no girlie confidante. Instead, Betty enjoyed her aloneness. She was content living in her own mind, making her own way. Now, many years later, searching for answers, she saw with a newfound insightfulness that many of her earliest memories were “built around aloneness.”
After all, didn’t the family often tell the story about how even as a four-year-old in Maine, she would escape to the deep pine forest that rose beyond their house? And how the local policeman, a man who knew those woods, would need to be summoned time after time to hunt through the forest to find her? There she’d be taking refuge—her first safe house—in the nook of a tree, hiding, contentedly listening to the wind and the bird sounds.
An eleven-year-old Betty would confess to her diary: “I am wondering what it would be like to live alone, alone in a beautiful place, only to be free! How wicked it must seem to talk in this fashion. I suppose some might think me a very unappreciative, disagreeable little girl. But I love to wonder and have my ‘queer feelings’ and ‘lonely, deserted emotions.’ . . . I love the queer sensation loneliness brings me.”
And when she wasn’t going off alone, she was running. And as her moods fluctuated, each competed for the hegemony of her heart. Either Betty had to lay low and take refuge from the world, or she had to run from it. Unchained, she’d rush pell-mell toward anything new, to whatever seemed to be rich with promise.
“Always in me, even when I was a child,” she told Hyde as she silently filed away another clue, “were two great passions: one to be alone, the other for excitement. . . . Any kind of excitement—even fear. . . . Anything to assuage my terrible restlessness and the excruciating sense of pressure . . . that was only released in action, in doing, in exhaustion.”
Betty’s vast, insatiable restlessness was not just a metaphor. It was real. She had no control: when a notion struck, she charged ahead. It had always been that tumultuous, often perilous way.
Betty, age twelve.
Churchill Archives Center, Papers of Harford Montgomery Hyde, HYDE 02 011
“When we were very young and running races,” she told Hyde, remembering with equal measures of amusement and bewilderment the many contests that took place between the siblings, “I always ran past the finish line and ran and ran until I dropped half strangled when my endurance finally gave out. I just couldn’t stop before that. There was no point in running unless I ran practically to death. My brother George used to go mad. ‘You’re crazy, you’re crazy!’ he’d shout as I raced by. ‘Why don’t you stop!’”
Betty never answered George back then. But now, if he asked, she could tell him it was all part of her training. She was the novice field agent learning her first hard lessons about living life on her own, discovering how to survive behind the lines, deep in enemy territory.
Chapter 8
A NEW BRIGHT DAY IN DUBLIN, and what better way to welcome it than with a full Irish breakfast? That was Hyde’s way of thinking. After the long night that had begun downstairs in the Horseshoe Bar and ended in the soft double bed next to Betty, he’d awoken with a roaring appetite. He was on the house phone to room service first thing.
Once the food arrived, enough bangers, bacon, beans, and fried eggs to feed a regiment, Hyde dug right in. Betty, without explanation, stuck to coffee and lit the first of her Capstans. She kept a guarded silence as she watched him feast.
If Hyde noticed her tension, if he felt the air in the room growing tighter and tighter, he chose to ignore it. Today’s plan, he explained instead between mouthfuls, was to check out of the Shelbourne and head off on the road. He’d reserved a rental car and planned an itinerary. He would drive and ask questions. She would look out the window at the green hills and answer. “That suit you?” he asked Betty. “I drive, and ask the questions. You look out the window at the green hills, and answer.”
At once Betty rallied. Whether her earlier stony mood had been due to the constant pain coursing through her jaw or the reminiscences Hyde’s barroom interrogation had provoked was now irrelevant; besides, she was always mercurial. Suddenly she was elated. The prospect of at last seeing the countryside that she had so vividly toured in her imagination was the elixir she needed. Once again reconciled to her mission, she apparently decided this would be as good a time as any to present the gift she’d brought from Castelnou.
She retrieved the book from her valise, considered for a moment, then wrote an inscription on the inside cover: “It is now more than ever important that we understand each other always and about everything.” She signed C, and with a quick flourish underlined the letter.
Betty handed Hyde the book without a word, but he suspected it was something precious.
Yet he was puzzled. He could not gauge its significance. The title—Fioretta: A Tale of Italy—left him stumped. It sounded operatic, but why would Betty—or he, for that matter—be interested in some melodramatic Italian folktale? The cover art—a primitive, rather childlike drawing of a young dark-haired woman in peasant dress—offered no further clue.
Then he saw it, at the bottom of the cover in small block letters: “By Betty Thorpe.”
With genuine surprise, he asked if she was the author.
Betty’s response was embarrassed, effusive and self-deprecating at the same time. “Remember that restlessness I was telling you about?” she began. “The same drive impelled me to write a novel when I was not yet eleven. It was set in Naples, where I’d never been of course. It’s madly romantic and the plot was hideously clichéd—but for a girl still eleven . . .” She trailed off. “I doubt if I could do as well now.”
He wondered where she got the idea, how she found the discipline.
Betty’s explanation was brisk, as if an eleven-year-old girl writing a book and getting it published was the most natural thing in the world. The peripatetic Thorpe family had moved to Hawaii; her father had assumed command of the Pearl Harbor marine detachment. She had a puppy and a pony to ride, and there were lots of sunny days spent splashing through the surf at Waikiki. But her father would come home from the base and spend evenings at his desk writing on maritime legal issues, and her mother was publishing nostalgic accounts of her European travels before her marriage in the local papers. If her parents could be writers, Betty, always competitive, decided she would be one too.
The cover of Fioretta: A Tale of Italy, which Betty wrote at age eleven.
Churchill Archives Center, Papers of Harford Montgomery Hyde, HYDE 02 003
As for the story in Fioretta, it just popped into her imagination. Ideas, she explained with a brusqueness that was almost an apology, were always floating through her head. Friendless, she had found a companionship of sorts by embroidering these fantasies.
Once the story about a young girl in Naples began to take shape in her mind, she wasn’t deterred because she’d never visited the city, or even been to Italy. At eleven, she was already resourceful. The library at the Pearl Harbor base had a shelf full of guidebooks on Italy. She spent several days reading, getting a sense—an admittedly broad one, she conceded—of the country until finally, driven by blind faith, she sat down to write.
Hyde had more questions, but Betty brushed them off. We need to pack, she ordered. Which was true, but she was also done talking about the book. One clue, and one clue only, is all you get.
The inscription was signed with her work name. Could she have been mor
e direct? Besides, it was scrawled across the inside cover, impossible to miss, shouting out to him like one of the flash messages they’d get from headquarters during the war: Urgent! Unbutton Immediately! Could she have been more beseeching? How could a fellow professional read this handwritten note and not understand that the thin volume she’d given him was what was known in the jargon of their past life as an “analogue”? She was handing him the key that would unravel all the previously encoded intelligence.
Here was where everything began.
BACK AT CASTELNOU, AS BETTY prepared for this final mission, she had absently picked up the book. She had not looked at it for years, decades in fact. But once she started to read Fioretta, she could not put it down. Now, trying to get some understanding of the life she had lived, Betty to her amazement found that this little volume was prescient, a guidebook filled with clues written by an eleven-year-old about the woman she would grow up to be. When she read it this way, it was a revelation.
She might as well, she told herself, have assembled all the evidence lurking in Fioretta into a dossier like the kind the Service’s vetters compiled and handed it to Hyde. You want to tell the story of my life? Well, consider—
“Little Fioretta”—as the eleven-year-old wrote in her opening sentence, trading in one reality for something that felt even realer—“sat at the large painted window waiting for her father.
“Here she lived with him, knowing no other love than his and no other parent. Even though her father’s love was not tenderly expressed at times, it meant a great deal for Fioretta.”
That’s me, all right, Betty now understood, and clearly hoped Hyde would grasp it too. I’m the girl who had only one parent. Cora had been dead to her for decades and decades. And there had been no period of bereavement. Instead, Betty had flamboyantly danced on her mother’s grave, turned her back on all the pretense and snooty conventionality that reigned over her mother’s world. Free of guilt, or so she’d thought at the time and would continue to believe for years to come, a reborn Betty had entered the world.
This motherless child couldn’t rest until she’d gone off and had her mad loves and her earnest, passionate affairs. Unencumbered, she charged into reckless adventures and signed on for vital, daring missions. It was as if she was led by a guiding maxim: if Cora would’ve thought it wrong, then it had to be right. And its corollary: love is action, not thought. A life lived by those precepts had given Betty a lot of moral leeway.
And who had taken her mother’s place in her heart? It had been clear to the young author, and now the old spy finally got the message too—her adored dad. Like Fioretta at the window, Betty had measured out her days searching for the comforting warmth of paternal affection. It was no accident that the parade of men who had marched through Betty’s real-life tale were routinely old enough to be her father. Take, for example, the Italian admiral she’d targeted. Or the diplomat in Valencia she’d run off with. Or the dashing patron in Chile. Or her first husband, Arthur Pack. Or, for that matter, her present husband, Charles Brousse.
Then—exhibit 2 in her dossier—there was the improbable quest that little Fioretta had embarked on. The girl’s beloved father was blind and penniless, so Fioretta, barely a teenager, decided to find a way to make the money that would save him. The family’s predicament, by any rational calculation, was impossible. “But,” as the young Betty confidently wrote, “Fioretta had a nimble brain, and it did not take her long to find a way.” Against all odds, Fioretta saved the day!
Now the adult Betty, looking back at this scenario, surely saw that it had anticipated the operational pattern for her professional life. Hadn’t there always been some beloved silver-haired father figure—be it Sir William Stephenson, the head of the British spy network in the western hemisphere, or Colonel Ellery Huntington of the OSS, the American wartime intelligence unit—constantly in a jam, challenging her with impossible missions? And didn’t Betty, another operative with “a nimble brain,” somehow find a way time after time to pull off unlikely successes?
Fioretta had set out to earn money by singing in the streets. She had “a voice like a nightingale’s,” and her songs never failed to enchant the audiences that gathered around. But it was apparent to even the young Betty that Fioretta’s voice was only a part of the strategy, and that the girl’s other natural attributes were also put into play. “More than one pair of admiring eyes,” the eleven-year-old admitted to her readers, “turned in her direction.” There was “a beautiful, wistful charm about her.”
Although she didn’t sing, Betty too had never hesitated to employ her fair share of “wistful charm” as she tackled her missions. “I was able to make certain men fall in love with me,” she recalled matter-of-factly to Hyde. “Or think they had at any rate, and in exchange for my ‘love’ they gave me information.” It had always struck Betty as the most natural of strategies, just one more way, as she put it, “to win the war.” Now she realized that her cavalier attitude toward sleeping with the enemy had deep roots: little Fioretta had helped set the stage for these clandestine encounters.
And Hyde should take a close look at Signor Scarlatti, Betty told herself as she checked off another exhibit lifted from the pages of the book. A renowned impresario and teacher, Scarlatti had taken Fioretta under his wing and, after a demanding tutelage, transformed her into a celebrated soprano. This too was a harbinger of things to come. How could anyone not notice that he was the model for all the handlers who would supervise her in the field, the precursor to all the forbearing, rueful, demanding controllers who would guide her missions?
But if anyone doubted the book’s uncanny predictive power, how it had unconsciously helped to shape the course of her life, Betty was convinced they only needed to read the description of Fioretta’s home.
“It was queer, with high walls, covered with ivy on top of which the road wound, towering in many curves. The walls were moulding and crumbling to pieces, while clinging vines tangled themselves with the damp moss growing in the crevasses . . . which made the place look very old and romantic.”
The eleven-year-old author had imagined a crumbling castle just like the one the adult Betty had moved into, and then set about renovating with a painstaking devotion.
Hyde, Betty might have challenged as she closed the dossier she’d assembled in her mind, you want to tell my story? You want to understand how it all came to be? Well, a lot of the answers are in this slim book.
After rereading it, Betty no doubt felt like shouting, Here’s what I’ve come to learn: the poet had it right! The child was indeed father to the man. Only this precocious child fathered a spy.
AND NO SOONER HAD THE book, which, thanks to her dutiful father’s generosity, been privately printed with colorful illustrations by Don Blanding, than Betty’s tutelage took a new turn. Colonel Thorpe, after twenty-four years as a marine, resigned his commission and, their year in Hawaii at an end, led his family off on a grand tour of Europe. Paris, Nice, Monte Carlo, Rome, and—Betty’s fondest wish come true—days in the much-imagined Naples. Next, while the rest of the family settled in Paris, Betty was sent off to perfect her French and her manners in a school for girls housed in a grand chateau perched over Lake Geneva.
All the exotic travel, which Betty dutifully recorded in her diary, helped to sharpen her watcher’s eye. And no less practical a talent for the would-be agent, she was soon speaking French like a native, or at least one who lived in the tony sixteenth arrondissement.
But when the year abroad was over and the family returned to Washington, the burgeoning spy’s most valuable, perhaps even her defining, quality started to beckon her attention. Betty was fourteen, and with a deliberate if not unseemly haste, she was ready to put her childhood behind her and become a woman.
Chapter 9
WITH THE COOL OBJECTIVITY OF a scientist watching a strange new culture gradually take shape in a petri dish, young Betty noted the signs in her diary. Slowly they grew stronger and stronger, each ano
ther intimation of the woman she was becoming. At first the adolescent was uncertain where her new thoughts, her new feelings, were leading. In time, though, Betty had no choice but to recognize the power that was now shaping and defining her. And when the teenage girl finally knew, she relished it.
A lifetime later, it was with the hope of dusting off some more clues for Hyde that the older Betty had picked up this childhood diary. She read it with the fascination of an archaeologist poring over some ancient text. Now, so experienced, she must have had no trouble seeing the hints, the telltale trail starting to take shape. Still, it had begun innocently enough; she clearly wanted Hyde to understand that, and not judge too harshly the young girl she had been.
A DANCE CLASS IN WASHINGTON. Reading the diary entry, Betty no doubt could once again visualize the boys in their blazers and rep ties, all awkward, pimply, and nervous. And the girls in their party dresses and crinolines, white gloves on their dainty hands, giggling to one another as they eyed their prospective partners.
“Today I went to dancing school. I said to the boy I was dancing with, ‘Je vous aime beaucoup.’ I did not know he understood French.”
Her first approach, and her first embarrassment. And a crucial lesson for the incipient spy: never assume your code can’t be cracked. But she was undeterred, and her next encounter was more important by far than her own preadolescent stirrings.
There was Betty, a pretty ten-year-old aboard the steamship taking the Thorpe family across a calm, sun-kissed Pacific to Hawaii.
“A Mr. Wei from Boston,” she wrote in her diary, “was extremely courteous. . . . He was educated in America and was a lieutenant in the Chinese army.
“‘Why do you wear blue socks, Mr. Wei?’
