The Last Goodnight

by Howard Blum

  Chapter 15

  ONCE BACK IN MADRID, BETTY, as if obeying Lord Beaverbrook’s suggestion, found a shining cause to latch on to. But always unpredictable, she pledged her allegiance to an organization that, despite its own strong tradition of power, mystery, and authority, the Beaver would never have anticipated. She embraced the Roman Catholic Church.

  The ostensible reason for her conversion, at least as she explained things at the time and reiterated to Hyde decades later, had some admirably pious logic. Days before her wedding, in a moment that was as rash as it was hopeful, she had promised Arthur that she would accept his Roman Catholic faith. She had never gotten around to fulfilling that pledge, and considering the bumpy course of their marriage, she might have easily reneged on that wedding vow too.

  But after five years of living in Chile and Spain, both countries whose rich Catholicism she had inhaled with every breath of the Latin air, Betty had begun to feel the lure of the church, as well as, she insisted, the stirrings of belief. And not least, practical Betty also reasoned that if everyone else—Arthur, Carlos, her crowd of Spanish friends—was convinced the Roman Church offered the path to heaven, she didn’t want to be the one unbeliever left alone on the side of the road come Judgment Day.

  Yet with the advantage of hindsight, Betty, as she explained to Hyde, could see a little more clearly what had driven her to the church. Her sudden devotion was just one further search for clarity, any clarity at all, to satisfy her yearnings and bring some measure of peace. If all this new Betty, a cleansed Catholic Betty, had to do to quell the storm raging in her soul was anoint God in His Heaven as her Controller, then she was ready to sign on. And if in the process she could expiate her past sins by owning up to them, she was prepared to take on that difficult mission too. At the time the catechism seemed like the operational handbook that offered the salvation she’d always been craving.

  Sharing all this with Hyde, she also reluctantly acknowledged the large inconsistencies that coexisted with her newfound religiosity. The gospel according to Betty preached a creed that any good Catholic of a pure and humble mind would have rejected. For even as she pledged her loyalty to the tenets of her adopted church, she shared a marital bed with Arthur while staying faithful to her afternoons with Carlos. Rather than trouble herself over the ethics of her own particular piety, Betty confessed that she simply chose to ignore the paradox. Besides, as she told Hyde, she’d always felt that you couldn’t beat a little sex for getting closer to God.

  For Arthur, her decision was an answered prayer. In his own burst of faith, he told himself that Betty was maturing, that she was ready to move on from what he, full of his usual fire and brimstone, condemned as her “American morality.” Before his wife had time to reconsider, he arranged for George Ogilvie-Forbes, the embassy counselor and a renowned lay leader of the Catholic Church in Britain, to prepare Betty for her baptism.

  Yet even Betty, so worldly and tolerant, was ambushed by the course her religious instruction took. Looking back, though, she must have smiled, now wise enough to be amused by its inevitability.

  WITH GOOD AND SOLEMN INTENTIONS, Ogilvie-Forbes announced to Betty that he had found a priest who would “keep the flame burning” in her newly christened Catholic heart.

  At first the sessions of religious instruction were merely a welcome interlude in Betty’s empty mornings. The priest would appear at her apartment and for the next hour or so would talk with fervor about what God expected from His beloved subjects. The catechism he preached was built on lofty ideals, and Betty, she told Hyde, chimed in approvingly.

  But clearly she never gave much thought to going as far as to live by such restrictive precepts. Nevertheless, she began to look forward to their time together. The priest had a soft, thoughtful way of talking that made her lean in close to listen to his every reverent word. Another blessing: the priest was young and handsome, his faced etched with a precocious mature dignity that she attributed to the many demands of his heavenly responsibilities. During their moments of silent prayer, their heads humbly bowed in unison, Betty felt the power of a shared intimacy.

  One week when the priest sent word that their next session would be at an address on the other side of the city. Betty did not give the news a second thought. Years later, and serving in another church, she’d learn one of the strict rules of tradecraft: when a contact suddenly changes his handwriting, alarm bells should go off in your head. But Betty was a novice back then, and she went unsuspectingly to the new address.

  There was Madrid, the bright Madrid where she lived, shopped, and socialized, and there was the other Madrid, a tangled network of dingy streets where people like her never ventured. She made her way through the garbage-strewn streets of an industrialized slum to the drab concrete apartment building at the address the priest had given. And now, as she looked about, she realized she’d heard her friends whispering about this neighborhood: “It was where wealthy Spaniards were in the habit of taking their girlfriends for an hour or two of love-making in the afternoon.” Still, she did not read anything into this small piece of recalled intelligence.

  When the priest opened the apartment door, he was not wearing his cassock but dressed in a brown suit. He looked awkward, a slighter man, in the banal outfit. Yet this disguise, too, did not provoke any suspicions.

  And when he reached out and put his arms around her, Betty still did not understand. For a frightful moment she thought that he was going to shake her silly and announce that in light of all her sins he had no choice but to excommunicate her. It was only when he kissed her awkwardly on the lips that she began to follow what was happening.

  “I love you,” he announced with a pious sincerity. A torrent of promises followed. He would forsake the church. He would devote himself instead to her. He would marry her. Hand in hand, they would leave Spain and make a new life.

  It was a proposal Betty didn’t seriously consider, but she was flattered. She also was quite fond of the handsome priest. She quickly began to imagine a reality where their roles could be reversed, where she could be the teacher and he the acolyte. Thinking the unthinkable was exciting. And besides, there seemed to be no polite way to free herself from the situation. She kissed him back.

  That afternoon they became lovers.

  “There followed,” Betty told Hyde, “a series of secret meetings once or twice a week at the apartment.” “As he was poor and the costs of the rooms high, I . . . helped him out with the bill.” It was a tithe she paid gladly.

  Betty’s already knotty life had become even more complicated. She had converted to Catholicism with the hope that religion would help wrestle her demons into submission. Instead, each night she shared her marital bed with her husband. In the afternoons, she sneaked off to a penthouse hideaway to meet with his friend. And in between, she made time for clandestine rendezvous with the priest who was supposed to instill in her the saintly principles of her new faith.

  How did Betty manage to live on several conflicting planes at once? The trick, as every spy had to learn, was to pledge loyalty to the one you were with, and to mean it with all your heart at the time.

  AND IF BETTY’S UNRULY CHOICES weren’t already sufficient cause for concern, converting to Catholicism in Spain in the tense spring of 1936 was a dangerous political decision too. A practicing Catholic could just as likely lose his life as save his soul.

  Spain was a smoking political volcano, a country poised to erupt in civil war. The battle lines were already being passionately drawn, the competing wall posters shouting on every street corner.

  On one side, grouped in a makeshift coalition dedicated to the defense of the Old Order, was a chorus of strident right-wing voices—the monarchists, the aristocracy, the wealthy, the Fascists, and the Roman Catholic Church. The uncompromising leader of these Nationalists was the former chief of the General Staff, General Francisco Franco.

  Opposed to the forces of conservatism and fascism was a broad alliance of impassioned representa
tives from the left. The Popular Front, as it was called, was a pragmatic—and often querulous—marriage of liberal reformers, labor unions, socialists, and members of the Communist Party.

  When Betty first arrived in Spain, the beleaguered country was already seething. Franco’s well-armed troops had charged into battle with a ruthless urgency, offering little mercy to the rebel forces. A right-wing Catholic government was installed. But their victory so costly, so bloody, was short-lived.

  In the tempestuous 1936 election, the political seesaw lifted the left into office. A new pro-Communist government was elected. But ballots could not heal deep and festering wounds, and it quickly became grimly clear that this new democratic Spanish Republic lacked the authority to govern. A chaos of assassinations—over two hundred political murders in just two months—and workers’ strikes rattled the country.

  It was an ominous, uneasy time. Few doubted that a bloody civil war loomed on the not too distant horizon. For the left, a world historical moment seemed to have arrived: the time had come for the Spanish masses to rise up and cast off their chains. At the same time, Betty’s privileged circle was convinced that the cherished soul of the glorious Spain they had inherited from their fathers—conservative, landed, and Catholic—was at stake. The upper class feared, and not without harrowing reason, that the Popular Front was determined to sweep their inegalitarian Spain into the dustbin of history.

  Continually stirring this rapidly boiling conflict were Spain’s powerful Catholic clergy—a holy legion of defenders of the Old Order that included 30,000 priests, 20,000 monks, and 60,000 nuns. Every Sunday pious churchmen preached that any parishioner who supported the liberal cause was committing a mortal sin.

  When the archbishop of Toledo vilified the newly elected government of the Republic in a widely circulated pastoral letter, the left decided it was the sign they’d been praying for. They took to the streets in rage. Priests were rounded up and thrown into jail. Churches were burned to the ground.

  “It was a frightful spectacle,” Betty told Hyde, the memory still disturbing after all the years. “The sky was crimson as far as you could see. Burning churches spread across night skies. But things could not go on, and everyone knew that this was the beginning of the end of the Republican regime.”

  As the anticlerical fury spread through Madrid, Betty’s priest was arrested and locked in a prison. It seemed very likely that he was destined to join the sainted ranks of Catholic martyrs.

  Fire engulfs a cathedral during the Spanish Civil War. Betty would later recall “[b]urning churches spread across night skies,” as she told Hyde about her time in Madrid.

  Hulton Archive/Getty Images

  WHEN BETTY HEARD THE NEWS of his arrest, she did not hesitate. At once, she decided to rescue her lover.

  It would be a freelance operation. She alone had cut the orders for this mission. The only master she was serving was her own unfettered heart.

  With an intuitive tradecraft, Betty did not rush into her operation. Rather than going off pell-mell, knocking insistently on one jailhouse door after another with the improbable hope of finding the priest, Betty surveyed the various prisons throughout the city with calm concentration. Some hint to his whereabouts, she hoped, would be revealed. Reconnaissance, she understood, was never time wasted. Yet when this failed to produce a clue, Betty did not surrender. With an impressive adaptability, she quickly hatched a new plan.

  She went to Ogilvie-Forbes, the embassy’s counselor, and, using all her well-practiced charm, asked for his help. If the embassy made an official request, the Republican government would certainly reveal where the priest was incarcerated, she pleaded.

  Let me see what I can do, Ogilvie-Forbes finally conceded with a diplomat’s noncommittal caution. A career Foreign Office official who not only played by the rules but also believed in them, he dutifully checked with Whitehall. How should I handle this? he cabled.

  Quickly, his query made its way across London to 54 Broadway, the offices of the Secret Intelligence Service. This was not an accident. Ever since Lord Beaverbrook brought Betty to the attention of Britain’s spy establishment, they had made it known to the Foreign Office that they were keeping a watchful eye on Mrs. Pack.

  Betty intrigued the talent spotters at MI6. A woman with her gifts could be very valuable in Spain, and, for that matter, in the coming battles that many in the Service believed would inevitably rock Europe. They were curious to see how she would do. A rescue mission in a war-torn city would be a good test of any potential agent’s skill and cunning. The instructions were sent to help Mrs. Pack along. Just be circumspect, make sure to keep the embassy’s involvement at arm’s length.

  Soon Betty had the name of the prison holding her priest. But short of marching up to the door, fluttering her eyelashes, flashing her luscious smile, and then asking ever so nicely that they please release her priest, she still had no plan. Once again, though, the ever-obliging Ogilvie-Forbes proved invaluable. Perhaps the papal nuncio could be helpful, he suggested.

  Betty, who already had had made one priest fall in love with her, went off to meet the papal nuncio, convinced that only a small dose of her potent charm would bend another holy man to her will. And she was right. There was some initial hesitation; the nuncio argued that if he intervened for one priest, he’d need to speak out in hundreds of other equally desperate cases. But in the end, Betty’s powers of persuasion overwhelmed his logic. Impressed by the authority of the Vatican’s representative, the Republican government released the priest.

  Once the priest was free, with a meticulousness that was cheered by the spies working at 54 Broadway, Betty saw her mission through to its operational end. She arranged for the priest to escape to northeast Spain, where the Nationalist forces were massing in an underground movement. He’d be free once again to practice his vocation. Unless, she conceded, he was still pining for her.

  George Arthur Ogilvie-Forbes (right), counselor at the British embassy in Madrid in the days before the Spanish Civil War, meets members of a Republican militia group in 1936.

  Fox Photos/Hulton Archive/Getty Images

  BETTY’S NEXT MISSION WAS ANOTHER exfiltration—her own.

  During the perilous first weeks of July 1936, the question being asked throughout Madrid was not whether a civil war would break out; it was, rather, whether the hostilities would commence the next day. The British ambassador and most of his staff had already scurried out of the city to the safety of the summer embassy in the seaside resort of San Sebastian, up in the calmer north of Spain, reassuringly close to the French border. Betty, however, had convinced her husband that they should linger. After all, there was a lover she still looked forward to meeting in the sticky summer afternoons.

  But by July 13, as volleys of gunshots rang out across Madrid, even Betty realized it would be imprudent to stay in the city. At least for their daughter’s sake, she agreed, they should leave. It was decided that they would drive north and cross the border into France. In Biarritz, they could rent a villa.

  She spent the night before her departure with Carlos. Wrapped in each other’s arms, they exchanged thin assurances that this was just a brief, temporary farewell. Carlos promised that he would fly to Biarritz, that they would somehow manage to spend time together. They both knew, though, that history was on the march. Unpredictable events would cavalierly shape their lives.

  Early the next morning Betty and her husband, along with Denise and her nanny, left the city. “There was nothing to suggest the beginning of fratricide along the peaceful highway or in the sleepy villages that laced the way to the French frontier on our drive north,” she recalled nostalgically to Hyde.

  “I remember the intense colors of the new day, and also the stillness. The sky was a Murillo blue and cloudless; its only inhabitants seemed to be the magpies that harvested here and there in scattered groups within the fields. And the fields themselves spread endlessly beneath the gold of their grain with great crimson splashes of re
d poppies.”

  It would not be long before Betty, off on her next mission, returned to Spain; and by then the fields were red not with flowers but with blood.

  Chapter 16

  THREE DAYS AFTER BETTY’S ESCAPE, the Spanish civil war began. The army rebelled, the Republican government armed civilians to fight the insurrection, and the country unraveled. Violence ruled. Both sides, furious, determined, and savage, rushed into battle. Honor justified every vengeful deed. The country bled with atrocities.

  In the north, the Republican city of San Sebastian fell under siege. “We must extend the terror,” thundered General Emilio Mola, who commanded the swarm of Nationalist forces gathering to take the town. “We must eliminate without scruples everyone who does not think as we do,” the New York Times reported the general telling his troops.

  From offshore Fascist gunboats anchored in the Bay of Biscay, cannons pounded away at the city, a terrifying, nearly constant barrage. From hidden nests dug out of the high ground, machine gunners indiscriminately riddled homes, stores, and anyone reckless enough to move about the boulevards. While in the foothills, the Nationalist army waited, eager for the command that would turn them loose to charge with a single blood-curdling scream into the streets of San Sebastian.

  At the same time, the makeshift soldiers of the Republic, workers and peasants armed with weapons stolen from gun shops and police stations, prepared to defend their homes. Formidable barricades encircled the city, every roadway guarded by exhausted, frightened men, fingers curled tight around the triggers of their rifles as they aggressively challenged anyone coming or going. In the neighborhoods, casas del pueblos, as the proletariat headquarters were christened, sprung up, chaotic battle stations manned by untrained troops resigned to fight to the death against the onslaught they knew would come soon.