The Last Goodnight

by Howard Blum

  Her campaign proved effective. Her cover remained unblemished, even unquestioned. To everyone on board, she remained Betty Pack, foreign correspondent; when she left Chile, she also left behind “Elizabeth Thomas.” She could still go up to anyone and ask practically anything. And who thinks twice about the covert motives of a reporter out to get a scoop? Especially when the eager scribe has a smile that makes the heart race.

  When the Orbita docked in Havana, Betty was offered further operational opportunity to test her new cover. George Ogilvie-Forbes, the man who had godfathered her conversion to Catholicism in Spain, was now minister in Cuba, and he had a proposition. Would Betty like to stay in Havana for the conference’s duration? There was another north-bound ship in a couple of weeks. In the meantime, she could stay in the legation as his guest, and, of course, keep her eyes and ears open to what was going on behind the scenes among the delegates.

  If Betty had any doubts about this seemingly spontaneous, rather offhanded invitation to spy, they were put to rest when the local MI6 man—“our man in Havana,” she joked to Hyde—came to call on her. His instructions were succinct: Betty was to pass on all the fruits of her labor to him; he’d make sure her reports got to London. In fact, he added pointedly, they were looking forward to them.

  Once again Betty proved her worth. The Service had all manner of agents. There were operatives who could break into enemy headquarters and make off with the battle plans. Others who could ingeniously spike an ambassador’s phone. And there were teams of scalphunters available for wet work, agents ready to cut a throat or put a bullet between the eyes. But there were few—arguably none—with Betty’s soft, coaxing touch. Who else could spend a long evening dancing cheek-to-cheek in La Floridita with a crowd of lovesick delegates and in the morning write a perceptive report detailing the schemes lurking in each of her dancing partners’ minds, the political maneuvers they had up their sleeves, their hidden loyalties? Who else could share a candlelit dinner with a virulent pro-Nazi, anti-British Argentine politico and have him spill the secrets that lay hidden in his soul? Who else could get the most truculent Marxist delegate to abandon the barricades for an evening, for the hope of a little human kindness?

  Betty could. And London had come to appreciate the valuable gift they’d been given.

  BETTY’S PLAN WAS TO SPEND a few weeks in the States. She’d do some shopping in New York, and then dutifully visit her mother and sister Jane in Washington. Once her time with Cora was done, she’d fly to Lisbon, and from there she’d make her way to London. Still, the wartime air route to Portugal was an ordeal. From Miami, it was on to Jamaica, and then, after a short layover, the Pan Am Clipper continued to Natal in Brazil and then crossed the South Atlantic, stopping next in Monrovia, Liberia. From there, a quick jaunt up the West African coast to Portuguese Guinea. And finally you landed at an airport just outside Lisbon, near where the Tagus River emptied into the Atlantic. The trip took four days and cost Betty $318.75 of her own funds; the British, after all, had written that they’d like to meet with her, not that they were buying her ticket.

  Exhausted, Betty arrived at the Palace Hotel on the outskirts of Lisbon. She was looking forward to a long bath followed by a gin and tonic; or maybe, she corrected herself, she’d have that drink first. At the front desk, she signed the register. No sooner had she put down the pen than she looked up with complete surprise into a familiar face. Standing next to her was Colonel Montagu Parry-Jones—the very man who had helped steer her back into intelligence work in Santiago.

  Parry-Jones played their encounter as the most fortunate of coincidences. He was returning to London for a new assignment, and now they could have a jolly time together in Lisbon as they waited for the next plane to England. What a spot of luck, he said. Purest chance.

  Yes, Betty agreed. But her suspicious mind told her something else. She’d been at the game long enough to know that there are no accidents in intelligence work—only schemes. The colonel’s showing up at her hotel was as unpremeditated as her fall from her horse just as he happened to be riding by. Betty had no idea what plan London was cooking—or, the larger issue, what role she would play in it. She knew it would be futile to ask Parry-Jones. For now, all she could do was put on her famous smile and suggest that the colonel might want to join her for the drink she’d been so anticipating.

  The following day a small, tantalizing corner of the plot was revealed. Returning to the hotel after a pleasant afternoon in Lisbon with Parry-Jones, she found a cable waiting for her at the front desk.

  Odd, she thought. Who knows I’m here? She’d made her travel arrangements at the last minute. She hadn’t known when she’d be arriving in Lisbon—or, for that matter, where she’d be staying. How could anyone else have known? Unless it was someone, like Parry-Jones, whose trade it was to know all manner of seemingly unknowable information.

  The mystery deepened when she read the cable. It was from Arthur. It wasn’t just that, from his outpost in faraway Santiago, he had somehow managed to track her down. It was what he was asking: that she fly home straight away. As the embassy’s commercial counselor, he’d be hosting a trade mission headed by Lord Willingdon, the famously haughty aristocrat who had been viceroy of India. He needed, he nearly pleaded, Betty’s help. He wanted her to serve as hostess during Willingdon’s visit.

  His proposal left Betty astonished. Furious at her desertion, Arthur had not been speaking to her by the time she’d left. And even if they had been civil to one another, she couldn’t imagine that her husband would’ve considered her presence beneficial to any diplomatic encounter.

  Hadn’t he ranted on and on about her “American morality”? Hadn’t he barked about her behavior at parties, the conspicuous attention she provoked? And now, when she was halfway around the world, he wanted her to give up her plan to go to London, turn straight around, and head straight back on another long, exhausting journey! And for what? To be reunited in a country that bored her silly, with a man with whom she could scarcely bear to speak? It was absurd. No, worse, it was mad.

  Yet that night, as she shared a cocktail with Parry-Jones, it began to make sense. She suddenly understood how Arthur had tracked her down. And she suspected that the idea to summon her back to Chile had not originated with him.

  After she had mentioned her mystification to the colonel, and in the process had shared a glimpse of her seething anger, he offered his own take on the situation. Full of calming reason, he told Betty that to return might make good sense, after all. As if the idea had just occurred to him, he suggested that it would offer an opportunity to resolve things once and for all with Arthur. At the moment she was still regarded—often warily—as the wife of a British diplomat. But people would see a single young woman differently. A divorced reporter would find all sorts of previously locked doors suddenly open. Imagine the kind of access she could have, the acquaintances she would make?

  The colonel talked on, carefully hypothetical, but nevertheless the spymasters’ curtains of subterfuge had parted. London, Betty understood, wanted her to put the finishing touch on her new cover.

  The next day she cabled Arthur that she’d be coming home. “In the circumstances, I felt it was best to comply,” she explained to Hyde.

  Although she’d be heading back to where she’d started, Betty felt that she was on the final stretch of her long journey back into the dangerous life. It did not make complete sense to her; why had she been summoned, and then directed to return to Chile? But she tried to convince herself—it was the bewildered fieldman’s constant rationalization—that the deskmen in London had their reasons, that they alone could see the big picture. Once she completed this final task, it wouldn’t be long before she’d be living a cloak-and-dagger life behind enemy lines in Europe.

  She could not have been more wrong. Other plans had been made for her.

  Chapter 32

  A SMALL BRONZE PLAQUE WAS FIXED to the wall outside room 3603 in the Rockefeller Center building at 630 Fi
fth Avenue in New York: “British Passport Control.”

  Behind the black door was a long counter manned by several knowledgeable clerks who would obligingly answer any questions regarding travel documents for England. At the end of the counter, jammed between a few straight-backed metal chairs and a waist-high bookcase empty but for a single shelf holding a pile of passport applications, was an unmarked door.

  To enter, it was necessary to press a buzzer. A peephole immediately opened, through which the visitor would be scrutinized. If he met with approval, the lock would be released and the heavy door would swing open. Inside, as well as on the floor below, was a warren of rooms swarming with busy office workers, or so they appeared at a cursory glance. Their trade, however, was espionage. This was a den of spies. It was the headquarters of the British Secret Intelligence Service in America.

  In June 1940 Colonel Stewart Menzies, the wily old-boy aristocrat who headed the Firm, had decided to send a man to New York to “establish relations on the highest possible level between the British SIS and the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation.” “C,” as the head of the Service was traditionally known, went outside his narrow circle of establishment cronies and intelligence professionals, the old Etonians who, like him, belonged to White’s Club, rode to the hounds, and had inherited stately piles in the country. A scrapper was necessary, he decided, someone who would lower his shoulders, clench his fists, and punch his way if necessary through the restrictions of America’s Neutrality Act. He selected a self-made millionaire, a Canadian businessman who had flown daring fighter missions in the last war and gone many rounds in the ring as an amateur boxer.

  He was also encouraged in his choice by the new prime minister, Winston Churchill. Even more than Menzies, Churchill envisioned the head of the Service in America as an activist. To his way of thinking, the essential mission was to get the United States to contribute the arms and matériel Britain needed to fight on and, no less important, to help convince a reluctant America that the nation must ultimately join the fight against Hitler. A practical politician, Churchill wanted someone brash enough to get the job done, and at the same time canny and charming enough to get away with stepping all over the sensibilities and, if need be, even the laws of the host country.

  Menzies chose William Stephenson, the forty-three-year-old part-time intelligence asset who had first entered the game by sharing the information he’d picked up during his prewar business jaunts to Germany. Churchill promptly seconded the choice. He met with Stephenson so soon after his election as prime minister that he’d not yet moved into Downing Street, and urged him to accept the post in America. “Your duty lies there,” Churchill insisted. “You must go.”

  Stephenson not only went, but in his ambitious way he saw his duty as something larger than either Menzies or even Churchill had imagined. Starting from scratch, and spending his own money freely as well as resourcefully, he built a vast intelligence organization whose covert activities stretched across the Western Hemisphere. Its agents penetrated enemy-controlled businesses, embassies, and spy rings. Political warfare officers shamelessly spread propaganda to the American press and, with money to burn, set up pro-interventionist front organizations. It recruited and trained special operations agents for impossible missions in America and Europe. In Bermuda, its teams intercepted sacks of mail bound for Europe or America, wantonly steamed open any letter that caught their fancy, and scrutinized the contents. And its armed patrols policed British interests in the Americas against Nazi sabotage.

  By the time Stephenson was done, he had built a formidable intelligence network that included espionage and counterintelligence missions that were normally restricted to either MI6, MI5, or the special operations units. An empire builder, Stephenson had all manner of inventive ops going on under his broad umbrella. He’d have, for example, a celebrated medium touring the country and making sure to sneak prognostications of spectacular Nazi setbacks into his act. And he ran Camp X in Canada, a backwoods training ground that taught derring-do secret agents all the dark arts. At full operational strength, he had over two thousand people—agents, staff, and assets—on the payroll.

  The organization became, Stephenson would boast, “the only all encompassing integrated secret security organization that had ever existed anywhere, and myself the repository of secret information at all levels beyond that of any other single individual then involved.”

  Including J. Edgar Hoover. Yet the FBI potentate, who also knew a good deal about the accumulation of power, was, surprisingly, one of Stephenson’s early supporters. At first he went tacitly along with British secret agents working in the United States. He even suggested the cover name for the group that Stephenson obligingly adopted—British Security Coordination (BSC). But as Intrepid—the organization’s Western Union code name and cable address, the name Stephenson embraced, as well as the image, as his own—he with increasing frequency launched missions that played fast and loose with American law and trampled over the country’s official stance of benign neutrality. Hoover turned hostile. He assigned his own agents to monitor what the British were up to. And if the Bureau caught BSC operatives in illegal acts, Hoover’s no-nonsense orders were to slap on the handcuffs and haul ’em in.

  Yet, the BSC had one important—definitive, arguably—supporter, President Franklin D. Roosevelt. “There should be the closest possible marriage between the FBI and British Intelligence,” the president assured His Majesty’s ambassador in Washington. And after Stephenson traveled to Hyde Park to give the intrigued president a remarkably candid briefing on what his organization planned to accomplish, neither Roosevelt’s enthusiasm nor the Anglo-American bond was diminished. “I’m your biggest undercover agent,” Roosevelt told Stephenson expansively.

  It was a slyly appropriate endorsement. After all, the meeting had been arranged by a tireless amateur spy who, in turn, saw himself as the president’s “biggest undercover agent”—Vincent Astor.

  THE ROOM WAS A SMALL, very select club, a secret society of rich and powerful men who liked to play at being spies. Its name was a veiled reference to their covert meeting place, a dingy apartment at 34 East Sixty-Second Street in New York, with an unlisted phone number and an impressive collection of wines. The Room’s keyholders all shared similar pedigrees, a provenance of recognizable family names, New England boarding schools, and Ivy League colleges. But the group’s acknowledged driving force was Vincent Astor.

  After the Titanic sank into the sea with his father, John Jacob Astor IV, onboard, Astor had dropped out of Harvard to manage the family’s multimillion-dollar real estate empire. Yet soon he was looking for more excitement, and instinct and opportunity conspired to push him toward the secret life. Here was a trade that offered not just the opportunity to protect the gilded establishment world he’d been born into but also a rustle of adventure. A well-connected amateur could ply it as effectively, or so he innocently thought, as the diligent professional.

  With Astor setting the tone and often the agenda, the monthly Room sessions were informal intelligence briefings. One member would report, for example, on his trip to China. Another would give an insider’s report on the growing Japanese financial reserves at his bank. Astor would share what he’d discovered on his self-styled reconnaissance missions across the Pacific in his gleaming motor yacht, the Nourmahal. Notes of the discussions would be typed, and then Astor, with a gravity normally reserved for state secrets, would distribute the Room memos to his important friends in the federal government and in the Office of Naval Intelligence.

  Playing intelligence agents proved to be enjoyable sport for these worldly men; they were as happily occupied as boys in a tree house frolicking with decoder rings and secret writing kits. But in 1933 their freelance ops abruptly took on a new significance—Franklin D. Roosevelt was elected president.

  Not only was FDR one of their privileged own, part of the Groton, Harvard, Knickerbocker gentry, but he was also Astor’s longtime friend. The new presiden
t soaked his paralyzed legs at the indoor pool on the Astor estate just down the dirt road from his farm at Hyde Park. When the pressures of his job grew overwhelming, he’d unwind with Astor and a tight circle of buddies, all members of the Room, on the palatial Nourmahal; “This is the only place I can get away from people, telephones and uniforms,” the president would write. And like the Room’s keyholders, Roosevelt too had a dilettante’s fascination for the intriguing game of espionage. He encouraged diplomats, generals, and journalists to bypass normal channels and pass their confidential reports directly to the intelligence analyst-in-chief. He did not hesitate to let his friends into this operational circle too.

  Vincent Astor and President Franklin Delano Roosevelt on the deck of Astor’s yacht, the Nourmahal.

  AP Photo

  Astor, particularly, relished his new heady role as the president’s very own secret agent. An entirely new way of living had swept away the tedium of his pampered life. What fun he had! There he’d be, the undercover yachtsman steering the Nourmahal around the Galapagos Islands to check out the rumor that Japanese ships were scouting the area for a covert base. Or he’d be playing the wireman with the yacht’s direction finder as he voyaged across the South Pacific, hoping to locate, as he wrote to Roosevelt, “the Jap Radio stations in the islands.” Or before taking on his next mission, he’d confidently share a bit of his tradecraft with his controller in the Oval Office: “Tomorrow I start working on the banks, using the Chase as the Guinea Pig. Espionage and sabotage need money and that has to pass through the banks at one stage or another.” And as director of the Western Union cable company, he could disregard privacy laws and use his lofty position to scour international cable traffic, uncovering a bounty of secrets. He’d forward to Roosevelt intelligence revealing the locations of Japanese gas storage facilities, burgeoning plots against the United States hatched by foreign agents in Mexico City, and the existence of a larcenous ring inside the Brazilian naval commission, a group of hustlers who routinely collected payoffs in return for the weapons they’d purchase in Washington.