A Covert Affair

by Jennet Conant

  Jane’s main purpose in gossiping about all the personnel changes was to gauge Betty’s knowledge about the altered situation in China and the future of the OSS mission there. Everything was very uncertain and unsettled. In October, Chiang Kai-shek had repeated his usual imperious demand for Stilwell’s removal but this time made sure he got his way “by holding a dagger at Roosevelt’s back,” threatening to make a separate peace with Japan unless Stilwell was removed and the control over all the booty—in the form of the guns, gasoline, wireless sets, and supplies—coming into China was turned over directly to him.

  Vinegar Joe had never hidden his contempt for the greedy warlord, whom he derisively called “the Peanut” and loathed for pocketing American money and doing nothing to throw his deteriorating Kuomin-tang armies against the Japanese while keeping his best divisions in the north to blockade the Chinese Communists. All the while, the Allies were spending vast sums in support of the Generalissimo, constructing air bases for bombing the Japanese mainland and building a road from Burma at the cost of a million dollars a mile. According to Jane, “Stilwell knew Chiang was completely corrupt and was selling supplies to the Japanese to enrich himself, his family, and his clique, and hoarding the rest to use against the Communists.” It got to the point where Stilwell could not stomach Chiang’s procrastination, lies, and shams, especially as the supplies being flown into China over “the Hump,” a treacherous wind-battered stretch over the Himalayas, came at a terrible price in terms of American lives. So many planes went astray that there was a mutiny in the Air Force, as pilots balked at taking their “101 boom-booms” over the Hump when they knew perfectly well where their cargo was headed.

  In the end, Stilwell was sent packing, with the small comfort that it took three men to replace him: General Albert C. Wedemeyer was moved to Chungking, Lieutenant General Raymond A. “Speck” Wheeler replaced him at Kandy, and Lieutenant General D. I. Sultan took over the Burma campaign. Jane rather sympathized with “the old sourpuss,” as she called Stilwell, who stormed around Ceylon in his scruffy jeep like a bald, scrawny John Wayne character. She had even let him twirl her across the dance floor at a couple of big functions at the Queen’s Hotel. There was a wonderful story that the first time Stilwell flew over the Hump into China he was napping on a lilo (inflatable mattress), but when the aircraft climbed to eighteen thousand feet and the cabin pressure dropped, the lilo suddenly burst. Vinegar Joe hit the deck hard, woke with a start, rolled over, and drew both revolvers. He was ready to shoot the first thing that moved. Fortunately for his fellow passengers, a second later he passed out from lack of oxygen. For all his hell-for-leather cowboy zeal, Stilwell was a Yankee and an intellectual, who had first gone to China as a young military attaché and had learned both Mandarin and Cantonese. Jane believed he had a genuine liking for and understanding of the Chinese—no one in his command was allowed to use the common military slurs “gooks” or “chinks”—but he just could not come to terms with the Peanut.

  Jane and Paul had spent a sad little early Christmas together, knowing that they were about to go their separate ways. His affection for “the chipmunk chaser” had deepened over time, and her name was a happy constant in letter after letter: Janie was helping him to organize a party, had accompanied him on a visit to the studio of a local artist, was just up from Colombo full of gossip about the triangular affair of close friends. She had been asked to decorate the enlisted men’s mess hall for the holidays and as usual had gone the extra mile, painting a fabulously tongue-in-cheek mural over the bar in their club depicting half-naked native women waiting on a soldier lazily reclining on a mound of pillows. She had devoted all her spare time to the project, and Paul was unabashed in his admiration.

  He was not in love with her, but she assuaged his feelings of loneliness and emptiness more than any other woman he had met since coming to Ceylon. She was simply “fantastic,” he wrote his brother, and would always remain a dear friend. He added that he had whipped out a little “jewel” of a watercolor as a birthday present for one of the other OSS girls but on second thought decided to keep it as it seemed too good to part with simply “as a casual, friendly gesture.” Then, in a letter five days later, he noted, “gave the little painting to Janie, as a Christmas present.” In a remarkably complacent aside, he mentioned that Julia had given him a Zippo lighter, “though where she ever got it,” he wrote, “I don’t know.” He seemed far more impressed with the coveted bit of GI paraphernalia than with the woman who had procured it for him.

  Paul spent his last evening in Ceylon with Jane, and after dinner they went back to her hotel in Colombo and talked long into the night. He felt “shaky” about his new assignment. It was not the prospect of building another set of war rooms for Wedemeyer so much as the proximity to danger that filled him with apprehension. He worried that once the Allies opened the Ledo Road, a vital supply road connecting Assam to Kunming for the first time, the Japanese would have to act to knock out the American wartime base. He did not understand the logic (“of course, I am not a military man”) of setting up an establishment in a place that was so obviously and one-sidedly threatened and feared they would all be “running like hell within 60 days.” It had all combined to make him more tense and fretful than usual.

  That night, he shared thoughts and feelings he probably never would have “except that all the elements of the time and place bent themselves toward sympathetic understanding, and even to bits of self-revelation”:

  Janie’s hotel, a strange place, far out of town and once the seat of a certain colonial elegance, no doubt—but now distinctly mouldy and passé. However, Janie’s room is in what was probably once a cellar storeroom and it has a little corridor outside leading directly onto a grassed and balustraded terrace shaped like a piece of pie…. We took two chairs and a little table out there and sat, facing the sea (only 50 feet away) with a strong wind in our faces, most grateful after a sweaty day, and drank gin and fruit juice. There was a brilliant new crescent accompanied by the evening star hanging like a lamp just above it. For an hour or two I felt really relaxed and smoothed out and fine and was able to forget the fox gnawing my entrails.

  After Paul’s departure, Jane was delighted to have Betty with her. The morning after she arrived, they drove up to Kandy in a jeep, along with “the Black Tulip,” her MO colleague Howard Palmer, and Julia’s new assistant, Patty Norbury. On the three-hour drive up to OSS headquarters, Jane played tour guide and kept up a bantering commentary on the local sights: “And there’s a famous footprint at a pilgrim station near here. The Brahmins say it’s the footstep of Siva. The Buddhists say it was made by Buddha; the Mohammedans, Adam. And now that the Americans are here in Ceylon,” she continued, “the gag is, of course, ‘George Washington stepped here.’” It was Jane at her silliest and most fun, and Betty laughed in spite of herself.

  During the long ride, Patty Norbury told them the reason she had volunteered to come to Ceylon was to try to find her fiancé, Lieutenant Roy Wentz Jr., who had been stationed with the Tenth Air Force in Burma. He was reported missing after his plane was shot down in a bombing mission over Rangoon. Everybody had told her he was dead and to move on with her life, but she would not give up hope. She was determined to find him or, failing that, to at least learn with certainty what had happened to him. “I took this job with OSS to be as close to Burma as I could,” she told them. “I watch every report that comes over my desk from our men in the field. One of their jobs is to report on Allied prisoners of war. Some day, someone will pick up Roy’s trail.” She added softly, “You see, no one ever saw his plane go down, no trace has ever been found of the crew.”* Her honesty and good cheer in the face of tragedy was like an unspoken rebuke to all their petty complaints and discomforts, and quite silenced the party for the remainder of the trip.

  By the time they reached Kandy, it was starting to drizzle. Jane deposited Betty at Scofield’s office and went in search of one of her Thai agents. The boy, nicknamed “Chop,”
weighed only eighty-five pounds and had been smuggled out of Bangkok in a rice basket. “Chop says he has worms again,” Jane told Betty. “He’s something of a hypochondriac. Doc Murphy slips him an aspirin, and he’s fine again for weeks.”

  Over their afternoon tea the previous day, Jane had explained that one of her more time-consuming duties was “the care and training” of a half-dozen native agents—Batak, Malay, Thai, and Karen—used in OSS intelligence-gathering missions. She and Howard Palmer looked after them as best they could, catered to their various needs and whims, and attempted, with varying degrees of success, to “shield them from the cruel white light of reality.” This was more complicated than it might seem, as they suffered from all kinds of fears, superstitions, and complexes. Her two Malay agents, Hadji Muktar and Abdul, a former university student and a village schoolteacher, were particularly sensitive and rank conscious.

  To bolster their esteem, Jane went to great lengths to obtain special privileges for them, including the right to eat in the officers’ mess. She came to regret it. When she went down to work in Colombo, the officers there refused to eat with her “zoo,” as they called the various native agents. Moreover, each of her charges had different dietary habits and taboos (“Hindus no beef, Moslems no pork, Buddhists no meat at all”) that resulted in “culinary chaos.” For that matter, Bataks had a quaint habit of practicing cannibalism, roasting the enemy for religious ritualistic reasons, but human flesh was definitely not on the canteen menu. Jane was appointed the Muslim agents’ “official taster,” but no matter what she said, Hadji persisted in badgering her about the possibility that this or that dish contained pork fat. Finally, they were forced to eat in an area of the mess hall that was cordoned off from everyone else. Even though Jane and Howard would have much preferred to dine with their friends, they always made a point of sitting with their agents “so no one’s feelings would be hurt.”

  The youngest of the group was Danny, a seventeen-year-old Karen student who had been captured by the British in Burma after he had fallen during a desperate attempt to flee. He had sustained a concussion but was convinced the headaches and dizziness were a sign that he was going crazy. Nothing the OSS camp psychiatrist said would persuade him he was sane. Further complicating matters, Danny was unaccustomed to wearing Western-style clothes and at the first opportunity tended to strip off his shirt, cap, and tie. Once, according to Jane, he had showed up at the open-air movie in Kandy and began to remove his pants in front of an amazed audience. They had quickly bundled him off to the camp, and they kept a close eye on him after that. Howard had hopes of one day employing Danny as a radio announcer for the Chittagong black radio station, but the young man still had a long way to go.

  A Batak agent who was presented to Jane shortly after she arrived in Kandy also proved to be a handful. “Nick” (his real name was Chabudeen) had been captured by a British submarine off Sumatra and was turned over to the Americans after being interrogated at Trincomalee. The questioning seemed to have wounded his soul, and thereafter he “wilted whenever anyone spoke sharply to him.” He, too, developed a variety of physical and mental ailments, and Jane, the only one fluent in Malay, was kept hopping between doctors and dispensaries. On one occasion, after Nick collapsed, she tried to translate his strange affliction for Dr. Murphy: “He says he’s emptying out blood.”

  “Which end?” the doc inquired without interest.

  Nick was admitted to the British hospital for observation in the event that he might have ulcers. With her usual disregard for protocol and procedure, Jane snagged him a bed by claiming he was an American sergeant, filling out the forms herself, and made him promise not to speak to anyone. The ruse backfired when a nurse at the hospital rang her in the middle of the night—“the mute ‘sargeant’ had written her name on a piece of paper and must see her at once.” Jane had to throw her clothes on and jeep the seventeen miles out to the infirmary. It turned out that Nick thought that the hospital was some form of house arrest and had become extremely agitated. “They don’t like me here,” he insisted, almost falling into her arms. “They want me to die. They are starving me to death. They are feeding me only milk.” Jane managed to settle him down after explaining that no wanted him to die and that milk was the prescribed treatment for ulcers. Three days later, he was back on his feet and begging Jane to drive him to a mosque so he could pray and give thanks for his recovery. That was the second OSS jeep she had to requisition on a shaky pretext to keep Nick contented. Theoretically the OSS boys were going to launch him deep into enemy territory with a handset to spy on the disposition of Japanese troops, but Jane thought he would be terrified at the very idea of such an assignment.

  The majority of their native agents were obtained by British submarines during “snatch sorties.” Snatching, according to Jane, was a method of collecting intelligence: “The subs go over to the mainland, wait around for a native fishing junk to appear. It’s a case of sighting ship, sinking same, and snatching survivors.” The captors were brought back to Trincomalee for questioning. If they were deemed of value, they were trained as agents. If not, they often ended up doing odd jobs and living in internee camps.

  In general, she continued, the native agents in Southeast Asia did not have a “subversive bone in their bodies” and could not understand why OSS involved itself in such elaborate black propaganda schemes. “They favor the direct approach to propagandizing their own people. They can’t understand why we just don’t drop leaflets into occupied zones telling the natives how bad the Japs are.” For example, Sam, one of Howard’s agents, a high-ranking official in the Thai government in exile, was hopelessly obliging. He had been brought in with the idea that he could provide advice on how to slant propaganda targeting the Thai population, but he had “a sweet habit” of agreeing with every proposed program, so that it was impossible to determine which ideas were more promising than others. Jane told Betty that the boys who taught Sam to play poker discovered this habit the hard way because “they never knew when he was bluffing. With every hand he drew he smiled and muttered: Good—good-good!”

  During her meeting with Scofield, Betty learned that Alex was making progress at Chittagong. The small, 5-kilowatt radio station had been erected just outside a Royal Air Force (RAF) camp in the Burma bush, but with their technical staff recalled to Delhi to run the powerful All India Radio, the British had offered the antenna to OSS. Alex had immediately been dispatched to check out the site’s possibilities for black radio warfare. The plan was for their MO-SEAC black radio station to operate under the cover of the Japanese radio station JOAK, going on the air just seconds before and only a hair’s-breadth turn of the dial from the Tokyo team’s frequency. They hoped that if they slipped their black broadcast in so close to the Japanese one, listeners in Thailand searching for news would accidentally pick up their signal and mistake it for the real thing. In the beginning, they would go on twice daily. They had no idea how big an audience they might net: “It could be just a few listeners; it could be thousands.” Alex decided to make their young Thai Harvard student their announcer. He was a mere waif, but he had a strong, confident voice that was tailor made for counterprogramming, and he would boast arrogantly in his perfect Thai of Japan’s ultimate goal of subduing all of Asia.

  Their first trial broadcasts succeeded in duping British direction-finding units in Burma, which reported picking up the signal of a “Jap” station operating in the jungle. Their black radio propaganda also paid dividends: a Bangkok newspaper reprinted part of the test news program that had been beamed to Thailand. The fake story described damage inflicted on Japan by Allied bombing raids and the resulting instability of Japanese markets. The Bangkok paper had swallowed it whole, crediting the report to the “Siamese Hour” over JOAK Tokyo. Scofield told Betty that she would need to start churning out ideas for radio scripts. “When the station starts operating,” he added, “we’ll broadcast all hours of the day and night.”

  It was not until months later in
Bangkok that Alex MacDonald would learn how effective his “sneak broadcasts” had been: “The Thai foreign minister told [him] that one day the Japanese ambassador in Thailand had come storming to him to report the ‘enemy’ operation and called on the Thai government officially to expose and denounce the airwaves intruder.” The minister assured him that this would only serve to make the broadcasts that much more popular with the Thai people.

  When Jane took Betty back to the Queen’s Hotel, they ran into Julia McWilliams and Gregory Bateson having drinks on the porch. Betty had always liked Julia. She admired her dedication and absolute discretion but had always wondered at someone her age, and with her obvious capabilities, being stuck behind a file cabinet. Looking at her now, Betty immediately saw that running the Kandy Registry had injected Julia with a new self-confidence. Julia, with her high security clearance, was in charge of the OSS camp’s “nerve center,” according to Fisher Howe, who headed the maritime unit and was privy to virtually every top secret, including “highly sensitive” plans and operations. “You can be an able and effective intelligence officer but not be under-cover, and we were not,” recalled Howe. “But she was very effective in the job she had.”