A Covert Affair (16 page)

Oh, what a wonderful theater,

Oh, what a beautiful place.

We love political warfare

We don't fight; we just save face.

Heppner attempted to improve matters that autumn by dispatching Ed Taylor and the recently arrived Alex MacDonald, both journalists, to set up a new propaganda workshop dedicated to OSS operations in Thailand. Taylor had an overconfident, almost cocky manner, but it was hard to argue with his authority as he had successfully matched wits with Nazi propagandists as the leader of the OSS's European psychological warfare branch. The new shop was based down in Colombo, within an adobe compound the OSS maintained downtown in the port city. Grim-faced Gurkha soldiers guarded the entrance. Jane was assigned to go with them, and to focus on black propaganda ideas for Indonesia, which was also under Japanese occupation.

Their new team included three Free Thai students who were training to be OSS operatives. The three had escaped the Japanese and had been helped out of Bangkok by OSS field agents. They reported that the political situation in Thailand was deteriorating rapidly. Japanese forces had shut down all Bangkok radio broadcasts, and had replaced them with their own war news broadcasts, created by Thai collaborators, over Radio Tokyo. Most of the student operatives' days were spent listening to Thai-language broadcasts out of Tokyo, analyzing the content, and suggesting counterpropaganda ideas.

The Japanese, of course, did counterprogramming almost exactly like their own and meticulously reported all of the Allies' failures for the edification of their listeners and the Tokyo rear echelon. Japanese even had plans for a secret black radio station, to be called Free Ceylon, aimed at inciting the Indian population. Ed Taylor had urged their team to
“put their imagination to work”
in trying to sabotage the Japanese radio propaganda. They gathered the first morning and sat around like
“Madison Avenue ad men,”
Alex recalled, “and ran a few ideas up the flagpole.”

They agreed that in order to win the propaganda war, they needed to produce their own insidious anti-Japanese broadcasts, copying the exact form of the Radio Tokyo programs, and pipe them back into Thailand. Their strategic purpose, MacDonald instructed his Thai apprentices, was to counteract the Radio Tokyo line that Japan was winning the war and that Thailand, as a passive ally, should join with the
empire in its goal of a “co-prosperity sphere” in Southeast Asia. But they would have to be subtle in their subversion. Most of their simulated programs had to consist of straight news, picked up from a variety of overseas broadcasts, with just a twist of their own—usually a “regretful” report of Japanese setbacks in the Pacific. One of the Thai students, who was twenty and had been studying architecture at Harvard, also masterminded “official” Japanese pronouncements worded in a way guaranteed to offend the Thais. The broadcasts—exactly imitating the style of the programs put out by the Japanese high command but with material designed to infuriate the native population cleverly inserted—would create distrust and dissension. The ultimate goal of the team's black radio scheme was to stir up resistance against the Japanese occupiers, aid the Thai underground, and enlist sympathy and even support for their own side. The additional challenge they faced was somehow to dissociate themselves from the attitudes of their colonialist allies, but this was not always a practical, let alone easy, policy to uphold.

Heppner had also banished their printing unit to Colombo, which Jane interpreted as another attempt to keep their MO work out of the sight and mind of the higher command in Kandy. A lot of Regular Army types, as well as the naval brass, viewed psychological warfare as a dubious Washington-spawned branch of the intelligence services, had no idea what it really meant, and wanted nothing to do with it. Their bafflement led to either ridicule or a lot of annoying questions that could not be answered. Hence MO offices were usually hidden away in some dark corner of the OSS compound. In Colombo, their “MO-tel,” as it was called, was on empty stretch of white beach on the outskirts of the city, at the end of a lonely road, beyond a stockade and barbed wire fence, and camouflaged beneath a green canopy of ancient palm trees. There was a cluster of nondescript thatch-and-plywood outbuildings, with the print shop set the farthest back from the beach to protect the equipment from the ocean spray.

Whenever Jane dropped off her painstakingly prepared black leaflets to be typeset, she felt as if she were sneaking off to a house of ill repute in the seedy part of town. It was thirty miles from the headquarters in Kandy and on the other side of the island from Trincomalee, the
British naval base. Of course, it was also possible that because of the undercurrent of distrust, the OSS might want to keep the MO production sequestered from British intelligence. It was an open secret that the two dueling cloak-and-dagger agencies were keeping an eye on each other's methods of operating with an eye to getting a political and economic leg up in postwar Asia.
“Each side cheated to about the same degree,”
according to Ed Taylor, “and usually with a certain gentlemanly restraint.” At times, he recalled, his “resources of ingenuity were severely taxed to produce for [their] SEAC superiors an innocent explanation for the presence of some accidentally discovered OSS intelligence team or guerilla base in an area where no such operation had yet been authorized; fortunately, the same occasion was usually exploited by one of [OSS's] British rivals to ‘surface' some equally unsanctified activity of its own, so SEAC could give its retrospective blessings to both.”

All OSS personnel in SEAC had been warned to be on guard against any interagency deception. The British considered this sort of trickery a classic secret service tradition and had been known to plant spies in U.S. bureaucracies to sift through information. Julia was told to protect the Registry's secrets from prying officials from outside agencies. There were rumors that one fair-haired British femme fatale was specifically targeting
“high-echelon personnel”
in Kandy, but there were so many decorative blondes on Mountbatten's staff it was impossible to guess her identity. OSS security even had the temerity to suggest that OSS female personnel were particularly at risk because gullible American girls were
“easy targets”
and tended to go to pieces “at the first sound of a British accent.”

Jane did her best to contribute to this spirit of virtuous intrigue. She suspected that her British friend Alec Peterson, who worked in Mountbatten's headquarters, was probably MI6 and engaged him in some minor cat-and-mouse games. They would often meet up on weekends for dinner and dancing at the Silver Fawn (more commonly known as “the Septic Prawn”), one of Colombo's nightclubs for officers that was enjoying a booming wartime trade. On these occasions, she would slip into the new black silk cocktail dress she'd had made locally (if her mother could only see the tailors in Ceylon!) and black high-heeled
sandals brought from the States. She would always bring along a bottle of “operational scotch,” and after they had both had a drink she would attempt her own sub-rosa maneuvering:
“OK, Alec, let's get it over with. When are the bombers going over?”

“On the twentieth.”

“Would you drop some of our leaflets?”

He would sigh and, more often than not, agree. Scofield repeatedly reproached her about being “too friendly with the British,” Jane recalled, “but reluctantly kept supplying the operational scotch.”

At the end of a particularly hectic week, Ed Taylor, the camp bon vivant, announced that he was organizing a big party “to celebrate the dark of the moon”—though clearly any excuse would do. It was the first real party since Jane had arrived. They all went to the Kandy Club for dinner and dancing—Ed, Jane, Paul, Julia, Scofie, Cora, Gregory, Virginia, and others. And, saints be praised, there was something closely approximating a bar, offering gin martinis, sherry, brandy, and scotch. Everyone had too much to drink, and one or two disgraced themselves, but no one was in any condition to be telling tales.

On the jeep ride home, Jane searched the night sky for the Big Dipper, knowing that, like everything in this part of the world, it would be upside down. Back in her room at the hotel, her head fuzzy with the effects of alcohol at that altitude, she discovered that some indefatigable monks were, as Paul put it,
“hell-raising”
at the Temple of the Tooth next door. Small lamps were burning in the niches in the old wall outside, and the smoky air was pungent with the smells of incense and coconut oil. There were drums beating, flutes wailing, and dozens of beggars bleating. This exotic scene, so characteristic of Ceylon, was wasted on her. She wished they would just shut up.

Thank Buddha, it was the third day of sunshine in a row. They were just emerging from a second wave of monsoons, the bedraggled survivors of weeks and weeks of daily drenchings. Sitting in her office cadjan, Jane had come to recognize the now-familiar signs of the coming onslaught: first came the roaring sound, steadily gathering force as it tore through the jungle; the sky dimmed; a violent wind whipped up and filled the air with the smell of rotten leaves; then came the slashing rain. It came in sheets and blew in through the open doors and windows, scattering her papers and sending rivers of muddy water across the ground outside. Then, just as suddenly, it stopped; the sun came out, and everything steamed. The air felt fresh and cool, though the humidity still soaked her cotton blouse and left it plastered to her back. Thousands of insects began to buzz; birds trilled; and, as Somerset Maugham put it, you could practically “see the herbage grow before your very eyes.” Then it rained again. In the past, both the British and the Japanese had maintained that it was impossible to fight during the wet season and shut down operations from April to October until the weather improved. Jane thought it an eminently sensible point of view.
The new SEAC commanders, however, saw no reason to let a little mud and malaria get in their way, and as a result it had been an unusually busy autumn in their corner of the war.

Jane was laboring in her Colombo office when Ed Taylor phoned down from Kandy, his voice uncharacteristically strained.
“Donovan's here,”
he announced grimly. “He'll be down to your place at ten tomorrow morning. I hope you've got something to show him.”

The OSS director, who had recently been promoted to major general, was on one of his swings through Southeast Asia and was headed their way sooner than expected. Donovan always traveled with a large entourage—assorted branch chiefs from Washington, Far Eastern theater officers, and a gaggle of bright young aides—that he referred to as his “flying circus.” His visits tended to be fast and formal, resembling a
“quasi-royal procession,”
and they inspired much scurrying about and nervous twitching throughout the theater. They also led to the most appalling displays of brown-nosing among their more sycophantic colleagues, some of whom could not get down on their knees fast enough when the great man appeared. Alex MacDonald called their small MO team together and warned them to be prepared.
“It meant we had to clean up everything,”
recalled Jane, “and make ourselves look terribly efficient, and draw up charts to show what we were doing and what we were planning to do.”

The next morning, the general arrived at ten sharp, wearing an overseas cap and slightly rumpled khaki uniform without medals, escorted by Heppner and another officer. Donovan took a keen interest in the black radio operation and was gracious with their three young Thai students. Nodding his silvered head in approval when MacDonald finished showing him their setup, he said,
“Sounds promising. Get it going. But you'll have to get closer to the action.”
Turning to Heppner, he ordered, “Send them up to Detachment 101 in Burma and order equipment for them out of Calcutta.” Then Donovan turned to Jane, who was on the verge of saluting when he extended his hand.
“How about Indonesia?”
he asked her. “Got anything going here?” As their team leader, MacDonald “groaned inwardly.” He was all too aware of what Jane had going.

Assuming a look of bland courtesy, Jane led the way toward a separate room at the far end of the cadjan dominated by a long table where several young Ceylonese women were busily working. Everywhere on the table surface were open boxes of SilverTex condoms. The women were expertly stretching the rubbers, prying them open, and stuffing in wadded-up pieces of paper and little yellow pills. They would then blow into the opening until it was partially inflated, quickly tie off the end, and toss the condom on the growing pile.

Donovan looked at Jane inquisitively, a bemused grin on his round, ruddy Irish face. Knowing he was a great believer in inspired amateurism, she plunged ahead, hoping to make a convincing case for her MO scheme:
“They're messages to the Indonesian people urging them to resist the Japanese. OSS officers are being taken over to Malaya and Indonesia by submarine to recruit native anti-Japanese agents. I've arranged for the OSS men to release thousands of these at sea along the island coasts. The Indonesians who pick them up will know they have friends outside to help drive out the Japanese. The messages are in both English and Arabic,”
she finished, adding that the pills were the “highly prized” antimalarial preparation Atabrine.

“Hmm,” Donovan muttered, fingering one of the inflated rubbers doubtfully, as if trying to image the reaction of the locals when they saw what the tide had brought in.
“It seems a long shot. But keep it going. Keep it going.”
He gingerly replaced the balloon in the bouncing pile with the others, gave Jane a weak smile, and departed. As soon as Donovan's jeep was out of sight, Alex turned to Jane and wrapped her in a hug that was part congratulations, part relief. Not long thereafter, he and his black radio team departed for Chittagong, near the border between India and Burma.