A Covert Affair (63 page)

*
After the war, the fox project was cited in
The New York Times
as an example of the OSS's wartime ingenuity.

*
Ellie Thiry also wrote very long letters to her family, including “almost a manuscript” about her voyage on the
Mariposa
, and asked her sister to share a carbon copy with “the gals and guys” left in D.C.—a veiled reference to her OSS colleagues.

*
MacDonald went on to become a best-selling mystery writer after the war.

*
Su-Lin made headlines when she arrived in New York in 1936, carried not in a cage but in Mrs. Harkness's arms, the first giant panda ever to be captured alive and safely brought back to the United States.

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Norbury eventually stumbled on a clue to her fiancé's fate in an OSS agent report. Roy Wentz had been captured by the Japanese and was interred in the Insein prison camp near Rangoon. After Burma fell, he was released, seriously ill and wasted to ninety-five pounds. Patty was reunited with him in Calcutta in May 1945, and they were married a few months later.

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Most such agents were Indonesian Communists in exile.

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In fact, not only did Surabaya Sue survive, but her influence increased as the revolution progressed in 1946 and she became a de facto public relations officer for Sukarno's fledgling government.

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A. Peter Dewey is often cited as America's first fatality in the Vietnam War.

*
Rudyard Kipling, “A Legend of Truth.”

*
Joy Homer never recovered, possibly due to complications from her diabetes, and she died a year later in the United States at the age of thirty-one.

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He proposed by giving her his signet ring, and they were married in London in 1946.

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Years later, an extreme anti-Communist group decided to make Birch a martyr for its cause and in 1958 appropriated his name, calling itself the John Birch Society.

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Marjorie Severyns ended up marrying Al Ravenholt in Shanghai in 1946.

*
As no censorship had yet been invoked on OSS files, Betty MacDonald's wartime memoir,
Undercover Girl
, was published in 1947.

*
George Zlatovski's FBI file notes that he was regarded as
“too non-conformist”
to gain admittance to the Duluth Communist Party and was described as “too selfish” and known for doing “a lot of talking.”

*
It took Service fourteen years of legal wrangling to clear his name. In 1957, the United States Supreme Court ruled that his discharge was illegal, based solely on the unfounded action of the Loyalty Review Board, and his record was expunged. He was then reinstated and promptly banished to Liverpool, where he remained until his retirement in 1962.

*
Determined to avoid a repeat of the Alger Hiss case on his watch, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles appointed R. W. Scott McLeod the first-ever assistant secretary of state for security and consular affairs in 1953. During his four-year tenure, McLeod fired some three hundred State Department employees on the suspicion that they were Communist sympathizers.

*
Paul was essentially correct: among the many affidavits and character references Jane provided to the State Department on January 24, 1955, was a list of her American friends in Paris, including Julia and Paul. It was on the basis of that information that the USIS initiated an investigation of Paul Child “to determine the nature and extent of his association with Jane Foster Zlatovski and her husband, George.”

*
In August 1955, an FBI field agent in Paris reported that confidential French sources indicated that George Zlatovski was
“believed to have been in contact with Haakon M. Chevalier and Robert Oppenheimer.”

*
Paul's personal papers, along with most of his correspondence covering June 1954 to December 1955, as well as from October 1956 to March 1959, mysteriously went missing. He noted that no one could come up with a satisfactory explanation of how or why they were lost.

*
In fact, the jaunty march, originally known as “The Parade of the Tin Soldiers,” was composed by Leon Jessel in 1905.

*
It is worth noting that Bentley, too, claimed she had been working for the Communist Party of the United States and initially had no idea that she was spying for the Soviet Union.

*
The FBI made some but not all of Jane Foster's massive file—more than 60,000 pages—available. In addition, some documents are censored, and in some cases so many names and sentence fragments have been blanked out that the reports are virtually incomprehensible.

*
This included the corroborating evidence supplied by the then top-secret Venona decrypts described in the appendix of this book.

*
In the search of the Zlatovskis' apartment on January 26, 1957, the French police took George's address book, which listed Paul Child as a contact. This information was forwarded to the FBI, which requested that George
“be questioned concerning the subject [Paul].”
A memo from the Paris legation to the director of the FBI in March 1957 states that a review of the Zlatovskis' statements revealed that Paul Child was in the OSS, then with the American Embassy and USIS, and
“the possibility exists that the subject is a covert operative with the CIA.”

*
Andrew Roadnight,
United States Policy Towards Indonesia in the Truman and Eisenhower Years
(New York: MacMillan), p. 154.

Julia McWilliams and Paul Child both served overseas with the OSS's Detachment 404. They met in Ceylon and did most of their courting in China, but Paul would not agree to marry the “6′2″
bien-jambée
” until he had seen her in civilian clothes. He finally relented in Maine in the summer of 1946: he was forty-four, and she was almost thirty-four.

Jane Foster, a beguiling blond OSS officer who first caught Paul's eye in Washington, D.C., in the fall of 1943, was “a wild, messy girl, always in trouble.”

OSS officer Betty MacDonald, who specialized in black propaganda, with the canine patrol guard she shipped home from China as “K-9 First Class Sammy.” Reared in the company of spies and GIs, the spaniel had a taste for gin martinis.

Julia striking a coquettish pose on the cot in her bamboo hut in Kandy. She hoped the photo would give Paul ideas, but instead he forwarded it to his brother as an interesting example of the local architecture.

OSS personnel at work in the Research and Analysis section of the Kandy field station, housed in an old tea plantation, where unwanted visitors included lizards, tarantulas, and six-foot-long cobras.

Lord Louis Mountbatten, the supreme commander of the China-Burma-India theater of war, paying a visit to the primitive OSS camp in Kandy. Behind him Detachment 404 commander John Coughlin looks on, along with Lieutenant Commander Edmond Taylor.

Major General William J. (“Wild Bill”) Donovan, director of the OSS, recruited what one employee called “rare, strange personalities” from every walk of life, including academics, journalists, assorted criminals, and Communists.