A Covert Affair (64 page)

Lieutenant Colonel Richard Heppner, the brash young head of Detachment 404, complained of constant interference by British intelligence so much that at times it was hard to tell they were on the same side.

The Queen's Hotel in Kandy, a Victorian relic, was a breeding ground for mosquitoes, so Julia, Jane, and the other OSS women billeted there promptly contracted dengue fever.

The charming Mountbatten, who Paul Child called the “one hero” in his life, selected the King's Pavilion as his elegant headquarters, and decreed Kandy “probably the most beautiful spot in the world.”

General Joseph Stilwell (
far right
) scowling as he poses with Mountbatten, who is flanked by Generalissimo and Madame Chiang Kai-shek, and Lieutenant General Brehon Somervell in Chungking, the wartime capital of China. Stilwell had nothing but contempt for the corrupt Chinese Nationalist leader and the imperialist ambitions of the British.

The OSS headquarters in Kunming was as bare bones as a cavalry outpost, consisting of a few two-story buildings scattered on a dirt parade ground. Paul described the atmosphere as “rather like a party which has gone sour.”

Betty MacDonald standing with colleagues in the doorway of the flooded MO print shop during the historic 1945 flood in Kunming. The camp's well-fortified walls turned the OSS compound into a three-foot-deep lagoon, and they were forced to commute between buildings in life rafts.

John Carter Vincent (among the Foreign Service Officers known as “China Hands”)

John Service (among the Foreign Service Officers known as “China Hands”)

John Paton Davies (among the Foreign Service Officers known as “China Hands”)

Owen Lattimore (among the Foreign Service Officers known as “China Hands”)

McCarthy investigated Communist sympathies in the movie industry and succeeded in jailing the “Hollywood Ten”—including the screenwriters and directors Samuel Ornitz, Ring Lardner, Jr., Albert Maltz, Alvah Bessie, Lester Cole, Herbert Biberman, and Edward Dmytryk—shown here on their way to federal court in Washington, D.C., to face trial on charges of contempt of Congress for their defiance of the House Un-American Activities Committee.

David Schine (
left
) and Roy M. Cohn (
center
), who Paul called “fascist bully-boy types,” with McCarthy during a subcommittee hearing in 1953.