A Covert Affair (9 page)

One method that had proved effective against the Germans in Europe was “black radio,” which involved creating stations supposedly manned by discontented rebels broadcasting from within Japanese-occupied territory and created the impression of resistance where there was none. This could be achieved either by jamming the Japanese signal or by using “ghost voices” to ruin an important enemy broadcast by creating static on the same wavelength. Even more devious were so-called slanted newscasts, slipped in so close to the enemy signal as to be confused with the genuine program but containing the slightest change in tone or emphasis, the ironic pause or well-placed snicker.
These subtle jabs could be directed at the lower echelon of the Japanese army or navy, where war weariness had set in and inefficiency and graft were rampant, or against home-front officials, cowardly bureaucrats, and black marketeers. This MO deception, when married to white propaganda, could be especially powerful, explained Jan, a courtly German American who was one of the last remaining members of the European MO branch. He went on, presumably by way of encouragement, to observe how
“admirably adapted this technique”
was to the feminine mind: “Who knows better than a woman how to use the poison darts of slander—the razor-edged rumor? Break a man with the twist of a phrase!”

Betty took offense at his suggestion that this was a talent all women had
“inherited from Eve.”
She still had a reporter's instinctive suspicion of the high-pressure salesman and recoiled at what she saw as the same “cheap” advertising tactics used to foist products on impressionable minds. She also could not help wondering how well this form of propaganda, packed with hidden lies and verbal trip mines, would work against the Japanese. If the research she had seen was to believed, they were dealing with people who were “exasperated with a Marx Brothers comedy and went into gales of laughter when Clark Gable kissed his leading lady.” Did MO really have any sound idea of what kind of subversive campaign would slow down a force of Japanese soldiers? Such soldiers had proved more than capable of using their own black propaganda when they led a banzai charge on Guadalcanal yelling “Down with Babe Ruth!”

After devoting two months to mastering the basics of MO work, Betty and Jane were eager to prove themselves ready to launch their own rumor campaigns against the Japanese. They had dutifully applied themselves to their studies; they had absorbed the contents of stacks of background papers. They had been introduced to some of the strangest characters and most harebrained schemes imaginable. The looniest proposal was for a “snake call,” a small device that made a strangled
shhhhh
sound that was supposed to convince Japanese soldiers that they were surrounded by snakes, which—to judge by folklore—inspired inordinate fear and would theoretically cause panic, confusion, and surrender.
This idea was proposed with utter seriousness by an elegantly suited older gentleman by the name of Mr. Earp, who waved an ivory cigarette holder about as he spoke, had logged time in the Orient, and claimed rare insight into the enemy. He wanted to put the gadgets, which he said could be bought at any sporting goods store for $4.50, into the hands of all Wingate's Raiders to blow as they
“crept up on the Jap positions.”
With that, Betty recalled, he picked up one of the small black tubes and, puckering his lips, produced
“a singularly unimpressive sound.”
Despite being relative novices, she was sure she and Jane could come up with something better for their boys than a whistle.

The same Mr. Earp was later responsible for one of the more embarrassing episodes in OSS history. He apparently did extensive research on Japanese superstitions and, citing old
Inari
fables that told of fox spirits with transformational powers and werewolf attributes, came up with the idea of inducing the Japanese to surrender by playing on their purported fear of foxes. His scheme called for American submarines to surface off the coast of Burma and put ashore thousands of foxes, which would then fan out along the beaches, scaring the Japanese out of their dugouts and sending them running for the hills. Earp must have been very persuasive, because Donovan, General Hugh A. Drum, and a handful of State Department officials agreed to observe a demonstration off Long Island Sound. Huddled on a barge and shivering in the predawn December fog, the dignitaries watched as the cage doors were opened and the animals, which had been dipped in phosphorous to make them easier to track, were dropped into the water. Despite Earp's assurances that the foxes would instinctively head for shore, they promptly swam out toward the Atlantic and disappeared without a trace.
“The professor may have been an expert on Japanese superstitions,”
Jane noted, “but he was the class dunce on zoology.” A furious Donovan called off the fox project, but it lived on, if only at bibulous OSS gatherings.
*

A chance remark over lunch a few weeks later convinced Jane and Betty that they had accidentally hit on their own formula for undermining the Japanese. They had been waiting in line at the OSS cafeteria when Jane, who always kept them amused with tales of her misadventures in Bali, told a funny story about a legendary “love curry” prepared by Indonesian women who wanted to exact revenge on their cheating men. According to Jane, wronged Indonesian women rendered their mouthwatering curries fatal by adding tiny, indissoluble hairs taken from the base of the bamboo plant. Some hours after a hearty meal, the tiny hairs would begin to work their way through the intestinal walls, causing hemorrhage and condemning the faithless lovers to certain death. When she finished describing the poisonous concoction, she grinned and added puckishly,
“Why not revive it for MO?”

Betty agreed it was an ingenious method of dispatching the enemy. Together they spent the next hour plotting a “bamboo death” campaign. The deadly side effects of the curry could be presented to Japanese soldiers in Indonesia, Burma, and Thailand in the form of medical leaflets, purportedly issued by their own military high command. The plan, as outlined by Betty, called for exploiting the Japanese soldier's doubts about the food with further leaflets, which would
“cast suspicion on native eating houses”
and describe the symptoms of poisoning “in a general way that would lead him to believe that simple dysentery and indigestion were the beginnings of hemorrhages.” As a crowning touch, Jane would use her artistic talents to do a series of medical drawings demonstrating “simple sabotage of the digestive tract, tracing the course of the deadly splinters into and through the colon walls with fluoroscopic clarity.”

For the sake of realism, Jane announced they would need to pay a visit to Washington's Botanic Garden. She needed to get close to some bamboo plants in order to make sketches and take a few samples. While Jane gathered up sketch pads and pencils, Betty borrowed a large kitchen knife from the cafeteria and stowed it uncertainly in her purse. Happily, they discovered that the Botanic Garden was not busy on weekday afternoons, and they found no one in the sultry greenhouse that was home to rows of palms, tree ferns, potted orchids, and bamboo
plants. Crawling on all fours, they began searching the base of the bamboo stalks for the tiny deadly barbs, but many of the plants were so old that when they peeled back the brown sheaths they found nothing but dust. Finally, they located a green shoot. Jane passed Betty the knife, and she began to scrape some splinters from the stalk.
“We were flat on our stomachs in mulch and dry bamboo leaves,”
Betty recalled, “when we heard a distinct cough.”

“Lost something?” The guard's steely tone, devoid of inflection, made it more of a statement than a question. Jane met his accusing stare and murmured something about “a school project,” her blue eyes all innocence. It took some fast talking on her part—a barely plausible yarn about their being art students completing an assignment—to secure their freedom. The guard eyed them coldly, confiscated the kitchen knife, and escorted them off the premises. They returned to Q Building and never said a word to anyone about the ignominious end of their first jungle expedition.

By Christmas 1943, rumors had begun swirling that a number of OSS personnel were headed to overseas posts. There was a buzz of excitement as staffers gathered in the corridors to exchange scraps of information. The word was that they were recruiting people for
“five major rear echelon bases”
: New Delhi, Calcutta, Colombo, Chungking, and Kunming. The assignments were supposed to be a secret, but that did not keep the rumor mill from providing regular updates. Paul Child got a telephone call Christmas Day telling him to pack up and get himself on a plane to New Delhi, where he was to be the OSS representative on the staff of Admiral Lord Louis Mountbatten. He complained that the call was so sudden, coming just after he had forked up a
“stomach-full of turkey,”
that it gave him a bad case of indigestion. He was also heard to grumble that because of the lasting influence of the British Raj on India, he was going to have to drop a small fortune at
“Brooks Brothers in America”
before he left.

Mountbatten was the name on everyone's lips. At the Quebec Conference that August, Roosevelt had met with Prime Minister Sir Winston Churchill to hammer out the details of their grand strategy
against Germany and Japan. After hearing from their war chiefs, the two leaders agreed it was to time to step up operations in the Far East in order to cut Japanese supply lines, destroy their communications, and secure forward bases from which the Japanese mainland could be attacked. Field Marshal Wavell, both leaders agreed, was finished. What was needed was a new commander and a new combined operation. Roosevelt offered to let Churchill name one of his own as head of the new South East Asia Command (SEAC), and after some negotiation Mountbatten was named supreme commander and General Stilwell his deputy. During the meeting, it was also agreed that China would not be part of Mountbatten's mandate and would remain part of America's strategic responsibility. To safeguard China's interests, Stilwell would do double duty as chief of staff to Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek and commander of Chinese troops in Burma and in Assam, India.

When Mountbatten visited Washington after the conference, he was greeted by a flurry of fawning press, who described the forty-three-year-old “boy” admiral—the youngest in the history of the Royal Navy—as a handsome, glamorous figure. Not everyone in the War Department was happy about the appointment, however, and P. J. Grigg, the British secretary of state for war, made no secret of the fact that he viewed Mountbatten as a rich playboy and not up to the job. The conservative Patterson newspapers, including the
Chicago Tribune
and
Washington Post and Times-Herald
, attacked “Dickie” Mountbatten as
“a princeling”
and were busy propagating alarmist rumors that the selection of the royal over the homegrown hero General MacArthur was another example of how Roosevelt regularly caved in to pressure from the British. The widespread skepticism toward Mountbatten, and his mission to reconquer all of the Crown's former territories—Burma, Malaya, the Dutch East Indies, and beyond—in a late-in-the-day effort to shore up the lost empire, led some OSS veterans to joke that SEAC (pronounced “See-Ack”) stood for “Save England's Asian Colonies.”

Over the next few months, Betty and Jane made it their business to learn as much as possible about the newly formed Southeast Asia theater, where their MO activities would be targeted. It was a
“rather confused situation,”
as Jane put it, because while Mountbatten's SEAC
command comprised all the territories that had once been British colonies, the Americans belonged to the CBI (China-Burma-India) theater of operations, informally known as “Confused Bastards in China.” The CBI included China, while Mountbatten's Southeast Asia command did not. Go figure. Thus far, the CBI had been “the Cinderella of the war,” its orphaned status reflected in the muddled state of affairs there. Militarily speaking, the CBI counted for little in the war. The big guns were Admiral Chester W. Nimitz's command in the Central Pacific and General Douglas MacArthur's in the Southwest Pacific. Stilwell's operation got the short end of the stick when it came to modern weapons and supplies. Stilwell earned plaudits from the press for his “fortitude in the face of adversity” and was routinely ignored by Washington. He was reputed to be a first-rate commander, but he was an aggressive, testy old professional soldier—having more than earned his nickname “Vinegar Joe”—and was consumed with hatred not only for the nation's enemies but also for some of its imperial allies, namely Britain and China, which he had been appointed to serve. He had nothing but scorn for Chiang Kai-shek, whom he regarded as an arrogant, unteachable Chinese overlord, and had an almost equal aversion for Mountbatten and his greedy colonial ambitions. As a result, Stilwell's command was riddled with feuds and bitter divides, and he was perennially rumored to be about to be replaced. From a political point of view, though, the CBI was
“the most important,”
in Jane's estimation. Certainly it was where the greatest postwar changes would occur, which was the reason Donovan was so determined to establish an OSS foothold in the region.

The situation in India was especially complicated for the OSS because of the rivalry between British and American clandestine warfare organizations. Theoretically, they were all part of a unified command, but in the past Stilwell's and Wavell's operations had been
“suspicious of—in fact, almost hostile to—each other,”
in the words of Albert C. Wedemeyer, the American general Mountbatten chose as his deputy chief of staff in New Delhi. It had gotten to the point where British authorities refused to have any working relationship with the OSS. The head of British intelligence there had reportedly told Donovan in no uncertain terms that the
“door to India was closed”
to the OSS, to
which Donovan had replied, in his inimitable fashion, “Then we'll slip in through the transom.” He got his chance with Mountbatten, who had pledged to foster Anglo-American cooperation and who took an interest in clandestine warfare. Donovan turned his not inconsiderable charm on the new supreme Allied commander and succeeded in getting his foot in the door to India. The story was that Donovan had won favor with Lord Louis by demonstrating his ability
“to obtain New York theater tickets, to procure Cadillac automobiles, and/or to provide the services of Hollywood's John Ford to record SEAC's anticipated successes on film.”
The upshot was that Mountbatten consented to host a new OSS base in his theater. He would retain
“full operational control”
over the unit, though it would not lose its American organization or be integrated with a British unit. While the details were being negotiated, OSS personnel were marking time in Washington waiting for the “big show” to begin.