Sisterhood of Spies

CHAPTER TWO

Code-Room

Mata Hari

When he applied for a job in January 1942, forty-eight-year old Ellery C. Huntington Jr. hoped for an overseas assignment, possibly behind enemy lines. His credentials were impeccable. He had seen service in France during World War I. He had played football against Eisenhower as a star quarterback at Colgate and knew him personally. He had taken his law degree at Harvard and was a highly respected New York attorney specializing in corporate law. He had traveled extensively and knew French, Italian, Spanish, and some German. He spoke with a soft Tennessee accent.

    A squash-playing friend of General Donovan, Huntington was immediately accepted for duty. After his security clearance, he was promoted to the rank of colonel by the War Department. He was named chief of the newly established Security Branch on 8 May 1942 and underwent a crash course in "spymanship" at a training camp in Virginia.

    His first assignment came as something of a shock to this erstwhile defender of the law. Colonel Huntington was ordered to work on an illegal break-in of the Vichy French embassy in Washington to steal French naval code books from a safe in a locked and guarded room. His team would include an OSS safecracker known only as the Georgia Cracker and a French embassy attache who had been seduced by a female agent, code name Cynthia, working for both British and American intelligence. Plans called for the code books to be removed to a safe room at the Wardman Park Hotel, photocopied, and returned within four hours to the chancery without incurring the suspicion of the embassy staff, the night watchman, or his alert guard dog. In addition, the new security chief was to avoid at all costs an FBI surveillance team that had the embassy and the female spy under watch for alleged pro-Nazi activities. Huntington was also given an alias for contacting Cynthia: Mr. Hunter.

    It was not until General Donovan briefed him on the true purpose of this mission that Huntington could approach the assignment with enthusiasm. The naval codes that Cynthia would obtain from the embassy had been requested by both the American and British high commands and were considered essential to the upcoming invasion of North Africa, Operation Torch. William Stephenson's British Security Coordination (BSC) in New York and General Donovan's office were instructed to cooperate in this venture, and Cynthia would be the key to its success. Eventually Huntington himself would be part of the OSS preinvasion infiltration of North Africa.

At a meeting with BSC officials on 10 March 1942 it was determined to schedule the embassy break-in for mid-June. Huntington would have the entire month of May to organize his team. His first step was to establish contact with the mysterious Mata Hari upon whom the BSC placed such reliance. He was impressed with her record: earlier she had helped obtain German and Italian codes, and she had also developed an intimate relationship with one Charles Emanuel Brousse at the French embassy. With his connivance she had supplied BSC and COI/OSS with a steady stream of diplomatic cable traffic between Vichy France and the Washington embassy.

    Travel orders were issued for Colonel Huntington, "within a radius of 500 miles from Washington, D.C. for the purpose of performing official business." In late March 1942 he traveled up to New York City and went directly to the Ritz Carlton Hotel. He was pleasantly surprised when he knocked on the door of a suite in the hotel. The woman who answered was tall and slim with bright auburn hair, a cleft chin, and large, deep green eyes. Her voice was throaty, almost sensuous, but there was a lilt in her greeting. Stylishly dressed, poised, and elegant, this was Cynthia.

    According to the information supplied to Huntington by BSC, Cynthia had been working for Stephenson since 1940. Born Amy Elizabeth Thorpe on 22 November 1910 in Minneapolis, Minnesota, she was the daughter of George Thorpe, a much-decorated former Marine Corps officer. Her mother had graduated with honors from the University of Michigan, then studied at the Sorbonne in Paris, the University of Munich, and later Columbia University. She was, as her daughter once wrote in her diary, "a passionate believer in the discipline of good manners and the rituals of society."

    Amy Thorpe inherited her father's love of adventure and her mother's inquisitive, bright mind. She studied in France and later in private schools in the United States, made her debut in Washington, and spent summers at Newport, Rhode Island. It was during this frivolous period in her life that she met Arthur Joseph Pack, a commercial secretary at the British embassy. They were married in April 1930. They had two children, Anthony and Denise, neither of whom lived much of the time with their family. Their mother opted for boarding schools and foster homes for these siblings who did not fit into her exotic mode of life.

    Cynthia and her husband traveled to European and South American posts, where she conducted a series of foreign intrigues with assorted admirers. She once wrote in her diary, "I love to love with all my heart, only I have to appear cool. Life is but a stage on which to play. One's role is to pretend, and always to hide one's true feelings." When Huntington met Cynthia, her marriage to Joseph Pack was dissolving in divorce. Her amorous relationship with Brousse would culminate after the war in her marriage to the Frenchman who had dared so much for her during his tour of duty in Washington.

    Debonair, balding Colonel Huntington, with a pronounced nose and blue-gray eyes, immediately bonded with Cynthia. They became a smooth working team. She respected his confident approach to problems and enjoyed--unusual for her--a father-daughter relationship with him. Their friendship lasted well after the war with exchanges of letters, mostly written by Cynthia, full of gossip, good humor, and information. She was a worldly woman who knew how to communicate.

    The colonel and the spy got down to business almost immediately. In her suite, Cynthia dutifully identified herself as working for Mr. John Highroad, whom Huntington knew perfectly well as a senior BSC officer, John Pepper. He introduced himself as Mr. Hunter and outlined his plan for supporting her mission. Cynthia had already been briefed by Mr. Highroad on the urgent need to obtain the codes. Cynthia had assured him that she and Charles Brousse could handle the problem. However, in her diary Cynthia admitted to being worried about her ability to handle it: "I was apprehensive about what I had promised. I worried that I had led my chiefs into placing too much confidence in my capabilities."

    Huntington's boss, General Donovan, was also concerned. If the operation failed, it could cause an international incident of major proportions. A presidential directive gave OSS limited power for subversive activities against neutral countries within the Western Hemisphere. "An embassy is a foreign territory," Donald Downes, an OSS officer later assigned to Huntington, cautioned Donovan. "Entering a foreign embassy clandestinely and borrowing code books is full of great risk for everyone concerned."

    There was also top-level concern about Huntington's ability as an untested though possibly overzealous neophyte agent. Donovan's aide, Col. Edward G. Buxton, warned that the general "had his hands full reacting, not always positively, to Ellery Huntington's schemes."

    It was also in mid-April of that year, as plans for the embassy break-in proceeded, that the political scene in France changed radically. The venerable Marshal Petain was replaced as head of the Vichy government in France by pro-Nazi Pierre Laval. As Laval announced over French radio, "My return to power is significant to everyone. For a long time I have always maintained that reconciliation between France and Germany is essential for the peace of Europe." Shortly afterward, five members of the Washington French embassy staff resigned on the grounds that they could no longer support Laval's policy. Vichy France had now become a tool of the Nazi regime.

    In this climate of indecision and disenchantment, Huntington and Cynthia began to make concrete plans for their part in the acquisition of the codes. As head of the OSS security office, Huntington had access to other sections within his organization dealing with undercover work, specifically the Special Operations Branch headed by Donald Downes, organized "to meet any situation that might arise." Huntington's own office was equipped with necessary wiretapping devices, special-purpose cameras, and, most important, an expert safecracker whose skill with locks and combinations had led him to one unlucky caper, and from there to a Georgia prison. He was one of many former convicts released from prisons and employed by OSS after agreeing to accept dangerous wartime assignments. To consolidate the operation, Cynthia had taken an apartment at the Wardman Park Hotel. It was here that her lover Brousse lived with his wife, and where the OSS security team moved to set up their photographic equipment.

    After her New York meeting with Huntington, Cynthia flew back to Washington and was scarcely prepared for the swiftness with which her controller acted. She had hardly unpacked when she heard a knock at her door. She opened it warily to see a man in work clothes carrying a "large pump-like device."

    "I'm the exterminator," he barked loudly and pushed his way into her suite.

    For a brief moment, Cynthia panicked. Had the Nazis or the Vichy French finally caught up with her? How had she blown her cover? Inside the room, as she closed the door, the man winked at her: "I'm from the OSS," he said sotto voce. "I'm checking your room for 'bugs.'"

    Under cover as a pest-control worker, he logically could have been hired by the management to exterminate the cockroaches and rodents that infested old hotels such as the Wardman Park. Cynthia watched as he systematically searched under wall panels, floorboards, and phone outlets for bugs of another variety. Once he had ascertained that Cynthia's suite was free of electronic devices, he returned to the OSS safe room in the hotel with his report.

    Cynthia and her OSS case officer held many careful planning sessions working from a ground plan of the French chancery provided by Brousse. The safe containing the codes was in the naval attache's office; somehow Cynthia must arrange to break into the safe, remove two bulky code books the size of large family Bibles, get them to the OSS photo team at Wardman Park, and have them returned within a few hours!

    At this point Huntington was introduced to Brousse. The Frenchman was fifty years old, a handsome, robust man with a twinkle in his eye. Several times divorced, he was currently married to an American woman of some wealth, the former Catherine Calhoun Graves, great-great-granddaughter of U.S. vice president John C. Calhoun.

    Cynthia's assessment of Catherine Brousse allayed Huntington's fears about possible repercussions from a jealous wife: "She is not possessive nor spirited and is mentally and physically a doll type, absolutely guileless and rather helpless as a result of delicate health. She is not interested in her husband emotionally, but is dependent upon him and his judgment. She is not female, but feminine."

    Cynthia's affair with Brousse had begun in May 1941, when she was asked by BSC to infiltrate the Vichy French embassy in Washington and establish a relationship with either the ambassador, Gaston Henry-Haye; his counselor, George Bertrand-Vigne; or Brousse, then an aide to the ambassador. Posing as a freelance writer, she was able to obtain a two-hour interview with the ambassador and also to meet Brousse, who was immediately attracted to this American woman. She spoke French like a native and seemed more interested in him than in the ambassador, He sent her a bouquet of roses the next day, leading to a second meeting at her Georgetown home where they made love that afternoon. From that day on, Brousse became more and more passionately involved with Cynthia, and she became his case officer as well as his mistress.

    Brousse had started work at the embassy in 1940. He was from Perpignan in the Pyrenees-Orientales, near the Spanish border. He was a bombardier with the French air force during World War I, and at the start of World War II he worked with Anglo-French air intelligence until France collapsed. Before leaving France he was president and co-owner of a leading regional newspaper string in the Perpignan region.

    Cynthia appealed to her lover's anti-Vichy sentiments and was soon receiving daily resumes of embassy cable traffic. Eventually, when the delicate job of breaking into the code room began to take shape, it was up to Cynthia to convince Brousse that he would be acting as a loyal Frenchman, fighting Hitler through Allied channels. Brousse at this point did not know that Cynthia was also working for the British. Like so many of his countrymen, he felt that England had betrayed France, first by retreating in the face of the German invasion of his homeland, and more specifically by destroying French warships at Mers el-Kebir near Oran, North Africa, to prevent the warships from falling under German or Italian control.

    It was vital that Brousse join the team as a witting and willing agent. After urgent sessions with her case officers in New York and Washington as the time grew shorter, Cynthia called her lover and asked him to meet her at her apartment. She came right to the point: "I must have the naval ciphers!"

    Brousse looked at her in disbelief. "It's impossible. I am not authorized to enter the code room."

    "Please, Charles, please. This is the way we shall handle it."

    Brousse finally succumbed to the plan as she outlined it to him, partly because he was already so deeply involved in the conspiracy, partly because of his infatuation with this beautiful and bewitching woman.

    The next night Brousse put Cynthia's plan into motion. He casually walked along with the night guard of the embassy as he was making his rounds. He confided that he had a problem. There was this girl he was seeing, without, of course, the knowledge of his wife. Because of his position at the embassy, it would be risky to take her to a hotel room; his wife might discover his infidelity. It was difficult to get away from home unless he was working at the office. He would like to "work late" some evenings, and if his wife telephoned the office, he would be able to answer the phone. Brousse begged the guard to help him, slipping him a generous bribe when the man hesitated.

    The ploy worked, and for the next few weeks in early June the security guard stayed conveniently out of sight while Brousse and his "girlfriend" spent several late-night hours together on a comfortable sofa in one of the two ground-floor salons at the chancery or in Brousse's office. When they left after each assignation, there was the usual friendly handshake with the guard, a pat on the head for his dog. The guard respected Brousse's position at the embassy, but he also seemed to get vicarious enjoyment from les amourettes of a fellow countryman and a very beautiful woman.

    On the night of 19 June 1942 the plan for the break-in of the chancery was activated. By then both Cynthia and Brousse trusted the night guard, who had respectfully ignored their midnight trysts. Cynthia had some reservations about the alert guard dog, which had become accustomed to them but not to any other intruders.

    They drove up to the embassy building with the Georgia Cracker hidden in the back seat of the car, which they parked across the street. They appeared at the entrance to the embassy in gala spirits, arm in arm, with two bottles of champagne. They explained to the guard that they were celebrating the anniversary of the day they had met and wanted him to join them in a friendly toast to their happiness. The wine was passed around several times. The second glass the guard received contained a dose of Nembutal, which Cynthia had been given by her BSC case officer. As planned, the guard went to sleep very quickly, and Brousse slipped a stronger dose into the dog's drinking water.

    Soon they were able to let the Georgia Cracker in the front entrance of the embassy, past the sleeping guard and his equally laid-out dog. They led the Cracker to the locked code-room door, which he quickly opened. Once inside, the safecracker went to work.

    As Brousse later wrote, "After many weeks of careful preparation under the supervision of Mr. Hunter we have on 19 June entered the naval room of the Embassy in most dangerous conditions at 1 a.m. with a specialist in safes brought from New York by the American service. After many hours of work, he found the secret of the safe."

    Unfortunately, it was nearly four o'clock in the morning when the Georgia Cracker was able to open the safe to reveal the large code books. Cynthia was torn. There were the books, but it was too late to remove them, take them to the hotel for photo reproduction, and return them; by that time, cleaning crews would be arriving and the embassy would be opening for business. Cynthia longingly eyed the two big black books but allowed the Cracker to close and lock the safe. He wrote down the combination for her--"4 left 5; 3 right 20; 2 left 95; 1 right 2; stop"--and the three left the embassy as the guard dog was just beginning to twitch. The quick-acting, short-lived barbiturate would leave no traces, and the guard would feel only a slight hangover.

    Encouraged by the initial venture, both BSC and OSS handlers agreed that Cynthia and Brousse should make another attempt to obtain the code books on 21 June. Unfortunately the Cracker would not be available, but Cynthia would attempt to open the safe with the combination now in their hands. A hesitant Brousse agreed but refused to drug the guard a second time.

    The pair arrived around midnight and spent an hour laughing and smoking in the salon. After they heard the guard start on his tour of the grounds, Cynthia slipped into the code room. She nervously began to twirl the safe's dial the way the Cracker had instructed, but nothing happened. She recalled his testy remarks about the safe: it was too old, it was not well lubricated. Brousse tried to read the numbers to her so she could concentrate, but still the safe would not open. It was nearly two o'clock before Brousse insisted that they give up for the night. They left the embassy and notified the OSS photographer parked across the dark street that the job was off.

    It was after three in the morning when they reached the hotel and reported their failure to both Huntington and BBC's Mr. Highroad, who ordered Cynthia to immediately catch an early flight to New York. He met her at the airport and escorted her to a deserted stretch of beach on Long Island, where to her surprise the Georgia Cracker was waiting in a paneled truck. In a back seat he had installed a safe similar in design and age to the one at the French embassy. Sitting on makeshift seats facing the safe, the ex-con and Cynthia began a three-hour lesson in the secrets of safecracking. The Cracker not only made Cynthia memorize the combination but instructed her in the "feel" of a safe mechanism: hesitate between each turn of the dial; listen as the tumblers drop into place before going on to the next sequence. She finally passed his rigorous course to his satisfaction.

    Exhausted, Cynthia flew back on the afternoon plane to meet Brousse and Huntington. It was agreed that there would be one final attempt to obtain the code books. In spite of her excellent tutelage in safecracking, Cynthia insisted that the Cracker be available as backup. They could help him enter the code room through a low window. It was also arranged that he would park across the street from the embassy and wait for an all-clear flashlight signal from Cynthia.

    Brousse had earlier told the guard that he and his amour would spend a last night together; his wife was getting suspicious of his long nights away from home. Brousse and his lady walked from the hotel to the chancery on Wyoming Avenue. It was a soft June night, and there was not much traffic in wartime Washington at that hour.

    As they neared the chancery, they noticed two strange cars parked on the opposite side of the street with occupants in each car. Cynthia surmised that they were probably the FBI agents who had been randomly tailing her since February 1941 on suspicion of espionage. Later she learned that a nosy hotel clerk had reported her to the bureau as a "trashy" woman who met strange foreigners in her rooms. She was not reassured by the presence of the cars, and her nervousness increased when they reached the embassy compound and there was no guard in sight. Brousse opened the door with his own key.

    As they started their usual routine of smoking, laughing, and making low, intimate conversation on the couch in the salon, Cynthia became tense and uneasy. She strained to hear some sound that would indicate that the guard and his dog were on duty. After half an hour more of disquieting silence, Cynthia acted upon a sudden impulse. She sat up on the couch and began quickly to disrobe. When Brousse started to protest, she commanded him in a whisper, "Get undressed, quickly."

    Cynthia's instincts were right on target. While Brousse was still reluctantly undressing, the door behind them opened without warning. A blinding flashlight beam swept across the room. The light caught Cynthia as she stood up, nude except for a string of lustrous pearls. She played the part to perfection, hiding her nakedness with both hands, mouth agape. The flashlight beamed over Brousse, half undressed on the couch. There was a throaty whispered "Merde" from an embarrassed guard, who stumbled out of the door with muttered apologies. This action on the part of the guard convinced both of them that the watchman had beaten a hasty retreat to allow them their last night together.

    Shortly after the guard disappeared, they heard two cars driving away from the embassy. After a ten-minute wait, Cynthia picked the code-room door lock as the Cracker had instructed her, ran to the window, opened it, and signaled the Cracker, who was crouching below on the ground. He was inside in minutes and quickly knelt by the safe. He verified their hunch that the guard had gone out and talked with the occupants of the cars, and that they had driven away.

    The Cracker swiftly opened the safe. They removed the two dark-colored code books, which they handed down to him as he climbed through the window. They heard him running toward the street and a waiting car. He was on his way to the Wardman Park Hotel, and their mission had been half accomplished.

    It was a long, tense wait for Brousse and Cynthia. As he wrote later, "I do not wish to underline what could have been the consequences, outside the physical danger from the armed guard, if we had been caught."

    They waited in darkness, Cynthia sometimes slinking over to the code-room window to watch for the Cracker. Their nerves on edge, they smoked one cigarette after another, anxiously watching the doors, not daring to dress until they had heard from their teammate. Their deadline had been 4 A.M., and it was now almost 4:30. Had something gone wrong? Had the FBI picked up the Cracker? With his past record, they could easily incarcerate him. Would the guard return?

    Finally, at about 4:40, Cynthia heard a movement under the window: the Cracker was back with the books. Swiftly he climbed through the window with an agility he had not lost since his early days as a second-story man. The books were replaced, the safe locks back in the position they had found them. Fingerprints were wiped clean, and the Cracker was out the window and gone. Brousse and Cynthia dressed quickly and left the embassy arm in arm. They arrived at Apartment 215B at the Wardman Park Hotel and entered a busy room filled with photo equipment, two cameramen, Huntington, and, most important, photographs of the code pages spread out to dry on several tables.

    Huntington congratulated them both. Brousse left almost immediately to change his clothes and return to his office to make certain that everything there was in order. Cynthia, weary and spent, crept into her own flat for a well-earned sleep. In the weeks ahead she was transferred to OSS from BSC for more Washington-based operations, but with Donovan's approval she continued to collaborate with the British BSC until the war's end.

    The precious ciphers were sent to London within forty-eight hours of the theft. OSS agents were the main beneficiaries of the codes, using them prior to and during the North African landings. Colonel Huntington was one of those OSS men for whom the Vichy codes proved invaluable in their undercover work with agents in North Africa before the landings.

Some twenty years later Ellery Huntington and his wife, Kitty, visited the Charles Brousses in France. Huntington had met attractive Helen Catherine DuBois in Algiers when she was secretary to the OSS intelligence chief there. They were married in 1946 and lived in New York and Washington until Huntington's death in 1987.

    In an interview with Kitty Huntington I learned that she and her husband had been traveling in Europe in the early 1960s when Ellery said he would like to look up his charming colleague from OSS days, who was living with her husband in a tenth-century hilltop fortress near Perpignan in the Pyrenees. "I remember when we arrived at Perpignan, the only town near the Brousses' chateau, we were met by Brousse himself," Kitty Huntington recalled. "He took us to lunch in town because they could not afford servants at that period in their marriage. He had renovated Chateau Castellnou for his wife at great expense, and I gathered they were short of funds."

    Brousse drove the Huntingtons up the mountainous road to the magnificent chateau with crenelated walls and large, spacious gardens. Mrs. Huntington had never met Cynthia, as her husband often referred to her, but she had been impressed by his tales of her beauty and charm. She continued: "Mrs. Brousse greeted us at the entryway, surrounded by three black and brown dogs with curly tails and sharp muzzles. She was talking to them the same way she did to us, as if they understood every word she said."

    Mrs. Huntington was not prepared for the person who reached out unsteadily and shook her hand. By then Cynthia had been suffering several years with cancer. She welcomed Ellery especially effusively and showed them into the drawing room for tea.

    "She was not the same woman Ellery had told me about," Kitty Huntington recalled somewhat sadly. "In her many letters to my husband she always wrote vivaciously, with good humor. These letters somehow reflected her great zest for living. Standing before us now was almost a shadow of this other person. I felt then that she would not spend much time at Castellnou."

    While they were having tea in the lovely room overlooking the mountains, Kitty Huntington noticed a portrait of a beautiful woman, tall and slim, wearing a white gown, long gloves, and a tiara over short reddish blonde curls, "The woman in the portrait was so beautiful that I spontaneously picked it up and asked Mrs. Brousse who it was. She looked at me for a short time in silence, then smiled. She said it was she, then Elizabeth Thorpe Pack, when she had been presented to the king of England at a court levee in 1933."

    Cynthia died a few months later, on 1 December 1963, and was buried in a park at Chateau Castellnou where she and Charles Brousse had lived during the happy years after the war.