Jeff Shear's History of "Cynthia," the World War II Spy
Index
Monday, January 11, 2010
Part Three, Continued: Fairly and Astor, the Spy Wars
Paul Fairly wore the uniform of a United States Navy officer in October 1940, though he was not in the Navy and he was not an officer. In fact, he ran errands for the British and their bespoke American espionage organization, the British Security Coordination.
For certain, running spies was not beyond the Navy or the Office of Naval intelligence, but not spies quite like Fairly, and certainly not spies working in tandem with a foreign power. Apart from principle, Naval intelligence would have been putting itself at too great a risk for too uncertain a reward to involve itself. The interdepartmental warfare taking place with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, along with other military intelligence agencies, and the State Department made Fairly a tenuous ruse.
There was, however, a "private" espionage ring attempting to validate itself in the eyes of the Roosevelt administration. The fabulously wealthy and well-connected New Yorker, Vincent Astor, not only had the president's ear, but the close attention of British Security Coordination. In fact, William Stephenson, who had come from London to New York that June to run British intelligence, took up residence at the St. Regis Hotel at the invitation of Astor, its owner.
FDR had plans for Astor’s interest in things clandestine, and the President had placed Astor in charge of the third Naval District, which had under its watchful eye the entire New York City region. The scion of one of Manhattan's greatest real estate fortunes had most recently been made a captain in the US Naval reserves at the direction of the President. Moreover, Astor had access to a veritable flotilla of yachts at his disposal through the New York Yacht Club, which would soon come in handy.
The ever fortunate Astor had been dealt three aces: close connections with British Security Coordination, the special attention of the President of the United States, and command of New York’s Naval nerve center. Unfortunately, his bona fides were lacking. His recent espionage sorties into the Pacific had proven notable for their timidity. A mission he undertook aboard his infamous and notorious yacht, the Nourmahal, into the secret Japanese environs of the Marshall Islands, had failed for lack of resourcefulness and opportunism – spy traits of the first order. His personal adventures in espionage turned out to be collegiate, prankish and inept. At the first inkling of Japanese rancor over the prying Nourmahal, Astor set a course for the safety of Diamond Head.
By contrast, the Fairly gambit was anything but sophomoric. The degree of craft involved in the impersonation of a naval officer augurs the work of an enterprising and practiced organization. The evidence would seem to indicate that by himself Astor would have been at sea. But the British Security Coordination -- working alongside Vincent Astor -- would have been enterprising enough to turn the civilian Fairly into a sailor, and an officer. Indeed, a long-time friend of the President, a man in charge of local naval authorities, with access to the New York Yacht Club like Astor would have been a perfect foil to British intelligence.
And such an association was very much in Astor's interest.
For the forces working inside Washington during the early days of America’s direct involvement in the war were engaged in a turf battle, the high dudgeon of ruthless bureaucratic empire building; and the two richest men in New York – Vincent Astor and Nelson Rockefeller – had cast themselves right in the middle of the contest, angling for empire.
Sunday, July 26, 2009
Part Six: Missing Parts
Under Construction
Saturday, July 25, 2009
Part Five: A Rogues' Gallery
Several characters remain to be introduced before the events of the Second Washington Conference take place.
Perhaps the most important among them was a small, gray and mysterious man by the name of William S. Stephenson. The diminutive director of England's intelligence operations in the Americas arrived to work full-time in the U.S. at age 43, in June 1940. He was known to his colleagues as "Little Bill." President Roosevelt's speech writer, Pulitzer Prize winner, Robert Sherwood, characterized Stephenson as "a quiet Canadian." The tag stuck, which is surprising. Sherwood wrote what was perhaps the first vivid White House tell-all, and the 900-plus page tome was thorough to an eye-glazing fault. Yet despite the writer's extraordinary perch from which to detail Roosevelt's heavily trafficked third administration, the "quiet Canadian" is mentioned just once. By comparison, Stephenson often let it be known that he had virtually open access to FDR. Given all that Sherwood reveals about FDR's chief intimate, Hopkins, it's hard to believe he would have kept a personage influential enough to have FDR's instant attention a secret.
British and Canadian writers have sensationalized Stephenson by his cable address, "Intrepid," which they touted as his code name. It was not. The most prolific popularizer of Britain's secret service in the Americas, H. Montgomery Hyde published Stephenson's story in England under the title, The Quiet Canadian: The Secret Service Story of Sir William Stephenson. Interestingly, the only other reference the American writier, Robert Sherwood, made to Stephenson in Roosevelt and Hopkins an Intimate History was buried in a long, alphabetical acknowledgment in the book's introduction, a paragraph-length list of 85 other Washington power-brokers.
Stephenson's story appears to be one of many pieces of misinformation or disinformation -- alterations of identity -- referred to in the intelligence community as a "legend." For while he is consistently described as quiet, he was not quite Canadian. Taken together, the real Bill Stephenson may be less than the sum of his parts, and many of those parts appear to be missing.
Part Six: Missing Parts
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Thursday, July 9, 2009
Part Four: Ecce Hoover
When Paul Fairly and Elizabeth Brousse were making their quasi-legal connections, in the fall and winter of 1940, J. Edgar Hoover's FBI was taking charge of all intelligence operations in the Americas. Here's how it worked.
Significantly for the future of Anglo-American relations, at least in the near-term, any references or concerns expressed by any of the executive agencies about foreign espionage were to be coordinated through the FBI, and its 44-year-old director, J. Edgar Hoover.
This presidential order succeeded in the creation of the Interdepartmental Intelligence Conference (IIC), which was chaired by Hoover and mediated by Berle, who was not only a thorn in Britain's ambitions, but became the IIC's last court of appeal. Indeed, Hoover often turned to Berle to mediate IIC's internal disputes.
Hoover presented no problem for Paul Fairly, at least not at first. The Navy was free to run its overseas operations. This did not mean, however, that ONI was to use its intelligence capabilities in the service of a wartime belligerent like Britain. First and foremost, the U.S., at this time, was determined to maintain its neutrality.
What is more, the quasi-official history of the British Security Coordination, the murky organization that represented England's Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) in the Americas, reports that "...ONI and G2...were opposed at that time to collaboration with the British," unless that information was passed to them through Hoover.
That would make Paul Fairly an increasingly puzzling figure. If he was in fact a naval officer working for ONI )which we will explore further). Because the fact remains, Fairly described himself to Brousse as an ONI officer. Which raises the logical question: what was he doing in bed, literally and figuratively, with Brousse?
Wednesday, July 1, 2009
Part Three: The Third Skein
There are actually three large skeins of history that explain the events of June 1942 and the tactics that ultimately determined Allied strategy in the Atlantic. Each of the skeins must be understood in its own right, and in connection with the others, even as they are all unraveling. One skein is the Second Washington Conference; the other is Russia, Molotov and the German invasion known as Barbarossa; and the last, finally, is the evolving and growing tension within the espionage and diplomatic community, as personified by the affairs of Madame Brousse. Each of these several and many plots has its own warp and woof, but all of them, in one way or another, are affected by or driven by Winston Churchill and his unbending determination to save as much of his beloved British Empire as possible, no matter what the excuse, no matter what the subterfuge, no matter what the price or who paid it: Britain, Russia, or the U.S.
Paul Fairly is one filament in the strange evolution of U.S. and British efforts in the realm of diplomacy and espionage. His story suggests that in the period from 1940 until Pearl Harbor, Britain was as concerned about cornering German activity in the Western Hemisphere as it was about influencing U.S. policy in the West Wing.
The story of Paul Fairly and Madame Brousse -- while not apparently involved in the Second Washington Conference -- reveals the strange interactions of these two national intelligence interests. For as Fairly and Brousse meet -- either on board the Excalibur or after at the Ritz -- it is unclear whose side each is working for. Brousse is apparently working officially or unofficially for Britain's Secret intelligence Service (MI6), and Fairly for the Office of Naval Intelligence, but it is Fairly who seems to skew the connections. Is he working for ONI, doubling for SIS, or is there some other working arrangement?
Thursday, December 4, 2008
Part Two: Lies, Damn Lies and Espionage
Madame Brousse’s role in the Second Washington Conference began more than a year before the U.S. entered the war, on October 1940. That autumn, German troops occupied Paris. The Soviets and the Nazis were twisted together in a treacherous peace. And the Blitz was in full force, with 250-thousand homeless. That fall, Brousse was traveling on board a passenger-cargo ship, one of the American Export Lines famed "Four Aces," The Excalibur, on her way from Lisbon to New York. As her biographers explain, she was heading home to Chile to help her invalid husband with a trade mission evaluating British interests in South America. The Excalibur's manifest suggests a more complex tale, however, reflecting America's nascent intelligence services' multi-layered connections to London, the first toddler's steps toward CIA.
The name, Paul Fairly, looms large in this section of the story, although it is easily overlooked. The first sign of his greater import appears on page 47 of the Excalibur's manifest, on the very first entry line. And it is by contrast with published work about Brousse and her affairs that this early appearance of Fairly takes on increasing significance.
According to Mary Lovell’s, Cast No shadow, Madame Brousse, then known as Betty Pack, did not meet Paul Fairly until some days after the Excalibur’s arrival, when she was staying at the Ritz, in New York City. Indeed, this was how Madame Brousse's first biographer, former British intelligence agent and author, H. Montgomery Hyde had it in his book, Cynthia: "Soon after [the voyage, Madame Brousse,] met a young naval lieutenant in U.S. Naval Intelligence...in the lobby of the old Ritz-Carlton Hotel." Neither author should he faulted for this error, because this is how Brousse herself explained events and the character she referred to as Pat, in the notes for her memoirs. What the manifest makes clear is that Fairly sailed on board the Excalibur with Brousse. The rest is open to speculation. Were Fairly and Brousse working together? Was she even aware of his presence on board the ship? Could he have been shadowing someone else? As with so much in the study of espionage, there is factual evidence and there is circumstantial evidence. Facts present an opportunity for disinformation; whereas circumstance is surprisingly more robust, but heaped in subjectivity. The Kennedy assassination is such an example. So what actually took place that fall on the Excalibur?
The focus of Lovell’s narrative (and the alleged object of Brousse’s amorous attentions onboard the Excalibur) was “Norman W.” See the name at line 15 on the manifest, which reveals Norman W, to be 54-year-old Norman Whitehouse, a wealthy Rhode Islander married to a glamorous Russian exile, Princess Tamara Bagration Moukharansky. In the 1920s, she posed for Edward Steichen (http://is.gd/17pFp), as well as in magazine advertising. Princess Bagration and her sister, Princess Ratief, had been — before the Communist Revolution — the largest landowners in the strategic, mineral rich Caucasus. Indeed, the Princess and the patrician were married in Tablisi, the regional capital. Such connections are enough for any spy, especially when Soviet-German relations were growing increasingly tense: Was it likely, for example, that the German-Soviet Commercial Agreements, waxing and waning since the summer of 1940 were deteriorating? Would Stalin extract additional claims on Eastern Europe from Hitler? How would Germany's August (1940) annexation of Romania affect the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact? Certainly, Whitehouse and his White Russian connections could prove to be a rich source of insight into Soviet deliberations.
By all three biographical accounts -- Lovell's, Hyde's and Brousse's -- Madame Brousse had a flirtation with "Norman W" on board the Excalibur, though he was 24 years her senior. Lovell even goes so far as to say that he proposed marriage to Brousse. Hyde reports that she told him that "they 'had a mild flirtation together.'"
Hyde was the only biographer to have actually interviewed Madame Brousse. He later proved himself a cad by boasting of having slept with her, although, at the time, she had months to live, suffering from an advanced stage of oral cancer.
To summarize Lovell’s reporting (which is roughly similar to Hyde's), Brousse visited Norman W.'s home accompanied by her mother. Though Lovell implies that this was Act Two of the shipboard dalliance, in reality it was the end of the drama. Cora Thorpe was not there to abet her daughter's amour with Whitehouse; her presence there made the visit proper, aboveboard. What is more, Brousse and her mother would have had much to share with the Whitehouse. Cora's late husband, Marine Col. George C. Thorpe and Whitehouse's brother William Fitz Hugh Whitehouse both explored Abyssiania at the turn of the turn of the Twentieth Century, when the new Suez Canal had turned the Horn of Africa into an increasingly important naval asset. More tellingly, perhaps, N.O. Whitehouse faded into the background of Brousse's attentions soon after she and her mother visited Lansmere, in Newport, Rhode Island. Most of all, Brousse's growing interaction and entanglement with Paul Fairly signaled new tensions in America's internal espionage wars.
Part Three: The Third Skein
FAIR USE NOTICE
This site contains copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We are making such material available in our efforts to advance understanding of education issues vital to a democracy. We believe this constitutes a 'fair use' of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. For more information click here. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond 'fair use', you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.
Saturday, November 22, 2008
Happy Birthday, Cynthia
On this day, 98 years ago, November 22, 1910, Amy Elizabeth Thorpe was born at Northwestern Hospital, in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Her father was a Marine Colonel and later a Washington lawyer who wrote six books, one of which remains in print 81 years later, entitled, Pure Logistics. Seemingly accomplished, George Cyrus Thorpe was a sickly and insecure man and, in many ways, like Cynthia, a creature of Cora Wells Thorpe, his wife. She was the daughter of Minnesota State Senator H.H. Wells, a merchant, land speculator and banker. Cora Thorpe earned an A.B. degree in literature from the University of Michigan and studied at Columbia. There has been speculation (which I have not been able to confirm) that she also studied at the Sorbonne and the University of Munich. If so, it would not come as a surprise. She was a considerable woman. In 1924 she compiled a now antiquated and naive collection of Hawaiian legends, In the Path of the Tradewinds, published by Putnam’s Sons, 1924. A rock-ribbed Republican, she served as a member of Republican National Committee and was a friend of Calvin Coolidge. She wrote for newspapers. Volunteered. And climbed the social ladder with the vigor of a firefighter. For better and worse, she is the instrument through which the character we know as “Cynthia” was created. Happy Birthday, Cynthia.
Tuesday, November 11, 2008
The Honey Trap: The True Story of Madame Elizabeth Brousse, A/K/A "Cynthia" -- Part One: Historic Interference
The Second Washington Conference ended not with a bang but a point, which was its purpose. It began as an unplanned summit between President Franklin Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, the second of their meetings since the U.S. entered the war. And though the encounter was held under extraordinary circumstances, it has been largely leafed over; this, even though it revealed an early and deep rift in the Alliance. But that was the least of it.
Left out of what is an already limited discussion about the summit, has been the role of Madame Elizabeth Brousse, an American socialite who spied for the British and played a cross-over role as
England mid-wifed the creation of the legendary Office of Strategic Services, pre-cursor to the CIA. Madame Brousse, as it turns out, had a crucial but invisible role in that exchange. For while Churchill and Roosevelt puffed over the issues of France's colonies in North Africa and V.M. Molotov's shuttle diplomacy between Washington and London, she played double agent, working for OSS and the British Security Coordination. Three times over four nights of the conference, she led a break-in into the Vichy Embassy to steal France's naval codes. The crime took place just 20-minutes from the Executive Mansion, at 27 Wyoming Ave., a block off Connecticut. The naval codes, we now know, held the secrets to the disposition and intentions of Admiral Darlan’s fleet then harbored in North Africa. Those ships represented what was potentially the most powerful force opposing the invasion that would come to be known as “Operation Torch.”
And that was key to the debate then raging between the Allied leaders.
For that summer, the U.S. had been pushing for a far different plan. The president and his Chiefs developed the scenario for a “cross-channel” invasion to be launched the following April, in keeping with long established U.S. military doctrine.
Churchill opposed the idea. For months, the English had nattered and argued until they finally caved to the American position, fearful the U.S. would turn its full attention to the war in the Pacific, as opposed to Europe, as was agreed at Arcadia. Congressional elections loomed. In reality, Churchill's comity was disingenuous. Whatever "commitments" he made to the President and his military advisers, he would soon renounce them. In fact, he was determined to fight the war against Hitler from the edges in, as sea powers do. The Prime Minister envisaged a peripheral war that would begin in Africa.
Until now, the role of Madame Brousse in Churchill’s machinations has only been described tangentially, though two biographies have been written about her. No direct connection between Brousse's actions during the summer summit has ever been identified; and no less than presidential historian, Timothy Naftali, director of the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum, who has written in some depth about the key players of the era, doubts that there was any connection beyond coincidence between Brousse's mission that June and Churchill's hurried visit.
But what if it could be proved that the opposite was the case, that Brousse was an integral element in the British manipulation of Allied planning for the war against Hitler?
Recent Entries
- Part Three, Continued: Fairly and Astor, the Spy Wars
- Part Six: Missing Parts
- Part Five: A Rogues' Gallery
- Part Four: Ecce Hoover
- Part Three: The Third Skein
- Part Two: Lies, Damn Lies and Espionage
- Happy Birthday, Cynthia
- The Honey Trap: The True Story of Madame Elizabeth Brousse, A/K/A "Cynthia" -- Part One: Historic Interference
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