Jeff Shear's History of "Cynthia," the World War II Spy
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?
Madame Elizabeth Brousse has been called the Mata Hari of World War Two, because she slept around and turned pillow talk into espionage. Madame was a “honey trap,” an agent who used sex to sway and compromise targets. But unlike Mata Hari, Brousse was no hoochie-coochie dancer. She was something of a literary prodigy, producing a charming novel, when she was just age 12. Educated at private schools in Wellesley, Massachusetts and (briefly) Montreux, Switzerland, she was presented to Washington Society in 1929 and was soon pregnant. Her father was a Marine Colonel, whose book, Pure Logistics, written in 1917, remains in print. Her mother was a successful climber on Washington's social ladder, who wrote a syrupy study of Hawaiian legends, published by G.P. Putnam's and Sons.
Curiously, and for reasons that must soon become apparent, almost every claim made for Madame Brousse's career has been exaggerated, incorrect or flawed. David Brinkley, in his 1988 best-seller, Washington Goes to War, wrote about Madame Brousse over several pages, calling attention to her more sensational exploits and declaring her to be the greatest secret agent of the War, “perhaps any war.” Brinkley got it wrong. He also got sued. Others did, too, which helps to explain why Madame Brousse has risen to Mata Hari-like prominence — which is to say, for all the wrong reasons. There is the suggestion, for instance, that she literally “changed the course” of the war, which is perhaps as accurate as the "Butterfly Effect" http://www.uh.edu/engines/epi652.htm.
The other grand claim about Madame Brousse is that she handed over to the English in 1938 information about Germany’s fabled cipher machine, Enigma. What a coup this would have been, had it been true. In reality, she was sacked by SIS, the Secret Intelligence Service, that year in Poland, soon after Neville Chamberlain blathered on about “Peace for our time.” Nor is it true that Madame Brousse captured the Italian naval ciphers prior to Britain’s Pearl Harbor-like victory over Italy in 1941 at the Battle of Matapan. Furthermore, she did not study the dread arts of assassination at the mysterious “Camp X” in Canada, as has been suggested. She never visited Camp X, according to Camp records.
What’s more, she was not a thoroughbred British agent, or a “Blonde Bond,” as TIME magazine once referred to her. In fact, she wasn’t even blonde. Her hair was auburn or “perioxided,” as her former husband’s family recalled. Indeed, Madame Brousse’s renowned code name, the near mythic appellation by which she is so well known, “Cynthia,” was merely one of many aliases she used in the course of a five-year career in and out of espionage. A memo obtainable – and obtained by many -- through the Freedom of Information Act, written eight months after Pearl Harbor, by “Special Agent in Charge, S. K. McKEE” for “Bureau File No. 65-43539” reveals her roster of sobriquets: “RE: MRS. ARTHUR PACK, (sic) with aliases Betty Pack, Elizabeth Thorpe, Mrs. Arthur J. Pack, Miss Carson, Miss Newhaven.” Six weeks after this memo was written, the FBI director himself, J. Edgar Hoover, supplied an additional alias for her, “Powers.” The code name, "Cynthia," is just one in a long litter, but it has become the pick of the litter, which is why she is so commonly referred by her code name. But that, too, is a fallacy. She lived the last 20 years of her brief 51-year-life as Madame Elizabeth Brousse, which is how she shall be known in this study.
And yet, even without any obvious claim on history, Brousse cannot be dismissed, because of what she tells us -- what she exposes -- about the grimy machinations of diplomacy. In effect, she serves as a historical chameleon, a Zelig-like witness to the crucial years from 1936 to 1943.
Among the facts known about Madame Brousse is that she worked on the side of the Fascists during the Spanish Civil War. Indeed, she supported Franco’s minions and, in turn, probably supplied the “neutral” British with information about German and Italian formations as they practiced for war, bombing then little-known cities such as Guernica. In the mean days leading up to the catastrophic Munich Conference in September 1938, she traveled to Prague to break into the Nazi headquarters of the Sudeten Czechs. She succeeded, too, and proved Hitler's ambitions extended far beyond the Sudetenland. But British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain preferred to believe Hitler’s promises and to ignore the courtesan’s warnings.
Less than two years later, after war in Europe gave the lie to Chamberlain, Brousse shadowed and reported on the Chilean delegation to the crucial Havana Conference of 1940. In the following months, she joined a boiler room spy operation, known as the “British Security Coordination,” (BSC) based in New York’s Rockefeller Center, three high-priced floors of prime Manhattan real estate supplied to the British Empire by Standard Oil grandson, Nelson Rockefeller, at the rate of $1 per annum.
BSC would become midwife to the Office of Strategic Services, precursor to the modern-day Central Intelligence Agency, and Brousse would become the chief operative in the OSS’s earliest operation, which occurred in the midst of the Second Washington Conference . The mission took place in the summer of 1942, as British Prime Minister Winston Churchill made his huried, nearly non-stop flight across the Atlantic to meet with President Roosevelt. Those four days in June – referred to today in the gray language of official history as the “Second Washington Conference” -- influenced the final, unlikely decision to invade North Africa. It is here we find a seemingly tangential character, code-named Cynthia stripped naked in the Vichy French Embassy.
Part Two: Lies, Damn Lies, And Espionage
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