The Last Goodnight Read online

  Then she told him: American friends needed the naval cipher code books. If he were willing to help, a “satisfactory understanding could be reached.” He’d have the money “to lead this kind of life.” She also added that he’d be helping Italy, but here her logic was so thin that she knew better than to offer any further explanation. She simply hoped it was a rationale, however specious, that he might find convenient. After all, no traitor liked to admit even to himself that he was in it only for the money.

  When Giulio asked, “How satisfactory an understanding are you suggesting?” Betty knew she had succeeded. All that remained was the negotiation. And this proved to be simpler than Betty had anticipated. For a cash payment far less than the BSC housekeepers had authorized, the deal was made.

  The actual exchange went so smoothly it left Betty with a feeling of anticlimax. While Giulio counted his money, in the next room the ciphers were photocopied. The original code books were returned to Giulio, who had them back in the embassy safe before anyone noticed that they had been removed.

  The next day an armed BSC courier left New York to hand-deliver Betty’s gift to the Admiralty in London.

  ACROSS THE GLOBE FROM BETTY’S world, shortly before noon on March 27, 1941, Admiral Sir Andrew Cunningham, commander in chief of the Mediterranean fleet, suggested to his flag officer, Lieutenant Hugh Lee, that a round of golf might be just the thing to help him to relax. When Lee hesitated, the admiral made sure the lieutenant understood it was not a request but an order.

  The admiral and his aide played eighteen holes at the Alexandria Sporting Club later that afternoon. They kept score, but that was a charade; the lieutenant was wise enough to know that junior officers never best commanders of the fleet. And anyway, that day they were playing for higher stakes.

  The admiral, despite his earlier suggestion to the lieutenant, had not been looking for a brief diversion in the midst of a war that seemed to be going dangerously wrong. He had taken to the links to be seen. He wanted the enemy diplomats who made it a habit to hang around the Egyptian club to get the impression that the commander of the British fleet had nothing better to do that day than play a round of golf. And on the way back to the clubhouse, when the wily Cunningham spotted the Japanese consul—a diplomat MI6 had identified as an Axis asset—he laid the disinformation on even thicker. “Is everything ready for dinner tonight?” he boomed to his lieutenant. And Lee, by now aware of the admiral’s ploy, played along. “Yes, everyone’s invited,” he improvised impressively.

  But there was no dinner scheduled. Just like the round of golf, it was an attempt to lull the enemy into a complaisant confidence. At seven that evening Cunningham would furtively sail out of the harbor on the HMS Warspite, leading a flotilla of British warships to surprise and then destroy the Italian fleet.

  And Betty had played a large—arguably crucial—part in the admiral’s daring battle plan.

  In the tense days leading up to his attack, Cunningham had received intelligence, as he guardedly explained to his vice admiral, “from a most secret source.” This information revealed that on March 28 the Italian fleet planned to ambush the British troop convoys that would sail from Alexandria to Piraeus. Only now that he knew about the scheduled Italian attack, the admiral had conceived a bold plan of his own: “My intention . . . is to clear area concerned and so endeavor to make enemy strike into thin air whilst taking all action possible damaging him whilst he is doing so.”

  At 10:20 on the night of March 28, Cunningham spotted the Italian fleet near Cape Matapan, off the southern tip of Greece—precisely where he’d known they would be. He gave the order for the British vessels to turn on their searchlights: a nearly straight line of huge enemy warships was illuminated in the heavy darkness, their gun turrets pointing fore and aft as benignly as if they were on parade in a sea pageant. “Fire!” Cunningham yelled. The Warspite’s fifteen-inch guns exploded, and quickly the other British ships joined in.

  By dawn, orange flames were shooting up from the dark, oily sea, the hulking carcasses of huge ships lay crippled in the water, and a grisly flotilla of inert bodies drifted toward the horizon. Three Italian cruisers, two destroyers, and one battleship had been sunk, burned, or destroyed. More than 2,400 Italian sailors lost their lives. The sole British casualty was the pilot of a Swordfish torpedo bomber. The Battle of Cape Matapan was a staggering victory for the outnumbered British fleet.

  Winston Churchill celebrated. A single battle, he declared as solemnly as if he were intoning a benediction, had put an end to “all challenges to British naval mastery in the Eastern Mediterranean at this crucial time.”

  For the remainder of the war, the Mediterranean remained a British sea.

  BUT WERE BETTY’S PURLOINED CODE books the magic wand that had made this victory possible? Were the ciphers taken from the embassy in Washington used to decrypt the Italian admiralty’s message traffic?

  The reality—as both Hyde and Betty, seasoned professionals, knew—was that every intelligence operation has many heroes. The agent in the field gets his orders and does his best to complete his mission. But the fieldman never knows where his assignment figures in the scheme of things. It’s up to the owls at headquarters to put together all the pieces collected from a multitude of covert sources. They are the ones sitting on the spy’s Olympus and looking down omnisciently.

  And although Betty was unaware of it at the time, teams of British wranglers working at the Government Code and Cypher School at Bletchley Park were also instrumental in deciphering Italian naval message traffic. In the days before the victory at Cape Matapan, they had finally broken the coded Italian messages being sent over the navy’s Enigma machines.

  Did Betty’s stolen code books give the cryptologists the edge they needed to pry open the Italian code? Were they the missing piece that completed the puzzle? The final clue that, presto!, solved the mystery?

  Or were the Bletchley Park discoveries simply icing on the operational cake? Did all the credit for the destruction of the Italian fleet, for the unknowable number of Allied lives saved as a result, for the subsequent successful Allied invasion of Italy, belong to the cipher sheets taken from the Washington embassy?

  Hyde—a writer and a spy—knew only too well how difficult it was to find the truth in a world where lies and deceptions were the accepted coin. Another rub: all the players had their own reasons for not telling the truth. Grudges, rivalries, pride, as well as the ingrained disposition of the intelligence professional to let secrets stay deeply buried—all this made getting at what actually had happened a difficult enterprise. Impossible, in fact, he was willing to venture. After all, who knew the answers to all the questions? Who stood above the raucous fray of a half-dozen or so competing agencies and possessed the objectivity to set things straight? Spies lie by inclination, and governments are in the business of endorsing these falsehoods. Truth inevitably falls by the wayside.

  Consider, he told Betty, what happened after he included a brief mention of her manipulation of Admiral Lais in his book on Stephenson. The Italian ministry of defense quickly shot back a belligerent response. Full of haughty indignation, they insisted his account was a libel on “a man of the highest integrity and honor in whom the ministry had absolute faith.” But if Lais had played a part in code books being taken from the embassy, then undoubtedly he was running his own intelligence operation: the cipher books passed on were counterfeits.

  It was, a still bristling Hyde felt, the sort of dexterous response one might expect from a ministry reluctant to concede that one of its naval heroes had been seduced into betraying his country. Yet who could blame them for being so defensive?

  In fact, Lais’s behavior was so mind-boggling, Hyde confided, to Betty’s utter embarrassment, that the classified “secret history of the BSC” that Stephenson had allowed him to read was still shaking its official head with wonder over the coup the spy named Cynthia had pulled off: “In retrospect, it seems almost incredible that a man of his [Lais’s] e
xperience and seniority, who was, by instinct, training and conviction, a patriotic officer, should have been so enfeebled by passion as to have been willing to work against the interests of his own country to win a lady’s favor. But that is what happened.”

  Hyde staunchly believed that this top-secret history of the BSC offered the final say on the significance of Betty’s role:

  “It is a matter of history that they [the undermanned British fleet] were never so challenged, and that the Italian Navy was virtually neutralized and failed to win a single battle.

  “This may have been largely due to the fact that British Intelligence had knowledge of the Italian Naval cipher.”

  And, the official BSC historians proudly boasted, Betty was the agent who single-handedly provided the intelligence that allowed the Admiralty to accomplish this incredible feat.

  Chapter 40

  EVEN AFTER THE CIPHER COUP, the Lais operation remained up and running. The admiral continued to shuffle off a few evenings each week to the house on O Street, and Betty diligently trolled for any stray bits of intelligence he had to offer. Lying naked next to him, she would from time to time pick up a small nugget, say, about the deployment of the Italian fleet or an intriguing snippet of embassy gossip. Yet unknown to Betty, these encounters had attracted some unwanted attention.

  To: Special Agent in Charge, Washington, D.C.

  Re: MRS. ARTHUR PACK (was ESPIONAGE F)

  Reference is made to your letter . . . in which you set out certain information concerning subject PACK and request authority to make an investigation of her. It is believed that a discreet enquiry of Mrs. Pack may produce valuable information and the same is authorized.

  Very truly yours

  John Edgar Hoover

  Director

  Betty would soon learn about the FBI surveillance on her home. Unfortunately, she made the discovery at precisely the same time that she unexpectedly picked up some startling intelligence from Admiral Lais. And in the scurrying panic that followed, the entire operation came very close to careening out of control.

  IT WAS THE LONG, DARK night after the Battle of Cape Matapan, but Lais, who—incredibly—never realized he might have played a role in his navy’s historic defeat, was consumed by another concern. He lay next to Betty in her bed, and that night her body did not tempt him. Instead, enveloped in a thick sadness, he began to sob softly.

  Betty felt sympathetic. She had the intelligent agent’s gift of caring about her target even while betraying him.

  “What’s the matter, Alberto?” she asked. “I can see there’s something on your mind. Let me help.”

  “Oh, my dear one, indeed there is,” he said, trying not to break into tears. “I’ve just received orders from Rome to put all our merchant ships at present in the United States ports out of commission.”

  Betty was immediately on alert. And as her mood shifted, the sympathy she’d felt only moments before was replaced by shrewd treachery. “Do you mean sabotage?”

  Lais took a moment to answer, and when he did, he was calm, almost matter-of-fact. “Yes,” he said, and then he explained. His words struck Betty as a confession: he wanted her, an American, to forgive him for what he had done.

  The high command, he said, had come to realize that it was only a matter of time, and probably sooner rather than later, before the United States abandoned its increasingly thin pretense of neutrality and seized the Italian ships that, wary of British destroyers and submarines, had been stranded since the start of the European war in American harbors. They had played with the idea of ordering the interned vessels to make a run for home, but even as this was discussed, the admirals knew it would be suicide. The lumbering merchant ships would have no realistic chance of running the British Atlantic blockade. Caught between two equally unsatisfactory alternatives, the high command settled on a compromise strategy that seemed marginally better: they would scuttle the ships. Lais had been asked to make sure their orders were executed.

  Betty probed carefully. Would you really be able to follow through? she asked. Destroy your own ships in American ports?

  Lais sighed with weary resignation. He had already given the orders. Time bombs had been placed in the engine rooms of five ships anchored in Newport Harbor. They were ticking away as he spoke. And before leaving the embassy this evening, he had cabled the captains of Italian vessels anchored in ports throughout the United States with a list of instructions. He would not be surprised if at this moment crews were busily tearing the ships apart.

  After he’d shared his secret, Lais, as if in a daze, got up and began to wander around the house. Perhaps he was looking for a distraction. Or maybe he just wanted to hide, to escape from what he had done.

  Betty, though, was on full operational footing. “I could scarcely believe my ears,” she told Hyde. She needed to telephone Pepper and Fairly. At once. Every second counted: time bombs were ticking. Yet it would be risky to do anything while Lais remained in her home. She had to come up with an excuse to make him leave.

  The FBI provided it. For no sooner had Betty begun scrolling through a variety of possible scenarios in her mind than an agitated Lais hurried back into the room. He had happened to glance out the window and seen two men standing by the front door. The glow of a streetlamp had framed them perfectly: two big, beefy men in topcoats and hats pulled low on their foreheads.

  “I’m sure they are from the FBI,” he said anxiously. The admiral was convinced the G-men had somehow learned about the sabotage plot and come to arrest him. It never occurred to him that their target was the British secret agent Betty Pack. “You must get me out of here. If I could only get back to my embassy, I would be safe. They couldn’t touch me there.”

  Betty turned out the light in the room and went to the window. With great care, she gently pulled back an inch or so of curtain and peered down into the street. And there they were! Two men who certainly had the dour, no-nonsense authority of FBI agents. Betty could’ve hugged them. They were the saviors she needed at precisely the moment she needed them.

  The doorbell suddenly exploded with a loud, long ring.

  “Hurry! Hurry!” Lais begged.

  Now a fist began pounding an insistent tattoo against the front door. The peal of the bell continued too.

  With a professional detachment, Betty ignored the constant noise, took the admiral by the hand, and led him to the rear of the house. Standing by a bedroom window, Betty revealed the escape route she’d mapped out months ago after moving in: a short drop below was the roof of the covered porch. From there, jump down and you’re in the garden. A door in the wooden garden fence opened onto an alleyway that led straight to Thirty-Third Street. Hail a cab, and you’d be in the Italian embassy in minutes. And best of all, no FBI agent stationed by the front door would be any wiser.

  Betty opened the window.

  The doorbell continued to scream. The pounding on the door rumbled on, one loud bang after another.

  But the admiral hesitated. He was in his sixties, and built like a teakettle. He wondered if he’d even fit through the window, let alone manage the jump from the porch roof down to the garden.

  Now it was Betty’s turn to say, “Hurry!”

  The angry noise coming from the front of the house seemed to be growing more intense. Finally the admiral realized he had no choice. With some difficulty, he squeezed himself through the window. Moments later Betty heard him land in the garden with a dull thud. She looked out, but he had vanished, lost in the night’s shadows.

  Hurrying to the sitting room, she picked up the telephone and called Pepper at his home on East Fifty-Seventh Street in New York; she had memorized the number in anticipation of a night like this. He listened and then told her to call Fairly. As luck would have it, Fairly was still in his Washington office at Naval Intelligence. He took down all the details, asked a few questions, and then told Betty he would get on it right away.

  By the time Betty put down the phone, the banging on the front d
oor had stopped. She looked furtively out the window and saw that the two FBI men had left.

  Only now did the evening’s ironies run through her head. The FBI had come to question her about her activities as an enemy agent, only to stumble unknowingly upon another adversary who was really up to no good—who had just launched a sabotage operation in ports throughout America. And yet their sudden arrival could very well have helped to thwart the plot and win the day—which, as it happened, was what their so-called enemy agent had also been trying to do. Espionage, she told herself with a small chuckle, was a bewildering profession. Rarely was anything what it seemed to be. But that, of course, was part of what made it so exciting.

  CHARGING UP THE GANGPLANKS, SQUADS of blue-coated US Coast Guard agents boarded the Italian ships. They raced through the vessels and caught the surprised crews in the midst of acting on Lais’s orders. Acetylene torches that had been burning through rods and shafts were abruptly extinguished. Sledgehammers, chisels, and crowbars fell to the floor. Oil-soaked rags wedged between containers of flammable cargo were hastily removed.

  Yet Fairly’s urgent information had meandered through the naval and then the federal bureaucracies with a costly loss of momentum. By the time the boarding parties raided the ships, six of the Italian vessels had been effectively put out of commission, and another twenty would need extensive repairs before they could go to sea. The Coast Guard had succeeded in saving only two ships from any substantial damage.

  But government agents did recover fourteen of the telegrams that had initiated the destruction. Each had been sent from the Italian embassy and signed by its naval attaché, Admiral Alberto Lais.

  The following day, an angry US State Department decided that the government had the tangible evidence it had been hoping for. Federal authorities seized all Italian and German ships in US ports and immediately went to work refitting the salvageable Italian vessels. And a vindictive press had a field day.