Trust was a rare and elusive quality in the shadowy world of espionage that Bett
y Pack, Allied secret agent, inhabited and yet, paradoxically, it was always in
the forefront of every operative s mind. Deskman, case officer, agent in the field t
hey all were preoccupied with concerns about whom they could put their faith in,
and who might be quietly plotting to betray them. It was not a casual speculati
on: survival depended on the choices they made.
And the tactic of pretending to love someone in order to win this trust was the s
moke, as the jargon of her trade put it, that that Betty had used with great succ
ess throughout the war. She was a 28-year-old Minnesota native, born of a good f
amily, tall, slim, and patrician, her sensible amber hair swept off her broad f
orehead, her emerald green eyes sparkled, her laugh naughty and uninhibited, who
as the agent code-named Cynthia had time after time had used the bedroom to turn
high-ranking Axis diplomats and military officials into traitors.
But now on a blustery afternoon in the second week of March, 1942, as she flew b
ack to Washington from the crash meeting in a New York hotel room with first her
British and then her American handlers
Betty was the rare operative who worked
for both intelligence services - for the first time in her long operational care
er she was troubled about what she d been asked to do.