KEEPING SECRETS from her husband, Bourke Cockran, Jr., was
nothing new for Mattie McGary as she gently kissed her sleeping husband goodbye
before she left for her office where she had to prepare two pieces of
correspondence. One was an ‘eyes only’ letter to her godfather, Prime Minister
Winston Churchill, telling him everything about her new mission, one he never
would have approved had he known beforehand. The other was a letter to her
husband on the same subject where she most definitely would not tell him
‘everything’. The second letter would be much more difficult to write than the
first.
When she had been a Pulitzer Prize-winning
photojournalist for the Hearst organization in the 20s and 30s, she often had
promised confidentiality to her sources and kept their identities a secret even
from Cockran, both before and after he became her husband. He understood
because, as a lawyer, he never disclosed to her privileged and confidential
communications he received from his clients no matter how newsworthy and
interested she might be in that information.
Once her godfather, Winston Churchill, became Prime
Minister in May 1940 and, at his request, she joined the SOE—the ‘Special
Operations Executive’—Mattie’s entire professional life became a secret from
Cockran, courtesy of Great Britain’s Official Secrets Act. The SOE was
Churchill’s own creation which he informally, albeit accurately, described as
the Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare.
A year later, in June 1941, at the behest of his
law partner, William ‘Wild Bill’ Donovan, Cockran began work for a new United
States government agency that became the OSS—the ‘Office of Strategic
Services’—so that his entire professional life became a secret from her thanks
to the America’s Espionage Act of 1917.
Now, Cockran was the #2 man at the OSS station in
London and she was the Deputy Director of the SOE for Central Europe. It had
certainly complicated their marriage, Mattie thought as she softly closed the
door to their suite at the Savoy.
Inter-Services Research Bureau
64 Baker Street
London
Saturday, 2 May 1942
MATTIE STOOD up from her desk in her office at SOE
headquarters, the outside of which carried on a brass plate the innocuous name
of Inter-Services Research Bureau, and walked over to the sideboard. She made
herself a cup of tea and looked down on the traffic below on Baker Street where
it was raining and pedestrian umbrellas were out in full force.
A husband and wife being spies for different Allied
governments raised more than a few eyebrows in the SOE and the OSS, but each
spouse had their own high-ranking patrons, Mattie with her godfather as the
British Prime Minister and Cockran with his old law partner Donovan as head of
the OSS. Nevertheless, they never brought work home to their suite at the Savoy
and never discussed with each other what they did.
Mattie was in a dilemma today, however, because
they had made each other a promise that she was about to violate. For the sake
of their two six-year-old children, fraternal twins Nora and Eric, they had
promised not to volunteer for any dangerous assignments in the field. At
the time, it seemed like a safe promise as both were sufficiently high-ranking
in their respective organizations not to be sent into any countries occupied by
the Nazis.
That was all before Operation Anthropoid—the
assassination of SS General Reinhard Heydrich, the ‘Butcher of Prague’—went off
the rails. No one else at SOE knew the reason why, but she did. The operation
was her idea from the outset. She had conceived it; she had personally trained
the three Czech SOE agents involved; and she was their handler now that they
were in the field. They had been in
Czechoslovakia for almost six months and nothing had happened. Others might disagree,
especially if they knew why she had pushed Operation Anthropoid so vigorously,
but she thought she was the only one with the necessary background to get the
show back on track.
That was why she was not flying to Stockholm
tomorrow for her bimonthly interview with the SOE’s most highly placed asset in
Nazi Germany—her former lover Kurt von Sturm, a high-ranking aide to the head
of the Luftwaffe, Reichsmarshall Hermann Göring. Instead,
she would be resurrecting from storage the leather flying outfit she had first
worn over ten years ago—a shearling–lined sheepskin flying jacket with matching
sheepskin trousers, boots and helmet—when she had flown across the country in
Cockran’s autogiro in her attempt to break Amelia Earhart’s coast-to coast
autogiro record. Then, that night, she would parachute into Occupied Europe to
kick-start an assassination plan that should have been completed six months
ago.
Travel outside Great Britain came with the job
descriptions for her and her husband. Typically, they told each other when they
left the country unless the destination itself was mission critical. Well, her
destination this time was most definitely mission critical and she would be
breaking her word to Cockran by doing so—she not only had volunteered for the
mission, she had created it. Still, she didn’t want to lie and telling him she
would be away for a month on assignment without adding that she would be out of
the country would almost be the same as a lie.
Finally, Mattie settled on the least deceptive
option. She would tell him the truth, just not all the truth. Isn’t that
what lawyers did all the time? She would tell him she was going to Switzerland
on assignment. Which she was, eventually, if she survived the most dangerous
part of the mission. She just wasn’t going there first. She went back to her
typewriter to finish her letter to the Prime Minister filling him in on her
mission and instructing him on what he was to tell her husband if she didn’t
make it back. She knew Winston wouldn’t like what she was doing any more than
her husband and indeed likely would have forbade her to do so had he known. But
her godfather had a war to run and he could not possibly keep track of every
SOE or MI-6 mission abroad. From her days working for Hearst, Mattie had always
believed begging for forgiveness afterwards was better than asking for
permission beforehand. After all, it
wouldn’t be a violation of the Official Secrets Act for the Prime Minister to
know what her husband could not.
Over nine years in the making, an old score was
about to be settled. Reinhard Heydrich was about to discover that, just as
Death once had an appointment in Samarra, Mattie McGary had an appointment in
Prague.
