In 1968, Lais’ heirs sued, claiming that the admiral, who died in 1951, never gave away any codes. They were successful in court. But what followed next would cement her story forever.
Breaking Into the Vichy French Embassy
In June 1942, Pack’s supervisor, George Stephenson, assigned her to seduce a member of the Vichy French embassy. The target, Charles Brousse, was the Vichy French press attaché. He was an ace in World War I and owned several newspapers in southern France. He had also been married several times.
The Vichy were virulently anti-British in their dealings. The British, therefore, would attempt to convince Brousse that Pack was working for the Americans. She wrote in her memoirs that after their first meeting, a lunch date, the two became lovers and he quickly became infatuated with her.
Soon, Brousse, thinking that Betty was working for the Americans, was feeding her information consisting of message traffic, embassy cables, and activities of the embassy staff.
One afternoon, she telephoned Brousse to meet her at her apartment, seemingly for another tryst. But as soon as he arrived, she sprung on him what she wanted. “Our American friends,” she said, “want the Vichy French codebooks.”
Brousse told her that only the chief cipher officer and his assistant had access to the code room. It was also guarded by a security watchman and a Belgian Malinois dog.
The two hatched a plan. Brousse would tell the security guard that the pair needed a secure tryst location at night and would pay him to look the other way, using the outer office as their location. The pair would then drug the night watchman’s wine as well as his dog’s food to knock them out for a few hours.
Then, using their relationship with General Donovan and his OSS contacts, they were furnished with a safecracker, the individual known only as the “Georgia cracker.” At first it went perfectly: The watchman and his dog were sound asleep, knocked out by phenobarbital. The safecracker got the safe open, but there wasn’t time to get all of the codebooks copied and returned, so the team retreated.
The lovers made a second attempt, this time without the safecracker, who provided Betty with the combination. She attempted several times, but couldn’t get the safe open. They would make one final attempt at it.
In a fantastic book about Pack, “The Last Goodnight” by Howard Blum, the author writes about what happened next. On the third try, the lovers had entered the Vichy embassy but had not seen the watchman or heard the dog. Betty thought that seemed ominous. She had a great idea, one that was simplistic, yet brilliant in its design.
Abruptly, Betty jumped up from the divan and was pulling her dress over her head. She tossed it on to the floor.
Brousse stared at her with astonishment.
Now she had wriggled out of her silk slip. She hurled it away and it landed next to the discarded dress.
“Have you gone mad?” Charles asked, anxious and confused.
She continued to undress, pulling down her stockings. “I don’t think so,” she said as the nylons were added to the pile on the floor. “But we shall see.”
“Suppose someone should come in!” Brousse pleaded. “What are you thinking?”
“I am thinking just that,” Betty answered, as she unhooked her brassiere. “Suppose someone does come in!”
She pulled down her panties and with one foot gracefully kicked them towards the rest of the clothes.
She stood naked except for the strand of pearls around her neck. She had no modesty, no inhibition. She held herself easily and confidently.
Now that she had undressed, she explained her strategy more fully to Charles. “What are we here for?” she demanded rhetorically. “We are here to make love. Who makes love with clothes on if they can be taken off?”
“If you wish to help me, you will get up and start undressing yourself too!”
Her tone had been sharp and insistent. She needed him to understand that every moment mattered.
Brousse still had not grasped Betty’s plan, but he trusted her. He took off his jacket, undid his tie, and had removed his shirt. He was unfastening his belt when the door opened.
A bright cone of light scanned the room, coming to a sudden halt when it focused on Betty. The light held steady, illuminating her nakedness.
“Oh, la la,” said Betty in a voice more playful than shocked. She tried to cover herself with her hands, but her modesty was half-hearted and deliberately careless. She wanted the watchman to get a good, long look. Regardless of any suspicions that had been previously brewing, it was important that he now understood the couple had entered the embassy with only one thing on their feverish minds.
“I beg your pardon a thousand times, Madame,” muttered the watchman as he finally extinguished the flashlight. Flustered, he hurried off, closing the door firmly behind him.
A peal of triumph in her voice, Betty told Charles, “There was method in my madness.”
The two lovers then went to the window and, using a flashlight, signaled the safecracker to enter through the window. The safe opened on the first try. On the ground, an OSS man, who held a ladder for the safecracker, took the code books and scurried off.
The copying of the code books was completed and they were returned by the OSS man at 4:30—just minutes before the cleaning crews would arrive to clean the offices. The codebooks were placed back in the safe and the lovers strode out of the embassy as if they didn’t have a care in the world. They went back to her hotel where the OSS men had all of the copies of the codebooks in hand. Days later they were in the hands of the British intelligence codebreakers at Bletchley Park.
The English and Americans soon used the Vichy codes to their advantage. Most importantly, in the upcoming invasion of North Africa, called “Operation Torch.” More than 30,000 Allied assault troops landed on beaches east and west of Algiers, relying on intelligence gleaned from the Vichy’s decoded messages.
After the North Africa invasion, Pack would work for both British intelligence and the OSS, but none of her subsequent work would have the intrigue of her standing nude in an office, wearing only pearls and high heels while stealing a foreign government’s codes.
Epilogue
Life wasn’t kind to any of the major players in this story. Arthur Pack committed suicide in 1945. Brousse divorced his wife and he and Betty Pack married. In what should have been a storybook finish, the two moved to the Château de Castelnou, a French medieval castle in the commune of Castelnou in the Pyrénées Alps.
But Pack would die of throat cancer in 1963. Several years later, Brousse would die of electrocution—killed by his electric blanket. Much of the castle was damaged in the resultant fire.
Pack never felt remorse or shame from her methods of garnering information. In her obituary, it was written, “She used sex like James Bond uses a Beretta.” She was quoted after the war in an interview saying she was motivated by patriotism:
“Ashamed? Not in the least. My superiors told me that the results of my work saved thousands of British and American lives…It involved me in situations from which ‘respectable’ women draw back—but mine was total commitment. Wars are not won by respectable methods.”
There is a film in the works about Pack and her exploits, and reportedly Jennifer Lawrence is set to play the auburn-haired beauty.
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