Amy Thorpe

Born	22 Nov 1910
Died	1 Dec 1963
Nationality	United States
Category	Other

Contributor: C. Peter Chen

Amy Elizabeth "Betty" Thorpe was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota, United States to an United States Marine Corps colonel. Her family moved to Washington, DC when her father resigned from his post and began to study law in 1929. Her mother Cora, a social butterfly in her own right, made sure her daughter was invited to all important parties in the city, which were often attended by diplomats from various countries. Her beauty and manner made her a popular figure in the social aspects of Washington's diplomatic circle. One admirer of hers was Arthur J. Pack, an attaché from the British embassy who was 19 years her senior. An extra-marital affair between them left Thorpe pregnant, which prompted the marriage between the two, which was perceived as absolutely required particularly to Pack. They were married in 1936, but the marriage was doomed from the start, for Pack was far too dull to satisfy Thorpe. Later that year, Pack was transferred to Madrid, Spain, and she followed. Bored with Pack, she sought her own outlet. With her connections established through her husband's colleagues at the British embassy, she arranged for the escape of key leaders of Francisco Franco's forces from certain capture, and smuggled Red Cross supplies to Franco's forces.

When Pack was assigned to Poland, Thorpe as well as her yearnings for covert work followed. In Warsaw, Pack admitted to her that he was involved with another woman, which gave her the excuse to seek affairs of her own with several men in Warsaw. Many of them men she was involved with held important posts; one of them included the personal aide to the foreign minister, Józef Beck. In the winter of 1937, she was noticed by Sir William Samuel Stephenson of the British Security Coordination, who recruited her to gather intelligence due to her wide network of contacts. While Stephenson never overtly suggested that Thorpe was to use her sexual prowess to gather intelligence, but that was exactly the skill she employed to complete her missions. Among Thorpe's greatest achievements in Warsaw was her ability to facilitate flow of Polish intelligence on the German Enigma code to Britain.

After seeing Thorpe's success, the British Foreign Office sent the couple Chile in South America after Poland fell under German control, putting Pack in charge of the commercial section of the British Embassy there. Thorpe, however, was soon transferred to New York City, and then immediately to Washington, DC, under the code name of "Cynthia"; Pack was left in Chile so he would be out of the way of his wife's work. Thorpe was placed at the residence at 3327 O Street under the guise of a journalist. She made contact with Italian naval attaché, Admiral Attaché Alberto Lais, who nicknamed her "Golden Girl". She was able to extract intelligence from him that Benito Mussolini, who was convinced that the United States would seize Italian ships operating in the US to use against the Axis, ordered Lais to sabotage them. Thorpe lured the information out of Lais with ease, but by the time the Americans acted, most of the 27 ships were already destroyed, though a few were saved due to Thorpe's intelligence; those that were saved were, as Mussolini feared, commandeered by the US military. Then, before Lais was kicked out of Washington, DC after the sabotage incident, she was able to acquire from him the Italian Navy's code books, which was used against the Italians later, particularly the operation against Taranto.

Finally, Thorpe was ordered to approach French figures in Washington in Mar 1942. She made contact with the Vichy-French ambassador Gaston Henry-Haye and embassy press attaché Captain Charles Brousse. From the latter, who was an anti-Nazi, she easily convinced him to pass along embassy documents. With the former, conventional sexual offerings failed to get her near her target, the French navy's code books. Thus, she resorted to burglary; drugging the security guard, she sneaked the French Navy's code books out the window of the embassy to a Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) agent waiting outside, who photographed them and returned them within an hour. The French codes were used to plan operations in North Africa.

Arthur Pack committed suicide in 1945 and Brousse divorced his wife soon after, giving way for Thorpe and Brousse to marry. They moved into a Medieval-era castle in southern France. Thrope passed away from month cancer in 1963.

"Ashamed? Not in the least," Thorpe once said in regards to her methods of obtaining intelligence. "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] wars are not won by respectable methods." To journalist David Brinkley, Thorpe was "a genuine heroine never sufficiently honored."

Sources: historynet.com, Washington Goes to War.

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