Lover And Spy

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31113, 16 July 1966, Page 4

Lover And Spy

Cynthia. By H. Montgomery Hvde. Hamish Hamilton. 181 pp.

Many of the bravest spies on both sides in the late war must have died unhonoured and unsung. It so happened that the object of these memoirs was already slightly known to the author when he chanced to get in touch with her at her Italian home shortly before her death. Mr Hyde was not aware of her approaching end, as she managed to conceal her illness from him while telling him her life’s history. “Cynthia” was the code name of a supremely lovely American girl, born Betty Thorpe. Her attitude to sex seems to have been casual in the extreme, perhaps because she was seduced at the age of fourteen, and was the mistress of her first husband, an English diplomat, at the time of their marriage. Indeed she was then five months’ pregnant and was sent to bear her child (a son) in far-distant Ireland, because her husband believed that what was obviously a “shotgun wedding” might prejudice his career. She only saw the little boy once again—shortly before his death as an officer in the Korean war. There is no evidence that Cynthia was a nymphomaniac, though, having been recruited into the British Intelligence Service before the war, she was always ready and willing to offer herself to any man who she felt could furnish her with valuable information, in the same way that other women might endure the fag of knitting in order to make a jumper. Still technically married (though there was no love between them), to an English diplomat, she travelled widely, and was able to gauge by the usual technique of going to bed with her informant (an Italian admiral) the intention of Italy

to come into the war on the German side. She managed to extract the French naval cyphers at a time when they were very valuable before the allied landings in North Africa, and her final contribution to the allied war effort was the burglary—carried out in the face of many difficulties—of the secret papers of Vichy France with the aid of Charles Brousse, who subsequently became her second husband. The dust-cover reveals a wide-eyed innocent looking beauty, and if, in her compulsion to aid the Allied cause, she regarded the sexual act as other people might regard the study of cookery or languages, she did achieve her patriotic objects one by one. She seems genuinely to have loved two men —a Spanish nobleman who during the Spanish war she managed by her wiles to have released from incarceration by the Republicans, and Charles Brousse. This is the type of book which could well arouse scepticism in the less credulous reader, if the truth of Cynthia's story were not amply corroborated by a number of respected and renowned personalities who are still living. Cynthia died in 1963, and the author his given her ample credit for her invaluable services to the Allied cause.