He planted a long, passionate kiss on my lips and pressed my back against the door until I was limp. Then he swung me easily off the floor and started to carry me up the stairs. "Charles," 1 remonstrated feebly, "what are you doing?" He looked at me hungrily. "Just point out your bedroom," he said. "You have nothing to fear, cherie."
As a lover, Charles Brousse was the most ardent of all those I met in my career as a spy . . .
Despite the bottled-in-Bond flavor, the scene actually took place in wartime Washington. It was recounted recently in London's The People by its heroine, a Mata Hari from Minnesota who worked for British Intelligence under the code name Cynthia. Her real name: Elizabeth Pack. Using the boudoir as Ian Fleming's hero uses a Beretta, she was described by her wartime boss as "the greatest unsung heroine of the war." After the war Cynthia married her onetime prey, the ardent Charles, and with him retreated to a remote 10th century French chateau where she died last week, at 53, of throat cancer.
Scuppered Admiral. When World War II broke out, blonde, green-eyed Cynthia had been married for nine years to Arthur Pack, a colorless British diplomat who was nearly twice her age. The daughter of a U.S. Marine Corps colonel, at 29 she was adventurous, astute, attractive and, from diligent years on Europe's diplomatic circuit, already an old hand at affairs of state. Leaving her husband, she returned to the U.S. shortly after the fall of France, immediately joined British Security Coordination (B.S.C.), the Manhattan-based intelligence and counterespionage network that was run by Sir William Stephenson, the famed "Quiet Canadian." He sent Cynthia to Washington, where she took a Georgetown house on O Street and went to work.
Cynthia's first big assignment was enough to daunt the wiliest old pro: her orders were to get hold of the Italian naval code book. Within a few weeks of first meeting the shapely Betty Pack, Italy's naval attache, Admiral Alberto Lais, was so scuppered by her that he surrendered the code with hardly a murmur. Italian apologists maintain that Lais, who died in 1951, was actually so ungallant as to give his mistress a fake cipher book. Undeniably, however, British Intelligence thereafter proved uncannily adept at forestalling Italian fleet movements, notably in the March 1941 sea battle off Greece's Cape Matapan, where the Royal Navy crippled Italy's numerically superior force.