Amy Elizabeth Thorpe, Spy 'Cynthia': Stealing Italian and Vichy Codes

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

Amy Elizabeth Thorpe was born in Minneapolis in 1910, daughter of a U.S. Marine Corps officer and granddaughter of a state senator, and grew up moving between Washington, New York and Europe. At 19 she married British diplomat Arthur Pack, nearly two decades older; their first child, a son, was placed in a foster home in England. Postings took them to Chile and in 1935 to Spain, where during the civil war she supported the Nationalists and crossed checkpoints on her own. In Warsaw from 1937 she drew secrets from Polish officials, including German plans against Czechoslovakia and word of Polish work on Enigma, and took them to the British Secret Intelligence Service. Poland expelled her in late 1938.

In 1940 she joined William Stephenson's British Security Coordination in Washington under the code name Cynthia. Senator Arthur Vandenberg, whom she cultivated, switched to support Lend-Lease. Through Admiral Alberto Lais she reached the Italian embassy's cipher clerk and bribed him for naval codes linked to the March 1941 Battle of Cape Matapan, though Bletchley Park may have broken them independently using Dilly Knox's rodding method. For the Vichy French embassy she recruited press attaché Charles Brousse and in June 1942 drugged the night guard so a safecracker could work. The codes aided Operation Torch. She later married Brousse, lived in a French castle and died of throat cancer in 1963.

• When the guard came back during a later attempt she undressed, and he left believing he had interrupted a romantic tryst.
• Lais's heirs later won a defamation suit in Italy against a British biographer who said he had betrayed secrets to her.
• J. Edgar Hoover's FBI kept her under surveillance despite British and American intelligence vouching for her.
• Her husband Arthur died by suicide in 1945, and her son was killed in the Korean War.
• She later said she had no regrets about her methods, arguing war suspended conventional morality.