She was born Amy Elizabeth Thorpe on November 22, 1910, in Minneapolis. Family and friends called her Betty. William Stephenson, who ran Great Britain’s World War II intelligence activities in the Western Hemisphere, would one day give her a code name–’Cynthia.’ She reputedly was one of the most successful spies in history.

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Amy Thorpe’s father was a U.S. Marine Corps officer, which put travel high on the family agenda. By the age of 11, she had used postcards and guidebooks to provide the Neapolitan setting for a romantic novel she wrote, titled Fioretta. A copy found its way to a young-at-heart naval attaché named Alberto Lais at the Italian Embassy in Washington, D.C.

Her father’s resignation from the service to study law brought Amy Thorpe to the U.S. capital, where she met Commander Lais. The Italian officer’s platonic relationship with the adolescent he called his ‘golden girl’ undoubtedly contributed to her appearance of maturity. By the time she made her debut in Washington society, 18-year-old Thorpe was beautiful, well-bred and graceful, with green eyes and amber-colored hair. She exuded a magnetism that drew men to her.

An affair with Arthur Pack, second secretary at the British Embassy and 19 years her senior, evolved into a mismatched marriage and gave her a second citizenship. Amy Thorpe Pack gave birth to a son five months after the wedding, but for a variety of reasons she turned the infant over to foster parents. A daughter, born in 1934, did nothing to help the eroding union.

Arthur Pack was transferred to Madrid on the eve of the Spanish Civil War, where Amy Pack immersed herself in secret operations. She helped smuggle rebel Nationalists to safety, transported Red Cross supplies to Franco’s forces, coordinated the destroyer evacuation of the British Embassy staff from northern Spain, and meddled in diplomatic affairs. Those activities ceased when she was denounced to her Nationalist friends as a Republican spy, apparently by a jealous woman.

In the fall of 1937, accompanied by her young daughter and a nanny, Amy Pack boarded the Warsaw Express in Paris to, in her words, ‘become a member of his Britannic Majesty’s Secret Intelligence Service.’ She was quickly ‘adopted’ by a group of young men working for the Polish foreign ministry, a situation facilitated by her husband. Arthur Pack, now an official at the embassy in Poland, had informed her he was in love with another woman. Shortly afterward, he suffered an attack of cerebral thrombosis that landed him in an English nursing home.

Amy Pack was recruited by the British intelligence and allotted an entertainment allowance of 20 pounds sterling to cultivate her high-placed Polish sources. Of her first official male conquest, she would later tell a biographer and future lover, ‘Our meetings were very fruitful, and I let him make love to me as often as he wanted, since this guaranteed the smooth flow of political information I needed.’ Pack met her next target at a dinner party hosted by the American ambassador. The handsome Pole seated next to her was a personal aide to foreign minister Jósef Beck. Although married, the aide was sufficiently impressed by his dinner companion to send her pink roses the next morning.

From him Pack learned Polish experts were working on overcoming the threat posed by Germany’s Enigma enciphering machine. The extent of her contribution to the ‘Ultra secret’ that gave the Allies a crucial edge over the Nazis remains a matter of conjecture. In fact, however, Britain would owe its ability to decode so much of Germany’s World War II radio traffic to the efforts of the Poles, who had cooperated with the French in working out the Enigma system.

In Prague, Pack obtained conclusive proof of Hitler’s plans to dismember Czechoslovakia. For reasons that remain unclear, in the fall of 1938 the ambassador ordered her to leave the country. The following April, having called a domestic truce, a recuperated Arthur Pack and his wife traveled to South America, where he took over his embassy’s commercial section in Santiago, Chile.

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