Amy Elizabeth Thorpe, also known as Betty Pack, Betty Thorpe, Elizabeth Pack, and Amy Brousse; (November 22, 1910 – December 1, 1963) was an Anglo-American spy, codenamed Cynthia, who worked for British Security Coordination (BSC) which was set up in New York City in 1940 during World War II by the British Secret Intelligence Service (MI6).
In an article published two months before her death she wrote, "...in the dangerous years of Nazi aggression I looked upon myself as a soldier serving my country.
"[2] Her Time magazine obituary quoted William Stephenson, head of the BSC, saying that she was "the greatest unsung heroine of the war.
"[3][4] The full story of her World War II activities cannot yet be known because some official archives as of 2016 were still "closed indefinitely" or "heavily redacted.
On April 29, 1930, Thorpe married Arthur Pack, nineteen years older and a second secretary at the British embassy in Washington.
When the Spanish Civil War began in 1936 Betty developed a strong, and oft-expressed preference for the Nationalists of Francisco Franco rather than the Republicans.
With the Civil War raging, Pack, a Nationalist supporter but accused of being a Republican spy, traveled around the country at great danger, searching for (and eventually finding) her priest-lover and becoming involved in humanitarian relief activities.
[10] Pack was described by author Lovell as "beautiful, slightly above medium height and slim with amber blond hair, patrician features and large green eyes."
Betty, using the pseudonym of "Elizabeth Thomas" wrote anti-Nazi articles for local newspapers, probably at the instigation of Embassy intelligence officers.
[12] Pack was investigated prior to her employment by a young American Naval Intelligence agent named Paul Fairly.
Her first major job was to persuade two prominent U.S. senators to support Lend-Lease legislation to provide military assistance to the beleaguered British forces.
The British needed the codes to read the Italian navy messages and gain an advantage in warfare in the Mediterranean Sea.
As a teenager, Pack had been friendly (and possibly romantically involved) with an Italian naval officer named Alberto Lais, 28 years older than her.
In 1988, Lais' two sons protested publication of the seduction account in David Brinkley's best-selling Washington Goes to War and persuaded the Italian defense ministry to publish denial ads in three leading East Coast newspapers.
The armistice agreement permitted a collaborationist French state called Vichy to remain unoccupied by the German military and retain some characteristics of independence, such as an embassy in Washington, D.C..
Posing as a pro-Vichy journalist, Pack made an appointment to see the press attaché, a much married World War I fighter ace named Charles Emmanuel Brousse and quickly seduced him.
When the guard made his rounds, he found them both naked (a deliberate ploy for credibility by Pack), apologized for his intrusion, and left them alone for the remainder of the night.
The safecracker climbed a ladder into the Embassy, opened the safe, took the cipher books away to be photographed, and returned them to the vault before daybreak.
Affirmations from the British and American spy agencies that Pack was an agent of theirs did not halt the FBI's interest in monitoring her activities.
In her last few months of life she began writing a memoir which was used by Hyde in a 1966 biography of her titled Cynthia, her World War II codename.
[27] In excerpts from her memoirs that were published in a newspaper in 1963 Elizabeth reported that her first child, Anthony—who had been raised by a country doctor and his wife in England—was killed in combat during the Korean War.