Cast no shadow

About this book

The Legend of Betty Pack is simple enough. She was a beautiful American spy recruited first by the British Secret Intelligence Service in 1938 and later by the American OSS. Her method of obtaining information was singular: seduction. In Cast No Shadow, Mary Lovell, author of Straight On Till Morning, the internationally acclaimed and best-selling biography of Beryl Markham, gives us for the first time the complete story behind the legend of this modern-day Mata Hari, a story more astounding than the legend. Betty Pack's milieu was the aristocratic world of international diplomatic society. The wife of a career British diplomat--the marriage for both partners had quickly become an arrangement of convenience, not passion--Betty would be witness to and participant in many of the most intense historic moments of the twentieth century: in civil war-torn Madrid, besieged Warsaw, occupied Paris, wartime Washington. In each locale, Betty's entree into diplomatic circles and her own penchant for seeking out men at the center of conflict made her a spy whose love of adventure was matched only by her talent for uncovering the enemy's secrets. Betty often knew what information her spymasters wanted; more important, she knew whom to approach and seduce in order to obtain it. Relying on top-secret and heretofore unrevealed documents from British Intelligence as well as on Betty's own memoir written shortly before her death, Mary Lovell offers a remarkable portrait of a woman whose adeptness for intrigue in affairs of espionage and passion is astonishing. Cast No Shadow is a story of subterfuge and romantic expediency that exposes the hidden human intrigue of World War II and the life of a woman whose contribution to the Allied effort was invaluable and unique.