Years before any bra was burned in protest, Betty Lussier starred in her own female liberation movement. Fueled less by politics and more by innate talent, Lussier boldly crossed gender lines throughout her life–first as a pilot, then as a World War II spy and later as a farmer in Morocco. Amid these chapters of daring, she also found time to marry a Spaniard, raise four boys and live in an elegant apartment in Madrid, with Ava Gardner as her friend and neighbor and Prince Rainier and Grace Kelly among the guests she entertained. Lussier, still robust at 83, moved to the Palisades four years ago. The die was cast for a life of adventure on a dairy farm in Maryland where Lussier grew up with her three sisters. Lussier’s father, a decorated WWI pilot, moved the family there from Canada, sharing the hard work of the farm with his young daughters, all of whom became champion swimmers and big achievers. “I built a boat with my dad when I was only 12,” Lussier recalled during a recent interview in her home in the El Medio Bluffs neighborhood. At 16, she learned to fly a family friend’s Piper Cub, thus initiating a lifelong love affair with flying. “Those Lussier Girls Should Have Been Boys” reads the headline from a 1943 Baltimore newspaper article. The piece highlighted how Betty Lussier’s mother was holding things together on the farm while her daughters, all grown except one, and husband were scattered around the world contributing to the war. That year Betty, at 21, had won her wings in the British Air Transport Auxiliary. Two years earlier, she had interviewed as a potential recruit, but lacked sufficient flying hours. “I just felt I had to go,” Lussier recalls of her teenaged zeal to aid a troubled Europe, even before the U.S. entered the war. “I had a firm idea that this was going to be a big threat to the world, but a lot of people didn’t see it.” A determined Lussier withdrew from the University of Maryland, worked the midnight shift at the Martin aircraft plant and used all the money she earned to get flying hours. Then, in 1943, she responded to the call from Britain to “come home” to aid the war effort, with passage included. Born in Canada, Lussier was entitled to a British passport. Once in England, Lussier was quickly assigned as an Air Transport Auxiliary pilot, work that mostly involved bringing new planes from the factory to the fields for operation, and flying planes in need of maintenance back to inland bases. “It was very satisfying. They paid us the same as men and advanced and promoted us just as if we were real citizens. It was the first time I saw equality with men, and that really amazed me,” Lussier said. Things turned sour when it was announced that women pilots would not be allowed to fly into combat zones on the Continent once the ground invasion of Europe took place. Lussier promptly resigned. “I loved flying so much I would have stayed, but I really wanted to do what the men were doing,” she says. Her next mission came about right away. Sir William Stephenson, the famous spymaster who directed British intelligence operations in WWII, also happened to be a close family friend. Stephenson and Lussier’s father, Emile, had been Canadian pilots during World War I. Known by his code name, Intrepid, Sir William had been instrumental in arranging the training of Americans by British intelligence. He recommended that Betty, his goddaughter, join the Office of Strategic Services as a counterespionage agent. Stephenson had watched over Lussier throughout her time as an ATA pilot. When he toured England every month to observe intelligence services, he always asked for her as his pilot. “Here’s this very important man seeing people like Churchill and Lord Beaverbrook and he’d say with a straight face, “I’d like third officer Lussier to fly me around,”” Lussier recalls with a laugh. “They would scurry around to find me, put me on the plane, but only allow me to be co-pilot.” She entered the elite division of the OSS known as X-2, and was one of the few Americans trained and authorized to deliver “Ultra” messages to combat headquarters. “Ultra,” called “Ice” by the Americans, was the name of the system the British developed to decode German messages. Shortly before the war, the British had secretly seized an Enigma machine, the device used by Germany to send signals. “There were the Germans chattering with each other from Berlin to their field agents, and they had no idea they were being intercepted,” Lussier explains. “Naturally, the British wanted to keep this a secret and very few people knew it existed. They set up a system called Special Liaison Unit whereby only one person would know about an intercept. That person would get the information from the British interceptor and take it back to American headquarters and present it as it if came from a different source.” Lussier became one of a handful of special liaison “Ultra” agents, a role requiring setting up station first in Algiers, then in Sicily, Naples, Rome and finally in France. She was not only delivering coded messages, but also tracking down collaborators and stay-behind Nazi agents. “We really trained ourselves how to catch spies; we invented it as we went along,” Lussier says. Among her X-2 comrades was a man named Ricardo Sicre (his nom de guerre was Rick Sickler), a Spaniard who had fought in the Spanish Civil War against Franco and managed to escape to London. The two worked as an operational team for nearly three years, organizing an extensive net of double agents. The duo was responsible for apprehending a French lieutenant who had sided with the Nazis and was transmitting damaging intelligence directly to Berlin from his farmhouse in southern France. X-2 seized the agent’s wife and child, threatening to kill them if he betrayed them. He eventually cooperated, sending false information to German headquarters about the location of Allied troops, which probably saved hundreds of lives. Another incident involved a captured German spy, who never broke under interrogation by either the French or the British. It was Lussier and Sickler who finally hit pay dirt by unearthing the man’s great ambition: to go to Hollywood to be a comedian like Charlie Chaplin. When the OSS team agreed that they could arrange this, the German confessed he was a paymaster and showed them a list of 35 agents. “We were able to arrest all these agents and turn about eight of them into double agents,” Lussier says. The man never made it to Hollywood, but was returned to the French and, according to Lussier, was probably killed. Lussier and Sickler’s wartime camaraderie blossomed into romance and the two married after the war ended in 1945. They settled into a well-heeled life in Madrid and eventually had four sons. Soon, however, the adventurous Lussier became restless with her too-comfortable life and left an elegant apartment in Madrid to find satisfaction in working the soil in Morocco. “The empty, getting-nowhere idleness of our life in Madrid, or rather of my life in Madrid, weighed upon me. I wanted to do something with my hands and brains,” Lussier stated in “Amid My Alien Corn,” a book she wrote in 1957 chronicling her North African journey. “Once one has farmed, one always misses a farm,” she further explains. Lussier took her four sons, a tractor and enough seed for 1,000 acres and settled on a farm in Morocco. She set out to produce hybrid corn because she felt it was the one crop, hitherto untried in Morocco, that would most benefit the country. As interested as she was in successfully raising a new crop, Lussier also focused on improving the social conditions of the people who worked on the farm, setting up schools and health clinics. When she returned 25 years later as part of a U.S. delegation working to set up income-generating activities for Moroccan women, she saw fields of corn and thought with satisfaction: “That’s me, I brought it here.” Lussier and her husband eventually moved from Spain to Switzerland, then to Manhattan before divorcing when their boys reached college age. Neither remarried, and they maintained a close relationship until Ricardo’s death 10 years ago. “He really liked the jet-set lifestyle and being with high-profile people; I was more a helper type, always setting up services for underprivileged people,” Lussier says. When she returned to the U.S. in the 1970s, she attended Columbia University and earned a master’s degree in community development. Lussier has nine grandchildren. One son, a film producer, lives in Santa Monica, two live in Spain and another lives in London. She sees her three sisters annually at a family reunion in Maryland. She maintains a long, lean athletic stature by running at the beach and biking to Venice, and among her local causes is planting trees with Palisades Beautiful. And she has never stopped flying. She’ll travel to Sacramento soon to visit cousins and fly their plane. Not surprisingly, Hollywood has approached her over the years hoping to turn her life story into a movie. “I’ve always said no,” she says. “When you do something that gets a lot of publicity, your privacy is destroyed.” Ava Gardner, the “it” actress of the 1950s and ’60s, was a good friend in Spain, someone Lussier bicycled, swam and socialized with often. “Going out with her was a nightmare. She really needed a new face.” Nonetheless, the publicity-shy Lussier does hope to have her recently completed memoir telling the story of her adventures in World War II published. “I always try to make each day worth being alive,” Lussier says. “I think it’s a privilege to be alive and you need to contribute to pay it back.”
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