A Man Called Intrepid

by William Stevenson

  16

  “The manoeuvre which brings an ally into the field is as serviceable as that which wins a great battle,” Churchill had written in his autobiographical account of World War I. As prime minister in the second, he added that the man to bring in the Americans must be fearless. He paused. “Dauntless?” He searched for the right word while Stephenson waited. “You must be—intrepid!”

  Churchill felt strongly about code names. They should be neither flamboyant nor trivial. He put up with the flippancy of the Baker Street Irregulars because “the Germans would never think us such idiots as to proclaim the title in the actual address.” Of course, in a way, Baker Street was not the real address. It sheltered those agencies in London charged with the task of rebuilding intelligence networks and creating guerrilla armies in Europe. But BSC was in New York, the junction box through which would pass all Allied secrets. BSC records were kept under the label INTREPID from the day Stephenson arrived back in New York posing as a passport control officer. This humble title was acceptable to the FBI, knowing it to be a traditional cover for British intelligence chiefs abroad.

  The new passport control officer’s immediate concerns included getting American help in developing the one weapon with which the British hoped to save themselves and, perhaps, civilization: communications, ULTRA was part of that weapon. To lead from defensive to offensive use of that weapon, enemy orders must be intercepted and analyzed swiftly, and orders to guerrilla units must be transmitted swiftly, all with absolute secrecy. Churchill acknowledged in June 1940 that most of this fighting would be conducted by guerrillas, special agents, revolutionaries, and saboteurs. Their operations would have to be orchestrated by radio. Wireless communication was the new factor in warfare that not only enabled the Germans to conduct blitzkriegs, but also could be used against the Germans to co-ordinate irregular actions. “The completely defensive habit of mind which has ruined the French must not be allowed to ruin all our initiative,” Churchill wrote in a confidential memo. “How wonderful it would be if the Germans could be made to wonder where they were going to be struck next, instead of forcing us to try to wall in the Island and roof it over!”

  Stephenson plunged straight into the wireless war when he got back to New York on June 21, 1940, the day after Churchill told a secret session of Parliament that the fall of France was the prelude to invasion: “Steady continuous bombing, probably rising to great intensity must be the regular condition of our life. It will be a test of our nerve against theirs.” In case German bombing should destroy the secret devices being perfected in Britain, copies were dispatched to New York. They included new methods of radio-location; in return for them, the Americans were asked to co-operate in Stephenson’s effort to provide Bletchley with information on U-boats derived from U.S. radio-detection stations.

  But this was only a beginning. Before Americans played their secret role in guerrilla operations and before the battles of Britain and the Atlantic, Stephenson found himself grappling with the enemy inside the United States. It was a dirty underside to the war, unexpected, and subsequently underestimated by those who chronicled the drama unfolding across the English Channel. It was the first of many guerrilla skirmishes fought on American soil. Defeat for the British here would have spelled defeat for Britain.

  The Wednesday after Stephenson returned, the Nazi military victories in Europe were celebrated in a private suite at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in Manhattan. The host was an agent of SS intelligence chief Reinhard Heydrich. The guests were prominent Americans, millionaires and industrialists who were being urged to “cut off supplies to Britain.”

  This advice came from Dr. Gerhard Alois Westrick, a German intelligence agent masquerading as a German trade official. Westrick served several Nazi masters, but his ultimate chief was Heydrich. He threw the Waldorf Astoria party in his capacity, he said, of an international business lawyer. “Britain will be polished off in three months,” he advised his guests. “Then the prospects for American trade with the New German Empire will be beyond your wildest dreams.” Stephenson knew Westrick as the Nazi representative who had done business years earlier with Colonel Sosthenes Behn, the American chief executive of International Telephone and Telegraph, who had been involved in producing weapons for the Germans and counter-weapons for the British. Behn attended Westrick’s party, along with other American contacts with large financial interests in Germany and territories now falling under the Nazi shadow. James D. Mooney, chief of overseas operations for General Motors, was expected to pressure Roosevelt into suspending help for Britain so that the Germans would allow GM to continue business in Europe. Edsel Ford and his millionaire friend from Pennsylvania, Ralph Beaver Strassburger, had large financial investments in Germany and property in France they wished to protect from Göring’s greedy treasure-hunting eyes. Executives from other U.S. corporations were supposedly susceptible to the argument that Nazi Germany had virtually won the war. This did not seem an unlikely proposition on the day of Westrick’s celebration party: June 26, 1940. It was the day the War Cabinet in London received intelligence that the German invasion would be preceded by heavy bombing and use of “a new weapon.” This was also the day that the British Ambassador in Washington, Lord Lothian, reported, “in a distressing telegram,” a wave of pessimism in the United States that might affect the President’s attempts to provide help, because it seemed most Americans regarded the defeat of Britain as inevitable. It was the day German troops prepared for the successful invasion of two of the British Channel Isles, Jersey and Guernsey, replacing the Union Jack with the Swastika.

  The appalling situation in Britain haunted Stephenson as he studied an account of the German’s victory party with American tycoons in the Waldorf Astoria. A message from Churchill advised caution and cool handling of the new threat. Another, also from the Prime Minister, was passed to Lothian: “Your mood should be bland and phlegmatic. No one is downhearted here.”

  One prominent figure at the German victory celebration was Torkild Rieber, of Texaco, whose tankers eluded the British blockade. The company had already been warned, at Roosevelt’s instigation, about violations of the Neutrality Law. But Rieber had set up an elaborate scheme for shipping oil and petroleum products through neutral ports in South America. With the Germans now preparing to turn the English Channel into what Churchill thought would become “a river of blood,” other industrialists were eager to learn from Texaco how to do more business with Hitler.

  Not all industrialists were as eager as the bumptious Westrick supposed. Had he done his homework, he would have spotted telltale signs of a strong anti-Nazi lobby. Nelson Rockefeller, for example, whose Standard Oil representative had been invited, was giving Stephenson discreet support and had recently lectured his executives on the political responsibilities of international corporations. Also in Stephenson’s private army of Irregulars was the same James D. Mooney who had attended the Waldorf Astoria party. He reported to Stephenson as STALLFORTH. “American corporations are being offered trade monopolies inside the new Nazi empire,” he said. “In return, American industrialists are asked to refuse to join any rearmament program.”

  A publicity spotlight was turned on Westrick by other friends of Stephenson. One of them was Frank Knox, Secretary of the Navy and owner of the Chicago Daily News. Another was Clare Boothe Luce, wife of the publisher of Time and Life. Helen Ogden Reid, of the New York Herald Tribune, was still another. They had been, at one time or another, guests of Mary Stephenson, now house-hunting in New York. It was not difficult to pass along the fact that a Nazi official was posing as a private citizen in order to pursue fifth-column activities. Big headlines about Westrick’s real background forced the State Department to send him on his way. This particular threat had been removed with breathtaking speed. So much was telescoped within each twenty-four-hour day that Stephenson would say later: “Day and night followed one upon another unnoticed. You couldn’t measure time by the clock. It was like being back in the lab with Steiny
.”

  To keep the White House in secure and continuous contact with Whitehall, a confidential agent of Roosevelt’s own choosing would have to be taken into the secret heart of Britain and given the freedom to measure morale and scrutinize the new and aggressive leadership. Many Americans would object to a presidential “spy” who might short-circuit diplomatic and political channels. Many in Britain would object to disclosing to a neutral the secrets that were their only defense.

  “The right man will have to combine integrity and discretion, compassion and resolve,” Stephenson wrote in a personal memo. “He will be going from a wealthy and self-indulgent society to one of austerity and the immediate prospect of annihilation, and he will need a great capacity to tolerate the short-tempered brusqueness of exhausted men at war.”

  Stephenson’s choice was already made. William Joseph Donovan had a law office at 2 Wall Street, handy to the Passport Control Office. The PCO in New York’s financial and shipping district was too cramped for what Stephenson had to do, but it was initially convenient. His aides, sent down from Canada in the guise of salesmen, were already de-bugging premises he had earmarked at the Dorset Hotel, Hampshire House, and Rockefeller Center. Stephenson had long ago envisioned this expansion. He had ambitious plans for Donovan, too.

  17

  On the face of it, Donovan would seem poorly qualified to work with Britain in any sensitive capacity. He was a Catholic of Irish descent, and a Republican who might seem also to represent all that was anathema to a Democratic administration. But Roosevelt trusted him and had already sent him on personal intelligence missions abroad. He was, in Stephenson’s opinion, just the man to be taken into Britain’s confidence. It was an unparalleled display of faith at a time when another Irish Catholic, Joseph P. Kennedy, created such cold hostility. Kennedy, quickly recovering from the scandal of his Embassy’s leaky security, was now complaining that the President circumvented him altogether.

  There were a number of matters about which Stephenson was empowered to tell Donovan. A great deal he knew already, for he had never been really out of touch with Stephenson since the World War I mission to England when the Canadian had given him such a vivid picture of battlefield realities. He knew Stephenson had arranged the emotionally charged and unprecedented visit by the British King and Queen the previous year, when Eleanor Roosevelt had written in her column, “They were returning to face a war,” and when Father Charles Coughlin had said to his huge radio audience that the royal couple were “pawns to nullify American policy of no foreign entanglements.” Donovan was aware that the President’s wife carried in her purse a prayer given to her by Stephenson:

  Dear Lord

  Lest I continue

  My complacent way

  Help me to remember

  Somewhere out there

  A man died for me today

  —As long as there be war

  I then must

  Ask and answer

  Am I worth dying for?

  That prayer reflected Stephenson’s emotional response to what was happening in Europe. He talked little about these feelings, Donovan recalled in later years. Instead, Stephenson assembled a formidable number of documents that proved beyond doubt that Germany was committed to the most gruesome policies of mass murder and enslavement. Orders issued as far back as 1933 laid down the basis on which human beings were to be graded in accordance with Hitler’s theories of racial purity. German “educational” films showed how doctors should select infants by measuring them against charts for the correct color of hair and eyes, the proper length and shape of nose and skull, and why it was important to discard children of inferior quality. The purification of the Germanic race, and in time the purification of all humanity, was the Nazis’ declared aim. Carefully selected Germans were to mate and produce purebred infants. In conquered territories, a system had been devised for picking out the few children deemed worthy of “Germanization.” The rest were to be given limited educations—enough to make them useful laborers—or left to die. Nazi proposals for populating the globe with German supermen were not matters of conjecture. Stephenson produced the written orders, the propaganda films, the textbooks and bureaucratic forms by which the world was to be purified with Teutonic thoroughness, because he believed this gave the Nazis their drive; this was their ambition, this was their aim. Everything else—military campaigns, battles won or lost—was secondary to the great overriding impulse to purge the human race of “impure blood.”

  This explained his relentlessness. He feared this German fanaticism. He feared where it might lead if the Nazis should develop new weapons.

  From Britain, Stephenson had brought “the first memorandum in any country which foretold with scientific conviction the practical possibility of a bomb and the horrors it would bring.”* These fateful notes raised the specter of a German empire using the immense resources of Europe to build an atomic bomb. Only a totalitarian state, it was thought, could mobilize the huge industrial capacity, labor, and raw materials necessary to produce “the ultimate weapon.” The memo randum was the product of years of British scientific research and espionage. All information on the matter should be restricted to the smallest possible circle, Stephenson had said. “If Germany conquers Britain, the way is clear for development of this weapon with which Hitler can blackmail the rest of the world. The Fuehrer has under his control the doyen of nuclear physicists, Niels Bohr, in Occupied Denmark. While Hitler remains preoccupied with military adventures, he may overlook this opportunity. Give him respite,” Stephenson concluded, “and he will make this new weapon of horror.”

  “We’ve gone some distance in that direction ourselves,” Donovan said to Stephenson when he read the scientific report known now as the Frisch-Peierls Paper. “But Hitler’s got the power to mobilize men and material which neither of us have. If he conquers Britain, he’ll capture the best brains in the business.”

  “Then we agree?”

  “Of course,” said Donovan, surprised.

  He was a large man, fifty-seven years old to Stephenson’s forty-four, and twice his size. They referred to each other as “Big Bill” and “Little Bill.” They were strolling in New York, and paused by Trinity churchyard at the corner of Broadway and Wall Street. Stephenson nodded toward a 1794 tombstone. “There’s our biggest need.”

  Big Bill Donovan peered between the rails at a cipher engraved on the stone. The grim admonition “Remember Death” was transcribed into a simple code of the sort often seen on old tombs.

  Donovan said: “If unbreakable ciphers and safe communications are what you’ve got in mind, you’ll need automation, cipher clerks, space, and transmitters—but where and how?”

  “Here. Using staff recruited in Canada. With FBI help.”

  “And Hoover?”

  “The FBI’s backing us.”

  Donovan always remembered that moment standing by the churchyard dating back to the time a British monarch once tried to keep his American colonies by force. It was then he glimpsed the magnitude of the task ahead and the delicate political balance he would have to maintain.

  A signal from INTREPID reached C in London on July 15, 1940:

  COLONEL WILLIAM J DONOVAN PERSONALLY REPRESENTING PRESIDENT LEFT YESTERDAY BY CLIPPER. . . . UNITED STATES EMBASSY NOT REPEAT NOT BEING INFORMED. . . .

  The reason for keeping Donovan’s journey secret from the Embassy was Kennedy’s continuing defeatism. He had written Roosevelt: “England is fighting for her possessions. They are not fighting Hitler. . . . They will spend every hour figuring how to get us in.” And he warned American businessmen that Britain was broke and lacked even gold to pay for arms.

  To King George VI, Stephenson sent another message, under the traditional cover marked: “For Your Eyes Only.” It said:

  DONOVAN BY VIRTUE OF HIS VERY INDEPENDENCE OF THOUGHT AND ACTION INEVITABLY HAS HIS CRITICS BUT NONE WILL DENY CREDIT THAT IS HIS DUE FOR REACHING CORRECT APPRAISAL OF INTERNATIONAL SITUATION. THE AMERICAN GOVERNMENT IS
DEBATING TWO ALTERNATIVE COURSES OF ACTION. ONE WOULD KEEP BRITAIN IN THE WAR WITH SUPPLIES NOW DESPERATELY NEEDED. OTHER IS TO GIVE BRITAIN UP FOR LOST. DONOVAN IS PRESIDENT’S MOST TRUSTED PERSONAL ADVISOR DESPITE POLITICAL DIFFERENCES AND I URGE YOU TO BARE YOUR BREAST TO HIM.

  Donovan reached London by way of Lisbon in the role of a bluff American businessman. Within hours he was talking with the King, who handed him the latest ULTRA recovery from the Enigma-enciphered directive issued the previous day, Tuesday, July 16, by Hitler: “Since England, in spite of her hopeless military situation, shows no sign of being ready to come to an understanding, I have decided to prepare a landing operation against England . . . to eliminate England as a base for the prosecution of the war against Germany.” The British intelligence report concluded that the main enemy sea-borne assault would be aimed at suitable beaches on the east and south coasts, while paratroops might be dropped on the scale of 15,000 in a single day in areas like East Anglia and Kent. But Hitler was demanding first that “the English Air Force must be so reduced morally and physically that it is unable to deliver any significant attack against the German crossing.”