A Man Called Intrepid

by William Stevenson

  34

  Senator Wheeler was uneasy. He was sure British intelligence was manipulating the new U.S. intelligence agency under Donovan, and, further, that both were operating extensively behind various American front organizations.

  On October 27, 1941, President Roosevelt made a speech that deepened the Senator’s suspicions: “. . . Hitler has often protested that his plans for conquest do not extend across the Atlantic Ocean. . . . I have in my possession a secret map, made in Germany by Hitler’s government—by planners of the New World Order. . . . It is a map of South America as Hitler proposes to reorganize it. . . . Today in this area there are 14 separate countries. . . . The geographical experts of Berlin, however, have ruthlessly obliterated all the existing boundary lines, bringing the whole continent under their domination. . . . This map makes clear the Nazi design, not only against South America but against the United States as well. . . .”

  The map showed the continent divided into four German-governed regions and one German colony. Axis strategy was to break one of the few remaining reservoirs of British economic strength by plunging South America into Nazi or pro-Axis revolutions. Stephenson noted: “The prizes in oil and other raw material seemed huge. The United States was the ultimate target.”

  Wheeler discovered that the map had been passed by Stephenson to Roosevelt. Previously, the Senator had somehow suspected the fabrication of documents to topple Britain’s enemies. With this in mind, he told friends that the German map was a forgery.

  In fact, the map had been taken from a German courier by British agents organizing groups in South America to form the nucleus of an anti-Nazi resistance wherever enemy influence predominated. A former attaché in the German Embassy in Argentina, Gottfried Sandstede, had made a copy of the original in the possession of his ambassador. Ordinarily, details of this sort would not have been passed along, but in this instance, because it was thought necessary to quell doubts about the authenticity of the map, Roosevelt was informed. This had unfortunate results for Sandstede. His identity as the source of information found its way back to German Gestapo agents in Buenos Aires. They had Sandstede killed, in yet another of the many “accidents” that marked this secret battle.

  Twelve days after the President had produced the map at the Navy Day banquet, Wheeler asked the Senate: “Where did this originate? It originated in the office of Colonel Donovan, in the office of the Coordinator of Information of the United States Government. Perhaps I should say it originated in New York, in the minds of gentlemen closely associated with the British Government. . . .”

  Determined to denounce undercover operations by a foreign power, Wheeler seized upon a War Department report, some 350 pages in length and clearly stamped TOP SECRET, which came his way in circumstances that should have aroused his suspicions. It was called Victory Program and purported to forecast U.S. government plans to enter the war. The “Germany First” thesis was set forth, with an estimate of the numbers of troops and equipment required to launch offensives in Europe and Africa.

  Wheeler passed this report to the Chicago Tribune, which splashed it under banner headlines and a lead paragraph: “A confidential report prepared by the joint Army and Navy high command by direction of President Roosevelt . . . is a blueprint for total war.”

  The leak reached the anti-Roosevelt press in the final days of peace. By December 3, 1941, a copy had reached the German Embassy. A summary was dispatched by radio to Berlin and was duly decoded in England. The German High Command celebrated “this fantastic intelligence coup.” The fact was that the Victory Program was a plant.

  Senator Wheeler had been watched by FBI counterespionage agents as a politician who thought preparation for war ran counter to the people’s will. The Political-Warfare Division of BSC concocted the Victory Program out of material already known to have reached the enemy in dribs and drabs, and added some misleading information. The moment for bringing the Senator and the report together had come into sight the previous month. Stephenson had men inside Japanese diplomatic and commercial agencies in the United States. One agent was in the “peace mission” of Saburo Kurusu, in Washington to negotiate. Kurusu’s real feelings were reported daily by the British to Roosevelt, who used his son James as the courier between BSC and the White House to guarantee security. On November 26, Colonel James Roosevelt had informed Stephenson that negotiations with the Japanese were regarded by the President as leading nowhere. A cable went to Churchill and the London headquarters of the Baker Street Irregulars from INTREPID:

  JAPANESE NEGOTIATIONS OFF. SERVICES EXPECT ACTION WITHIN TWO WEEKS.

  This historic message was delivered in London on November 27, ten days before Pearl Harbor.

  It was then that the deception of Wheeler went into effect. A young U.S. Army captain delivered the bogus Victory Program to the Senator, claiming he did this out of concern for the American people, who should be warned against the President’s duplicity.

  The primary aim of this deception was to use isolationist channels as a means of revealing to Hitler a “secret plan” calculated to provoke him into a declaration of war. Even if the Japanese attacked British and American bases without warning, the British feared that the United States still would not declare war on Germany.

  The secondary aim was to plant the notion that Anglo-American planners of a massive assault upon Europe had set Invasion Day for July 1, 1943. The date confronted the Germans with a credible military threat that would force them to maintain large forces along the Western wall and reduce pressure against Russia.

  The attack on Pearl Harbor gave the United States no option about war with Japan. But Hitler had been persuaded by his military and political advisers that even Japanese aggression would not budge the Americans into a voluntary declaration of war against Germany.

  The Führer abruptly changed policy when the Victory Program reached him, supposedly as a major revelation of American intent. Hitler declared war on the United States on December 11, a sudden decision that shocked Nazi diplomats. “The Führer felt that he alone had the right to plan surprise attacks against unsuspecting victims,” Stephenson commented. “Here the United States had arrogantly used his own tactics against him. Angered, giddy with visions, Hitler gloried in beating Roosevelt to the punch.

  “Hitler helped us achieve what Congress might have prevented or delayed. Under the U.S. Constitution, only Congress could declare war. And Roosevelt, with all his enormous personal influence and prestige as President, had failed to move the large isolationist block in Congress.”

  The most awkward of isolationists, Senator Wheeler—crony of Davis the oilman and Lewis the labor leader—had been made an instrument of justice. By leaking supposedly secret war plans, he tripped a wire in the minefield of Hitler’s mind.

  Those fateful days in December 1941 were recalled many years later by Stephenson. He wrote:

  “Triple Priority and Most Urgent and finally Personal and Secret to the President were the warnings preceding a message from London on the day before Pearl Harbor. It read: ‘British Admiralty reports that at 0300 hours London time this morning two Japanese groups seen off Cambodia Point sailing westward toward Malaya and Thailand. . . . First group twenty-five transports, six cruisers, ten destroyers. Second group ten transports, two cruisers, ten destroyers. . . .’

  “This did no more than confirm what American code breakers had suspected for some time—that the Japanese were preparing aggression. The U.S. Navy’s Bainbridge Island intercept station in Puget Sound read the coded traffic transmitted by the Japanese Embassy and the radio messages received from Tokyo. At 0128 on the morning of December 7, 1941, Tokyo instructed its Ambassador to tell the United States that negotiations were to be broken off an hour after midday, Washington time. The actual text meant little, unless seen within the frame of previous messages. Lieutenant-Commander Alwin D. Kramer, the duty Japanese-language expert at the Navy Department, was familiar with those messages, and when he saw the latest he ran the eight blo
cks down Constitution Avenue to the State Department to report his conviction that the Pacific war was about to begin.

  “The Americans knew they were about to be attacked, but they did not know where. The sighting of heavy Japanese forces around Indo-china strengthened the general opinion that Imperial Japan would seek easy prey among the colonies of the European powers now under the Nazi jackboot or close to it. The task force of Japanese aircraft carriers that waited to strike Pearl Harbor had sheltered in the cold and secret rendezvous of the Kurile Islands until late November. When the carriers positioned themselves to attack, they had escaped detection by keeping radio silence. It was an ironical twist of fate that gave them this unexpected advantage. Those Americans intercepting the Tokyo-Washington diplomatie traffic, and an unusual amount of Japanese radio transmissions from naval ships in Southeast Asia, were distracted from the biggest threat of all. The Japanese took Pearl Harbor by surprise and in two hours disposed of 349 U.S. aircraft, 3,700 American servicemen and damaged or sank eighteen U.S. Navy warships.

  “This stunning blow stamped the name and date indelibly upon the history of conventional warfare. But in secret warfare, the boundaries were blurred between tension and outright hostilities.

  “Pearl Harbor, December 7, 1941, is a signpost. Before that day of infamy, President Roosevelt had let slip the dogs of war in less spectacular fashion.

  “Postwar historians felt that Hitler acted foolishly when he declared war on America, because the U.S. Congress was not at the time committed to fight the Nazis. Distinguished Americans like George Ball, later a presidential adviser himself, said: ‘If Hitler had not made this decision and if he had simply done nothing, there would have been an enormous sentiment in the United States . . . that the Pacific was now our war and the European war was for the Europeans and we Americans should concentrate all our efforts on Japan.’

  “But of course Hitler had long before declared war unofficially and secretly against America, his ultimate target. He had written: ‘Our strategy is to destroy the enemy from within. Our aim is to conquer the enemy through himself.’

  “This was, and still is, the most difficult challenge to meet. It threatens national security when there is no evident state of war.

  “In the worst possible sense, it does ‘Cry, Havoc!’ ”

  Three days after the Fiihrer’s unnecessary declaration of war, Churchill bustled aboard the battleship Duke of York complete with chiefs of staff and a series of proposals to be submitted to the first war council with the Americans. He had been prepared for Hitler’s tantrum and its consequences. The display of power (a great battleship), flexibility (the swift passage through North Atlantic gales and U-boats), and the seizing of the initiative in Washington formed part of a careful campaign, executed by a veteran of foreign wars and political battles. Churchill pounced upon Washington, ready armed with a grand design to win the war.

  “Unprepared for detailed argument while the shock of Pearl Harbor was still wearing off, the U.S. War Department had no time to combine forces to resist this sudden onslaught which it vaguely suspected to be designed to serve British interests first,” the BSC Papers commented later. In fairness, on the night the Japanese made their fatal move, and before Hitler reacted in the way Stephenson hoped he would, the British showed no hesitation in jumping to America’s side. “We shall declare war on Japan,” Churchill said to U.S. Ambassador John G. Winant, who replied, “Good God, you can’t declare war on a radio announcement.” The BBC announcer was still delivering the first details of Pearl Harbor. Churchill signaled INTREPID and Roosevelt that “His Majesty’s Ambassador at Tokyo has been instructed to inform the Imperial Japanese Government in the name of His Majesty’s Government in the United Kingdom that a state of war exists between our two countries.” Churchill sent a similar message to the Japanese Ambassador in London, ending: “I have the honour to be, with high consideration, Sir, Your obedient servant, Winston S. Churchill.”

  The Prime Minister commented: “When you have to kill a man it costs nothing to be polite.” He had no obvious reason to display puckish good humor. Europe had entered the new Dark Age. Russia was in retreat. In all the vast expanse of waters from the Indian Ocean to the Pacific, Japan was supreme. Churchill’s first military priority was still “the defence of this Island and the U-boat war,” despite the fact that a large part of his first-line forces were fighting in the Middle East. Yet he displayed rising good spirits because the greatest burden had been lifted from his mind. The United States would be fully committed as Britain’s ally on terms almost beyond belief—agreement on the policy of dealing with Germany First—terms that might have been greatly altered if President Roosevelt had been obliged to plead and bargain with Congress to get a declaration of war. Hitler, by seizing that initiative, had vindicated Roosevelt in all his preparations. As Ball commented, without the Nazis’ impulsive and militarily useless announcement, Americans would have voted overwhelmingly to fight the Japanese and leave Europe for others to handle.

  “Instinct warned Churchill that his friend the President would turn his attention and energies to the Pacific,” commented a BSC historian. “How much the Victory Program tilted the balance the other way, I suppose we can only guess.”

  Churchill had a powerful inkling. “The manoeuvre which brings an ally into the field is as serviceable as that which wins a great battle,” he had written long before, and the remark bears repetition. After Hitler’s reckless and impassioned attack on the United States, and despite all the gloomy war news, he confided to his diary: “So we had won after all! . . . I had studied the American Civil War. . . . American blood flowed in my veins. I thought of a remark . . . that the United States is like ‘a gigantic boiler. Once the fire is lighted under it there is no limit to the power it can generate.’ Being saturated and satiated with emotion and sensation, I went to bed and slept the sleep of the saved and thankful.”

  There was little sleep for Stephenson. The underground wars merely intensified. For regular soldiers, the enemy could be spotted by their uniform and insignia. But for guerrilla leaders, the enemy might appear in the guise of a friend.

  “We have always looked on this war as global and maritime,” he told a small group at Camp X that included Donovan’s hand-picked Americans, who would become leaders of OSS.

  He turned to a map display in the blacked-out hut. “Now the whole of North America is officially in the conflict and we can fight more openly. . . . The enemy is loose throughout the ocean depths, and also within the land mass of the Western Hemisphere. His U-boats we can sink. His allies here in the Americas are more difficult to identify. The worst are the Vichy French. If we stop them here, we rob the enemy of eyes and ears. . . .” His pointer moved to small dots marking French colonial possessions in the Caribbean and west Atlantic.

  “The Vichy French in continental America, however, provide channels through which we can feed false information back to the enemy. . . . When they lose this limited usefulness, when we finally destroy the Nazis among Frenchmen on this continent, it will be time to move into French possessions here. . . .” The pointer swept from North America across to Africa, paused, then moved up the western Mediterranean. “We can unite patriotic Frenchmen everywhere, once we’re in French North Africa. Then France itself will revolt. The corrosion will spread.”

  Churchill, in Washington with his blueprint for action, spoke of preparing “for the liberation of the captive countries . . . to enable the conquered populations to revolt . . . to release the fury of rebellion.”

  A few blocks from Churchill in the White House, preparations were already underway. A BSC pawn inside the French Embassy had started a process of corrosion that would eat into Fortress Europe.

  PART

  V

  AN ORIGINAL AND

  SINISTER TOUCH

  “There is required for the composition of the great commander not only massive commonsense and reasoning power, not only imagination, but also an element of legerde
main, an original and sinister touch, which leaves the enemy puzzled as well as beaten. There are many kinds of maneuvers in war, some only of which take place upon the battlefield.”

  —Winston S. Churchill, The World Crisis (written between World Wars I and II)

  “In the high ranges of Secret Service work the actual facts in many cases were in every respect equal to the most fantastic inventions of romance and melodrama. Tangle within tangle, plot and counter-plot, ruse and treachery, cross and double-cross, true agent, false agent, double agent, gold and steel, the bomb, the dagger and the firing party, were interwoven in many a texture so intricate as to be incredible and yet true.”

  —Winston S. Churchill, as quoted by Ian Fleming in a letter to Sir William Stephenson

  35

  The Vichy French ran their own Gestapo and intelligence services from the embassy in Washington, demonstrating how the Nazis were most effective in disguise. The French offshore islands were used to refuel enemy submarines roaming the Atlantic in search of unarmed merchantmen. In December 1941, the French Gestapo was blackmailing a technician to tap the vital cable from the United States to Britain that passed through the fishing islands of St. Pierre and Miquelon. These islands inside the Gulf of St. Lawrence were linked physically with Canada. They took dictation, legally, from Vichy France. Plans were afoot to transmit from the islands the latest details on the big convoys that assembled nearby at Halifax.

  Stephenson’s agents reported that the majority of islanders were anti-Nazi supporters of the Free French led by General Charles de Gaulle. Ten days after Pearl Harbor, the Free French gathered a small invasion fleet—against the wishes of Canadian and U.S. diplomats. On Christmas Eve they occupied the two islands. There was an uproar. Cordell Hull took the same legalistic view as Ottawa: Hitler could use De Gaulle’s action to justify overt German moves against other French territories.