A Man Called Intrepid

by William Stevenson

  Both Admiral King and General Marshall, such bitter and impatient critics, would eventually put their signatures to a letter to Mountbatten written on the final D day:

  Today we visited the British and American armies on the soil of France. We sailed through vast fleets of ships with landing-craft of many types pouring men, vehicles and stores ashore. . . . We have shared our secrets in common and helped each other all we could. We wish to tell you at this moment that we realize that much of this remarkable technique, and therefore the success of the venture, has its origins in developments effected by you and your staff of Combined Operations.

  JUBILEE’S secrets were so well kept that long after the war, a famous libel action was fought over a report by the author Quentin Reynolds that “a scientist known as Professor Wendell” went to Dieppe on a suicide mission. The columnist Westbrook Pegler called Reynolds a liar, braggart, and absentee war correspondent, arguing that the story of “a mad scientist” was woven out of Reynolds’s imagination. Reynolds sued, and in 1955 the libel case was heard. A member of Lord Mountbatten’s staff, Jock Laurence, testified that Quentin Reynolds had reported accurately the presence of scientists on a dangerous mission. But details could not be released from secret files, even after so long a period. The judge agreed to treat the information as confidential if the witness would write names on a piece of paper which was later destroyed. Reynolds won the libel action and was awarded $175,000. Another twenty years passed before Mountbatten, speaking as the Chief of Combined Operations, made further disclosures.

  JUBILEE, said Mountbatten in 1974, convinced the Germans that the full-scale invasion could not be conducted over open beaches. “We came firmly to the conclusion that we could invade the open beaches with prefabricated mobile ports,” said Mountbatten. “MULBERRIES were developed—the ports we floated across the Channel to produce sheltered water off those open beaches that the enemy had been deceived into lightly defending. So JUBILEE became the Great Deception.”

  Mountbatten knew nothing about the prizes won by Allied intelligence, except where these affected his own forward planning. Among the agents brought out for BSC was one whose report, sealed and stamped THIS IS OF PARTICULAR SECRECY, told of “liquid air bombs being developed in Germany . . . of terrific destructive power.” Stephenson noted that these were likely to be rockets with atomic warheads.

  The report began a chain of events, obscured in the months immediately ahead by preparations for the next big amphibious operation—TORCH—on the road to D day.

  * The Molotov peace mission was wrapped in mystery until ULTRA’S story became known thirty-one years later. One reference to it appeared briefly in Sir Basil Liddell Hart’s History of the Second World War.

  * The men on Baker Street Special Operations were not awarded medals, nor was their work disclosed after the war. Nissenthall was advised to change his name, for fear of German reprisals. He later settled in South Africa, where he ran an electronics company in Johannesburg.

  PART

  VI

  THE END OF

  THE BEGINNING

  “Now this is not the end.

  It is not even the beginning of the end.

  But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.”

  —Winston Churchill, at a meeting

  in the City of London on the final day

  of fighting in OPERATION TORCH

  42

  September 5, 1942: Roosevelt to Churchill: “Hurrah!”

  September 6, 1942: Former Naval Person to Roosevelt: “O.K., full blast.”

  Lots of things would go wrong with TORCH, the mass onslaught against French North Africa heralded by the brief exchange of hurrahs. Even FDR and Churchill were premature in congratulating each other on the decision to go ahead, made in the face of opposition from some of their own commanders. TORCH was delayed by one unforeseen obstacle after another. Mistakes were made. But the infant OSS was ready to slide into harness within three weeks of Dieppe. Ahead was complete U.S. entry into the type of conflict that would produce the gigantic organizations with their unaccountable budgets known today as the Central Intelligence Agency and the National Security Agency. History must judge if TORCH also marked a fatal division between British and U.S. intelligence systems—shattering Stephenson’s dream of one co-ordinated agency, democratically monitored without being exposed to subversion.

  TORCH, made possible by BSC’s acquisition of the French codes, signified the final spark that would fulfill Churchill’s vision of “Europe ablaze.” After TORCH, BSC became the junior partner. The partnership worked well enough in completing an atomic bomb. In secret warfare, it depended more and more upon personal friendship between men like Stephenson and Donovan. Sometimes they just could not paper over the cracks, especially in the early days of OSS in England. Miles Copeland, a future CIA case officer, unconsciously annoyed the British from the moment he arrived in mid-1942.

  He described the OSS mood as one of “we have to show these British how to clean up their mess.” When security was finally lifted in 1974, he wrote in the Spectator: “We Americans bumbled about Britain launching out on what we thought were new tacks, only to have it brought home to us that the British had been there first and we were muddying the waters. . . . There was our gaming by which carefully briefed American officers imagined themselves in the shoes of the German General Staff and gamed out how they would react to the various alternative moves [the British] General Staff were contemplating. For not always acting on our results, we thought our commanders fools and incompetents. Eventually we were told that they knew exactly what intelligence the Germans were acting upon—for the simple reason that it was they who had furnished it through the ‘double X’ operation which John Masterman revealed thirty years later. We were not told that [the British] General Staff also knew what counter-moves the Germans were about to make, because they were reading the Germans’ top secret orders—often before [German] commanders in the field were receiving them. Only some twenty-odd American officers had access to ULTRA. The rest of us, despite our ‘top secret’ security clearances, went through the war judging our commanders as we saw them—usually with not very flattering conclusions.”

  Copeland in July 1942 had arrested a German suspect in London. He was helped by Frank Kearns, who later became a well-known CBS newscaster. They marched their captive to Grosvenor Square and what was then U.S. military headquarters, where they were stopped by a very angry British colonel.

  “Our agent was already under Scotland Yard’s surveillance,” Copeland related. “He was to have been turned into a controlled double-agent sending his spymasters in Berlin only what the British High Command wanted them to have. . . . There were several such incidents at God-knows-what cost to ‘Deception.’ . . .”

  There was only so much Stephenson could do to persuade London to stop treating the OSS like an infant. Finally he sent Donovan a note, quoting Hamlet:

  “To thine own self be true,

  And it must follow, as the night the day,

  Thou canst not then be false to any man.”

  This, said Stephenson, was the philosophy at the top in Britain, as it was that of Donovan and his colleagues. If they could all remember this, and treat one another as honorable men, a fatal rift could be avoided.

  The basic argument arose during preparations for TORCH. The Anglo-American invasion of French North Africa was preceded by large-scale OSS operations. Bill Donovan and BSC were agreed on extending co-ordination to the Mediterranean area.

  But from London came word that secret operations must be kept separate. This “seeming perfidy” sent Donovan into “a towering rage,” according to Bickham Sweet-Escott, who was then the senior Baker Street Irregular in Washington. “Donovan was convinced he had been double-crossed.”

  The cause of Donovan’s distress was troublemaking by Russian agents who had infiltrated London. One was Kim Philby, holding a key desk job in British Secret Intelligence. He was in the best possible position to hel
p his real masters, the Soviet Secret Service. Philby, as he wrote later in his memoirs, published in Moscow, was keenly aware that “Stephenson offered all help in the early stages in order to earn the right to receive from the Americans the intelligence that might be expected to flow from deployment of the far greater American resources.” In the long run, any partnership between American and British intelligence agencies was a threat to Russia. Philby had access to the top professionals in British intelligence and easily persuaded them that OSS would introduce blundering or ambitious American interference into their tidy arrangements. After that, efforts were made constantly to sabotage the Stephenson-Donovan partnership. This did not tax the ingenuity of specialists in dirty tricks. Orders could be mislaid, messages overlooked. Hoover glimpsed what was going on when he requested certain British files on Communist subversion which had a direct bearing on the U.S. war effort. Philby sidetracked the FBI’s inquiries, then withheld some files and redirected others. Hoover became rightly convinced that somewhere in the pipelines were operatives working against his country’s interests, but the proof itself was under Philby’s control until he finally scampered off to Moscow twenty years later.

  The rush of events in the fall of 1942 kept Stephenson and Donovan in control of what might have proved a disintegrating alliance. Donovan had proposed to the President that preparatory work in the French colonies be speeded up so that “the aid of native chiefs might be obtained, the loyalty of the inhabitants cultivated, fifth columnists organized and placed, demolition materials cached and secret armies of bold and daring men installed.” All this would fall upon OSS shoulders. The British had been expelled from French territories overseas, and were diplomatically “blind” there. To the Soviet-directed traitors within British intelligence, these proposals added to the threat of OSS dominance in a strategically important region.

  While the bickering went on, the commander of the U.S. Fifth Army, General Mark Clark, code-named MARK, and a Baker Street Irregular were in the British submarine Seraph, nosing its way along the Mediterranean sea bed for a rendezvous in enemy waters. The crew was skilled in clandestine operations. Awaiting MARK on a beach seventy-five miles from Algiers was the same Robert Murphy who had been the U.S. Embassy Counsellor at Vichy, lending an attentive ear to the pro-Nazi French leader, Pierre Laval.

  “This was the kind of co-ordination we were aiming for,” commented Stephenson later. “Huge armies waited in the wings to sail through hostile waters to the French colonies. The British were in no position to judge the temper of French commanders in Morocco and Algeria. The Americans had been doing that. General Clark was now heading for the most delicate talks to discover how much resistance there might be to the landings. We wanted the French empire to re-enter the war against the Axis. TORCH would open the road back.”

  Clark’s submarine surfaced at 2100 hours on October 22. Ridgeway Knight, an OSS agent, had been feeling his way back and forth across the empty beach for nearly three hours. Behind him, Murphy watched from a villa where he had slung a naked light bulb in the window. With him in the villa was the French General Charles Mast.

  At midnight a rubber raft paddled by a British Commando sniffed along the sands. Three more rafts followed, with Clark and his staff officers. The Seraph sank to the sea floor and would not surface again until the following night. In between, French and American generals conferred.

  This last-minute reconnaissance was intended to convince French military leaders that TORCH was underway; that France itself would be liberated if this operation was successful; and that the American government guaranteed the honesty of British intent.

  The commander of French troops in Algeria was General Alphonse Juin, who had negotiated with Göring in Berlin only eleven months earlier on the use of French African territory by German troops under Rommel. On the day of Clark’s meeting, the battles raging in the deserts east of the French colonies were still apparently inflicting defeat on the British. The French under Juin—who knew nothing of Rommel’s moral defeat—thought the Germans were heading beyond the Pyramids for a link-up with German forces striking out of the Russian Caucasus. Juin and his cronies were unlikely to come off the fence for the sake of an ill-favored Anglo-American expedition. Also, Juin was on close terms with the chief of the German military mission in Casablanca, General Theodor Auer, and his fluctuating neutrality might become TORCH’S death knell. There were now 107,000 Allied troops preparing to land along 2,000 miles of North African coast. Outside Cairo, the British 8th Army was standing its ground at last and would soon move onto the offensive. All this was at risk. By nightfall, Clark had concluded his talks with the French. The meeting was about to break up. A local coast watcher bicycled over with a warning that a police search had just started and was approaching the villa.

  “We dived into the wine cellar as if fifty skunks had been tossed into the room,” Clark said later. The French general and his staff officers hunkered down with the Americans while Murphy and Knight slid a table over the trap door, rolled back their sleeves, and began a game of poker. The police duly arrived, inspected Murphy’s diplomatic credentials, and Knight’s vice-consular papers, apologized, and left.

  General Clark left Seraph at Gibraltar on Monday after a weekend of terrifying possibilities. Churchill cabled Cairo:

  CLARK HAS VISITED “TORCH” AREA AND HELD LONG CONFERENCE WITH FRIENDLY FRENCH GENERALS. WE HAVE REASON TO BELIEVE THAT NOT ONLY WILL LITTLE OPPOSITION BE ENCOUNTERED, BUT THAT POWERFUL ASSISTANCE WILL BE FORTHCOMING. EVENTS MAY THEREFORE MOVE MORE QUICKLY, PERHAPS CONSIDERABLY MORE QUICKLY, THAN HAD BEEN PLANNED. . . .

  Clark’s accomplishment was a climax to months of preparations. CYNTHIA had secured the code books that unlocked Vichy’s naval mysteries and allowed ULTRA to break the new German-French codes and so gain insight into plans to resist any landings. The Dieppe raid provided practical information. Donovan’s research and analysis teams studied French North African shipping and railroads, cargo capacities, terrain maps, tidal tables, and charts of reefs and channels. Two U.S. vice-consuls smuggled out of Casablanca a French marine pilot who could navigate an armada through sunken ships and reefs.

  A clandestine network of radio stations was strung across North Africa: LINCOLN at Casablanca, FRANKLIN at Oran, YANKEE at Algiers, PILGRIM at Tunis. Tribal chiefs were enlisted to enter enemy fortifications, provide escorts for agents, and carry plastic explosives, guns, and other equipment inland. Fishermen located U-boat hideouts. Cable offices were infiltrated. Airline and shipping clerks were bribed for information on the movements of senior Axis officials. The center of the web was Tangier International Zone, where contact was possible between the Americans and the British, who maintained there a solitary legation in an ocean of enemies.

  ULTRA played little part at this stage. General Clark gave it equal value to the field intelligence so patiently gathered. U.S. service chiefs in general were still not fully informed of the range of Bletchley’s work in retrieving, decoding, and analyzing all German signals. Apart from President Roosevelt and Bill Donovan, Americans were told only as much as the British felt they needed to know, on the same basis as their own commanders. The Americans at Bletchley had a severely restricted view of the vast operations there. One result was that American commanders, like many of their British colleagues, did not exploit ULTRA situation reports. Perhaps this was just as well. The special ULTRA liaison unit shipped to Gibraltar prior to TORCH distilled little useful information from German traffic. Later, General Clark declared that ULTRA became the vital intelligence weapon once its value was understood. The problem persisted of when to risk losing a battle to protect the secret.

  General Dwight D. Eisenhower became Supreme Commander Allied Expeditionary Force a week after Dieppe, and moved into London’s drab Norfolk House, a battered building near The Hole. He plunged into plans for the amphibious operation that would make Dieppe seem like child’s play. One TORCH force with 35,000 troops under General George S. Patton would invade Afr
ica, 3,000 miles from the point of embarkation at Norfolk, Virginia. Another 39,000 U.S. Army troops would sail from England. Yet another force embarked in England would consist of British and American troops totaling 33,000 men. These forces had to hit widely separated beaches in French North Africa within narrow time slots.

  Even in peacetime, the synchronization of such mixed groups of sea, land, and air units would have been a triumph. Eisenhower had good reason for misgivings. There were the same difficulties encountered at Dieppe: shortages of shipping, lack of escorts, and inadequate landing craft. And what if intelligence proved as faulty?

  On August 23, Eisenhower warned the Chiefs of Staff: “It is my opinion that this expedition . . . is not sufficiently powerful to accomplish against the potential opposition . . . the purpose prescribed.”

  The Casablanca landings struck him as presenting the gravest risks. Divisions of troops would be sailing directly from the United States, unblooded in war, exposed to U-boat attack, many of them unfit for action after riding heavy Atlantic swells, and with the imponderables greatly enlarged by distance and time. The other targets, at Bône, Algiers, and Oran, would have to be hit simultaneously; and the whole combination, depending as it did upon lack of organized French and German resistance, seemed fraught with uncertainties.

  “TORCH was one of the most momentous decisions. It would eventually pull more than a million Americans into the Mediterranean theater,” Stephenson later noted in BSC records. “This was the first amphibious operation conducted by the United States in forty-five years except for the landings at Guadalcanal. By any yardstick, it was the boldest. And it presented the most formidable security problems. There would have to be two refuelings at sea. Nobody on board the American vessels had ever seen such an operation and very few had seen combat. The USN Air Group of five carriers alone had to sortie out of Bermuda, only one of hundreds of movements that required co-ordination while being concealed from an enemy who had listened for weeks to the preliminary volume of radio traffic.” London was worried and Stephenson reported that Washington had become equally cautious. There were renewed doubts about British ability to hold Egypt; a German victory there would raise the odds against TORCH.