Donovan found the British in a jubilant mood. Their troops in North Africa were pursuing a much larger Italian army, which was in full retreat. The English also were cheered by the Greek victories over the Italian invaders in Albania. There were even Christmas decorations here and there in London, despite the German air attacks. By late fall of 1940 the Germans had given up trying to sweep the RAF from the skies and had commenced the night bombing of British cities.
Vernon Pritchard and his group went about their affairs, and Donovan saw nothing of them during the remainder of his mission. On the evening of December 17, Donovan went to see Lee at his home. “As soon as I got home from the office Wild Bill came in to talk,” Lee wrote in his journal.
He said when he got home from his last trip he told General Marshall and the Secretary of War that, in his opinion, the Military Attaché and his officers were the only people in the Embassy who were making up their own minds about things here without reference to Kennedy’s pessimism. He then went on to make a few scathing remarks about Kennedy and the damage he was doing at home. Apparently Kennedy has infected Wall Street with his pessimism and has also succeeded in poisoning the minds of the admirals of the Navy.
His (Donovan’s) present mission is here in England, and I think is more or less a general survey, after which he is to go out through the Mediterranean. He does not say that he is going to Vichy or to see Weygand, but I have a notion that he will do both.
One of the things he said which pleased me was that my despatches to Washington were so good that I should be careful to save them because I should write, since I had a real gift for it. I told him that I thought that I would have a file of the despatches, but whether I wrote anything about them would depend first on whether I had the time and second, on whether this whole affair turned out to be as historical as it promised to be.
After a good deal of talk which involved discussing possible theaters in which the United States might take part, and some of my plans for the remodeling of the world after the war is over, and the necessity of getting the right sort of men to do the job (to which he replied that at the present time in the United States they were only to be found in the Army and the Navy) he made off for a dinner engagement.
The next day Donovan lunched with Churchill at Number 10 Downing Street. Reporters who kept their vigil outside the building spotted Donovan upon his arrival. They demanded to know what the smiling presidential agent had in mind. “I can’t say anything about why I am here,” he replied, “but please don’t make me mysterious or important.”
Grayson MP. Murphy, with whom Donovan sailed on a fact-finding trip to Europe in 1920. Murphy, who had also served in the Rainbow Division, was one of Donovan’s earliest acquaintances in America’s informal intelligence community.
(American Red Cross)
Donovan, candidate for governor of New York in 1932, and his wife, Ruth, pose for a photograph designed to win votes. Politics brought the Donovans together in a traditional public display of family solidarity.
(Buffalo and Erie County Historical Society)
Herbert Hoover (left) and William Donovan. The two men saw their friendship ripped apart by political controversy in 1929, when Presidentelect Hoover yielded to anti-Catholic and Prohibitionist pressures and denied Donovan the attorney generalship.
(Buffalo and Erie County Historical Society)
William Stephenson, the British superspy Intrepid, was among the first to recognize the value of Donovan’s remarkable experiences and abilities. After establishing the office of British Security Coordinator in New York in June 1940, he campaigned to make Donovan the director of an American centralized intelligence agency.
(Sir William Stephenson)
A jaunty Donovan returns to New York on August 4, 1940, from a presidential mission to England that was to decide whether the United States would help Britain fight on against Germany or would give Britain up for lost and prepare for the expected Nazi attack on the Western Hemisphere.
(Buffalo and Erie County Historical Society)
In June 1941 Eleanor Roosevelt (with Donovan) spoke to the President about the need for an American intelligence service and urged that Bill Donovan be put in charge.
(Buffalo and Erie County Historical Society)
The Hotel Palacio in Estoril, Portugal, was a haunt of spies during World War II. In March 1941 Donovan met there with Averell Harriman (in a room checked carefully for listening devices) before continuing across the Atlantic to report to FDR on his mission to the Balkans and the Mideast.
(Portuguese National Tourist Office)
Donovan (at right, hat in hand) reviews Bulgarian cadets in Sofia on January 22, 1941. Later that morning he tried to talk King Boris out of his alliance with Hitler.
(Buffalo and Erie County Historical Society)
During lunch Churchill stated with customary eloquence that the United States and the United Kingdom must together defeat Hitler. Donovan kept to the instructions given to him by Franklin Roosevelt. He informed Churchill that the United States and Britain must help each other in this crisis in history in a “relationship of mutual selfishness.”
The prime minister told Donovan he was convinced that, the Nazi-Soviet Nonaggression Pact notwithstanding, the Germans would attack Russia in May. Donovan saw that his trip into the Mediterranean must include an effort to create a Balkan entente that would stand up to German intentions in the area and, if all went well, throw off the Nazis’ timetable so they could not attack the Soviets until later. The more the Germans delayed invading Russia, the greater the chance that they would not be able to complete their conquest before the severe northern winter entrapped their armies.
Churchill promised Donovan his complete cooperation. “We will give you the best man in the cabinet secretariat, who has been present at meetings of the Joint Board and Combined Arms, to go with you,” Churchill told Donovan.
The best man in the secretariat turned out to be Lt. Col. Vivian Dykes, assistant secretary to the cabinet. A message went from the British government:
Colonel Donovan is visiting the Mediterranean as an observer for President Roosevelt with whom he has great influence. He is a lawyer who has made a close study of military affairs and is one of our best friends in USA. He proposes to visit Gibraltar, Malta, Crete, Egypt and the western desert, Palestine and Greece. His object is to study and report to the President on our manned [sic] situation in Mediterranean, but his terms of reference are very wide. The Prime Minister directs that every facility should be afforded to Colonel Donovan who has been taken fully into our confidence. He will be accompanied by Lieutenant Colonel Dykes, Royal Engineers, of the Cabinet Secretariat.
Donovan studied not only the military situation but the entire complex of forces—political, economic, social, and psychological—which together made it possible to predict the outcome of a campaign. That morning he had turned over a list of questions concerning British tactics and the operations of the mechanized forces to the American Adm. Robert Ghormley, at the U.S. Embassy. A second list that Donovan gave to Ghormley asked for answers to theoretical questions as to what the British would do in this or that contingency. It fell to Raymond Lee to obtain answers to those questions. By that evening he had some of the responses, which he brought to Donovan at Claridge’s about seven o’clock.
“I found him with Helen Kirkpatrick, the newspaperwoman,” Lee wrote in his journal. “I think she is rather clever but she is far from being as attractive and alluring as she thinks she is. She was trying to get a story out of him but he was not giving her any. They talked about Kennedy and both of them ripped him up the back, and I didn’t think I needed to contribute to that. Donovan knows much better how to deal with the press than Kennedy ever did, for Kennedy used to get very much excited and go on saying things which were not at all what he had in mind to say.”
When the newspaperwoman had left, Lee showed Donovan some cables that he had sent to Washington. At the time, British and American represe
ntatives were preparing to meet in Washington for staff talks. Admiral Stark and General Marshall felt that the British might intend to pay too much attention to their immediate problems and not enough attention to American interests. If they did, the forthcoming talks would be meaningless. Lee’s cables dealt with the British delegation to the staff talks and British instructions to their delegates.
Lee’s journal went on: “He [Donovan] said that at lunch today Churchill had given him information that instructions to the delegation would be very wide open and that they were to approach every question with a completely open mind, to lay their proposals before the United States for the decision of the United States.”
“In England I was given access to the various studies made of the different theaters of war,” Donovan said later. “I went through many parts of the country not only to see the effects of bombings, but to see how factories were run, to observe how the activities of peace and of war went on together, and to look with wonder at the way the people went about their daily tasks as if no pall of war lay over them.”
There was much to accomplish in London before Donovan could set out for the Mediterranean. As an intelligence agent, he lived by the maxim “You can find out anything you want to know about anybody in the world if you really want to.” With Churchill’s active support, Donovan set about finding answers to the questions he had about the United Kingdom. Members of the press considered Donovan both “mysterious and important” and did their best to catch up with him as he went about England. The usually fruitless pursuit of the enigmatic Donovan led one reporter to observe that he was “a man who moved so fast he created the myth that he often left one morning and returned the previous afternoon.”
Donovan inspected British ordnance, shipping, signal corps, and maintenance depots. He saw firsthand the striking improvements in British preparations to defend their island if the Nazis attacked. When a New York Times reporter caught up with him on December 20, he said, “When I returned to the United States last August after a previous visit, I said I found the British ‘resolute and courageous.’ Now I would add, ‘confident.’ ” Donovan said he thought Great Britain would win the war. This upset some British leaders who feared that if the American people believed Donovan they might think Britain was so certain to win that America need not help.
Menzies saw Donovan to brief him about Britain’s intelligence operations and explained Ultra to him, thus confirming what Donovan had guessed on his earlier trip. In this way Donovan became the first American to be told about the British secret cryptanalytic success upon which so much high-level intelligence was to depend during the remainder of the war.
Donovan traveled to Coventry to see the devastation brought by German bombers. Not only the press but also German intelligence attempted to shadow Donovan in London. He lost his tail of German agents by the simple expedient of switching taxis.
On the morning of December 24, Donovan phoned Lee and said he would like to see both Lee and Admiral Ghormley before he left London on the day after Christmas. When the three men got together at Donovan’s rooms at Claridge’s, they had, in Lee’s words, “so much to talk about that we really did not get anywhere.” The principal subject was Ireland. Most Irishmen sympathized with Great Britain, but some were such Anglophobes that they were working for a German victory. Churchill was negotiating with Irish Prime Minister Eamon de Valera to cut off Irish assistance to Germany and to obtain bases to help protect Atlantic shipping against German depredations. There also was the very real likelihood that a German strike at the British Isles would not be aimed directly at England but would first attack Ireland so as to divide the British strength.
“It seems that Dulanty, the Irish High Commissioner here, has been after him [Donovan] to go over and pay a visit to De Valera,” Lee reported in his journal.
Donovan said that if De Valera invited him and did so publicly, of course he would be delighted to go over at once. Dulanty had no such invitation to convey, so Donovan declined to have anything to do with it. He asked me if I thought he was correct, and I said yes, that the Irish question had been so badly bungled in the interchange of speeches between Churchill and De Valera that the best thing to do was to let it cool off for a while. I said, of course, Churchill is a man upon whom great responsibilities are resting and he is very worried about the way the war is going, and especially the attacks on British shipping in the Atlantic. His speech about the bases had been hasty and ill-conceived, in my opinion, but De Valera’s answer to it was even more hasty and more badly conceived, for De Valera showed a streak of temper and implied that Churchill had made many threats and statements which had not been made at all. Donovan said that as far as he could see the increasing economic pressure upon Ireland would operate to bring them around. Ninety percent of the people in Ireland, according to Dulanty, had been enthusiastic in their support of Great Britain until this interchange of speeches had been made. Now they were not so much so but if they began to have to go without fruit and supplies and feed for their cattle, it might make them take a little sober second thought. If it were only possible to ignore these three million malcontents who call themselves Irish, it would be a great help. They do more to stir up strife, misunderstanding, and trouble in the world than any other three million people alive. Donovan, in spite of his Irish name and ancestry and the fact that he commanded the Fighting 69th, does not seem to have any particular fondness for the Free State.
In Washington at this time, President Roosevelt also was fuming over the Irish question, and he discussed with aides the possibility of asking Bill Donovan or perhaps even Joe Kennedy, two of the most prominent Irish-Americans, to go to Dublin to try to persuade the Irish that their stubborn policies were apt to betray them as well as the British into the hands of the Germans.
If Roosevelt intended to send Donovan to Ireland, he did not move fast enough in alerting him to the mission. The President’s “secret legs” spent Christmas in London, but at two in the morning of December 26 he boarded a British flying boat with Vivian Dykes. The plane lifted off the dark Channel waters and flew into the night. Donovan had completed the first phase of his mission, and his reports to Roosevelt and Knox on the situation were already speeding by air and cable across the Atlantic. Now he was embarked on the real business of the journey.
Later in the day of his departure, the American press in London discovered that Donovan had gone. When they demanded to know where he was going, his friends would only admit that he was bound for an undisclosed destination. They asserted that “Colonel Donovan had not left for Ireland, the United States or the Continent, but was making a private trip.” Some journalists, knowing of his appreciation for the fair sex, accused him of a holiday season dalliance in a secluded English country house. Everyone wondered where he would surface next.
21
Playing for Time
AS DONOVAN WAS FLYING southward along the blacked-out coast of Europe, the British commander-in-chief of the Mediterranean fleet was pondering a message from Admiral Godfrey, a message William Stephenson was instrumental in persuading Godfrey to send: “Donovan got us bombsights, destroyers, and other urgent requirements. We can achieve more through Donovan than any other individual. He can be trusted to represent our needs in the right quarters and in the right way in USA.”
On his Mediterranean journey Donovan was to fly in British bombers and use British base facilities. For all effects and purposes he was now Churchill’s as well as Roosevelt’s confidential agent. When his plane touched down at Gibraltar, the key to the Mediterranean, Donovan inspected the British fortifications and gazed 6 miles across the bay to Algeciras, the Spanish port from which the German spymaster, Adm. Wilhelm Canaris, in his turn often peered at the Rock through field glasses from his customary hotel, the Maria Cristina.
Donovan later told the Union League of Philadelphia about his visit to Gibraltar: “There I saw how strongly fortified was that historic rock. I learned there, too, of a proposed and possible
German intention of seeking to seal up the Strait of Gibraltar to prevent the passage of British ships, and to do this by striking from Spain.” If Germany wanted to go into Gibraltar, he commented,
it isn’t necessary for her to take the Rock of Gibraltar itself. That has been given tremendous strength in the last six months. They had, while I was there, a Canadian detachment of miners that were widening the galleries, projecting the fortifications, they had additional troops in there, but they all admitted that if the Germans can get in position across the bay in Spain, or if they are able to get into Morocco and move into Gibraltar, catch Gibraltar in reverse, that a denial of the use of the harbor to the British will be sufficient to prevent in any practical way, excepting by some night movements, of the use of the Strait of Gibraltar.
At Gibraltar, Donovan also observed how the British kept up tradition even in the face of modern war. He and U.S. Adm. James Fife were both dinner guests of the governor of Gibraltar that night at the Rock. When the entire company of about 15 had been seated, Fife recalled, “There was this very colorful ceremony of the drum major coming in, followed by a small troop of men bearing a pillow on top of which was the key to the gate to La Linea. They paraded around the table, as I recall, three times, and then deposited the key in front of His Excellency, the Governor, to indicate that the Rock was secured for the night.”
Donovan and Lieutenant Colonel Dykes of the cabinet secretariat flew east along the British lifeline to beleaguered Malta. Early in the 1930s fascism had taken root among the Maltese, but Donovan now found that persistent Italian air raids had destroyed any pro-Italian feeling there might have been on the three islands that made up the British bastion.
“You will remember the Italian claim that Malta would fall within two weeks,” Donovan reported later to the War Department. “Malta, however, still endures after something over 120 bombings and is still serviceable as a repair base for cruisers and destroyers.”
Donovan Page 33
