Donovan went to sea with a British squadron to learn firsthand how the Royal Navy convoyed merchantmen past threatening Italy. “Any movement of convoy through the Mediterranean is a major operation,” he said. “I have seen a rendezvous in the ocean where Admiral Somerville will go out with his force and take it in during the night and, getting through the Strait, carry it as far as Malta, and there at Malta that convoy is picked up by [Admiral] Cunningham and carried on to Alexandria.”
On Tuesday, January 7, 1941, Donovan and Dykes reached Cairo and were given comfortable rooms at the British Embassy. On Wednesday Donovan conferred with Bert Fish, the U.S. minister in Cairo, but he spent most of the next several days with British leaders, including the commander-in-chief in the Middle East, Gen. Archibald Percival Wavell, with whom Donovan struck up an immediate friendship. Both men had been through the thick of World War I fighting, and Donovan was greatly impressed by the man he described as “a slight fellow with only one eye. He is a very inarticulate man except that he gets bursts of speech after some days of depression, but he writes exceedingly well.” By the time Donovan reached Cairo, Wavell’s greatly outnumbered forces had already defeated the Italians in Ethiopia and were dealing them blows in the Cyrenaican Desert west of Cairo. Wavell’s brilliant strategy and leadership were bringing disaster to the plans of Marshal Rodolfo Graziani, an old acquaintance of Donovan, to cut through Egypt to the Suez Canal. Donovan also saw a great deal of Air Marshal Sir Arthur Longmore, head of the British air forces in the Near East, Vice Air Marshal Sir Arthur Tedder, and Adm. Sir Andrew Cunningham, who commanded the fleet in the eastern Mediterranean.
“Wavell is all that you hear said of him,” said Donovan in a War Department lecture upon his return to the United States, “and Cunningham is even more than they say. They are both very able officers, and both standing up against superior numbers, conditions that are almost overwhelming, in a remarkable way.”
Donovan learned that Wavell was confident of victory in the desert but was greatly worried about German forces that were massing in Romania for an advance through Bulgaria to attack Greece. On the day after Donovan’s arrival, London informed Wavell that the only succor England could give Greece had to come from North Africa, and on January 9, Air Marshal Longmore was ordered to withdraw three squadrons of Hurricanes and at least one squadron of Blenheim bombers from action against the Italians and send them to Athens. Donovan was at British headquarters as additional messages arrived from London requiring Wavell and Longmore to dispatch important parts of both their air and ground forces to Greece. On January 10 Wavell showed Donovan a message from Churchill:
Our information contradicts idea that German concentration in Romania is merely “move in war of nerves” or “bluff to cause dispersion of force.”
Destruction of Greece would eclipse victories you have gained in Libya and might affect decisively Turkish attitude, especially if we had shown ourselves callous of fate of allies. You must now therefore conform your plans to larger interests at stake.
Nothing must hamper capture of Tobruk but thereafter all operations in Libya are subordinated to aiding Greece.
We expect and require prompt and active compliance with our decisions for which we bear full responsibility. Your joint visit to Athens will enable you to contrive the best method of giving effect to the above decisions. It should not be delayed.
Although Donovan declined to talk to the press in Cairo, news reports speculated that he would furnish the U.S. government with a firsthand account of the situation in the Middle East and North Africa. Other stories suggested that he was training to become the new U.S. ambassador to the Court of St. James and that he would be sounding out Gen. Maxime Weygand on the possibilities of French forces in North Africa eventually reentering the war on the side of Great Britain. Actually, Donovan did strike up an old acquaintanceship in Cairo, with French Gen. George Catroux, who drew up an estimate of the situation for Donovan to transmit to Weygand. Catroux assured Donovan that Weygand hoped for a British victory but was afraid to take action in North Africa for fear that if he did, the Nazis would occupy all of France. As early as December 1940, when Donovan was still in Lisbon, German intelligence had reported to Berlin that the main purpose of his mystery trip was to bring French troops in North Africa and the Middle East back into the war. On December 10, the German government asked the Vichy government to refuse Donovan admission to any French territories.
Donovan obtained Wavell’s permission to go into the Libyan Desert to see the fighting, and on Saturday, January 11, he set out for the front. Five years before, Donovan had been in that very area with the Italian troops; now he was with the British soldiers as they launched their last attacks on his old acquaintances. Jogging in jeeps across the desert sands, Donovan stretched out his sleeping bag beneath the stars at night and learned from the British Tommies what it was like to fight a Sahara campaign.
“I was with the troops at the taking of Bardia and the attack on Tobruk,” he said in his speech to Philadelphia’s Union League,
and the surprising thing about that—I see now it is beginning to come out and I can speak of it—is that in that whole advance the British had no more than 30,000 troops. . . . With the 30,000 troops they took something like 150,000 prisoners, and it must not be deduced from that that it was so easy. The difficulty was not lack of bravery of the Italians—true, of course, they did not have their heart in it—but the trouble was in the generalship, and that generalship manifested itself in the setting up of a lot of little maharajahs, medieval style, because these towns you see on the map—Bardia, Tobruk, and Bengasi—are simply a group of houses on the desert, with the exception of Bengasi, which is quite a community. The British made the desert their ally; the Italians looked upon it as an enemy and they locked themselves up in these little fortresses and permitted themselves to be surrounded.
Donovan described what it was like as he came up to the front, just before the attack on Tobruk. “When you are driving an automobile on that desert on a moonlight night, where the sky and desert meet and where you cannot tell exactly where you are,” he said, “it is perfectly understandable that any roving column from the enemy can pick you up. I was really scared to death, because I thought that would happen to us all the time, and it is particularly true when you are on the defensive.”
In the desert Donovan talked to captured Italian soldiers. Officers whom he had once known as the cocky conquerors of Ethiopia were now bedraggled in defeat. From them he drew information that helped him to assess the Italian war commitment. Both the British and American governments very much wanted to know just how much heart the Italian people had for the war. Donovan became convinced that Italy would quit Germany’s side as soon as Mussolini could be removed, but that the dictator’s overthrow would take many more defeats and probably an invasion of the Italian peninsula.
Back in Cairo, Donovan continued talks with British leaders. He collected information from confidants. He spoke not only with the British but also with Arabs whom he had met on his visit to Egypt in 1936. He conferred with executives of the Jewish underground in Palestine, who pledged to support the British against the Germans. A sophisticated Zionist intelligence network was in place throughout the Middle East, and its Cairo representatives agreed to keep Donovan informed about political, economic, and military developments. The Jewish leaders promised to cooperate with the Palestinian Arabs until the Germans were defeated, but they warned Donovan that the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem and his extremists were working for a Nazi victory.
On Thursday, January 16, Dykes and Donovan flew over the Aegean Sea to Athens. Axis chancelleries speculated on what Donovan’s mission meant, and the Axis and pro-Axis press commented on it. The Bucharest Tageblatt suggested that “a secret meeting between the enigmatic Donovan and the Egyptian Sphinx would be in order.” Lincoln MacVeagh, the American minister to Greece, reported to Franklin Roosevelt about Donovan’s three-day visit. “He did a grand job,” wrote MacVeagh.
“He flew over from Egypt at about the same time as General Wavell, and stayed at the British Legation with the General, but I had him to lunch with the King and introduced him to the Premier.”
Donovan spent considerable time with Premier John Metaxas, the veritable dictator of the country, and Gen. Alexander Papagos, the commander-in-chief who was Metaxas’s chief of staff. At the British Legation the British military delegation kept Donovan abreast of negotiations with the Greeks. Metaxas declined the offer of British troops to help the Greek soldiers who were still driving back the Italians on the Albanian front, but he welcomed whatever arms and supplies the British could provide to strengthen the forces preparing to defend Macedonia against a probable German assault. It was Metaxas’s position that any British military assistance short of overwhelming strength would merely goad the Germans into action. Only supplies and military aid on the scale that America alone could provide would secure Greece against Germany. Donovan carefully noted exactly what supplies and equipment would most help the Greeks.
Greek friends told Donovan that Adm. Wilhelm Canaris, chief of the Abwehr (the intelligence service of the German General Staff), had also recently been in Athens, as Hitler’s envoy. Metaxas was friendly toward Britain and had no illusions concerning the fate of Greece if Germany invaded, but at the same time he believed Canaris was a friend of Greece and had agreed that he mediate the differences between Germany and Greece. Canaris had promised Metaxas not only a guarantee of Greece’s prewar frontiers but also the annexation of all Albanian territory conquered by the Greek Army. In exchange, Greece would assist Germany in its plans for the Balkans and the Middle East.
Donovan soon discovered that Canaris had assigned a team of top agents to monitor his movements in Athens. This did not prove to be any serious problem. What he did not know was that the Germans had broken the American diplomatic code and were able to read the messages sent by cable from the American Legation in Athens to the State Department in Washington. Every message was scrutinized by the research office in the Schillerstrasse in Berlin and then passed on to the foreign ministry and to Hitler. Fortunately, Lincoln MacVeagh’s letter to Roosevelt of January 19 went by diplomatic pouch and was not read by the Germans. In it MacVeagh explained Donovan’s evaluation of the situation in the Balkans:
The most outstanding developments from this point of view are the coming of German air forces to the Mediterranean and the subsequent visit of General Wavell to Athens. In the former connection, it seems that Germany has decided to take over Italy’s job of pressing on Britain’s lifeline in this section of the world, and if so, a move on her part to Salonika would make sense as a step toward securing bases in the Eastern Mediterranean to supplement those she now has in southern Italy and Sicily. Thus, new weight is given to the Greek Premier’s opinion, which I have already reported, that a German drive southward from Romania may be expected soon. On the other hand, British strategy must not only be prepared to meet this threat, but has always contemplated forming an Eastern Front, if possible, in order to extend and exhaust the enemy within the circle of the blockade. Consequently, immediately after expelling the Italians from Egypt, General Wavell has come to Athens not only to discuss with the Greeks the problem of supplying their army, but to seek their aid in the prompt preparation of Salonika for action against Germany, either defensive or offensive, as circumstances may dictate. At the same time, a British Military Mission now in Turkey is trying to influence that country to enter the war on Britain’s side without further delay.
German forces in Romania are increasing, though perhaps not to the extent alleged by British propaganda, and General Wavell’s mission, while disappointing so far as concerns insuring immediate and adequate supplies to the Greek Army, has overcome part of Greece’s natural caution regarding giving provocation to Germany to set these forces in motion. The British argument in this connection seems to have been that in dealing with the Dictators it is no use not provoking them, since they will follow in any case what they conceive to be their interests, and if no provocation exists, will invent it, as Italy has so recently done with Greece; and that consequently the best policy is to “fear God and take your own part” rather than to fear Hitler and neglect opportunities.
MacVeagh also told Roosevelt that Donovan “was planning to go to the Albanian Front, but the British Minister and General Heywood, Chief of the British Military Mission here, were anxious to rush him up to Sofia and Belgrade without delay, believing that the present moment is truly critical and that he might help to give the leaders in those capitals a very timely steer.”
Donovan had come to the conclusion that if Greece and Turkey would unite against the Germans, the other Balkans might join them in an alliance, and Hitler would not dare to attack. If he could help to create such an alliance, he could balk Hitler’s plans or at least upset the German timetable of conquest. Churchill had told him in London that Hitler was planning to invade the Soviet Union in May. He could not do this with impunity while the potentially hostile Balkans lay behind him. Perhaps it would be possible to prevent an invasion of Russia or at least delay it into the summer.
On Saturday, January 18, Donovan boarded the Sofia train, shadowed by German agents. In his briefcase he carried documents that detailed British military plans for massive support to Bulgarian resistance to a Nazi invasion. Another paper purported to show huge American military aid. Neither document was authentic. They had been created in a house on Jarvis Street in London where British intelligence technicians fabricated papers intended to mislead the enemy.
As he traveled northward through Thessaly and across Macedonia to Bulgaria, Donovan had time to speculate on the situation. The British had given up Bulgaria to the Germans, but he was not so sure. He would do his best to persuade King Boris III to reconsider his position. Donovan arrived in Sofia the next day and went directly to the U.S. Legation, where Minister George Howard Earle was to be his host for the stay in Sofia. By order of the government, no mention of Donovan’s arrival was made in the Sofia newspapers. The government press department also issued an order barring anti-American articles and cartoons, which had been running during the previous month as Bulgaria’s leaders attempted to prepare their country for adherence to the Axis.
Donovan discussed the precarious Bulgarian situation at length with Earle, a close friend of Franklin Roosevelt who had become an intimate of King Boris. Earle, a former governor of Pennsylvania, was a canny observer who acted the part of a brash American. He rarely let a chance to abuse the Nazis go by, and once in a Sofia nightclub when the Germans present asked the band to play the “Horst Wessel Lied,” he retaliated by demanding that the band give equal attention to the British by playing “Tipperary.” This started an old-fashioned bar brawl. When he caught a German spy in the legation, he personally beat a full confession out of him. Earle’s current girl friend, a beautiful Hungarian dancer, was a spy for the Abwehr and the Sicherheitsdienst, both German intelligence organizations, and the minister knew it. Donovan listened to Earle’s description of the girl with lively interest, and he thought of his briefcase with its documents.
On Monday morning Donovan called upon Bulgarin Foreign Minister Ivan Popoff, and in the afternoon he was received by Premier Bogdan Philoff. The National Assembly was in session, and all day long delegates talked excitedly about Donovan’s confidential mission to their country. It was rumored that Donovan had brought a personal letter from President Roosevelt to the king. Democrats, who opposed the German domination over their country, took heart and told other delegates that perhaps the nation was moving too rapidly into the Axis camp. The government should wait until it was learned what Donovan told the king.
Donovan did not limit his talks to officials. He already knew a large number of Bulgarians, some of whom he had met as long ago as 1916, when they came to Vienna to discuss with him their nation’s sanitation problems while he was with the War Relief Commission. On Tuesday, January 21, he lunched with Earle, the British and Tur
kish ministers, and the Bulgarian war minister, Theodoro Daskaloff. That night the British minister gave a dinner party in his honor so that he could meet other key members of the diplomatic community in Sofia.
On Tuesday the Sofia press had suddenly discovered Donovan’s presence in the city, and prominent front-page announcements of his arrival were printed together with brief comments emphasizing that Colonel Donovan was one of Roosevelt’s closest military advisers. Beyond that the government, and Donovan too, maintained a discreet silence as to his movements about the city and the purpose of his visit. By Tuesday evening Donovan was convinced that the Bulgarian leaders with whom he had been talking were simply waiting for the German takeover.
King Boris III might be another matter. Since 1938 Germany had enjoyed a strong influence on the Bulgarian government. Bulgarians realized that the Romanian cession to Bulgaria of the southern Dobruja during the previous September had been due to German pressure, and Hitler was promising still more land at the expense of Yugoslavia and Greece. Nonetheless, Bulgaria had not yet joined the Berlin-Rome Axis, and Donovan knew that the king was the final authority in the nation.
On Wednesday morning Donovan reviewed the cadets at the Bulgarian military academy at the invitation of the academy commandant, General Nihoff. Then he went to the Royal Palace at eleven o’clock to see the king. He was outspoken in warning the monarch about the danger of collaborating with Germany. He reported to Roosevelt that the king replied, “I must not run the risk of having my country overrun without first attempting to reduce the shock.”
“Of course, I understand,” said Donovan. “But your difficulty is that in Hitler you are dealing with a man who has never kept his word.”
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