Donovan made dozens of speeches while at the same time quietly helping to shape his country’s intelligence plans. His speeches further incensed the German government. “We hate the Knoxes, Frankfurters, Morgenthaus, and that ‘smart aleck’ Donovan, but we also know that the great majority of American people do not think their way,” a spokesman said. “These gentlemen and their ilk make themselves self-appointed enemies of the Axis and indeed, one might say, of the European continent, but with the American people we have no quarrel. Obviously the prognosis of these gentlemen regarding the indubitable efficacy of American aid to Yugoslavia and Greece has been proven so wrong and Donovan proved such a nincompoop that they must befuddle the American people with vocal strength rather than logic.”
President Roosevelt listened with careful interest to Bill Donovan’s views on an integrated intelligence service for the United States. Writing about the intelligence problem that Roosevelt confronted in the spring of 1941, Conyers Read said:
Anywhere from two million to ten million words of strategic information were pouring into Washington every day in reports from all sorts of observers all over the world. Army (MIS) and Navy (ONI) Intelligence, the FBI, the diplomatic and consular services, the Departments of Commerce and Agriculture, Treasury, the Immigration Service, the Coast Guard, and many others received these reports. There was, however, no adequate system for correlating this enormous mass of information, for supplementing it or for analyzing and presenting it in readily comprehensible form to the men who were supposed to base their decisions and actions upon it. A very considerable proportion of this great mass of material went to the President himself—so much of it that he could not possibly read it all, still less digest it.
Roosevelt appointed a special cabinet committee made up of Stimson, Knox, and Attorney General Robert Jackson to study the intelligence problem. They asked Bill Donovan to present his ideas, which he did without delay. He also discussed his intelligence proposals with John G. Winant, ambassador to Great Britain; Winant in turn took them up with the President. While the cabinet committee was working with Donovan, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover and General Miles of Army Intelligence were embroiled in a jurisdictional battle over intelligence operations. Their battle complicated matters still further. In early June the cabinet report favoring Donovan’s ideas reached Roosevelt. The President, who was exasperated by the intransigence and narrow-minded bickering of Miles and Hoover, decided that an integrated strategic intelligence service was long overdue.
That spring of 1941 Bill Stephenson was blunt in his discussions with Bill Donovan. The two men met often in Stephenson’s apartment in New York’s Hampshire House overlooking Central Park. There they talked about America’s intelligence needs. Britain would share its intelligence reports with the United States, Stephenson said, but could Britain be counted on to tell America everything if the interests of the two nations should diverge? Why shouldn’t America pull its own weight in the vital field of intelligence and special operations? He explained to Donovan how his work as the British Security Coordinator in New York was complicated by the confusion and jealousies among the overlapping intelligence agencies in Washington with which he had to deal. These agencies were as much concerned with their prestige and selfish interests as they were in doing the job that Donovan more than any other American must know so badly needed doing. Stephenson demanded to know what the United States would do if it had to go to war without a modern intelligence service. Later, after Donovan’s death, Stephenson wrote, “I had discussed and argued with him the necessity for the United States government to establish an agency for conducting secret activities throughout the world—an agency with which I could collaborate fully by virtue of its being patterned in the matter of coordination functions after my own organization. Early he agreed in principle.”
Donovan, although no friend of Hoover’s since their first days together in the Department of Justice, gave J. Edgar and his G-men grudging admiration; but particularly after his last fact-finding trip into the Balkans and the Middle East, he realized that Stephenson was right. The FBI and the other conflicting agencies could not give the United States an intelligence apparatus that could compete against the Abwehr. He not only had lunch with the cabinet committee to talk about the problem, but he used every opportunity to urge the President to establish a central intelligence authority at once.
One day as Donovan talked to the President, Roosevelt remarked, almost as if the thought had just occurred to him, “We have no intelligence service.” Donovan realized that it was just a question of time before FDR would take the necessary action and that most likely he himself would be asked to create the service.
During late spring the British and Americans cooperated in intelligence matters as best they could. Donovan persuaded Roosevelt to approve an arrangement by which Stephenson was to work closely with the FBI on counterespionage within the United States. Urgent positive intelligence was to be given immediately by Churchill to the President over a direct line that had been established between the two leaders. On less urgent matters Stephenson and Donovan were to be the go-betweens. All of these arrangements were kept secret from Secretary of State Cordell Hull and Foreign Minister Anthony Eden, who were considered too bound up in diplomatic protocol to be of any use.
From his headquarters in the International Building at Rockefeller Center, Stephenson mounted a campaign to persuade Roosevelt that America needed an intelligence organization of its own and that Donovan was the man to direct it. Then on May 25, Admiral Godfrey came from London, bringing with him his personal assistant, Ian Fleming. Dressed in blue suits of conservative cut, they stepped off the Yankee Clipper in New York posing as two British businessmen. To their discomfort as they came ashore, they saw a parcel of press photographers waiting on the pier. They were only partly relieved when they learned that the press reception was not for them but for Madame Schiaparelli, whose svelte charms were soon being photographed for the evening papers. (That night Admiral Godfrey and Commander Fleming appeared in the background of newspaper photos of the chic French-woman arriving in New York.) They went from La Guardia to Bill Donovan’s apartment, where they stayed during their visit to New York.
Godfrey and Fleming were presumably in America to establish better liaison between British Naval Intelligence and the FBI and ONI, but they soon found themselves balked by Hoover’s intransigence and the complete disarray of American intelligence. Stephenson had no difficulty enlisting Godfrey and Fleming in his effort to convince Roosevelt to establish a unified intelligence service.
On Sunday, June 1, Bill Donovan drove a car up to a side street at Rockefeller Center; Bill Stephenson stepped out of a doorway and slipped into the seat beside him. The two men drove north across the border into Canada. That night at Dorval Airport, Montreal, they climbed into the gun turret of a brand new B-24 bomber that was being flown to Scotland. Late on Monday they landed at Prestwick and boarded the night train for London. The blacked-out train traveled at a crawl and had to stop several times because of German air-raid alarms.
In London, Donovan conferred with British leaders. Then on Friday, June 6, he and Stephenson were driven to Woburn Abbey on the Duke of Bedford’s estate where security men, dressed as gamekeepers, kept away the curious from the small group who had masterminded the Ultra secret. Donovan found himself in the drawing room with Britain’s top intelligence leaders.
“Gentlemen,” said Reginald Leeper, chief of British Political Intelligence, when everyone was gathered in the room.
I have been authorized by the prime minister to reveal to you a piece of secret information which has been known to Mr. Churchill and the chiefs of staff for several weeks. He permits me to tell you—and you only—in order that we may concert our plans, that Hitler is to attack Soviet Russia. The actual invasion is expected around the middle of June. The estimate is Sunday, the twenty-second, which is to say two weeks and two days from now. You will not make notes of what I tell you, nor can you p
repare any specific action until the day itself. You are each responsible for sections that will come into play when the Germans move.
Not many in the room believed that the Germans would achieve complete surprise in their attack. Donovan was not so sure. In any case, Stephenson and he returned to the United States immediately after the meeting. When Donovan reported to Roosevelt that the British did not intend to share their intelligence discovery with the Soviet Union, he said, “Stalin might have faced reality. But the British regard the whole Bletchley apparatus as far too secret. They feel they can use their information to gain advantage in other ways.”
“Colonel ‘Wild Bill’ Donovan was, at the outset of the war, a hero in search of a role,” commented CIA historian Thomas Troy. If America went to war, what was the role to be? He had been considered a possible secretary of war, had worked for draft legislation, helped Knox settle into his job as secretary of the navy, been instrumental in arranging for the transfer of aged American destroyers to the British Navy, and fought for U.S. naval escorts for British-bound shipping. There had been speculation the previous December that he might be named U.S. ambassador to Britain. He might head a bureau for what Roosevelt called “constructive counterespionage work” or head a “sort of ballyhoo committee” on behalf of the administration’s foreign policy. He might head the national savings bond drive. Donovan had already undertaken two of the most important diplomatic and intelligence missions ever given to an American citizen.
During his last interview with Stimson before leaving for London on December 7, 1940, Donovan had brought up the possibility that he might be given a military command in the field. The World War I hero wanted very much to join the fray. Stimson noted that Donovan said that what he would like more than anything else was “the toughest division in the whole outfit.”
As early as April 1, 1941, news reports indicated that Donovan would be named to administer the Lend-Lease Act. Donovan merely smiled when reporters asked him to verify this or that rumor as to his future.
In late May Roosevelt asked him to draw up a proposal for psychological warfare and the development of intelligence. Donovan set about drafting a memorandum. Ian Fleming was then a house guest in his Georgetown home. Never loath to suggest in later years that he had played a significant role in the founding of the OSS, Fleming was fond of showing off a .38 Police Positive Colt revolver bearing the inscription “For Special Services.” The weapon, he claimed, was given to him by none other than the American master spy, Wild Bill Donovan. Fleming never spelled out exactly what the “special services” were, and hardly anybody believed him. In fact, Donovan did give the pistol to Fleming, and Fleming’s services were considerable.
Sitting down with pen and paper in Donovan’s home, Fleming drafted ideas that Donovan was to consider as he prepared his memo. Fleming suggested that although the United States was presumably neutral in the war, American officers at embassies and consulates should carry out clandestine intelligence work. Secretaries, assistant attachés, cipher clerks, and technical advisers could all help, in collaboration with British agents. They could train with the British Secret Intelligence in England. “These U.S. officers must have trained powers of observation, analysis, and evaluation,” wrote Fleming, “absolute discretion, sobriety, devotion to duty, languages and wide experience and be aged about forty to fifty.”
According to Fleming, the new U.S. intelligence might concentrate in Stockholm to gather information about the German Navy and in Istanbul to learn what Russia’s intentions might be. Before the United States withdrew its diplomatic representatives from Axis nations, it should infiltrate agents bearing neutral passports. American secret intelligence, said Fleming, “should be under the protection of a strong government department and it should be insured by every means possible against political interference or control. Furthermore, it should not be controlled by the FBI, which has no conception of offensive intelligence and is incapable of a strategic mentality.”
Some intelligence experts say that Fleming even wrote the memorandum that Donovan was to take to the White House. This is far from the truth, for Donovan called upon his own experiences dating back to his days in the Siberia of Admiral Kolchak. He had a firsthand familiarity with British cloak-and-dagger experience long before he met Fleming. He had long been aware of how Washington bureaucratic and political connivance so often inhibited action. He discussed his report with Secretary Knox, Secretary Stimson, Assistant Secretary of War John J. McCloy, Ambassador Winant, playwright and Roosevelt speech writer Robert Sherwood, and Vincent Astor to get their ideas. He told journalist Wallace R. Deuel that he “talked to everybody who would listen.” He appreciated the expertise of a highly capable English agent, but Fleming was hardly Donovan’s ghostwriter.
In later years Donovan paid tribute to William Stephenson’s contributions to his thinking, saying, “The proposals for the establishment of a service for strategic information, including political, military, and economic intelligence submitted to the President in June, 1941, were to a great extent based upon ideas, appraisals, and experiences of Mr. Stephenson, learned from thorough and detailed discussions with him and his staff.”
On June 10, 1941, Donovan submitted to the President a document entitled “Memorandum of Establishment of Service of Strategic Information.” “Strategy without information upon which it can rely is helpless,” Donovan advised Roosevelt.
Likewise, information is useless unless it is intelligently directed to the strategic purpose. Modern warfare depends upon the economic base—upon the supply of raw materials, on the capacity and performance of the industrial plant, on the scope of agricultural production, and upon the character and efficiency of communications. Strategic reserves will determine the strength of the attack and the resistance of the defense. Steel and gasoline constitute these reserves as much as do men and powder. The width and depth of terrain occupied by the present-day army exacts an equally wide and deep network of operational lines. The “depth of strategy” depends upon the “depth of armament.” The commitment of all the resources of a nation, moral as well as material, constitutes what is called total war. To anticipate every intention as to the mobilization and employment of these forces is a difficult task. General von Bernhardi says, “We must try by correctly foreseeing what is coming, to anticipate developments and thereby to gain an advantage which our opponents cannot overcome on the field of battle. That is what the future expects us to do.”
Although we are facing imminent peril, we are lacking in effective services for analyzing, comprehending, and appraising such information as we might obtain (or in some cases have obtained) relative to the intention of potential enemies and the limit of the economic and military resources of these enemies. Our mechanism of collecting information is inadequate. It is true we have intelligence units in the Army and Navy. We can assume that through these units our fighting services can obtain technical information in time of peace, have available immediate operation information in time of war, and, on certain occasions, obtain “spot” news as to enemy movements. But these services cannot, out of the very nature of things, obtain that accurate, comprehensive, long-range information without which no strategic board can plan for the future. And we have arrived at the moment when there must be plans laid down for the spring of 1942.
We have scattered through the various departments of our government, documents and memoranda concerning military and naval and air and economic potentials of the Axis, which, if gathered together and studied in detail by carefully selected trained minds, with a knowledge both of the related languages and techniques, would yield valuable and often decisive results.
Central analysis of this information is as presently important for our supply program as if we were actually engaged in armed conflict. It is unimaginable that Germany would engage in a seven-billion-dollar supply program without first studying in detail the productive capacity of her actual and potential enemies. It is because she does exactly this that she dis
plays such a mastery of the secrecy, timing, and effectiveness of her attacks.
Even if we participate to no greater extent than we do now, it is essential that we set up a central enemy intelligence organization, which would itself collect either directly or through existing departments of Government, at home and abroad, pertinent information concerning potential enemies, the character and strength of their armed forces, their internal economic organization, their principal channels of supply, the morale of their troops and their people, and their relations with their neighbors or allies.
For example, in the economic field there are many weapons that can be used against the enemy. But in our Government these weapons are distributed through several different departments. How and when to use them is of vital interest, not only to the Commander-in-Chief, but to each of the departments concerned. All departments should have the same information upon which economic warfare could be determined.
But there is another element of modern warfare, and that is the psychological attack against the moral and spiritual defenses of a nation. In this attack the most powerful weapon is radio. The use of radio as a weapon, though effectively employed by Germany, is still to be perfected. But this perfection can be realized only by planning, and planning is dependent on accurate information. From this information action can be carried out by the appropriate agencies.
Donovan maintained that the central intelligence agency should be responsible directly to the President, with an advisory panel to consist of the director of the FBI, representatives of Army and Naval Intelligence, and other officials concerned.
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