Donovan

by Richard Dunlop

On June 23 Donovan signed up Thomas G. Early, secretary of the Civil Aeronautics Board, and put him in charge of administration. Then on June 29 Donovan paid a call on Archibald MacLeish to arrange for a Research and Analysis section at the Library of Congress. MacLeish pointed out that a mine of data was in the library in books, magazines, newspapers, and maps, if it could be exploited by research scholars familiar with such sources. He offered the facilities of the Library of Congress and suggested some scholars who might be willing to help. In fact, many new employees of COI (and later OSS) initially went to work in an annex of the library, the only place they could sit and be usefully employed in reading, pending completion of their security clearances. Not only was there a vast intelligence lode buried in the library, but it seemed particularly valuable to Donovan since it could readily be mined without risking a single secret agent.

  When Steve Early announced the formation of the COI on July 11, Donovan moved into rooms 246, 247, and 248 in the baroque old State Department Building on Pennsylvania Avenue, next to the White House. He borrowed the furniture from other more established branches of government. On July 12 a mail carrier turned up at the building’s front desk with a registered letter for Colonel Donovan.

  “Donovan?” said the guard. “I don’t know of any Donovan.” He sent the letter back to the post office. The COI was appropriately launched on its mysterious course.

  Early in August the COI moved to the Apex Building at Pennsylvania and Constitution avenues near Capitol Hill, where it occupied 32 rooms and soon was spilling out into the halls as Donovan expanded the organization. The fateful Sunday of December 7 was still almost four months away.

  The rapid growth of the COI was viewed with alarm by Washington rivals.

  “It would be of help to us if we knew exactly what picture the President had of Bill’s functions,” complained Adolph Berle, who had charge of the State Department’s intelligence functions. J. Edgar Hoover, jealous of his own prerogatives as director of the FBI, expressed his displeasure at the COI. Navy and army brass hats were offended at the idea that a mere reserve officer such as Donovan had been put in charge of the fledgling intelligence apparatus. The chief of Army Intelligence (G-2) refused even to speak to Donovan and communicated with him only through an intermediary.

  “The old army and the old navy were not ready insofar as their G-2 sections were concerned for the new kind of war that was being forced upon them,” observed Air Force Gen. H. H. Arnold. “The G-2 men could not see over the hill to the necessity of establishing an agency for securing the new kind of information needed.”

  Even across the Atlantic, Raymond Lee at the American Embassy in London heard of the bureaucratic war in Washington. FDR’s adviser Harry Hopkins, in the British capital on a presidential assignment, rang up Lee on July 21. Hopkins, according to Lee, reported that Donovan was encountering tremendous opposition in trying to put over his intelligence idea, that he was “in a frightful row with Stimson and Knox and Marshall and Stark. Hopkins’s recital of how the thing was bungled with everyone at loggerheads is an illuminating commentary on how affairs are conducted in Washington.”

  The acerbic Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes shared Hopkins’s view. On Friday, July 25, Ickes had lunch with John J. McCloy. “He told me that the War Department had blocked the plan of the President to make Colonel Donovan a major general in charge of all intelligence work in the government,” Ickes noted in his diary. “Donovan retains his rank of colonel and has been appointed coordinator of the intelligence services. When we run into a jam in Washington we appoint a coordinator and usually he has a great deal of trouble doing anything in the way of coordinating.”

  The Treasury’s intelligence people cooperated with the COI in good part due to Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau, who pointed out that Donovan had seen more of the war in Europe than anyone else “by about a thousand percent.”

  “That is all good preparation for Washington,” observed an assistant. When Morgenthau asked what he meant, the assistant replied that the new COI director “ought to be at home in all the fighting that is going on.”

  “Well, he is a fighter, don’t worry,” commented Morgenthau.

  Unlike his opponents in the bureaucratic wars, Donovan was concerned only with getting the COI into action as fast as possible. He understood fully how rapidly world events were rushing to a climax. On July 14 Lee wrote to Donovan:

  There have been rumors, based chiefly on the authoritative sounding surmises of American columnists, that you were to turn into a super-super intelligence man, but the State Department radio confirms it only today.

  I’m extremely gratified that something is finally going to be done to consolidate or to collate all the information which reaches Washington by way of a dozen different channels. It is certain that what is reported by the State Department, the army, the navy, and a number of other agencies would make a definite and fairly accurate picture, if properly fitted together. If this is not done, then prodigious decisions will be taken in the light of only a part of the information which is available in Washington.

  This may not be fatal as long as we have enough money, men, and material to operate on a wide and wasteful margin, but as that day passes we will be confronted with the responsibility of making only accurate decisions—or else. In that situation we want to weigh and act in the light of every scrap of information we can secure.

  In shaping up the COI, Donovan, according to writer Jay Robert Nash, “was everything that Hoover was not. He hated bureaucracy. The chronic paper shuffling, memoranda, and tedious documentation that were a part of all government work bored and enraged him. Donovan preferred to give his orders verbally. He was a conversationalist.”

  According to Jim Murphy, in those early days of the COI Donovan never even glanced at an organizational chart. For several months he and his staff worked without budget or finance of any kind. There was not even a payroll officer, and nobody got paid. “We thought we’d eventually get our back pay,” Murphy remembered after the war, “but most of us never did.”

  The Bureau of the Budget had first estimated that the COI would be able to get along on an annual budget of $1,454,700. The money was to be taken from the President’s Emergency Fund of $100 million. Budget Director Harold D. Smith provided $450,000 for Donovan on July 21 to get the COI started. In the light of COI’s clandestine role, the funds were to be unvouchered. This did not mean that Donovan did not insist on strict accounting.

  “I may not have to account,” he told William Langer when Langer became director of the Research and Analysis branch. “Everybody thinks the COI is wonderful. But once the war is over, there will be criticism, there will be inquiries, and I want every penny accounted for.” He brought in the head of a big insurance company to oversee all the finances.

  Despite Donovan’s careful accounting procedures, the budget people were resentful. Budget Director Smith’s resentment mounted when, in September, Donovan put in a request for $10 million for the first year’s operation. From the start he had no intention of operating a small agency confined to sifting through other agencies’ reports and correlating them for the President. Week by week the COI grew at a pace that astounded the intelligence services of both friendly and hostile nations.

  Roosevelt had written to Donovan on July 23, “In your capacity as Coordinator of Information, which position I established by Order of July 11, 1941, you will receive no compensation, but shall be entitled to actual and necessary transportation, subsistence, and other expenses incidental to the performance of your duties.” Until April 1942, when he was named a brigadier general, Donovan drew no pay. When Roosevelt asked him to submit an expense account, he asked for $1,000. The Treasury told him he had to itemize the account, and Donovan withdrew it, never to submit it again.

  On May 20, Roosevelt had set up the Office of Civilian Defense (OCD). One of its purposes was to maintain domestic morale and disseminate information to the nation. Now his advisers suggested
that the new COI might impinge upon the functions of the OCD; therefore, on July 14 Roosevelt directed that the OCD confine its morale functions within the United States while the COI was to undertake the responsibility for international broadcasts.

  The first of the COI overseas broadcasts took place on July 14, only three days after the agency was established. Fernard Gustave Auberjonois, the chief of the National Broadcasting Company’s French division, presented a program on the anniversary of the storming of the Bastille. The program opened with the pealing of Philadelphia’s Liberty Bell and the playing of “La Marseillaise” and featured addresses by William J. Donovan and actor Charles Boyer. Over the next few months COI experts under Sherwood and Donovan created a special program service to be beamed across the Atlantic by the radio broadcasting companies’ overseas transmitters.

  “The COI,” said Washington Star writer Blair Bolles, “is the seat of the American radio-propaganda drive for the airwave invasion of Europe. It arranges broadcasts to South America for offsetting the Axis propaganda barrage against that part of the world. It directs psychological inquiries into the inner meanings of German shortwave broadcasts.”

  German propaganda broadcasts quickly took up the challenge from the COI. The spokeswoman “Jane Anderson” announced:

  Roosevelt has made the innovation of harnessing the American Secret Service to propagandists under a renegade Irishman named Donovan, who prepared for his job by visiting a chain of embassies and the nightclubs of the Balkans.

  Highly remunerative experts prepare for the White House each day a report distilled upon the short-wave stations of the universe and from this compilation the Donovan radio is fed so that the larvae lies for the perjuring of world opinion is vomited further from the entrails of this mechanized machine in an avalanche of hatred and vituperation to which Dante might have dedicated with fervor a choice spot in his immortalization of the hell pits of the earth.

  Once the COI was launched, a series of Wednesday lunches was held in the Round Table Room at the Library of Congress. COI men from the Apex Building and the Library of Congress annex met and discussed the intelligence questions that Donovan put to them. During the early days of the COI, the Willard Hotel was the after-hours hangout of Donovan’s men and women, and Donovan and MacLeish often met there for lunch. With the German war machine slashing deep into the Soviet Ukraine, it was critical that they determine what routes could be used for delivering Lend-Lease aid to Russia. This became one of the first urgent assignments handed to Research and Analysis (R&A).

  “The high-level decision had been made, but how and over what terrain (in addition to the sea route to Murmansk) was this possible?” remembered Henry Field.

  Professor Gerald T. Robinson (Columbia University) was given the R&A assignment. After two day and night sessions, the report was ready for typing. The maximum security precautions were arranged. Each typist copied every third page to prevent continuity of copy. Every desk was four feet apart to prevent even far-sighted reading. Four armed Marines stood guard pacing up and down and across each line of desks. Two Marines collected carbons and recopied pages for the Marine-guarded incinerator. No typist could bring a handbag into the room. Sandwiches and coffee were brought in at noon. A police matron accompanied any typist to and from the washroom. Maximum security prevailed.

  About 12:30 Professor Robinson left for luncheon. Walking down the slope toward “Q” Building, the Professor was in an elated frame of mind. The report would be finished in a couple of hours. As he walked in the sunshine, he swung his tightly rolled umbrella.

  Suddenly, he noticed [on the ground] fragments of paper, all torn, some charred, some partially burned. When he pierced a torn fragment with his umbrella, Professor Robinson was horrified to find it was a piece of his precious report. Security had been perfect except for the unscreened chimney above the incinerator. An updraft had carried hundreds of pieces skyward to fall on the bushes and ground. . . .

  The professor ran back to the South Building. Marines were rushed to throw a cordon around the area and to pick up every fragment.

  At about the same time that Donovan directed R&A to study routes to Russia, he asked Roosevelt what he considered the most necessary intelligence. The President replied that it was critical to know the intentions of the Japanese in Indochina and Thailand. Donovan began at once searching for an American scholar who was an expert on Southeast Asia. When Archibald MacLeish, Mortimer Graves of the Council of American Learned Societies, and informants at the University of Pennsylvania, and at Yale, Harvard, Princeton, and Chicago each suggested the name Kenneth Landon, Donovan set about locating Landon.

  Kenneth Landon then was a professor of philosophy at Earlham College in Indiana. That July he was vacationing with his wife and children at Gull Lake in Michigan.

  “I received a message that I should go to the country store,” recalled Landon, whose wife, Margaret, wrote Anna and the King of Siam. “There was a call from Washington.” Landon went to the phone, and a voice at the other end identified the caller as Donovan. “I’d never heard of him,” said Landon. “He said the President wanted me in Washington right away. It was about a three weeks’ job. When Donovan announced that I would be paid $15 a day or $50 a day, I don’t know which, since it was a bad connection, I decided to go. Both amounts were much more than a professor at Earlham earned.”

  Landon left his wife and children at the lake and took the train to Washington, where he checked into COI’s offices in the Apex Building. “There was the receptionist, two secretaries and me,” he remembers. “The next day I went to the office, and when I swung open the door, it hit somebody. It was a tall young man.”

  “Good morning, sir,” the young man said. “My father sent me over to see whether I can help out.”

  It was Capt. James Roosevelt. Donovan had put him to work probing other government agencies for facts required for COI reports. Most of the agencies were touchy about giving out information, but when the President’s son inquired, their touchiness vanished. Young Roosevelt used his clout with the White House staff too. When, on July 23, he telephoned the White House to ask Maj. Gen. Edwin M. Watson, FDR’s appointments secretary, about a letter that “Colonel Donovan had written to the President, suggesting returning our consuls from Germany and Italy,” he was given the information he needed.

  At COI headquarters Donovan briefed Kenneth Landon as to the vital importance of information about Southeast Asia. Landon was handed the key to a cabinet that was labeled “Southeast Asia Intelligence.” He opened the first three drawers and found them empty. The fourth drawer contained an envelope marked top secret. He opened the envelope with some trepidation and discovered inside two articles, both of which he had written. At that point he fully understood the staggering dimensions of his new job.

  In August the COI chief decided it was important to know what the Japanese were planning. Donovan knew that Hitler wanted Japan to join the war, and he had received alarming information through Japanese connections that dated back to his mission to Siberia in 1919. Donovan asked Edgar Ansel Mowrer to go to the Orient as soon as possible. Mowrer would presumably be writing articles for the Chicago Daily News, but actually he was to learn everything he could about Japan’s intentions.

  “My job was to cover what we would now call Main Beat,” Mowrer said after the war. “I intended to get to Tokyo at the end. I went to the Philippines, to Saigon, Hanoi, Batavia [Djakarta], Singapore, Bangkok, Rangoon, over the Hump by air to Kunming up to Chungking.”

  Mowrer’s next stop was Hong Kong. “This was three weeks before Pearl Harbor, and I sniffed the air and said to myself, ‘I’m not going to Tokyo.’” Instead he went to Manila, where he had an interview with General MacArthur. In MacArthur’s office he met an American businessman. About nine o’clock that evening, as Mowrer was returning to the Hotel Manila from dinner, he met the same man in the lobby. Mowrer attempted to brush past him to the elevators.

  “Come over and have a drink
,” the businessman called.

  “No, I don’t think I will,” replied Mowrer. “I am going to try to get a couple of hours of sleep. I have to get up at 1:00 or 2:00 A.M. or some such ghastly time. I am going to get a plane.”

  “Well, don’t do that. You can sleep on the plane anyway. Please sit down. I want to talk to somebody.”

  Mowrer thought this curious and sat down.

  “You know, I want you to do me a favor when you are in San Francisco. Call up my daughter and tell her I love her. You see, I shall never see my daughter again.”

  “Why not?” asked Mowrer.

  “You know, the war is coming,” said the businessman. “The Japanese fleet, so help me God, has gone sailing east. I think they are going to attack us, and if they do they will certainly occupy the Philippines; and we will all be taken prisoner, and I have a hunch I will never see my daughter again.”

  Mowrer had questioned scores of experts on Japan, including General MacArthur, during his trip, and this man was the only person who anticipated an attack on the United States. On the flight home Mowrer stopped off in Hawaii, where he called on Adm. Husband Kimmel, commander of the Pacific fleet.

  “I told Admiral Kimmel what this man had told me, and he pooh-poohed it,” said Mowrer.

  Back in Washington Mowrer met with army brass, whom Donovan had called into conference at COI headquarters, to report what he had learned. He told the officers that most of the people he had seen thought “that the Japs were going to do something soon. . . . Most believed that they were going to attack Russia, whereas a few believed they were going to attack south, the Dutch Indies and Singapore; but [I told them] that I had met this one freak who had said what they were going to do; and I remember afterwards that [the army officers] sort of looked at each other knowingly.” Mowrer made a written report of his trip, finishing it in November. Washington officials who saw it gave little credence to the fears of a businessman whose main concern was to send a message to his daughter.