“This piecing together and appraisal of strategic information is the most ambitious and expert intelligence operation of its kind of which there is any knowledge,” reported Wallace R. Deuel. “It is General Donovan’s—and his agency’s—first and most important contribution to the theory and practice of strategic intelligence operations.”
During World War I, Langer had been a Marine sergeant. The experience, said Henry Field, “gave him the ruthless quality necessary to whip together in short order a working team of prima donnas used to the tranquillity of their ivy-covered towers. . . . In COI four distinguished professors might find themselves in a small room, each ordered to complete a different report within a few hours and forced to type [the reports] themselves. Many quit under the pressure. In time the results were superb. The shakedown cruise lasted but a few weeks. Those indisposed returned home. The rest became a great team, inspired by Langer and super-inspired by Colonel Donovan.”
Walter Langer was as distinguished a psychoanalyst as his brother William was a historian. In August 1941, convalescing from a double hernia operation in a hospital and thoroughly bored, Walter read in a newspaper of the new COI, one of whose functions was to organize and conduct psychological warfare. “It was the psychological warfare part that caught my attention,” Langer wrote later. “I had never concerned myself with the problem of psychological warfare, but I had served overseas during World War I and had been far from impressed with our blatant psychological warfare endeavors. Psychological warfare, it seemed to me, should be much more than a constant repetition of fabricated atrocity stories which are designed to prove that the enemy were all ‘bad guys’ who had to be eliminated so we ‘good guys’ could live in peace.”
Langer launched a tirade at his wife, who finally said, “Why tell me about it? Tell Colonel Donovan!”
So, on the spur of the moment, I dictated a letter to Colonel Donovan covering the range of topics I had been mulling over. Then, having disgorged my sentiments on the subject, I felt that I had done my duty, and the rest was up to him.
My evaluation of the situation proved to be completely erroneous. Scarcely had I returned to my home and begun to “toddle” when I received a call from Washington informing me that Colonel Donovan was very much interested in my views and inviting me to have breakfast with him a week hence. I was flabbergasted both by the invitation and his interest in what I had written. Taken off guard, I accepted, without stopping to consider my physical condition. When I informed my doctor of what had happened, he insisted that I was in no condition to make the trip and urged a postponement. I was adamant, however. I had inadvertently put myself out on a limb and the least I could do now was to follow through as best I could. With great reluctance, he finally consented to the trip, providing I observed a number of restrictions.
I arrived at the Donovan home at the appointed hour, and during a delicious breakfast that lasted almost two hours, we discussed many of the points I raised in my letter. I was pleasantly surprised to find that the colonel was well versed in psychoanalytic theory and much impressed with the possibility of making use of it in a psychological warfare program. This, of course, made it much simpler for me to explain what I had in mind. The discussion, consequently, progressed from generalities to more specific topics and finally the morale of our young men.
The enthusiasm that preceded our entry into World War I was clearly absent. Across the nation there were more and more rallies and demonstrations condemning the war in general and, more specifically, our possible involvement in it. Many of the sentiments that became so vocal and violent in the late 1960’s were smoldering at that time. Why this drastic change in attitude? How would the young men who would be called upon to fight respond if this country were drawn into the war?
“What light could psychoanalysis shed on these pressing problems?” Colonel Donovan asked. “And how would you go about getting it?” . . .
I replied, “I have had several patients, mostly college students, in whom this antiwar attitude was manifest and I am sure that every other analyst in this country has had some experience with cases of this type.” [Langer proposed enlisting the aid of psychoanalysts across the country to make a study of the psychological factors underlying these attitudes.]
“That sounds very interesting,” replied Colonel Donovan, “but since all of these patients are presumably neurotic, it would throw little light on the psychology of the normal young men of this age. What we want to know is how the cross section of young men would react in the event of a draft.”
“I think you will find, Colonel,” I answered, “that the neurotics in any culture at a given time are not different from the average in kind, but in degree. The cultural pressures have had, for one reason or another, a more telling effect on them than they have had on the average. If this is true, the neurotic presents us with a magnified picture of what is going on in the culture and affords us the opportunity of exploring in detail the underlying factors that are involved.”
“Very good,” replied Colonel Donovan. “How soon can you come to Washington and get the project under way?”
Within a month study groups were functioning across the nation. The study provided a fascinating insight into the young men of America in 1941, but it was outmoded when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor and changed the social and political climate of the nation in one short hour of violence.
Millard Preston Goodfellow, World War I war correspondent and later president and publisher of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle and the Pocatello (Idaho) Tribune, had served as a volunteer with the Boys’ Clubs of America for more than 40 years. He had become a senior director. Late that summer of 1941, his old friend Bill Donovan asked him to come to Washington and help with Donovan’s shadowy COI. Goodfellow played an unaccustomed role for a Boys’ Clubs director. He was made deputy director of special activities. Donovan coined the name Special Activities Goodfellow to differentiate that group from Special Activities Bruce, which was headed by David Bruce. Bruce was to concern himself with intelligence, and Goodfellow was to be in charge of clandestine warfare and sabotage. Bruce, who eventually became one of America’s most distinguished diplomats, later wrote about the COI and the OSS:
[Donovan’s] mandate was almost unlimited in the field of clandestine activities. Nor did any chief ever as readily respond to such a challenge. Something had to knit together beings so disparate, recruited for tasks so indefinite. The polarization came from one individual—Donovan. In the midst of the gravest preoccupations, with a task so comprehensive as, at times, to appall his subordinates, the general remained unruffled, calm to deal with the exigencies of worldwide covert operations, but able to turn what seemed an equal concentration on the marital, or extramarital problems, the health or illness, the financial tribulations or any other concerns of those who worked for him.
Around the world Donovan’s “moles,” recruited over the years on his countless trips abroad, began to report to the Secret Intelligence branch. On August 6, he outlined to the Bureau of the Budget his plans for peacetime and wartime operations. While America was still at peace, Donovan’s agents would go about their missions in the Axis countries of Germany, Italy, and Japan, and would make intelligence use of “strategic listening points” at Lisbon, Stockholm, Geneva, and Shanghai. His counterintelligence agents, to be called X-2, would function in the United States, South America, and neutral Europe, and also in the Soviet Union and the United Kingdom.
When the COI first began to submit reports to the President, Donovan announced that he wanted to read everything. By the time the OSS had completed its wartime work, even the speed-reading Donovan would have had to spend eight hours a day, six days a week for 16½ years to read the reports his agents and researchers had assembled. Donovan’s reports to the President alone, which are contained among the Roosevelt papers at Hyde Park, total 7,500 pages. They all begin, “My Dear Mr. President,” and they all are signed, “Bill.”
25
COI Sets Up S
hop
THE PRUSSIAN GENERAL and military writer Friedrich von Bernhardi defined intelligence as “unmasking the enemy’s intent.”
“It is more than that,” said William J. Donovan, writing in Life magazine. “In this imperfect world, as yet ruled by power and swept by passion and ambition, a nation’s foreign policy is successful only to the extent that it is conditioned at all times by the true intent of its enemies and friends. If the purpose of a potential enemy is unmasked in time, the war may be averted. If we Americans, for example, know and are able to evaluate properly the comparative resources, production, manpower, and political outlook of a neighbor, we should be able to measure the friendship or enmity of that neighbor. If we know the true state of morale of our allies and the structure of their economies, we can plan our own security with confidence.”
When he established the COI, President Roosevelt had announced that “Mr. Donovan’s task will be to coordinate and correlate defense information, but his work is not intended to supersede or to duplicate or to involve any direction of or interference with the activities of the General Staff, the regular intelligence services, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, or of other existing departments and agencies.”
“Having stated what Colonel Donovan is not,” said Blair Bolles in the October 5, 1941, Washington Star, “the White House has never bothered since then to state what Colonel Donovan is.”
Even before the COI was officially announced, Donovan forwarded the first of his top-secret reports to the White House for the President’s eyes only. From the start, he sent these reports by messenger to Grace Tully, FDR’s secretary, and she saw to it that they were handed to the President. Donovan’s approach was first to create a flow of information from R&A to the President and other top officers of the government, and then to concentrate on collecting and analyzing secret intelligence. Still, some of the earliest dispatches came from secret agents in the field.
Donovan believed that a man was not completely an intelligence officer until he had been behind enemy lines. “Gentlemen, have you ever been behind enemy lines?” he would sometimes ask a group of staff members who were assessing a sheaf of intelligence reports.
“You can find out anything you want to know about anybody in the world if you really want to,” Donovan was fond of saying, and he meant what he said. He also believed that an intelligence organization must not be bound by the laws of probability, but instead by the laws of improbability. “This is no place for a guy bound by the law of averages,” he told federal judge Hubert Will, one of his aides. “The unlooked-for, even antic event must be anticipated and understood just as quickly and deeply as the expected, rational event. We must be governed as much by inspired illogic as logic.”
To Donovan, intelligence was truly believable only if it could be corroborated by a number of sources. Then it could be seen from more than one viewpoint and given proper perspective.
Mussolini scoffed at Donovan’s fledgling COI. “The Americans have the best intelligence system in the world,” he said, “because nobody has been able to discover it.”
Even as Mussolini was making his quip, Donovan’s agents were infiltrating his government. One of Donovan’s first informants on Italian affairs, during the summer of 1941, was Count Carlo Sforza, an anti-Fascist statesman who had left Italy in 1929 to oppose Mussolini from voluntary exile. Sforza came to the United States in 1940. Donovan went to see the count in his home at 131 East 93rd Street in New York from time to time to obtain the latest secret information from Italy. Franklin Roosevelt, who had a fine appetite for intrigue, had made the initial contact with Sforza and introduced Donovan to him.
Sforza felt it was the duty of every Italian patriot to fight Hitler and to free Italy from the rule of his accomplice Mussolini. Sforza cooperated with Donovan’s COI, and his friends in Italy became Donovan’s agents. Because the count was a leading member of one of his nation’s proudest and oldest aristocratic families, he knew men who were high in Italian government, the professions, and commerce. Added to these people were Donovan’s own high-ranking friends in Italy, many of whom he had come to know during the Italian invasion of Ethiopia. These were people who secretly opposed the brutal attack on Haile Selassie’s virtually defenseless kingdom and who considered that the only honorable future for their country depended upon the defeat of Mussolini and his removal from office.
The intelligence services of the U.S. Army and U.S. Navy became part of Donovan’s sources. “The United States has never been quite so innocent as it has sometimes pretended to be about spies,” commented White House correspondent Jonathan Daniels. “Before World War II we had sent out some very zealous naval and military attachés, some of whom, fortunately, had done more than watch military parades and attend Embassy teas in full uniform. But when war came and Donovan began to train his men for the wonderful jobs some of them did in dangerous territory, the discovery was suddenly made that what spies got in danger was no more important than information we had collected—or should have collected—before the fighting began.”
Donovan fumed at the shortcomings of armed forces and State Department information, but he made the best of it. “The armed services had never devoted any considerable attention to political, economic, and psychological problems,” reported a Donovan aide, Wallace R. Deuel.
They were primarily interested in information about the armed forces of other countries. Yet these other types of information were now urgently needed. They could only be gathered and appraised by the most highly qualified experts. The armed forces did not have enough of such experts, nor could they recruit them.
Moreover, the ideals and traditions of the services were marked by a directness of thought and conduct that were ill suited for some of the most important of all intelligence operations. A certain number of professional officers, in fact, looked down on irregular undercover warfare as a dirty business altogether unbecoming an officer and a gentleman.
Much of the intelligence the United States had been receiving from military and naval attachés also ceased by autumn 1941. “After Europe was overrun by the enemy,” said Donovan, “our State Department found itself cut off from most sources of information and dependent largely upon what friendly governments chose to provide. We had only the intelligence gathered by other arms. We had no way of telling when information was planted or where rumor originated.”
At least the State Department was cooperative with the COI. “Sumner Welles was then under secretary of state, Roosevelt’s closest contact in Cordell Hull’s rather inert State Department,” recalled Ray S. Cline, who served Donovan faithfully throughout the COI’s period of mushrooming growth, “and he undertook to work in reasonable harmony with COI and later with OSS. He reached an understanding with Donovan, on August 10, 1941, conceding to the new agency responsibility for the collection of economic information and other related data overseas and levying on it requirement for reports and studies on foreign countries of foreign policy interest. The coverage was not to include Latin America, where not only J. Edgar Hoover but also Nelson Rockefeller, Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs, were already active.”
Donovan, the master spy, particularly valued the critical intelligence being provided during the summer of 1941 by William Stephenson, a close personal friend and the principal agent in North America of America’s closest ally. As a confidential OSS paper indicated, in July 1941 “arrangements were made by Mr. Stephenson to provide the General [Donovan] with a regular flow of secret information from sources available to his own organization, including highly confidential British censorship material not normally circulated outside British government departments.”
On August 9 Stephenson reported to London that Donovan’s office was already functioning. He set up a Washington branch of the British Security Coordinator (BSC) to keep in constant touch with the COI, and Donovan set up a COI office in New York to keep in close touch with the BSC. Donovan established other offices in New York too. The Foreign Information
Service (FIS) opened at 270 Madison Avenue on August 1, staffed with journalists and radio broadcasters under Robert Sherwood’s direction. The FIS produced special programs that were beamed overseas by American broadcasting companies and relayed by BBC transmitters. The Foreign Broadcast Monitoring Service was soon transcribing Nazi propaganda transmissions and hurrying them to Sherwood’s staff. The FIS was able to put its response on the air before Goebbels’s propaganda had a chance to sink in.
Reports reaching the COI from both covert and open sources were employed in preparing the broadcasts. “The facts go first to the President and heads of departments,” journalist Thomas M. Johnson reported. “Then such of them as are not too secret go into the second barrel of Donovan’s double-barreled job, are let out over the world in the best way to aid democracy and injure dictatorship. In such a cause are needed devotion, a touch of ardent imagination, with the fundamental, the unvarnished truth. For though the bursting charge be propaganda, it must be propaganda in the true and American sense of that much misunderstood word, which really means not lies and distortion but the propagation of the faith.”
James L. Wright, writing in the Buffalo Evening News, summed up Donovan’s concept of the role of the FIS: “Just as Nazism seeks to undermine each country before it physically attacks it, so in Col. Donovan’s judgment, the Allies must confront Nazism with a psychological offensive of their own. He believes that can be made to reach the Rhine and beyond, that there can be a constant hammering of Adolf Hitler’s home front.”
Donovan Page 43
