Donovan

by Richard Dunlop

  Ned Buxton and Bill Donovan had also struck upon the idea of debriefing refugees from Europe as they arrived in New York, and on August 25, a small Oral Intelligence unit began operations in Manhattan.

  In August Donovan asked Stephenson to make available to his staff “the services of experienced officers of his own organization to assist in laying down the framework of the COI headquarters and field establishment.” Donovan’s calendar of appointments and telephone calls from August 18 to America’s entry into the war shows that the two men were in touch on 36 occasions. The British assistance proved invaluable as, according to OSS man Carleton Coon, the Harvard anthropologist, Donovan modeled the OSS on the British SOE, which, just two years before, Colin Gubbins had in turn modeled on the Irish Republican Army.

  After the war Stephenson remarked, “If Donovan had not been able to rely upon BSC assistance, his organization could not have survived. Indeed, it is a fact that, before he had his own operational machinery in working order, which was not until several months after Pearl Harbor, he was entirely dependent on it.” Stephenson claimed too much for British support during the early days of COI, but there is no denying that without the assistance of British intelligence, the COI would have found its growth more tortuous and much slower.

  British intelligence might be cooperative, but Donovan found that the British Foreign Office could be just as prickly as the U.S. Department of State. “In relation to shipping equipment to the U.S.S.R.,” remembered Henry Field,

  the question came up about road conditions and capacities across Afghanistan. Since this was considered a “British sphere of influence,” General Donovan requested the latest handbook or handbooks. He was sent a series, obviously out of date, with the statement that these were the latest available. I could not believe this. COI, London, reported the same lack of detailed information.

  Just at this time General Donovan asked me to brief Mr. Mauran from Providence, who was leaving shortly for Cairo. I suggested that Mr. Mauran try to obtain the code numbers of any British handbooks on the Near East while in Cairo. He returned to Washington in about three weeks with a splendid list, including Afghanistan. Donovan then requested the latter by number from London. The cabled answer said that this handbook and others were available to COI in the British Mission on nearby Pennsylvania Avenue. Here, upon request by number, I was given the Afghanistan handbook. The keeper of this safe had been instructed not to release a handbook to anyone without the correct number. In this large safe lay many important documents now available to COI through Mr. Mauran’s research in Cairo. Mr. Mauran, who died very shortly thereafter from a virus picked up in Egypt, rendered special service.

  The pulling and pushing between the FBI, the ONI, G-2, the State Department, and the COI over the gathering of intelligence continued unabated.

  “FDR’s way of operating Washington was like a boxing free-for-all,” observed Turner McBaine. “Put a bunch of pugilists in the ring and let them slug it out. The winner was the last guy left standing. Donovan flourished in this environment. He rose to the top and became the confidant of FDR.”

  While the bureaucratic battle of Washington raged over the form and substance of American intelligence, the British agent Bickham Sweet-Escott, in London, received a message from Bill Stephenson in New York that “it was going to be a long time before Donovan’s position in Washington was clearly defined.” Sweet-Escott wrote after the war: “The American system of government at this point was well described by an American friend of mine, who used to say of it that ‘there is a lot of noise on the stairs but it is a long time before anyone comes down.’ It was a system which encouraged Great Debates about American secret activities.”

  Atherton Richards once remarked, “Bill Donovan’s method of running an organization is like pouring molasses from a barrel onto the table. It will ooze in every direction, but eventually he’ll make it into some sort of pattern.”

  The pattern was not always obvious to the naval commander who found himself countermanded by a corporal, since Donovan delegated authority based on ability and not rank. Nor was it evident to William Langer, who went to Washington to head R&A and found another man in his spot. “He can be the director, and you can be the chief,” Donovan said.

  As did Roosevelt, Donovan often appointed men with overlapping authority and let them compete to get the job done. He assigned unimaginative aides to watch over his woolliest idea men. “A man with a plan for a bomb that he is going to steer to its target with his feet should be put to work,” he said, “but somebody has to keep an eye on him.”

  Donovan, by his own admission never much of an organization man, refused to respect the table of organization and the chain of command established by his aides. His executives, recalled one aide, “would walk into Donovan’s office with dozens of charts, charts for the budget, charts for the administration, charts for the various divisions. Donovan would glance at them, smile at them, approve them with a mild wave of the hand, and then he would have another idea, and he would forget them completely.” Since many of his top aides were either corporate attorneys or executives, they struck upon the notion of organizing the COI as a holding company. Donovan burst out laughing at the very idea. He much preferred to run affairs on a person-to-person basis. The kind of organization that emerged sometimes seemed to be no organization at all, but it proved amazingly practical in the world of espionage and subversion. At the same time Donovan was a stickler for security.

  “At the first organization meeting which I attended Colonel Donovan laid down a few basic security regulations,” recalled Henry Field.

  Since very few of us had any security training, each of us was to work as a small cell, communicating any details of our work within COI to the fewest possible number of people. Only the Director, Ned Buxton, and a few administrators would be kept informed of progress. The minimum of interoffice discussion was to be allowed.

  The first team of U.S. specialists in all fields was to be assembled in COI. Permission must be granted to discuss any project with anyone outside each individual cell. However, with the assemblage of such a staff, almost any question could be answered. For example, specialists on geography, geology, anthropology, oceanography, meteorology, politics, history, photography, and photo-interpretation were immediately available or could be brought to Washington for immediate consultation.

  In conclusion Colonel Donovan emphasized the fact that since COI was to become the key intelligence organization for the President, foreign spies must be expected to infiltrate. He added that the best he could expect with FBI clearance and all possible unusual precautions, would be at least one brilliant spy per five hundred personnel—hence the cellular structure. Any unusual questions asked by a member of COI staff must be reported at once to the Security Division. Hence I never knew what my neighbors were doing; I presume this was mutual. Security officers mixed with the staff in eating places nearby, often encouraging indiscreet talk. On three occasions I reported questioners, two of whom turned out to be security officers. As far as I know my cell members never broke security, a tribute to their loyalty and FBI and COI clearance.

  By September, Donovan’s COI was making striking progress in secret intelligence. General Miles of G-2, who had opposed Donovan in order to protect his own clandestine intelligence operations, now changed his mind. On September 5, he wrote to General Marshall:

  The military and naval intelligence services have gone into the field of undercover intelligence to a limited extent. In view of the appointment of the Coordinator of Information and the work which it is understood the President desires him to undertake, it is believed that the undercover intelligence of the two services should be consolidated under the Coordinator of Information. The reasons for this are that an undercover intelligence service is much more effective if under one head rather than three and that a civilian agency, such as the Coordinator of Information, has distinct advantages over any military or naval agency in the administration of such a se
rvice.

  The navy held out a little longer. Wallace B. Phillips, who commanded a Naval Intelligence unit in New York City, at first refused to turn over his operation to the COI. When Donovan implied that he might inform the President of the navy’s reluctance to close up shop, Alan G. Kirk, now an admiral and chief of Naval Intelligence, decided to give in too. On October 10, Donovan was able to tell Roosevelt that, with the approval of the secretaries of war and the navy and the joint action of G-2 and ONI, “there was consolidated under the COI the undercover intelligence of the two services.”

  The FBI still remained hostile toward the COI. “The Abwehr gets better treatment from the FBI than we do,” Donovan remarked to Allen Dulles.

  There was no question in Donovan’s mind that the United States was coming closer and closer to war. “One morning in late September, Donovan summoned me to his office,” said Kermit Roosevelt. “Pearl Harbor was still three months away, but he was absolutely certain that somehow we would be drawn into war. I shared his feeling.”

  As Roosevelt was leaving, Donovan called him back. “Kim,” he asked, “what do you think of happenings in Iran? That’s going to be an important part of the world for us.” Roosevelt recalled what occurred next:

  At that point, I must admit, I had very little to contribute on Iran. I knew roughly where it was but little more. So I said, safely but noncommittally, that “it looks serious.” That was satisfactory for the moment. As soon as I was out of his office, I looked up Iran in an atlas and an encyclopedia. Thereafter I kept myself better informed.

  One thing I did immediately after the Donovan interrogation; in addition to consulting the atlas and encyclopedia, I visited a colleague at the Library of Congress. Ralph Bunche, later under secretary general of the United Nations, was already doing research work for the COI, and was well able to answer my questions.

  Ralph was a quiet, studious-looking black gentleman who received me with appropriate gravity.

  “Kim,” he began, “I take it I’m to start from scratch.”

  Roosevelt nodded, and Bunche gave him an erudite lecture emphasizing, as Roosevelt remembered, the point, “Don’t ever confuse Iranians with the Arabs. They don’t like it.”

  When new recruits reported to the COI, they often looked forward to their first meeting with the director with considerable trepidation. The reputation of Wild Bill Donovan, dauntless hero of World War I, prepared them for a formidable, perhaps even violent individual. “I’m afraid I disappoint people,” Donovan confided to the writer Thomas M. Johnson, “for really, my ideal isn’t ‘Wild Bill’ but another Irish character called ‘the real McCoy.’ I prefer facts to fireworks.”

  The truth of the matter is that Donovan also had a penchant for fireworks, and by August he was already planning to organize operational groups to fight guerrilla warfare.

  “I took Bill Donovan to lunch with me at Woodley,” Henry L. Stimson wrote in his diary on August 13, “and had a good talk with him about his proposed guerrillas: I think there is a good deal in this proposition, because we are likely to need that kind of fighting in any South American jungle country that we may have to go into to prevent the Germans from getting a foothold.”

  COI reports indicated that German agents were infiltrating both Brazil and Argentina and that Allied defeat in Europe would inevitably lead to trouble in South America. Donovan was equally concerned in August about Japanese movements in the Orient. On August 16, T. V. Soong, Chinese minister of foreign affairs, came to see him, to explain China’s grim situation. Soong hoped that Donovan would use his influence with the President to obtain fighter aircraft for China. Soong described the overwhelming air assault the Japanese were making on Chungking, China’s wartime capital.

  Without planes the Chinese could not fight off the bombers over the city or exact retribution by bombing the bases from which the raiders came. “It is perfectly clear,” Soong told Donovan, “that the purpose of this bombing is to finish the ‘China Incident’ before Japan moves in other directions—by demonstrating to the people of China the difference between reality and hopes of the last fourteen months that American assistance would be effective.”

  Soong noted that, in light of deliveries of aircraft being made to Russia, the Chinese felt their resistance was “just a pawn in the calculations of other democratic powers. Japan is being furnished the materials with which to destroy us in order to relieve the British from attack in the south and maybe even the Russians from attack in the north.

  “Remember, Colonel,” concluded Soong, “that we have proved that we can fight longer than any other people who are fighting on the democratic side—that given the arms we can really finish the job. We have stuck for five years. Please help us stick now.”

  Donovan assigned James Roosevelt to urge the Chinese case with such Roosevelt aides as Harry L. Hopkins, and he reported to the President in detail.

  In the meantime the structuring of the COI continued. The first meeting of the Board of Analysts was held at 2:40 P.M. on September 10 in James Phinney Baxter’s office. Plans were discussed for two large rooms “open only to the President, the Cabinet, Colonel Donovan, and the Board of Analysts.” One room was to hold a strategic map of the world, depicting the American defense posture; the other would contain graphic charts “portraying aspects of national defense.”

  “Mr. Baxter reported,” said the minutes of the meeting, “that Colonel Donovan has noted that any secret agents sent into the field by us must be given in advance the most careful set of instructions.”

  The board dealt with such mundane problems as the routing of top-secret material and the decisions that “Secret material will be placed each night in the central safe, which will be time locked.” The projects already under way included: “(1) a general picture of the situation in regard to Japan; (2) a study of our exposed flank in South America, in case we should be drawn into the war; (3) a study of our exposed flank in West Africa; (4) a study of the strategic distribution of Russian war industries.”

  The meeting adjourned at 3:55 P.M. after deciding that from then on the staff would meet daily at 9:30 A.M.

  Donovan continued his recruiting. On September 11, John Ford, 46 years old and at the height of his career as one of Hollywood’s most talented directors, finished a film, How Green Was My Valley, and left for Washington on the Union Pacific streamliner, ostensibly to join the U.S. Navy. When he reached Washington, Ford checked into the Carlton Hotel where, for the next four years, room 501 was to be his home.

  “It was a tiny broom closet of a room,” he reminisced, but this scarcely mattered. Ford, in the words of his grandson Don, “had been scooped up, not by the navy but by one of the most dynamic, mysterious, and visionary men in the first half of the 20th century—William J. ‘Wild Bill’ Donovan.” Ford was to organize the Field Photographic branch, and he immediately sent for some of the top cameramen in Hollywood. They set up quarters and a mess and established their shop in the South Building at 25th and E. The laboratory and studio were in the basement.

  Ford was to report directly to Donovan. He came back from a meeting with the COI director and told his crew, “We’re going to be involved in a hell of a lot more than photography.”

  Their first assignment was to make a film report on the condition of the U.S. Atlantic fleet, which was escorting convoys from the United States to Iceland. On October 21, Ray Kellogg left for Iceland by boat to shoot the documentary. When the film was finished Donovan screened it for the President as a new type of intelligence report.

  Autumn 1941 was a seminal period for the COI. Donovan arranged with the Council on Foreign Relations in New York to consider questions of national import, which he would from time to time pose, and he talked with lawyer-diplomat John Foster Dulles about organizing “a group to study and make suggestions with reference to various phases of the international situation.” He persuaded the adventurous members of the Explorers Club in New York to contribute information garnered on their expeditions t
o odd corners of the world, any one of which could become a cockpit of war.

  In 1940 Donovan had engaged the Arctic explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson as an adviser on a proposed development of oil in the province of Alberta along the Athabasca, Slave, and Mackenzie rivers. The entire project depended upon the construction of an oil pipeline, and Donovan had attempted to get Roosevelt’s approval of the undertaking, which he was confident would greatly strengthen America’s military position. On October 28, 1941, Donovan wrote to Stefansson: “I would like very much to discuss with you the possibility of the establishment of a center of Arctic studies. It does seem to me that in connection with my task it would be most desirable to have, in one place, geographical and meteorological information bearing on the Far North.”

  Stefansson, who had sizable research facilities at his disposal, readily agreed to cooperate, and Donovan went to New York to work out the plans. He was convinced that the Arctic would play a signal role in the war with Germany. If military aid was to be carried safely to the Russians at Murmansk, Allied shipping in the North Atlantic would have to follow the Arctic pack ice to stay as far as possible from German submarines and bombers based in Norway.

  From Donovan’s point of view, probably the most valuable part of Stefansson’s studies would relate to Japan, not Germany. When Hitler and Stalin signed the Nazi-Soviet Pact in August 1939, Donovan realized that the way was opened for Hitler to attack first Poland and then the West without fear of an assault from the Soviet Union. At the same time he recognized that the pact also forced the Japanese to delay their own military adventures in Asia because the Soviet Union remained in a strong position to balk them. Thus, when Hitler attacked Russia on June 22, 1941, it was apparent to Donovan that Japan was now free to move in Asia and that war with the United States would almost certainly result within the year.

  Within a month after the German blitzkrieg into Russia, Japan invaded Indochina. Roosevelt warned the Japanese government against its policy of military expansion, placed an embargo on oil shipments, and froze Japanese assets in the United States. When Gen. Hideki Tojo replaced the moderate Prime Minister Prince Fumimaro Konoye in October, it confirmed Donovan’s belief that before Japan would abandon plans to conquer East Asia and the South Pacific it would launch an attack on both the United States and Great Britain. Oil embargoes and frozen assets would only goad the Japanese into action.