Donovan called McBaine into his office. “You’re from San Francisco,” he said. “Do you know the name of the admiral in charge of the naval district there? Get him on the phone and find out what’s going on there. The President wants to know.”
McBaine, who had just been given an ensign’s commission, was stunned by the chief’s order. Military communications to the West Coast had failed, and for all Washington knew the Japanese were about to land in California. McBaine went into the room next to Donovan’s office and rang the long-distance operator. She informed him that all long-distance phone service was suspended in the emergency.
“I had a hell of a row with the telephone operator,” said McBaine. “I cussed her. I told her that I was calling on the direct order of Colonel Donovan. She never heard of either the Colonel or the COI.”
Finally McBaine got through to Adm. John Greenslade in San Francisco.
“Admiral Greenslade,” answered a gruff navy voice at the other end of the continent.
McBaine, knowing that admirals do not take kindly to being called by lowly ensigns even in a national emergency, mumbled through his rank but managed to pronounce “McBaine” firmly enough and very distinctly said, “calling for Colonel Donovan at the request of the President.”
“Who?” demanded the admiral.
McBaine repeated his performance. It wasn’t until his third try that Greenslade understood and gave him his anguished report.
“It was already three to four hours after the attack, and he hadn’t heard from anyone in Washington,” recalled McBaine. “The problem was in Washington. Only officers of a certain rank were supposed to call the head of a naval district. Since all the top-ranking officers were away from Washington on the weekend, only junior officers were on watch. Since nobody had enough rank to call with impunity, nobody had called. The President had been forced to turn to Donovan for information.”
Admiral Greenslade explained that he had ordered submarine nets at Tiburón, Mexico. There had been bogies on the radar. What planes did he have to defend San Francisco? Virtually nothing. When Greenslade had finished his gloomy report, McBaine asked him to wait just a second and stepped into Donovan’s office.
“You’ve got to go into the other room and thank him,” he told Donovan. Donovan did so and left immediately to see FDR.
William Langer and his wife had spent the afternoon at the Corcoran Art Gallery. As they drove home, they heard the newsboys hawking the terrible news. Dropping his wife at his house, Langer continued on to COI headquarters. By that time Donovan was back from the White House, and the COI staff had gathered.
“With the utmost gravity he gave us a full report of the catastrophe,” recalled Langer, “and the American losses in men and material. None of us needed to be told that thenceforth all efforts on our part would have to be redoubled.”
The phone rang. It was Robert Sherwood, who was at the White House helping Roosevelt draft his speech declaring war on Japan. Donovan and Sherwood discussed the points the President might make in the address to the Congress.
Nelson Poynter, who had left the editor’s chair of the St. Petersburg (Florida) Times to work for Donovan, was with him throughout the evening. “We were grabbing bulletins, all the information we could from Honolulu and the Philippines, and Donovan leaned back to appraise our situation, and he said, ‘Nelson, we’ve been hit awfully hard. We’re going to have to fight guerrilla warfare until we can rebuild our strength.’”
Donovan had seen Britain, stunned by Dunkirk, prepare for guerrilla warfare as its only option in the face of an enemy who possessed overwhelming strength. Now the United States, shattered by the Japanese strike at Pearl Harbor and the Philippines, had to resort to guerrilla warfare to hold off the enemy. It was going to be a long war.
Late in the evening Donovan received a phone call from correspondent Henry J. Taylor at the U.S. Legation in Lisbon. He had heard about the attack on Pearl Harbor from the barber at the Hotel Palacio. News of the Japanese blow had swept through the Lisbon listening post of spies soon after the planes first came out of the dawn. Taylor had rushed to the legation to see U.S. Minister Bert Fish.
“All we know is from Vichy,” said Fish.
“Fish and I agreed that I would place a priority telephone call to Washington to Col. William J. Donovan,” recalled Taylor. “And Bill Donovan’s weird transatlantic words ricocheted back to me over a wavy circuit—weird words, dreamlike and wild.”
“Out of the west at 7:55 this morning,” said Donovan. “Could anybody believe it?”
Taylor recalled having stood with Donovan at Pearl Harbor and observed the mighty battle fleet, now blasted to the bottom.
“The casualties were high—dreadfully high,” Donovan’s eerie faraway voice was saying.
“Bill Donovan’s voice wound down like a ghostly echo,” remembered Taylor. “The connection broke; the circuit was lost.”
This was the first direct word from Washington to Europe as to what had happened in the Pacific. Hitler and Mussolini and their sympathizers gloated over their ally’s incredible victory. The mighty New World nation that Donovan had portrayed on his mission to the Balkans and the Middle East as readying its colossal power to come to the aid of freedom had instead stumbled blindly into war, its armed forces suffering a terrible defeat from which it would seemingly need years to recover. By that time the European dictators had good reason to believe they would have long since won the war.
The White House appointment book for December 7 shows that the CBS correspondent Edward R. Murrow and Col. William Donovan arrived to see the President at exactly midnight. A delegation of key senators and congressmen and the vice-president had been there a little earlier; Under Secretary of State Sumner Welles was just going out as Donovan and Murrow came in. Murrow left at 12:05, but Donovan stayed until 2:00 A.M. The President and his intelligence chief talked about the attack and what it meant to America’s capacity to wage war. Donovan explained his own war strategy and pressed for an American commitment to guerrilla warfare. The failure of military intelligence to define clearly Japanese naval movements, coupled with the astounding lack of preparation by the Pacific command, had led to the worst defeat America had ever suffered. Later Donovan said:
Before World War II we in America assumed we didn’t need intelligence about other nations. As a result, when war came, we found that we were ignorant of what was going on in the world. We had to depend on allied and friendly governments for our information. Even then we were unable to make use of the information we obtained, because the various documents and reports on the enemy were scattered through various agencies of the government and had not been brought together and analyzed to give us the information we needed. Only later, during the investigation of Pearl Harbor, did we find out that in December 1941 we had information, which if properly mobilized and interpreted might well have disclosed to us what Japan intended to do.
Just before Donovan left the White House on that night when the radio still crackled with new details of the disaster and intimations of further Japanese moves, the President talked about the importance of the COI. “It’s a good thing you got me started on this,” he told Donovan.
December 8, the day FDR signed a declaration of war against Japan, was a frantic day at COI.
“Everyone I saw and worked with at headquarters,” said Kay Halle, a Cleveland radio broadcaster who had joined the COI, “felt a strong sense of mission—a fire in the belly.”
Mrs. Atherton Richards, wife of Donovan’s visual reports director, had long ago scheduled a dinner that evening in honor of the COI director. Bill Donovan attended but was silent. Another guest, Arthur Krock of the New York Times, kept going to the phone throughout dinner. “My God,” he said after one phone call. “Ninety percent of the fleet has been sunk at Pearl Harbor.”
The diners were stunned. They asked Krock for more details. Donovan remained silent. He left the party early to return to his office. One guest caught him at the door
and asked whether he thought Krock’s estimate of the Pearl Harbor tragedy was correct.
“Arthur has excellent sources of information,” Donovan said and hurried down the steps to his car, which whisked him away to COI headquarters, where he spent another long night studying the latest reports of the Japanese attack. Japanese torpedo planes and bombers had sunk the battleships Arizona, California, West Virginia, and Oklahoma. The Nevada lay beached in sinking condition, and the Tennessee, Pennsylvania, and Maryland were badly damaged. Three cruisers had been hit and four destroyers sunk. Other ships had been sent to the bottom or damaged. Several thousand Americans were dead or injured. The only bright spot was that Japanese planes had left untouched the workshops and drydocks. Donovan believed this meant that repairs to the damaged warships could be started at once.
Donovan sorted out the facts from the rumors, analyzed the information now coming in from secret sources in Europe, Asia, and elsewhere, and sought to learn where the Japanese might strike next and what their great victory might mean to the war in Europe. What effect could it have on the sensitive Middle East, on the battle positions in North Africa, on the Russian front? (A few days later, on December 11, America would formally enter the struggle in Europe, declaring war on Germany and Italy after they declared war on the United States.)
On Tuesday, December 9, Roosevelt ordered Donovan to coordinate all North American intelligence agencies, including the recalcitrant FBI. The lesson of Pearl Harbor was fresh in his mind: The welter of conflicting intelligence agencies had contributed to the tragic unpreparedness in the Pacific. But when J. Edgar Hoover refused to cooperate with Donovan, Roosevelt backed off and on December 23 lamely reaffirmed the authority of the FBI. A week later he sent another directive to the attorney general, Sumner Welles at the State Department, Army Intelligence, and Naval Intelligence, stating, “On December 23rd, without examination, I signed a confidential directive. . . . I believe that this directive interferes with work already being conducted by other agencies. In view of this, please meet together and straighten out this whole program and let me have whatever is necessary by way of an amended directive.”
Japan may have dealt the United States a disastrous defeat, but during the gloomy holiday season of 1941 the intelligence services were engaged in angry infighting. It was not until January 6 that the principals met in the attorney general’s office and agreed that the President’s December 23 directive would stand. Donovan’s agents were not to operate in the Western Hemisphere unless they informed the FBI first and even then they were not to operate under cover. J. Edgar Hoover had reason to be content with the arrangement.
Donovan issued a special order to all branch officers: “It is hereby ordered that no member of the Coordinator of Information will carry on any activity within the continental limits of the United States of America.”
John Ford received the order at Field Photographic branch, and he called in Robert Parrish and Bill Faralla, then first-class petty officers. He told them to take a prototype Cunningham combat camera and test it. Ray Cunningham, a technician at the RKO studios, had modeled it after a captured German camera for Field Photo. It featured a 35-millimeter Eyemot-type mechanism mounted on a 200-foot magazine on a .30-.30 rifle stock. To operate it the cameraman simply pulled a trigger. Ford rose from his desk, spit accurately into a box of sand in the corner of his office, and carefully lit his pipe.
“I want a complete photographic report on the old State Department Building next to the White House,” he ordered. “Cover it from all angles, from the street and from the tops of the surrounding buildings. If anyone asks you what you are doing, show them your COI cards and keep shooting. Don’t take any crap from anybody. Just do your job.”
Parrish and Faralla, wearing their naval uniforms, took their camera into the hospital across the street from the State Department Building. As they climbed out onto the roof, a head nurse stopped them. Faralla showed her his card.
“Oh, yes,” she said, impressed. “COI. Okay.”
The two men set up their tripod, snapped on the telescopic lens, and aimed what appeared to be a machine gun. A U.S. Marine sergeant appeared on the roof of Old State. He waved furiously. The Field Photo men made a movie of two marines unconcernedly playing cards on a box they’d set up between them. They photographed a World War I machine gun that was covering the White House. They panned back to the State Department roof just in time to film six marines with rifles running into position, dropping down and aiming their weapons right at the cameramen. A gust of wind blew the marines’ cards off of the roof so they drifted down onto the White House lawn. The Field Photo men got a dreamy shot of the fluttering cards and then surrendered. It was good training in combat photography. The marines took them to a lockup in the subbasement of Old State, where they were kept for 42 hours until Donovan sent Tom Early to vouch for them. The Field Photo branch had set a standard for COI and OSS men to follow. Their chief might obey what they considered directives forced upon him by rival agencies, but they would show what was often to be an antic disdain for them.
Donovan was in a ferment of intelligence activity. With the declaration of war, long-range strategic intelligence had to be deemphasized in favor of urgently needed tactical intelligence. The day after FDR’s address declaring war, Donovan already had overseas reports on how the speech was received in various European countries. He provided the President with reports on conditions in Germany and on the disillusionment of the Slovaks with the Axis cause, and news of Japanese submarines lurking off the Mexican coasts and of the presence of mysterious Japanese-constructed airfields in Mexico.
David Bruce recalled Donovan in this time of stress. “His imagination was unlimited. Ideas were his plaything. Excitement made him snort like a racehorse,” Bruce said later. “Woe to the officer who turned down a project because, on its face, it seemed ridiculous, or at least unusual.” Donovan would gaze at him with an expression of such stoic sorrow that the officer would never want to offend his chief again.
Colonel Wally Booth arrived from Puerto Rico for duty with the COI. Donovan called him into his office. “Wally, you speak Spanish, don’t you?”
“Yes, sir.”
“The British have informed us that the Germans are going to come down through Spain early next summer to take Gibraltar. I want you to go to Spain and find out what is going on,” said Donovan.
Booth stared at Donovan with some disbelief at the thought of the sensitive and urgent mission suddenly handed to him.
“You’ll be back from Spain in 90 days,” Donovan reassured him.
Booth left for Spain a few days later. He did not return for two and a half years.
Donovan’s agents already in the field were providing important information, which he sent on to the President. Whitney in the London office reported from British secret sources on the situation in France, where Adm. Jean Darlan, commander-in-chief of the French Navy, had become vice-premier and cabinet leader in Marshal Pétain’s Vichy government. Donovan told the President, on December 15, “Although Darlan prefers to remain on the fence he has compromised himself with Germans and has not convinced them of his own sincerity. Full collaboration must come if Pétain can be got around. Believe Pétain must surrender as he has always done when faced with ultimatum. Certain the Germans will occupy French North Africa to prevent British coming from east and shut off Americans from west. Division equally of opinion on whether Spain will be used or whether will enter by Bizerta and convoy from Marseilles if Tunisian Straits are closed.”
Donovan informed Roosevelt on December 16 of “a theory that one reason for the failure of the Germans in Russia is the lubricants they use in their mechanized equipment. These lubricants are the product of the Romanian wells. By reason of the cracking process in Romanian plants there is left a residue of paraffin. When these lubricants are used in the machines in this intensely cold weather, it is like putting ice in the gears. I am having those familiar with the subject here on Thursday, and o
ur economists will develop it at that time.”
J. Edgar Hoover would fume if he knew that the COI had invaded his Western Hemisphere domain, but Donovan already had put a man in Rio de Janeiro. That agent provided his chief with vital information on Brazil’s intentions. The pro-Axis Integralists were well financed and were gaining in popularity. “There have been signs of activities and meetings of known German agents,” Donovan told Roosevelt on December 17. “The Integralists are also active, although there is no actual indication of immediate action by them. There is also the impression that several German air pilots are standing to for some job.”
Donovan also stated that “a declaration of war or severing of diplomatic relations with the Axis powers is considered as most improbable. The Minister of War wishes to preserve neutrality, and vigorous anti-Axis policy could probably produce an army revolt.
“The Minister of War could count on a considerable section of the Army to follow him, and according to information from reliable sources, on the bulk of the Air Force also.”
On December 21, Donovan had more to say about the Japanese threat to the West Coast. He had top-secret information from Vicente Lombardo Toledano, president of the Confederation of Laborers of Latin America, and Dionicio Encina, secretary-general of the Communist Party of Mexico.
There is a strong possibility that the Japanese have hidden bases for small submarines and airplanes in Lower California. There are probably no more than 1,000 Japanese on the Peninsula, but enough to do considerable damage. The current immigration of the Sinarquistas [members of a fascist movement in Mexico], allegedly Axis stooges, accompanied by at least one known German agent, represents an added threat.
The Mexican armed forces are totally inadequate to patrol the Peninsula and its waters. However, a Mexican fishermen’s cooperative union which has a concession to fish in the Gulf of California can be used to obtain information on Japanese activities in the Gulf, and peasant unions can be used to obtain information about activities on the Peninsula itself. Their information would be most reliable.
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