The most important organized anti-Axis forces in Mexico are (1) the Confederation of Mexican Workers, 800,000 membership, and (2) the Communist Party, 5,000 to 10,000 membership. That latter, though small, has a highly developed information service.
Though traditional “anti-Yankee” feeling is widespread among the people, anti-Axis sentiment on the part of organized labor and peasant movements is far stronger. With the cooperation of labor and peasants, a majority of the Mexican people could be organized into a powerful anti-Axis front.
The Confederation of Mexican Workers and the Communist Party will cooperate with the United States on condition that the American Government does not support any reactionary Catholic political action or influence directly or indirectly.
In view of the fact that Japanese submarines may already be based along the coast of Lower California, the element of great urgency is present. May I, therefore, have your instructions with regard to enlisting the services of the fishermen’s cooperative union and peasant unions in an endeavor to ferret them out?
We have just received a mass of highly confidential material on Mexico which is being processed and will be made available to you at the earliest possible moment.
Donovan was also experimenting with visual reports. When he learned that some Washington officials feared Japan might try to take the Panama Canal, he dispatched John Ford and a film crew to make a motion-picture report on the canal’s defenses. Ford and two Field Photo cameramen, Al Jolkes and Al Zeigler, flew down to Panama on December 30 and photographed key defense installations over New Year’s weekend. They hurried back to Washington, where Ford rushed the “Canal Report” through editing so that the film, complete with narration, could be shown to Roosevelt just a few days after New Year’s.
Bob Parrish of Field Photo was present at the screening at the White House, and he reported that FDR was “very pleased not only with the film, but with the ability of the COI to cut through red tape and give him accurate reports on what was really going on. No army or navy unit could have made such a report. By the time it got through channels, all the flaws in the canal’s defenses would have been covered up.”
Donovan was also pleased with the “Canal Report,” and he next gave Ford orders to make a top-secret film report on the Pearl Harbor attack. Donovan was determined to find out who had been at fault in the disaster. He soon discovered that the navy was far more interested in covering up than in discovering how such a thing could have happened. Secretary of War Stimson was also uncooperative and warned the COI director that he would insist upon seeing the film before it could be released. Donovan ignored the army and navy’s opposition and sent Gregg Toland and Ray Kellogg by plane to Pearl Harbor.
The Field Photo team was brash and arrogant in Hawaii. They took pictures of salvage operations, obtained footage of the Japanese attack from private sources, and restaged the attack with miniatures. Ford himself flew out in mid-February to check on progress. He tried to bring the nearly completed film back to Donovan so that Donovan could show it to the President, but the navy managed to confiscate the film and lock it up in a vault.
Donovan’s concerns during the first month of American participation in the war ranged as far away as China, where he was endeavoring “A. To organize Mongol guerrillas to break the present Japanese control in that area, B. To organize a revolt in Manchukuo and Korea, C. To operate guerrilla bands in China proper.” Preston Good-fellow, deputy director of special activities, reported to Donovan that there were problems. The COI must obtain the cooperation of the Chinese government and arrange the delivery of ammunition and supplies despite the fact that “trucks presumed to be engaged in delivering war materials to Chungking are only operating at twenty percent capacity, the remaining eighty percent being used by the Soong family for their own purposes.” Also, an agreement would have to be entered into between the Chungking government and the Communists, and “the attitude of the Russians would also have to be taken into consideration as they exercise considerable influence in Mongolia.”
Donovan’s plans for China would have to wait because the most urgent theater of COI operations was North Africa. On December 22, Donovan informed Roosevelt:
That as an essential part of any strategic plan, there be recognized the need of sowing the dragon’s teeth in those territories from which we must withdraw and in which the enemy will place his army; for example the Azores or North Africa. That the aid of native chiefs be obtained, the loyalty of the inhabitants be cultivated. Fifth columnists organized and placed, demolition material cached; and guerrilla bands of bold and daring men organized and installed.
That there be organized now in the United States a guerrilla corps, independent and separate from the Army and Navy and imbued with a maximum of the offensive and imaginative spirit. This force should, of course, be created along disciplined military lines analogous to the British Commando principle, a statement of which I sent you recently.
Winston Churchill was staying with Roosevelt at the White House. The President showed the prime minister Donovan’s memo. The next day FDR told Donovan that he approved the unprecedented COI action. “I want you to take this up with Mr. Churchill and find out whom we should work with in England toward this end,” he ordered on December 23.
On the day after Christmas, a glum Christmas for the Donovan family and much of America, Ruth’s mother died. Franklin Roosevelt wrote Bill Donovan a note of sympathy. Donovan had always liked his mother-in-law, but he had little time for grief. Since Patricia’s death, he had given less and less time to his family. Now he scarcely saw Ruth, who stayed either in the New York duplex or on the Massachusetts coast. Even when Donovan found it necessary to go to Manhattan, he now occupied a suite that he kept at the St. Regis Hotel. The plight of the country preoccupied him, and his mind was busy with the comings and goings of his agents, their deployment around the world, and the fascinating and often highly significant reports that came back to him in one clandestine way or another.
New Year’s Day of 1942 was just Thursday, January 1, as far as Bill Donovan was concerned. He brought General Marshall plans as to how the COI might work in the Azores and the Cape Verde Islands in support of American military action. Marshall approved Donovan’s plans but asked him to coordinate his Azores project with the British and to discuss the Cape Verde situation with Gen. Joseph Stilwell. Stilwell came to see Donovan the next day, and on January 3 Donovan reported to President Roosevelt on their meeting. He described COI action in the Cape Verde Islands in three stages:
“1. A plan of short-wave penetration. This we would work out by trying to have it reach its climax on ‘M Day.’
“2. The ascertainment of detailed information on particular parts of the territory that he [Stilwell] had in mind.
“3. The preliminary installation of a group that would be able to strike at the moment he would designate.”
Donovan also proposed a team of COI geographers, photographers, radiomen, and analysts to work with Stilwell’s staff “and have the psychological and political preparation go hand-in-hand with the military.” As it turned out, the United States never carried out the military action contemplated in either the Azores or the Cape Verde Islands, but the proposal provided Donovan and his COI with a dress rehearsal of their role in the forthcoming North African landings.
Ever since his trip to the Mediterranean the previous year, Donovan had been certain that North Africa was to be a strategic battleground in the war against the Axis. In Cairo, Donovan had met Marine Lt. Col. William A. Eddy, who was the naval attaché at the U.S. Legation. Eddy, who walked with a limp from a World War I wound, had been born in Syria, the son of missionaries, and spoke faultless Arabic. He was former chairman of the English department at the American University in Cairo, where he had introduced basketball to the Egyptians. Eddy had returned to America to become president of Hobart College, in upstate New York.
“I’m out of love with teaching,” he explained to the college trustees. �
��I want to be a marine.” Eddy resigned from Hobart, but he didn’t explain what kind of marine he intended to be. Donovan had persuaded him to join the COI and picked him to spearhead the COI penetration of North Africa.
Donovan asked Navy Secretary Frank Knox to make Eddy the naval attaché at Tangier, where no naval attaché had ever been stationed, and on January 3 Eddy left for North Africa. He was to preside over the Twelve Disciples, an intelligence network already in position.
The COI had not yet been established in December 1940, when Franklin Roosevelt asked Robert D. Murphy, counselor of the U.S. Embassy in Vichy, to look into the French situation in North Africa. Murphy did so after conferring with Donovan, who was about to leave on his critical mission to Europe and the Middle East. Charles de Gaulle gibed at Murphy as “long familiar with the best society and apparently inclined to believe that France consisted of the people he dined with in town” but conceded that he was “skillful and determined.” Tall, stoop-shouldered, and appearing anything but a soldier or an agent, Murphy went about his mission. He negotiated an agreement with septuagenarian Gen. Maxime Weygand, the Vichy governor of North Africa. The United States was to ship such things as tea, sugar, cotton, and enough fuel oil to enable the French to retain the loyalties of the Arabs.
Twelve U.S. control officers were to be stationed in Algeria, Tunisia, and Morocco to see that the supplies did indeed go to the Arabs and were not diverted for the use of Vichy’s German overlords. The control officers were to be designated vice-consuls, but in fact they were to be COI agents. An intercept of German intelligence reports indicated that their cover did not exactly mislead the Germans. “We can only congratulate ourselves on the selection of this group of agents who will give us no trouble,” said the German report. “They are totally lacking in method, organization, and discipline. The danger presented by their arrival in North Africa may be considered nil.”
The Twelve Disciples were not impressed with themselves either. One of the 12, Kenneth Pendar, a young archaeologist from Harvard, later remarked, “We flew over to drop like so many Alices into the African wonderland.”
Alices or no, the 12 went to work, and their intelligence reports proved of great value. Donovan advised Roosevelt that the United States must seize French Africa to make a German invasion impossible. “The next war move of the German armies may well be the attack on Great Britain,” Donovan told FDR on December 13, 1941, “or it may be the occupation of Spain and Portugal with the consent of those countries and the passage to Africa of large forces that will make impossible the sending of anything more than a token army by the United States to Africa.”
He also urged, “Immediate reinforcement of the North Africa Army by American air and ground troops seems the only move which could retrieve the situation. Double thrust at Africa under present circumstances would almost surely succeed.”
Donovan had a high regard for De Gaulle and the Free French movement, but he was convinced that De Gaulle lacked sufficient support both in France and in London and Washington. Just before Churchill arrived in Washington to meet with Roosevelt at the end of December, Donovan suggested to FDR that he talk with the prime minister about “the deplorable condition of the whole Free French movement in this country and inquire into the advisability or possibility of getting out of France, some leader, perhaps like Herriott.” Donovan believed that a French leader other than De Gaulle must be found to oppose the Axis in Africa and support the British and Americans.
During the last days of December, Roosevelt and Churchill discussed how this might be done. They mulled over British and American combined action in North Africa. Their decision to prepare for Operation Torch—the invasion of North Africa—created a significant role for the COI, which was given the responsibility for secret and subversive activity. At the time Donovan and the COI were under attack from the traditional U.S. intelligence establishment. Donovan was locked in battle with the American military for what Roosevelt called “operational elbow room.”
“Our whole future,” Donovan informed his staff, “may depend on the outcome of Torch and the accuracy of our intelligence estimates.”
With the aid of William Stephenson, Donovan arranged for the cooperation of British Intelligence in Tangier and at Gibraltar. Both British Secret Intelligence (SI) and Special Operations (SO) directed by Col. Brian Clarke at Gibraltar, were placed under COI jurisdiction. Eddy was to report to both London and Washington.
Tangier in January 1942 appeared much like any other North African coastal city. It rose white and gleaming in tiers beside a pellucid bay, and the land about it was tawny as an African lion. There were the usual Medina—the old walled Arab quarter—and the European quarter with broad streets, but otherwise Tangier was a very different sort of place. Located on an inlet of the Strait of Gibraltar, it had always played such a strategic role in the history of the Mediterranean that although the rest of Morocco was a French protectorate, Tangier itself had been officially designated an international zone by the Tangier Convention of 1923. In June 1940, the Spanish had seized the zone, but it was still a place where anything could happen without causing so much as a lifted eyebrow, and it was the most critical intelligence cockpit of North Africa. Spanish authorities looked on the often comic espionage interplay with a mixture of cynicism and bemused lack of comprehension.
Eddy established COI North African headquarters in Tangier. He set up a secret network across North Africa with the assistance of Robert Murphy and the Twelve Disciples so that intelligence information from all of the American listening posts could be concentrated in his office for field analysis and then transmitted to London and Washington. The COI stations were assigned code names: Casablanca became Lincoln; Algiers, Yankee; Tunis, Pilgrim; Oran, Franklin; Tangier, Midway. The Midway transmitter was set up on the roof of the U.S. Consulate. Soon it had to be moved because the wife of the consul, who knew nothing of Eddy’s sub rosa life, complained that a mysterious tapping from the roof kept her awake at night. The transmitter was moved in the dark of night to a winepress overlooking the airfield.
“Tunis has transmitted valuable information to Malta regarding the departure and course of ships carrying war materials to the Axis in Libya,” was one of Eddy’s reports to Donovan.
During the next few months several of the original Twelve Disciples returned to America, and Donovan replaced them with new agents. One of the replacements was Donald Q. Coster, who had been captured by the Germans in 1940 while driving an American Field Service ambulance for the French Army. He had been repatriated to the United States and joined the COI. On a Sunday afternoon Donovan called him into his office. Lincoln needed replacing. “You are going to Casablanca,” he said. “It’s the most important place in the world at the moment.”
Donovan invariably made a man going into the field feel he was undertaking the most important mission of the entire war. Coster blinked.
“French Africa will be invaded one of these days by either the Germans or ourselves,” continued the COI director. “You are to help prepare for either eventuality. We must know the German plans.”
“Yes, sir.”
“A German Armistice Commission is in Casablanca enforcing the terms the Nazis imposed on the French in 1940. You might try to make them believe that, if and when we invade, we will come in through Dakar. I’ll leave the method of doing that up to you.”
Coster swallowed hard.
“And you’d better stop by London, Lisbon, and Gibraltar to pick up what information you can from British Intelligence. That’s all,” concluded Donovan. A few days later, Coster left on his mission.
Special Operations chief Robert Solborg returned to Washington from England, where he had spent some time at the British guerrilla school outside London.
Donovan had Eddy heading secret intelligence in North Africa, and now Solborg was to open up an operations and espionage center in Lisbon. Solborg was to contact the French and Arab undergrounds, coordinate his activities with those of
the British, and establish secret communications with Eddy and his agents in North Africa. Solborg set up his center in Lisbon, an enclave of agents and double agents in neutral Portugal, and began recruiting.
“The plan involves organization of groups to receive and hide material, which will be supplied them directly by ship from us by road and train from Tangier and Casablanca,” Solborg reported to his chief on February 6, 1942. “A group of operatives will be supplied by the British together with equipment to organize and direct the subversive parties I shall put at their disposal in Morocco.”
Supplies to assist the Arab underground were to be landed near Agadir and Fedala. Eddy went to Gibraltar to confer with Viscount Gort and British SI to insure their cooperation, and to Lisbon to work out arrangements with Solborg. At the same time, Eddy was plotting to bribe members of the elderly bey of Tunis’s family to carry out a palace revolution and remove the pro-Vichy bey from office. When Eddy told Donovan he needed from $20,000 to $30,000 to “do the trick,” Donovan sent $50,000. When it came to buying a palace revolt, an agent could not go hat in hand to his work. Donovan later dropped the plan because it promised to stir up more problems than it would have cured.
Donovan had more than his share of problems in Washington. He and Bob Sherwood, his FIS director, no longer saw eye to eye. Donovan wished to channel information efforts to soften up enemy resistance and to include black propaganda techniques when desirable. Donovan’s black propaganda would encompass distortions of truth and even outright lies, while Sherwood saw the FIS as a medium for providing the warring world with accurate news. On February 11, the first Voice of America broadcast was made from New York.
“That night Colonel Donovan paid one of his rare visits to 270 Madison Avenue,” remembered actor John Houseman, who worked for Sherwood. “He appeared unannounced in the cramped studio where we were broadcasting—in evening dress with two generals. They listened for two or three minutes, nodded, and departed in silence.”
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