Donovan

by Richard Dunlop

  “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” opened the broadcast. “Today and every day from now on we shall be speaking to you about America and the war,” an announcer said. “Here in America we receive news from all over the world. This news may be favorable or unfavorable. Every day we shall bring you this news—The Truth.”

  There was nothing in what the announcer said with which Donovan disagreed, and later Sherwood was to show an aptitude for black propaganda that belied his apparent adherence to “the truth and nothing but the truth” in broadcasting. It was simply that both Donovan and Sherwood were as strong-willed and individualistic as they were gifted, and they no longer could get along together within the COI. Both had back-door access to the White House, and in late winter and spring of 1942 they fought an internecine war over whether the FIS should continue as part of the COI or be established as an independent agency.

  “Now that we are at war, foreign propaganda must be employed as a weapon of war,” Donovan told Roosevelt.

  It must march with events. It is primarily an attack weapon. It must be identified with specific strategic movements often having within it the flavor of subversion. To do this kind of work effectively it must be allied with the military services. It must be to a degree informed as to possible movements. The more closely it is knit with the intelligence and the physically subversive activities of the Army and the Navy, the more effective it can be. In point of fact the use of propaganda is the arrow of initial penetration in conditioning and preparing the people and the territory in which invasion is contemplated. It is the first step—then fifth column work—then militarized raiders or “commandos” and then the invading divisions.

  Donovan also found himself under new attack from the military brass, who thought of the COI as a fly-by-night civilian outfit trying to horn in on the war. Donovan continued his recruiting, and the COI drafted plans for intelligence and clandestine activities in support of Allied military operations in North Africa as well as in Asia. But Donovan’s military critics were inflexible.

  “Donovan did a fine job of recruiting able men for our operation, but he had gotten a cold shoulder from the military services. Not a single project had been approved,” Preston Goodfellow said of the early months of the war.

  When it was learned that Joseph Stilwell had been made Chiang Kai-shek’s chief of staff of Allied forces, Goodfellow asked Donovan to let him make staff studies for an intelligence and irregular warfare operation in Burma and submit them to the general. In early February Goodfellow was called to Stilwell’s office. The general liked the project; he would give his go-ahead to COI. When a jubilant Goodfellow returned to the COI office, he decided not to tell anybody, including Donovan, until he had the approval in writing.

  Goodfellow lived on Q Street in Georgetown, close to Donovan’s house, and the two men often walked home from the office together. That afternoon Donovan telephoned Goodfellow and asked him to walk with him. They strolled down Pennsylvania Avenue in the wintry dusk.

  “Never did I see Donovan so low in spirits as on that walk,” Goodfellow said after the war. “I had decided to await formal acceptance by General Stilwell before saying anything to Donovan about it. But when I reached his home, I weakened. On the promise by Donovan not to mention to anyone my advance information, I told him we were going to get approval of the Burma operation.”

  Donovan brightened at once and invited Goodfellow into the house for a glass of sherry. They talked for an hour. Then Goodfellow went home, knowing he had not seen the last of his chief for the night. Donovan went to bed but, as usual, he read much of the night, first one book and then another, placing the half-read volumes face down on the bedside stand and on the bed around him. His mind teemed with plans for Asia. Finally he could stand it no longer and telephoned Goodfellow.

  “He phoned me three times that night,” Goodfellow remembered, “the last at 3:00 A.M.”

  “You’re not in bed, are you, Preston?” he asked on the last call.

  “No, I’m sitting here waiting for your call,” replied the sleepy deputy director.

  “Well, get your pants on and come over here. I want to talk more about Burma.”

  Goodfellow walked to Donovan’s house, and they talked until dawn. Goodfellow reiterated his request that Donovan keep the matter to himself. Donovan was convinced that Stilwell’s approval was an important break in the military’s hostility toward COI.

  In the morning at the regular staff meeting, Donovan called on each aide for his report. At last, when all the aides had been heard from, Donovan announced, “Gentlemen, I have reason to believe that our Burma show will be approved. I want all the Far East studies and operational plans speeded up—those for China, Thailand, and other fields.”

  “Of course, everyone went out of that meeting jubilant and got busy,” Goodfellow remembered. “Three days later the staff study came back from General Stilwell. It was disapproved.”

  When Goodfellow brought the news to his chief, Donovan was icy.

  “Preston, your intelligence was a little faulty,” he said.

  “No, it wasn’t. Let me have that study, and I’ll find out what happened.”

  Goodfellow went directly to General Stilwell’s office. He knocked on the door. “Come in,” said Stilwell.

  “General,” said Goodfellow at once. “I had something to do with the secret Burma operational study, and I came to ask you what is wrong with it.”

  “Not a thing,” replied Stilwell.

  “Then why the disapproval?”

  “It’s the officer you put in charge. That man, if sent out to blow up a bridge, would blow up a windmill instead and come back with an excuse.”

  “General, I don’t know this officer. I went to the adjutant general and asked for the name of a senior Regular Army officer—one who knew the Far East and, if possible, had an Oriental language. The officer’s name came up. He not only had all the qualifications I requested, but had been on your staff. So, General, why don’t you name the man?”

  Stilwell wrote a dozen names on a pad of paper. He crossed them off one by one until there were two left.

  “Get either of these two men and your project has my approval.”

  Back at COI headquarters, Goodfellow discovered the first man on the list was in Texas. “I went after him first because of his seniority,” said Goodfellow after the war. “He died the day before I got to him.”

  The second man was Capt. Carl Eifler, who was brought to Washington from Honolulu. Eifler was to head Detachment 101 in Burma, first of the COI groups to go into the field.

  Donovan was now certain that the future of the COI rested with the military. With the first meeting of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) on February 9, he urged the President to place the COI under the JCS. The support of the JCS could help Donovan to ward off the attacks from within the COI being prepared by Robert Sherwood and from without by Adolph Berle in the State Department.

  “Due to your continued support and confidence we have been able to set up for you an instrument of modern warfare which if left unimpaired would mean for you a weapon of combined operations which will be able to stand against any similar weapon of the Axis,” he wrote to the President. “In doing this we have not usurped the functions or impinged upon the demands of the Army, Navy, or State Department.”

  On March 30, Donovan urged Roosevelt to sign an order to place the COI under the JCS. “I hope that you will approve the order,” he said. “It exactly conforms to your original directive to me, both in name and function—but which was finally modified at the instance of the Army and Navy. The present proposal comes at their instance. The services now seem to have confidence in our organization and feel that we have in motion certain instrumentalities of war useful to them.”

  Even as he attempted to create a closer working relationship with the army and navy, Donovan had to ward off their attacks, sometimes providing high comedy. When Donovan and an admiral were guests at a formal dinner party, the admiral
remarked that the COI was “a Tinker Toy outfit, spying on spies.”

  “I don’t know, Admiral,” said Donovan. “I think that we could get your secret files and blow up your ammunition dump on the other side of the river before midnight.”

  The admiral burst out laughing. Soon afterward Donovan excused himself from the table, presumably to go to the washroom. He telephoned his headquarters and within an hour several high-ranking navy officers showed up at the Navy Building demanding to see the admiral. The sentry saluted and said the admiral was not in.

  “Then,” said one, “we’ll wait in his office.”

  Once inside, the officers went to work. One, a safecracker, opened the admiral’s safe and removed its top-secret contents. Then the party left and drove to the ammunition dump, where they dressed down the officer of the day for not demanding their security clearances at the gate. When the OD left in relief, they planted dummy dynamite tubes. They sent the admiral’s top-secret files and a report on their activities to Donovan at the dinner party. As the party was breaking up, Donovan handed the admiral his files without comment and explained where he could find the dummy charges at the ammunition dump.

  Sometimes a hostile admiral or general would come to see Donovan at COI headquarters. If the visitor began to get troublesome, the director would call in Donald Downes, one of his aides. Downes had worked with the British in the Mideast and could spellbind listeners with his tales of derring-do.

  “Tell them about your experiences in the Mideast,” Donovan would ask him.

  After Downes told a few intriguing stories that gave his listeners an insight into how a top agent worked, they would go away in a happier frame of mind, perhaps even admitting that there might be something to this intelligence business after all.

  Despite its troubles, the COI continued to grow. Donovan recruited a leading ornithologist to solve the bird problem on Ascension Island. Birds nesting on the runway had flown into the propellers of landing DC-3s and brought them crashing to the earth. The ornithologist lured the birds to the other end of the island, where they were not a menace. Donovan persuaded specialists from other government departments and agencies to join the COI. He signed up such socialites as Raymond Guest, who was to carry out a dangerous P T boat mission across the English Channel, and Jock Whitney, who was to work behind the German lines in France. He also recruited as agents the chef of the River Club and the bartender of the Yale Club in New York, together with bullfighter Sidney Franklin, wrestler and Notre Dame fullback Joe Savoldi, Detroit pitcher Tommy Bridges, and Boston catcher Moe Berg. He took in some avowed communists and laughed when a congressman called him up and berated him for it. “They are great at sabotage,” he explained.

  He interviewed Charles A. Lindbergh for a job. “Donovan was very pleasant and said he would have me, provided it would be satisfactory to the President,” Lindbergh later said. But Roosevelt didn’t want any part of the aviator hero who had done so much to balk his country’s war preparations, and Lindbergh did not join the COI.

  One day a celebrated mathematician had an appointment with Donovan. “I know, General Donovan, that you take a dim view of astrology and at one time so did I,” he said. “But I can assure you that it is not a pseudoscience; there is something to it, and I am prepared to prove it and to show you how the war can be won with it. I want nothing for myself and I think I can demonstrate with only a small amount of money to cover expenses that very remarkable things can be deduced about the plans and the fate of men whose date and hour of birth can be precisely known. This, of course, would have very enormous implications with respect to Hitler.”

  “But look, how would one know the date and hour of Hitler’s birth?” Donovan asked. “Even his parentage is in doubt.”

  “In the case of Hitler,” continued the mathematician confidently, “these time elements can be more precisely ascertained than even in your case or mine. This is true because we know certain events in Hitler’s life with great precision. We know the date and hour that he became chancellor of Germany; we know the hour that he invaded the Ruhr; the moment he invaded the Rhineland; the time he invaded Czechoslovakia, Austria and Poland. These are fixed points on the chart and by simply extrapolating backward in time, we can arrive not only at the date and hour of his birth but at the precise instant that he first saw light. Then having determined the circumstances and the conjunction of the planets at his birth, we extrapolate forward and find out every decision he will make in the future.”

  “This is perfectly wonderful,” observed Donovan. “How much did you say it would cost?”

  “Well, only enough to hire an actuary, a second-class astronomer, and maybe two or three clerks for a matter of a month or so. I would think that $25,000 or $30,000 would cover the bill.”

  “Fine,” said Donovan. “It is precisely what my office should do, but I must observe protocol very strictly or we could not exist, operating as we do between the military and the White House. Put on your hat and coat, sir, and go get the secretaries of war and navy to ask me to act on this, and my office will take it from there.”

  As the mathematician left the office, Donovan called after him, “And be sure to get it in writing.”

  In North Africa Col. A. S. Van Ecke, a curt Dutchman who had served in the French Foreign Legion, was plotting with other French officers to revolt against Vichy. Bill Eddy drew up a list of munitions and armaments the French would need if they were to strike, and on March 3 he submitted it to Donovan. Knowing that American arms and supplies were being concentrated in the Pacific, where the Japanese advance was still unchecked, Donovan could only cable Eddy, “The supplies requested appear to be enormous and quite out of proportion to the projected operations.”

  Donovan once said that he preferred a lieutenant who disobeyed intelligently to a colonel who obeyed without thinking. Eddy was a lieutenant colonel who disobeyed his chief. He fired off a reply to Washington urging that the French North African underground be given all the support possible since it was the only source of opposition to the Axis.

  “We will not find such leaders elsewhere,” Eddy cabled Donovan, “and we dare not lose them now. They are taking all the risk; and they will receive, distribute, and use the supplies, every step being taken with the threat of execution as traitors if they were uncovered. The least we can do is to help supply them on their own terms, which are generous and gallant.”

  Donovan could not respond quickly to Eddy’s appeal, since it came at a time when Robert Sherwood, Archibald MacLeish, and Budget Director Harold Smith were trying to persuade President Roosevelt to have the COI dismantled. The information services would be assigned to a new agency headed by Sherwood and MacLeish. Other COI functions would be given to other agencies, and Donovan, it was felt, could be made happy with some sort of intelligence function.

  On March 19, Sherwood sent the President a “personal and confidential” letter in which he claimed to speak for Donovan. “Bill himself would be overjoyed to be ordered to service with the Army and Navy,” he wrote, particularly if the President “made it known to Bill that this service was of a special, secret and even mysterious nature. Bill would be especially happy and his personal prestige would be undamaged.”

  Roosevelt appeared to agonize over his decision, but he had already come to the conclusion that if the COI were to be placed under the JCS, the FIS must be separated from it. The President had no intention of allowing the nation’s information services to become subordinate to the military. Donovan still struggled for the preservation of the COI as he had conceived it, but Roosevelt had already decided that Sherwood was right.

  Donovan, embattled as he was, somehow managed to keep the COI moving at high speed. In the course of his law practice, he had met a talented Chicago attorney named Arthur Goldberg—later a Supreme Court justice and U.S. ambassador to the United Nations—who had built quite a reputation as a labor lawyer. George Bowden, another Chicago lawyer and a close friend of Donovan’s who had helped to dr
aft the legislation permitting the President to send the overage destroyers to Great Britain, listened to Goldberg describe how labor in Europe, even in Germany, was solidly anti-Fascist and would provide the Allies with a valiant underground movement. Bowden urged Goldberg to get in touch with Donovan.

  “Early in 1942 I sent Donovan a note,” said Goldberg. “We had important allies who were ideologically against Hitler, and they occupied strategic positions. Workers loaded ships. Railroads were manned by workers. Laboring men and women who could help the Allied cause.”

  Donovan, who once remarked, “Half an hour spent with the brakeman of a freight train running into Occupied France would produce more useful information than Mata Hari could learn in a night,” immediately telephoned Goldberg. He asked him to go to New York to set up the Labor Desk for the COI. “We’d be more free of bureaucratic restraint and have more contact with refugees from Europe,” Goldberg explained. “We had five people in our group.”

  Goldberg and his aides interviewed working people and labor leaders who were refugees from Europe, and filed valuable reports with Donovan. They also made plans for a future intelligence penetration of Europe, including Hitler’s Reich, by labor people. European Social Democrats, Goldberg reported, were promising sources for intelligence and future anti-Nazi action. Dr. Heinrich Bruening, a Social Democrat and one of the last German chancellors before Hitler came to power, was in New York, and Donovan arranged a conference with him for April 1 in New York. Since Donovan wanted to talk with Bruening about creating a German resistance movement, he asked John Wheeler-Bennett, a British expert on German politics and military affairs, to sit in on the meeting.

  Donovan’s chauffeur picked him up at his Georgetown home shortly after midnight on April 1 and drove off to catch the 1:05 A.M. train to New York. Suddenly a car lunged out of a side street and hit Donovan’s limousine in the side. The impact threw Donovan against the wall and struck both knees a sharp blow.