Donovan

by Richard Dunlop

  Donovan refused to go to the hospital although the old World War I injury to his right knee was hurting fearfully. He boarded the train, and as it sped to New York, a porter soaked Pullman towels in cold water and applied them to Donovan’s swelling knees. From Pennsylvania Station he was driven to his apartment at the St. Regis Hotel. In the morning the meeting with Dr. Bruening took place. Donovan made no mention of his injury, but he did drink two stiff brandy-and-sodas. The talk with Dr. Bruening went well, and when the former chancellor left, Donovan was able to turn over the task of forming a German anti-Hitler movement to Allen Dulles, whom he had put in charge of the New York office, and Goldberg.

  For the next six weeks he was confined to his apartment at the St. Regis. Roosevelt sent him a sympathetic letter, and on April 14, Donovan wrote to the President, “As Grace probably told you, I was ready to return when a blood clot, from which knee they do not know, settled in my left lung and after a few uncomfortable days is now in process of absorption. The doctors assure me that it will not be long before I shall be completely well. In the meantime, through direct connection with my office I am able to continue the supervisory, if not the active, part of my job.”

  Donovan directed the COI and his battle with Washington rivals from his bed. His enforced absence from Washington proved to be a great advantage to his opponents. If there had been any doubt as to what was to happen to the COI, Donovan’s midnight auto accident settled it. Roosevelt was tiring of the question. On Thursday, April 30, Adolph Berle lunched on trout and eggs Benedict with the President, and noted in his diary, “We reverted then to the subject of political warfare. I asked whether he had finally come to an arrangement on the Donovan outfit. He said that, as I perhaps knew, he had been trying to get a brigadier generalship for the Colonel; after which he was thinking of putting him on some nice quiet, isolated island, where he could have a scrap with some Japs every morning before breakfast. Then he thought the Colonel would be out of trouble and be entirely happy. The rest of us would have to be re-integrated somehow.”

  After his return to Washington Donovan made one more effort to keep the COI intact. The Joint Chiefs of Staff helped him to argue his case. Some Washington friends warned Donovan about voluntarily seeking to have the COI report to the JCS. On May 15 Donovan went to see Roosevelt. The President told him that “we’d better stay clear of JCS. They’ll absorb you.”

  “You leave that to me, Mr. President!” said Donovan.

  After the war he told an interviewer, “I knew the rumors that were going around that JCS wanted to get us under their control and then tear the agency apart piece by piece and scuttle me, but I explained to Roosevelt that the JCS were the ones who would win the war, so that was the place for the agency to be.”

  Roosevelt saw his way out of his dilemma. He could separate the FIS from the COI and then place the latter under the JCS. His decision to do so seemed inevitable, but on June 8 Donovan made one more effort. He wrote to FDR:

  It is curious to note that at the very moment when the British are beginning to come to centralization of the various activities we already have under one tent, we have many theorists who, because of a false logic, are seeking to break up our own efficient centralization. The separation of our foreign service is the beginning, and I do hope for the sake of the war effort, you will not permit it to go farther. I say this frankly because you know that if you feel my usefulness here is ended, you have only to tell me so. I know very well that with the assistance of men of brains and character who have been with me, we have built up a real wartime service for you. I would not want to see it broken up without calling it to your attention. Whatever your decision is, we will implement it loyally and efficiently.

  Donovan was not at all sanguine about his prospects. He dined with OSS woman Margaret Griggs Setton that night. Afterward they drove back to COI headquarters in Donovan’s limousine.

  “We may fall,” he said, “but we will fall forward.” Donovan also said “he would take the case to Congress if Roosevelt took the organization from him,” Mrs. Setton recalled later.

  Two days after his memorandum to the President, Donovan together with Jim Murphy and Preston Goodfellow went to New York. They picked up William Stephenson and continued to Montreal, where, on the next day, they caught a British plane for England. It was now crucial that an agreement be negotiated with the British on how COI’s Special Operations could work with the British equivalent. On the day that Donovan arrived in London, Roosevelt finally acted. His Executive Order 9128 consolidated “certain War Information Functions into the Office of War Information,” (OWI) and his Military Order of June 13, 1942, established the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), and abolished the COI. Elmer Davis was to head the OWI. Robert Sherwood would direct the FIS and report to him. The OSS was to be headed by William J. Donovan and was directed “to collect secret intelligence, to prepare intelligence appreciations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the planning and execution of secret operations, and the training of personnel for ‘strategic services.’”

  The President explained that strategic services included “all measures (except those pertaining to the Federal program of radio, press, published and related foreign propaganda activities involving the dissemination of information) taken to enforce our will upon the enemy by means other than military action, as may be applied in support of actual or planned military operations or in the furtherance of the war effort.”

  On June 15, James L. Wright of the Buffalo Evening News went to the White House to talk to Press Secretary Steve Early about Donovan.

  He told me that the Army did not want him [Donovan], but that he thought the President would make the brass hats take him. Of course, the President could make them do that. I told Steve the President had volunteered to me that he was going to appoint Bill a brigadier.

  “I still think you will see him in uniform,” said Steve, “but right now I do not see the appointment in the works, and I have not talked to the President about it.

  “I think,” continued Early, “we now have Bill in the right spot. He loves intrigue and the infiltration ideas. He lives in that atmosphere, and we had to get him out of where he was in order that Robert Sherwood, who could not get along with him, might have a free hand in the development of his foreign propaganda.”

  Donovan heard the news from Bill Whitney, his London bureau chief. He was determined to establish his own secret intelligence overseas and to pool intelligence with the British SIS and to create a partnership with the British SOE. The way was now open for the OSS’s two most dramatic roles in World War II, the imaginative collection of intelligence and providing resistance leadership. At the same time Donovan was equally determined to have R&A continue to gather intelligence from open sources and to further Morale Operations’ use of black propaganda to undermine the enemy’s resistance, although this was inevitably to bring the OSS into collision with the new OWI. X-2 was to carry out OSS counterespionage work. Peter Tompkins, an OSS agent in North Africa and Italy, summed it up by saying that Donovan had been given the job of “subverting governments, sabotaging industry, smuggling bombs and explosives, setting up clandestine radio nets, organizing parachute drops and submarine voyages, falsifying documents, developing secret inks and poisoned pills.”

  27

  OSS Goes to War

  ONE OF DONOVAN’S FIRST steps as OSS chief was to reassure Winston Churchill about the role of America’s new intelligence service. Then, on June 16, Donovan appeared before the British War Cabinet. According to the presiding officer, Field Marshal Sir Alan Brooke, chief of the Imperial General Staff, Donovan explained in some detail “the organization of their Secret Service.”

  While Donovan was speaking to the War Cabinet, his aides were developing joint plans with the British SIS and SOE. Subject to the approval of Donovan and Colin Gubbins, head of SOE, the two staff groups divided up the world into areas of responsibility. India, for example, was to be a British sphere, although the OSS would se
nd liaison officers to New Delhi. China, on the other hand, was to be an American domain. While SOE was responsible for most of Europe, the OSS was to be in charge of North Africa, Finland, and in time Bulgaria, Romania, and the northern part of Norway. Neither the British nor the Americans sitting around the table in London on June 16 wanted any part of the South Pacific because that meant conflict with Douglas MacArthur, who claimed with considerable vehemence that he had the intelligence situation in that region well under control. In cases of joint responsibility the British and Americans agreed to keep closely in touch. Donovan and Gubbins approved the arrangements, which were to survive substantially intact to the end of the war.

  Lord Louis Mountbatten, chief of Britain’s Combined Operations, was present when Donovan spoke to the War Cabinet. He and Donovan had discussed the British and Canadian preparations for a commando raid on German-held Dieppe, France. When Mountbatten offered to let Donovan see a dress rehearsal, Donovan accompanied him to West Bay, Dorset, where the two men sat on an upturned fishing boat at the break of day and watched the commando assault forces storm ashore. Donovan, who was contemplating OSS operational raids on places as far removed from one another as Norway, the Southwest Pacific, and Mindanao in the Philippines, watched with intense interest and asked Mountbatten searching questions.

  Donovan also persuaded the British to allow OSS men to study sabotage and subversion in British schools. The British and American intelligence chiefs agreed to share gadgetry that each developed, ranging from new enciphering devices to plastic explosives. At the end of June Donovan returned to Washington, where he found the OSS carrying out all the functions of the COI with the exception of information responsibilities, which now were under the OWI. There were conflicting directives emanating from the White House and the Joint Chiefs of Staff as to how the OSS would work with the JCS, but these did not deter Donovan.

  On July 6 he wrote to Gen. Sir Archibald Wavell, who had been sent to India as commander-in-chief, that he had managed to persuade the JCS to “do something which has never been done in our military history. That is to take in as part of their organization a civilian unit. There had been great neglect of the new elements in modern warfare, and we have succeeded in getting them set up and all under one tent, including special intelligence, special operations, and psychological warfare.”

  First, Donovan had to reorganize the London office to reflect the changes in Washington. Bill Stephenson had convinced him that it was essential to separate Special Operations from Secret Intelligence, and on his last visit to London, Donovan had ordered that this be done. When London bureau head Bill Whitney refused to accept his chief’s decision on the subject, Donovan removed him. Now he offered the job to William Phillips, who had been the U.S. ambassador to Italy.

  “It was early in July, 1942,” Phillips later wrote, “that I received a cable from Colonel William J. Donovan, asking me whether I would head his new London Office of Strategic Services. Actually, I knew next to nothing about the OSS except that it had been created by the President, about a month earlier. Before replying definitely I wrote to the President that I would not accept it without his approval, and received a telegram from him saying that he was ‘delighted with the idea.’”

  On July 3 Donovan invited Phillips to one of his sumptuous Georgetown breakfasts and discussed the matter at length. “My old Foreign Service friend, Hugh Wilson, former Ambassador to Germany, and now an important member of the OSS was the only other guest,” wrote Phillips. “I felt at once drawn to the Colonel. His knowledge of world affairs, his contacts with the State and War Departments, his immense vitality and conviction that OSS would play an important role in our military program convinced me that here was a man after my own heart; I accepted his offer with enthusiasm.”

  Donovan told Phillips that he had plans for enlarging the OSS London office, then housed in the U.S. Embassy, and had taken a building on Grosvenor Street. “He thought that it would be desirable for me to have an office in the Embassy as well as in the new building; on the theory, I supposed, that my connection with the Embassy would add to the prestige of the OSS set-up,” recalled Phillips.

  From Donovan’s house the three men drove to OSS headquarters, where Donovan showed Phillips around and introduced him to his top aides. After a week of consulting with aides on secret intelligence, secret operations, and research and analysis, Phillips boarded a Pan-American Clipper on July 18 to fly to England. In London he found there were three OSS branches in the Grosvenor Street office corresponding to the three branches in Washington: “SI, Psychological Warfare, and another . . . more terrible line of activity connected with secret demolition in enemy territory before the arrival of our armies.” Phillips, whom Roosevelt gave the rank of minister, also made contact with foreign governments in exile; as he put it, “mostly foreign ministers, who had their own secret intelligence sources from behind the lines.”

  “We had no problem in integrating the OSS activity with similar British activities,” said Phillips. “We found nothing but the most welcome response. Immediately, I was invited to luncheons and dinners to meet the members of their various staffs. These were always pleasant occasions and helped to bring OSS into personal touch with their organizations.”

  Donovan threw himself into psychological warfare preparations. In the reorganization he had emerged as chairman of the Joint Psychological Warfare Committee (JPWC) under the JCS. “For Donovan PW [psychological warfare] was an old weapon,” wrote Thomas Troy, “as old as the Trojan horse, the paint on Indians’ faces and the whispering promoted by Richelieu beneath the walls of La Rochelle. Basically it was any weapon or tactic, outside organized military action, that undermined the enemy and his will to resist.”

  Donovan particularly admired author Edmond Taylor’s The Strategy of Terror, and he brought Taylor into the OSS to draft a program. Taylor presented his ideas on June 30, and Donovan had them in mind when, on July 8, he chaired the first meeting of the JPWC. Donovan explained that psychological warfare as conducted by the OSS would include “genuine propaganda insofar as it affects military strategy, the spreading of rumors, black leaflets and black radio, partisan bands and underground political groups, sabotage, and propaganda in combat zones aimed against enemy forces.” During the summer of 1942, he worked diligently with the committee, and on September 7 the essence of his beliefs was embodied in a definition of psychological warfare that was to dominate American policy during World War II.

  Donovan learned with regret that the OWI was not interested in continuing Walter Langer’s research into the problems of domestic morale and overt psychological warfare. “Colonel Donovan, however, still had faith in the worth of the psychoanalytic approach,” said Langer. “Not long after the creation of the new Office of Strategic Services, he suggested that I set up a Psychoanalytic Field Unit in Cambridge, Massachusetts. This would not only be close to my home, but it could also make full use of the Harvard University library and draw on the talents of many experienced psychoanalysts.”

  On July 9, Donovan outlined the “functions, conception, organization, and operations” of the OSS to the JCS. It was a far-ranging memorandum that described, among other things, the intelligence teams already in the field. The director of the OSS described the overseas offices in such capitals as London, Cairo, Chungking, and Lisbon. He told of the OSS agent “traveling through French Equatorial Africa and the Belgian Congo with instructions to report on the state of mind of native and colonial leaders and report on any evidence of Axis activity,” and of the agent in Iran who “was instructed to report on the developments of military interest in Iran, and keep this office advised as to the state of the relationships between the native population and the British and Russian troops.”

  Another agent, an Armenian-born American citizen, worked in Russian-occupied Iran, Turkish Kurdistan, and the Caucasus. Donovan had instructed him “to secure information of military and political interest such as the strength and disposition of troops and airfiel
ds and the movement of the naval and commercial vessels in the Black Sea.” There was an agent in Nigeria checking on Axis activities and another in southern Palestine observing the attitude of the Bedouins toward the British. In Portugal, OSS agents were locked in a battle of wits with their Axis counterparts, and in South Africa agents were looking into the activities of German Intelligence. There were OSS men in Sweden, Spain, Syria, Turkey, Afghanistan, and Liberia.

  Donovan told the JCS about his special agent in the province of Hatay, Turkey, who was investigating secret enemy activity in Alexandretta and establishing a network of subagents in Turkey and Syria “with a view to obtaining information in the event that this region is overrun by Axis troops.” OSS agents were working with Gen. Draža Mihajlović in Yugoslavia and had infiltrated into Romania, where they sought out possible air targets and assessed the effects of air raids.

  He spoke of still other agents preparing to go to Japanese-occupied China “to report on Japanese military and naval activities” and to India and Ceylon “to establish an intelligence network which could function in the event that India and/or Ceylon were occupied by enemy forces.”

  “In an eager, somewhat frenetic effort, Donovan put his men in the field,” said OSS man Ray Cline, “and set up the first large-scale professional U.S. espionage network ever to operate abroad. To a great extent, however, collection work became mixed up with the quite different behind-the-lines work of OSS’s covert paramilitary action teams. Espionage agents often ended up in contact with internal political or guerrilla resistance forces, and paramilitary teams often ended up sending back useful intelligence, particularly tactical military data.”

  Bickham Sweet-Escott, a British agent, visited the OSS headquarters. He observed: