The French border presented no problems, but getting through the Spanish post was not so easy. One OSS man lifted a portion of the tarpaulin so that the Spanish officer could see the gasoline drums. Meanwhile the officer’s dog was sniffing at the front of the trailer, where Malverne lay hidden. The other OSS man quickly took a can of meat from his lunch box and opened it for the dog. The Spaniard was delighted at the generosity of the Americans, and he waved them to get back into their auto and drive on. From Tangier, Malverne was flown to Washington. He was to pilot the first American destroyers into his home port.
General Eisenhower realized how essential it was to make certain of the assistance of the French Army during the landings in North Africa, now only a few weeks off, but he was afraid to let the French know when and where the troops would come ashore. That British Army and Navy units were taking part was also necessarily top secret. Eisenhower gave General Clark, commander of the U.S. Fifth Army, the task of meeting with Giraud’s North African representative, Gen. Charles Mast, to work out a better relationship. They met on Cherchel Beach, 75 miles west of Algiers, with OSS and French representatives on the night of October 21.
A few weeks later the vast armada of Operation Torch was nearing the Strait of Gibraltar. It was a time of rumors. Eddy instructed two young Austrian anti-Nazis to go to Casablanca and offer to spy for Gen. Theodor Auer of the German Armistice Commission in North Africa. The Austrians dined openly with American consular officers to demonstrate how capable they would be of gaining access to U.S. secrets. Auer was delighted. The Austrians fed him accurate but unimportant information about American plans, which could be easily verified. Once they had gained Auer’s confidence, they let him know that there was an Allied invasion fleet nearing Africa and that the blow was to fall at Dakar on the Atlantic coast of French West Africa. This interesting intelligence was flashed to Germany, and the German high command ordered submarine and fleet units to meet in the Atlantic close to Dakar.
Eddy’s men also planted a report that the civilian population of the island of Malta was approaching starvation and that a huge fleet of Allied ships was on its way with urgently needed supplies. This rumor, prevalent in North Africa, may have reached the German command and may be the reason Abwehr strait-watchers let the Allied flotilla pass them by without raising the alarm.
At midnight on November 8, the BBC in London announced mysteriously: “Allo Robert, Franklin arrive!”
Robert stood for Robert Murphy; Franklin for Franklin Roosevelt. OSS men knew that the attack was about to begin, and the French and Arab undergrounds struck.
“Allo Robert, Franklin arrive!” came the strange message over and over. French resistance groups sent up flares over the beaches to guide the landing craft ashore. Guides waited on the beach to welcome the first men, who began to wade ashore at 1:30 A.M. The password was “whiskey.” The answer was “soda.”
In Algiers an Englishwoman had shown the conspirators a hidden entry in her villa garden that led to secret passages beneath the ancient city. They had last been used by the Barbary pirates. The French patriots ran through the passages to points where their maps showed vital telephone and cable lines could be cut. That night they could hear the Vichy sentries on duty in the admiralty above them as they cut the lines. The telephones of the city went dead.
Eddy was in Gibraltar with General Eisenhower acting as the OSS liaison officer with the commander-in-chief of the invasion force. Murphy and the other Casablanca OSS men and underground leaders were assembled in José Aboulker’s apartment. A radio was operating in the bathroom to keep them in touch with Eddy and the fleet. The unusual gathering of men in the apartment attracted the attention of a Vichy sympathizer, who informed the police. The chief of the political police decided to check on the mysterious group in person. Once inside the apartment, he found a gun pointed at his head. He submitted to arrest in the name of the French people.
There came a knock on the door. A young priest, the Abbé Cordier, stood there. It was his duty to cut the lines of the main French Army telephone station, but the night watchman had a German shepherd that made his approach impossible. Aboulker gave the Abbé the poison he needed to deal with the dog.
In Algiers several hundred boys, members of the OSS-directed Chantiers de la Jeunesse, seized key positions in the city for the Allies. They had few arms because most of the inadequate OSS weapons supplies had been given to older and presumably more dependable underground groups. The Chantiers held out against overwhelming police fire, expecting the American Army to come to their aid momentarily. Unfortunately, U.S. troops missed the target beach and made their landing 4.5 miles farther away than expected. They became lost on the dark roads. By the time they reached Algiers, 13 hours behind schedule, most of the boys were dead and the positions had to be captured all over again.
In Morocco the underground seized the Vichy governor. Pro-Allied French Army units and the underground went into action, but in Morocco the Allied forces also missed their landing, and before they could reach the city, Vichy troops had arrested the pro-Allied army commander. Everywhere Allied troops blundered and moved ahead so slowly that their friends in North Africa were overwhelmed by French forces faithful to Vichy. What might have been a peaceful invasion turned into a bitter struggle in which both French and American soldiers and sailors were dying.
In spite of the blunders at the start, the Allied invasion of North Africa proved successful. It showed that the decision to strike at Africa before Europe had been a sound one, since the green troops and confused planning most likely would have failed against the European bastion. Donovan’s OSS was “blooded” in North Africa. At the same time his agents and operational teams were continuing to move into the field. Allen Dulles was now Donovan’s man in Switzerland, from where he was ordered to penetrate the Reich and discover the opposition to Hitler. From the Cairo base, agents were intriguing, according to a JCS directive, “from the eastern boundary of Italy to and including the Middle East as far as the western boundary of India; and in North Africa from the eastern boundary of Tunisia to and including Ethiopia; and islands adjacent to all countries included.” Agents of OSS Detachment 101 were now established at Nazira, in Assam, India, and were making their initial probes behind the Japanese lines in Burma. On November 10, at President Roosevelt’s press conference, a reporter asked, “Mr. President, is Bill Donovan’s work still a secret?”
“What?” asked the President in feigned surprise.
“Is Bill Donovan’s work still a secret?”
“Oh my, yes,” replied Roosevelt. “Heavens, he operates all over the world.”
The President and the White House correspondents laughed together.
Even while the OSS was bringing to life Donovan’s ideas of a coordinated intelligence and special operations effort to assure the success of Allied arms in North Africa and also to function throughout the world, Donovan had been forced to spend long hours every day dealing with the jealous and obstructive admirals and generals in Washington. All of this proved as disturbing to General Marshall as it did to Donovan. On December 23, 1942, Marshall looked back over the year and the great contribution the OSS had made to the victory in North Africa. He wrote to the OSS director, “I cannot let the holiday season pass without expressing my gratitude to you for the cooperation and assistance you have given me personally in the trying times of the past year.
“I regret that after voluntarily coming under the jurisdiction of the Joint Chiefs of Staff your organization has not had smoother sailing. Nevertheless, it has rendered invaluable service, particularly with reference to the North African Campaign.” The balky Joint Chiefs of Staff were at last prepared to give Donovan and his men the “elbow room to operate in” that Roosevelt had requested a good nine months before.
Donovan had reason to be pleased with the way things stood in December 1942. His OSS had proven its worth, and Ruth was now living with him in Washington. David was away in the service, and David’s wife had
also moved into the Georgetown house. Bill Donovan’s friend Alexander Woollcott, recuperating from an operation, was contemplating a visit. Donovan always found Woollcott’s irrepressible chatter stimulating.
“Of course you would be more than welcome to be with us,” he wrote to Woollcott with some satisfaction. “You know, of course, that now besides Ruth, I have my daughter-in-law and my granddaughter there. I hope they would not bother you. You could have the room on the top floor, and we could take good care of you if you wouldn’t be annoyed by a child.”
29
Professor Moriarty Joins the OSS
“YOU’RE MY EVIL GENIUS,” Donovan once told Stanley Lovell. “I promise you that you’ll never be killed, for I’ll need you in the next story just as Conan Doyle needed your counterpart in his next novel.”
Lovell, of whom Franklin Roosevelt remarked, “You’re either a Down East Yankee or you’ve got a case of adenoids,” was indeed a Down East Yankee, as well as a chemist and inventor, and Donovan placed him in charge of the OSS Research and Development branch.
R&D was charged with creating everything from improved radio transmitters and receivers for the use of agents and field stations to inventing a new kind of explosive. Carleton Coon, the anthropologist turned OSS man, might fashion explosive horse and camel turds to use against Rommel’s tanks and personnel, but it was up to Lovell to invent the plastic explosive in the first place.
Lovell began his Washington career in the laboratory of Dr. Vannevar Bush, director of the office of scientific research and development. One day Bush asked his assistants what they would need if they were to be put ashore in a rubber raft in the dark of night on an Axis-held coast with orders to destroy a radio installation defended by armed guards, dogs, and searchlights. Lovell replied that he would want a silent, flashless Colt automatic, a submachine gun, or both. He would pick off the first sentry with no sound or flash to explain his slumping to the ground. When the next sentry hurried to his aid, Lovell would pick him off too. The reply was scarcely original, but Bush informed him that he had won the contest. He told him he should report to an office at 25th and E that evening.
Lovell stepped out of a cab at the corner where E ends at 25th. He walked up the hill into the 25th Street cul-de-sac and turned in at a gate. Going around a brick building, he found himself in a quadrangle with flowering trees and shrubs. He entered the pillared building dead ahead and walked down a narrow hall to a room at right angles to it. He was told to wait. He studied a 500-year-old map of the world—on which Africa was labeled Terra Incognita—hanging on the wall.
A stocky man with mischievous blue eyes strode into the room and held out his hand. “You know your Sherlock Holmes, of course,” he said. “Professor Moriarty is the man I want for my staff here at OSS. I think you’re it.”
“Do I look to be as evil a character as Conan Doyle made him in his stories?” Lovell asked.
“I don’t give a damn how you look. I need every subtle device and every underhanded trick to use against the Germans and the Japanese—by our own people—but especially by the underground resistance groups in all occupied countries.”
Stanley Lovell moved into a minuscule office in the basement of the South Building. From his fertile imagination and the minds of his assistants were to flow a freshet of devices and tricks to serve OSS personnel and the patriotic undergrounds in Europe, North Africa, and Asia. Lovell and his staff produced false passports, identification papers, ration books, currency, and letters. They learned to combine the precise paper fibers with the proper invisible inks, trick watermarks, and special identification chemicals to frustrate even the closest scrutiny. The Bureau of Engraving and Printing proved helpful, and Frank Wilson, chief of the Treasury Department’s Secret Service, also provided technical assistance so Lovell could develop invisible inks that would stand up to simple iodine tests and more sophisticated tests.
Donovan posted guards around the R&D laboratory for two reasons: to keep away other OSS people on the supposition that if they didn’t know what was going on they could scarcely tell anybody about it, and to guard several patriotic if unprincipled counterfeiters who had been released from prison by the President to serve the OSS. FDR found it hard to believe that the counterfeiters would stick to counterfeiting for the OSS. He feared that if given a chance, they would very likely start turning out illegal U.S. currency.
“If the Secret Service picks up anything counterfeit that originated in your shop,” the President told Donovan, “we’re closing you down.”
Invisible inks for secret messages, cameras camouflaged in matchboxes, a candle that was half wax and half explosive, and shoes with hidden space for messages all came out of the laboratory of Professor Moriarty. As each gadget was created, it was put to work in the field. Allen Dulles in Switzerland contacted the Bally Shoe Company in Schoenewerd, a small town some 25 miles from Zurich. Bally’s salesmen were persuaded to help the OSS, and as they traveled through Germany and Occupied Europe, they carried messages written on paper or cloth and inserted in place of a shoe’s bottom filler. The shoe sole, following a technique worked out by R&D, was laid over the message, stitched in place, and beveled, its edge stained and set.
When Lovell heard that an OSS spy captured in the lobby of the Adlon Hotel in Berlin might have escaped had he been able to create a distraction, he put together a small but mighty fireworks device. Pull a tiny wire loop, and the device gave a startling imitation of a bomb falling with a spectacular roar. It was so distracting that Lovell named it for Hedy Lamarr, the glamorous movie star of the time.
Bill Donovan took Lovell with him to one of his periodic lectures to the Joint Chiefs of Staff on August 28, 1943. Donovan explained Hedy to the top brass. Then he went on talking about other matters as Lovell pulled the ring and slipped Hedy into a metal wastebasket. The fearful sound of a bomb descended on the meeting. Two- and three-star generals and admirals rushed for the door as a mighty roar ended Hedy’s performance. Donovan surveyed the nearly empty room.
“Professor Moriarty, we overdid that one, I think,” he observed.
The inventions multiplied. There was the pocket incendiary, invented by Dr. Louis Fieser of Harvard, that was about the size of a pencil eraser, and there was an incendiary case filled with napalm with a delayed ignition that could be set for any period of time from 15 minutes to three days. It could be made to resemble anything from a suitcase to a box of crackers. “Beano” was a grenade that looked like a baseball and was named for the game played at carnivals. “Casey Jones” was a small explosive box with a permanent magnet on one side so it could be stuck to the iron or steel undersides of a railroad car.
One of R&D’s other inventions was a silent and flashless pistol, carried by OSS agents. It and an equally silent, flashless submachine gun were invented by Professor Gus Hammar of the University of Washington, Dr. Robert King and Gordon Ingram of American Telephone and Telegraph Research, and John Sibelius of Hi-Standard Manufacturing Company. Lovell gave one of the first pistols to Donovan.
“Get me another, Stan,” he said. “I want to present one to President Roosevelt.”
Donovan obtained a small duffel bag filled with sand and, placing it in a corner of his office, practiced shooting the pistol into it. One day he went to the White House to call on the President. The pistol was in his shoulder holster, and Donovan toted a bag full of sand in his hand past the Secret Service guards. Sitting in a corner of the office as FDR finished dictating to Grace Tully, Donovan fired a clip into the bag of sand.
When FDR’s secretary left, Donovan handed the gun to the President with a handkerchief wrapped around the barrel. “Mr. President,” he said, “I’ve just fired ten live bullets from this new OSS silent and flashless pistol into that sandbag over there in the corner. Take the gun by the grip and look out for the muzzle, as it’s still hot.”
The President was shocked. No man who holds the awesome power of the presidency does so entirely without fear of assassination. H
e put the gun down on the desk. “Bill, you’re the only black Republican I’ll ever allow in my office with a weapon like that,” he said.
Roosevelt appreciated how valuable the weapon would be to OSS agents. He showed the gun to visiting admirals and generals and sent it to Hyde Park, where it is now in the custody of the Roosevelt Museum.
Other inventions included exploding limpets that could be affixed to the side of a ship by OSS frogmen, a submersible canoe, an arrow gun, and a confusion bomb that was dropped over Europe. This bomb ticked frightfully but contained only a cheap clock, a radio, a speedometer, a thermometer, fuses, valves, and whatever else might be handy when it was assembled.
R&D did not contain the only OSS men with inventive minds, and Donovan was willing to talk to anybody who had an idea. John Shaheen, after the war an international financier, was long on ideas. One day he went to Donovan and proposed a gliding bomb that he himself offered to guide to its target. He would ride the bomb and alter its course by shifting his weight from side to side. Shaheen confidently expected to escape annihilation by spreading a parachute and floating away to safety just before the bomb hit. Donovan gave him a go-ahead on the project. Probably a cat saved Shaheen from his moment of truth. Other OSS men were simultaneously working on having a cat guide a bomb to its target, and they decided against risking Shaheen’s life since a cat has nine. The OSS cat-guided bomb also failed to make it out of the laboratory.
OSS proved to be the breeding place for what has been accurately called the battiest weapon of the war. It all got started when Dr. Lytle S. Adams, a Pennsylvania dentist, went exploring in a much larger cavity than he was accustomed to—Carlsbad Caverns, in New Mexico. The bats winging from the cave at sunset fired Adams’s imagination, and he saw in the little mammals a way to win the war. Why not tie incendiaries to their wings and release them over Japan? The bats would fly to the nearest Japanese houses and attach themselves to the eaves, and the flammable structures would go up in flames. The dentist sent his suggestion to Eleanor Roosevelt, who passed it to her husband, who sent it to Donovan, who saw merit in it. John Jeffries was dispatched with a team of OSS men to Carlsbad Caverns to capture bats. Louis Fieser set to work designing an incendiary for the bats to carry. Despite the effort put into the project, Stanley Lovell would gladly have forgotten about it, but at a staff meeting Donovan demanded to know what was happening. Franklin Roosevelt had been needling the OSS director about the progress with the bats. Lovell’s men put tiny metal bands around the bats and soldered the newly developed mini-incendiaries to them.
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