But the bats never saw action in Japan. When, during a test, they were released from planes over an abandoned mining town in the American West, they tumbled helplessly to earth, unable to take wing at the plane’s speed. Some survivors showed definite Axis sympathies by setting fire to an American airplane hangar and a U.S. general’s command car.
Lovell’s staff also produced the L (lethal) tablets that OSS men, including Donovan, carried to take if captured. Chemists also concocted K tablets, which knocked a person out for several hours. There were hollow clothing buttons in which messages could be hidden. At first the button tops were made to unscrew by turning counterclockwise. When the Germans discovered this, Professor Moriarty reversed the thread so that the buttons unscrewed clockwise. The harder the Germans tried to open a suspect button, the tighter they screwed it shut.
George Kistiokowsky was the OSS explosives expert. He invented an explosive that could be mixed with water or milk, kneaded into dough, raised with yeast or baking powder, and baked into biscuits. Lovell named the flour-like powder Aunt Jemima.
Lovell, John Jeffries, and Donovan took a quantity of Aunt Jemima to the OSS explosives proving range at the Congressional Country Club to see how effective it would be. General Marshall went along for the demonstration. Molded and patted into dough, the explosive was placed beneath a large section of armor plate. There came a mighty bang, and chunks of steel flew into the air. One smashed through the shatterproof windshield of General Marshall’s car. Another whizzed past Donovan’s head and plunged into a tree behind him. Donovan didn’t flick a muscle. “What’s next on the program?” he asked.
Aunt Jemima was packaged in Chinese flour bags, and Carl Eifler, Detachment 101’s commander, took it with him to China, where it was put to work. OSS men in the field added a time-delay detonator to Aunt Jemima and blasted a Yangtze River bridge.
While R&D was designing the gadgets for OSS agents and resistance fighters to use in the field, Donovan was establishing camps at which his people could be trained for their tasks. The first OSS men were taught in England or at Camp X, a British-Canadian school of unorthodox warfare established by Bill Stephenson on the shores of Lake Ontario near Oshawa, Ontario. There British, Canadian, and in time American experts taught courses in lock picking, safe blowing, second-story entry, the planting of explosives and incendiaries, the use of radios and listening devices, and codes and ciphers. By March 1942 Donovan had established Area B in the Catoctin Mountains of Maryland, 65 miles northwest of Washington. It was just over the mountain from Franklin Roosevelt’s Shangri-La, which today is known as Camp David, renamed by President Eisenhower for his grandson. OSS established other training camps close to Washington, and Donovan took pride in showing cabinet officers, generals, and admirals how OSS agents were trained.
James F. Byrnes, then head of the Office of War Mobilization, told of a presidential visit to Shangri-La in July 1943 that turned out to be something other than peaceful for him and his wife. FDR brought the Filipino mess boys from the presidential yacht and plenty of good food. He also brought some prints and pictures and his stamp collection. The President and his valet hung pictures in the cabin, and then FDR worked on his stamps with the good company of Fala, his dog. All was serene.
Mr. and Mrs. Byrnes and Bill Donovan were guests of the President. Donovan invited the Byrnes to go with him to visit the nearby OSS camp. “When we arrived,” wrote Byrnes,
the Chief [Major Fairbairn] had his men running along a narrow board about fifty feet from the ground; it was supposed to represent a housetop. If they slipped, they fell into a net. After watching this and similar stunts, we went into a house where, accompanied by one of the recruits, we walked through a hall about four feet wide and dark as melted midnight. Suddenly the floor beneath us dropped about six or eight inches and in a split second there appeared ahead of us the figure of Tojo. While off balance the recruit fired from the hip, hitting the papier-mâché Tojo in the head. Then in short order Hitler appeared and was got rid of the same way, and the recruit earned a rating for good marksmanship.
Donovan and Byrnes brought Fairbairn back to Shangri-La with them, and he enthralled the President with his “repertoire of stunts and stories, and by his assortment of trick weapons.”
Once he had his training camps functioning, Donovan turned his attention to improving the selection of personnel for OSS. Harry Murray, John Gardner, and James Hamilton, the prominent San Francisco psychiatrist, were asked to establish a psychological testing program. “The old man looked at me with his blue eyes and said, ‘I want it done in a month,’” Hamilton recalled. “‘You will get the best people from the army and from civilian life. You’ll get an estate in the country, and I want it done in a month.’”
At the OSS “assessment school,” psychological tests screened individuals who might have Axis sympathies, could not withstand frustrations, could not hold their liquor, or had other characteristics that would limit their effectiveness. Van Halsey, who assessed OSS personnel for overseas duty, found he could learn what he needed to know from the answers men and women gave to these questions: What experience made you feel like sinking through the floor? What things do you dislike seeing people do? What would you like to do if you had unlimited means? What would you teach your children? What would push you into a nervous breakdown? What moods and feelings are most disturbing to you and how often do you have them?
As the OSS grew, the psychological testing program became more and more sophisticated. After the war it was studied by the psychology profession for its groundbreaking contributions to the knowledge of behavior in given situations. The OSS had made considerable progress since the early days of the COI, when a recruiter once asked a friend, “Have you met any well-adjusted psychotics lately?”
OSS testing established what types of personalities made the finest agents. A spy is a peculiar sort of person. He must be secretive by nature but open in manner. He must be well balanced and normal in most respects or he cannot gather and accurately rate information. He must be able to stand up under loneliness and the ever-present fear of discovery. He must keep cool in a crisis.
The first months of 1943 saw a bitter dispute between OWI chief Elmer Davis and Donovan as to who should be responsible for psychological warfare abroad. Donovan, convinced that psychological warfare must be integrated into his overall plans for the completion of the conquest of North Africa as well as for the “softening up” of Italy (the next target for Allied arms), felt that Davis should confine his efforts to keeping the American public informed of the progress of the war. Robert Sherwood, who headed the OWI’s foreign information service, told reporter friends that if Donovan obtained control he would quit his post. He had had enough of his former chief’s freewheeling ways.
“We are not press agents for the government,” asserted Davis. “We expect to set forth the difficulties with which both the military and civilian branches of the government are faced, and their shortcomings as well as their successes.”
Donovan had no quarrel with this policy when applied to the American public, but he argued that American information services abroad should “adjust to military strategy.” He proposed to plant stories and rumors that would cripple the enemy and help the United States. Both Donovan and Davis proved to be formidable bureaucratic combatants in the service of their conflicting views, and it became evident that only Franklin Roosevelt would be able to settle their differences. Donovan, who was supported by the JCS, urged War Secretary Stimson to intercede with the President.
“Both of these functions,” Stimson wrote to FDR in February, “are definitely weapons of war.” Donovan and Davis differed, said Stimson, “as to the scope and jurisdiction of their separate duties. As the head of the War Department, I am in the position of the innocent bystander in the case of an attempt by a procession of the Ancient and Honorable Order of Hibernians and a procession of Orangemen to pass each other on the street. I only know that every Army commander in a foreign thea
ter, if the present difficulties persist, will be subject to great embarrassment and danger to his operations.”
General Marshall was outspoken in his support of Donovan’s OSS. He felt strongly that Sherwood’s staff had seriously impeded Eisenhower’s political negotiations before and during the North African invasion as well as ongoing military operations. OWI’s efforts simply were not coordinated with what American arms had to achieve, and Sherwood had followed his own political predilections regardless of their effect on events in the field.
“How Mr. Sherwood operates has long been one of Washington’s mysteries,” editorialized the Washington Post.
He has a large staff of ideologists who seem to be well versed in the Four Freedoms, but not so well endowed with the common sense to apply their learning and enthusiasm with prudence and knowledge of local situations, and not so well grounded in the technics of psychological warfare. At any rate, the Joint Chiefs of Staff feel with General Eisenhower that their work has furnished less aid than hindrance in the prosecution of our military operations. Hence they have requested that Mr. Sherwood’s agency report in future to Col. William J. Donovan’s Office of Strategic Services, which is under the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The directive has set off a jurisdictional dispute of some magnitude.
The dispute became more complicated on February 18, when Davis, who was lunching at the White House with the President, brought Donovan’s old foe General Strong of G-2 into the fray. Davis urged that Strong be called to the White House to give his views on the OSS-OWI controversy. Roosevelt summoned Strong, who appeared within the hour. Listening to Davis and Strong’s combined arguments, the President decided that propaganda operations should be put under the OWI, and for good measure, to silence JCS support for Donovan, that the OSS should be transferred to the War Department where, for practical purposes, it would report to G-2.
Some observers of Roosevelt’s wartime Washington believe that Harry Hopkins had been warning Roosevelt and the Democrats of the political danger of Donovan’s undoubted ambition, charismatic personality, and allegiance to the Republican Party. Others say that Strong and Davis changed Roosevelt’s mind. In any case, the directive that Strong prepared that day amounted to the dissolution of the OSS. He gave it to General Marshall for his approval the next day. “All this of course was quite out of channels,” remarked Thomas Troy. “The G-2 chief, used by the OWI director, was instructed by the President to draft an order abolishing a JCS agency! It was also productive of much high-level scurrying, chattering, and rumoring, all at a feverish pace.”
Major General Joseph T. McNarney, who as Marshall’s deputy chief of staff was the JCS’s link to the White House, asked Donovan to come see him on February 20. He bluntly told Donovan that Roosevelt had decided to put the OSS under G-2. If Donovan would go along willingly with this move, Roosevelt would make him a brigadier general.
“Frankly I was shocked as hell,” Donovan recalled after the war.
The OSS had proved itself in North Africa, and we had our agents out all over the world. We had already earned the respect of both our allies and our enemies, and the President of the United States was going to destroy us for what were his own private political reasons. What began as a difference of opinion between Roosevelt’s crony Sherwood and General Eisenhower had involved both the OSS and the OWI in an angry showdown. Davis intemperately had brought G-2 back into the picture in an attempt to find an ally wherever he could, regardless of the consequences to the war effort and American security.
Donovan talked with his key aides. James Grafton Rogers, a Yale law professor who had taken Edmond Taylor’s place as the OSS psychological warfare chief, had a gloomy conference with Donovan. “Bill and I agreed,” wrote Rogers in his journal, that “we must resign. He is to write a letter of protest, try to see the President as a last resort. We could neither of us live under General Strong.”
“Bill Donovan troubles me,” added Rogers in a few days. “He is so honest, so aggressive, so scattered, so provocative. Day by day I see him getting near elimination because he excites anger. But he has taught Washington the elements of modern warfare, and no one else has even tried.”
People at the JCS told Donovan “to sit tight and wait,” but on February 23, Donovan wrote a letter to Roosevelt, who had agreed to see him.
During these past months I have hesitated to encroach upon your crowded days. This course (however excellent the motive) has perhaps failed to keep you aware of the manner in which we have been endeavoring to fulfill the responsibilities you gave us.
I would like to tell you about these activities. Though I have seen articles in the press to the contrary, this organization has no quarrel with OWI. It is not true that we have in any way invaded the province of OWI.
We do not duplicate their activity in the open propaganda assigned to them by your Directive. We do not possess either equipment or personnel to do such work. In fact, we have not thus far even secured all the equipment necessary to operate in the field of black subversion—an arena in which OWI has always disclaimed any interest.
I suspect that confusion has arisen because the word “psychological” has been given different meanings by different American and English agencies. The U.S. Chiefs of Staff have used the word in the general sense employed by the German and other Continental armies as applying to all unorthodox methods. They call this weapon of warfare psychological only because of the effect produced rather than as a description of the means employed.
In the subversive field of unorthodox warfare we do not impinge upon the assigned functions of any other agency. The Joint Chiefs made a thorough inquiry into our organization and issued a Directive clearly limiting our duties within our assigned field.
I have heard that a suggestion has been made that you consider transferring this Agency to the War Department. This would, in my opinion, disrupt our usefulness. You early recognized that this work could not live if it were buried in the machinery of a great department. You saw that it must have elbow room and made us an Agency of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
The Joint Chiefs should have every facility which can effectively aid them. We are prepared to act for them in unorthodox warfare through a far-flung net of organizers and agents throughout the theaters—except for the moment in the South Pacific.
Our connections with underground channels will, as has already been demonstrated, count heavily when invasions are ready.
To disrupt such plans at this moment would, I believe, be a valuable gift to the enemy.
I hope you will examine the situation and ascertain the truth.
I anticipate the privilege of talking with you soon.
Donovan had good reason to be alarmed about the future of the OSS. The directive drafted by Strong was now on the President’s desk awaiting his signature. Realizing that one of Roosevelt’s motives in moving against him was political, Donovan called in Ernest Cuneo, the OSS liaison officer with both J. Edgar Hoover and Bill Stephenson. Cuneo was a Democratic stalwart with top-level connections in the administration.
“I went into action,” Cuneo said. “I phoned the White House time and again. I asked that the directive be taken off the President’s desk. They wouldn’t do it. I told them to at least put it on the bottom of the pile of work awaiting Mr. Roosevelt’s attention. This at least was done.”
“He won’t reach it until 4:00 P.M.,” Cuneo was told.
In this way Cuneo gave Donovan six precious hours in which to mobilize aid from the JCS. Support was swift and vociferous. For once the top admirals and generals, appreciating what OSS had accomplished, spoke up on Donovan’s behalf. They also helped by describing Davis and the OWI as unrealistic, uncooperative, and troublesome. Listening to the angry reaction from the JCS, Roosevelt took the directive off his desk. The JCS now set about drafting a new directive that would eliminate the area of conflict between the OSS and the OWI.
On March 9, President Roosevelt issued Executive Order No. 9312. It placed full responsibility
for foreign propaganda activities under the OWI. The OSS was to keep the responsibility for propaganda activities behind enemy lines. Nothing was said of removing the OSS from the Joint Chiefs of Staff to place it under G-2. As was the case with many of Roosevelt’s directives, the order left plenty of room for bureaucratic maneuvering and confusion in the future, but the OSS survived. On March 15 Donovan, Davis, and OWI Associate Director Milton Eisenhower lunched together. Their conversation was amicable as they explored ways in which the two organizations could cooperate. It seemed to all three men at the table that perhaps the true enemy was in Berlin, Tokyo, and Rome, after all.
There were to be renewed attacks on the OSS by General Strong, but for now Donovan had good reason to be satisfied. He tore up his letter of resignation. At last the OSS had a clear-cut status in the Washington bureaucracy, a standing without which no government agency can expect more than an ephemeral life, regardless of its contributions to the public good.
30
Partners with the Resistance
“THERE ARE TWO sides to covert activities,” OSS man George Bowden once remarked, “blowing up a bridge or watching what goes over it. Some people would rather blow the bridge up, and at times Donovan got on that side of the fence.”
Donovan Page 53
