Donovan regarded the American and the Kachin standing together with their arms around each other’s waists, a visual embodiment of the American-Kachin partnership. He was confident that this partnership would play an important role in the Burma campaigns to come. When it was time for Donovan and Eifler to leave, Donovan clapped Eifler on the back. Eifler could see he was impressed.
The Kachins brought the Moth out of hiding and cleared the strip.
“Rev it up all you can and then take off,” Curl told Eifler after the two men climbed into the plane.
The Kachins held back the plane as Eifler revved up the engine. When he signaled, they gave it a push, and the Moth jounced down the field, as Eifler later said, “like a tumblebug. We were taking off downhill, and we gathered speed slowly because of Donovan’s weight.”
Eifler himself was a big man, and the light plane, unable to gain speed, bumbled down the strip toward the wall of trees at the far end. Suddenly Eifler cut the plane at a sharp angle to the left, where the forest canopy was lower, and roared over the nearby river.
“We haven’t got the power on the nose of these planes that we should have,” remarked Donovan to Eifler as the plane banked five feet over the river’s brown flood.
John Coughlin, another top OSS man with 101, had returned to Nazira from a trip to find that Donovan was behind the lines with Eifler. He never expected to see either Eifler or Donovan alive again. That night, as the OSS men celebrated the safe conclusion to the flight to Knothead, Coughlin took Donovan aside.
“General, what were you thinking about to go in there with Carl?”
Donovan always was ready to listen to his men’s criticism. “I had to,” he replied.
“You should have considered more things than your damned honor. If I’d been here, I would have reminded you of every one of them.”
Donovan smiled. He felt buoyed by his firsthand impression of the OSS men in the field and their Kachin friends, and he now knew exactly what Detachment 101 would be able to offer Gen. Joseph Stilwell, who was waiting for him in China. He spent much of the evening playing bridge with one of Nicol Smith’s young Thais.
Donovan flew in the Moth to Chabua in the morning and took off in another plane for Kunming. John Ford and cameraman John Pennick flew with Donovan, as did the young Thai bridge player. The Thai came along to entertain Donovan at cards on the long flight over the Hump, and Ford, who knew Maj. Gen. Claire Chennault, commander of the 14th U.S. Air Force, was making the trip to introduce Donovan to Chennault’s Flying Tigers. Detachment 202 must live up to the commitments 109 had made for it at Cairo. Donovan was concerned, for he had sent representative after representative to China only to have each one fall under the sway of the Chinese intelligence chief, Tai Li.
Tai Li, one of the 20th century’s remarkable spymasters, curiously enough was described by some OSS men as stocky and by others as slender. At least all agreed he was short. Unsmiling, he had all the inscrutability attributed to the Orient, but when he smiled he showed an impressive amount of gold bridgework and revealed a sunny innocence that contradicted his malign reputation. His eyes were black and piercing. He usually wore a khaki whipcord suit with a high collar buttoned up to the neck. He believed the less Donovan’s OSS knew about China, the better.
Captain Milton Miles, who had replaced Al Lusey as Donovan’s man in China, had become Tai Li’s close friend, or so it appeared. On April 15, 1943, Far East OSS Chief Miles, Donovan, Chinese Foreign Minister T. V. Soong, Navy Secretary Frank Knox, and Tai Li had met in Washington to establish the Sino-American Special Technical Cooperation Agreement. The agreement pledged that China and the United States, “animated by mutual desire to annihilate the common enemy and achieve military victory,” would work together in the fields of intelligence and clandestine warfare. SACO, as the organization came to be called, was meant to end the conflict between American and Chinese intelligence. Donovan had made Miles his coordinator for the OSS in the Far East, but he had become disillusioned with his ability to work out any useful relationship with Tai Li. While Miles was in Washington for the SACO meetings, Donovan invited him to dinner at his Georgetown house and drew him out about his attitudes and plans. His remaining confidence in Miles dwindled, and he decided to send Richard Heppner, another Donovan law partner, to China.
“The OSS is the only institution that is run by its own inmates,” said Miles, and returned to China. Heppner arrived in Chungking presumably to assist Miles. Actually Donovan had intended from the start that Heppner should replace him. Heppner and Miles failed to get along, and Tai Li obstructed both of the rival OSS leaders. By late summer 1943, when OSS agents found proof that Tai Li was withholding most intelligence of value and was contributing virtually nothing of importance to the SACO undertaking, Donovan decided that the agreement must be dissolved. The OSS should instead cooperate in China with Chennault’s 14th Air Force. Agents would work in the field to discover enemy troop concentrations and supply dumps that might merit 14th Air Force attacks.
The intelligence situation in China became critical when Roosevelt, Churchill, and Chiang Kai-shek held their Cairo meeting beginning on November 23, 1943. Tai Li must not be allowed to obstruct the flow of intelligence about China, and as Donovan flew over the Hump he had every intention of forcing a showdown.
Donovan left his companions in Kunming, where the OSS had an important base, and flew on to Chungking, arriving on December 2. Ed McGinnis, an OSS man who was later to be sergeant-at-arms of the U.S. Senate, accompanied Donovan to a dinner given in 109’s honor by T. V. Soong.
There were 20 men seated at two tables, ranging from U.S. Ambassador Pat Hurley and Gen. Albert Wedemeyer to Donovan and Tai Li. Pat Hurley distinguished himself by drinking too much of the Chinese orange wine, which Tai Li usually enriched with a discreet addition of knockout drops, and made a speech in which he blearily announced that there were two men seated at the table who should be the chief executives of their respective countries—the great citizen soldier William J. Donovan and T. V. Soong. Donovan proposed a toast to Tai Li, while privately observing that Tai Li had the earmarks of “a mediocre policeman with medieval ideas of intelligence work.”
Oliver Caldwell, an old China hand and an OSS man, was also present. As the dinner, course after Chinese course, ran on into the night, Caldwell listened to “toast follow toast, one gombei leading to another, until most of the Chinese and Americans alike were tipsy. Only Donovan and Tai Li drank little or nothing and remained cool and collected. The two great spymasters competed in charm, each smiling and urbane, each so very agreeable. Butter would have melted in their mouths.”
Then, to Caldwell’s amazement, Donovan bluntly informed Tai Li that if the OSS could not perform its mission in cooperation with him, then the OSS would operate separately.
“If OSS tries to operate outside SACO,” said the smiling Tai Li, “I will kill your agents.”
“For every one of our agents you kill,” replied Donovan, “we will kill one of your generals.”
“You can’t talk to me like that,” said Tai Li.
“I am talking to you like that,” said Donovan evenly.
The OSS chief smiled, but a chill that even the most besotted diner soon recognized settled over the room. The party broke up, and Donovan went to OSS headquarters for the night. The next day Donovan and Tai Li met privately. Donovan made certain that the Chinese intelligence chief understood he would not allow any interference with the OSS.
Donovan next descended upon Milton Miles. Miles attempted to pick up the argument where it had been left in Washington the previous summer. Donovan demanded that SACO make sweeping changes to assure OSS control. He asserted that Miles had hurt the OSS by turning over both large sums of money and hard-to-obtain equipment to Tai Li while believing the glowing reports that the Chinese were forever passing on to their American colleagues in SACO. Miles, who had painstakingly negotiated the SACO agreement signed in Washington, shouted, “I don’t agree with writing
one thing and doing another. I quit!”
“You can’t quit,” Donovan replied. “You’re fired.”
Donovan ended OSS participation in SACO and immediately set about establishing a new relationship for OSS with the 14th Air Force. John Ford took Donovan to see Chennault, and 109 made arrangements to have OSS agents brought into China as members of the 5329th Air and Ground Forces Resources and Technical Staff, AGFRTS, which OSS men soon were calling Agfarts.
When Donovan was finished in China, he flew back to Chabua to pay another visit to Carl Eifler. He found Eifler very ill. The 101 commander could not sleep at night and would not take the medicine prescribed by doctors at the 20th General Hospital at Ledo. The pain in his head had become severe. Donovan felt he had no choice but to relieve Eifler of command. On December 11, he placed John Coughlin in command of Detachment 101, but on December 17 Coughlin turned over the command to Ray Peers.
Before leaving Washington on November 11, Donovan had met with Franklin Roosevelt to tell him of his plan to go to Moscow to establish an OSS mission in exchange for an NKVD mission in the American capital. In 1942 Russia had made large additions to its embassy and consular staff, an indication that they were increasing their espionage in the United States. Donovan reasoned that an agreement between the OSS and the NKVD would not enable the Communists to learn more than they were in a position to learn already. If Russia and the western Allies were to work well together to defeat Hitler, they must share essential intelligence. As things were, British and American commanders had to rely on intercepted German battle messages to discover the positions of the Red Army. The Soviets were constantly demanding of the Americans and British both their war plans and estimates of Axis strength, but they were totally unwilling to share any intelligence with the West.
On November 22, Donovan, then in Cairo, had sent a top-secret report to his OSS headquarters in Washington “for distribution among those people who are discreet and who should have the information.” It dealt with conditions inside the Soviet Union as a basis for the Kremlin’s decisions on the conduct of the war. Donovan considered the possibilities that the Soviets might help the United States fight Japan, but “until Germany has been completely defeated, they will not attack Japan or give us bases.” With intriguing insight, Donovan wrote:
On the subject of the postwar world, they assume that they will have the Baltic states; that the states adjoining Russian territory will not be set up as anti-Soviet buffer states but as friendly to Russia as to Great Britain; also that the Dardanelles will be internationalized. A “Cordon Sanitaire” will not be tolerated. They want Polish and Finnish governments set up which are not anti-Russian. They may be willing to negotiate boundary questions under these circumstances. They desire an accepted position among the nations of the world and expect to be conferred with on all international questions that arise whether it is an Arab or South American problem. They want to secure all the above on a friendly basis but failing this they will employ whatever tactics necessary to attain these ends.
Roosevelt approved Donovan’s plan to go to Moscow. John R. Deane, secretary to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was made part of Donovan’s mission. Deane and Donovan met in Cairo to plan the trip, and Deane went on to Moscow. Two days before Christmas Donovan’s plane set down in Moscow on an airport runway where the snow was already piled deep. Skies were gloomy, and he shivered, accustomed to the Mediterranean world’s warmth. Both Deane and Ambassador Averell Harriman were at the airport to welcome him.
“I was never more pleased to see anyone,” Deane noted in his journal. “We were all feeling a little sorry for ourselves at being in the bleak cold atmosphere of Moscow so far from home. His coming was a breath of fresh air from the outside world, and he was none the less welcome because of the case of Scotch whisky which he brought to brighten my Christmas. We had been old friends in Washington and had fought several battles together against some of the Washington agencies which were jealous of OSS achievements. As secretary of the JCS, I was well aware of the strength of the organization which Donovan had created and had some appreciation of its capabilities, and apparently the Russians had too.”
Harriman immediately took Donovan to see Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov, who set up a meeting for him with the NKVD. The headquarters for the NKVD was at 2 Dzerzhinsky Street in two buildings that had been joined, their facades combined in such a way that they seemed to be one. One of the buildings was actually the Lubyanka, a prison for political offenders, and the other was a ponderous stone structure that had housed the offices of an insurance company in czarist days and later became a hotel. On December 27, Donovan, Deane, and the Russian-speaking Charles Bohlen as interpreter went to the headquarters of the NKVD, where they were taken down several bleak halls to a conference room.
Donovan made a quick appraisal of the smiling Russians, who he was certain were making a similar appraisal of him. In the conference room, one chair was placed in such a fashion that whoever sat in it would have to look into a strong light. It was an old police trick. Noticing at a glance the chair that the Russians evidently hoped he would take, Donovan willingly passed up several other chairs to take his seat in it.
“I’m ready for the fifth degree,” he remarked as he looked into the bright light.
Lieutenant General P. M. Fitin, head of the Soviet External Intelligence Service, wore a Soviet uniform with the blue piping of the Red police. Quiet and cordial in manner, he had long blond hair and blue eyes, and appeared to be a most agreeable spymaster. His colleague was Maj. Gen. A. P. Ossipov, head of subversion in foreign countries, a man with a sallow complexion and a threatening manner. Ossipov spoke excellent English.
In response to Fitin’s questions, interpreted by Ossipov, Donovan gave the Russians an outline of OSS activities, describing the kinds of agents employed and in what countries they were active. Fitin was interested in how the OSS introduced agents into enemy territory, their training and equipment, and where they were trained. Donovan gave candid replies. He told about the OSS suitcase radios and plastic explosives, and concluded by saying that he would be willing to appoint an OSS officer to be his liaison with Moscow. Donovan also said he would welcome a Soviet liaison officer in Washington.
Fitin thought the arrangement could be useful. “If the NKVD is about to sabotage a German plant or railroad, it would be good to let the OSS know,” he said.
Smoothly and with the same smile that had wreathed his face from the start of the interview, Fitin now wanted to know if Donovan had some other more devious reasons for coming to the Soviet Union. Donovan withered him with a look so contemptuous that no denial was needed.
Both intelligence chiefs relaxed. They agreed that OSS man John Haskell would represent Donovan in Moscow and NKVD man Col. A. G. Grauer would be the NKVD deputy in Washington. Each would have a staff of assistants.
Donovan was anxious to leave Moscow so he could get to Italy for the Allied landing at Anzio, scheduled for late January. When he got back to the U.S. Embassy, Ambassador Harriman offered to send him out of Russia in the four-engine plane that the United States kept at the Moscow airport for Harriman’s use. Of course, the Russians had to give permission. It was agreed that Bohlen, who had been recalled by the State Department, would accompany Donovan as far as Cairo.
To the Americans’ chagrin, Molotov refused to allow Donovan to fly in the plane. “It is only for the use of the ambassador,” said Molotov.
Harriman insisted that Molotov’s attitude was unfriendly and detrimental to the Allied war effort, but Molotov was adamant. On the other hand, he would be more than pleased to make available a Soviet two-engine plane to fly Donovan out of Russia.
“This was an empty gesture,” Donovan said after the war. “A small plane like that had little chance of making it through the furious storms then sweeping Russia. Molotov was merely trying to throw his weight around. He wanted me to understand fully that he was the boss.”
“Averell, you leave this to me,”
Donovan is quoted by Bohlen as saying, “and I will show you how to deal with the Russians.”
Donovan explained that he would take direct action. According to Bohlen:
With me along as interpreter, Donovan and Harriman’s pilot went to the military airfield where the plane was stationed. We arrived at about 11 o’clock at night and were met by a Soviet armed guard. Following Donovan’s instructions, I explained that he was an American general and wished to see the officer on duty. After some fumbling around with the telephones, a frightened sentry led us to the officer of the watch, a thin-faced young captain. Donovan explained the mission. He said it was an unfriendly act not to permit an American pilot to see the weather report and that he, as an American general, must insist. The captain was much concerned about a derogation from his orders, but General Donovan’s importunities wore him down, and he and our pilot went into the weather room and looked at the forecast for the following couple of days.
The weather report was bad, and there was no possibility of flying that night. The Americans returned to the embassy. “You people in the State Department just aren’t tough enough,” said Donovan as they drove back into Moscow. “You have no knowledge of how to deal with the Slavs. You see the results which we achieved by direct action.”
The next morning Harriman was informed that the Soviet authorities had moved his plane from the military field to the civilian field so that they could strengthen their control over it.
For 11 days Harriman and Molotov wrangled. There was nothing to do but to fly in the Soviet plane. The year 1943 came to an end, and a glum Donovan spent the New Year at the embassy. On January 6, Donovan and his party got up at six in the morning and drove in subzero weather to the airport, where they got ready once again to board the plane. A two-engine plane would have to land in Baku, Astrakhan, or Stalingrad to refuel on its way to Teheran over the only routes safe from German attack. Weather was severe in all of these places, and Donovan and his party once again returned to the U.S. Embassy. Donovan and Harriman had breakfast and discussed the situation.
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