On the morning of December 16, the agents were proved correct when the Germans struck on an 80-mile front in the wooded hills of the Ardennes and achieved tactical surprise. Two panzer armies cracked the front wide open and drove into Belgium. The Battle of the Bulge had begun. For ten days the German attack made dangerous progress, and the OSS agents in the area were hard put to get reports of value to the OSS liaison officers. Donovan, checking on his OSS groups, appeared at the front lines. He walked into Vance Vogel’s headquarters.
“Hi, Vance, how are you doing?” he asked.
“I’d met him only once in a group of 75 or 80 in Washington,” recalled Vogel.
Donovan straddled a chair and leaned forward over its back, a genial smile on his face despite the tenseness of the situation.
“For 30 minutes or so I briefed him on our operations,” said Vogel. “We’d run over 100 missions out of our unit.”
Then Donovan was off to visit another OSS group, then still another. On December 26, the day that the British and Americans halted the German offensive short of the Meuse River, Donovan had dinner with Churchill at Chequers. There was much to discuss concerning the peace, which now seemed only months away.
After he had conferred with OSS London, Donovan flew off on what had become an almost routine inspection of OSS bases in the Mediterranean and Asia. Since he now had his own C-54, which could fly at 210 miles per hour, Donovan was able to include more destinations than before in a given number of days. The Department of State had asked him to assess the Russian losses in the war for the President’s information at the Yalta Conference, scheduled to take place on February 4. In Cairo Donovan checked agent sources. The Air Transport Command had asked that he also gather information about conditions along the routes that the President’s C-54, The Sacred Cow, and other delegates to the conference would take.
At the same time, the State Department pointedly did not ask Donovan for intelligence information that might have proved critical at Yalta. Donovan had been forbidden to send agents into Manchuria to find out the truth about the Japanese Kwantung Army, which had occupied the province since 1931. “It is terribly easy to go wrong, to make a mistake in high policy because of an intelligence slip-up,” said Donovan after the war.
The appearance of the USSR as a partner of the Chinese in Manchuria was largely brought about by an American policy decision growing out of a fatal gap in intelligence.
In February 1945, at Yalta, Mr. Roosevelt wanted from Stalin a pledge that Russia would enter the Pacific war. At that time the crack Kwantung Army of 750,000 troops was believed by the U.S. chiefs of staff to be based at the Manchurian arsenal. With our own forces about to close with the Japanese on the home islands and, in conjunction with the Chinese, on the continent of Asia, the U.S. high command was anxious to have the Kwantung Army engaged simultaneously by the Russians and thus be drawn away from our proposed battlegrounds. To win the Russians to this plan, Mr. Roosevelt bid high. Did he bid too high? The bargain struck at Yalta was based upon intelligence which we know now was incomplete. The truth about the Kwantung Army is that the best troops had been drawn off to reinforce the Philippines and Okinawa, leaving behind mostly green recruits. When the Russians did in fact invade Manchuria they found a paper army.
From the Middle East Donovan continued to New Delhi, where he rendezvoused with Ray Peers, commanding officer of Detachment 101. Peers briefed him on 101 operations in preparation for a meeting a few days later in Myitkyina, Burma, with Lord Mountbatten and generals Daniel Sultan, Albert Wedemeyer, and Howard Davidson. At Myitkyina the Allied generals sat in Sultan’s office and considered what should be done about the serious weakness of the Chinese armies in China. They agreed that the Chinese troops then in Burma should be sent back to China as soon as they had played their part in the capture of Lashio and Mandalay. Donovan and Peers went to Kandy to discuss OSS contingency plans for Asia with John Coughlin, Detachment 404’s commander. Together they planned the victory drive of the American-Kachin Rangers, which was to destroy the last important Japanese resistance in Burma.
Donovan flew in a light plane to Ramree Island on the coast of Burma, where a South African motor launch and a U.S. patrol boat had put ashore an OSS operational group to harass the retreating Japanese. The group’s commanding officer, George Bright, and his team were astounded when the plane approached their newly won landing strip. They were even more astounded when the man in the passenger’s seat turned out to be Bill Donovan, who wanted another firsthand impression of the war in Burma.
The OSS chief learned much of value in Southeast Asia, but it was in China that Donovan gained the most significant new information. He was first to learn through Chinese sources that the Japanese Kwantung Army had been depleted. From China he sent urgent messages to Washington, but these were discounted by State Department officers who were preparing background papers for the President’s use at Yalta. On January 24 Donovan left China aboard his C-54 and over the next two weeks made additional visits to Calcutta, Colombo and Kandy, Delhi, Karachi, Cairo, Casablanca, and Terceira Island in the Azores on his way back to Washington.
Upon returning to America, Donovan caught up on the reports from his agents in other parts of the world. On February 25, he wrote to Roosevelt: “In the course of a search [in Italy] for the official and personal papers of Marshal Graziani (which were found in their hiding place in the Catacombs), our people recovered certain boxes of personal property. This property evidently represented booty taken by the Marshal in the Abyssinian campaign. Of chief interest are the silver service, Coptic cross, and ceremonial garments of Haile Selassie and certain of his chieftains.” Donovan wanted Roosevelt to pen a personal note to Haile Selassie, to whom he planned to return his belongings.
The recovery of the emperor of Ethiopia’s royal property was just an incident of the day in February 1945, as OSS groups and agents operating at scattered points on the globe sent their reports to Washington. In Switzerland Allen Dulles had received word through Maj. Max Waibel of Swiss Intelligence that the million German troops in northern Italy were considering surrender to the OSS. Dulles kept Donovan in close touch with the negotiations, which he called Operation Sunrise.
The Combined Chiefs of Staff approved Dulles’s plan, and a meeting was arranged at Caserta to draw up the armistice. It remained only to inform the Soviet Union, which had long since discovered Dulles’s activities through its agents in Switzerland. When Ambassador Harriman told Foreign Minister Molotov in Moscow, the Russian immediately announced that the Soviet Union must send three officers to Bern. Moscow was advised that nothing was to be done at Bern, that the armistice meeting was to be held in Caserta. The Soviets replied that if they couldn’t be represented in Bern, they wouldn’t go to Caserta either. They demanded that the negotiations be broken off.
Stalin and Roosevelt considered the matter. Stalin accused the United States of negotiating with Field Marshal Kesselring, in Dulles’s words, “to open up the German front to permit the American Army to advance. In return for this military assistance, the United States and Britain had agreed to secure easier peace terms for Germany. In accordance with this agreement, the Germans already had moved three divisions from the Italian front to the Russian front, and the American Army had been permitted to advance in Germany.”
Roosevelt was furious at the Russian dictator’s Byzantine charges. Operation Sunrise dragged on through March and April, to Donovan’s frustration.
Donovan was also encountering frustration at home, where his proposals for a peacetime intelligence agency had run into a storm of opposition. “His plan was beset with conflicting views,” said Allen Dulles. “Some in our government would have the new organization report to the Joint Chiefs of Staff—as did OSS during the war—while others preferred it to be under the Department of State. And there was controversy as to whether one individual could or should be responsible for presenting a consolidated view of the intelligence picture to the policymakers, or whether this
should be the collective responsibility of the chiefs of all the intelligence services.”
The Joint Chiefs of Staff had submitted the Donovan plan to the army and navy for review; both services spiritedly insisted on keeping control of all their intelligence services. The State Department wished to control all political intelligence. Donovan and his OSS aides were confident that with Roosevelt’s support they would be able to persuade the armed forces and the State Department to cooperate with a peacetime central intelligence, but on February 9, the roof fell in.
Donovan, still an early riser, got up at 5:00 A.M., stepped outside his Georgetown front door, and picked up a copy of the Washington Times-Herald. He found his name in a front-page headline.
“Creation of an all-powerful intelligence service to spy on the postwar world and to pry into the lives of citizens at home is under consideration by the New Deal,” began a story by Walter Trohan.
“The Washington Times-Herald and the Chicago Tribune yesterday secured exclusively a copy of a highly confidential and secret memorandum fron General (William J.) Donovan to President Roosevelt. . . . Also obtained was a copy of an equally secret suggested draft of an order setting up the general intelligence service, which would supersede all existing Federal police and intelligence units, including Army G-2, Navy ONI, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Internal Revenue Agency.”
Trohan, working for a virulently anti-Roosevelt newspaper that had been a standard-bearer of isolationist feeling in the United States, had found a way to embarrass the administration. Obviously, somebody had leaked the Donovan memorandum of November 18 to Trohan. Donovan telephoned Otto C. “Ole” Doering, his executive officer.
“Ole, I want you to find out who did this and report to me at nine.”
There had been five copies of the Donovan memorandum.
“At nine, I was ready,” Doering said later. “I told the General that J. Edgar Hoover had personally handed the memorandum to Trohan. Donovan never said a word.”
Other sources later implicated General Strong of G-2 in the leak, and Walter Trohan claimed that FDR himself gave him the information. This could hardly have been the case, for FDR was not the sort of politician who willingly handed a political enemy a knife to drive into his back. Roosevelt phoned Donovan on the afternoon of February 9. He directed Donovan to “shove the entire thing under the rug for as long as the shock waves reverberate.”
On February 23 Donovan wrote to the President concerning the “deliberate plan to sabotage any attempt at reorganization of this government’s intelligence services,” saying, “The characterization of the plan as ‘Gestapo’ is fully refuted by the specific provision in my paper that the organization have no police or law enforcement functions, either at home or abroad. The entire situation is most disturbing because it looks like an inside job or at least, it was abetted by someone on the inside.”
Donovan also suggested to the JCS that the “matter be investigated by those who have the power to take testimony under oath,” since General Strong and not J. Edgar Hoover might have been the person responsible for the breach of security.
Roosevelt waited until April 5 before he judged the shock waves were no longer reverberating. “I should appreciate your calling together the chiefs of the foreign intelligence and internal security units in the various executive agencies, so that a consensus of opinion can be secured,” Roosevelt told Donovan. “It appears to me that all of the ten executive departments, as well as the Foreign Economic Administration and the Federal Communications Commission have a direct interest in the proposed venture. They should all be asked to contribute their suggestions to the proposed centralized intelligence service.”
The next day Donovan set about calling the meeting. He asked each of the heads of the executive departments and agencies to comment on the proposal.
“I am hopeful that the meeting can be held immediately after my return, on or about April 25, from a brief trip to Europe,” he wrote to Roosevelt.
Allied armies had crossed the Rhine and were throwing a ring of steel around the German Army in the Ruhr. The war was drawing to a close, and Donovan had urgent preparations to make for the OSS role in Europe after the armistice was signed. By the evening of April 6, Donovan had sent letters to all the agencies mentioned by Roosevelt, and at 9:00 P.M. he and John Wilson, a young aide, left for Paris. They arrived the next day and stayed at the Ritz Hotel in a suite that Hermann Göring had favored. Russell Forgan and David Bruce came from London, and other key men from OSS bases on the Continent joined them to attend a conference held at the Hotel Metropole on the Boulevard des Italiens.
“We all know about the Free French,” Donovan said when the subject of France came up. “We’ve been working with them for three years, but we don’t know anything about Vichy French. We’ll call them the conservatives.”
Adolph Schmidt was directed to find out everything he could about the Vichy French, who also must be counted upon to rebuild their nation if France were again to be a great power.
“My plan for a peacetime central intelligence seemed assured, providing the President continued to support it,” Donovan said later. “I had nothing to worry about. I went to bed on the night of April 12 confident that things would work out one way or the other. I dropped off to sleep little knowing that Franklin Roosevelt had suffered a massive cerebral hemorrhage and had died just a few hours before.”
OSS in Washington sent an urgent message to the Ritz Hotel. Forgan and Wilson received the message and burst into Donovan’s room. Told the news, Donovan stared in silence for several moments. “I’m not surprised,” he finally said.
He immediately placed a transatlantic call to Ned Buxton in Washington to confirm the circumstances.
“What will happen now to OSS?” Buxton asked.
“I’m afraid it’s the end,” replied Donovan.
Donovan knew he must hurry back to Washington to meet with Harry S. Truman, the new President, but he first had to give further instructions to his men in Europe. At the time there was much talk about the diehard Nazis forming a redoubt of resistance in the Alps. Before leaving Washington Donovan had reported to Roosevelt:
The Nazi Party Intelligence Service (RSHA), controlled by Himmler, has absorbed the Abwehr and the two services are being consolidated into an effective tool, which may be used by the underground after military defeat.
Among other things the report indicates that officers for a German resistance army of between 35,000 and 40,000 men are receiving training in resistance methods and guerrilla warfare at special Nazi schools. There is also evidence of the caching of supplies and that RSHA has issued directions which, although they have not so far related to continuing guerrilla resistance, have directed intelligence, subversion, and sabotage activities.
To disrupt the Nazi redoubt, OSS mission Iron Cross had been created under Capt. Aaron Bank. “The personnel involved were around 150 German POWs, who had been recruited in French POW camps in January 1945, who claimed they were anti-Nazi,” said Bank. “I organized and trained them in pertinent aspects of unconventional warfare and parachuting.”
The Iron Cross mission was to parachute into the Inn Valley of the Austrian Alps, where the Nazis were expected to make their last stand. Donovan dined at the Ritz with Bank’s staff supervisor from OSS Paris headquarters. He approved of Bank’s mission. “Tell Bank to get Hitler” were his final instructions.
Donovan also called Adolph Schmidt to the Ritz. “We don’t know where the Russians will stop,” he said. “I want you to load up with about ten radio sets and put them in plastic material. Take them into Germany to points behind where the Russians are supposed to stop. Bury the radios 20 to 30 miles apart so that they’ll be there in case we want to send some people in once they’ve taken over.”
Donovan left for Washington on April 25, and Schmidt and a team of OSS men with their radios left for Germany.
“We had no trouble passing the Russian lines,” said Schmidt. “We hande
d out cigarettes to the Russian troops. We buried the radios 20 to 30 miles apart pretty much along a line.”
Even as Donovan flew back to America, patrols of the U.S. First Army were crossing the Elbe River to make the first Anglo-American contact with Soviet troops at Torgau. On the same day, Russian forces under Marshal Georgi K. Zhukov and Gen. Ivan S. Konev surrounded Berlin. OSS agents soon reported that Hitler himself was trapped in the beleaguered city. He had made no effort to reach the Alpine stronghold that OSS agents had feared would create one last obstacle to Allied victory. On April 28 Benito Mussolini and his mistress were captured and put to death by partisans while attempting to flee to Switzerland. Two days later Hitler married his mistress, Eva Braun, and then committed suicide with her in a bunker beneath the Reich Chancellery. Berlin surrendered on May 2, and on May 7 the official German capitulation was signed by Hitler’s successor, Adm. Karl Dönitz, at Allied supreme headquarters in Reims.
Throughout Europe OSS men and women celebrated the Allied victory and then went back to work. Donovan had given orders to gather evidence for war crimes trials and to keep a close eye on the Soviets. OSS teams were among the first to reach Hitler’s death camps and discover the grim proofs of genocide.
On May 7 Bill Donovan and Bill Stephenson were together in Donovan’s suite at the St. Regis Hotel in New York when word reached them that Germany had signed the peace. The war was over in Europe. “We both let out a shout of jubilation,” remembered Sir William Stephenson. “We embraced in a big hug and did a bear dance of triumph.”
Big Bill and Little Bill, partners in intelligence who had done so much in the clandestine world of secret warfare to bring about Hitler’s defeat, pranced about the room, whooping with boyish delight at the good news. Then they sat and soberly talked about what the future held for American and British intelligence services once the war with Japan was won as well. Already the principal business at hand was the winning of the peace. To Bill Donovan it seemed that critical mistakes had already been made. He knew that the Soviet Union was an untrustworthy ally and that possible cause for still another great war was being created by the subjection of Eastern Europe to Communist rule. The Yalta agreement supposed that the Soviets would permit democratic institutions and free elections in the countries they occupied, but Donovan knew this would never happen.
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