The Secret War

by Max Hastings

  While the FBI could claim success in protecting the United States from Axis intelligence – a relatively easy task, given the clumsiness of Abwehr and Japanese attempts at penetration – its chief quarrelled with every branch of the armed forces because of his refusal to collaborate, to share information or informants that fell into his clutches. The Office of Naval Intelligence was especially exasperated by Hoover’s intransigence. On 13 August 1942 one of its officers, Commander W.S. Hogg, launched a fierce attack on the Bureau’s ‘inability to fit into a place in any coordinated military activity. [The] FBI is a civilian organisation with a background of peace. It has been built on its publicity, its favour with the public and Congress and its reputation as a protector of the people. It is ambitious, properly so in peacetime, perhaps, but questionably so in time of war … Ex-agents of FBI have said that every Agent owes his allegiance first to Hoover and second to the United States.’

  A characteristic episode took place when an escaped German airman, Peter Krug, was arrested in San Antonio: armed forces intelligence branches were not informed until after the FBI had held a triumphant press conference. Meanwhile Laurance Safford of Op-20-G had a major row with the Bureau over ownership of some German diplomatic codes that FBI agents seized in San Francisco. Hoover launched a bitter offensive against the infant OSS’s early ventures in South America, denouncing Donovan’s alleged ‘interference with the Bureau’s responsibility for handling and controlling operations of enemy espionage agents in the Western Hemisphere’. The director was even more hostile to Churchill’s nation and its intelligence services. The FBI’s internal history complains: ‘The British MI6 displayed its uncooperative attitude to such a degree that on Feb 4, 1944, the Bureau found it necessary to make a vigorous protest to the British Security representative in New York and to the London headquarters.’ For its own part, MI6 abandoned early and unsuccessful efforts to work with the FBI’s men on the ground in South America, and collaborated instead with the US Army’s G-2 department.

  All intelligence services seek to promote factional interests and inflate their own achievements, but the wartime FBI carried this practice to manic lengths. The British were exasperated that Hoover preferred to snatch headline credit for high-profile captures, rather than privily track or turn enemy spies. They were especially annoyed when their own prize double agent, ‘Garbo’, spent some time in the US in 1941–42, and the FBI mismanaged him so grossly that he was almost blown. Moreover the Bureau had the chutzpah to boast that it was itself responsible for the creation and management of the Double Cross system which helped to confuse the Germans about D-Day: the FBI Espionage Section’s quarterly summary of ‘outstanding accomplishments’, composed on 1 May 1944 for circulation throughout the higher echelons of the Roosevelt administration, recorded: ‘On March 17 the first message calculated to deceive the Germans as to the date of the European invasion by the Allies was sent through the [FBI’s] double agent Pat J by radio. This message was followed by similar messages for the same purpose … The operation of double agents during this quarter continued to add to the Bureau’s knowledge of the modus operandi and personnel employed by the German intelligence service.’ In the winter of 1944 the FBI circulated a memorandum which concluded magisterially: ‘Consideration is being given to continuing some of our double agents to penetrate the [German] underground after cessation of hostilities.’ To a greater degree than any other intelligence and security organisation the FBI – or, more explicitly, Hoover its chieftain – chose to view the war as providing a theatre for the extension of his own power and prestige, rather than as a mission to defeat the Axis.

  While the FBI waged a successful expansionist campaign in the Americas, elsewhere in the world Donovan triumphed, and soon presided over a large empire. Bill Bentinck of the British JIC never wavered in his view that the prime minister’s creation of SOE as a separate service and rival to MI6 had been a mistake. He urged Donovan to keep ‘skulduggery’ and intelligence-gathering under one roof, and so indeed the Americans did. In June 1942, by executive order the Office of War Information became the Office of Strategic Services. It was housed mostly in buildings vacated by the Public Health Service, and soon comprised four branches: Secret Intelligence (SI); Secret Operations (SO); psychological warfare or ‘Morale Operations’ (MO); counter-espionage (X-2).

  Washington bulged with people – 70,000 new arrivals in the first year after Pearl Harbor – and 5,000 more federal workers arrived each month thereafter, many bringing their families with them. The telephone system struggled to grapple with increased demand, especially for long-distance calls. The government spent – and wasted – cash on such a scale as the world had never seen. ‘Tempos’, buildings rushed up in a couple of months to house new departments, appeared on every green space around the city centre. Paper, filing cabinets and typewriters were in desperately short supply; amid a national appeal for used machines, radio stations played a jingle: ‘An idle typewriter is a help to Hitler.’ The capital was transformed over a decade from a quiet backwater into a noisy, crowded, expensive city boasting a mushroom growth of acronyms, each one signifying a new organisation: WPB, OPA, WMC, BEW, NWLB, ODT – and now OSS.

  The British were delighted, except Claude Dansey of MI6, who expressed disgust. Hating both the United States and SOE, he was appalled that the latter was now to have an American counterpart, bent on pursuing the same ‘noisy paths’, and run by a flamboyant officer who, in Dansey’s view, was ‘completely sold on publicity’. Broadway judged that Donovan was more interested in the thrills and spills of sponsoring paramilitary operations in enemy territory than in intelligence-gathering. One key area of US secret activities was ring-fenced beyond OSS’s remit: the colonel had no influence over the US Army’s and US Navy’s codebreakers, who represented by far the most important elements of America’s wartime intelligence effort. Moreover, in 1942, and to Donovan’s chagrin, propaganda was hived off to Elmer Davis’s Office of War Information. His own men were to be spies, saboteurs and sponsors of guerrilla campaigns.

  Under the stimulus of its manically energetic founder, OSS expanded like a giant party balloon. Donovan promised FDR an organisation based on men who were ‘calculatingly reckless’, with ‘disciplined daring’, and ‘trained for aggressive action’. Its New York facility struck one officer as resembling a pantomime repertory company: ‘Everyone was working up a scheme. Everything shimmered in secrecy, and it was a rare man who knew what his fellows were doing. Brooks Brothers was the unofficial costume-maker while Abercrombie & Fitch functioned as an uptown Quartermaster Corps, supplying air mattresses and sleeping bags and all the paraphernalia so dear to the hearts of small boys and civilians turned semi-guerrillas.’ When Arthur Schlesinger joined the organisation in 1943, he wrote to his parents that nobody seemed to work too hard, the material was interesting, and there were nice perquisites such as private screenings of Hollywood new releases for Donovan’s intimate circle. But the young academic deplored the remoteness from reality, as he saw it, of the new organisation: ‘For all the deathly secrecy of much of the material, there is an ivory-tower serenity about the place.’

  OSS eventually employed over 13,000 Americans together with many more foreigners, and enjoyed almost unlimited funding for weapons, planes, cars, office equipment, houses. Malcolm Muggeridge, MI6’s man in Lourenço Marques, complained that the arrival there of an OSS representative prompted soaring inflation in the local bribe market. A US officer dispatched to the Mediterranean wrote: ‘The chiefs of the various OSS headquarters overseas had a spectacular talent for living in style. The Cairo villa looked like a bastard version of the Taj Mahal. The high wall around it was pierced by a tall iron gate; there were broad verandas of inlaid tile and a profusion of shade trees above vast stretches of lawn. A platoon of servants glided in endless circles, the punkahs revolved overhead and through a leafy crevasse you could gaze each dawn on a pair of young Egyptian girls as they combed each other’s hair.’ OSS set up its Indian hea
dquarters at 32 Ferozshah Road, in Delhi’s smartest neighbourhood, with an implausible sign on the gate proclaiming it to be the residence of ‘Dr L.L. Smith, American Dentist’.

  Donovan had no patience with administration, and less with accountancy, which enabled some OSS officers to steal substantial sums of cash. Major William Holohan, a forty-year-old Harvard-educated former lawyer for the Securities & Exchange Commission, was parachuted into northern Italy for OSS in September 1944 with $16,000 in operational funds and an Italian-American interpreter, Lt. Aldo Icardi. Icardi thereafter reported his chief killed in a German ambush. After the war, however, an Italian court found in absentia that Icardi and his sergeant, a New York factory worker of Sicilian extraction, had poisoned then shot Holohan, dumped his body in a lake and seized his priceless dollars for the benefit of a communist partisan group. The truth of that episode remains disputed, but OSS cheerfully acknowledged employment of some bloodstained characters, including accredited members of the Mafia.

  Although most of Donovan’s men wore uniform, there was no saluting nor dress code. Where every other wartime intelligence chief was a creature of his respective government, he was entirely his own man, possessed of a cheek founded on a personal mandate from the president. This was a source of exasperation to the British; for the rest of the war their intelligence chiefs were torn between condescension towards Donovan, whom they regarded as a charlatan, and grudging acknowledgement of his clout in Washington. Bruce Lockhart wrote after a meeting in London in June 1942: ‘The colonel has aged and is not very impressive. According to Desmond Morton … The President likes Colonel Donovan, says he must be helped down, but that he is no organiser and is a child in political matters.’

  Within the United States the new service acquired instant glamour, and a reputation as the place for any well-connected warrior who wished to serve his country on more congenial terms than line duty could offer. American infantry leadership was as much weakened as was that of the British Army by the diversion of officers and NCOs to ‘private armies’, of which Donovan’s was the most conspicuous example. All manner of clever, upmarket Americans gravitated to OSS who had courage in plenty, but no appetite for displaying it in foxholes. Few of Donovan’s recruits had military experience; most were, instead, former corporate executives. The Madison Avenue advertising agency J. Walter Thompson provided OSS’s chief of planning, Cairo’s executive officer and Casablanca’s black-propaganda specialist. There were many rich Ivy Leaguers, including both of J.P. Morgan’s sons; in Washington a DuPont handled French intelligence activities; Andrew Mellon’s son Paul was London administrative officer of Special Operations, and his brother-in-law David Bruce became head of station. Only Rockefellers were lacking: Nelson, who served as the government’s Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs, got into a turf row with Donovan, as a result of which the two men were no longer on speaking terms. OSS also recruited many White Russians, including ‘Prince’ Serge Obolensky.

  Then there were the humbler personnel, many of them women, pioneers whose previous experience of the world outside their own state, never mind the US, could be described on a postage stamp. The files record thousands of clerical staff such as Cecilia Chapman Justice, twenty-four, just five feet two inches tall, from Grosse Pointe, Michigan: she had been an airline ticket agent, then spent a few months as a cryptanalyst for Air Transport Command before she joined OSS, and was posted to India. She wrote in her own submission for suitability: ‘The training I have received since I have been with OSS gives me confidence that the assignment I am to have abroad will be one I can handle with assurance. Because of the knowledge I have acquired of the politics of this organisation, I am sure I can comply with them. For the time I was employed by ATC I lived completely independent of my family, and I feel sure that I shall be competent to take care of myself while overseas. I am a Protestant and I do not belong to any organisation which advocates the overthrow of the US Government.’

  The archives catalogue hundreds of other such little personal odysseys. Posterity may wonder what Martha Belle Kershaw made of Ceylon, Laura Wolcott Tuckerman of Cairo, or Thelma Stone Carson of London. What was for sure was that American diplomats had no more time for Donovan’s pushy people than did their British counterparts for SOE. The US ambassador in Ankara protested furiously against demands that OSS personnel should be granted diplomatic cover. His office wrote to Washington: ‘He feels very strongly that the Embassy must not be used to give cover to OSS … He himself believes that the entire idea of “cover” for OSS is ridiculous.’ The US ambassador in Chongqing likewise opposed accrediting Donovan’s personnel unless he was granted some authority over their activities, which the general would never countenance.

  The US consul in Tangier resisted a plan to send OSS’s Colonel Harry Wanvig into Spanish Morocco disguised as a civilian, pointing out that he was already known to the Spanish authorities as an army officer, and that ‘his presence here would serve no useful purpose and would furthermore be undesirable from security point of view’. There were almost ceaseless State Department protests against the ballooning scale of OSS offices and staffing, as a stream of its personnel of all ages and both sexes descended on every major city where the Allies had a footing. Donovan and his subordinates, however, waved aside the nay-sayers and – at least until the autumn of 1944, when his influence in the White House began to decline precipitously – got away with plenty more than murder.

  Even those OSS field officers not recruited from the social elite were often exotic personalities. Prominent among them was Sterling ‘Buzz’ Hayden, who became one of Donovan’s stars. He was born in 1916, son of an improvident New Jersey newspaper-space salesman who died when he was nine. Exposure to New England harbours bred into his roving and rackety childhood a passion for the sea which proved lifelong. At sixteen he ran away to join a sailing schooner, and thereafter served on a Banks fishing trawler before skippering an eighty-nine-foot brigantine through a hurricane to Tahiti. He fell in love with a lot of girls, and plenty of them succumbed to his rugged good looks and venturesome spirit. He spent everything he had saved to buy Kaiser Wilhelm II’s old yacht, only to have it wrecked under him in a storm. In 1939 his godfather, a New York businessman, said, ‘Gollys, young feller, you’ve had quite a time for yourself, haven’t you? Don’t you think it’s about time you settled down and made something of yourself?’

  In a fashion, so he did. His six-foot-four, 220-pound figure caught the eye of a Hollywood talent scout. In 1940 he started work at Paramount on a $600-a-month contract, and was promptly cast opposite Madeleine Carroll, the British-born Birmingham University graduate and former schoolteacher who had become the most highly paid female star in the world. They made the movie Virginia together, and fell in love. She was ten years older, but somebody once described the couple as ‘the two most beautiful human beings in the world.’ Hayden met Roosevelt at the White House before rejecting the lead in For Whom the Bell Tolls to join the war. He hated Hollywood, and struck up an acquaintance with Bill Donovan. In November 1941 he sailed to England, completing commando and parachute courses there before injuring himself on a jump in March 1942 and returning to America, where he married Carroll.

  Hayden was refused a US Navy commission, on the grounds that he was almost uneducated. Instead he joined the Marine Corps by way of Parris Island boot camp, then transferred to OSS. He was bent upon shedding the Hollywood fame he despised, and changed his name for operational purposes to ‘John Hamilton’. His wife’s sister had been killed in the London Blitz; this prompted Carroll, too, to quit the film business: for the rest of the war she served with the Red Cross in Europe. ‘Lt. Hamilton’ became one of the small army of OSS personnel who crossed the Atlantic to play a picaresque bit-part in that biggest blockbuster melodrama of all: The War.

  OSS London station chief William Phillips described his own mission in terms echoed by his counterparts around the world: ‘My duty was to pursue Donovan’s goal of a global US intelligence servi
ce, while resisting all efforts of the British Secret Information [sic] to gobble us up.’ The OSS’s London base on Brook Street, a few blocks from the US embassy, eventually boasted fourteen outlying branches, and grew to a strength of 2,000 people, including a stellar constellation of academics such as Walt Rostow, Crane Brinton, Chandler Morse. Most of Donovan’s men were anti-colonialist, which sustained chronic tensions with the British and French. Colonel Harold Hoskins planned a 1942 expedition through Arab countries which he hoped to persuade to expel the British. Unsurprisingly, this trip was blocked in London; the Foreign Office and SOE strove, albeit without success, to exclude OSS from the entire Middle and Far East, and especially India. There was an early Donovan plot to overthrow the pro-Vichy prime minister of Tunisia, for which the colonel established a $50,000 war chest. Robert Murphy of the State Department vetoed the scheme because it must enrage Vichy and frustrate any hopes of recruiting its armed forces to the Allies. Amid the contortions of American policy towards the French after the December 1942 assassination of Admiral Darlan, a new OSS pro-Gaullist commando unit was formed under the direction of a Harvard anthropologist and Arabist impossibly named Carleton Coon.

  State aborted a succession of other OSS projects which it considered likely to ‘upset colonial relationships with local native populations’. Many of Donovan’s men began to work on the principle that ‘in intelligence, the British are just as much the enemy as the Germans’. From every corner of the globe American officers fired off a stream of complaints about lack of cooperation from their Anglo-Saxon allies. When ten OSS men perished after planes flown by inexperienced USAAF crews crashed while carrying them to Norway, it was alleged that the mishap occurred because the British refused to allow the agents to be dispatched in RAF aircraft piloted by Norwegians.