The Secret War

by Max Hastings

  Mistrust and disdain were mutual. Hugh Trevor-Roper wrote with characteristic scorn in January 1943 about his American counterparts: ‘these callow, touchy, boastful, flatulent invaders, who seem to think themselves, as politicians, a match for the case-hardened double-crossers of struggling, tortured Europe. Will they never see … that they are only great children, pampered children of the rich, among experienced and desperate sharpers?’ When a joint OSS/SOE headquarters was established in Algiers, the two nations’ officers concealed information and plans from each other, and the British took lunch an hour after the Americans’ 12–1 break, in order to do their most secret business in the absence of their allies. Bickham Sweet-Escott of SOE was back-handedly delighted when a distinguished Indian major with a DSO won in the desert turned up in Washington on a tour to recover from his wounds, and was refused access to a bar because of his colour. After that episode, the British officer said that he felt much less embarrassed when OSS men fulminated in his presence about ‘British imperialism’.

  As US chargé d’affaires in Lisbon, George Kennan had to intervene to stop the OSS fomenting a revolt against Portuguese rule in the Azores: Donovan’s agents viewed President de Oliveira Salazar simply as one more fascist dictator whose removal must represent a good deed in the world, and were mortally displeased to be prevented from performing it. Meanwhile, Eisenhower’s staff in North Africa quashed another project to assassinate German generals in their headquarters, though British commandos had already tried unsuccessfully to kill Rommel. In 1942 an OSS officer quizzed Adolphe Berle of the State Department about US policy towards Thailand. Berle turned up his palms: ‘We haven’t got any policy yet.’ This vacuum in Washington, which extended to many parts of the globe, enabled Donovan’s field men to invent their own party line in the name of the United States. Dr Walter Cline of the OSS Rabat station told the pasha of Marrakech, ‘The French have nothing to do [in Morocco] … except to leave it,’ a remark that naturally outraged the colonial power. Donovan wrote dismissively to Foggy Bottom, saying that Cline was doing work of ‘great value’, and authorised him to carry on regardless.

  An 11 January 1944 meeting at the Foreign Office in London discussed with alarm Donovan’s assertion to journalists that he was determined to create a US secret service regardless of opposition from any quarter. Menzies said ‘he assumed this reference to opposition was directed against MI6 and SOE … In his view there was no possibility of preventing General Donovan [as he had now become] from proceeding as he wished, and the only possible course was to fight a rearguard action with a view to preventing him from causing unnecessary mischief.’ SOE and MI6 agreed about almost nothing else, but were at one in their fears of the havoc that might be wreaked by OSS officers in the field, especially in the Mediterranean and South-East Asia. In July 1945, US planes dropped OSS leaflets on Tonkin, drafted by Donovan’s fanatically anti-colonialist officer in Hanoi, Captain Archimedes Patti. These proclaimed to the Vietnamese on behalf of the US: ‘We are shortly coming to Indo-China to free you, but we do not act like the French who are only coming to oppress you, we are your true liberators.’

  One of the most extraordinary OSS missions was that of Brooke Dolan and Ilya Tolstoy, exiled grandson of the novelist, who were dispatched from China in September 1942 to visit the ten-year-old Dalai Lama in Lhasa. The overland journey took them three months. They were greeted amiably enough by the Tibetans, who requested a radio transmitter. The State Department objected that this would upset the Chinese, who had claims on Tibet, but in November 1943 the set was duly delivered to Lhasa, without much visible impact on the war. The two Americans got back to Chongqing in July, after a seven-month odyssey, and were hastily dispatched home in case they met with an ‘accident’ at the hands of Chiang Kai-shek’s secret police as the price of their impudence in having trafficked with the Tibetans, whom China regarded as its own subjects.

  By 1944 OSS special operations personnel were operating in every theatre of war – indeed, the size and conspicuousness of some American parties rendered them especially vulnerable. A twenty-strong team parachuted into the lower Tatra mountains on 25 September 1943 to contact guerrillas in the far east of Czechoslovakia spent weeks in hiding as its supplies dwindled, then was betrayed to the Germans by a Slovakian; only two men escaped to the Russian lines. Fifteen who landed north of Anzio in March 1944 to sabotage the La Spezia–Genoa rail link were promptly captured and shot by the Germans, in accordance with Hitler’s 1942 Commando Order. Col. Florimond Duke and his fellow-members of a March 1944 OSS mission to the Hungarian government were handed over to the Germans as soon as they landed, though they were fortunate enough to survive the war. In February 1945, Berlin announced that a seventeen-strong OSS and SOE party captured in Czechoslovakia had been shot at Mauthausen concentration camp – this included Joe Morton of Associated Press, the only war correspondent to be executed in the course of the conflict.

  The left-wing enthusiasms of many OSS officers led to special difficulties in Greece, where they threw their full support behind the communists. George Voumas, a Washington attorney in Donovan’s Cairo station, charged that Churchill’s officers ‘were not interested in Greek liberation or even effective prosecution of the war, but in naked [imperialist] political interest’. British policy towards the fantastically complex Greek imbroglio was indeed often fumbled, but the OSS’s men were naïve in supposing that the communists of EAM-ELAS would impose a benign polity if they gained control of the country. In Greece as in neighbouring Yugoslavia, all the political options before the Allies were unpalatable, but it proved mistaken to allow young, idealistic and usually ignorant OSS and SOE officers on the spot to make judgements which influenced the fate of nations. Many saw their own role in understandably romantic terms, as latter-day Lawrences, and some managed to create no less trouble than he did.

  ‘Here, I was America,’ an OSS officer who served in Yugoslavia wrote wonderingly. ‘I had a message, perhaps merely words, of course, of encouragement to a long-suffering people.’ Sterling Hayden said of a year he spent working with the Yugoslavs: ‘We established a tremendously close personal feeling with these people. We had enormous, I would say unlimited respect for the way they were fighting. We got quite steamed up by it. I myself was steamed up considerably by it. I had never experienced anything quite like that, and it made a tremendous impression on me.’ He was first posted to run an operations base on the Italian coast at Monopoli, south of Bari, shipping arms to the partisans. This lifelong adventurer found himself directing a shuttle service of fourteen schooners, six ketches and two brigantines, running eighty miles across the Adriatic at an average speed of seven knots.

  He fell in love with the experience, and with the four hundred Yugoslavs working the vessels. He wrote in the third person that he ‘found himself committed in a way he had never known before … He had never known such men. There was a ferocity about them … straining and sweating for hours on end, refusing to pause or accept relief until ordered to do so.’ Like more than a few left-wing American and British personnel serving in the theatre, he came to idealise Tito’s men, writing to a friend in the US on 22 January 1944: ‘I told you in earlier letters how reluctant some of the local British are to really go all out for the Yugoslavs. My eyes are being opened to a lot of things … I know now that my entire life before this was one endless search for pleasure. Well, maybe it isn’t too late to make up for the wasted years.’

  Who could blame junior officers for succumbing to romanticism, when their chief was the foremost romantic of all? Donovan flew over Japanese-held territory in a Tiger Moth biplane to visit an OSS camp in Burma, and appeared at Roosevelt and Churchill’s November 1943 Cairo summit to propose a ‘Unity’ plan for the partition of Yugoslavia between rival factions, which FDR endorsed. The general announced an intention himself to parachute into the wilderness, to stage-manage a reconciliation between Tito and Mihailović. This plan got nowhere because none of the Yugoslavs were interested; the Americ
ans afterwards blamed Churchill for throwing his support behind Tito. Both Western Allies misread Yugoslavia, and it is unlikely that any peaceful non-communist outcome was achievable. In May 1944 Donovan burst into London, inspected the OSS station and accused its staff of doing too much planning, not enough fighting. He exhorted them: ‘Throw your plans out of the window!’ Confusion, supposedly creative, was restored. Donovan was so keen for even his chairbound operatives to smell powder that that October he caused two academics from OSS’s Research & Analysis division, David Colin and George Peck, to be parachuted into the Po valley with only rudimentary special forces training. They were promptly captured by the Germans, which caused an OSS officer to express somewhat heartless concern that their experience of conducting PhD oral examinations might have left them ill-prepared to resist ‘unusual methods of interrogation’.

  OSS personnel were famous spenders, as attested by innumerable payment dockets in the archives, together with accompanying protests from the State Department. A truck driver could earn 200,000 francs – the equivalent of $US4,000 or £1,000 – by carrying a box of documents across France to the Spanish border, with a further 50,000 francs on offer to anybody who would take such a cargo on the last leg of the journey, across the border into Spain. A characteristic signal to the US embassy in Madrid demanded: ‘Please turn over to OSS representative against his receipt one million pesetas from funds to your credit under authorisation 37 … You are authorised to pay $2000 repeat two thousand dollars to Colonel W.A. Eddy … You are authorised to pay to Colonel Robert A. Solborg in one or several payments a total of $100,000 … I have arranged free dollar credit for purchase by you of one million Algerian francs with further purchase later … You are authorised to pay Colonel W.A. Eddy on behalf of the OSS the sum of $50,000 …’

  The above-mentioned Colonel William Eddy was born in Syria to missionary parents, served as an intelligence officer in World War I, then headed the English department at Cairo’s American university, where he introduced Egyptians to baseball. In April 1942, in Tangier during Donovan’s pre-OSS incarnation, he demanded half a million dollars in operational funds to subvert and then arm Vichy French forces in North Africa. When the chiefs of staff baulked, Eddy messaged crossly: ‘If [Robert] Murphy and I cannot be trusted with a few million francs in an emergency then I should be called back and somebody who can be trusted sent. We are desperately hoping and waiting.’ One of Donovan’s men in Washington commented histrionically: ‘The war may be won or lost by Colonel Eddy, and certainly the day of victory will be indefinitely advanced or retarded.’ The chiefs of staff remained doggedly unsympathetic, and Eddy failed to get his money.

  Some swaggering initiatives by Donovan’s agents alarmed Allied codebreakers, among them an OSS raid on the Japanese consulate in Lisbon. Arlington Hall and Bletchley were appalled when they heard that the Americans had stolen codebooks. The last thing they wanted was action that might prompt the enemy to believe that his communications were compromised. Towards the end of 1944 Finnish intelligence approached the OSS in Stockholm, offering 1,500 pages of Soviet codes, including keys. Donovan hastened to accept, and gleefully informed the White House of the windfall. President Roosevelt, however, at the urging of Edward Stettinius, his new secretary of state, ordered that the codebooks should be handed over to the Russians without copies being made. Donovan defied the White House by photographing the books before surrendering them, but this can have given the Americans little advantage, when so many OSS staffers were secretly briefing the NKVD.

  Even by the standards of the secret war, some OSS message traffic was outlandish, for instance this on 3 October 1944 from Caserta, in Italy, to Washington: ‘We learn that King Michael of Rumania has urgently requested OSS representatives in Bucharest that 4,000 rounds of .45 caliber ammunition and 3,000 of 30 millimeter carbine ammunition be sent by plane for the Royal Palace.’ In China, the OSS’s Alghan Lusey, a former UPI correspondent in Shanghai, requested a delivery of sawn-off shotguns for the use of Chiang Kai-shek’s agents in occupied territories, whom he described as ‘a swell bunch of hard-hitting, honest men, good gunmen’. Lusey was recalled to Washington in July 1942. Donovan’s station head later came to believe that Tai Li, Chiang’s secret police chief – the man who wanted the shotguns – was responsible for the liquidation of several of the OSS’s Chinese informants.

  David Bruce, an early OSS recruit and latterly a distinguished head of its intelligence branch, wrote: ‘Woe to the officer who turned down a project because, on its face, it seemed ridiculous, or at least unusual.’ Although South America was notionally FBI turf, Donovan plunged enthusiastically into the continent anyway. Breckinridge Long of the State Department complained that Donovan ‘is into everyone’s business – knows no bounds of jurisdiction – tries to fill the shoes of each agency charged with responsibility for a war activity … has had almost unlimited money and a regular army at work and agents all over the world’.

  The US ambassador to Spain, Carlton Hayes, shared with his British counterpart Sir Samuel Hoare a horror of special operations and their perpetrators, which caused frequent embarrassments in the Allies’ relations with the fascist dictatorship of Gen. Francisco Franco. Frank Schoonmaker, author of a successful series of European travel guides, was caught by Spanish police in the spring of 1943 passing OSS cash to a French Resistance contact, and languished for six months in a Spanish jail before being sprung. In June that year, the British naval attaché Captain Alan Hillgarth, who liaised closely with MI6, persuaded OSS’s Col. Solborg of the merits of launching a joint operation to depose Franco and replace him with a military junta. London wisely vetoed this scheme, on the grounds that it was by then obvious that Franco had no intention of entering the war.

  The frustration of that scheme did not deter Donovan’s men from almost immediately starting another, organised from North Africa by Donald Downes in support of the anti-Franco Spanish Resistance. He dispatched OSS-trained Spanish agents to make contact with the Republicans in Malaga. The outcome was spectacularly messy: Franco’s men trapped them all. Some of Downes’s men were captured, along with their American weapons. The prisoners talked, and named Downes and his colleague Arthur Goldberg as their sponsors. When the State Department confronted the OSS with this considerable embarrassment, Goldberg and Donovan pleaded ignorance. The US nonetheless made a formal apology in Madrid. The OSS-sponsored Spaniards were executed. Thereafter Donovan bowed to the US ambassador’s insistence that there should be no more operations against Franco.

  Some of the cooler heads within Donovan’s organisation recognised that its excesses were squandering resources and injuring its reputation, to scant purpose. In the summer of 1943, while the brigadier-general – Donovan’s new rank – was off roaming the world, a clutch of internal reports expressed alarm about OSS’s condition. One senior officer, George Platt, compiled a memorandum in August which was forwarded to Donovan. Platt wrote of ‘a deterioration of morale’. Nobody except a few people closest to the general, he said, ‘can put his finger on anything concrete that the organisation has accomplished’. Another senior figure, Ellery Huntington, warned of ‘a dangerous lack of cohesion’. Donovan returned to Washington in October to find a six-page memorandum from a group of senior staffers, which stated brutally: ‘OSS has grown too big and is engaged in too many diverse activities.’ The group concluded by proposing that Donovan should relinquish executive control of the organisation, effectively becoming ‘chairman of the board’ while departmental chiefs ran its operations. It was plain that these views were shared by some of the ablest and best-informed of OSS’s senior staffers. The critics hit a brick wall, or rather Donovan. He dismissed their proposals out of hand, and until the war ended held OSS on the course he had set for it. He himself remained a defiantly free spirit, serving as ringmaster for a host of like-minded individualists and adventurers.

  OSS earned a reputation as controversial as that of SOE for promoting communist interests in occupied Europe and
the Balkans. Donovan was warned that he had recruited many known ‘Reds’, of whom more below. He shrugged in response, ‘In that kind of game, if you’re afraid of wolves, you have to stay out of the forest.’ Gen. Albert Wedermeyer, one of America’s more ruthless proconsuls in China, wrote sourly after the war: ‘We were very much in the position of being in a football contest, going out to win the game, and then with victory achieved, proposing only to return home to celebrate the victory. We were just that naïve. We did not seem to understand that in fighting wars with the Germans and the Italians in Europe, and with the Japanese in the Far East, we should strive to create the conditions which would bring a realistic and enduring peace.’ Yet it was asking too much of most Western Allied soldiers, politicians and secret agents to conduct operations against the Axis with an eye over their shoulders to what would follow victory. Even Winston Churchill only began to do so late in 1944, when the war’s outcome was assured. Stalin alone among the Allied warlords conducted policy and strategy in ironclad accordance with his own post-war purposes, in which his American and British admirers strove manfully to assist him.

  2 IVORY TOWERS

  It is as easy to mock OSS’s ‘track and field stars’ and their exotic operations as it is to deride SOE’s wilder activities. In Washington, however, Donovan created something very different and more impressive. The Research & Analysis division recruited some of the finest brains in US academe, which between 1942 and 1945 produced an extraordinary range of reports, most of them interesting, a few outstanding. No warring nation’s intelligence services matched the quality – and quantity – of R&A’s studies. The division was headed by James Finney Baxter, president of Williams College, and drew its analysts – some of them later Nobel Prize-winners – from thirty-five campuses across the nation. Bickham Sweet-Escott of SOE toured the department while visiting the US, and came home lamenting the lack of anything comparable in London. Britain’s Joint Intelligence Staff had only a handful of men undertaking research to which R&A committed hundreds.