The Double Agents

by W. E. B Griffin

  If, however, the professor would not allow himself to be so persuaded, Canidy’s orders were to take him out—in the absolute worst possible sense of the phrase—thus depriving the Germans and Italians of his expertise in their advancement of such new weaponry.

  Canidy was also to reconnoiter the area, keeping an eye out for locations and, if possible, personnel to set up OSS stations on Sicily like that of Pearl Harbor on Corsica, as well as collect anything else that would be of military intelligence value.

  In a short time, Canidy got more than anyone had bargained for.

  For starters, the professor shared evidence that the enemy had biological weapons in its possession, then, at the eleventh hour, pointed out the existence of chemical weapons as well.

  Canidy had carefully put to use his Composition C-2 plastic explosives to get rid of both.

  And when the submarine returned exactly on schedule six days later for the extraction, both he and the professor were more than ready to get the hell out of there.

  That extraction had happened the previous night.

  Now, this morning, with the professor sound and secure in a bunk room of the submarine, the suitcase at his feet packed with all the scholarly writings that he could carry out, Canidy had borrowed a ship’s typewriter and written the mission’s after-action report.

  Canidy then had confirmed the critical points of his report with the professor, then composed a brief top secret message that would need to be sent by the sub’s commo room as soon as possible, and then finally requested the private meeting with the commander of the Casabianca.

  In L’Herminier’s office, Canidy handed over the typewritten message.

  “We need to encrypt this at the earliest opportunity,” Canidy said, “then radio it.”

  On the five-hundred-nautical-mile leg from Algiers to Sicily’s Mondello, the sub had run as hard and fast as conditions allowed—sometimes ten knots, sometimes dead in the water at depth to avoid detection by German and Italian ships on patrol.

  Heading back would take her at least as long, and Canidy knew his report could not wait for that time frame.

  News of the nerve gas would be enough to get attention right away. He decided there was no reason to muddy the message with the discovery of the yellow fever—which was detailed in his after action-report—and would save it for a subsequent message, or till they reached OSS Algiers Station.

  There shouldn’t be anything left of the villa and its lab, anyway, Canidy thought.

  L’Herminier took the sheet and his eyes fell on it:

  * * *

  TOP SECRET

  OPERATIONAL IMMEDIATE

  26MAR43 0900

  FOR OSS WASHINGTON EYES ONLY COL DONOVAN; OSS ALGIERS EYES ONLY CAPT FINE.

  BEGIN QUOTE

  PACKAGE COLLECTED AND FLOATING HOME.

  URGENT: NOTE THAT PACKAGE CONFIRMS REPEAT PACKAGE CONFIRMS BEYOND ANY QUESTION THAT ANTACID EXISTS AT COLLECTION POINT PLUS OTHERS.

  DETAILS TO FOLLOW ON ARRIVAL.

  CANIDY

  END QUOTE

  TOP SECRET

  * * *

  L’Herminier folded it and put it in his tunic pocket.

  “Consider it done,” Commander L’Herminier said agreeably. “Soon as it is safe to surface.”

  “Thank you,” Canidy said.

  L’Herminier looked like he had a question.

  “Something on your mind, Commander?” Canidy said.

  “Antacid?” he said simply.

  Canidy raised an eyebrow.

  “My code words aren’t always appreciated,” he said.

  “But antacid for a nerve agent?” L’Herminier said, not making a connection and thinking something must be lost in the translation.

  “I think it’s fair to say that if you had a bout of stomach acid,” Canidy said, somewhat darkly, “a dose of Tabun would cure you of it for good.”

  The commander’s eyebrows went up in recognition.

  “Oui,” he said softly. “That and everything else.”

  [THREE]

  The Oval Office The White House 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW Washington, D.C. 1125 27 March 1943

  “Bill!” Franklin Delano Roosevelt called fondly. The President of the United States of America propelled himself across the room in the wooden chair that he had had specially fitted with wheels. “Such a pleasure to see you again so soon.”

  William J. Donovan, a stocky, silver-haired, ruddy-faced Irishman, stood in the doorway to the right, which led to the office of the President’s personal secretary.

  “Come in, General,” Roosevelt continued as he rolled closer, smiling, with his ivory cigarette holder clenched between his teeth.

  Roosevelt took great delight in the use of the rank. When Donovan had returned to the employ of the United States government in 1941 at the request of FDR, he had been a civilian using the honorific title of “Colonel,” which he had in fact been in the First World War.

  On Tuesday, March 23, when he had been given his new commission, he became Brigadier General William Joseph Donovan, USA.

  It was a title more appropriate for the man whom FDR had made America’s spymaster.

  Donovan forced a smile. He was pleased to find Roosevelt in a pleasant frame of mind. The President had been under a lot of stress of late, plus clearly in some pain from the cruel effects of the polio that had nearly killed him in 1921. Donovan was sorry that the news he bore would no doubt squash those good spirits.

  Still, he knew that Roosevelt was the kind of man who knew he should hear bad news when that’s what it was. He demanded to hear it—undiluted and never, ever withheld.

  Donovan put out his right hand to meet Roosevelt’s.

  “Mr. President,” he said, “you’re looking especially well.”

  “I’m feeling especially well,” Roosevelt replied, shaking Donovan’s hand while warmly gripping his forearm with his left hand. “I wish I could tell you what it is—because I’d damn well bottle it for use on my darker days—but, with the exception of the glorious weather on this spring day, I don’t have an inkling…”

  His voice trailed off.

  Roosevelt sensed in Donovan’s eyes that, despite the smile, there was something troubling his old friend terribly. And FDR knew that that took something very serious indeed.

  It was a matter of official record that “Wild Bill” Donovan had been one hell of a soldier in his day. In World War One, on the battlefields of France, he had earned his silver eagle and the Medal of Honor—his country’s highest honor for valor—while with the “Fighting 69th,” the National Guard regiment from New York City.

  Roosevelt remembered the wording of the MOH citation being along the lines of: After then Lieutenant Colonel Donovan personally led an assault against a strongly organized enemy position, and his troops suffered heavy casualties, he moved among his men in exposed positions, reorganized the decimated platoons, then accompanied them forward in attacks. When badly wounded in the leg by machine-gun fire, he refused to be evacuated and instead continued fighting the enemy until his unit withdrew to a less-exposed position.

  A determined man of great integrity—who inspired loyalty, led by example, didn’t back down—Franklin Roosevelt had known Bill Donovan since their days as classmates at Columbia Law School more than thirty years earlier.

  Roosevelt recognized that Donovan shared more than a few of his own qualities. Topping the list: being one tough and shrewd sonofabitch. And an extremely smart one, of course.

  An ambitious Irishman, Donovan was self-made. Between wars he had become a very successful—and very wealthy—attorney in New York City, and, with that, a power behind the political scenes, not only in New York but in Washington.

  Roosevelt was neither professionally nor personally bothered by the fact that Donovan was a solid Republican who had opposed FDR’s New Deal, which conservatives termed “socialist” when they were being nice, something far less polite when they weren’t.

  What mattered
to FDR was the man’s character, not his politics, and he was glad that they were pals.

  He was even more grateful that whatever Donovan told FDR as being factual, FDR could take it as that.

  Roosevelt, ever the savvy politician, long had used his friends with great wealth or high connections—and especially those with both, because he knew that heads of state never put themselves far from deep pockets—to serve as his eyes and ears around the world.

  Donovan was no exception.

  When FDR had served as assistant secretary of the Navy, he’d attached Donovan to the Office of Naval Intelligence, and, in 1920, secretly sent him to Siberia to collect intelligence. When, in 1935, the belligerent dictator of Italy, Benito Mussolini, invaded Ethiopia—dirt poor and essentially unarmed—Roosevelt, in his first term as President, had dispatched Donovan to supply him trusted information on that one-sided “war.” And, in 1940, as another Fascist—the charismatic German chancellor, Adolf Hitler—waged an unchecked war of evil across Europe, FDR twice sent Donovan across the pond.

  Donovan’s first trip that year, in July, was a relatively quick one to England.

  “Find out if our cousins can beat back that bastard Hitler,” Roosevelt had told Donovan.

  Donovan had done so, and, in August, reported back that the Brits were not likely to be pushing the German forces anywhere anytime soon but, at least for the time being, they could protect their country—especially with the help of neutral America.

  The second 1940 trip began in the middle of December and lasted for nearly three months, covering the Baltics and the Mediterranean.

  Donovan reported his newest findings to the President in March 1941. Roosevelt’s fears of the spreading of Fascism and Communism—and the free world’s ability to contain them—grew faster than ever before. These threats were real, and he felt that they could not be underestimated—abroad, clearly, but also in the United States.

  Thus FDR, being a shrewd, smart sonofabitch now in his third term as President, knew that despite the cries of the isolationists who wanted America to have nothing to do with another world war it was only a matter of time before the country would be forced to shed its neutral status.

  And the best way to be prepared for that moment was to have the finest intelligence he could.

  And the best way to get that information, to get the facts that he trusted because he trusted the messenger, was to put another shrewd, smart sonofabitch in charge—his pal Wild Bill Donovan.

  The problem was not that intelligence wasn’t being collected. The United States of America had vast organizations actively engaged in it—the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Office of Naval Intelligence, and the Military Intelligence Division chief among them.

  The problem was that the intelligence these organizations collected was, in the word of the old-school British spymasters, “coloured.” That was to say, the intel tended first to serve to promote the respective branches.

  If, for example, ONI overstated the number of, say, German submarines, then the Navy brass could use that intelligence to justify its demands for more funds for sailors and ships to hunt down those U-boats. (Which, of course, played to everyone’s natural fears as the U-boats were damn effective killing machines.)

  Likewise, if MID stated that it had found significantly more Axis troops amassing toward an Allied border than was previously thought, Army brass could argue that ground and/or air forces needed the money more than did the swabbies.

  Then there was the turf-fighting FBI. J. Edgar Hoover and Company didn’t want any Allied spies snooping around in their backyard.

  It followed then that if the agencies had their own agendas, they were not prone to share with others the information that they collected. The argument, as might be expected, was that intelligence shared was intelligence compromised.

  There was also the interagency fear, unspoken but there, as sure as God made little green apples, that some shared intel would be found to be wanting. If that should happen, it would make the particular agency that had developed it look bad. And that, fear of all fears, would result in the reduction of funds, of men, of weapons, et cetera, et cetera. In short, the loss of importance of the agency in the eyes of the grand political scheme.

  Thus among the various agencies there continued the endless turf battles, the duplications of effort—even the instances, say, of undercover FBI agents arresting undercover ONI agents snooping around Washington, D.C., and New York City.

  Roosevelt had had enough. A master of political maneuvering, he had an answer.

  On July 11, 1941, the President created a new department. He said it would collect all information critical to national security—from the FBI, ONI, MID, from anyone and everyone—analyze it, and act on such information as necessary.

  This new office, logically, was named Coordinator of Information.

  And he appointed William J. Donovan as its director.

  Donovan would report directly to the President. His pay: one dollar per annum.

  Roosevelt was quite pleased with himself. This was a natural extension of what Donovan had very much been doing for FDR for years, dating back to when FDR first had attached Donovan to ONI.

  But not everyone could be described as being overjoyed.

  If the existing intelligence organizations did not play happily together before, there was certainly no reason to expect them to embrace the new kid on the playground. Particularly with the new kid answering only to the President and having access to the vast secret funds of the Office of the President.

  There were howls of protest, which Roosevelt more or less managed. But the top brass that made up the Joint Chiefs of Staff eventually prevailed upon the President that an organization evaluating intelligence of the military and for the military should not be outside the military. And certainly not answerable to a civilian. (Donovan’s unquestionable credentials be damned, this was bureaucratic battling at its best.)

  And so on June 13, 1942, the COI evolved into the OSS—the Office of Strategic Services—and was duly placed under the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

  On paper, Donovan now answered to General George Catlett Marshall, the Chief of Staff, who in turn answered to the President.

  In reality, however, the door to the Oval Office—and any other place the President of the United States might be—was always open to FDR’s old friend and confidante.

  The President released Donovan’s forearm, then his hand, and then rolled the chair back two feet, the high spirits seeming to drain from him as he did so.

  Roosevelt quietly spun his chair, and began wheeling it toward the ornate, wooden presidential desk—what was known as the Resolute desk, as on the orders of the Queen of England it had been finely crafted from timbers taken from the retired HMS Resolute and then in 1880 given by Her Majesty Queen Victoria to Rutherford Hayes, who was then the President of the United States.

  Donovan saw that spread across this magnificent desk, next to the wire baskets holding decrypted secret messages and a half-full water glass, were the tools of FDR’s lifelong hobby of stamp collecting. There were scissors, a magnifying glass, a thick album, and, next to a well-worn guidebook with dog-eared pages, an eight-by-ten-inch manila envelope torn open to give ready access to its mass of stamps from around the world, newly collected and packaged for him by an admirer in the State Department.

  Bright sunlight filtered into the Oval Office through the tall windows and doors, gloriously lighting the great two-story interior of the thirty-five-by-twenty-nine-foot room. The glossy white walls shined. The intricately patterned woodwork of the floor glowed. The details practically popped in each of the representations of the Presidential Seal on the room’s ceiling and in its floor.

  Roosevelt stopped at the windows. He thoughtfully looked out at the Rose Garden and its fanciful foliage beginning to bloom, then across the well-manicured grounds of the South Lawn. He grunted and nodded appreciatively, puffed his cigarette, then finally maneuvered his chair around the b
ig, royal blue banner that was the President’s Flag. It hung from an eight-foot-tall staff standing near the wall behind the desk, opposite the flag of the United States of America, also on a tall staff.

  Donovan followed the President across the Oval Office. He stopped at the three finely patterned silk-upholstered armchairs arranged in an arc in front of the desk and sat down in the center one.

  After a moment, the President looked across the desk and straight into Donovan’s concerned eyes.

  “What is it, Bill?” Roosevelt asked. “May I ask about the family?”

  Roosevelt knew that he could of course ask about Donovan’s family; as friends for decades, and as both husbands and fathers, they felt a genuine fondness for one another’s family.

  Still painfully fresh in their minds was the memory, not quite three years earlier, of Donovan’s beloved daughter Patricia having died when her car overturned near Fredericksburg, Virginia. Roosevelt had made sure then that every arrangement for her final resting went without difficulty for Donovan, including Patricia’s place of burial in Arlington National Cemetery.

  “The family is fine,” Donovan said, “as I hope is yours.”

  “Yes, yes. Quite,” the President said. He coughed twice, puffed his cigarette, then pursued, “And Dave?”

  Lieutenant David Rumsey Donovan, United States Navy, was twenty-eight; he had been born two years before Patricia. Roosevelt was particularly fond of him—he was close in age to FDR’s son James, and the three of them were products of Harvard.

  Donovan smiled warmly.

  “Dave’s fine, too, thank you. What do you hear from Jimmy?”

  Donovan knew Jimmy Roosevelt well and liked him very much. As his father’s confidante, in 1941 Jimmy had been, in addition to other presidential assignments, temporarily attached to the COI to minimize the bureaucratic attacks on Donovan’s—and, really, FDR’s—fledgling organization.