Wild Bill Donovan

by Douglas Waller

  Lovell and Donovan brought Marshall to the Congressional Country Club to demonstrate the power of “Aunt Jemima,” their nickname for the flour. A batch of the deadly dough was placed under a thick armored plate and detonated. Ordnance officers, however, misjudged its explosive force. Shards of steel flew in every direction. One crashed through the window of Marshall’s car. Another chunk narrowly missed Donovan’s head and embedded into a tree behind him. Lovell, trembling, picked himself up from the ground next to Donovan. “What’s next on the program?” the spymaster asked him in a calm voice, oblivious to his near-death moment.

  Some of his gadgets were comical. Lovell had gland experts produce female sex hormones an agent could inject into the vegetables Hitler ate to make the hair from his mustache fall out and his voice turn soprano. Other ideas flopped. A chemical called “Dog Drag” to confuse bloodhounds chasing an agent did not work; the hounds never lost the scent. But Lovell had other gadgets that were deadly serious, such as tasteless poisons that could be slipped into food and drinks. More than twelve thousand knockout pills, called “K tablets,” were manufactured for American and British agents. DuPont Company also produced the “L tablet,” a poison pill spies could take if captured that caused quick death. Donovan kept one when he traveled overseas. He had a gag he liked to pull on his aides, taking two white pills out of his pocket for a headache and saying: “I don’t know which is the L tablet and which is the aspirin.” But once when a plane carrying him to Europe strayed too near the French coast and came under German antiaircraft fire, Donovan reached into his coat pocket for his L pill in case the aircraft was forced down over enemy-occupied territory.

  With Donovan’s blessing, Lovell also conducted highly secret research into how chemical or biological agents could be used as mass destruction weapons—or for discreet sabotage operations. Lovell’s scientists investigated poison gases that could kill draft animals and researched a rare bacterium, designated “peach fuzz,” that had “tremendous possibilities” as a lethal biological weapon, according to one memo.

  SMOKE SWIRLED AROUND Little Augie’s head as he took another long drag on the cigarette. His real name was August Del Gaizo, a middle-aged New York gangster who had been in and out of prison for assorted assaults and murder charges and who now ran the mob on New York’s Lower East Side. Little Augie lounged on a couch in the apartment of George White, a roly-poly former New York cop who had busted him several times but kept in friendly contact with the mobster over the years. Augie’s driver waited impatiently in the car on the street below, but the crime boss was in no hurry. And the more he sucked on the cigarette the chattier he became. He bragged about the bribes he had given to cops over the years. He offered details about his loansharking operation that was raking in hundreds of thousands of dollars. He shared gossip about Lucky Luciano’s battles with other underworld bosses like Meyer Lansky and Frank Costello. “Whatever you do, don’t ever use any of the stuff I’m telling you,” Little Augie said with a silly grin on his face.

  White smiled and just listened. The ex-cop now worked for Donovan. Little Augie didn’t know that the cigarette White had offered him was laced with tetrahydrocannabinol acetate. The highly secret truth drug experiment seemed to White to have worked.

  Donovan, who had collected research papers on truth drugs and had kept close track of the Little Augie test, had ordered Lovell in September 1942 to find a potion that could be used on high-value war prisoners, enemy agents, or even American officials suspected of betraying state secrets. It had to get them to talk—without the person knowing he’d been slipped it. The Army also was eager to have a reliable drug for its interrogations. Lovell had tried scores of concoctions on unwitting soldiers, who were told they were part of a research project to find a treatment for shell shock: mescaline, various barbiturates, scopolamine, Benzedrine, and marijuana. None produced the desired results with the subject unaware that he was being doped. But the drug that showed promise when injected into food or cigarettes was tetrahydrocannabinol acetate, an extract of Indian hemp.

  White had Little Augie back several more times for smokes and chats. The gangster gabbed about bribing a congressman and his opium smuggling business, which along with his other revelations could have put him back in prison. (Augie’s secrets were safe with Donovan, who did not want the “TD” project revealed in a trial.) But the drug’s effect was uneven and Augie sometimes complained of being woozy, which meant an agent might be tipped off if he was slipped it. Tetrahydrocannabinol acetate, Lovell’s scientists wrote Donovan, “is not a perfect ‘truth drug,’” and “is probably not adaptable for mass interrogation.” But Donovan persevered, secretly enlisting the Surgeon General’s Office and Cornell University’s Medical College to continue the experiments.

  SOME AIDES IN Donovan’s inner circle began to grumble that their director was becoming too creative, jumping at too many jobs and offbeat ideas. Donovan invited self-criticism—he sent his senior staff a memo in February ordering “a review of all projects now under way”—but he wasn’t always happy with the feedback. Bill Whitney, his London representative, wrote him a lengthy and pointed memo complaining that the agency was spread too thinly and Donovan was micromanaging too many extraneous details. Instead of “dabbling in some of this and some of that,” choose one core mission, such as spying, “and let the others go,” Whitney advised. Donovan, who had already decided that Whitney was a self-centered eccentric, had no intention of slimming down his organization. He sent a curt note back to Whitney that he was all wet. His London chief resigned in April.

  Donovan’s deepest rift came with his propaganda director, Robert Sherwood, who ran his Foreign Information Service. Sherwood turned out to be a poor administrator and Donovan became increasingly annoyed that the playwright wasn’t keeping him in the loop on what his propaganda operation was doing. But a deeper philosophical difference began to divide them. Sherwood believed propaganda should be based on the truth and that his service should educate the world on “the American way of life.” Donovan saw information as a weapon and had no qualms about spreading lies to subvert the enemy. By March the feud between Donovan and his playwright had grown so bitter the two men weren’t speaking to each other. Eventually, Sherwood privately urged Roosevelt to shut down Donovan’s entire spy agency and fold its work into the Army and Navy.

  Roosevelt, who let the bickering fester, did not intend to do that. The president and his spy chief had developed their own, somewhat peculiar, rapport. Donovan sent Roosevelt documents from France in their original French, knowing FDR liked to exercise his fluency in the language. Roosevelt was as open to weird ideas as Donovan. When his spymaster sent him a slightly bizarre suggestion that oil pipelines could be built with plywood, FDR had him run it by the War Production Board. The board thought it too risky to try. Roosevelt even sent Donovan his own wild suggestions, such as one Eleanor passed on from a Pennsylvania dentist who claimed that bats fitted with tiny time-delayed incendiary devices could be powerful terror weapons if dropped from planes over Japanese homes. The bats would fly into the eaves of the wood and paper houses and their charges would ignite to burn them down. Donovan ordered Lovell to test the idea. But when the Air Force released the poor creatures from planes with the devices clamped on their backs they dropped to the earth like stones.

  Roosevelt also liked the fact that Donovan was eager to take on unconventional diplomatic missions his stodgy State Department wouldn’t touch. In July, Donovan dispatched Count Ilya Tolstoy (the grandson of the Russian novelist) and explorer Brooke Dolan to scout a route from India to Tibet and on to China as a possible supply corridor for Chinese fighting the Japanese. The two agents (code-named “Mud” and “Slug”) also were to report on enemy espionage and sabotage along the route. It was a politically tricky mission because the Tibetans in the middle had been warring with the Chinese, who wanted to control them. But Tolstoy and Dolan managed to carry it off and came back with a warm letter to FDR from the Kashag, Tibet’s
governing council. Roosevelt, who didn’t have a clue what a Kashag was, penned Donovan a playful note:

  Thank you for sending me the letter from the Kashag. I never saw a Kashag. I never want to see one. But this I know, and know full well, I would rather see than be one!

  The President not only did not mind Donovan’s branching out, he enjoyed his adventures.

  Chapter 11

  Adolf Hitler

  DONOVAN’S COORDINATOR of Information office became a favorite target for Fred Kaltenbach. The German American from Iowa was now a radio anchor in Berlin for Joseph Goebbels’s Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda.

  With Donovan’s appointment as a spy chief, Roosevelt has turned “his attention to propaganda on a large scale,” Kaltenbach began one of his English-language shows, broadcast on shortwave to the United States.

  “Oh, Donovan!” responded “Fritz,” his straight man in the booth. “Isn’t he the man of the nightclubs in the Balkans?”

  “At any rate, he’s going to spread the desirable information,” Kaltenbach said. “His department is called COI.”

  What does that stand for, the two asked each other—“Center of Ignorance” or “Corporation of Idiots”?

  Goebbels’s propaganda machine was now vilifying Donovan almost as frequently as Roosevelt. Stephenson sent him a Nazi document British agents in Holland had captured warning that Donovan was plotting to subvert German morale with a wide-ranging propaganda and espionage program.

  Donovan aimed to do exactly that. A 1939 attempt on Hitler’s life by a German dissident had failed. Among the German high command there were a few skeptics of the führer’s western and eastern offensives, but most senior military officers (whom he had bought off with bribes and large estates) backed him, the rank-and-file soldiers were even more loyal, and the German public overwhelmingly approved. But from the first day he became Coordinator of Information, Donovan began plotting how to topple Adolf Hitler, a man he personally viewed as the incarnation of evil.

  Donovan formed a team of psychoanalysts to study the führer’s mind from afar. He wanted “to know what Hitler was thinking before he thought it,” Baxter recalls. The psychological and personality reports the shrinks eventually produced on Hitler took up 392 pages. The leader of the Third Reich is well read and “a veritable demon for work,” the reports noted. His physique is frail but his bright blue eyes have a “depth and glint which makes them appear to have a hypnotic quality.” He has “underlying inferiority feelings.” “Sexually he is a full-fledged masochist,” who when “smitten with a girl, tends to grovel at her feet in a most disgusting manner.” The psychologists found no evidence he was homosexual, but he displays “feminine characteristics” and “derives sexual pleasure from looking at men’s bodies and associating with homosexuals.” “But, underneath,” the reports concluded, “he is every inch the Führer.” Hitler will never surrender or allow himself to be captured, the psychologists predicted. If he is not assassinated beforehand, he will wait “until the last moment” as the enemy is closing in and commit suicide. Donovan ordered propagandists to publicize a “spiced-up” version of the studies, emphasizing the sex.

  An important contributor to Hitler’s psychological study was a Harvard man like FDR, who had once been the führer’s press secretary. The son of a Munich art dealer and an American mother from a prominent New England family, Ernst “Putzi” Hanfstaengl was a tall heavyset man from two opposite worlds. After graduating from the Ivy League college in 1906 he had sat out World War I minding his father’s art shop on New York’s Fifth Avenue. But he returned to Munich in 1921 and soon fell under Hitler’s spell. When Hitler took power in 1933, he made the cosmopolitan Hanfstaengl his foreign press secretary and glad-hander for Americans checking out the new chancellor. But by 1937, Hanfstaengl had fallen out of favor with Hitler and his inner circle of fanatics, who never trusted the American half-breed. He fled to England.

  John Franklin Carter, FDR’s personal spy, discovered Hanfstaengl languishing in a British internment camp in Canada and convinced Roosevelt that his fellow alumnus could be a valuable window into the Nazi regime. Hanfstaengl, who was now eager to switch sides and gossip about his old boss, had an encyclopedic memory for intimate details of Hitler and key henchmen, such as Hermann Göring, Goebbels, and Interior Minister Heinrich Himmler. In July 1942 a U.S. Army plane flew Hanfstaengl to Washington, where he was put under armed guard in quarters at Fort Belvoir, Virginia. The dubious British agreed to release their prisoner only on condition that he be kept under wraps and not allowed to stray.

  Putzi became a pain. The Army found him to be a demanding, arrogant, and racist houseguest. When rumors began circulating in Washington that a top Nazi was living the high life at Fort Belvoir, the post commander demanded that he be evicted. Putzi, who had been given the pseudonym “Ernst Sedgewick” after his mother’s maiden surname, was relocated to a secluded estate in Bush Hill, Virginia, where he kept his ear glued each day to a shortwave radio set receiving German propaganda broadcasts.

  Hanfstaengl had volumes of Third Reich tales to unload. Hitler, he told his interrogators, considered Churchill and Roosevelt parlor patriots, while he stayed at the front “sharing the Spartan life of the Army.” Donovan’s analysts who interviewed Hanfstaengl complained it took a herculean effort to organize his disjointed thoughts into coherent reports. Donovan found them valuable more for their peek into the regime’s insider politics than for military intelligence. Roosevelt also enjoyed reading Putzi’s papers. He called them his “Hitler bedtime stories.”

  Donovan looked for ways to create anti-Hitler unrest. His broad targets were German civilians and soldiers. “Our propaganda must be convincing,” a strategy memo advised. “It must carry the ring of truth” to their mind-set and play on their assorted paranoia, such as fear of inflation making their marks once more worthless. Some propaganda lines his brain trust dreamed up made sense: German soldiers are freezing on the Eastern Front because they were issued only summer clothing, while Hitler is snug and warm at his Berchtesgaden retreat. Others ideas were silly: planes dropping leaflets over Germany with “pictures of succulent, appetizing dishes that would make a hungry person almost go mad with longing.”

  Donovan became almost frenetic with schemes to topple Hitler. On one day alone (September 30, 1941) he shuttled from his office to his home for secret meetings on three different plots—the final one of the day by a Quaker named Malcolm Lovell who proposed to be an intermediary in an unusual gambit.

  A peace activist and a bit of an airhead, Lovell had struck up a friendship the past three years with Hans Thomsen, Germany’s acting ambassador to Washington. Over long dinners he urged the envoy and the Nazi regime “to pursue paths of love rather than hatred.” Tall, suave, and well educated, Thomsen (half-Norwegian on his mother’s side) was a good conversationalist and clever at eliciting information on the diplomatic cocktail circuit. He would even have his wife burst into tears at designated times about “those awful Nazis” so sympathetic Washington women would spill their husbands’ secrets to her.

  Lovell was convinced Thomsen wanted to defect. During a dinner two weeks earlier, the ambassador confided that he would be willing to lead a coup against Hitler and take over the government if he had “financial backing.” He told Lovell to convey the offer to Donovan.

  A chargé d’affaires in a faraway embassy was hardly a prime candidate for seizing the German government. Donovan, nevertheless, was intrigued enough by the approach that he directed the Quaker to tell Thomsen he would put up $1 million if the ambassador would renounce the Nazi government and come out publicly in favor of the western alliance. That was a healthy sum for just a propaganda coup. Thomsen, however, never bit on the bribe. When it served his diplomatic purposes, the ambassador portrayed himself simply as a loyal foreign service officer, but in reality Thomsen was a loyal Nazi and a Hitler friend.

  Hoping to glean intelligence, Donovan nevertheless continued to have Lovell
dine with Thomsen and file reports on their conversations, which he forwarded to Roosevelt. But by November 1941 Thomsen was often feeding Lovell Nazi disinformation—one line he peddled: “Russia has already been permanently eliminated as an offensive factor”—knowing it would get back to Donovan.

  The failure of the Thomsen affair did not discourage Donovan. He hunted for secret bank accounts Nazi leaders might have in Latin America and the United States that the State Department could seize. The British sent him details gleaned from a Hungarian diplomatic source on the special train Hitler rode as his mobile headquarters, the planes at his disposal when he flew by air, and the type of meals he liked to eat when he visited military canteens—all helpful for planning an assassination.

  New York as well as Washington became a hub for Donovan’s early schemes to topple Hitler. Using his union contacts, Arthur Goldberg looked for ways to organize what remained of the German labor movement. Allen Dulles, a New York lawyer with diplomatic experience who had left the city’s prestigious Sullivan and Cromwell law firm to join Donovan’s agency, was convinced a dissident movement remained in Germany waiting to be exploited. Donovan agreed. He and Dulles began hatching their plots among the royalty, the clerics, the intelligentsia, the business wealthy, the politicians, and the retired military officers who had fled Germany, Austria, and other European countries and who now sat in fancy salons in New York and Washington dreaming up ways to return to power.

  They were an odd cast of characters for overthrowing Hitler. Finding levelheaded operatives among the often feuding exiles proved difficult. All brimmed with biases or personal agendas. Paul Hagan, an Austrian author Dulles at first thought was “a revolutionary with fire in his eye,” proposed a daring plan to infiltrate a small team into Europe to link up with the German underground movement; but Hagan soon became worthless as a secret agent when he publicly bickered with other expatriates who accused him of being a communist Lothario. Father Odo, who had arrived in Washington in 1940, offered to send Donovan detailed reports on conditions in Germany. The good father had been the former duke of Würtemberg and a major on the German General Staff, but after his testicles were shot off during World War I he became a Benedictine monk. Donovan found him fanatically anti-Nazi but temperamental and his reports “highly colored and inaccurate,” he finally wrote Roosevelt.