Wild Bill Donovan

by Douglas Waller

  Donovan, who waited nervously for a report on the operation, was “practically delirious with joy” over the haul, Ernest Cuneo recalled. The code book copies were delivered to Stephenson and the War Department so both countries could read Spain’s diplomatic messages. The risky burglaries, however, had to be repeated each month when the embassy switched out the code books. In October the operation came to a crashing halt.

  The phone in Donovan’s bedroom jarred him awake in the middle of the night. Downes was on the other end of the line and relayed the story the burglary team had just given him. Cohen and the two Spanish American agents were about to open the safe when they heard police sirens outside waking up the neighborhood. When they looked out the window they saw FBI agents approaching the embassy. Hoover’s men intended to arrest them, Downes told Donovan. Downes suspected that Hoover knew the OSS was breaking into embassies. He told Donovan that Hoover intentionally launched this raid to catch them. Fortunately, the team scampered away and no one was caught. Downes recalled later that he did not “believe any single event in [Donovan’s] career enraged him more” than this incident.

  Hoover, however, had a different story. FBI agents , who were also breaking into the Spanish embassy on a regular basis, had spotted one of the OSS burglars earlier in the summer, casing it late at night, and shooed him off. Hoover’s men said they warned Downes the next day that the OSS had no legal authority to sneak into Washington embassies. That should have settled the matter, the FBI agents thought, but apparently not. Downes continued his black-bag jobs. But Hoover insisted he had not raided Donovan’s men in retaliation. The sirens Downes’s excited team heard that night came not from the FBI but rather from District of Columbia police squad cars. The local cops had arrived at the Spanish embassy in response to calls from a neighbor who thought he had seen a prowler there. Fortunately, the Spaniards never discovered all this activity in and around their compound.

  Donovan and Hoover, each furious at the other, rushed to the White House the day after the botched burglary to protest. Roosevelt settled the dispute by ordering that from then on the FBI would break into all embassies, but would have to share what it stole with the OSS. (Hoover later refused to provide Donovan copies of what FBI agents took.) Donovan turned his operations and his burglars over to Hoover. The FBI director finally learned what Cynthia had been up to. Donovan eventually sent Downes out of the country, fearing Hoover might look for any excuse to arrest him if he stayed in Washington.

  After the Spanish embassy incident, a visceral hatred grew between Donovan and Hoover. Intelligence exchanges between the two agencies began to taper off and Donovan’s aides considered much of what the FBI still provided the OSS worthless. Both men also stepped up their espionage war against the other. Hoover had his agents investigate the personal lives of senior aides like Dulles and even kept tabs on Donovan’s brother Vincent. The bureau opened overseas mail addressed to Donovan. Donovan had his home phone routinely checked for taps, which he suspected might be placed by Axis agents or Hoover. FBI agents, who catalogued for Hoover every derogatory comment they heard on Donovan from his political and press enemies, had no trouble uncovering the talk in Washington about his extramarital affairs.

  Donovan also had his moles inside the FBI. He assigned an officer to investigate the bureau and compile a dossier on its blunders. It also did not take long for Donovan’s men to accumulate reports that Hoover was gay. FBI officers were routinely sent out to try to squelch rumors around the country “that the director was a ‘fairy,’” as internal bureau memos always indelicately put it. From then on, each man treated the other as if he were the Axis foe. The rivalry detracted from the war both agencies were supposed to be fighting against the real enemy.

  Chapter 14

  Torch

  DAVID BRUCE MET Donovan’s plane when it landed at London’s Hendon Airport on the afternoon of June 12, 1942. An Anglophile like Donovan, Bruce had an aristocrat’s taste for fine wines and expensive antiques (both of which he had to be enterprising to find in bomb-damaged London). The Virginian was immensely popular among Britain’s senior leadership—one reason Donovan would soon make him chief of the OSS station in London.

  Stephenson followed Donovan down the plane’s ladder. The British agent, whose code name was “G,” had already sent long memos to London on “G.50,000” (London’s code name for Donovan) and the new OSS organization ordered by “G.60,000” (Roosevelt’s code name). Though he was still bogged down in bureaucratic warfare at home, Donovan had managed to set up five OSS stations in London, Chungking, Lisbon, Cairo, and Lagos by the summer of 1942. He had fifty-seven espionage projects either underway around the world, about to get underway, or awaiting approval from the Joint Chiefs. The intelligence sharing between Donovan and the British had grown regular and intimate. Donovan’s was still a small operation by British standards, but Stephenson’s bosses wanted G.50,000 in town to make sure it did not invade London’s networks as it grew.

  Donovan settled into a suite at Claridge’s, his favorite London hotel. After obligatory visits to the king in Kensington Palace and the War Cabinet, which met in a secret chamber buried deep under Whitehall, he got down to important business in a family flat at 64 Baker Street. It was the unlikely headquarters for the Special Operations Executive, Churchill’s commando organization whose mission was to set occupied Europe ablaze with sabotage and guerrilla attacks. Sir Charles Hambro, a large man who had been a wealthy international banker, now headed the “Baker Street Irregulars,” as the SOE became known. Donovan and “CD,” the code name always given to the SOE director, divided up the world for their commandos. Neither completely trusted the other not to poach territory, but they agreed that the British would oversee operations in India, the Balkans, the Middle East, and for the moment Western Europe. They would jointly operate in Southeast Asia, Germany, and Italy. Donovan got control of mostly table scraps, such as China and Finland. But he would also run the region most important to him and CD just now: North Africa.

  “Torch,” the code name for the Allied landing to capture French North Africa in November 1942, would be the U.S. Army’s first major test in the war. The American force could not have been more unprepared for the complex and risky operation. Torch would also be the first large-scale test of Donovan’s OSS. But flying back to Washington on June 26, he knew his spies and saboteurs were as unprepared as the conventional soldiers. In North Africa “we have neither the trained agents nor any great reservoir of dependable potential agents susceptible of being trained,” warned a blunt memo from one of his aides. Even for simple items like photos of North Africa, Donovan’s men had to go to the National Geographic Society and rummage through their archives.

  His mission for Torch was threefold: keep Spain neutral, ensure that the French fleet that Vichy controlled did not join the Axis in attacking Allied forces, and prevent a war between the Vichy French and the United States when American GIs landed in North Africa. Spain intended to remain neutral, although Donovan did not realize it at the time. He proposed beaming shortwave radio broadcasts at French navy ships to convince their officers to resist any German takeover of their vessels. Roosevelt approved the plan. Admiral King thought it was a dumb idea. The French navy, like most sea services, restricted the broadcasts its ships received and their senior officers were still loyal to Vichy. But if it would keep Donovan busy, King saw no harm in his trying.

  Donovan’s most difficult mission was keeping the eight Vichy divisions in North Africa from fighting the Allied landing. If they did, General Dwight Eisenhower, commander of the Torch invasion, feared it might take him three months to subdue them before he could march toward Tunisia. He wanted to occupy that country within two weeks and before the Axis could rush in reinforcements from Sicily and Italy. Roosevelt and Churchill ordered Donovan to do all he could to entice the French authorities to cooperate in North Africa. But if carrots did not work—and neither Roosevelt nor Churchill trusted that they would—the OSS had the g
reen light to subvert Vichy control there with its covert operatives.

  Churchill and Roosevelt did not trust de Gaulle, the maverick and abrasive French general who had denounced Vichy collaboration with the Nazis and declared himself leader of the Free French resistance force. He now demanded command of the North African invasion. But Washington and London excluded the Free French commander from Torch. His presence would only antagonize the Vichy defenders in North Africa to put up a fight, they feared. That left Donovan the collection of leaders in Vichy to woo. They ran the gamut from the feckless to the opportunistic to those traitorous to the Allied cause.

  With no espionage and sabotage network of his own in North Africa, Donovan had to cobble one together from the natives on the ground. He gave that assignment to William Eddy, a hulking Marine lieutenant colonel who limped on a squeaky prosthetic because his right leg had been shot off in fierce World War I combat. A scholar, Eddy had taught English literature at Princeton in the interwar years and served as president of Hobart College. Born in Lebanon, he was also fluent in Arabic and French. Donovan had recruited him from Cairo where Eddy, who had rejoined the Marines before Pearl Harbor, served as a military attaché. Wallace Phillips, who ran Donovan’s first spy network, found the hard-drinking marine temperamental and prone to bouts of “extreme depression” if not handled carefully. Donovan believed Eddy was his Lawrence of Arabia.

  With $1 million from the White House secret fund, Eddy had set up his headquarters in Spanish Morocco’s Tangier by January. He kept another apartment in Algiers, for operations in the French Algerian capital, which was filled with secret agents of all stripes along with tens of thousands of French refugees.

  Eddy joined forces with Robert Daniel Murphy, whose title as the State Department’s consul general in Algiers masked a far more important job he had in North Africa. A gregarious career diplomat whose Milwaukee Irish background was considered lower-middle-class by State Department elitists, Murphy had nevertheless had important postings overseas. He had been in the American embassy when the Germans marched into Paris and had taken charge of the U.S. mission in Vichy in July 1940, soon with a direct pipeline to Roosevelt, who considered him his personal spy. More importantly, in February 1941 Murphy had negotiated an agreement with the Vichy regime to allow its North Africa colonies to import American food and consumer items in exchange for twelve U.S. control officers he would supervise at five port cities there to make sure the goods weren’t slipped to the Axis. Those officers were soon known as Roosevelt’s “Twelve Apostles,” collecting intelligence on French forces and the Axis presence in North Africa. De Gaulle distrusted Murphy and some OSS officers thought he had developed an unseemly affection over the years for French right-wingers. His control officers were a mixed lot of mostly upper-class Ivy Leaguers with little or no spy training. But by October 1941, Donovan had been given control of Murphy and his Twelve Apostles. Eddy managed the espionage and sabotage operations. Murphy hunted for French officers who might be sympathetic to an invasion.

  By the time Donovan flew home from London in late June, Eddy had clandestine radio stations in Tangier, Algiers, Tunis, and Casablanca. The transmitters would broadcast messages to the Torch invaders as they neared the shore. Intelligence chains had been set up in Tunisia, Algeria, and French Morocco manned by an odd collection of foreign agents with comical code names like “Pink Eye” for a former legionnaire organizing midlevel French officers who hated the Nazis.

  To support an Allied invasion, Eddy thought he could count on six sabotage cells in Morocco to turn out some two hundred European-born guerrillas and potentially ten thousand native tribesmen, although few had arms at the moment. He believed the large French garrison of 35,000 soldiers and irregulars in Algeria was poised to defect. Carleton Coon, a middle-aged and overweight Harvard anthropology professor, who had studied Spanish Morocco’s Muslims, arrived in Tangier in May. With Gordon Browne, a Boston importer who also had lived in Tangier and now worked under diplomatic cover as a vice consul, the two began secretly cultivating tribal chiefs among the Arab Moors and Berber adventurers.

  Eddy had begun some minor vandalism jobs, such as pouring iodine into the fuel tanks of German trucks in Tunisia to ruin their motors. Coon, who had a bawdy side, developed the “explosive turd”—a charge to blow vehicle tires, which looked like a mule dropping. Donovan enjoyed reading cables on their antics. But his demand for intelligence to pass to the Torch planners also became insatiable. Murphy’s control officers sent hundreds of reports on Vichy forces and fortifications along the Algerian and French Moroccan coasts, on fuel and equipment stockpiles for their armies, on the sea and beach conditions Eisenhower’s amphibious assault would face. Coon and Browne even set out in a car to clock travel times on Spanish Moroccan roads that Ike’s forces might use.

  German intelligence soon planted a Spanish cleaning woman in Eddy’s Tangier office. She pawed through papers left out in the open at night until OSS counterespionage officers finally caught her. Gestapo thugs had little difficulty identifying Murphy’s control officers. They considered them rank amateurs. But Hitler’s diplomats there were not so smug. “The activity of the American Murphy in Algeria must be considered as very dangerous for Germany,” one cabled Berlin.

  The covert operation Eddy and Murphy launched under the nose of the Gestapo hinged on organizing a nascent French underground in North Africa to back an Allied landing. Their key intermediary became a mysterious Algiers peanut oil magnate named Jacques Lemaigre-Dubreuil. Lemaigre-Dubreuil had floated between Vichy and Nazi circles but now led what became known as the “Group of Five,” a collection of right-wing French monarchists and industrialists plotting to seize power in North Africa and then invite in the Americans. Murphy believed Lemaigre-Dubreuil, whose code name became “Peanuts,” was a “courageous, patriotic Frenchman” and now a German hater eager to work with the allies. Many of Donovan’s senior advisers were wary. The Group of Five seemed to them a French version of Ku Klux Klansmen. They had all been connected with the Cagoulards, a French fascist organization whose members wore hoods at their meetings. Eddy and Murphy, however, convinced Donovan and the Joint Chiefs that Lemaigre-Dubreuil and his Group of Five were the only game in town. But suspicious that Lemaigre-Dubreuil had not given up all his Nazi ties, particularly to the pro-German banks and industrialists grouped under Banque Worms et Cie, Donovan ordered that Peanuts know as little as possible about Allied plans.

  For the insurrection among French officers in Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia, Murphy and Eddy needed a supreme leader. They thought they had found their “noble puppet,” as Murphy came to call him, in Henri Honoré Giraud, a sixty-three-year-old French general the Germans had captured when they overran his 7th Army headquarters in the northern France offensive. Giraud in April had managed to slide down a rope from the window of his castle prison and make his way back to Vichy, where his old friend, Marshal Pétain, kept the Nazis from recapturing him. A French journalist had slipped Donovan a heartfelt letter Giraud had written to his children two years earlier urging them to join the rebellion against the Nazis. “The sentiments he expressed from his prison camp are both poignant and significant,” Donovan wrote FDR, enclosing a copy of the letter in its original French.

  Roosevelt approved an approach. Lemaigre-Dubreuil, whom the Germans allowed to travel in and out of unoccupied France, had once served under Giraud during his army duty, so Murphy dispatched him to Lyon in southern France to sound the general out about leading a revolt as the Allies landed. Giraud appeared interested, but he soon was not the only senior French officer receiving American feelers. Pétain’s senior naval officer and the commander of his Vichy forces was Admiral Jean Louis Xavier François Darlan, a stump-sized and often foul-mouthed egotist who became a Hitler enthusiast to climb the ladder in the Vichy government. But after the United States entered the war, Darlan, whom the Americans called “Popeye,” could feel the wind shift and he had begun sniffing out collaboration with the Allies. The
admiral now sent a message through an intermediary that he also might be willing to join Giraud and bring the French navy with him. Donovan’s agents also picked up intelligence that Darlan’s son had entered an Algiers hospital suffering from polio. Roosevelt approved another approach.

  In July, Eddy flew to London to pitch his covert plan to Eisenhower’s command. George Patton, who would lead the western task force landing at French Morocco, was impressed. “The son-of-a-bitch has been shot at enough,” the general wisecracked when Eddy walked into a dinner with him at Claridge’s wearing his Marine uniform that had five rows of combat ribbons from World War I. Strong, the Army’s G-2, who was with Patton in London, at first was skeptical, but he left the dinner persuaded that Eddy could win over the French officers in North Africa. Eddy did so by inflating the number of guerrillas he could count on at that point. Eisenhower, who was smoking three packs of Camel cigarettes a day worrying about the Torch invasion, nevertheless welcomed Donovan’s OSS and believed that Eddy might just deliver the French.

  Friday evening, August 21, Donovan gathered Eddy and his headquarters brain trust at the St. Regis in New York to review where their covert operation for North Africa stood. Donovan was not as optimistic as Eddy that Giraud, Darlan, and other senior French officers would be won over. We should plan for the worst, he told his aides. “We should look at it as if there were not any French help, that there would be some resistance,” he said. He wanted more ideas from his men, more “considered thought.”

  DONOVAN SLIPPED INTO London unnoticed on Thursday morning, September 10, to review the OSS covert operations for Torch with Eisenhower. He had not been impressed with Ike so far. The general was not his idea of a great wartime leader. He had no combat experience and to Donovan his career up to this point seemed unremarkable as a staff officer. But Eisenhower’s genial manner masked a razor-sharp intellect and command of detail.