Wild Bill Donovan

by Douglas Waller

  MARSHALL SENT DONOVAN a kind note on December 23. The Army chief had wanted no part of his spy outfit at the outset, but in the end he had saved it from a premature death. Marshall finally had his deputy, Major General Joseph McNarney, hammer out a lengthy formal charter delineating the duties of the OSS. Donovan would not coordinate Army and Navy intelligence—his goal from the outset—but he would be an equal partner with the two services. The thicket of red tape was cleared so his OSS could launch espionage and sabotage operations overseas, and Donovan finally won approval to form his guerrilla and commando forces. Now Marshall, who had been impressed with the intelligence the OSS had produced for Torch, offered in his note to bury the hatchet. “I regret that after voluntarily coming under the jurisdiction of the Joint Chiefs of Staff your organization has not had smoother sailing,” he wrote.

  Donovan planned to spend Christmas at Chapel Hill with Ruth, Mary, and his new granddaughter. David and Mary had their first child the year before and named her Patricia, after Donovan’s daughter, who had died in the car accident. With the war begun, the Navy was not so picky about personnel and commissioned David as an ensign to operate landing craft—not as glamorous as sailing the high seas on a warship, but the service thought it suitable for the small boat skills he had picked up aboard the Yankee schooner. David had been aboard an amphibious ship for Torch and was now earning glowing fitness reports as a lieutenant junior grade training landing craft crews on the base the U.S. Navy set up at the port of Arzew along the Algerian coast.

  As Donovan drafted a response on Christmas Eve to Marshall’s note, an aide rushed in with a cable from North Africa: Darlan was dead.

  Fernand Bonnier de la Chapelle, a fanatic recruited by French monarchists bent on eliminating the hated admiral, had gunned down Darlan in his office at Algiers’s Palais d’Été. Suspicion turned first to the British being behind the assassination (Bonnier had received guerrilla training at their Äin-Taya camp west of Algiers) and then to the OSS (Carleton Coon had been detailed to Äin-Taya and taught Bonnier). Donovan had no qualms about “wet” jobs. His men had been prepared to kill Armistice Commission members in North Africa and in OSS reports after Torch agents wrote in clinical language of using “extra-legal” means to eliminate Axis sympathizers. Donovan had been dreaming up schemes to assassinate Hitler. Coon had also prepared a lengthy memo proposing that after the war the OSS retain an elite team of assassins who would roam the world eliminating future Adolf Hitlers before they could start conflicts. Neither the British nor Coon had any role in the Darlan assassination, however. Even so, Eddy thought it prudent to send Coon undercover to the Tunisian front until Algiers calmed.

  Giraud, who served as Darlan’s military chief and now took over as high commissioner, had Bonnier executed the day after Christmas, which ensured that the extent of the plot never would unravel. Nobody was particularly interested in a full investigation. The murder was “an act of providence,” Mark Clark admitted. “His removal from the scene was like lancing a troublesome boil.” As commissioner, Darlan had surrounded himself with Vichy officers who like he had once backed the Nazis. He was despised by de Gaulle’s Free French. “All over North Africa,” one OSS report noted, “the habitants raised their Christmas wine glasses to the Admiral’s assassin.”

  Chapter 15

  Bern

  AT THE STATION in Annemasse, the last stop in southern France before the train crossed the border into Geneva, Allen Dulles handed his diplomatic passport to gendarmes behind the desk. A Gestapo man stood behind the French officers, watching. With the Allied landing at North Africa the day before, German intelligence was even more interested in who was entering the neutral country. The Gestapo agent huddled with the gendarmes out of Dulles’s earshot. He had been smart enough not to carry any OSS documents to reveal who he really was, but the Gestapo would certainly become suspicious if they searched his bag and found the $1 million letter of credit for a Swiss bank in it that he planned to use to set up his operation in Bern.

  The chief gendarme at Annemasse finally returned and told Dulles they would have to consult Vichy before they could allow an American diplomat to cross. Dulles drew the gendarme aside and in whispered broken French pleaded with the man to let him pass, at one point pulling out his wallet stuffed with ten one-thousand-Swiss-franc notes Donovan had bought for him in New York five months earlier. The gendarme refused the bribe. Dulles considered grabbing his bag and running across the countryside to the border. But at noon, as engineers stoked the train’s steam engine for the last leg to Geneva, the Gestapo man left for lunch at a nearby pub. The gendarme handed Dulles his passport and told him to board. “Now you see that our collaboration is only symbolic,” he said with a slight smile. Using the code name “Burns,” Dulles messaged “Victor,” the code name for the OSS radio receiving station in London, when he arrived in the Swiss capital on November 10. The German army swept into southern France that day. “I was the last American for a year and a half to cross legally into Switzerland,” Dulles later proudly wrote.

  Dulles had debated whether even to attempt the train trip from the Spanish border through southern France, not knowing if the Nazis had begun to move in. But Donovan was anxious to put him in Switzerland before the Germans sealed the Swiss border and had booked priority passage for him on a plane to Lisbon. Penetrating a closed totalitarian state like Germany with his agents could take years and Donovan did not have the time. Neutrals such as Switzerland for the moment would be his porthole into the Third Reich.

  Dulles knew that he was made for the Bern assignment. Born with a clubfoot to an upstate New York Presbyterian minister whose father-in-law had been secretary of state, Allen Welsh Dulles joined the State Department in 1916, serving first as an embassy secretary in Vienna and then in Bern. He found his ambition, curiosity, and affable charm useful in collecting World War I intelligence on Germany, Austria-Hungary, and the Balkans. He served as an adviser later to the Versailles peace conference and helped reopen the Berlin embassy, prowling communist cell meetings to collect intelligence and striking up acquaintances with Weimar Republic backbenchers who would prove useful later, such as Gerhart von Schulze-Gaevernitz. After earning a law degree, Dulles left State in 1926 and joined his brother, John Foster, at Sullivan & Cromwell. There he made his fortune in international finance and wrote foreign policy treaties for the prestigious Council on Foreign Relations until he joined Donovan’s outfit after the Pearl Harbor attack.

  Donovan occasionally played tennis with Dulles and found him a fierce competitor on and off the court. Dulles believed he was more qualified—and sophisticated—to run the OSS than any of his colleagues, including Donovan. He had jumped at the chance to set up the agency’s secluded outpost in Bern so Donovan would not be looking over his shoulder. Other OSS officers complained that behind the outward charm he was insufferably patronizing, rigid, self-centered, and devious. But Dulles proved to be the perfect man for setting up what amounted to a separate OSS organization in isolated Bern.

  Switzerland was a spy haven for the Allies and the Axis. Some 150,000 Germans lived there, at least 1,500 of whom the OSS considered hostile Nazi agents. Within five days of his arrival in Bern, Dulles had begun cabling to London tidbits of intelligence picked up from other embassies. He settled into an old burgher’s mansion at Herrengasse 23 that came with a butler, regrew his mustache, and had a Swiss tailor sew him tweedy sports jackets to give him a country look he thought more congenial for cultivating sources in his wood-paneled study. Dulles kept a revolver at his bedside table in case of emergencies and before long a mistress lay in the bed next to him: Mary Bancroft, who had arranged Donovan’s trysts with Becky Hamilton and who joined Dulles’s operation to analyze German news reports. Dulles’s marriage to his wife, Clover, had become loveless by the 1930s. Donovan learned of the affair and pestered Mary for details when she later traveled out of the country.

  Dulles, whose code number became 110, turned Herrengasse 23 into a lint trap for
informants. He welcomed anyone with tips: chatty diplomats from other embassies, Swiss intelligence officers, journalists, German dissidents, and complete strangers off the street. He set up weekly radio-telephone calls to the OSS message center in Washington. Because the Germans had cut off Swiss mail and courier service with the Allies, a friendly engineer tucked microfilms of Dulles’s longer written reports in an engine compartment for the Geneva train run to Lyon, where a bicyclist carried it in a backpack to Marseille, where it eventually made its way by boat and plane to the OSS station at Algiers. The circuitous delivery took about twelve days.

  Donovan soon began sending Dulles’s reports to the War Department and White House as well as to the British embassy. But much of the early material proved to be uncorroborated gossip the British and American military found false when they cross-checked it with Ultra or Magic intercepts. On April 20 Donovan had an aide send Dulles a stinging cable warning him “that all news from Bern these days is being discounted 100% by the War Department.”

  Dulles developed a curious collection of walk-ins, but several of the contacts proved exceedingly valuable. Ten days after arriving in Bern, he was introduced to Gero, the handsome and debonair son of Gerhart von Schulze-Gaevernitz, his friend from Berlin twenty-two years earlier. Now forty and an international investment broker, Gero had taken up residence in New York but maintained a home in Switzerland. When he met Dulles in Bern, he was committed to overthrowing the Nazi regime and had a wealth of insights for the American on dissident military officers and government officials he knew from his years in Germany. Hoover, whose agents had kept tabs on Gaevernitz in New York, warned the White House that he had an “unsavory reputation.” But Dulles soon became close friends with the Weimar legislator’s son, who found him important contacts in German industrial, banking, and diplomatic circles and even interviewed many of them for him.

  Among the Germans Gaevernitz screened and introduced to Dulles was Hans Bernd Gisevius, a stern and haughty Abwehr counterintelligence agent over six feet tall (Dulles referred to him as “Tiny” in reports) who literally looked down on Hitler as a common criminal. Gisevius operated undercover in the Germans’ Zurich consulate. Admiral Wilhelm Franz Canaris, the Abwehr’s chief, who had also grown disenchanted with the war, had posted Gisevius there to contact the Allies on behalf of opposition elements among German government and military intellectuals. British intelligence believed Gisevius was a Nazi plant sent to flush out regime opponents meeting with Dulles, but Dulles believed Tiny was genuine and stood by the intelligence he fed on opposition elements, which largely proved accurate.

  In August, Dulles met his most valuable contact, Fritz Kolbe, a short, wiry, baldheaded man who worked in the bowels of Joachim von Ribbentrop’s Foreign Office and had refused to join the Nazi Party. Kolbe made trips to Bern or Stockholm periodically as part of his job and had access to the secret cables that came into the Foreign Office from its embassies. What the Prussian idealist read of Nazi “wickedness” overseas sickened him. He first approached the British offering to deliver to them the Foreign Office documents that crossed his desk, but the MI6 officers rebuffed him suspecting he was a double agent. Donovan also at first was skeptical this source was too good to be true. But over the next two years, Kolbe, whom Dulles gave the code name “George Wood,” delivered him 1,600 ministry documents smuggled out of Berlin. To save space, Kolbe at night condensed long reports into handwritten letters that he photographed with a camera Dulles gave him, then hid the microfilm rolls in a clothes trunk he had a Berlin courier service ship to Switzerland for his visits. He narrowly escaped capture when a Nazi official at the courier service one time began searching his trunk. Kolbe gripped the revolver he always kept in his pocket, ready to shoot as many Nazis as he could before killing himself. But the inspector became distracted when another official entered the room and let the trunk pass.

  The British eventually conceded that they were wrong about Kolbe. “The Wood traffic . . . is one of the greatest secret intelligence achievements of this war,” Stephenson concluded.

  Dulles had his problems. Donovan had approved his operating somewhat in the open in Bern to attract sources, but that made him vulnerable to Axis penetration. Within weeks of his arrival the Gestapo began following him, believing—incorrectly—that he was collecting only economic secrets. But even with heavy enemy surveillance, within a year of planting his flag in Bern, Dulles had made his station “the hub of intelligence from Germany, Italy, occupied countries, and the Balkan satellites,” an OSS report concluded. Donovan considered Dulles’s operation one of his greatest successes in the war—although he always remained wary of his ambitious protégé, who was not shy about taking credit for successes.

  ROOSEVELT AND CHURCHILL gathered at Casablanca’s Anfa Hotel on January 14, 1943, to plot their next move. The prime minister succeeded in pressing the British position that the war should continue in the Mediterranean with the invasion of Sicily by July as the stepping-stone for attacking Italy. Donovan sent Roosevelt stacks of travel guides his aides could use to see the sights in the Moroccan city during their ten-day stay. The OSS also developed thirteen thousand feet of movie film taken at the conference, which was distributed to newsreel companies to show in American theaters. Donovan backed Churchill’s Mediterranean strategy. But another announcement Roosevelt made at a press conference after the meeting left him and Dulles worried.

  Tender after the international uproar over the Darlan deal, Churchill and Roosevelt wanted to reassure the public that the alliance would strike no more sweetheart deals with fascist French admirals or any Nazis now popping up peddling offers to halt the war in exchange for their taking over the government from Hitler. From Germany, Japan, and Italy, the alliance would accept nothing less than “unconditional surrender,” Roosevelt told reporters.

  Donovan wanted total defeat of the Axis as much as Roosevelt, but he feared that FDR’s stark announcement could backfire. It offered proud German soldiers no alternative than to continue fighting. Dulles worried as well that FDR’s edict put a straitjacket on his covert maneuvers in Bern to encourage internal dissidents to topple Hitler. Donovan tried to convince FDR to take a more nuanced approach so German officers could be enticed to work for the Allies. Roosevelt refused. Donovan’s agents could meet with Axis intermediaries to milk them for intelligence, but not to negotiate peace deals. Unconditional surrender demands ended up having no effect one way or the other on the German government, but Goebbels at the time was delighted with such announcements. The more the Allies talked about “a disgraceful peace for Germany,” he wrote in his diary, “the more easily I succeed in toughening and hardening German resistance.”

  While Goebbels had a seasoned propaganda operation to put out his message, Donovan’s psychological warfare program was still struggling to get off the ground. Morale Operations, a new branch started in January 1943 and staffed with a number of decidedly unmilitary journalists and artists, concocted a mixed bag of propaganda ploys. Rumors were spread out of London that senior Nazis had gone into hiding. Leaflets were eventually dropped over German soldiers claiming their wives and sweethearts back home belonged to the “League of Lonely Women” having sex with their comrades on leave. Fake German mailbags, stuffed with poison-pen letters whose addresses were copied from prewar German phone directories, were air-dropped in the hopes that German civilians would give the sacks to postmen to deliver the phony mail.

  But Morale Operations mired Donovan in another ugly bureaucratic battle that once again threatened to sink his organization. Elmer Davis was outraged that the Joint Chiefs let the OSS play these psywar games when Roosevelt had clearly ordered that his Office of War Information ran propaganda at home and abroad. Davis lined up powerful allies, such as General Strong, to try to convince Roosevelt to strip Donovan of propaganda. George the Fifth still considered Donovan “high and mighty” and his OSS “a hydra-headed organization.” On February 18, the general stumbled into his best chance ever to ta
ke Donovan down.

  As Strong told the story, Roosevelt had summoned him to the White House that afternoon and when he walked into the Oval Office, Davis was sitting there badgering the president to transfer the last of Donovan’s propaganda operations to his Office of War Information. Roosevelt was already nervous about politically sensitive propaganda being in military hands. Strong claimed that FDR ordered him to draft another executive order to transfer not only Donovan’s psychological warfare functions to Davis but also to move the rest of the OSS under Strong’s Army intelligence office.

  Donovan never pinned down whether this was FDR’s idea or Strong had put it in his head, but that didn’t matter. He considered it a major betrayal by the president. The executive order that Strong rushed back to his office to draft allowed Strong to do what he wanted with the agency when it came under his wing and he intended to break it up into small pieces. Furious, Donovan considered resigning. His aides scrambled for time to head off a confrontation. Ernest Cuneo phoned a White House friend to see if he could take Strong’s draft order off Roosevelt’s desk. Impossible, the aide told him. “Well, put it at the bottom of the pile!” Cuneo shouted into the phone.

  Donovan sent Roosevelt a protest letter, which he tried his best to word diplomatically. But it warned that the order FDR was about to sign would “be a valuable gift to the enemy.” That was pretty strong stuff. Donovan was now charging that the bureaucratic move Roosevelt contemplated was treasonous. The Joint Chiefs sided with Donovan so Roosevelt backed off. He signed an order on March 9 giving Davis overall control of propaganda but allowing Donovan to keep his secret psywar operations like the sex leaflets and the rumor campaigns. Donovan also got Strong off his back; the order did not move the OSS to Army intelligence.