Wild Bill Donovan

by Douglas Waller

  Donovan’s relations with his old friend from college days started to go downhill before the Torch invasion, however. By the spring of 1943 the two men were at war with each other. Though Spain had helped the Axis, Hayes believed Franco was now distancing himself from Hitler. The ambassador saw his job as making sure American-Spanish relations were “not disturbed,” he argued, so Franco would inch closer to the Allies. Washington also had adopted a policy of not interfering in Spanish affairs, which Hayes intended to follow to the letter. He, therefore, wanted OSS officers in the country to be professional and discreet so the Spanish did not uncover them.

  Hayes was convinced Donovan’s officers were a bunch of uncouth cowboys and he began firing off angry cables to the State Department. The agents who were posing as petroleum attachés were “woefully” ignorant about their cover jobs, he complained, which meant Spanish and Axis officers could easily spot the phonies. The OSS operatives seemed to Hayes not to know what kind of military intelligence they should collect in their spy jobs. Some of the secret information they bought from informants had actually been copied from local newspapers, he charged. Donovan’s operatives also seemed tone deaf to Spain’s internal politics. Hayes erupted when he discovered OSS officers contacting Basque separatists to infiltrate them into France. The separatists were enemies of Franco, who had demanded that the United States have nothing to do with them.

  Tony Di Luca arrived in Madrid in the fall of 1942 to be Donovan’s first station chief. Hayes considered him a disaster. Di Luca passed out lavish tips at restaurants, ran up bills at a tailor shop for expensive suits and shirts, and imported stashes of gourmet foods and silk stockings that Hayes suspected he was selling on the black market. “He threw money around like a drunken sailor,” the ambassador griped, so it wasn’t long before the former narc “was being watched and shadowed by Spanish police.” On November 9, Hayes demanded that Di Luca not only be recalled to Washington but also never be allowed to work in another foreign country. The envoy was outraged when Donovan instead transferred him to Lisbon.

  Donovan replaced Di Luca in Madrid with the agent’s deputy, Jack Pratt, whose code name was “Silky.” He also dispatched Frank Ryan, a waste management businessman before he joined the OSS, to investigate the station’s messy finances. Hayes found Pratt an improvement over Di Luca but still considered him a political naïf—Silky refused to halt the OSS contacts with the Basques. The ambassador was shocked when Ryan arrived with silk stockings he wanted to give Franco’s wife as a present. Hayes ordered him to stay away from the woman.

  Donovan’s agents in Madrid groused that Hayes was a meddlesome micromanager, who did not understand that clandestine agents often had to entertain extravagantly and pass out wads of cash to attract informants. Of course the Spanish would be upset with the spy agency’s work. “Those engaged in espionage are constantly and regularly violating the laws of the country in which they operate,” Ryan told Donovan. Hayes had poisoned the embassy against the OSS officers, he charged. His diplomatic aides even became cavalier about protecting the identities of undercover agents when they chatted with Spanish officials. One OSS officer leaving Washington for the Madrid station was told: “Good luck, you’ll probably have more trouble keeping under cover from Americans than from the Gestapo.”

  Hayes was not allergic to spying; he had set up his own intelligence operation in the embassy to snoop on the Axis in Spain, which was separate from the OSS station and run by his military attaché. Donovan finally proposed sending Gregory Thomas, a large balding man who had worked in the New York office and knew Spain well, to clean up the Madrid mess. But Hayes wanted no more repairmen. In April he demanded that the entire OSS station be evicted and replaced by General Strong’s Army intelligence officers who would work under Hayes’s attaché. Though Strong was eager to displace Donovan in Madrid, Marshall opposed such a drastic move and so did Eisenhower. Nevertheless, the Joint Chiefs summoned Donovan to appear before them to respond to the ambassador’s charges and make the case for hanging on to his operation in Spain. It amounted to a trial.

  At 2:30 on Friday afternoon, April 9, Donovan walked into a basement room at the Public Health Service Building on Constitution Avenue. The Joint Chiefs, who met there regularly with their British counterparts, had nicknamed it “the tank” because that was what the windowless room looked like. Donovan pulled out a chair at the long conference table, wearing his new uniform with the general’s stars embroidered on the epaulets and his lone Medal of Honor pinned to his chest.

  “At the outset, let me state frankly that Spain has been our greatest difficulty,” Donovan admitted as Marshall and the other generals and admirals listened in stony silence. Although he thought this was more a problem of clashing personalities and Hayes had exaggerated OSS misdeeds, Donovan conceded that the agency’s intelligence product from Madrid “could be improved both in content and in volume.” The station chiefs sent to Madrid have not been the right men for the job, Donovan acknowledged, although Di Luca had performed well in Lisbon. And yes, the other agents sent to Madrid have been amateurs, but “we are all amateurs in this field.” America was late to join the intelligence game.

  Hayes, however, suffers from a serious case of clientitis, Donovan complained. The ambassador seems more interested in cultivating Franco than in fighting the Nazis. Donovan’s marching orders from the Joint Chiefs were to collect intelligence on Hitler’s war aims in the Iberian Peninsula and to organize resistance groups there to infiltrate France and Germany. That important mission overrode “the risk of offending the sensibilities of the present Spanish government.” The Basques were important for setting up “an underground passage into France” for OSS operatives, Donovan pointed out, and unlike the fascist Franco they could be counted on to fight the Germans if Hitler tried to occupy Spain. “As for the silk stockings,” Donovan added, “they are the most valuable informational barter medium in Spain today.”

  Donovan’s presentation was forceful and lawyerly. The next day, the Joint Chiefs delivered their verdict. Hayes would not be allowed to expel the OSS and take over spying in Spain with Strong’s officers. Thomas would be sent to Madrid to fix the problems. But “Ambassador Hayes has considerable justification for his complaints,” the service chiefs ruled in a letter sent to the State Department. Donovan had done a poor job of selecting agents for Madrid. Any more OSS officers who embarrass Hayes or anybody else in the embassy will “be summarily withdrawn,” the chiefs promised. For Donovan, it amounted to a formal censure—his first as a general—and it stung.

  Chapter 17

  Infiltration

  HIS PRIDE STILL wounded by the Madrid episode, Donovan took off late Monday night, June 21, 1943, for England. At heart he remained an Anglophile. In many instances his intelligence sharing with the British was more intimate than with his own Army and Navy. London opened up its files on German agents to X-2, the name for a new counterespionage branch Donovan had formed earlier, and had begun sharing with the X-2 spy catchers Ultra, its penetration of the German Enigma cipher. Yet tensions still festered in the American-British alliance. At the Trident Conference in Washington the month before, Churchill acceded to a cross-Channel invasion of France in May 1944 and Roosevelt agreed to more operations in the Mediterranean after the Sicily landing. But the decisions came after heated debate and deep suspicion on the American side that Churchill was manipulating them to protect British interests in the Mediterranean.

  Donovan arrived in London to confront tensions also building between his OSS and Britain’s clandestine services. He hosted a boozy party at Claridge’s Wednesday night to lift the spirits of David Bruce’s London staff. “The injection of some three hundred cocktails and untold bottles of Scotch into our systems” did the trick, Bruce later wrote. The next two days, however, Donovan held more sobering sessions with his counterparts. The OSS had the Joint Chiefs’ approval to mount espionage and subversive operations into Western Europe, the Balkans and southern France from England an
d North Africa. Donovan was in London now to look for a way to wedge his operations into areas the British secret services controlled. He had decided to exploit the openings the British gave him and seep the few men he could field at the moment into their turf like water looking for cracks.

  Donovan’s British counterparts, however, knew this was his game plan before he arrived in London. He had a frosty lunch with Menzies as a result. The MI6 chief at first had resisted Donovan’s trickle of intelligence agents into Greece and the other Balkan nations, but eventually he went along with them. He had refused, however, to allow OSS espionage agents to take off from England and parachute into France. “Broadway” (the code name for Menzies’s Secret Intelligence Service headquarters that came from the street where it was located) had had its own networks in France since 1940. C did not want the Americans now muddying them up with independent operations. Donovan’s inexperienced agents would surely “burn” British spies in the field; it was nearly impossible for operatives working the same area not to know each other. General Jacob Devers, the U.S. commander for the European theater, for now was content to rely on Broadway’s agents and not let Donovan intrude. Menzies, however, was irritated that Donovan was still looking for ways to sneak his people into France.

  Hambro’s dinner with Donovan was not much warmer. Hambro had no quarrel with his junior partner trying to organize guerrilla and sabotage operations against the Nazis in Bulgaria and Romania, where his Special Operations Executive agents were not operating. He was also willing to accept OSS subversives perhaps later working on their own in Greece and Albania. But Hambro and Churchill considered Yugoslavia Britain’s exclusive preserve and they wanted to keep a short leash on any OSS operations there.

  Yugoslavia was a political snake pit. The Croatian Ustasha collaborated with the Nazis. The British at first backed General Draža Mihailović, who led Serbian army forces that were nominally fighting the Germans; but Mihailović’s Chetniks were also attacking Josip Broz Tito’s communist partisans, who were battling the Germans as well. By the end of March 1943, Churchill had become disenchanted with Mihailović, whose Chetniks increasingly appeared to be collaborating with the Axis. So the prime minister sent a British mission to Tito. As London recalibrated its support between these two factions, Hambro believed now was not the time for Donovan’s OSS to be barging in with independent operations that might muddle the British moves to pressure Mihailović back into the Allies’ camp. But by May, Hambro’s field operatives in North Africa, who were under orders to keep a close eye on their OSS colleagues, began warning CD that Donovan was now scheming to sneak his own commandos into Yugoslavia to hook up with both Mihailović’s and Tito’s forces. At his dinner with Donovan, Hambro tried diplomatically, but as forcefully as he could, to convince him that in Yugoslavia the OSS must operate under the British.

  Donovan listened politely to Hambro and Menzies, but he remained determined to have his own independent operations in Europe. Otherwise London would direct and dominate every move he made and the U.S. military would never take his OSS seriously. The Balkans would be an important battleground for secret warriors. The liberation of France, with its growing underground, was even more important. Donovan did not intend to join in the fight for those prizes as an adjunct to the British.

  On Sunday, June 27, he took a jog in Hyde Park and a swim in its Serpentine, then he boarded his aircraft at Hendon. He sat in the co-pilot’s seat to try his hand at flying once they were airborne. Eventually tired of gripping the stick he gave control of the plane back to the pilot and browsed through German and French grammar books sitting on his lap. It would be a long flight to Algiers, where he hoped to speed up the infiltrations into Europe that made his British cousins so nervous.

  DONOVAN SETTLED INTO the St. George Hotel on a hilltop overlooking Algiers Harbor on Monday, June 28. He had a masseur rub the soreness out of his body from the long flight. The radio by the massage table broadcast news while Donovan alternatively read reports and dictated cables to a secretary Eddy had sent from his headquarters at the nearby Villa Magnol, a palatial nineteenth-century Arab estate.

  Getting his men to work was the problem Donovan had to tackle at the moment. He had three hundred spies, commandos, and support personnel he wanted to move to the Mediterranean along with their tons of weapons and supplies, but the OSS was no higher on the shipping priority list than civilian organizations like Davis’s Office of War Information. Once his force finally arrived in the Mediterranean, Donovan also needed planes. The Royal Air Force had assigned two squadrons of Halifax bombers for infiltrating their agents and supplies into Southern Europe, but the British were being stingy about lending aircraft for his OSS missions. For France alone, he needed a squadron to haul more than three million pounds of war supplies to some fifty thousand French guerrillas he hoped to equip, plus another three long-range bombers for delivering his parachuting spies.

  Donovan had his own personnel problems as well. Snug with his North Africa operations, Eddy showed little interest in expanding to Southern Europe. For most of the OSS officers sent so far to mount missions into France, Eddy had relegated them to shuffling papers at desks in Algiers. So before leaving Washington, Donovan ordered Eddy to focus on operations in North Africa and Italy. To lead the penetration of France, Donovan brought in more energetic agents. The day he arrived in Algiers, Donovan met briefly with one of them.

  At twenty-eight, Henry Hyde was terribly young to take over Donovan’s secret intelligence missions that would be launched from North Africa into France. He had no experience with spying save for the short course the OSS gave him before his posting to Algiers. But the forceful, bright, and boyish-looking Hyde would become one of Donovan’s most skilled operators and the perfect man to manage espionage in France. The grandson of the founder of the Equitable Life Insurance Company, Hyde had been born in Paris, educated throughout Europe, and after a law degree from Harvard had been working in a New York firm when Allen Dulles recruited him. Hammertoes he developed climbing the Swiss Alps kept Hyde out of the Army. He spoke French fluently enough to pass himself off as a native, but more importantly he knew intimately the French character, which proved complicated in this war.

  The first two missions Donovan’s men had dispatched to southern France produced mixed results. Hyde spent more time training his agents for the third infiltration, code-named Penny Farthing. General Giraud, North Africa’s high commissioner after Darlan, had handed over seven French exiles for the job. Hyde planned to infiltrate them as two-man teams to organize spy networks in the southeast, central, and southwest regions of France, through which the Allied armies might have to move. The day Donovan arrived in Algiers, Hyde was ready with his first team. “Jacques,” who would organize the spy network, was the code name for Jacques de Rocquefort, a frail, thirty-year-old former French army reserve officer who had worked as an Agriculture Ministry civil servant before the war and had been one of Robert Murphy’s coup plotters during Torch. “Toto” was twenty-three-year-old Mario Marret, a tough high school dropout from a peasant family in central France’s Auvergne region, who would serve as the team’s radio operator. There was no aircraft available in Algiers to parachute Jacques and Toto into France. But the Special Operations Executive station chief there, Douglas Dodds-Parker, had agreed to sneak Hyde and his two French agents, dressed as British officers, aboard a regular flight to one of his agency’s London bases, where an SOE plane was available to airlift them to France. In agreeing to this circuitous and clandestine bit of transportation, Dodds-Parker, who Donovan thought was crafty “like a fox,” was risking the wrath of the SOE’s bitter rival, the British Secret Intelligence Service and its chief, Menzies.

  C was furious when he learned that the Special Operations Executive had let in Donovan’s trespassers against his express wishes. But after a week of tense negotiations behind closed doors between Bruce and MI6, Menzies finally relented. On the morning of July 17, Hyde, Rocquefort, and Marret were driven to a s
afe house near Cambridge. Rocquefort and Marret would be dropped over Clermont-Ferrand near Lyon in central France’s Rhône Valley. Lyon was a key hub for German transportation routes into southern France. Rocquefort’s mission was to organize a spy network to report on enemy train and truck traffic into the city as well as Nazi troop concentrations in the area.

  The two men had been given fake identities. Rocquefort was posing as a visitor to a sanatorium, which was not a stretch since he actually suffered from a tubercular condition in his left lung, while Marret would be a farm machinery salesman. They had been grilled for hours on their covers in mock police interrogations. British officers lent them the latest reference books for businesses, restaurants, and shops in the Clermont-Ferrand and nearby Lyon areas so the men could brush up on everyday details of French life since they were last there. British officers had also supplied them French banknotes with serial numbers that would not arouse police suspicion, French identity cards, clothing cards, workers’ registration and food cards, along with two French suitcases with false bottoms for storing documents and weapons.

  An hour before their 9 p.m. takeoff, the spies were taken to a nearby Royal Air Force base under heavy British guard. In a hut near the runway they put camouflaged jumpsuits over their civilian clothes, strapped on crash helmets, and fitted snow-boot-type overshoes over their regular shoes. They would likely be parachuting into muddy fields and would shed the overshoes, along with their jumpsuits, when they reached a road. That way if they ran into police, there would be no suspicious mud cakes on their regular shoes to conflict with their cover story that they had just left a friend’s house. Finally they received their poison tablets in case suicide became necessary.

  Hyde rode with Jacques and Toto in the car that took them to a Halifax bomber revving up on the runway. Later, when he had more teams infiltrating into southern France, Hyde had “Joe-handlers” assigned to this job: OSS men who would tend to the nervous agents like parents with children—fielding last-minute requests to contact their wives, to pass along a final letter, to buy milk for their babies—until the spies climbed into the plane.