Wild Bill Donovan

by Douglas Waller

  The noise now made small talk impossible. Forty-two bombers with engines gunning were preparing for takeoff that night for missions over France. Jacques and Toto did not want a long goodbye anyway. Hyde shook their hands quickly, and because they were Frenchmen, gave them a peck on each cheek. Donovan’s first two agents to parachute into France from England hurried to climb aboard the plane.

  AUGUST 17, 1943, the early morning hours before dawn. Rocquefort and Marret quickly gathered up their parachutes and their two suitcases in the open field. Rocquefort’s ankle throbbed from the airdrop. He thought he might have sprained it when he landed.

  The July 17 drop had to be aborted. Looking out the belly hatch of the Halifax that night, Jacques and Toto had spotted lights flickering on the ground from the resistance fighters waiting near Clermont-Ferrand to receive them. But just as the two men prepared to jump, the lights went off. Jacques and Toto held back. The pilots circled the bomber twice over the target to see if the lights came on again, but they did not so the plane returned to England with the two French agents. The pilots had been told not to drop the agents unless they saw the lights from the reception committee below, which turned out to be wise instructions; the British later learned from one of their other teams on the ground that the Germans had spotted the guerrillas waiting for the spies and had arrested them. The drop had to be postponed until August during the next full moon.

  This time, Jacques and Toto made a “blind drop” southeast of Clermont-Ferrand, with no reception committee on the ground that the enemy might find. The dispatcher in the bomber, however, had pushed them out early and they had landed three miles from their “pinpoint,” spy jargon for the spot on the ground where a parachuting agent was supposed to land. Three miles off might not seem like much, but Jacques and Toto had spent hours studying their pinpoint on a map before leaving England. All the landmarks they had memorized to give them their bearings in the dark—the church steeples, hills, road crossing—were now not there. It took them several hours to get oriented.

  Weight was another problem. One of their suitcases contained two radios and spare parts. The other had their clothing, money, and weapons. Lugging the heavy bags the more than nine miles to Clermont-Ferrand would be impossible, so they decided to bury the suitcase with the radios in a vineyard they saw near their pinpoint, whose earth had been freshly turned. They would carry the lighter bag with the clothes and weapons.

  Dawn had broken by the time they finished burying the first suitcase. The spies were too exhausted to walk further to Clermont-Ferrand. Fortunately, Toto knew a farm family near the pinpoint who let them hide the suitcase in their house and sleep for a while. Later that afternoon, Jacques, his sore ankle aching, set out for Clermont-Ferrand. Despite wearing the jumpsuit his civilian clothes had been splattered with mud and he was worried he would attract attention along the way.

  Beginning an agent network in Lyon, their final destination, was not easy. Rocquefort and Marret did not yet know what kind of reports hotel or apartment owners were required to file with the Vichy police on renters, so they took a room in a private house, but dared not pull their radios out of the suitcase for fear the nosy landlord might report them. The old friends they first tried to track down were either on vacation, in prison for anti-occupation crimes, or hiding out with the resistance. Jacques finally located an attorney he had known and a Jesuit priest for a Catholic student association he had once belonged to. They and the young woman in Clermont-Ferrand “were the only connections I had with which to begin organizing my intelligence service,” he later recalled.

  But he had to move carefully and slowly with them. You don’t just drop into the lives of ordinary civilians and the next day ask them to be espionage agents collecting military secrets. Jacques kept his contacts with the three social at first. But he lucked out a week or so later. The girl from Clermont-Ferrand, out of the blue, introduced him to three friends: a major in the Vichy army, a Michelin tire factory engineer, and the engineer’s brother, who was an artillery captain. He now had three more people who had the professional background to know the kind of military or industrial information that might be important. At the same time the Jesuit priest on his own initiative put him in touch with two of his students who were in their mid-twenties. Rocquefort gave them the code names “Jacques II” and “Petit Jean.” They helped him find a private apartment where Toto could set up his radio with no questions asked.

  Henry Hyde and other OSS officers gathered anxiously around the radio at their station in Algiers on Wednesday morning, September 15. Before Rocquefort and Marret had left England on August 17, Hyde had arranged for them to transmit their first message to Algiers thirty days later at 8:30 a.m. on that Wednesday. The silence the last month—not knowing if his two agents had succeeded in infiltrating into Lyon, if they had begun their network, or if they had been captured or killed—had been agonizing. One minute past the designated hour a faint voice over the radio’s crackle could be heard. It was Toto. They had arrived safely, he told them, and had begun building their network. But it would be slow going at the outset. Hyde breathed a sigh of relief. “The cornerstone of our house was in place,” he would report later.

  Chapter 18

  Sicily and Italy

  DAVID DONOVAN had become an exemplary naval officer. His eyesight remained poor by service standards but his superior officers found that it in no way hampered him in performing his duties managing amphibious vessels. He had also displayed “remarkable judgment in emergency operations,” one of his commanders noted in a fitness report. David would have preferred duty in the Pacific, where the Navy was doing the real fighting, rather than being a taxi service for Army soldiers landing at the shore. But for now he was satisfied serving as a staff officer aboard the USS Samuel Chase, the flagship for the admiral commanding the amphibious force putting troops ashore on July 10 for Operation Husky, the invasion of Sicily. David had been promoted to lieutenant two months earlier. Senior naval officers knew he was Donovan’s son and had pushed for speedy promotions, although David would have earned them on his own merit. In fact, wanting to keep as much distance from Donovan as he could, David had never told his shipmates he had a famous father.

  It explained why he was both embarrassed and angry when the day before the Sicily invasion, Donovan was piped aboard the Samuel Chase as it prepared to get underway from the port of Algiers. He was there to visit David and to join the troops in landing on the beach. Donovan could not be faulted for wanting to see him. Senior officers routinely checked on their sons and the sons of others in war zones. As another ship’s officer shot a home movie, David stood awkwardly by his father on deck, forcing a smile. The Buffalo Evening News learned of the reunion and published a glowing story on “father and son landing from the same ship for the invasion of Sicily.” But David hated the attention Donovan’s presence brought him.

  David also didn’t believe his father had any business being in a war zone at his age. Donovan, who was sixty, had passed his Army physical three months earlier but his body was showing signs of wear and tear from being on the go constantly. He weighed two hundred pounds, too much for his five-foot-nine-inch frame, and his waistline had grown to forty inches. Both legs bore scars from war wounds or football injuries, and he had astigmatism in his right eye. His blood pressure thankfully was low but an X-ray revealed that he had “moderate cardiac hypertrophy,” a thickening of the heart muscle from too much stress on the organ. It was not life-threatening though it had to be watched. But oblivious to danger as he always had been, Donovan was eager to make this landing.

  In April the Joint Chiefs approved an aggressive $3 million covert operation for Sicily. Donovan, who had begun studying Italian, wanted to shower the island with black propaganda broadcasts, infiltrate spies to supply the Army and Navy intelligence for the beach landings, and organize partisan guerrilla bands to harass the 300,000 Italian and German soldiers who defended it. A year earlier, a twenty-two-year-old Sicilian American
named Biagio Max Corvo, who had worked on a Connecticut newspaper and was just a private in the Army, walked into OSS headquarters in Washington and convinced Donovan’s officers he had a plan to recruit Sicilian Americans from around the country to infiltrate into Sicily and organize a rebellion among antifascists on the island. They hired the young supply clerk and sent him out to begin recruiting. At one point, Army counterintelligence officers in New York grabbed him, wondering why a lowly private was roaming the city trying to enlist agents for a secret mission. Corvo eventually was commissioned a second lieutenant and sent to Algiers in May with the Sicilian Americans he had rounded up; they included Vincent Scamporino, a Connecticut lawyer who served as his deputy. Before Corvo left, Donovan told him to get a haircut so he would look more military. In North Africa, Corvo and Scamporino recruited more Sicilian refugees for their penetration. The British suspected that some of the men Scamporino found in Tunis were Mafia foot soldiers who had fled the island, although Scamporino assured them that was not the case.

  Two weeks before the Sicily invasion, Donovan’s Morale Operations branch set up a radio station in Tunis that beamed in broadcasts mixing facts with phony news and urging Sicilians to rise up against the Germans and the Italians who had “sold out to the Nazis.” But otherwise, the invasion moved too quickly for the rest of Donovan’s covert plan. Corvo finally had a team ready to penetrate the island by early June but Husky’s commanders canceled the mission at the last minute, fearing at that late date it might alert Sicily’s coastal defenses that an invasion was imminent.

  So except for one of his officers assigned to a division to interrogate prisoners, Donovan was the only OSS man going ashore on Saturday, July 10. The night before D-Day, as the Samuel Chase steamed through stormy weather to the southwestern beaches at Gela, Sicily, he had slept in a bunk on the weather deck. The ship’s other berths were crammed with officers and solders from the 1st Division. The next morning after the first wave of Big Red One division soldiers had debarked, Donovan borrowed camouflage fatigues from the crew and climbed down the ship’s rope ladder to a landing craft, which took him to Gela’s beach.

  The invasion caught the Axis defenders by surprise. General Sir Bernard Montgomery’s 8th Army had landed on the southeastern side of the island and met little opposition. Patton’s 7th Army, assigned the south side, at first came under fire from coastal artillery and Italian and German planes strafing the Gulf of Gela and its beaches. But the U.S. Navy’s heavy guns soon obliterated the coastal defenses and by mid-morning Patton’s army had begun to move inland. Once ashore, Donovan found the Big Red One’s temporary headquarters off the crowded beach. Its assistant division commander, General Theodore Roosevelt Jr., lent him a jeep and one of his aides, Captain Paul Gale, to give him a tour of the operation. Donovan wanted to drive inland, which made Gale nervous because the enemy was not far ahead, but the captain obliged and the two sped down a road away from the beach.

  Sure enough, they soon ran into an Italian patrol, which opened fire on the vehicle. Donovan grabbed the light machine gun Gale had brought along and began firing back. “He shot up the Italians single-handed,” recalled Gale, a combat veteran from Torch who nevertheless found this firefight a bit unnerving. “He was happy as a clam.”

  The next day, as the Hermann Göring Panzer Division moved south to counterattack, Donovan caught up with Patton in the town of Gela and the two shared a K ration lunch. They were old friends from Virginia’s horse country. Patton owned a Middleburg home near Chapel Hill. “You know, Bill,” Patton had once roared at one of their Middleburg get-togethers, “there are two things in life that I love to do—fucking and fighting.” “Yes, George,” Donovan roared back, “and in that order, too.” Patton had been impressed with the intelligence Eddy’s men had fed him for the Torch campaign, but as the two men spooned out cold K rations from cans at Gela, he proved a tough bargainer when they started talking business. Eddy had found that Patton could be prickly and more than willing to throw units like the OSS out of his theater if they crossed him. Patton now agreed to have more of Donovan’s espionage and sabotage teams join him in Sicily. But when Donovan asked if two of the 7th Army’s officers who were expert in French affairs could be transferred to the OSS, Patton refused to let him raid his staff.

  Corvo and his nine-man team were not able to wedge their way onto a Navy transport ship to Sicily until three days after the first landing. Once there, they tried to cross enemy lines riding mules or on foot to collect intelligence but usually found the Axis forces retreating and Patton’s army overrunning them before they could return with any worthwhile information. Since his team all spoke the Sicilian dialect they became more useful interrogating POWs. When Donovan left on July 18, his parting orders to Corvo were: “plan for the invasion of Italy.” Operating out of a walled villa in Palermo after Patton captured the northwest city on July 22, Corvo’s men began collecting intelligence from Sicilians, including Mafia gunmen, who had connections on the Italian mainland. Donovan also dispatched one of Langer’s research analysts from Washington to set up what he called the “OSS University of Palermo” in an abandoned country club. Local professors and college students were brought in to analyze the mass of documents seized from the fascist headquarters around the island and to write military and political reports on Italy.

  Donovan returned to Washington on August 4, his face sunburned from tromping through Sicily with the troops. Aides thought he had shed a few pounds from his adventure. He also came back with a GI crew cut a ship’s barber on the Samuel Chase had given him, which earned him a little teasing. “That’s sure as hell some haircut you’ve got there, mister,” Wallace Deuel joked when he poked his head into Donovan’s office. Agent 109 laughed. He intended to crop his hair closely for more landings.

  DONOVAN SPENT ONLY a week back in Washington before boarding a train for Quebec late Thursday night, August 12. He paid the $38.88 out of his own pocket for a sleeping compartment in the Pullman. He stopped in Nonquitt for a brief visit Friday afternoon with Ruth, who was on her regular summer vacation, but was back on the train headed north the next day.

  Events were moving quickly in Europe. Patton and Montgomery had ground their armies forward to take Sicily but tragically had allowed more than 100,000 Axis soldiers on the island to escape across the Strait of Messina to the Italian mainland. On July 25, the Fascist Grand Council had ousted Mussolini. King Vittorio Emanuele III had the dictator arrested and made Marshal Badoglio, who had impressed Donovan in the 1936 Ethiopian campaign, the new head of the Italian government. Badoglio soon dissolved the National Fascist Party and opened secret negotiations with the Allies for an armistice. But already Hitler had begun moving German soldiers from France and the Russian front into Italy, as well as into the Balkans, to block the Allies from seizing them. Roosevelt and Churchill would be making important decisions at their Quebec conference, code-named Quadrant, which began on August 17. “Action will follow quickly,” warned Lieutenant Colonel Ellery Huntington, a former Yale all-American quarterback and now Donovan’s Special Operations chief. Donovan’s men had been unprepared for the Sicily invasion. He did not want the war to pass them by in Italy or the Balkans.

  Over the next week in Quebec’s historic Citadelle, Roosevelt and Marshall managed to quash Churchill’s proposal for an Allied army to invade the Balkans. No more diversions beyond an Italian campaign, the Americans insisted. The cross-Channel invasion of France, under the command of an American, would be the priority for the next year. Instead of a Balkans offensive, the president and prime minister agreed the Allies would back the region’s guerrilla movements with arms and operatives from the British secret services and Donovan’s OSS.

  Donovan also convinced Marshall that the OSS and British special operations might be able to capture the Italian island of Sardinia and the French territorial island of Corsica just north of it. Six Italian divisions along with German garrisons held the two islands. In December 1942, the OSS had infiltrated a f
our-man team into Corsica, which radioed back intelligence on the strength of Axis forces on the island for six months before occupation troops captured and killed the men. On June 23, a five-man team slipped into Sardinia but was captured by Italian sentries the next day. The Allies did not consider the two islands valuable enough prizes to warrant a conventional invasion. But Marshall was willing to let Donovan’s fifth column subversives sneak in to try to convince the Italian defenders to give up Sardinia and Corsica without a fight. Eisenhower doubted the covert operatives could pull it off, particularly on the more heavily defended Sardinia. But Marshall cabled him from Quebec that it would “give Donovan a chance to do his stuff without fear of compromising” Eisenhower’s other operations. “If he succeeds, fine, if not, nothing would be lost,” Marshall reasoned. Ike agreed to give it a try.

  Churchill and Roosevelt had also agreed to appoint Admiral Lord Louis Mountbatten the top commander for Southeast Asia, whose theater would also include India and China. After being told of the appointment, Mountbatten walked back to his quarters at the Château Frontenac and found Donovan sitting in his room. Donovan had done small favors for Mountbatten in the past, such as helping his wife, Edwina, arrange a tour of the United States on behalf of the British Red Cross.

  “How did you get in?” Mountbatten asked, a bit irritated. “It was locked.”

  “The OSS can get in anywhere,” Donovan said smugly. “Let me be the first to congratulate you on being appointed Supreme Allied Commander Southeast Asia.”