Wild Bill Donovan

by Douglas Waller

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about!” Mountbatten, appalled, nearly shouted. The appointment was still a closely guarded secret.

  “You can’t fool me,” Donovan said. “I’ve got spies everywhere.”

  “Well supposing you’re right,” Mountbatten said gruffly. “Why do you come and worry me about it?”

  “Because I want your permission to operate in Southeast Asia,” Donovan replied quickly.

  “Are you any good?” Mountbatten shot back.

  “You bet we’re good.”

  “Then I’m going to test you,” Mountbatten said. He would be in New York with his flag lieutenant in a couple of days. Oklahoma! had opened on Broadway in March. Donovan’s test: “Get me two of the best seats” for the musical, Mountbatten demanded.

  “Goddamn it, that’s impossible!” Donovan yelped. “There are absolutely no seats for six months. How do you expect me—?”

  “No seats for Oklahoma!, no operations in Southeast Asia,” Mountbatten interrupted. Then he threw Donovan out.

  Two days later, Donovan showed up at Mountbatten’s New York hotel with six tickets plus three beautiful young women to help the admiral, the flag lieutenant, and the spy chief enjoy the play and a nightclub afterward. (Lord and Lady Mountbatten had what could charitably be called an open marriage.) A news photographer, however, intercepted the party as they walked out of the club later that night and snapped photos of Mountbatten with his date.

  “If those photographs are published,” Mountbatten told Donovan, not only will the OSS be out of Southeast Asia, “I’ll probably be out, too!” Suddenly two burly agents protecting Donovan appeared, grabbed the photographer by both elbows and carried him off. The shots never made the papers. “Bill, you are in,” Mountbatten said, smiling.

  AS THE NAVAL armada of 642 ships loitered in the calm waters of the Gulf of Salerno early Thursday morning, September 9, waiting to disgorge their 55,000 assault troops for Operation Avalanche, Donovan stood on the flag bridge of the USS Ancon command ship with Admiral Kent Hewitt and the 5th Army’s commander, Mark Clark. (David also was in the Gulf of Salerno aboard the Samuel Chase, but, much to his relief, his father did not drop in on him this time.) Donovan sported combat fatigues and a helmet and planned to smear black camouflage paint over his face when he went ashore after the initial wave. Donald Downes, who had led the embassy break-ins in Washington, was also on the Ancon in charge of a twenty-man OSS detachment wading ashore with the first wave. He had arranged for a Navy PT boat to ferry Donovan to the beach later. German warplanes began strafing the fleet shortly after 4 a.m., but Donovan remained on deck to watch out of curiosity. Donovan’s senior aides had tried admonishing him about being too close to the line of fire. His head was filled with the knowledge of Magic and Ultra and countless other sensitive Allied secrets, which risked exposure if he was captured at a beach landing. But Donovan had no intention of missing the Allied invasion at Salerno.

  Clark saw no problem with the spy chief making the landing. Once Donovan reached the beach, he told Clark: “If you can give me a jeep and a gun I won’t bother you further.” Clark was willing to provide the weapon and vehicle, but he balked on other matters. With Ultra already giving him a detailed picture of enemy forces in Italy, the 5th Army commander refused to let Donovan’s agents infiltrate into Salerno before D-Day and risk compromise of Operation Avalanche’s timing if they were discovered. Since May, however, Marshall and Eisenhower had approved Donovan’s broadcasting bare-knuckled propaganda messages into Italian radio sets to convince their listeners that alliance with Germany would set Italy back a hundred years.

  Italy did not need Donovan’s propaganda to convince her that breaking from the Axis was the only way she could survive. On September 3, Badoglio’s representative signed unconditional surrender documents at the Allied forward headquarters in Sicily. Just eight hours before the Salerno invasion Eisenhower and Badoglio announced the Italian capitulation over Rome and Algiers radio. Soldiers on the ships floating in the Gulf of Salerno were euphoric, believing that the landing would be a cakewalk. It was anything but. Anticipating an Allied landing somewhere in the Salerno area, the German 16th Panzer Division nearby rushed to counterattack while German reinforcements further south moved toward the city. Clark landed his force in short order but it stalled within several miles of the beachhead as the Germans fought ferociously to drive his army back into the sea. Finally after ten days of intense fighting and some nine thousand British and American casualties, the 5th Army managed to hold, then push back the Germans, eventually with the help of Montgomery’s slowly arriving force.

  As Donovan watched from the shore, Downes’s detachment interrogated enemy POWs and began sending small intelligence-gathering teams ten to fifty miles behind German lines. They were guided often by antifascist Italian soldiers and civilians from the Salerno area, whom the OSS men hired on the spot. Two days after the first landings, Downes and three other OSS officers sped in a PT boat to the small beachhead Lieutenant Colonel William O. Darby’s Army Ranger battalions had carved out at the coastal resort villages of Maiori, Minori, and Amalfi on the Sorrento Peninsula jutting west of Salerno. The agents rounded up some four hundred raggedy-looking men and boys from the villages who hauled ammunition, fuel cans, and food that Navy amphibious ships off-loaded at the beach to Darby’s force fighting at the front. Downes paid the men of this makeshift stevedore gang fifty lire a day and the boys thirty-seven lire along with two cans of C rations for each from the boxes they toted.

  As Darby’s Rangers pushed northward, Downes, who also had a nose for fine living, commandeered the Hotel Luna in Amalfi as his headquarters. He drove Donovan there and had the hotel’s waiters serve them a seven-course dinner in black tie. The boss was nonplussed by this ostentatious display. Donovan had begun receiving disturbing reports from other OSS officers that his protégé from the Spanish embassy break-ins was in over his head at Salerno. “Downes and his staff were acting like bandits, requisitioning everything, including cars, without rhyme or reason,” one OSS officer complained in an after-action report. Downes’s agents looted one Italian villa of its personal effects. Predictably many of the locals his men hurriedly hired to infiltrate the German lines proved to be “of doubtful character,” the report continued. “Lack of discipline was the rule of the day. The [OSS] personnel behaved much as they pleased.” Donovan knew he had a potential mess on his hands.

  But before he tackled the Downes problem, Donovan returned to Algiers to launch the two missions Marshall had approved at Quebec. He sprung the Sardinia operation on Serge Obolensky, the dashing czarist officer who had been one of his early hires in New York and who had just arrived in Algiers to train OSS commandos. Donovan wanted him to parachute onto the island with surrender letters from Eisenhower and the new Badoglio government and convince the commander of the 270,000 Italian soldiers there, many perhaps still loyal to Mussolini, to surrender and begin attacking the nineteen thousand Germans in Sardinia as they evacuated north into Corsica. “Oboe,” the nickname Obolensky’s comrades had given him, was less than enthusiastic at first. “General, I don’t speak Italian,” he pointed out. “I know France and speak French fluently . . .”

  “I know you can do it, Oboe,” Donovan kept repeating with his soft, soothing voice. “I have confidence in you.” Donovan had a way of making an agent feel that the mission he was going on was “perfectly simple,” as he always put it. “Believe me, I wish I were going with you.”

  Oboe took the bait. A half hour before midnight on September 13, with his weak ankles heavily taped so he hopefully wouldn’t sprain them, the Russian cavalryman jumped out of a Halifax bomber along with two other OSS commandos and a British radio operator and floated down to the foothills of Sardinia about fifteen miles from Cagliari, its capital in the south. The mission turned out to be as simple as Donovan had predicted. General Alberto Basso, the island’s courtly Italian commander, read Obolensky’s two surrender letters the next afte
rnoon and courteously agreed to “push the Germans out of Sardinia.” Instead of fighting the Nazis, however, Basso’s divisions merely followed them up the island and watched as they all crossed the narrow Strait of Bonifacio into Corsica by September 18.

  The Corsica operation, which Donovan sprang on anthropology professor Carleton Coon, proved to be not as easy. At midnight September 13, the French warships Fantasque and Terrible pulled up to the docks at Corsica’s east coast capital of Ajaccio and deposited Coon, his small contingent of OSS intelligence agents and commandos plus a reinforced brigade of French, Moroccan, and Algerian colonial soldiers the French headquarters in Algiers had cobbled together to liberate the island. They were greeted by a noisy crowd of Corsicans dancing, singing the “Marseillaise,” and firing shotguns in the air. After the Italian surrender had been announced September 8, Corsican resistance bands around the island had begun seizing towns and enemy barracks. But the clannish Corsicans fought the hated Italians on the island and one another as much as the Germans. The eighty thousand Italians on Corsica who had been expected to join the Allies in capturing the Germans instead blew up bridges and threw up roadblocks in front of French convoys moving to the front.

  At any time, the island’s Nazi garrison reinforced by the nineteen thousand well-trained German soldiers who had arrived from Sardinia could have turned around and wiped out the ragtag band of invaders. Instead they conducted a fighting withdrawal to the northern town of Bastia, where ships evacuated the force to the Italian mainland on October 4. Coon’s intelligence team spied on the retreating Germans and his thirty-four commandos harassed them with guerrilla attacks. Three of his men died in a crossfire. Donovan, who dropped in on Coon’s villa headquarters at one point before the battle ended, now had a base on the two islands for launching covert operations into Italy and southern France. But “far from being a great victory,” the invasion of Corsica “was largely an act of occupying territory which the Germans did not want,” Coon later admitted. His OSS army ended up “simply annoying them on their way out.”

  On a PT boat ride with Downes in late September to the resort island of Capri just off the Sorrento Peninsula, Donovan finally dealt with his Salerno problem. Ellery Huntington, the Special Operations chief from Washington, will take over the OSS detachment assigned to Clark’s army, he told the agent. Downes could remain as Huntington’s counterintelligence officer. And before the British grabbed it, Donovan also wanted Downes to secure a plush Capri villa that had been vacated during the war by his friend Mona Williams, a New York fashion icon married to a public utilities millionaire. Donovan wanted to use Villa Fortino as a rest camp for OSS agents.

  Downes blew up. He angrily declared that he would not work for Huntington, who he claimed was incompetent and had risen this far in the OSS only because he had been one of Donovan’s campaign contributors. As for the villa, Downes said huffily, he wasn’t fighting this war to protect Donovan’s clients. It was all Donovan could do to keep from throwing Downes overboard. Instead, he calmly told his agent he looked exhausted and needed to come home for a rest. Downes did need a rest. He was suffering from amoebic dysentery. Donovan was prone to relieve an officer from one position, then find another job for him to do in the OSS. But the man he had considered a superstar for the embassy break-ins left Italy and never returned to the field as a secret agent.

  Chapter 19

  The Balkans

  DONOVAN ROAMED the Mediterranean region until October 2, seeding ideas and rearranging his personnel. The briefcase he carried with him also bulged with secret plans for the Balkans. The region was not a primary war theater for Roosevelt, whose generals wanted no part of invading it with a conventional force, nor for Hitler, whose troops there were mostly too old or unfit for duty on the Eastern or Western Fronts. For outsiders, it was forbidding territory. The incessant infighting among countless Balkan factions became a constant headache for the German occupiers. For the Allies, organizing a unified resistance against the Germans became filthy work as well. The indigenous guerrillas, often more intent on battling rival factions than the Nazis, wanted American and British arms but no meddling in their internal affairs. Yet the Balkans became a key theater for Donovan’s war. By the fall of 1943 both he and the Joint Chiefs believed the time was “ripe” for intensive subversion and propaganda operations to peel off countries such as Bulgaria, Romania, and Hungary. With Italy’s surrender and German defeats on the Soviet front, the Nazi satellites had begun looking for ways to wiggle out of an alliance with what would likely be the losing side. If it did not cause a breach, “subversive pressure” would at least “cause difficulties for the Axis,” Donovan reasoned.

  The Balkans would also be the place for Donovan’s most intense battles with the British. He had finally reached an accord with Sir Charles Hambro on July 26, which allowed his men to work jointly under the SOE missions already in Yugoslavia and Greece. In Yugoslavia, he agreed that both outfits would use the same cipher system to encode their radio messages transmitted from the field. (That would also conveniently enable Hambro’s men to monitor OSS communications.) But Donovan had no intention of merely servicing London in Yugoslavia or Greece. He drew up detailed plans for OSS-organized commando attacks on rail lines, bridges, and telephone exchanges the Germans used in both countries. The guerrilla uprisings would make life miserable for the Nazis, Donovan envisioned, forcing them to withdraw, or at least to drain soldiers from France and the Eastern Front to fight the rebellions. Donovan ordered a “supreme effort” to put more American operatives than the British wanted into both Yugoslavia and Greece.

  In mid-August, Walter Mansfield, a thirty-two-year-old Marine lieutenant who had worked in Donovan’s law firm, parachuted into the mountain headquarters of Draža Mihailović, who commanded some seventy thousand Chetnik fighters in central and eastern Serbia. Army Lieutenant Colonel Albert Seitz, a tall Virginian and Mansfield’s friend from parachute training, joined him the next month. Mihailović, a middle-aged stocky man who sported an iron-gray beard, black cap, and leather jacket, gave Mansfield and Seitz the royal treatment, much to the chagrin of the British.

  For six months, Mansfield and Seitz interviewed Mihailović and hiked through his command, sleeping under tents made of torn parachutes, eating black bread and lamb stew with his soldiers (who all had heavy black beards and skull-and-bones insignias sewn onto their frayed uniforms), and dodging German patrols hunting for guerrillas. They came away convinced that while Mihailović hated Tito’s communist partisans far more than the Germans, the Serbian nationalist would start killing more Nazis if the Americans gave his threadbare army weapons. Even if Churchill prevailed and convinced Roosevelt to cut off all arms to Mihailović, Mansfield and Seitz argued that it still made sense to keep OSS officers in the Serb’s tent camp to exploit him “as a source of intelligence” on the German occupiers.

  Donovan was not convinced Mihailović was the man to back with American arms. He had other senior advisers warning him that the Chetniks were killing more communist partisans than Germans and that Mihailović often was collaborating with the Nazis in his power struggle with Tito. But he believed that OSS agents should remain with Mihailović to spy and to work with the Chetnik warlord evacuating Allied pilots whose planes were shot down over his territory. By the end of 1943, however, Churchill convinced Roosevelt that the British and American officers at Mihailović’s headquarters should leave and all Allied arms and advisers should be shifted to Tito. Donovan bitterly fought the move, but Churchill, who did not want to alienate Tito by continuing ties with his hated rival, prevailed. The British mission pulled up stakes by February 1944. Donovan reluctantly ordered his officers at Draža’s headquarters to leave as well.

  Before he left North Africa after the Salerno landing, however, Donovan was intent on throwing the full weight of the OSS behind Tito. The communist commander’s army of some 180,000 occupied most of Bosnia-Herzegovina, Dalmatia, Slovenia, and a chunk of Croatia-Slavonia. Though they were figh
ting a civil war with the Chetniks, Tito’s partisans were also violently anti-Nazi and inflicting far more damage on the thirteen German divisions occupying Yugoslavia. On September 14 during a stop in Algiers, Donovan huddled at Villa Magnol with two young aides to Louis Huot, his Cairo special operations officer, who offered up a new operation code-named Audrey (after the name of Huot’s wife) to ship massive amounts of supplies to Tito. The British still controlled the planes for special operations but with the Allies now occupying half of southern Italy, Huot proposed another way of moving men and supplies to Tito—by boat on the relatively short hop over the Adriatic Sea from Italy’s eastern coast to Yugoslavia’s western coast. John Toulmin, a former Boston bank executive Donovan had recently made his Cairo station chief, had a queasy feeling about the headstrong Huot, who tended to jump the gun on operations. But for now, Donovan was enthusiastic about Audrey. He ordered Huot “to push ahead full speed.”

  Huot did just that. He set up his secret naval base at Bari, an Italian fishing town on the Adriatic coast whose boutique shops, opera house, and a strategically more important deepwater port had been left intact by the departing Germans. By mid-October, Huot had a fleet of seventeen small steamers and schooners there, which began sailing fuel, food, weapons, uniforms, and medical supplies to Vis Island, south of the coastal town of Split, where Tito’s men off-loaded the cargo by hand. Later, however, it became an open and hotly disputed question whether Huot had obtained the proper authorizations from the theater command to mount a major supply operation into a country London considered its turf. Huot insisted he had the clearances. Before leaving North Africa, Donovan also had told British General Henry Maitland Wilson, the Middle East commander, that he wanted to set up an OSS “advanced base” on southern Italy’s Adriatic coast to mount covert operations into the Balkans. “Jumbo,” the nickname Wilson had earned because he was huge, saw no problem with the base, according to Donovan. The British later howled that Huot never told them he was convoying hundreds of tons of supplies to Tito, which amounted to a smuggling operation behind their backs.