Wild Bill Donovan

by Douglas Waller

  Donovan wasted no time getting down to business. In their first meeting at Friendship Valley, he gave Tai Li an earful. He was not happy with the way the Sino-American Cooperative Organization was treating the OSS. The “person at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue” had ordered him to collect intelligence in China and fight the Japanese, Donovan told the general, and that’s what he intended to do with or without Tai Li’s help. If the regime did not let the OSS expand its operations in China and have a voice in deciding what spying would be done by both sides, Donovan bluntly warned, he would shut off the OSS money spigot and equipment pipeline to Tai Li’s intelligence service.

  Tai Li arranged a dog-and-pony show for the American delegation the next day—tables in the Friendship Valley headquarters stacked with documents, uniforms, and weapons captured from Japanese soldiers—but the OSS director was not impressed. Later Friday afternoon, Donovan sat down for a private meeting with Mary Miles to break the news he had for him. The naval officer could not hide his nervousness at being in the room alone with Donovan. Though he was contemptuous of other OSS agents, Miles still told friends that from the first day he had met Donovan he “liked the cut of his jib.” But the captain knew the ax was falling. Donovan did his best to soften the blow with kind words. He still hoped to salvage an accord with Tai Li, who, after all, held the monopoly on Chinese espionage, and Miles continued to be the only American close to him. Miles’s workload was “far too heavy for any one man to carry,” Donovan gently told him. He was relieving him as the OSS officer for the Far East. Miles could still spy for the Navy in China and be the sea service’s representative in the Sino-American Cooperative Organization. But to run China operations for the OSS, Donovan was bringing in one of his trusted officers, Lieutenant Colonel John Coughlin, a thirty-six-year-old West Pointer from Arizona who was currently working in Burma. Coughlin would look out for the agency’s interests with Tai Li’s group, not Miles. To Donovan’s relief, Miles appeared to meekly accept the decision.

  Friday night, Tai Li hosted a large banquet in Donovan’s honor at the French Group House in Friendship Valley, hoping that a seven-course meal, free-flowing wine, and pretty young Chinese women among the men would loosen him up—or perhaps catch him in an indiscretion. Tai Li’s spies didn’t tell him that Donovan did not drink and he was not interested in these girls. Up to that point, Tai Li did not impress Donovan as being all that sinister. Donovan could clearly see that the Chinese general was “a mediocre policeman with medieval ideas of intelligence work,” he later told Mountbatten, “but apart from that a rather likeable fellow.” As more bottles drained at the banquet, however, and the two men resumed their argument over Donovan’s freedom to operate in China, Tai Li began to bare his talons.

  “General, I want you to know that I am going to send my men into China whether you like it or not,” Donovan finally said.

  “If OSS tries to operate outside of SACO I will kill your agents,” Tai Li answered, his eyes flaring.

  “For every one of our agents you kill, we will kill one of your generals,” Donovan said, pounding the table with his fist and clanking the dishware.

  “You can’t talk to me like that!” Tai Li shouted.

  “I am talking to you like that!” Donovan shouted back.

  A deathly silence fell over the banquet room. Donovan and Tai Li locked their eyes on each other. Miles sat horrified. He knew Tai Li was seething over this serious breach of protocol. Tai Li visited Miles’s quarters later and vented that “General Donovan could not get away with those things in China.” But for now, Tai forced a thin smile. Donovan did as well. Others in the room strained to resume conversations.

  Over the next three days, Donovan and Tai Li finally reached a peace agreement. The Chinese spymaster promised to give the OSS more freedom to operate in China. Miles no longer could block Donovan’s agents from coming into the country. Tai Li would share more useful intelligence with Donovan’s men and point his spies more at the Japanese.

  Before Donovan left China Monday evening, December 6, Tai Li drove him up the mountains overlooking Chungking past two sentries guarding an entrance to Chiang’s rock-walled compound, which Japanese bombers had never been able to find. Chiang, who spoke no English and met with only a few Americans, pointed Donovan to a chair beside his desk, which had a sign over it with the motto: “All officials must serve the people.” Donovan didn’t believe it for a minute. His aides had given him a secret memo ahead of time warning that Chiang was a “narrow and limited” leader who maintained power by ruthlessly repressing dissent. The result: a brain drain of talented civil servants and intellectuals from his government, Donovan’s memo warned, which meant “less and less hope of [the regime] being able to meet current problems.”

  Tai Li had already alerted Chiang to the American’s rude behavior at the banquet. Speaking through an interpreter, the generalissimo began with a stern lecture. Donovan was operating in a land “both foreign and friendly to you,” Chiang said. “We Chinese are a sovereign country and expect you to recognize that. We expect you Americans to behave in the same manner as you would expect other allies to behave in your country. You do not expect a secret service from another country to go into the United States and start operations.” We, likewise, object to the American spies “working without the knowledge of the Chinese.” So “please conduct yourself accordingly,” the warlord warned. Donovan replied (more politely than he had to Chiang’s spy chief): FDR ordered him to place agents in China and he intended to follow those orders. And he will “replace” each agent Tai Li killed with another one. This time, Donovan considered it best to leave out the eye-for-an-eye threat to kill Chiang’s generals. But Tai Li still thought he acted impudently in front of the generalissimo.

  Donovan boarded his B-24 Monday evening confident he had broken the logjam in China. But soon that would prove not to be the case. Donovan left Mary Miles in a vengeful mood. He later told one of Hoover’s agents that Donovan had fired him because Miles refused to accept “communists, pinks and sexual perverts” the OSS wanted to foist on his operation, which was hardly the case. Miles told friends he still intended to make life “difficult” for the OSS in China. So did Tai Li.

  John Ford and his movie crew, which had accompanied Donovan to China, boarded the bomber to film him at his next important stop: Nazira in the east Indian state of Assam. He had a base camp there launching operations into nearby Burma, the only place on the Asian mainland where he was actually fighting the Japanese at this point. But Donovan had another disagreeable chore to take care of at Nazira out of view of the cameras: sending Carl Eifler home.

  AFTER THE JAPANESE gained control of China’s eastern coast in 1937 and the Nationalist government had fled to Chungking in the interior, Chiang depended on a western artery to supply his poorly equipped army of four million men. Ships docked at the southern Burmese port of Rangoon and off-loaded weapons and matériel onto trains that chugged northeast to the town of Lashio, where the precious cargo was transferred to trucks. The vehicles then trekked east over a windy seven-hundred-mile mountain highway Chiang had drafted more than a hundred thousand Chinese laborers to build to Kunming. The entire route became known as the Burma Road, but by spring 1942 the Japanese had cut that lifeline as well with four divisions occupying all but the northern tip of Burma. Cargo planes valiantly flew tons of supplies over “the Hump”—the eastern end of the rugged Himalayan mountain range between India and China—but Japanese fighter aircraft based at the northern Burmese town of Myitkyina shot down many of them. Stilwell was desperate to close the Japanese base and open a northern ground corridor to Chiang’s army—a road stretching from Ledo at the eastern tip of India south into Burma to hook up with the Chinese leg of the Burma Road at the border below Myitkyina.

  Carl Eifler was commanding a detention camp in Hawaii for Japanese Americans when a cable from Washington arrived February 17, 1942, asking if he was available for duty in the Far East. A hulk of a man over six feet tall and 250 po
unds with ham hocks for arms and gigantic hands, Eifler had been a U.S. Customs agent rounding up bootleggers in San Diego when he decided to return to active duty in the Army. He had served before as a reserve officer. When Stilwell was a lieutenant colonel, he had commanded Eifler in a San Diego reserve unit and had been impressed with the thoroughness of his reports before the Pearl Harbor attack on Japanese officers who roamed in Mexico. Skilled in jujitsu, Eifler also was as smart and imaginative as he was loud and domineering. And he was willing to stick his neck out to tackle risky projects, which Stilwell liked. When Donovan’s men approached Stilwell about having a small OSS detachment sent to spy and launch guerrilla strikes behind Japanese lines, Vinegar Joe demanded that it be commanded by Major Eifler and that his team be sent to Nazira to attack the Myitkyina airbase and reopen the Burma Road. He gave Eifler a free hand to carry out the espionage and guerrilla operations as he saw fit. All Stilwell said he wanted to hear were “booms” from the Burmese jungle.

  Eifler became one of the most colorful guerrilla leaders in the Office of Strategic Services. For Detachment 101, the name given his unit, he assembled nearly two dozen American officers and soldiers he had recruited stateside. To penetrate deep behind enemy lines, Eifler’s men trained thousands of Burmese agents drawn from the Indian army, refugee camps, and the Kachin tribes of northern Burma. The sign at their Nazira camp read “The U.S. Army Experimental Station,” which made any curious locals think it was a research facility studying tropical diseases. Inside, Eifler kept a pet bear for roughhousing during his free time. He used magic tricks to convince superstitious Kachins the spirits wanted them to fight the Japanese and he often paid the small wiry tribesmen with opium. His agent training was rigorous, often dangerous—Eifler liked to pull out his .45 and fire rounds several inches from recruits crawling through obstacle courses to see how they reacted—and he ruled Detachment 101 with an iron hand. But his men grew intensely loyal to him. The few who became insubordinate literally got the back of his hand across their faces. Burmese agents who betrayed him were taken out to the jungle and beheaded.

  By the end of 1943, Detachment 101 was showing results, which delighted Donovan. Promoted to lieutenant colonel, Eifler had six camps hidden in northern Burma’s jungles, which were sending out agents to spy on the Japanese and harass their bases and troop trains with guerrilla attacks. A maritime team also patrolled Burma’s Indian Ocean coast to scout Japanese defenses and insert agents.

  It was during one of those coastal infiltrations in March 1943, however, that Eifler’s head slammed against a rock when his rubber boat crashed in pounding surf near the shore. The accident left him deaf in one ear and with a ringing noise and excruciating pain in his head. Eifler tried to cope with painkillers, but the symptoms worsened over the months. He could not sleep and grew more nervous, irritable, and forgetful. Heppner was stunned when in one meeting the detachment chief broke out crying for no reason.

  Eifler clung stubbornly to his command, checking himself into a hospital for a while, then checking out when he thought he had the pain under control. Donovan dispatched aides to Burma to investigate his troubled warrior. They reported back that Eifler seemed mentally unbalanced and increasingly acting irrationally.

  Donovan arrived at Nazira on Tuesday, December 7. Eifler thought the day went well. He gave his general a personal tour of the camp, impressed that Donovan had memorized the names of Eifler’s officers from the cables he had read and chatted with them as if they were old friends. Donovan probed Eifler on the supplies and personnel he needed and the morale of his troops. That night, after a hearty meal, the two men sat in Eifler’s war room and the lieutenant colonel pulled back the curtain to seven tactical maps marked with positions for his field units. Eifler began explaining the seven routes into Burma he said Stilwell wanted him to carve. “I was supposed to organize each one of them, and I did,” he began proudly, but Donovan interrupted.

  “That’s what I mean about you, Carl,” Donovan said frostily, barely looking at the maps. “You are too goddamn ambiguous about organizing. What do you mean by organizing?”

  Eifler was taken aback. The day had gone so pleasantly. Donovan’s visit had been a tremendous morale boost for his men, and for Eifler. But the tone of Donovan’s voice and the almost belligerent way he had interrupted with his question told Eifler that the OSS director was here for another reason besides a guided tour.

  Eifler kept his cool and asked in a soft voice: “Would the General like to go behind the lines and see for himself?” It was as juvenile as a high school dare. Eifler knew the Medal of Honor winner, who itched to be at the front, would take it. He was practically challenging Donovan’s manhood.

  “When do we leave?” Donovan asked calmly.

  “First thing in the morning,” Eifler replied, a thin smile creeping across his face.

  Shortly before ten o’clock Wednesday morning Eifler stepped into his parachute straps next to the de Havilland Tiger Moth. Eifler knew how to pilot the lightweight single-prop biplane, which he had bought from the British to fly his agents to remote jungle landing strips. Ford’s crew filmed the scene. Donovan at first refused to wear his chute, believing it would be far better for him to go down with the plane than to be captured by the Japanese, but Eifler, sensibly for once, talked him into strapping it on. The men climbed into the Moth’s two front-and-back seats.

  Eifler had picked “Knothead” for their visit, the code name for one of his jungle camps 150 miles behind Japanese lines and almost 275 miles from Nazira. The little Moth did not have that kind of range for a round-trip so Eifler had an Air Force cargo plane air-drop drums of gasoline onto the Knothead camp ahead of time so they could fill up for the return flight.

  The Moth rumbled down the dirt landing strip and strained to clear the bushes and trees at the end. The mechanics worried that the more than 450 pounds Eifler and Donovan added would give the plane’s four-cylinder engine a hernia lifting off. Talking was impossible in the open cockpits so Donovan enjoyed the view as Eifler in the front seat followed a river below flowing east into Burma and kept his head on a swivel for the enemy. Japanese warplanes routinely prowled the skies, their antiaircraft batteries on the ground dotted the path the Moth was taking, and enemy soldiers bivouacked close to Knothead’s secret headquarters. Two hours into the flight, Eifler twisted his body back and pointed down. Donovan could see only thatched roofs tucked into dense jungle foliage. Then suddenly the roofs began to move and Donovan realized they were props to camouflage a crude airstrip.

  Eifler made a perfect landing and while he taxied to the jungle on the side, where men would cover his plane with branches to hide it, natives had already begun moving the fake huts back over the strip to conceal it. Scruffy-looking OSS officers and Burmese agents crowded around Donovan saluting and shaking his hand, as if he were MacArthur come to liberate. They showed him around the camp. Donovan interviewed, through an interpreter, skinny Kachin guerrillas, some barely taller than the U.S. rifles they toted. Eifler, meanwhile, paced off the crooked landing strip. He calculated that his plane had to rise into the air 80 percent of the way down the path to clear the trees at the end. If the Moth couldn’t by that point he decided his only recourse was to tilt the aircraft sharply right to slip almost sideways through a break in the trees.

  After an hour and a half on the ground, Eifler pulled Donovan away from his Kachin entourage and told him they needed to climb into the now refueled plane so they could make it back to Nazira before dusk. The strip was cleared of the huts. Natives gripped the wings tightly to hold the plane in place while Eifler revved up its engine. They let the aircraft go and the Moth raced down the runway. But it did not have enough speed at the 80 percent mark to go airborne. Eifler quickly had to switch to his alternate plan. When the Moth finally lifted off further down the runway, he banked it violently to the right. Flying sideways, the aircraft squeezed through the break in the trees, dipped down the hill past them, and came to within five feet of the surfa
ce of the river beyond when Eifler leveled it and managed to gain altitude.

  “You didn’t think you were going to make it, did you?” Donovan said calmly after they climbed out of the aircraft at Nazira.

  “General, I knew we were going to make it,” Eifler said with a cocky grin. But the harrowing flight demonstrated that he needed more powerful planes to stay connected with his remote bases, Eifler added.

  Donovan approved better aircraft along with other supplies the detachment desperately needed. But that evening he broached the main reason for his visit. “Carl, I think it is time for you to return to America,” Donovan said gently but firmly. He was cutting the orders “immediately,” he said, replacing Eifler with one of the detachment’s senior officers, William Peers. Eifler stood stunned. (Later he broke down in tears over being relieved of command.) He tried to talk Donovan out of it. Donovan had actually been impressed with what he saw at Nazira and the Knothead camp, but his decision remained firm.

  Donovan left Burma thrilled over his trip behind enemy lines. His senior aides were horrified when they learned of the escapade. Donovan knew Eifler had taken a serious blow to his head but he did not know how serious it was. Eifler was suffering from traumatic brain injury and taking morphine for the pain when he climbed into the cockpit the day before. He had no business operating an aircraft, much less flying the leader of America’s intelligence service over Japanese territory. For both men, the trip had been a reckless display of bravado.