Wild Bill Donovan

by Douglas Waller

  Jackson later had second thoughts about making the proceedings a media spectacle. But for now he was eager to have Donovan’s agency at his disposal. He flew to London to join the spymaster, impressed with the luxury suite he commanded at Claridge’s and the Dewar’s White Label Scotch he had stocked in the rooms. Jackson was even more impressed with the doors Donovan opened for him in the British government, foreign embassies, and Eisenhower’s command. The two men paid a visit to Fedor Gusev, the Soviet ambassador in London, who was cordial but secretive about Soviet plans for the tribunal. They flew in Donovan’s plane to Frankfurt, where Beetle Smith manned Ike’s forward headquarters in the former I. G. Farben building, one of the few left standing in a city that to Jackson seemed nothing but “a mass of rubble.” Smith was skeptical about the value of the tribunals. The Soviets, he told them, had a far more efficient system for dealing with undesirable Germans in their sector; they just shot them on the spot.

  Donovan soon became Jackson’s most trusted emissary, with the OSS insinuated into every aspect of the justice’s operation. He gave Jackson’s lawyers OSS office space in Paris, brought in his propagandists to write press releases, covered the prosecution team’s expenses with money from the agency’s accounts so Jackson did not have to haggle with Congress, and helped him screen American judges for the tribunal. By mid-June Donovan had presented his team captain a detailed plan for organizing the prosecution staff with the spy chief acting as his deputy and his star attorney during the trial. Jackson, who thought Donovan and his OSS had been a godsend, agreed to practically all of the suggestions.

  DONOVAN FLEW BACK to Washington on Monday, June 11, and made a rare weekday excursion to Nonquitt, where Ruth, Mary, and Patricia were vacationing. But as usual, he became bored and spent most of his two days at the retreat on the phone to headquarters or New York. Back in Washington, Jackson returned Donovan’s favors and lobbied for his postwar central intelligence service. “It’s none of my business,” Jackson had already told Truman in one meeting, but Donovan seems to be the only person in town who has paid much attention to collecting foreign intelligence. “Perhaps there is some way” his large organization could continue after the war, Jackson said. “It would be very useful.” Truman was noncommittal, repeating once more that he did not want to see “the beginning of a Gestapo” in the country.

  Jackson let Donovan tag along on another visit the justice made to the Oval Office on Saturday, June 16, shortly after noon. Truman was in a cheerier mood than the last time Donovan had been to the White House. Jackson began by catching him up on the war crimes prosecution; he was having to treat the Russians with kid gloves in organizing the tribunal. He handed Truman a draft executive order directing other agencies to work with his team. Don’t be too solicitous toward the Soviets, Truman cautioned. “They have more respect for people who stand up to them.” Truman summoned an appointments secretary and told him to have an aide put the draft order “in shape to sign.” And “if he can add any forty-dollar words to make it more effective, do so.”

  Jackson planned to fly to Rome and pay Pope Pius a visit to solicit his cooperation with the war crimes trials. Truman thought that was a good idea. “You and I are Masons,” Jackson pointed out. Just as that fraternal organization binds together millions of Americans, “the two most cohesive forces in Europe are the Communist Party and the Catholic Church.” Truman understood and stood up to fetch from a cabinet the gavel the grand master of Missouri’s Masons had given him. Maybe they should take it as a gift for the pontiff, he said with a chuckle. It might be better to take Donovan with me to the meeting since he is a Catholic, Jackson suggested. Looking at Donovan with a smile, Truman thought that was a good idea as well.

  Donovan recounted stories about the high-value Nazis now in custody for trial. Göring was ingesting large dosages of codeine, he said. Truman got up once more and retrieved another souvenir from the cabinet: Göring’s gaudy Reichsmarschall baton covered with Nazi symbols and inlaid diamonds, which the U.S. Army had delivered to him.

  Jackson finally moved the conversation to the direction Donovan wanted it to go. As the justice had mentioned to Truman before, he and Donovan both believed that someone in the new administration should be assigned to work “more closely” with the OSS and “to know what it is doing.” Donovan’s intelligence agency had been vital for the prosecution team, Jackson said, and he thought it could be useful for Truman. It was important for a president to have an outfit collecting political intelligence overseas in addition to military secrets gathered by the Pentagon; it was also important that the intelligence agency be independent and its “reports not pass through some department for screening, which would have a special interest in slanting the information.” Truman agreed.

  Donovan sat there somewhat stunned. Jackson was the best lobbyist he could have ever found for his organization; the justice was one of the most well-connected Democrats in town, close to many people who were becoming key players in this new administration, and here he was promoting—quite effectively—a role for the OSS after the war ended. And Truman, who had given Donovan nothing but a cold shoulder so far, seemed amenable to the idea of a peacetime intelligence service—at least in principle.

  Donovan took over the pitch at this point. Truman might want to consider sending one of his most trusted aides to the OSS, he told the president, and Donovan would give him “complete access” to the agency’s secrets. He zeroed in on the all-important political problem he knew Democrats had with him and his organization. Donovan believed in party government, he told Truman, and he recognized that Democrats were in power. Yes, there were “a good many” Republicans in the OSS, but “about seventy percent of the staff are Democrats and many of them New Dealers,” he said. Domestic policy will be run by Democrats as long as he is president, Truman told Donovan. But party affiliation “should make no difference in foreign affairs,” the president said. The country comes first.

  Donovan drove back to the Supreme Court with Jackson elated over their Oval Office meeting. But whatever goodwill the justice had built for him with Truman was being eaten away by more hostile news stories, which were painting for the new president a portrait of a rogue intelligence chief. Donovan had enjoyed cozy relations with many reporters, but now he found elements of the media a powerful enemy helping to nail the coffin of the OSS.

  Walter Trohan reported that day in the Washington Times-Herald that MacArthur had refused to allow Donovan’s men into his theater and followed up with a second story four days later that Nimitz had barred the OSS from his operation as well. The House Appropriations Committee, which was considering Donovan’s budget for the next year, decided to poll the Joint Chiefs and all the theater commanders on the value of the OSS. Donovan scrambled to contain the damage. He ordered his overseas stations to do all they could to massage the answers the theater commands cabled to Washington. In many cases the station chiefs were allowed to edit the responses before they were sent. MacArthur and Nimitz wrote back that they could not evaluate the OSS’s performance because neither had asked for its services. The Joint Chiefs delivered a qualified verdict, acknowledging both the agency’s successes and failures. But Eisenhower and the commanders for the China, India-Burma, and Mediterranean theaters turned in glowing reviews. The value of the OSS in Europe “has been so great that there should be no thought of its elimination as an activity,” Ike declared.

  Trohan wasn’t through. Citing unnamed congressional sources, he followed up with two more stories, which charged that the OSS was riddled with communists and “scarcely more than an arm of the British Intelligence Service.” Donovan managed to get some of his news friends, such as New York Times Washington bureau chief Arthur Krock, to defend him in print. But their voices were drowned out by bigger media stars.

  One of the most negative stories came from a leak in Donovan’s own organization while he was in Europe with Jackson. On May 25, Drew Pearson published an April cable Donovan had sent Russell Forgan, his co
unterintelligence officer in Paris, ordering him to keep three I. G. Farben executives the OSS had in custody isolated and to make sure the tons of files that had been seized, which incriminated the company in the Nazi war buildup, were shipped to Paris. Pearson suggested that Donovan and Forgan, a former Chicago banker, had a sinister motive: keeping the Farben executives away from Justice and Army investigators to protect the giant German chemical manufacturer for American business interests after the war. But Pearson was taking what he read in the one cable out of context. If the columnist had had a dozen other OSS messages in the case, he would have discovered that Donovan wanted the Farben execs sequestered so they could be interrogated properly for Jackson’s war crimes prosecution and their documents analyzed by a skilled OSS team that included representatives from his George Project, which had been carefully tracking Farben’s infiltration into Latin America. Donovan had asked Beetle Smith to hold off having untrained military investigators question the suspects. Angry Army intelligence officers in Washington, however, believed the OSS was pampering the Farben execs while aides for Biddle complained that Donovan should not be allowed to corner the interrogations.

  Donovan was furious that Pearson had gotten hold of even one of the secret cables. He had sent his message to Forgan encrypted in what he thought was an unbreakable code and he now feared Pearson had found a way to decipher it with the help of someone inside the OSS. He ordered another internal probe into what could be a serious security breach. His investigators eventually concluded that someone in the message center passed a copy of the cable to the columnist before it was encoded but they could not pinpoint the leaker. The affair, however, took another twist typical for Washington political intrigue. Ole Doering turned up what Donovan suspected might be a shady connection between Francis Biddle and the leak to Pearson. When Donovan returned from his Europe trip with Jackson, he placed an angry phone call to the attorney general. Biddle sheepishly admitted that Pearson had shown him the cable during a visit to his office.

  Did you tell Pentagon security officers that Pearson had the classified cable “or did you tell this office?” Donovan asked, his voice rising in indignation.

  “No. No reason why I should have,” Biddle answered just as indignantly.

  “Did Pearson tell you where he got it?” Donovan asked.

  “No, you’ll have to ask him,” Biddle answered smugly.

  Donovan fought to control the rage boiling in him. Biddle was the nation’s top law enforcement officer. He had been presented with evidence that a highly classified document had been stolen from the U.S. government and he sat on his hands. It further convinced Donovan that Biddle, Hoover, and enemies in the Pentagon were in cahoots with Trohan, Pearson, and other hostile journalists intent on destroying his agency.

  DONOVAN BOARDED his plane on June 22 for another trip to Europe with Jackson. It was almost as if he were trying to escape his enemies in Washington. The two men did their best to entertain Ambassador Gusev and other members of the Soviet prosecution team at a private dinner at Claridge’s. Donovan, who would have preferred to run the tribunal without them, stood up and gave a solemn speech extolling the American-Soviet alliance. Gusev and the other Russians toasted Truman, but they sipped little of the yellowish liquid the hotel claimed was vodka.

  A fortnight later Donovan and Jackson flew to the Bavarian city of Nuremberg, the cultural home for National Socialism, where Hitler staged his grandest propaganda rallies and the Reichstag convened to pass the horrid anti-Semitic laws. The Russians wanted the war crimes trials held in Berlin, which they controlled. Donovan pressed for Nuremberg, not just because of its symbolic importance to the Nazis, but also because it was in the American zone and had the spacious Palace of Justice, damaged but still intact, with a large prison near the courthouse. Jackson agreed. The two picked their way through piles of brick and debris over barely recognized roads and sidewalks near the medieval city center to reach the palace. Allied bombers had destroyed practically all of the city and the stink of corpses rotting under rubble still hung in the air. Inside the palace they took out tape measures to plot the dimensions of the courtrooms, checked out the badly damaged library, and inspected the jail. The trial rooms were small, but with repairs and a few walls knocked out one in the east wing would do. The jail, by Jackson’s count, seemed to have room for about a thousand prisoners.

  Casey and Forgan flew back with Donovan to Washington on July 13. Between rounds of gin rummy in the passenger cabin, they brainstormed operations in Asia where the costly war still raged. Donovan had ambitious plans for infiltrating agents into Japan’s home islands, but ultimately no operatives ended up reaching them so he had to settle for collecting intelligence through intermediaries, such as Vatican diplomats and visiting Thai students. He was just as enthusiastic about anti-Japanese propaganda. But because of cultural differences and a dearth of long-range radio transmitters those initiatives also ended up being small-time, such as fake surrender orders from their commanders dropped on Japanese troops in Burma or rumors spread that their quinine, which comes from the cinchona, was made from the worthless bark of other trees. Donovan did feel some sense of pride over his China operation, however. After interminable haggling with Chiang and his generals, his OSS officers had managed to mount credible guerrilla attacks that had inflicted more than six thousand Japanese casualties. Five thousand Chinese airborne commandos were being trained and hundreds of OSS operatives from Europe were being transferred to the mainland to expand that mission.

  After less than two weeks in Washington, Donovan boarded his plane with more than a dozen senior aides for one last tour of the Asian war. Even his son, David, finally got his wish to serve there. The Navy assigned him to the USS Avoyel, a fleet tug towing ships and clearing mines in the Pacific, where he became its executive officer and later its skipper. Bureaucratically, it was probably safe for Donovan to be overseas once more; the person who would decide the fate of his organization, Harry Truman, was out of town as well, preoccupied with Churchill and Stalin at the Potsdam conference in the Brandenburg state, where the three powers were deciding on punishment for occupied Germany and strategy for finally defeating Japan. On the way to Potsdam, Truman learned of the successful atomic bomb test in New Mexico and informed Stalin of the development when he arrived. Stalin did not appear surprised.

  DONOVAN WAS IN rain-soaked Kunming, arguing with Chiang over his generals who still did not cooperate with the OSS station, when news came of the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki August 6 and 9. His Far East officers immediately queried the few Japanese sources they had to gauge the government’s reaction to the devastation.

  Donovan took a side trip to the ancient city of X’ian north of Kunming where an OSS team was located at a remote U.S. Army base. He kept to a leisurely pace, rising early before the summer heat became oppressive and sitting on the porch at his quarters, where he read a prayer book, fingered a rosary, and meditated. During his morning meditation, OSS officers gathered around the steps to the porch and listened quietly as Donovan turned philosophical. He was sure the atomic bombs would soon end the fighting in Asia. (Japan formally surrendered on September 2.) Our possession of these terrifying weapons meant there would be a “peaceful interlude,” but sooner or later America would have a showdown with the communist world, he predicted, and it would be a nuclear showdown. It was only a matter of time before Russia acquired atomic arms. (Two months later, Donovan phoned Jackson and told him U.S. intelligence had “incontestable proof” the Soviets were in “complete possession of the secret of the atomic bomb,” which explains “their stiff and aloof position in international affairs.”) The OSS would be needed in Europe to spy on the Russians, Donovan believed, and in Asia to police the Japanese and monitor communist advances in China, Manchuria, and Korea. “You must understand,” he told his men on the porch, “America has won a war but not a peace.”

  WHEN DONOVAN RETURNED to Washington on August 14, he immediately launched an eleven
th-hour publicity campaign to save his spy organization. Wallace Deuel, an OSS propaganda adviser, had already left the agency to rejoin the Chicago Daily News, but Donovan enlisted him to write a series of articles in the paper touting OSS accomplishments. Donovan and Doering screened the pieces before Deuel turned them in to his editors. Fisher Howe, who had returned from overseas to be one of Doering’s aides, drafted an elaborate twenty-page plan to sell the media. But the OSS had no trained publicity staff. Donovan’s aides had always been leery of Pentagon press releases mentioning OSS operations and his agents in the field loathed seeing their names in print for fear it would compromise operations and get someone killed. Donovan, to a large degree, was the agency’s public affairs officer, and his dealings with reporters were almost always on background or off the record. Howe dreamed up the PR plan off the top of his head. Deuel, the only one in the group with journalistic experience, was skeptical it would work. Donovan, nevertheless, turned on the spigot. He had his aides declassify more than a hundred secret operations and released accounts of them to reporters—in many cases including their code names and the names of the agents who had performed heroically. British diplomats grew nervous about Donovan taking the wraps off clandestine operations. Truman, who read the flurry of puff pieces in the newspapers, knew what Donovan was up to and he didn’t like it.

  The press, however, continued sniping. Newsweek ran a snide item on the alleged wage scale for Donovan’s “cloak and dagger department.” An “Eavesdropper” was paid $1,550 a year, a “Rumormonger” received $1,770 annually, and a “Back Stabber” got $4,660, the magazine claimed.

  Smelling blood, the House Appropriations Committee slashed Donovan’s budget from $38 million to $20 million for the next year. Donovan considered himself lucky to get that much. But he pleaded in memos to both Smith and Truman that it was critical a central intelligence service like the one he proposed to Roosevelt remain in place for peacetime. Donovan told them he intended to resign after the OSS’s war assets had been liquidated to return to civilian life. (That was just a ploy on his part to keep from being a lightning rod as he maneuvered to put his central intelligence plan in place. Donovan wanted to run the postwar CIA.)