Oppose Any Foe

by Mark Moyar

  The son of poor Irish immigrants, Donovan was raised in the waterfront district of Buffalo, New York, where the lowest of the city’s lower classes resided. James Quigley, a Catholic bishop who saw promise in the boy, used funds from the Buffalo diocese to pay for Donovan to attend a Catholic high school and Niagara University. Donovan enrolled at Niagara with aspirations to enter the priesthood, but both he and the faculty soon decided that he was not a good fit for the clergy. In 1903, he transferred to Columbia College to complete his undergraduate degree before entering law school.

  For Donovan, admission to Columbia Law School was his golden ticket out of poverty and into the upper middle class. Donovan worked hard during law school, though a substantial amount of his labor went into part-time jobs that helped finance his education. He did not perform particularly well on written assignments and examinations, and hence his grades were undistinguished, but he excelled in oratory and debate. One of his law professors, the renowned Jackson E. Reynolds, recalled that whereas Roosevelt was “not much of a student and nothing of a lawyer afterward,” Donovan was “a good student, industrious, quick and alert, his work practical, adaptable to any problem.”

  Donovan had a gift for social interaction, and in time would show that he could endear himself to the world’s wealthiest with the ease of a Viennese grand duke. At Columbia, however, he did not mingle with Roosevelt or the other blue bloods. Roosevelt, as the son of a prominent Episcopalian family and a product of Groton, socialized with the children of railroad tycoons, not those of poor Irish Catholics. “I would meet Franklin Roosevelt walking across the campus almost every day, but he never once even noticed,” Donovan remembered years later. “His eyes were always fixed on some other object.”

  The paths of Donovan and Roosevelt diverged after Columbia. Following a brief foray into the world of law, Roosevelt entered politics. In 1913, when he was a mere thirty-one years of age, Roosevelt received an appointment from President Woodrow Wilson to the position of assistant secretary of the Navy. Donovan went to work for the Buffalo law firm of Love & Keating, then formed his own practice two years later. During World War I, Donovan went off to Europe to lead troops of the 69th “Fighting Irish” Regiment, an outfit of 3,000 Irishmen from New York City. He found that he enjoyed combat, informing his wife that it thrilled him like “a youngster at Halloween.” Displaying exceptional courage and poise under fire, Donovan earned the nation’s highest military awards, the Congressional Medal of Honor and the Distinguished Service Cross.

  The trajectories of the two men crossed back over in 1932, when Franklin Roosevelt ran his first presidential campaign. Roosevelt’s decision to vacate the office of Governor of New York, to which he had been elected four years earlier, convinced Donovan to make a run for the governorship. Capitalizing on his war record and his more recent triumphs as assistant attorney general of the United States, Donovan secured the nomination of the Republican Party. In the swirl of the gubernatorial campaign, the conservative Donovan denounced his Democratic opponent as a “Siamese twin” of the liberal Roosevelt, intent on continuing Roosevelt’s big-government policies. Donovan also inserted his mouth into the presidential contest, publicly denouncing Roosevelt as a “faker” whose claims to represent the lower classes belied the fact that he was a “new kind of red, white and blue dictator” with “delusions of grandeur.”

  Roosevelt parried the insults with words of conciliation. In one speech, he asserted that he had been friends with Donovan in law school. Donovan, sensing that Roosevelt’s fronds of grace were but cover for poisonous berries of condescension and self-promotion, retorted, “I was a youngster earning my way through law school, and he never knew me.”

  That November, Roosevelt won the presidency by eighteen percentage points, and Donovan lost the race for the New York governorship by eighteen percentage points. Donovan went back to the private sector, but he maintained a foot in politics, with a particular eye toward foreign affairs. Traveling abroad with the frequency of a diplomat and the fervor of a pilgrim, Donovan used his war record and ingratiating charm to gain audiences with foreign leaders. In the late 1930s, as the Axis powers built their armies and swallowed territories, he demanded preparedness for looming conflict. “In an age of bullies,” he pronounced in November 1939, “we cannot afford to be a sissy.”

  Donovan’s support for the cause of Britain and France in their war with Nazi Germany was to bring him back into Roosevelt’s orbit. Eager for Republican allies in galvanizing the nation against the Axis, and willing to overlook Donovan’s prior affronts, Roosevelt sent Donovan on a secret mission to London in the summer of 1940. He asked Donovan to determine how, if at all, the United States could help the British stay afloat in the aftermath of Germany’s crushing conquest of France. British officials, desperate to show that their country could keep fighting the Germans with American help, gave Donovan a reception fit for a chief of state. He received audiences with Prime Minister Winston Churchill, King George V, and all the leading military and intelligence figures. Legions of British experts briefed Donovan on British industrial production, ship and aircraft design, food supplies, and anything else that might make a favorable impression on the American.

  Upon his return to the United States, Donovan delivered his findings to Roosevelt during an overnight ride on the eight-car presidential train and a cruise aboard the presidential yacht Potomac. The British, Donovan reported, could repulse a German invasion, but to do so they would need a massive infusion of US military aid. The items most desperately needed were destroyers, bombers, and the newly developed Sperry telescopic bombsights. Energetically delivered and rich in detail, Donovan’s findings revitalized Roosevelt’s resolve to support the beleaguered island kingdom.

  Donovan then took his hopeful message to the rest of the country, which at the time was crawling with doubts about supporting a British empire that seemed destined to fall to the Nazi juggernaut. Donovan did Roosevelt, and the country, a great favor by dissipating popular gloom and building support for aid to Britain. Columnist Walter Lippmann observed that Donovan’s trip report “almost single-handedly overcame the unmitigated defeatism which was paralyzing Washington.”

  In the coming months, Donovan further developed his relationship with top British intelligence officials, who were keen to cultivate this curiously Anglophilic Irish-American and obtain his assistance in convincing Roosevelt to establish a central intelligence service. In the spring of 1941, Donovan and the British jointly advised Roosevelt to create a new agency that would generate intelligence, wage psychological warfare, and employ commandos in raids and guerrilla operations. Donovan recommended modeling the intelligence component on the British MI-6, which had been in the espionage business since the sixteenth century, and the special operations component on the British Special Operations Executive, which Churchill had formed in July 1940 to foment resistance activities in Axis-held territories.

  Donovan’s proposal encountered stiff opposition from a host of Washington bureaucrats, who in the main were worried that the new organization would intrude upon their organizational turf. Roosevelt, however, was receptive. Since his days as assistant secretary of the Navy, Roosevelt had been infatuated with espionage, absorbing spy novels and demonstrating a schoolboy’s love for fantastic chicanery. During World War I, he had ordered a series of investigations into alleged German conniving inside the United States, to include a scheme by German Americans to buy an aircraft in New Hampshire and bomb the Portsmouth Navy Yard. After claiming to have uncovered several improbable German plans to assassinate him, he had carried a revolver to and from work.

  Roosevelt was taken in by Donovan’s limitless confidence in unorthodox methods of warfare and by the effervescent ideas that seemed to spring eternal from Donovan’s head. The president reveled in his chats with Donovan, finding them a delightful contrast to his interactions with other government officials, most of whom bored him terribly. Donovan, for his part, was amiable enough when speaking with th
e president, though he was distinctly less enthused by his conversation partner. To one friend, Donovan confided that Roosevelt was “a conceited man whose moods resembled those of a young girl: they were liable to sudden changes.”

  In July, the president signed off on the centralized intelligence service conceived by Donovan, and he made Donovan its first director, with the privilege of reporting directly to the commander in chief. Dubbed the Coordinator of Information, Donovan received his own secret funding account. Taking advantage of this slush fund and an exemption from civil service salary caps, Donovan plunged into the task of recruitment in his usual manner, with a terrier’s verve and a bulldog’s tenacity.

  Few Americans had experience in espionage, so Donovan sought out talented individuals who could be sculpted into intelligence specialists. One veteran of the organization recounted that Donovan “concentrated on recruiting talent wherever he could find it—in universities, businesses, law firms, in the armed services, at Georgetown cocktail parties, in fact, anywhere he happened to meet or hear about bright and eager men and women who wanted to help.” With promises of indispensable secret missions, offers of high salaries, and solemn utterances of “I’m counting on you,” Donovan drew a startling array of high flyers into his new organization. Four of his junior recruits were to become directors of America’s Central Intelligence Agency—Allen Dulles, Richard Helms, William Colby, and William Casey. Even more impressive was Donovan’s success in recruiting people who had already risen to greatness in other pursuits, such as movie director John Ford, poet Archibald MacLeish, Rhode Island governor William H. Vanderbilt III, Harvard historian William Langer, and travel writer Eugene Fodor.

  Acquiring talent and setting up an organization on the scale that Donovan envisioned would take close to one year. At the time of the Pearl Harbor attack, the Coordinator of Information had yet to coordinate anything, let alone conduct operations or generate intelligence products. During the organization’s formative period, Donovan placated Roosevelt’s craving for skullduggery by concocting amazing plots for undoing the Axis powers, which he presented to the president with the aplomb of a jeweler bringing out his finest diamonds from the safe. Among the most imaginative was the slipping of female hormones into Hitler’s carrots and beets to cause his mustache to fall out and his voice to rise to a soprano pitch. Donovan’s contrivances for countering enemy propaganda included inundating German territory with leaflets containing, in his description, “pictures of succulent appetizing dishes that would make a hungry person go almost mad with longing.”

  Roosevelt egged Donovan on with his unveiled delight and his own outlandish suggestions. At one point, he asked Donovan to look into air-dropping bats over the Japanese homeland for the purpose of “frightening, demoralizing and exciting the prejudices” of the Japanese people, who reportedly abhorred bats. Donovan convinced the curator of the mammalian division of the American Museum of Natural History to help organize experiments in which transport aircraft released bats at high altitude. The project had to be abandoned after the bats repeatedly froze to death.

  During Donovan’s first year as intelligence chief, he herded a wide assortment of activities into his organizational corral—espionage, intelligence analysis, research, special operations, and psychological operations, to name the most important. In the stampede of bureaucratic expansion, Donovan and his lieutenants often paid scant heed to the bureaucratic toes they trampled. Donovan had his operatives pose as military attachés overseas without obtaining the consent of the military. His propaganda division espoused US foreign policies at variance with the State Department’s official line. A bitter rivalry emerged between Donovan and Federal Bureau of Investigation director J. Edgar Hoover after both tried to burglarize the Spanish embassy at the same time. In April 1942, Assistant Secretary of State Breckenridge Long observed that Donovan “has been a thorn in the side of a number of the regular agencies of the government for some time.… He is into everybody’s business—knows no bounds of jurisdiction—tries to fill the shoes of each agency charged with responsibility for a war activity.”

  The most problematic of Donovan’s rivals was the War Department, the leadership of which had fought in vain against the creation of his organization. Donovan’s initial attempts to form special operations forces fell victim to the bureaucratic gatekeeping of the head of military intelligence, Major General George V. Strong, known as “George the Fifth” for his haughty demeanor. Strong refused to give Donovan access to the military’s manpower pools, which were teeming with men whose prior training could allow them to become commandos in relatively short order.

  The military’s stinginess nearly starved Donovan’s organization to death in the spring of 1942. Recognizing the danger, Donovan executed a cunning change of course, employing the full measure of his persuasive powers to reach the intended destination. Cozying up to generals and admirals who had tried to stifle the infant organization, Donovan lobbied with them to move him and his staff under the umbrella of the War Department, which would gain him access to military resources and shield him from the tentacles of jealous civilian agencies. He persuaded the military leaders to go along with this plan by explaining that they could prevent the sullying of the hands of their military personnel by leaving certain messy jobs in the hands of Donovan’s civilian operatives. On June 13, 1942, Roosevelt signed an order redesignating Donovan’s organization the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) under the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Army Chief of Staff George Marshall then granted the OSS permission to create guerrilla and commando forces using US military personnel.

  DONOVAN’S FIRST SIGNIFICANT success in special operations would come in Asia. He began his Asian ventures by entreating the principal US commanders in the Pacific, General Douglas MacArthur and Admiral Chester Nimitz, to permit cloak-and-dagger activities in the Pacific islands. Both men refused. He next turned to General Joseph Stilwell, who as commander of the China-Burma-India Theater was a pauper in comparison with the other Pacific Theater commanders, desperately short on US personnel and other resources. Given his dearth of manpower, Stilwell was willing to entertain any proposals that put more Americans under his command.

  In April 1942, Stilwell accepted an offer from Donovan to create a new special operations unit for service in the China-Burma-India Theater. The unit was to be called Detachment 1. Then, however, someone pointed out that this name would disclose to enemies and allies alike the extremely embarrassing fact that the Americans had only one unit. The unit was hence renamed Detachment 101.

  Stilwell, in one of his many questionable decisions as theater commander, handpicked Carl Eifler to command Detachment 101. No one who met Eifler, it was said, would ever forget him. His appearance was often likened to that of a mastodon. In comportment, he demonstrated certain beast-like tendencies, though he also manifested a surprising degree of intelligence. Lieutenant Commander James C. Luce, a medical officer assigned to Detachment 101, described Eifler as “a tremendous man with a florid countenance and a voice that would dwarf a circus barker into insignificance. I never heard him talk in any other than maximum volume.” Stilwell, having commanded Eifler’s reserve unit during the 1930s, knew all of the man’s idiosyncrasies, and subsequent events would suggest that Stilwell chose Eifler precisely because he wanted someone who would not inscribe the new unit into the annals of military glory.

  Donovan authorized Eifler to select whomever he desired for the new unit, up to one hundred men in total. Seeking individuals with a multitude of skills and attributes that might be of use in special operations against the Japanese, Eifler went in search of investigators, electrical engineers, chemists, finance officers, radio technicians, demolition experts, locksmiths, railroad engineers, mechanics, and photographers. “The word was out now,” Eifler later wrote, “that a strange new outfit was looking for some talented and unusual men.”

  When interested individuals showed up for interviews, Eifler opened by asking them to punch him in the stomach as har
d as they could. Then he took a dagger and plunged it several inches into his desk. His displays were enough to convince some men that they had found just the right unit, and others that they had best put maximum distance between themselves and Detachment 101. Ray Peers, who later commanded Detachment 101 and eventually attained international acclaim for his investigation into the My Lai Massacre during the Vietnam War, counted himself among those initially put off by Eifler’s bravado and theatrics. He agreed nevertheless to join the unit after Donovan gave him a much more sober and sophisticated explanation of the unit’s purpose.

  Following several months of training in the United States, Detachment 101 headed to the extreme eastern reaches of India, where the British had retreated in May 1942 after the Japanese overran most of Burma. Eifler and his men had not been there long when they ran afoul of regular US Army units stationed in the vicinity. Resenting the detachment’s unorthodox mission and chain of command, regular officers believed that the unit ought to be stuffed into the box of Army conformity, complying with standard Army tactics and operating under a regular Army headquarters. Several Army organizations attempted to take control of the unit’s personnel, but Eifler and his superiors were able to fend them off.

  In September 1942, Eifler reported that his men were ready for duty. Stilwell directed him to commence sabotage operations against the Japanese in Burma, as an opening gambit in Stilwell’s long-term plan to reopen the Burma Road, a critical supply artery into China. “You have ninety days for me to hear booms from the jungle,” Stilwell informed Eifler. Peers considered Stilwell’s directive to be “utterly fantastic,” for “we had no trainees, no radios, it was over three hundred miles away through some of the world’s worst jungles, and there were less than three months to do it in.” Eifler suspected that Stilwell had given him a mission that he thought stood no chance of success, because of a conventional officer’s doubts about the effectiveness and legality of irregular units. In a message to OSS headquarters, Eifler alleged that Stillwell would relish his failure, because it “will be the end of operations and the verification of his belief.”