Gubbins also arranged for Donovan to meet the head of the SOE’s French Section, Maurice Buckmaster, who said that women had been his first choice to be trained as couriers and wireless operators. He invited Donovan to come with him on his weekly visit to Wanborough Manor, the section’s training school for agents.
Over lunch in the canteen he spoke to some of the other agents. Buckmaster translated his questions, explaining agents were required to speak only French. In between watching them mastering Morse code and learning how to code and decode messages, Donovan saw them learning in the manor workshop how to diagnose and repair faults in their wireless sets. Afterward he went to a classroom to hear a psychologist’s lecture on how to handle the stress of their work once they were in France.
On the drive back to London, Buckmaster said that female recruits were achieving excellent results not only in shooting and sabotage but also as potential clandestine radio operators. The next day Donovan flew back to Washington to begin the search for such women.
The pilots of RAF 138 Squadron sensed their time at Newmarket racecourse was coming to an end. There had been flights out over the Channel, flying at no more than fifty feet above the water before turning back and giving the correct Morse code signal that would allow them to reenter friendly airspace. By day there was firearms training at the shooting range and lectures on escape and evasion tactics should they be shot down on a mission.
At night they were awakened from their bunks, driven in a closed truck several miles away, and dropped after being told they would be hunted by the local and military police as escaped prisoners from a local army lockup. Their instructors warned they could expect to be roughly treated, a forerunner of what they would face if they crash-landed in occupied Europe.
One morning, returning from an exercise, the pilots found new faces in the officers’ mess with their aircraft parked on the airfield. The newcomers told them they were joining the squadron in time to go with them to their new base.
For the first time in weeks, William Donovan had taken off a Sunday afternoon on that December 7, 1941. Wrapped in an overcoat he had bought in Savile Row on his visit to London, he sat in the stands in New York’s Polo Grounds, one of fifty-five thousand fans who’d come to watch the National Football League matchup between the Giants and the Brooklyn Dodgers.
He had hardly settled in his seat before a voice came over the loudspeakers: “Attention please! Here is an urgent message. Will Colonel William J. Donovan call operator 19 in Washington immediately.”
Donovan left his seat and found a phone booth under the bleachers. In moments operator 19 connected him to his assistant, James Roosevelt. “Bill, the Japs have attacked Pearl Harbor. The President wants you back as soon as possible. I’ve booked you on the 5:15 flight out of La Guardia.”
Donovan ignored the reporters waiting at the terminal. He had asked James Roosevelt to call Eloise Page and have her drive his car to the airport to collect him so he could use its radio to communicate on the way to the office. In the meantime, playwright Robert Sherwood and his team in the COI’s Foreign Information Service, based on New York’s Madison Avenue, would prepare stories to distribute around the world about America’s response to the attack.
Page drove him at speed to headquarters on Navy Hill. He used the car radio to give orders. He told Sherwood to contact the radio networks and instruct them to prepare their anchormen to broadcast the stories crafted by Sherwood’s staff. Priority to the copy would be given to stations in Los Angeles and San Francisco to broadcast on their shortwave transmitters to Latin America and the Far East. By the time Donovan reached his office he was told that four thousand words of copy had been broadcast. Each story carried the same words that Donovan had provided: “What the Japanese have done doesn’t frighten but unifies the United States.”
Stephenson had called to say that Churchill had phoned FDR and told him, “We are all in the same boat now.” Donovan told Sherwood to use the words in the next stories, which were broadcast to Canada and Europe throughout the night.
As evening fell, he visited every office. He told staff the point of no return had been reached when the Rising Sun, Japan’s emblem, had arrived over Pearl Harbor earlier that Sunday and “by God had caught our planes on the ground, crippled our battleship, and killed Americans.” Donovan called it a day of infamy.
Radios in the building continued to report the mood in Washington. Cherry trees outside the Japanese embassy had been cut down by super patriots among a crowd watching smoke rising from the building’s chimney. The Japanese were burning diplomatic papers. Police cars were patrolling the streets, and officers were calling for calm.
Donovan drove to the White House. He found the president alone in his study behind his desk, its top scattered with cable messages from naval headquarters in Pearl Harbor. The empty chairs that cluttered the room were a reminder of the visitors who had come and gone. His voice thick with the start of a cold, Roosevelt asked Donovan if Hitler could have had prior knowledge of the attack. Donovan said he didn’t know but Hitler would almost certainly have been the first to be briefed by Tokyo after the raid.
Roosevelt said, “I’m glad you pushed so hard to have an intelligence agency.”
Donovan said he would like to rename the COI. He wanted it called the Office of Strategic Services, or OSS. Roosevelt nodded approval. If he was curious he did not show it. But it would be something to tell Churchill when he arrived in Washington.
While they sat there, Grace Tully, Roosevelt’s secretary, brought messages from the navy and Pearl Harbor to the study. Thumping his fist on the desktop at the latest news that 90 percent of the Pacific fleet had been lost, Roosevelt asked Donovan how the American public would react. Donovan was reassuring; Americans would be ready to go to war and not just talk about it. He suggested that the speech Roosevelt would make to Congress at noon the following day to declare war on Japan should start, “What they have done on this Sunday will live in infamy.” The president wrote down the words on a pad. Later, they would form one of the most powerful speeches of his presidency.
Returning to his office, Donovan worked until daylight, drinking coffee that Eloise Page regularly brought in. He requested reports from the Research and Analysis section on what foreign radio stations were saying about how vulnerable the United States was to another attack.
James Baxter, the head of R&A, produced several scenarios: The Japanese navy could send its aircraft carriers in pursuit of the remaining American Pacific fleet if it attempted to head back to the mainland. The Japanese could attack the Panama Canal. The attack on Pearl Harbor could “discourage the Russians from joining forces with us.”
On December 9, Stephenson alerted Donovan that Germany was about to declare war on the United States. Hours later the American embassies in Berlin and Rome were closed down. Two days later, in a joint statement, Hitler and Mussolini declared war against the United States.
With the Middle East trip still fresh in his mind, Donovan suggested that Roosevelt should contact Portugal’s ruler, António Salazar, and persuade him to accept a joint American and British force to protect the nine hundred miles of Azores coastline, which American convoys passed on their way to Britain. Roosevelt decided to put the idea on hold until Churchill arrived. Other proposals from Donovan were circulated to government departments and rejected.
The navy rejected a scheme that Japanese Americans could be selected by the OSS and trained at Camp X in Canada before being sent to the South Pacific to spy and wage guerrilla war against the Japanese. General Douglas MacArthur, no admirer of Donovan, bluntly told him he needed “broadcasts and leaflets to counter Tokyo broadcasts to the Philippines urging its soldiers to desert.”
The idea of using Japanese Americans continued to preoccupy Donovan. He sent a memo to Roosevelt that they did not pose a sabotage threat and to intern them, as some newspapers were demanding, would only make enemies of loyal citizens. He said he would like to recruit some to broadcast OSS
propaganda aimed at Japan and to decipher Japanese broadcasts. He had asked Sherwood to prepare a draft speech in which Roosevelt would stress the “government has faith in their loyalty and feels no enmity toward the Japanese people, but only for the clique of military leaders in Tokyo who had betrayed Japan.”
The draft remained in Donovan’s office. Roosevelt had gone ahead and ordered the internment of Japanese Americans.
On December 22, wearing a Royal Navy pea jacket and yachting cap, Winston Churchill and his advisors arrived in Washington. They included Averell Harriman, the US ambassador to Britain, Menzies, and Gubbins. Stephenson and Hoover, the FBI chief, had flown up from New York to join Donovan.
The second floor of the White House was code-named Arcadia and became the base for the British party. Churchill had the Rose Suite and the Lincoln Study, where he could confer with his staff. Its walls were covered with maps of Europe his staff had brought with them and which they updated morning, noon, and night with information from London. Menzies, Gubbins, and Stephenson had adjoining bedrooms. Donovan chaired his own meetings with Menzies, Gubbins, and Stephenson to discuss cooperation between the SOE and OSS.
Initially the White House meetings took place in an atmosphere of mutual wariness among the various groups, despite the magnificent rhetoric of Churchill at meals, which convinced Roosevelt that Britain would fight for her life and that a two-way exchange between both countries would help them to win the war.
It was left to Churchill to tell his own advisers, “We are here to bring our ally into the war with us. How wonderful it will be if Hitler can be made to fear when he is going to be next struck by such a powerful force.” He looked around the Lincoln Study, his voice firm. “We must cooperate with our hosts as they do with us.”
At their meeting next morning, Menzies told Hoover that the MI6 agent in Mexico City had learned that four German ships were preparing to outrun the Royal Navy blockade across the Gulf of Mexico; the US Navy had stopped the ships and escorted them back to harbor, where they would remain “until further notice.” The details were transmitted to the Admiralty’s Royal Navy intelligence department, NI, and encoded and sent to the patrolling warships in the gulf.
Meantime Hoover, after saying that “South America is FBI territory,” revealed that Italians in New York were in the process of smuggling $4 million in cash to finance attacks against British companies in South America. The FBI had stopped the transaction and confiscated the money. In answer to Donovan’s smiling question, Hoover said it was “now in the US Treasury and waiting to see if they will claim it. If they do I’ll tell you.”
It was the start of a growing relationship between the FBI and BCS as they exchanged intelligence about enemy activities in the United States, South America, and the Caribbean. The White House meetings concluded with Donovan and Gubbins finalizing the relationship between the OSS and SOE.
Donovan was frank. He wanted his agents trained to the level he had seen in England and Scotland at OSS training camps in Maryland and Virginia. America’s foreign-born and first-generation population—close to forty-five million—would be tapped for those who spoke the languages of occupied Europe, especially German. Donovan would also like the OSS to have its own airfield in Britain. Gubbins said if OSS pilots flew their own planes to England, he would make sure they had their own base. He would also arrange for SOE instructors to work in OSS training camps in the United States and would help to select OSS agents to be trained in Canada.
5
Enigma in the Suitcase
ON SUNDAY, JANUARY 11, 1942, when Churchill had flown back to England, Eleanor Grecay Weis, a trim, soft-spoken twenty-three-year-old who shared a Brooklyn apartment with her school friend, Charlotte Gristed, had spent her morning on her regular task of scanning the New York Times want ads for jobs. As usual there were plenty of vacancies, but she wanted something more exciting than working behind a counter at Macy’s or serving in a restaurant on Third Avenue, like Gristed. Her own present post as a receptionist for a Polish dentist had lost its appeal, the more so as he complained about New York and spoke of Warsaw as the center of Europe, and in between his patients, told her that he was going back there once he’d saved enough money. But the war had stopped that—just as it had ended her dream of going to France to see Paris and, afterward, London. Gristed had shaken her head and said it wouldn’t be safe now to go there because of the war. Besides, New York was getting more exciting with all the émigrés from Europe. Was that why there was no job that would excite her? Weis asked herself.
Earlier that morning she had listened to the radio reporting the departure of the British prime minister back to England and Donovan describing the visit to a radio reporter as “a curtain-raiser to history.” Her uncle had served with Donovan in the First World War, and had taken her to see The Fighting 69th, the movie about Donovan’s regiment in the trenches of Flanders. “A man’s man,” her uncle had said at the end of the movie.
The film had made a sufficient impact on Weis for her to listen whenever Donovan spoke on the radio or in a newsreel. His deep voice had never lost its Irish brogue. She wondered if what seemed a hint of sadness in his voice came from the death of his daughter, Patricia, in a road accident, driving the convertible he had given her to celebrate her college graduation in 1940. But on that Sunday morning in January, Donovan’s tone on the radio in answer to a reporter’s question was positive. “Smart people like Churchill can do the job of winning the war with our help.”
Encouraged by the words, Weis continued to work her way through the Times section advertising jobs. One had caught her eye, for a secretary with administrate skills, ready to work long hours. Applicants were to phone a telephone number and leave their name, details of present work, and a call-back number.
The advertisement had been placed by Allen Dulles, a Wall Street lawyer, the first of a number of attorneys and professional acquaintances Donovan had invited to “come aboard” the OSS.
Dulles was forty-nine years old, smartly dressed, a pipe smoker, and still in a marriage he knew was long over. The son of a Presbyterian clergyman and educated at Princeton, he had traveled around Europe, had served in the State Department, and was on the US delegation to the 1919 Versailles peace conference. Returning to New York, he had become a corporate and international lawyer with an office on Wall Street.
Like Donovan, he had developed connections with lawyers in Europe. They included several in Berlin opposed to the growing threat posed by Hitler’s National Socialism and who were founding members of what became known as the Rote Kapelle, the Red Orchestra, a network with links to Moscow.
Those connections attracted Donovan. He knew that Dulles had served in US embassies in Vienna, Paris, and Bern and had spent six months in the Legation in the Swiss city, which was not far from the border with Germany. Donovan was optimistic that Dulles’s contacts in Bern would still be there. Switzerland was a neutral country in a hostile desert, but Bern offered an ideal listening post to spy on Germany.
Donovan had appointed Dulles as the head of the OSS office in New York, located on the fifth floor at 630 Fifth Avenue, and told him he would once more be attached to the US Legation in Bern as the OSS station chief. He would have a $1 million initial budget in a bank account lodged in his name and would be free to choose his own staff and initiate his operation.
On that Sunday evening Dulles went to his office and listened to the recordings of the latest applicants for the advertisement in that morning’s Times. The only one that attracted him was Eleanor Grecay Weis.
The requisitioned Victoria Hotel where Selwyn Jepson interviewed women for the SOE was a dingy building on Northumberland Avenue in the heart of London. Its windows were boarded up and, apart from the sandbags around the entrance, there was no sign that the building had any connection with the war. The hotel bar and restaurant had been closed, and the lone man stationed at reception checked each woman’s name on a list. After noting the time she arrived, he would take h
er to the elevator and escort her to the second floor, where Jepson had his office in what had been a bedroom.
The bed had been removed and in its place were a desk and an armchair. Blackout curtains were kept drawn over the window. A ceiling light and a desk lamp lit the room. The walls were without any pictures, but a poster was hung behind the desk to catch the eye of anyone entering the room. It showed a woman seated on a couch in an evening dress. She looked alluring and desirable, as she listened closemouthed to three serviceman gathered around her. The poster was captioned CARELESS TALK COSTS LIVES.
Jepson had sent each woman a brief letter requesting them to come to the hotel to discuss “their role in the war.” His letters were written on War Office stationery and sent to their home addresses, which MI5 had provided along with the background checks he had required for potential agents.
A number of the women had come to their interviews dressed in clothes that were both fashionable and respectable. Others came in well-worn dresses he suspected had been in use for some time. Since the start of the war, new clothes were rationed and expensive. Some of the women wore the uniforms of the Auxiliary Territorial Service, ATS, or the Woman’s Auxiliary Air Force, WAAF.
Many were Anglo-French, with British fathers who had married French women after the First World War, and included Jews, Roman Catholics, Buddhists, Protestants, and Quakers. Their mixed parentage and a French upbringing had given them knowledge of French customs. The MI5 checks established that most of the women had come to England before the occupation of France. While some had been aware of the French Resistance, most had no hands-on knowledge of its activities.
Shadow Warriors of World War II Page 10
