General Donovan hastened to London. By the time he arrived a few days before Christmas, the reasons for the failure to detect German preparations for the attack were becoming clear. As the German forces retreated in Western Europe, the Wehrmacht turned increasingly to the use of landlines for communication; there were fewer radio transmissions subject to ULTRA coverage; a run of bad weather had severely impaired aerial reconnaissance; and the Allied commanders who were accustomed to the highest-level intelligence from London headquarters had grown complacent, and tended not to push tactical intelligence collection at the division and corps levels.
By the time I had arrived—by train from Scotland, where the naval plane had left me—General Donovan had named Casey chief of OSS/SI for Europe with carte blanche orders to penetrate Germany by any means. At the time, Casey had had a year’s experience in OSS Washington, and less than six months in London as Colonel Bruce’s special assistant. His new responsibilities paralleled those of the most senior and experienced British MI-6 German operations specialists and those of the German branch of SOE (Special Operations Executive), the sabotage and paramilitary element of British intelligence. On the assumption that these experienced senior officers might be more responsive to a young opposite number in mufti than to a two-stripe naval officer, Donovan arranged for Casey to be placed on inactive naval service and allowed to slip into civilian clothes. I was not expected to be dealing with any senior British officers, and was to remain in my Navy uniform throughout my tour in Europe.
Some OSS parachute operations were mounted directly from England, others from airfields in France. Airdrops into Germany were far more dangerous than those elsewhere on the Continent where some help from local resistance groups was available. There was no such support in the Third Reich, and OSS agents were on their own from the moment they were dropped. Only those with very recent experience within Germany had any chance of survival. These men—I knew of no women who were dropped into Germany—were not fearless, they were brave. They knew that the odds were heavily against them, and that capture meant death—probably torture and death. Among the German nationals, motives were mixed: many had been active in the German labor movement, others were simply opposed to Hitler and the Nazis. None of these agents were influenced by the prospect of any material reward, the standard $2400 death benefit notwithstanding.
A few days after my arrival, Casey assigned me to supervise the preparation and dispatch of an OSS-trained German agent that the British had cleared for a parachute mission into Germany. It was dark, and a light rain had begun to fall as we wedged ourselves into the staff car. My companion glanced anxiously at the windshield wipers. “At least the weather’s clear over the target area,” he muttered. “If it holds, the plane will leave.” The driver eased away from the curb to thread a passage through the blackout and away from London.
Hours earlier, the young German, whose name and pseudonym I’ve long forgotten, had gone through the final briefing and a last oral run-through of his cover story. Not that it could matter much. The forged documents would support the cover legend and satisfy a preliminary police or military police examination. Despite the care lavished on the documents and in piecing together the cover, it was obviously impossible to backstop any documents in local German records. Even a perfunctory counterintelligence probe meant death for the agent. As the war ground on, and German administration began to fall apart, the military police were too hard pressed to bother with details involved in an extended interrogation. If for any reason the agent were to be referred to the secret field police, the military component of the Gestapo would simply assume he was a deserter and shoot him out of hand. To discourage others, the uniformed body, with a scrawled placard proclaiming the offense, would be left hanging from a lamppost.
In the rigidly enforced blackout the masked headlights of our staff car shed just enough light to alert imperiled pedestrians. Because all road signs had been removed early in the war, experienced drivers had learned to navigate by a self-taught form of dead reckoning, disciplined by highly developed survival instincts. From the rear seat it was impossible to know exactly where we were, but we reached Harrington Field in two hours, exactly on schedule. As we passed the officers’ mess and reached a Nissen hut two hundred yards beyond, we could see the lonely black aircraft—as I recall it, a converted A-26 attack bomber.
The bleak staging area was quiet except for murmured comments in German as the webbed straps of the parachute were carefully adjusted. It may have been a myth, but we worked on the assumption that if the agent were apprehended and fortunate enough to be held for interrogation, it was important that there be no bruises about the shoulders or on the thighs that might indicate a parachute harness. The flight to the Ruhr area would be long and uncomfortable for the burdened young agent, but experience had shown that it was easier to adjust the chute on the ground rather than later when bouncing around in the blacked-out aircraft.
The young aircrew, whose lives were also on the line, ducked in and out of the staging area. Obviously preoccupied with the weather and flight plans, they barely glanced at their passenger. It took an extra measure of courage to volunteer to fly without fighter protection to a remote area which, unlike cities or industrial targets, would be difficult to find. Worse, the pilots were required to approach the drop zone at less than a very vulnerable thousand feet. In theory, agents were to jump at five hundred feet, a height which would best ensure that the drop area could be correctly identified, and which would get the agent on the ground quickly. “Fly low and slow” was an ironic bit of advice given tyro bomber pilots by their more seasoned comrades, but it was definitely not the recommended means of ensuring safe passage. It required iron self-discipline for the pilot and navigator, both anxious to scoot away, to be sure they had reached the target, and were low enough to signal the jump.
The bulky, one-piece coveralls zipped loosely over the well-worn, field gray Wehrmacht uniform, the padded parachute helmet, and heavy gauntlet gloves gave the impression that the agent was being fitted for a deep-sea dive rather than a parachute jump. Bits of equipment hung from the coveralls—a knife, flashlight, padded aviation goggles to protect the eyes if the landing was in a tree or brush, and an entrenching tool for digging the hole to bury the parachute. I wondered how much self-control it would take for the lone agent, who at best could only hope he had landed somewhere close to the chosen area, to dig a hole deep enough to bury the chute, the tangle of lines, and the coveralls. Then, in total darkness, he was to tarry long enough to camouflage the freshly dug dirt. Only then was he to leave the area with the heavy radio set—a death warrant—in a worn suitcase.
I knew that—briefings notwithstanding—my instinct would be to get far away from the landing site as soon as possible. I was in awe of the courageous agent, and I remain so.
After a handshake and final word with his case officer, the agent was guided to the plane. He turned, waved a token salute, and pulled himself up the narrow ladder into the belly of the aircraft. Six of us watched as the plane lurched across the field toward the takeoff area. No one mentioned it, but the knowledge that we would sit safely at the airfield while the flight crew and the young agent faced what could be the ultimate test kindled a long bout of intense reflection. The only consolation we had was that the agent had been given the best preparation we could contrive.
The aircraft was to maintain strict radio silence. It would be hours before it returned to base and could report that the drop had been made on target, and a great many more hours before the agent could set up his radio and signal a safe landing.
The odds were against the mission succeeding and the agent knew it. He had asked for and been issued a lethal tablet. Even in wartime, suicide devices are a snarled problem. The lethal OSS tablets were supplied only upon the request of the agent. From a security viewpoint, they were of some value. If the agent became convinced that he was about to be captured, he could of his own volition commit suicide and avoid the possibilit
y of betraying comrades under the pressure of vicious torture. But there were many negatives. Despite the best testing possible, the tablets did not always work, and a botched suicide attempt would leave the agent even less able to protect himself. Worse, experience had shown that in the extreme anxiety of a dangerous mission, agents were rarely in a position to make desperate decisions, and might needlessly take their lives.
It was in London that I first heard the expression “hard target,” a phrase which was to haunt me for thirty years. In time, I came to realize that the hard targets are the only objectives worth strategic intelligence attention. In the Europe of 1944, the hard targets were in Germany—Hitler, the High Command, the upper bracket of the Nazi Party, the foreign office, and the elite group of well-informed civilians who formed the Nazi establishment. By the time I retired, the hard targets included the USSR, the Soviet satellite countries, Communist China, North Korea, North Vietnam, Iraq, Iran, Syria, and the Near East terrorist groups. The less than strategic targets encompassed every potential flare-up anywhere on the globe that meant the President was to be closely informed.
OSS London was crowded with a remarkable congeries of men and women who were to make their mark in the postwar world. Under the command of Colonel David K.E. Bruce, later to be ambassador to France, Germany, and the Court of St. James, the London staff included Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., historian and presidential advisor; Milton Katz, of the Marshall Plan and Harvard Law School; Julia Child, who would forever change American cooking; Norman Pearson, professor of American literature at Yale; Richard Ellmann, scholar and biographer of Yeats, Joyce, and Wilde; and dozens of other wildly assorted characters. OSS may have been the only organization in the European theater of operations in which ranks were relatively jumbled. In some offices, enlisted personnel—usually in civilian clothes—functioned on an equal level with uniformed officers.
One of the lessons of our efforts to penetrate Germany that should have been more thoroughly ingested in the immediate postwar years was the difference between the operations Allen Dulles had created in Switzerland and which, to a lesser degree, OSS had mounted from neutral Sweden, and those General Donovan and Bill Casey pushed from our London headquarters.
From the beginning of his work in Switzerland, Dulles had focused on recruiting sources who had near-primary access to the most needed intelligence. This is the category of source that in the years that followed was to become known as “agents in place.” Dulles’s operations were greatly facilitated by his location in Switzerland, surrounded by Germany and the various Nazi-occupied or -dominated countries. The diplomatic, business, and other cross-border travel to and from Germany and the occupied areas was as restricted as possible by German security controls. There were still enough legal travelers to provide a few potential sources with access to a high level of strategic intelligence.
One of the great strengths of the Swiss station was Dulles’s range of contacts throughout Switzerland who were in a position to signal the presence of these travelers to the station. In some instances these contacts were able themselves to solicit the active cooperation of travelers, or to put a station officer or an intermediary in touch with the visitor. Many of Dulles’s collaborators were well placed and sufficiently well informed to elicit significant intelligence from visitors who had no intention of cooperating with the Allies and no idea that their remarks would go straight to Washington and London.
Neutral Sweden also offered access to Germany and the occupied areas in Scandinavia, and along the Baltic. Bruce Hopper, the first OSS officer, arrived in Stockholm in March 1942. He came from London, skirting enemy-occupied territory in a fast-flying RAF light bomber. By December that year, the station—three men strong—was established. Although the State Department had reluctantly agreed to accept the OSS representatives as members of the legation, the minister in charge was less than welcoming. Within days of his arrival, the chief of station was informed that if anything resembling espionage was undertaken, the minister would insist that the State Department recall the OSS representatives. No matter that the most devastating conflict in history was raging—and that Sweden, like Switzerland, offered a unique location from which to collect information on the Third Reich and some of the Nazi-occupied areas—espionage was too naughty an activity to be sheltered on American diplomatic premises. It is much to Hopper’s credit that within a year the OSS station had begun to function effectively.
In 1944 the Allied strategic bombing of German ball-bearing factories had cut production to the point that the Reich had to turn to Sweden for the vital supply. OSS agent reports on the tonnage of bearings and manufacturing equipment being shipped to Germany made it possible for the U.S. economic warfare authority to persuade Sweden to halt the shipments, which by then were accounting for a significant percentage of Germany’s need.
By 1945, the station, then thirty-five strong, had recruited businessmen who were making regular trips to Germany and Scandinavia, opened liaison with representatives and intelligence officers of some of the governments in exile from the occupied countries, and made arrangements for the debriefing of refugees from the Baltic areas. It was a strong performance, deserving more public credit than it has received.
The operations organized by Casey and staged by the OSS field units attached to the Seventh Army in southern France were short-term tactical missions. As Germany’s security forces disintegrated, these short-range operations—dubbed “tourist” missions, a euphemism if ever there was one—were able to report a minimum of tactical data of interest to the military. The agents we parachuted into Germany were brave men, dedicated patriots hoping for a new Germany and a better Austria.
By late August when Paris was liberated, the push was on for the various London-based headquarters to move forward, particularly toward the Paris area. OSS was no exception. My assignment to help organize the cadre of SI officers who would staff what had become known as the OSS German Mission was revived, and I was one of the early arrivals in Paris.
General Dwight Eisenhower had been in the Army long enough to know that if any units were allowed to establish rear area headquarters and support staffs in the Paris area, a significant portion of his forces would instantly find ironclad reasons to remain there. Despite the general’s prescience and strict orders, Paris and its environs were soon engulfed by Allied forces. OSS was no exception, and our offices swarmed with officers and men in transit. Some were anxious for new assignments, and ready for transfer to the Pacific theater. Others were in a less discernible rush, content to catch their breath in the city of light before getting on with the war.
OSS headquarters were established on the Champs-Elysées in comfortable premises which had hastily been abandoned by a Nazi security unit. My billet in the Parc Monceau hotel was redundant proof of the U.S. Navy’s reputation for taking care of its own. The hotel staff was not intact, but service had bounced back to a near-prewar standard. The various naval and military mess facilities remained under the thumb of the service cooks, and the hearty but tame GI rations soon began to appear in a new and welcome guise.
The most obvious traces of the German occupation had been erased, but Paris was still in some disarray. Black markets of every sort flourished. However happy the French were to have been freed of German occupation, and despite occasional flashes of exuberant black market chic, there remained a strong underlying sense of fatigue. The very visible and huge Allied military and civilian presence could only have been an added irritant as the Parisians struggled to reestablish their lives.
On May 8, the day the war ended in Europe, Colonel Russell Forgan, who had replaced David Bruce as OSS chief in London, and Allen Dulles, still slated to become OSS chief in Germany, had an appointment with General Eisenhower at SHAEF headquarters in Rheims. Because I had many questions for Dulles, who was still based in Switzerland, I was included in the ride from Paris.
It was immediately apparent that General Eisenhower’s VE Day commitments made it impossible for hi
m to keep his appointment. I was left in an outer office to muse on the defeat of the Wehrmacht, while my companions conducted their business with General Walter Bedell Smith, General Eisenhower’s chief of staff. When they emerged from the meeting, I was introduced to General Smith. It was an odd quirk of history that three men of such wildly differing background, experience, and rank, but each destined eventually to become director of Central Intelligence in Washington, stood chatting in Rheims at the moment the Third Reich admitted total defeat.
In Paris, the roster for the move toward Germany took shape and an advance party pulled stakes to an interim location in Luxembourg, a picturesque medieval city. My hotel room window opened onto a view along a pastoral valley, with a single rail line etched along the horizon. In the distance, a lonely engine puffed toward Belgium and the remains of Hitler’s Thousand Year Reich.
From Luxembourg we moved into Germany, to take up offices at the Henkel champagne factory on the outskirts of Wiesbaden in Hesse.
Chapter 5
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WIEDER BERLIN
Whether the assignment of the OSS contingent to the Henkel champagne works in Biebrich on the outskirts of Wiesbaden was a sly bit of military humor—the OSS soubriquet Oh So Social had percolated from Washington—or simply the luck of the draw didn’t much matter in 1945. The U.S. Army had taken over large chunks of the Hessen area, and because the Henkel premises were undamaged and the spa city of Wiesbaden had largely escaped destruction, we felt well served. The administrative offices of the champagne works served as headquarters, and a section of the wine-producing space was converted into a dining hall and kitchen.
The Henkel champagne works were closely associated with Joachim von Ribbentrop, who for seven years served as Nazi foreign minister. Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi propaganda chief and one of the brighter evil lights of Hitler’s inner circle, described his colleague as having “bought his name … married his money, and … swindled his way into office.” The Ribbentrop family tree had two branches, only one of which could sport the ennobling “von.” Alas, poor Joachim was one of the plain vanilla Ribbentrops, a condition he remedied by bribing a von Ribbentrop aunt to adopt him. The rechristened Joachim von Ribbentrop acquired his money by marrying the daughter of the wealthy Henkel family. Although Hitler once described his foreign minister as a genius and compared him with Bismarck, von Ribbentrop’s only diplomatic qualifications were a rich wife, fluent English acquired while peddling wine and spirits in Canada, and an affected posture of a deep thinker and man of the world. His diplomatic peers considered him an arrogant, bombastic fool—as ambassador to the Court of St. James, von Ribbentrop greeted George V with a Nazi salute. Goebbels and his wife poisoned their six young children before committing suicide in Hitler’s bunker; von Ribbentrop was asleep in bed when arrested. By the time OSS occupied the champagne works, the bewildered but unrepentant former foreign minister was in a Nuremberg cell, awaiting trial and eventual hanging.
A Look Over My Shoulder Page 7