by Sam Kean
When World War II rolled around, Donovan was working in a New York law firm. He happened to have attended law school at Columbia with Franklin Roosevelt, and Roosevelt sent his old chum to England in July 1940 to provide a more accurate picture of events there than the defeatist Joseph Kennedy Sr. could. (Kennedy took this as a slap in the face, exactly as FDR intended.) Although Donovan agreed that things were grim, he emphasized the grit of the British people and singled out Winston Churchill—who wasn’t even prime minster yet—as a stupendous leader. The assessment bucked up FDR’s spirits and helped forge the Churchill-Roosevelt alliance that would ultimately help defeat Hitler.
Donovan parlayed his field trip to England into a job as Roosevelt’s coordinator of intelligence, and from there he founded OSS and became its chief. But while the role made sense on paper—Donovan clearly had the vision and drive to see OSS succeed—Wild Bill also lacked pretty much every other skill necessary to run a government agency. Even those who adored him admitted that he had “abysmal” if not “atrocious” administrative skills, and he simply didn’t have the patience or fortitude to manage people. As a result OSS became one of the most poorly run agencies in American history—the bureaucratic equivalent of Prohibition. Employees used to laugh over a line from Macbeth that perfectly summed up the enterprise: “Confusion now has made his masterpiece.”
Nowhere were Donovan’s flaws more evident than in his hiring practices. Needing to throw together an agency quickly, he turned to his circle of friends in New York and hired bluebloods by the dozen: the OSS roster was lousy with Mellons, Du Ponts, Morgans, and Vanderbilts. Columnists joked that the agency’s initials actually stood for “Oh So Social.” In Donovan’s defense, hiring aristocrats did make sense on some level: they usually spoke several languages and knew Europe well. But holidays on the Riviera were a far cry from war. As one reporter noted, “Knowing how to speak French in a tux didn’t necessarily prepare recruits for parachuting into enemy territory or blowing up bridges.” More than a few heirs and heiresses suffered “dramatic mental crackups” in the field.
Even more than aristocrats, however, Donovan loved misfits, and he staffed OSS with a bizarre array of talent. There were mafia contract killers and theology professors. There were bartenders, anthropologists, and pro wrestlers. There were orthodontists, ornithologists, and felons on leave from federal penitentiaries. Marlene Dietrich, Julia Child, John Steinbeck, John Wayne, Leo Tolstoy’s grandson, and a Ringling circus heir all pitched in as well. Observers sometimes referred to OSS as “St. Elizabeths,” after the well-known Washington lunatic asylum, and they weren’t just saying that. One top official there admitted that “OSS may indeed have employed quite a few psychopathic characters.” Donovan once said, “I’d put Stalin on the OSS payroll if I thought it would help defeat Hitler.” No one knew whether he was kidding.
To be fair, Donovan did hire some brilliant misfits as well, including chief scientist Stanley Lovell. When Donovan first interviewed Lovell, he asked him to become the OSS equivalent of Dr. Moriarty, the nemesis of Sherlock Holmes. It’s more accurate to think of Lovell as Q from the James Bond franchise: his job basically consisted of puttering around in a lab and thinking up cool spy shit. To take a few examples, he and his labmates developed bombs that looked like mollusks to attach to ships. They crafted shoes and buttons and batteries with secret cavities to conceal documents. They invented pencils and cigarettes that shot bullets. They devised an explosive powder called Aunt Jemima that had the consistency of flour and that could be mixed with water and even baked into biscuits and nibbled on without any danger; only when ignited with a fuse did Aunt Jemima detonate. Like overgrown toddlers, Lovell’s team also developed several feces-based weapons. One, called caccolube, destroyed car engines far more thoroughly than sugar or sand when dumped into gas tanks. Another weapon involved creating artificial goat turds to bombard North Africa with, in the hope of attracting flies that spread diseases. (They called it Project Capricious.) Yet another project required synthesizing what was essentially eau de diarrhea, a compound that, as Lovell said, “duplicated the revolting odor of a very loose bowel movement.” They then hired small children to dart out and squirt it onto the pants of Japanese officers in occupied China. Lovell dubbed it the “Who, Me?” bomb.
And those weren’t even the crazy ideas. After hearing that Hitler and Mussolini would be holding a summit at the Brenner Pass between Austria and Italy, Lovell devised a scheme to dump a vial of caustic liquid into a vase of flowers in the conference room. Within twenty minutes this volatile liquid would evaporate, turning into mustard gas and frying the corneas of everyone present. To really add some punch, Lovell suggested contacting the pope ahead of time and having him prophesy that God would strike the fascists blind for violating the Ten Commandments. When the mustard gas fulfilled this “prediction,” the citizens of Germany and Italy would surely revolt, he argued, and take down the fascists from within. (Alas, the summit location was changed at the last second, and the plan never went into effect.) Lovell also developed what he called the “glandular approach” to winning the war. Drawing on some dubious Freudian theory, Lovell declared that Hitler straddled the “male/female gender line” and therefore might easily be pushed toward one sex or the other. Accordingly, Lovell isolated several feminine hormones to inject into beets and carrots in Hitler’s personal vegetable garden. He hoped that Hitler’s breasts would swell, that his mustache would fall out, that his voice would rise to a humiliating soprano register. The plan got far enough for Lovell to bribe one of Hitler’s gardeners, but ultimately nothing came of it. As Lovell later admitted, “I can only assume that the gardener took our money and threw the syringes and medications into the nearest thicket.”
The stories go on and on. But the craziest, nuttiest, most unbelievable thing about OSS was this: that often as not, its schemes worked. Whatever his faults as an administrator, Wild Bill Donovan possessed a rare combination of physical courage and mental daring. As film director John Ford—another OSS recruit—once said, “Bill Donovan… thought nothing of parachuting into France, blowing up a bridge, pissing in Luftwaffe gas tanks, then dancing on the roof of the St. Regis Hotel with a German spy.” A man like that couldn’t help but inspire people. And for every twenty of Lovell’s cockamamie ideas, one or two worked brilliantly, seriously disrupting Axis missions. In fact, given the chaos of the world then, perhaps only something as haphazard as OSS could have succeeded. The agency ran a dizzying array of covert operations all over the world, gathering data on everything from troop movements to nuclear bombs. It also made brilliant use of several eccentrics who otherwise might not have contributed to the war effort, including catcher Moe Berg.
CHAPTER 20
Baja Days
Like Moe Berg, Boris Pash had Latin American sports on his mind in the summer of 1942. But while Berg’s interest in them was wholesome and innocent, Pash was playing a wily game of espionage.
In 1940 Coach Pash had quit Hollywood High School and moved to San Francisco to help run the U.S. army’s intelligence division there. Although Major Pash’s jurisdiction was massive—the seven westernmost U.S. states, plus the Alaska territory—the assignment was a fairly sleepy one until the attack on Pearl Harbor. After that, the region remained on high alert for several months, and for good reason. Most people don’t realize it today, but Japan actually attacked U.S. territory a second time shortly after Pearl Harbor, on February 23, 1942, when a submarine surfaced near Santa Barbara, California, and shelled an oil refinery. The assault did little damage, and no one died. But for a country still reeling from Pearl Harbor, the incident looked dire. Japan could seemingly strike from the air or sea at any moment.
Given his interactions with Japanese families at Hollywood High—not to mention his familiarity with the Japanese military after it began drafting his ballplayers—Pash was assigned the task of hunting for Japanese insurgents along the Baja peninsula of western Mexico. The military especially feared a surpris
e attack on the naval yards in San Diego, just north of Baja. Now, hunting for Japanese insurgents in Mexico might sound daft, but more than 3,600 Japanese people lived on Baja in the early 1940s, descendants of farmworkers who’d migrated from Japan for jobs in the cotton industry there. In fact, the Mexican government had already rounded most of them up in January 1942 and shipped them off to Mexico City and Guadalajara, inland sites where people of supposedly dubious loyalty could do less damage. (Similarly, the Canadian government evicted 2,500 Japanese people from Vancouver, and the Roosevelt administration relocated and interned 110,000 over the course of the war.) Despite the relocations, Pash’s office continued to worry about subversive activity in Baja. So in the summer of 1942 he deployed a half dozen agents to the area, instructing them to scour the peninsula “by auto, burro, horse, boat, and on foot.”
Every so often the agents—who went by code names like “Z” and “Brush” and “Strong-Arm”—mailed off reports on their findings. They usually addressed them to “Dr. Bernard T. Norman,” an alias Pash had cooked up, and at first glance the reports seem laughably incompetent. The most prolific letter writer, “Carlos,” kept getting stranded in small towns in Baja without transport out; in one case he tried buying passage on a ship hauling dynamite, but the captain rebuffed him, forcing him to waste three weeks there doing nothing. Whenever Carlos did wash up somewhere new, instead of scouting around for subversives he’d spend his days fishing or hunting on horseback in the countryside. He’d also wander down to the local ball diamond to catch a few innings. Carlos in fact seemed obsessed with baseball: in every single village he’d count how many ballplayers and ball fields and baseball gloves there were; he even tallied umpires. We know all this because he vomited every last detail of his “findings” onto Pash, blathering on and on about the baseball-playing habits of Baja Mexicans. Today these letters seem both monotonous and exasperating, which is quite a literary feat.
And that’s exactly what Pash intended. The mail service in Baja then was spotty and unsecured, and anyone snooping through the letters would have found them vacuous. But among Pash’s personal papers, there’s a decipherment key that makes sense of everything—for the letters were written in code. In prattling on about the size and location of “baseball diamonds,” Carlos was really providing intel on airplane runways. “Gloves” were planes, “bats and balls” were gasoline depots, and “umpires” were potential saboteurs. Other code words (e.g., “handball courts”) referred to submarine docks or caches of oil and cement. Similarly, the fishing and hunting trips were perfect opportunities to scout out beaches and other areas where enemy troops could invade or hide. All the mindless blather had a serious purpose.
To be honest, this surveillance didn’t amount to much. All the “baseball diamonds” and “bats and balls” in Baja were for civilian use, and despite the persistent rumors of Japanese subs surfacing off Mexico, no U.S. agent ever saw one. Indeed, there were probably more U.S. spies hunting Japanese subversives in Baja than there were actual Japanese subversives. (One agent, whose job entailed stopping local tuna boats and interrogating the crews, was chagrined to discover that the captains of two of them were also American military personnel working undercover.) What’s more, some of Pash’s sources of information seemed less than reliable—lazy, indiscreet con men who were taking money from both sides and were more intent on settling personal scores than providing good intelligence: they’d snitch on each other for visiting “cat houses” while their wives were away or for smuggling booze across the U.S. border.
Still, if the Baja campaign didn’t exactly win the war, it did change the direction of Boris Pash’s life. He loved trading in secrets and delighted in outwitting people with codes and other stratagems: in addition to managing agents, he reportedly experimented with disguises during this period, dressing up in wigs and employing “voice-altering devices” to conceal his identity. Although a simple soldier and teacher before the war, intelligence work enthralled him, and he wanted more. Luckily for him, a new scientific venture needed a man with his exact skills. It was called the Manhattan Project.
Although founded before Pearl Harbor, the Manhattan Project had drifted along for months without much energy or purpose—little more than a series of meetings and studies by government officials, the main outcome of which was to suggest further meetings and further studies, ad infinitum. This lack of urgency infuriated nuclear physicists, especially the refugees from Hitler’s Europe, who knew that Germany had been working on fission for nearly three years by then.
This lethargy ended the day General Leslie Groves took command of the project in September 1942. Although practically synonymous with the Manhattan Project today, Groves originally loathed the idea of running it. Known as a brilliant but ruthless manager—simultaneously the best construction foreman and the biggest asshole in the military—Groves was in charge of all army construction within the United States and on offshore bases at the war’s outset, overseeing a budget of $600 million per month ($10 billion today). Running the Manhattan Project—whose entire budget was only $100 million at the outset—was effectively a demotion. It turned out that Groves had pissed off one too many people in the Pentagon (whose construction he’d personally overseen), and the Manhattan Project was his punishment. His superiors figured he had no chance in hell of building one of those nuclear whatsits before the war’s end, and the failure would teach him some humility.
Things didn’t quite work out that way. Roused to anger, Groves threw himself into the task, and in one of his first moves as director he named physicist Robert Oppenheimer, a professor at the University of California at Berkeley, as head of the weapons design lab at Los Alamos. In hindsight, hiring Oppenheimer looks like a brilliant move, but at the time it was radioactively controversial, among both scientists and military officials. Rather snootily, several top physicists suggested to Groves that Oppenheimer wouldn’t command much respect as a leader since he lacked a Nobel Prize. More to the point, he was a theoretical physicist, not an experimentalist, and he seemed as clueless about administrative matters as OSS chief Wild Bill Donovan. “He couldn’t manage a hamburger stand,” one scientist complained to Groves. Groves didn’t care. He considered himself a shrewd judge of character, and against all available evidence he decided that Oppenheimer would thrive as head of Los Alamos.
The military’s objection to Oppenheimer was more grave. Having grown up rich and politically naïve—a classic limousine liberal—Oppenheimer had always vaguely supported whatever causes were fashionable among the Berkeley elite. In the 1930s that meant communism, and Oppenheimer had spent the decade befriending Stalinists and raising thousands of dollars for the Spanish Civil War. More worrisome, he surrounded himself with student radicals who worked on fission research by day and met secretly with Communist Party officials by night, to spill everything they knew. In short, Oppenheimer was a gargantuan security risk. So much so that, despite being head of the most secret laboratory of World War II, the army refused to grant him a security clearance to work there—which was a bit awkward. Groves finally had to intervene and arrange for a temporary pass so his tenure could begin.
Despite his confidence in Oppenheimer, Groves felt duty-bound to investigate the physicist’s ties to communism, and he soon found the perfect person for the task: a dogged, clever intelligence officer already living in the Bay Area—someone who, ever since fighting against the Red Army as a teenager, had loathed communists and all they stood for. Boris Theodore Pash.
CHAPTER 21
V-1, V-2, V-3
In the spring and summer of 1942, Wernher von Braun scheduled three V-2 launch trials at the Peenemünde rocket-testing grounds in northern Germany. All three ended in failure. The body of the first rocket blew up during a preliminary check of the combustion chamber. The second wobbled dangerously on takeoff and crashed into the Baltic Sea a mile away. The third lifted off just fine, but suffered an electrical short and exploded in midair like a fourteen-ton bottle rocket�
��an entertaining but frustrating development.
On October 3, however, the V-2 finally took flight. The rocket was actually pretty sluggish on the launch pad; as one former slave at Peenemünde remembered, “V-2s rise slowly, as if pushed up by men with poles.” But they acquire momentum fast, and can reach 3,500 miles an hour at top speed. In anticipation of the launch that day, von Braun’s crew had decorated the fuselage with a painting of a comely woman straddling a crescent moon. The rocket didn’t fly that far, but it did land an incredible 118 miles away.
Von Braun’s staff filmed this and other successful launches over the next few months, and Nazi military leaders began passing the reels around like snuff films, ecstatic at the possibilities. Propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels squealed, “If we could only show this film in every cinema in Germany, I wouldn’t have to make another speech or write another word. The most hardboiled pessimist could doubt in victory no longer.” Hitler was less enthused. In a rare display of common sense, he pointed out that the rockets seemed difficult to aim—the October 3 launch had flown far, yes, but had also missed its target by two full miles. Surgical strikes seemed all but impossible.
The Nazis nevertheless poured billions of Reichsmarks into the development of the V-weapons over the next several months. And although no one realized it at the time, the rockets’ inaccuracy would soon prove their greatest asset. Because they were impossible to aim, they could land anywhere within a huge radius. No one on the ground ever felt safe as a result, no matter how far they lived from potential targets. The vengeance weapons, in other words, were supreme weapons of terror—perfect for pummeling the 360 square miles of London and the millions of people who lived there.
So while testing continued at Peenemünde, the German army began toiling away in northern France, just south of London, to build launch facilities for the V-weapons. In the meantime, von Braun’s engineers began drawing up plans for an even more ambitious weapon, the enigmatic V-3.