The plea worked, and that October, Freddy got his orders to report to Camp Upton on Long Island, then travel by train to Alabama for infantry basic training at Fort Rucker. Even before he was officially sworn into the army, he waited in line with the other new soldiers to learn his first assignment. He hoped to draw a slot that would let him work on engines—jeeps, tanks, maybe even aircraft. But an officer walking up and down the long line went looking for volunteers for a less glamorous assignment: “KP” duty in the kitchen. Seeing no hands raised, the officer barked at Freddy and two others in his line of sight: “You, you, and you: volunteer!” Freddy’s first duties in the military would be fixing eggs, not engines.
His new home base in southeastern Alabama had been built hurriedly just five months earlier, as the United States began the biggest military mobilization in its history. It was less a formal army base than a massing of tents in the middle of a peanut field. After four years in Brooklyn, with the constant hum of trolley cars, baseball, hot dog vendors, and dance halls, Freddy had taken on a bit of northern big-city snobbery. This place seemed like a wasteland to him. There was a small town nearby—“a hick town,” Freddy called it—and he would wander there on leave to get a Coca-Cola. The merchants made Yankee soldiers like him pay a dime, twice what they charged the locals. He couldn’t wait to leave the place.
From Alabama, it was on to another base in Florida, then another in Tennessee, then another in Arizona. Training, downtime; more training, more downtime; and so on. “Hurry up and wait,” as the soldiers liked to say. He finally got to work on a few engines after volunteering for a slot in the 81st Division’s heavy-machinery unit, but after a short while, even that work seemed mundane. He was anxious for more; the war seemed agonizingly far away, and it was being fought without him. The Nazis were gaining ground through Europe with terrifying force, and Freddy found it hard to envision how all this stateside training was preparing him and his fellow enlistees to go overseas—back home, for him—to fight them. While stationed in Tennessee his restlessness got the best of him when he went into town with another soldier and missed a march—earning him an AWOL notice and a stint digging ditches six feet deep in rock-hard clay. “Fill it up!” the sergeant would yell as soon as he finished digging a ditch, then he would pile in the dirt and start all over again.
Freddy’s disdain for military rules and regulations became his calling card. He didn’t like waiting around—in a line of infantrymen or anywhere else. He seemed to fail more inspections than he passed, with his face rarely shaven quite closely enough, and his boots never shined quite brightly enough. That earned him more stints on KP duty, and fewer weekend passes, but beneath Freddy’s irreverence, his commanding officers detected grit and tenacity, enough to stick with him.
In the summer of ’43, in Arizona, Freddy got the chance to show his mettle on a battlefield—albeit a simulated one. It was there, in the searing desert heat, that he began to show off the traits that would later be documented in military assessments describing him as “a natural leader” and an “ingenious” soldier, with “remarkable stamina” and “a remarkable ability to improvise in unexpected situations.” Camp Horn, where Freddy was stationed, was part of a sprawling, eighteen-thousand-square-mile base that spilled from the Mojave Desert in Southern California into the Sonoran Desert in southern Arizona in a never-ending sea of sand, rock, and cactus. General George S. Patton, who knew the region from his own childhood in Southern California, had handpicked this otherworldly terrain as a proving ground for a million war-bound infantrymen.
For Freddy, the assignment was as much a test of physical endurance as military preparedness. With temperatures reaching 110 degrees for six straight weeks, and soldiers crammed six to a tent, the men had to survive on rations of eight ounces of water a day—little more than the bottle of soda that Freddy bought for a dime in Alabama. Freddy maximized his rations as best he could, even swallowing the water he used for brushing his teeth. His unit trained to see how long they could last out in the heat and how long they could go without sleep. The scalding temperatures, the meager rations, and the exhausting regimen beat down many men; seven died during training, mostly from dehydration. Yet somehow Freddy, a Jew now truly wandering in the desert, seemed to flourish in the nomadic conditions. He actually gained a few pounds that summer, and he never seemed short of strength or stamina. He even found time to become an American citizen while in Arizona.
Freddy volunteered for the “Wildcat” Rangers, an elite reconnaissance group, and he rose to become “first scout” on training missions in the war game simulations pitting soldier against soldier. He loved the challenge. This was about as close to real-life warfare as a soldier could get on American soil, complete with fighter planes, tanks, freshly dug foxholes, and encrypted radio transmissions. In one days-long exercise, Freddy broke away from his troop and managed to sneak behind “enemy” lines, slithering on his squat frame with a .45 pistol in hand—alone and unseen—along the rock-hard desert floor. The goal was to capture the “blue” enemy soldiers and seize their territory, bit by bit, but Freddy had bolder ambitions. Spying the headquarters where the 81st Division’s top officers were huddled, he burst in with gun drawn and demanded their surrender. This wasn’t in the Wildcat playbook. “You can’t do that!” yelled the stunned commander, General Marcus Bell. The private was undeterred. “The rules of war are to win,” Freddy responded matter-of-factly in his German accent. The general put his hands in the air. Freddy had taken down the enemy, rules be damned.
The very next day, General Bell called Freddy into his office at division command—not for a reprimand or another ditch-digging stint, but for a possible promotion. He had to admit that the kid had moxie. “You’re wasting your time in the infantry,” the general told him. “Would you like to do something more daring?” Freddy’s eyes widened. The general explained that OSS was looking for soldiers—especially foreign-speaking men from Europe—to penetrate enemy lines in secret espionage missions. Was Private Mayer interested?
The general didn’t need to sell him on the idea. Freddy was anxious to do anything to escape the tedium of being just “another body” in the infantry. He had shucked his misbegotten status as an enemy alien, and this new assignment promised him the prize he had been chasing: return passage to Europe to take the fight to the Nazis.
Freddy had just one question for the general: “What’s OSS?”
3
* * *
The Cloak-and-Dagger Brigade
BETHESDA, MARYLAND
December 1943
By the time he had dropped his sun-bleached duffel bag inside the gates of a converted country club outside Washington, DC, Freddy knew exactly what OSS was. He was joining up that winter with a brand-new American spy outfit aimed at sussing out the enemy’s plans—and filling a gaping void in American intelligence. It was an elite spot, and dauntingly dangerous, even by the standards of warfare. But for Freddy, anxious to escape the monotony of the Arizona desert, it was precisely where he wanted to be.
“Espionage” had become something of a dirty word in American foreign-policy circles in the run-up to World War II. In the 1930s, amid the isolationism of the Fords and Lindberghs, many war-weary government leaders in Washington had soured on the messy business of breaking secret radio codes and spying on enemies. President Herbert Hoover’s secretary of state, Henry Stimson, was furious when he learned in 1929 of a covert American code-breaking program known as the Black Chamber, which targeted foreign diplomats both friend and foe. Stimson promptly shut it down. “Gentlemen do not read each other’s mail,” the buttoned-up lawyer declared primly. Peace was secured through trust, not trickery, Stimson believed. “We will do better by being an honest simpleton in the world of nations,” he said, “than a designing Sherlock Holmes.”
The dramatic pendulum-shift away from foreign snooping left deep fissures in America’s intelligence operations. The military was still gathering intelligence on foreign enemies, but as Hitle
r’s Panzer tanks began ransacking Europe in 1939, it was a fractured effort, with little ability to target the biggest threats or piece together the fragments of information that had already been collected. The closest the United States came to a centralized intelligence agency in those years, some observers scoffed in the sexist tone of the era, was a group of a half-dozen matronly secretaries at the War Department who stood watch over a few file cabinets marked SECRET.
A celebrated World War I hero named William Donovan, an Irish lawyer with a brash swagger and a nickname—“Wild Bill”—to match, was determined to change what he saw as the dangerous, see-no-evil approach in Washington. Donovan had gone to law school with FDR at Columbia University, and despite their political differences, the retired colonel—a conservative Republican—became a confidant to the president on matters of war. As Roosevelt’s unofficial emissary, Donovan made two long trips throughout Europe and northern Africa in 1940 and early 1941 to survey the darkening wartime landscape.
Donovan had met Hitler by chance seventeen years earlier in a foreboding evening they spent at a Bavarian resort, when the Nazi Party’s charismatic young leader told him of his grand aspirations, comparing himself to Christ in “driving the Jewish money-lenders from the temple.” Now Donovan was returning to Europe to witness the destruction that the Führer had wrought in the interim.
In the British leg of his travels, Donovan dined with King George VI, strategized with Prime Minister Churchill, and spent days alongside the country’s master spies to study how even their famed intelligence services were struggling to keep pace with the Nazis. He returned to Washington with a blunt warning—not only for FDR but for the American public. In a remarkable call to arms that was broadcast by all three existing television networks in the United States, Donovan—still with no official role or title in the government—warned that war was at hand for America, whether the country wanted it or not. In his travels, he had come to the grudging conclusion that “Germany is a formidable, a resourceful, and a brutal foe.” Donovan “Says Nazis Seek to Rule the World,” warned the front-page headline of one US newspaper reporting on the speech.
Privately, he offered FDR a plan of action. It would take the United States two years to build a military machine capable of challenging the Nazis’ intimidating arsenal, he predicted, and the Americans still might not win in a straight fight. The nation needed to create a commando-style spy force and start playing dirty: “Play a bush-league game, stealing the ball and killing the umpire,” he told FDR. He formalized his proposal in a memo that June. In the face of “immediate peril,” America’s fractured approach to wartime intelligence had left it dangerously exposed, he wrote to FDR. The bottom line: “It is essential that we set up a central enemy intelligence agency.”
Rivals inside the government like J. Edgar Hoover, the always turf-savvy FBI director, had their knives out for Donovan, fending off what they saw as a reckless power grab by the cocky Irishman. Hoover, who had built a vast counterespionage operation of his own and didn’t want competition, even opened a dirt dossier on Donovan at the FBI. Henry Stimson, who had now become FDR’s war secretary a decade after famously turning up his nose at the reading of “gentlemen’s mail,” didn’t like Donovan’s brash presidential pitch either. His nemeses were beginning to resent Donovan not only for his growing influence, but also for the colorful public persona of a man who would get his own comic strip, “The Exciting Adventures of ‘Wild Bill’ Donovan,” in the Washington Star. “I have greater enemies in Washington than Hitler in Europe,” Donovan once remarked.
The man who mattered most was ultimately persuaded by Donovan’s warnings about America’s foreign-intelligence void, and Roosevelt gave approval in June 1941 for the creation of a fledgling US intelligence service. Not surprisingly, he tapped its inventor to lead it, giving Donovan the vague title of “coordinator of information.” The new agency was a scaled-back version of the one Donovan had planned, without the muscle and reach he had imagined, but it was a win for the decorated war hero nonetheless.
Less than six months later, with his spy group still jockeying with other agencies to find its place in the crowded federal bureaucracy, Donovan’s warnings about America’s fractured intelligence system proved tragically prophetic when the Japanese launched their surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, bringing the United States to war. On the night of December 7, 1941, as sporadic reports of the scope of the death and destruction in Hawaii streamed into the White House, Donovan rushed back to Washington from a football game in New York and met with a shaken Roosevelt to map out the next steps for his fledgling spy force. “It’s a good thing you got me started on this,” FDR told Donovan as he left.
Even as the country went to war, national security officials in Washington agonized over the question of whether a better-prepared intelligence apparatus could have averted the notorious “date that will live in infamy.” Ultimately, a string of government reviews would demonstrate that American military cryptographers had managed to break Japan’s encrypted “Purple” code-making system long before the surprise bombing, offering tantalizing glimpses of Japan’s intentions in the Pacific, but the information was splintered across so many levels—from the army and the navy to the FBI and the White House—that no one foresaw what was coming. “We might have had the genius to break the Purple code, but in 1941 we didn’t have the brains to figure out what to do with it,” bemoaned Henry Clausen, a military lawyer who conducted an extensive postmortem on the attack on orders from Stimson. The surprise strike would rank, one scholar said, as “certainly one of the greatest intelligence failures in history.”
OSS grew out of the embers of Pearl Harbor. Six months after the bombing, President Roosevelt formally rebranded Donovan’s intelligence brigade as the Office of Strategic Services, with a broadened new mandate to train American spies and commandos in a way the country had never tried before. Now on wartime footing, Donovan’s spy service profited from more of almost everything: more money, more soldiers, more training sites, more weapons, and more political might. The one constant was Donovan, who as head of OSS wanted his growing band of “glorious amateurs”—thousands of agents strong—to wage “unorthodox warfare” against the enemy.
This was to be “the cloak-and-dagger brigade,” as Donovan called his team; or, as his rivals inside the federal government sniped, “Donovan’s private army,” a “Tinker Toy” outfit among real military men. Donovan wanted his agents to employ not only the traditional tools of spycraft, like surveillance and undercover work, but also psychological tricks, propaganda, sabotage, and even guerrilla warfare and assassinations. While the military was readying for traditional, head-on attacks with fighter planes, battleships, and tanks, Donovan’s idea was for his agents to penetrate enemy lines undetected, just two or three at a time, by parachute, submarine, tunneling, or any other means they could devise. Imagination was the only limit, Donovan would say. One favorite mantra—“Let’s give it a try!”—would have sounded trite had it not come from a war hero who had famously refused to be evacuated from battle after being wounded multiple times, insisting instead that his men carry him from one foxhole to the next.
His break-the-mold concept for OSS would mean sending some men to near-certain deaths in the hopes that a few might complete their missions and make it out alive with prized intelligence. They would create a new brand of spies and saboteurs: before America deployed Green Berets in the Vietnam War in the 1960s, or Navy SEALs in Afghanistan after the terror attacks of September 11, 2001, or Delta Force soldiers in Syria after that, it unleashed OSS and Donovan’s brigade of covert agents.
Freddy got his orders while stationed in Arizona in December 1943, traveling by train to OSS headquarters in Washington, DC, then up the road twelve miles to a secret location in rural Maryland known only as Area F. Freddy and the other OSS trainees weren’t allowed to disclose their destination to anyone, but Area F was a hard place to hide: a postcard-worthy landscape on four hundred acres of rollin
g greens, swarming day and night with armed men in camouflage uniforms. Curious cabbies and well-heeled neighbors soon got wind of what was going on inside the gates. The idyllic setting was almost as unlikely as the OSS mission itself. Until just a few months before, this had been home to Congressional Country Club, which for years had catered to American elites with names like Coolidge, Rockefeller, Carnegie, Hearst, and Du Pont. But the country club’s Shangri-La veneer was fading badly by the late 1930s, and shrinking membership and the Depression had left it broke. The war proved a boon for both the club and for Bill Donovan. The club got a financial lifeline, renting out the entire property to the military for four thousand dollars a month in the name of wartime patriotism, and Donovan got a sprawling new training facility for his spy brigade.
The bucolic club was soon transformed into a military proving ground, with a missile range near the eleventh and sixteenth holes of one of the golf courses, climbing ropes hanging from the towering oak trees, a makeshift deck high above the pool for parachuting, and barbed-wired fences splicing through the grounds. Nighttime “compass runs” required the men to navigate their way through darkened woods and six-foot-deep creeks where errant golf balls had once landed. The only place that was off limits to the soldiers was a room in the clubhouse converted into a laboratory, where scientists were working on secret weapons for the American arsenal; among the sci-fi ideas that OSS scientists entertained were training bats to drop bombs and injecting Hitler with female hormones to make him less aggressive.
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