Ike's Spies: Eisenhower and the Espionage Establishment

by Stephen E. Ambrose

  The Kennedy people felt so because they had it from the best possible source, Ike himself. On January 19, the day before Eisenhower left office, he had an all-morning transition meeting in the Cabinet Room of the White House with the top echelon of the incoming administration. Clark Clifford, Harry Truman’s special counsel and later Lyndon Johnson’s Secretary of Defense, took notes.

  According to Clifford’s notes, Eisenhower, with JFK sitting on his left, made it clear that the project was going very well and that it was Kennedy’s “responsibility” to do “whatever is necessary” to make it work. Clifford saw no “reluctance or hesitation” on Ike’s part. Indeed, five days later Clifford sent a memorandum to President Kennedy reminding him that Ike had said “it was the policy of this government” to help the Cubans “to the utmost” and that this effort should be “continued and accelerated.”35

  The result, as everyone knows, was the disaster of the Bay of Pigs. The momentum Ike had allowed the CIA to build proved irresistible.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  Ike and His Spies

  THE LONG BLACK LIMOUSINE pulls up outside the CIA’S headquarters building. Sitting in the back seat are the Attorney General of the United States, Robert F. Kennedy, and the Director of Central Intelligence, Allen Dulles. The door opens. Slowly, painfully, Dulles gets out. The limousine drives off.

  Dulles’ shoulders are slumped. He is very dejected, deeply depressed. He has just finished another in a series of morning meetings with the committee that is investigating the Bay of Pigs disaster. Created by John Kennedy and chaired by Maxwell Taylor, the committee’s real purpose, according to Howard Hunt, is “simply to whitewash the New Frontier and to lay the blame on the CIA.” In Hunt’s view, Dulles is “being harassed by Bobby Kennedy, harassed by the President, by Dean Rusk, and Bob McNamara.”

  Back with his own people at CIA headquarters, free for the remainder of the day from the hostility of the New Frontiersmen, Dulles’ spirits revive. Turning away from Kennedy’s departing limousine, his pace quickens, his step becomes a little lighter.

  HUNT RECALLED, “By the time he emerged on the third floor from his private elevator and walked into the office, he would have a cheery grin on his face. He’d be rubbing his arthritic hands together, and would be cheerful and outgoing, giving none of us any reason to believe that he was under strain, that he was depressed about the fate that awaited him, and the very harsh and unwarranted criticism that the agency was being subjected to.

  “And he would come into the mess for lunch (we would be already inside and seated) and give a shoulder-pounding to somebody, and shake hands here and there, and take his place at the head of the table and begin commenting on the World Series game the day before, ask for news of one thing or another. Very little business—mostly on events in the outside world. He was a pretty avid sports fan, so that is what he chatted about.”1

  ALLEN DULLES became the scapegoat for the Bay of Pigs. President Kennedy accepted his resignation. After that, his health failed rapidly. Within a few months he had a stroke.

  More bad news followed. Dulles’ son had been living with him in Washington. The boy had been a brilliant student at Princeton but had suffered a grievous wound in the Korean War, where he served in the Marine Corps. A Chinese bullet had blown away a good portion of his head. Dulles’ son’s condition naturally preyed on his mind. The burden became intolerable when the boy became extremely violent. Dulles had to have him taken off to a sanitarium in Switzerland.

  As Hunt summed up, “The last years of Allen Dulles’ life were very sad and unrewarding ones, although he and his wife maintained their beautiful Georgetown home in their customary style, with gracious hospitality. But he was at the end, a very tragic, sad, and unfulfilled figure of a man.”2

  HE HAD BEEN IKE’S CHIEF SPY FOR EIGHT YEARS. More than any other individual, he had shaped and molded the CIA. For better or for worse, it was his agency. He gave it a sense of importance and a sense of mission. The CIA under Allen Dulles fought on the front lines of the Cold War, its purpose nothing less than to save the world from the Communists. Morale was consistently high inside the agency, as was its reputation on the outside.

  Two decades later, former agents looked back on the fifties with strong feelings of nostalgia. Gone were the greats—Frank Wisner, Richard Bissell, Tracey Barnes—and Allen Dulles. Nearly to a man, veterans felt that never again did the CIA have a leader to match Dulles. His motives were pure, his loyalty to his subordinates complete, his cause inspiring, his methods brilliant—or so at least it seemed to the ex-agents, in retrospect.

  To the outside world, he seemed more difficult to assess. To some commentators, he appeared to be a rather bumbling imitation of the British master spy, a man who used the twist of a knife here, or a well-staged riot there, to gain and hold an empire. A somewhat contrary view regarded Allen Dulles as the evil genius who was at the center of the capitalist conspiracy to rule the world for the benefit of American corporations, the epitome of the immoral imperialist. Others saw him as a man who could be relied upon to protect American interests around the world, by whatever means were necessary.

  Dulles was a leader who made some mistakes, enjoyed many triumphs. Nothing says more about Ike’s view of Dulles than the fact that the President kept him on the job for eight years, a job that was crucial to the success of the Eisenhower administration, and a job that was clearly the most sensitive in the government. Ike decided he would rather have Allen Dulles as his chief spy, even with his limitations, than anyone else he knew. By itself, that was a powerful endorsement and recommendation.

  INTERVIEWING IKE ABOUT HIS SPIES in his Gettysburg office, when he was in his mid-seventies, it was obvious that he enjoyed dwelling on the war years more than on the years with the CIA. Like many old men, he could remember events of thirty years past more vivdly than those of ten years past. When thinking about the war, he would grin and laugh as he recalled how the Allies won a victory, grimace and redden as he remembered something that had gone wrong.

  Talking about Operation FORTITUDE, he would point out where Patton had created a dummy tank corps, or how the strategic bombing pattern convinced the Germans that the Allies would land at the Pas de Calais rather than Normandy. In the middle of discussing one or another of the myriad of elements that went into FORTITUDE, he would look skyward, frown, then smile, turn toward me with that wonderful grin, slap his hand down on his thigh, and exclaim, “By God, we really fooled them, didn’t we!”

  And he would laugh that big gusty Eisenhower laugh, and still get a kick out of remembering it, after all those years and all those rememberings. “By God, we really fooled them, didn’t we!” You would have thought he was Tom Sawyer, pulling off a fast one on Aunt Polly.

  And indeed Ike’s spies did fool the Germans, generally throughout the war but especially so in the crucial OVERLORD battle. Make no mistake about it. OVERLORD was no sure thing. It was about as even a battle, taking all things into consideration, as ever happens. Either side could have won, without the victory being a fluke or the result of some piece of sheer luck. If intelligence and subterfuge did not win the war for the Allies, as might be argued, it is clear that without the edge in intelligence and subterfuge that they achieved and maintained, the Allies might not have won the war.

  “WE REALLY FOOLED THEM.” With Ike, the emphasis was always on the “we,” even though he of all men in the Allied world had the right to claim, “I really fooled them.” Partly that “we” was due to native modesty, but mainly it was a recognition of fact. Ike headed a team. He was not a professional intelligence officer, never had been. But through the war he learned how to command an intelligence effort, as he progressed from Robert Murphy and Mark Clark to Mockler-Ferryman and finally to Kenneth Strong.

  Strong and his people let their boss down only once, at the Bulge. Otherwise, SHAEF G-2 compiled an enviable record. Strong could brag, with justice, that he knew the German order of battle better than the German High C
ommand did from mid-August to the end of the war (even in December 1944), which was a feat unmatched by any other intelligence operation in this or any other war.

  The “we” who helped fool them included all those nameless people associated with Bletchley Park and ULTRA. Churchill said of the RAF pilots in the Battle of Britain that never had so many owed so much to so few. It could be said with equal or more truth of the men and women of BP. Without them, the war could not have been won, or at least as quickly as it was.

  Another part of the “we” was the French Resistance, which Ike guided and steered primarily through his adroit handling of General de Gaulle, partly through his judicious distribution of arms and supplies to the Maquis. The Resistance not only helped fool the Germans, it also delayed by force of arms the passage of major German divisions to the Normandy battlefield, which was always the aim of FORTITUDE—delay the German reinforcements.

  Success in FORTITUDE owed much to General Patton and his acting abilities. He made the wholly fictional FUSAG seem real, was helped by stagehands who could create, out of nothing but cardboard and plywood and some glue and nails, oil depots and tank divisions and barracks and whatever else one might want. He was also aided by those overage British and American officers, spread about Scotland and the east coast, constantly signaling to each other on the radio to hurry up with the ski bindings or get ready for General Patton’s inspection or send more maps of the Pas de Calais coastline. A boring task, but one of those dull jobs that, had there been one slipup over the radio, could have led to disaster.

  There could have been no FORTITUDE without the British Secret Service and the Double-Cross System. Garbo’s message of June 5, warning his German controller that OVERLORD was coming, and his message of June 9, in which he argued that the real invasion would come later at the Pas de Calais, may have been the two most important messages of the war.

  Obviously, Ike had no personal contact with Garbo or Brutus or any of the other turned spies, or with the radio officers in Scotland, or with the people of BP, although he commended them all.

  But he was grateful to them all, just as he was to those who were intimately involved with SHAEF, or those he saw on a daily or weekly basis—such men as Bedell Smith and Kenneth Strong and Omar Bradley, and of course Monty.

  Of all those who were part of the “we,” Winston Churchill surely stood tall. He had cooperated handsomely on the Diplomatic Ban, with such distasteful tasks as moving British citizens out of their homes, and in countless other ways, but his real contribution was the unfailing support he gave to BP, to the Double-Cross System, and to all the other ranks in the Battle of Wits.

  OVERLORD pitted the best Germany had to offer against the best the United States and the United Kingdom had to offer. It was Churchill and Roosevelt vs. Hitler, Eisenhower vs. Rundstedt, Bradley vs. Rommel, American sergeants and British privates vs. their German counterparts. In a sense, OVERLORD pitted the German educational system against the democratic educational system.

  The Allies won. They won most of all because of the success of FORTITUDE and OVERLORD, which in turn depended on a culture, a political system, a tradition, a belief, an understanding of what democracy is and what it means. That kind of understanding and commitment come only when the threat to democracy is real and perceived, but when it does come, it is an awesome thing.

  FORTITUDE required trust among the participants, up and down the line, a kind of trust that simply did not exist in Nazi Germany. Nearly every general in the Wehrmacht knew of the various plots to kill Hitler, while dozens of the generals were actively involved. Not a single one of them went to Hitler with the information. Such a situation in the Allied world is unimaginable.

  People who do not trust each other, or believe in the cause they are fighting for, cannot equal the effort made by the people in Bletchley Park, at Strong’s G-2, among the French Resistance and the British Secret Service, and throughout Ike’s command.

  FORTITUDE and OVERLORD were triumphs for Western democracy. I think that is what Ike had in his mind when he would grin that wonderful grin and slap his thigh and exclaim, “By God, we really fooled them, didn’t we!”

  If such a test of Western democracy ever comes again, it is that spirit that we can and will draw upon to defend ourselves.

  NOTES

  CHAPTER ONE

  1. The whole secret war is magnificently described in R. V. Jones, The Wizard War.

  2. Ibid., p. 215.

  3. Anthony Cave Brown, Bodyguard of Lies, and Ronald Lewin, Ultra Goes to War: The Secret Story, are basic sources on ULTRA.

  4. Brown, Bodyguard, p. 22.

  5. Lewin, Ultra, p. 248.

  6. Interview with Filby.

  7. Jones, Wizard War, pp. 139, 204.

  8. Lewin, Ultra, p. 281.

  9. Adolph G. Rosengarten, Jr., “With Ultra from Omaha Beach to Weimar, Germany—a Personal View,” Military Affairs, vol. XLII (October 1978), p. 129.

  10. Patrick Beesly, Very Special Intelligence: The Story of the Admiralty’s Intelligence Centre, 1939–1945, p. 69.

  11. F. W. Winterbotham, The Ultra Secret, p. 135.

  12. Lewin, Ultra, p. 19.

  CHAPTER TWO

  1. Alfred D. Chandler, ed., The Papers of Dwight D. Eisenhower: The War Years, p. 545. Hereinafter cited as Eisenhower Papers.

  2. Robert Murphy, Diplomat Among Warriors, pp. 102–3; Harry Butcher, My Three Years with Eisenhower, pp. 105–10; Stephen E. Ambrose, The Supreme Commander: The War Years of Dwight D. Eisenhower, pp. 98–99; Dwight D. Eisenhower, Crusade in Europe, pp. 86–87; Arthur Funk, The Politics of Torch, pp. 106–9.

  3. Eisenhower Papers, pp. 253–54.

  4. Anthony Cave Brown, ed., The Secret War Report of the OSS, pp. 42–62.

  5. Butcher, My Three Years, pp. 98–99.

  6. Eisenhower Papers, p. 448.

  7. Eisenhower Papers, pp. 562–63; Funk, Politics of Torch, p. 107; Murphy, Diplomat Among Warriors, p. 106.

  8. Eisenhower Papers, p. 699.

  9. Butcher, My Three Years, p. 106.

  10. Ray Cline, Secrets, Spies and Soldiers, pp. 44–45.

  11. Funk, Politics of Torch, p. 18.

  12. Brown, Secret War Report of the OSS, p. 135.

  13. Murphy, Diplomat Among Warriors, p. 117.

  14. The OSS reports on Dubreuil are in a Military Attaché Report of July 13, 1944, from Madrid, Record Group No. 3020, in Modern Military Records, National Archives; and in report No. MFT 3.3., June 19, 1944, Record Group No. 3700, in ibid., and in Richard Harris Smith, OSS: The Secret History of America’s First Central Intelligence Agency, p. 40; see also Murphy, Diplomat Among Warriors, p. 116.

  15. Funk, Politics of Torch, p. 89; Smith, OSS, p. 51.

  16. Smith, OSS, pp. 42–43; Murphy, Diplomat Among Warriors, p. 92.

  17. Smith, OSS, pp. 43–44.

  18. Eisenhower Papers, pp. 469–71.

  19. Brown, Secret War Report of the OSS, p. 134.

  20. Ibid., pp. 140–42.

  21. Smith, OSS, p. 57.

  22. Eisenhower Papers, p. 590.

  23. Butcher, My Three Years, pp. 106–7.

  24. Funk, Politics of Torch, pp. 106–7; Murphy, Diplomat Among Warriors, p. 104; Butcher, My Three Years, pp. 108–9.

  25. The document is in Record Group No. 226, OSS, Entry 5, cables, Modern Military Records, National Archives.

  26. Winston Churchill, The Hinge of Fate, p. 630.

  27. Funk, Politics of Torch, p. 21.

  28. Butcher, My Three Years, p. 110; Murphy, Diplomat Among Warriors, p. 105; Ambrose, The Supreme Commander, pp. 100–1.

  29. Eisenhower Papers, p. 567.

  CHAPTER THREE

  1. Mark Clark, Calculated Risk, p. 66.

  2. Arthur Funk, The Politics of Torch, pp. 133–34; Robert Murphy, Diplomat Among Warriors, p. 118; Harry Butcher, My Three Years with Eisenhower, pp. 144–47; Clark, Calculated Risk, p. 67; Stephen E. Ambrose, The Supreme Commander: The War Years of Dwight D. Eisenh
ower, pp. 105–6; Smith, OSS: The Secret History of America’s First Central Intelligence Agency, p. 58.

  3. Interview with Eisenhower, October 7, 1965; Clark, Calculated Risk, pp. 67–68.

  4. Clark, Calculated Risk, pp. 71–72.

  5. Ambrose, Supreme Commander, p. 106.

  6. Butcher, My Three Years, pp. 147–54.

  7. Ibid., pp. 152–57; Clark, Calculated Risk, pp. 73–89.

  8. Clark, Calculated Risk, p. 90.

  9. Dwight D. Eisenhower, Crusade in Europe, p. 88.

  10. The best discussion is in Funk, Politics of Torch, pp. 149–59.

  11. Murphy, Diplomat Among Warriors, p. 120.

  12. Ibid., pp. 120–21.

  13. Eisenhower Papers, p. 666.

  14. Eisenhower Papers, pp. 668–69; Ambrose, Supreme Commander, pp. 113–15.

  15. Brown, Secret History of the OSS, pp. 143–45.

  16. Ronald Lewin, Ultra Goes to War: The Secret Story, p. 244.

  17. Eisenhower Papers, p. 606.

  18. Ambrose, Supreme Commander, p. 117.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  1. Eisenhower Papers, p. 677.

  2. Eisenhower Papers, p. 680.

  3. Eisenhower Papers, p. 693.

  4. Stephen E. Ambrose, The Supreme Commander: The War Years of Dwight D. Eisenhower, pp. 116–17.

  5. Details are available in a secret OSS Report, M.I.9 (R.P.S.), 1218, January 20, 1943, in Modern Military Branch, National Archives.

  6. Harry Butcher’s diary, November 8, 1942, in Eisenhower Manuscripts, Abilene, Kansas.

  7. Eisenhower Papers, pp. 686–88.

  8. Eisenhower Papers, p. 699.

  9. Butcher’s diary, November 13, 1942.