A Man Called Intrepid

by William Stevenson

  All this, too, captured Donovan’s imagination. But was there enough time? On the last day of July, a secret session of the House of Commons was warned by Churchill that a dreadful month lay ahead: “Hitler may try to bomb and gas the country before landing. Italy and Japan will snarl and snap like jackals.”

  The very next day, another powerful nation bared its teeth. The Soviet Union accused Britain of prolonging the war by spurning Hitler’s peace offers. This attack, from Foreign Minister Molotov, opening the seventh session of the USSR’s Supreme Council, meant more than Russian moral support for Germany. It carried a message for all members of the Communist parties in Britain and America. Wherever Communists manipulated the workers—loading ships in U.S. ports for the dangerous supply runs to Britain, in American factories beginning to produce weapons, even in Britain’s own vital industries—there would be strikes and go-slow campaigns and a betrayal of men dying at sea and in the air.

  This brought Donovan’s Irish temper to a boil. He prided himself upon hiding it; his value to Roosevelt was built on iron self-control. There had been a moment when he thought he should call on Kennedy at the U.S. Embassy. Now, unsure about keeping his temper in check, he let the temptation pass. “Joe’s joined the knockers and the kickers,” he told Stephenson. The Ambassador deplored the fact that Americans in London had formed the 1st American squadron of the RAF and wore British Home Guard uniforms with red eagles for shoulder flashes. And Kennedy’s dispatches, becoming more defeatist than ever, matched those of Ambassador William Bullitt in France, who believed the physical and moral defeat of the French had been so complete that “they accept the fate of becoming a province of Nazi Germany [and] hope England will be rapidly and completely defeated.” Just to make the British feel better about the desertions and betrayals, the French General Léon Huntziger told German General Walther von Brauchitsch: “France is fighting with Germany against Britain.”

  Despite Donovan’s discretion, Kennedy soon learned of the presence in his bailiwick of the President’s special agent. “Kennedy was furious at the intrusion and did his best to sabotage the mission,” said a British Foreign Office historian, Nicholas Bethell, after the files were opened for the first time thirty-three years later. “Even the British diplomatic world knew nothing about Donovan when he arrived.” Kennedy tried to limit Donovan’s contacts, not knowing what powerful patrons stood behind him, by making it appear that Donovan was writing articles for U.S. publications—an ingenious move, because stringent British censorship would place Donovan at a disadvantage. Foreign journalists were regarded as a potential source of security leaks.

  Lord Halifax, then still Foreign Secretary, wrote: “The U.S. Ambassador is somewhat embarrassed by [Donovan’s] presence here and regards him as a newspaperman employed by Colonel Knox for his own newspaper [the Chicago Daily News]. It would seem therefore out of the question to treat him as a high official of the U.S. Government.”

  Donovan was due to report back to the White House early in August. He lingered on, feeling something in common with people for whom the luxury and trappings of normal life were abruptly gone. Joan Bright, the girl in the middle of it all, later described, in The Inner Circle, “the relief to feel responsible, within one’s own limitations, for one’s own salvation. We hugged London to our beating hearts. London was ours from the hour the blacked-out night hid its beauty until the morning siren signalled the coming day. . . .”

  Donovan found Bright at the heart of a labyrinth of tunnels under Whitehall, known as “The Hole in the Ground.” The maze of underground rooms had been dungeons where fusty old documents were stored. At the bottom of a spiral staircase was the War Room where Churchill held forth. He usually sat in a wooden chair at the head of the conference table. When Donovan visited, he bumped into the Prime Minister balancing a food tray in the subterranean canteen, followed by the Chief of the Imperial General Staff. Churchill was in his “boilersuit,” which zipped down the front and made him look like a large Teddy bear. The corridors were lit by candles stuck in lanterns. The walls were damp. Ugly tubes snaked through the labyrinth, emitting odd pings and whistles whenever a message cannister propelled by compressed air whizzed at thirty miles an hour from one government post to another.

  Amid the banging and hollow whistles of the tubes sat Joan Bright, keeping tabs on the Joint Planning Staff and the Joint Intelligence Committee. Above The Hole, enemy bombers were less than one hour’s flying time from the crag at Felsennest, from which Hitler said he would direct his invasion. In The Hole, Bright and her “secret ladies”—girl secretaries with high security clearances—giggled over the Führer’s rumored plan to terrify the islanders with “war crocodiles,” which would carry 200 armed men in each concrete belly as they crawled along the bottom of the English Channel.

  Their counterplans, however, looked pathetic by contrast. They seemed to be little more than neatly handwritten notes on file cards in Blight’s index to the future prosecution of an aggressive war. Cards for Major Strategy had an orange edge; most of Europe was blue; the Iberian Peninsula, Africa, and Latin America were pale pink; and there was no edging at all for Asia.

  The world in her shoe-box file was easily condensed. A/SPEC. OPS/1: Planning for Irregular and Subversive Activities; B/FOES/1: Formation of Future Operations (Enemy) Section; C/COMB.OPS/1: Landing Craft . . . The whole tone was belligerent. Nothing here about evacuating the Home Fleet to American bases. Instead, the colored eight-by-five-inch cards referred to assaults and captures, demolitions and attacks, and future military expeditions to places not marked on the 1901 Navy League map behind Churchill’s chair. One card was labeled B/SOE/1: Formation of Special Operations Executive. This referred to the red file labeled INTREPID and a red-bordered card calling for “a reign of terror conducted by specially trained agents and fortified by espionage and intelligence so that the lives of German troops in Occupied Europe be made an intense torment.”

  All this in a shoe box, thought Donovan. Was it reality? He said later to Stephenson: “In those dungeons under Whitehall, you step into a Shakespearean play with stage directions like ‘Army Heard in Distance, Sound of Trumpets. . . .’ You know there isn’t an army, but it’s hard to be sure, down there in the theatre.”

  Reality was a wooden signpost outside War Lord Churchill’s conference room. Four cards could be put into a slot: COLD, SUNNY, FINE, WINDY. For the men and women who worked in The Hole, rain was an academic question when they were sometimes there for weeks on end without ever coming up. More often the signpost informed the troglodytes of the degree of aerial bombing above. For all its impressive superstructure and reinforced tunneling, The Hole would collapse under a direct hit or a near-miss.

  Donovan was kept informed of Hitler’s progress with OPERATION SEALION through the German orders plucked out of thin air by the ULTRA teams. Now, on the Thursday that Russia joined in kicking an apparently fallen Britain, the Führer issued Directive No. 17: “Establish the necessary conditions for the final conquest of England.” The German Air Force was to overpower the RAF before the invasion. “I reserve to myself,” Hitler added, “the right to decide on terror tactics. . . .”

  None of this seemed to strike terror among Donovan’s new friends. Instead, they showed him a device to turn the landing beaches into blazing infernos. The secrecy surrounding the weapon was such that many historians have since thought the whole thing was a British deception. Donovan’s biographer, Corey Ford, wrote of “ingenious British propaganda devices, including the carefully planted rumor that a system of underwater pipelines could turn every beach and cove into a sea of flaming oil.” The system did exist and led to Pluto, the Pipe Line under the Ocean, which would eventually carry oil from Britain to Allied forces storming Hitler’s Fortress Europe. But it was first conceived as a deterrent.

  “Stephenson proposed a Petroleum Warfare Department and flamethrowing weapons,” Donovan was told. “PWD laid perforated pipelines out to sea and along the coast. The whole system co
uld be ignited when the Germans landed. Churchill loved the scheme because he was convinced Hitler had a superstitious dread of fire.”

  When Donovan reluctantly left, the Germans had launched the mass bomber raids that were a prelude to invasion. He was convinced the British would pit ingenuity against invasion, even if they had to retreat underground for years to come. Back in Washington, he reported to Roosevelt that American aid should be accelerated and increased because “here is the first line of our own defense. If the British are reduced to guerrilla campaigns against a Nazi occupation, it will take Americans a generation to regain a foothold in Europe. And from what I have learned here about Nazi fifth-column methods, we in America by then may find it’s too late to save ourselves.”

  Ambassador Kennedy reported that Britain was done. German air raids had employed only a fraction of the vast armadas that Charles Lindbergh had described to him in such graphic detail. When the real blitz got underway, London would be razed. He would endure a month of bombing, Kennedy announced, and then leave.

  The Foreign Office expert on U.S. affairs, Professor North Whitehead, wrote mildly that “it looks as if he was thoroughly frightened and has gone to pieces. If his ‘foreign policy’ prevails, we will be left alone to be torn apart, piece by piece.”

  * From an official report, Britain and Atomic Energy, 1939–1945, by Margaret Gowing, later published by Macmillan, London.

  * Hitler’s little-known sojourn in England between November 1912 and April 1913 is authenticated by BSC documents and an unpublished account by Bridget Elizabeth Hitler, “My Brother-in-law Adolf.” Hitler’s brother Alois married the actress Bridget Elizabeth Dowling in London in 1910. They lived at 120 Upper Stanhope Street, Texteth Park, Liverpool, and ran a small restaurant nearby. When the son of Alois, William Patrick Hitler, moved to New York in 1940, he disclosed details of the Liverpool period, taken from his mother’s diaries and letters, before himself adopting another name. He was known to BSC as PEARL. His usefulness as a source of information on the Führer was limited, but as a link with Hitler’s brief life in England, he added a curious footnote to history. BSC records suggest that Adolf Hitler spent much of his time watching the flow of sea traffic through Liverpool to the four corners of the British Empire, undoubtedly impressed by this evidence of maritime power.

  18

  “I’m your biggest undercover agent,” President Roosevelt said to Bill Stephenson after a frank disclosure of what a puppet British government might do to preserve the islanders from Hitler’s worst excesses. The President was scarcely joking. The new barbarians had overrun much of civilized Europe since he had ordered the FBI to join with British intelligence to work against Nazi subversion. Now, in early July 1940, the same logic propelled him another giant step toward deep involvement.

  The secret alliance had seemed necessary when the British and French empires stood shoulder to shoulder. Now one empire had collapsed. Paris was stamped with the crooked cross. And Prime Minister Churchill was privately warning that he could not answer for his successors if Britain were occupied. She might become part of a united Nazi Europe whose combined fleets would control the oceans and put a Nazi gun at American heads.

  The distant British garrison under Churchill might survive if life lines to America remained open. Roosevelt knew this. Could he convince his own people? The life lines to England were under constant U-boat attack. Convoys were betrayed by German agents in U.S. ports. Stephenson was creating a police force to guard the cargoes of supplies and arms piling up in those ports, but he wanted more help from U.S. radio-detection stations to hunt enemy submarines. “Foreign police on American soil and Americans in a foreign conflict” was the way the President’s enemies would portray these developments. Still, London’s demands on BSC continued to grow, and Stephenson tried to meet them, his organization expanding in every direction.

  “My secret legs” was Roosevelt’s wistful description of Donovan. The President, trapped in his wheelchair, had less flattering names for ex-Prime Minister Chamberlain and those who still dealt with Hitler. He knew them, through Stephenson, as the Better-Notters. What was happening in Britain might foreshadow events in the United States—the War-Wagers in London had won power in time to see the war being apparently lost.

  Roosevelt hoped such pessimism was ill-founded, but some of his own military advisers, though contemptuous of Britain’s Better-Notters, admired Germany’s military efficiency. Their views were shared by such private counselors as William Allen White. “What an avalanche of blunders Great Britain has let loose upon the democracies of the world!” he had written. “The old British lion looks mangy, sore-eyed. . . . He can’t even roar.” When the Better-Notters were thrown out by the British, however, White began campaigning for aid to Britain, because this would buy time for Americans to prepare for the inevitable attack upon themselves.

  A Better-Notter had been British ambassador to Washington since the start of the war. He was Lord Lothian, whose family motto was Sero Sed Serio (Late but in Earnest). He had actually arrived several months late, long after his appointment was announced. He was a relic of the Cliveden Set, which thought Hitler’s greed could be satisfied on scraps. Lothian had the grace to let Stephenson pursue his covert diplomacy, asking only that formal agreements go through the Embassy. Otherwise, he was bypassed as efficiently as Ambassador Kennedy was in London.

  The undiplomatic question that had to be asked the President was would he run for a third term.

  If Britain had sued for peace that summer, as might have happened had the Chamberlain appeasers won the day, “nothing would have made Roosevelt face another campaign,” Stephenson had advised Churchill. “But FDR knew we depended on him as much as America depended on us. He was the single factor weighing the scales in our favor. If he seemed to be running as our candidate, the isolationists would accuse him of delivering the United States back into the British Empire. Then he would lose, and so would we.” Stephenson believes FDR made the decision to run because Churchill was resolved to fight on. The evidence of British resourcefulness was to be seen in the mounting success of ULTRA and Bletchley’s service to the White House. But some of Churchill’s pressure on the President evoked a sharp warning from Stephenson: “All democratic governments in the run-up to an election are obliged to go to the country on a ticket of peace, no matter what the grim truth. Exercise patience. Recognize the basic good sense, generosity and instinct for doing the right thing that prevails among Americans.”

  This was difficult counsel to give. “It required real courage,” said Lord Louis Mountbatten, the King’s cousin. “He had to tell the British to be patient when we needed urgent action, and urge action on Americans who wanted any excuse to be patient.”

  Stephenson showed physical courage, too. “It gave the FBI the shudders and had to be kept from the President,” said Ian Fleming, who had heard directly from J. Edgar Hoover about one incident. “A British seaman was selling information on convoys. Little Bill tracked down the traitor after seeing the decoded recoveries from a Nazi transmitter in New York. The signals told U-boats where to intercept British ships with the most militarily valuable cargoes. Bill went out that afternoon and was back in his office by nightfall. The FBI man on the case said to him: ‘Someone ought to give the treacherous son of a bitch the chop.’

  “Bill glanced down at his right hand. He lifted it and chopped at an angle against the hardwood surface of his desk.

  “ ‘I already have,’ he said.

  “The FBI thought he was joking, until the man was found dead in the basement of an apartment building.”

  Fleming’s comment was: “There was overwhelming evidence against the seaman. Killing him quickly perhaps saved hundreds of sailors’ lives and precious supplies. It did him a favor, too, saving a long journey to an English trial; and after many proceedings, the hangman’s rope. Saved his Majesty’s Government a lot of time and money, too.” However, the Under-Secretary of State, Sumner Welles, later wrote that t
he zeal of British intelligence sometimes seemed excessive; and Stephenson tried to save the U.S. authorities any embarrassment from such incidents.* He had far too much at stake to jeopardize relations with the President.

  Their first formal meeting was conducted in the presence of the British Ambassador and was confined to the shopping list of destroyers, aircraft, guns, steel, and ammunition desperately needed to replace the supplies the British had abandoned in Europe. Then Roosevelt and Stephenson were left alone to discuss British Security Coordination. The debacle of Dunkirk had shaken even FDR’s confidence in the British. His misgivings were not in any way relieved by the continuing prophecies of doom from his Ambassador in London, and Bill Donovan was not ready yet to report. FDR was cheered, however, by Stephenson’s description of “the cold chill that ran down the spines of the staff at 10 Downing Street when they heard Churchill was to become prime minister.” Plans were well underway for guerrilla warfare if Britain should be occupied; and this secret army would link up with European partisans. If London fell, direction would come from BSC, now combining what were known officially as British Secret Intelligence Service, Special Operations Executive, and Security Executive, all quartered in New York.

  Stephenson was already known as a modest but forceful industrialist. There was a risk that he was also known in Washington as chief of British secret intelligence, reporting directly to Churchill. Obviously, he could not be identified as a confidant of President Roosevelt.

  The President’s own concern was evident in a letter he wrote to the Governor-General of Canada. Lord Tweedsmuir, better known as the writer of spy thrillers John Buchan, had proposed to visit Roosevelt at Hyde Park to discuss the use of Canada as the meeting and training ground for secret intelligence and other forms of “un-neutral” collaboration. The President discouraged this notion: “The first [reason] is that you could not ‘slip down inconspicuously.’ . . . The second reason is that . . . I am at the moment saying nothing, seeing nothing and hearing nothing.”