A Man Called Intrepid

by William Stevenson

  Help in disguise was on its way within forty-eight hours of the arrival of Churchill’s letter. The President’s special agent Bill Donovan was once again dispatched to look into Britain’s immediate needs. Stephenson cabled to Churchill:

  IMPOSSIBLE OVER-EMPHASIZE IMPORTANCE OF DONOVAN MISSION. HE CAN PLAY A GREAT AND PERHAPS VITAL ROLE. IT MAY NOT BE CONSISTENT WITH ORTHODOX DIPLOMACY NOR CONFINED TO ITS CHANNELS. . . .

  Donovan was leaving on a mission comparable to that of Stephenson in STRIKE ox. The cable deliberately echoed Churchill’s description of that earlier operation as “using methods neither diplomatic nor military.”

  Meanwhile, the President wondered if he could make some open gesture to hearten the islanders.

  “What could be better than sending Mr. Wendell Willkie, your opponent in the recent bitter elections?” Stephenson suggested.

  Roosevelt liked the idea. He was working on his third inaugural address when Willkie called before leaving for London. Tugging some of his personal stationery out of a drawer, the President wrote a passage from Longfellow as a message for the embattled Prime Minister. Churchill, seeing at once its significance and its value in boosting morale, read it before an assembly of the burghers of the City of London between bombing raids:

  Sail on, O Ship of State!

  Sail on, O Union, strong and great!

  Humanity with all its fears,

  With all the hopes of future years,

  Is hanging breathless on thy fate!

  Roosevelt did not fear death for himself. His balance seemed to derive from having come to terms with death. What he feared was some misstep that might condemn humanity. He wanted to reassure and encourage Britain, but he dare not expose himself to political attacks that might destroy his plans. The swiftly expanding British intelligence operations in New York would have to take responsibility for concealing Anglo-American staff talks beginning in January 1941. What Roosevelt had been preparing was a conference that would provide the United States with the greatest degree of strategic preparedness ever achieved before entering war. He was drawing on British expertise, believing his commanders too big-minded to resent it. He had Stephenson’s organization throw an invisible shield around the talks—with FBI co-operation. But playing second fiddle was not in director J. Edgar Hoover’s nature.

  * Robert Sherwood, as presidential aide, quoted the definition of a common-law marriage as applying perfectly to this alliance: an agreement between a man and a woman to enter into the marriage relation without ecclesiastic or civil ceremony, and not recognized in many jurisdictions (“such as Congress,” Sherwood added to Stephenson). He was attached to BSC at the time.

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  “If these precedents are to stand unimpeached and to provide sanctions for the continued conduct of American affairs, the Constitution may be nullified by the President,” wrote the American historian Charles A. Beard in President Roosevelt and the Coming of the War, 1941, an indictment of Roosevelt’s “binding agreements” with Britain before Pearl Harbor.

  “If the isolationists had known the full extent of the secret alliance between the United States and Britain,” Robert Sherwood commented to Stephenson in the winter of 1940, “their demands for the President’s impeachment would have rumbled like thunder through the land.”

  American-British staff talks opened in Washington in January 1941 with warnings from General George C. Marshall and Admiral Harold R. Stark that utmost secrecy must prevail. If their plans had fallen into Axis hands, no great harm would have resulted. Had they leaked to the press and Congress, American preparation for war might have been wrecked. “Utmost secrecy” meant preventing any premature disclosure to the American public. “Roosevelt never overlooked the fact that his actions might lead to his immediate or eventual impeachment,” Sherwood wrote later, in Roosevelt and Hopkins.

  ABC-1 was “the common-law alliance” suggested almost six months earlier by Stephenson when he reported the disastrous consequences of Dunkirk to the President. The name meant American-British Conference Number One, suggesting more to follow.

  The British military men who came over for the conference were high-ranking officers in ill-fitting civilian suits. Within three months, these “low-level talks” produced operational war plans on a global scale. The policy was established that the Nazi threat should take priority over any military aggression by Japan. For the British, this was a major diplomatic victory that passed unnoticed and uncelebrated because it took place in the shadowy world occupied by Stephenson. He found it odd to sit in the austere battleship-gray offices of the old Navy Building for another session of Anglo-American talks on war when the New York Times for that morning had reported shrill Lend-Lease arguments in Congress, so far removed from what was being discussed behind locked doors. After one conference with the U.S. War Plans Division, he heard Marshall, the Army Chief of Staff, tell a Senate committee there was “absolutely no intention that America should enter the war.” Nonetheless, that day’s secret discussions centered on a projected American army of five million troops within two years. Marshall dared not disclose this. Nor could the President announce a “Germany first” policy.

  Perhaps as many as a score of Americans and a tiny group of British service chiefs knew about these talks on global strategy. The task of keeping that knowledge secret fell on Stephenson’s shoulders. It was a necessarily strange state of affairs. The President’s dissembling was undignified. The lies did small justice to Congress. “Germany first” was a policy before the U.S. was at war. If there were no ABC-1, and no agreement on priorities, a surprise attack by Japan would swing the whole inadequate and ill-prepared American war machine to face east, significantly relieving the pressure on Germany. If Germany seized the French fleet, directed the affairs of Vichy France, controlled the raw materials of Eastern Europe, and continued to draw on Russian resources, Hitler would continue to conquer nations, then continents, with world domination a terrifyingly real possibility; he would have the time and resources to construct the atomic bomb already within his reach. Such cold logic could be safely presented only at those secret meetings.

  “The Germans wanted the Americans to focus on Japan to give Hitler time to finish his initial schedule of conquest, and to make sure that when Japan did advance, she wouldn’t advance too far beyond Southeast Asia,” Stephenson noted later.

  The plans drawn up at ABC-1 were “gentlemen’s agreements.” There were no secret treaties. Operations directed by BSC from Rockefeller Center were at all times liable to be halted. The Manhattan headquarters were still a makeshift combination of borrowed officers, improvised coding machines, and filing systems that would have baffled an outsider. It was a twilight period, during which Walter Lippmann in his column expressed the widely held, glum opinion that when hard issues of war and peace come up for decision, “the executive and judicial departments, with their civil servants and technicians, lose their power to decide.”

  During the conference, British officers asked Secretary of War Stimson why his country still held back when the free world’s survival hung in the balance. Stimson nodded toward the White House. “Take the question there,” he said. “That’s where you’ll find the greatest isolationist of them all.”

  The answer the President gave Stephenson was, “I cannot bring a divided nation into war. I learned that from the First World War. I felt the same urgency then that your people feel now. But Wilson taught me a lesson. I am going to be sure, very sure, that if the United States publicly enters the war, it will enter united.”

  He might have added: “Secretly, we’re in it now.”

  The dictators were sure that the President was incapable of action. This appeared in German diplomatic and military message traffic recovered by Bletchley. General Friedrich von Boetticher, the German military and air attaché in Washington, reported to Berlin that a pro-German military establishment dominated America. He told Hitler that Roosevelt and the State Department were outflanked by what he called the General
stab, suggesting a parallel with the monolithic German military establishment. His favorite phrase was “the Jewish wire-pullers.” These he blamed in February 1941 for Lend-Lease. Neither this nor the transfer of destroyers to Britain was to be regarded, he said, as posing any significant political or military threat. Hitler, hearing only what he wished to hear, was assured that the American Generalstab believed in Germany’s lightning victories and counted Britain out. American intervention was out of the question. The trickle of American aid was only to gag the howling little minority of “Jew-lovers.”

  Hitler ordered an intensification of campaigns to “Nazify” these sympathetic Americans of Boetticher’s fancy, to build up agencies in the Western Hemisphere for political and economic infiltration, and in strongly pro-German regions of South America to reinforce bases for military action.

  General Raymond Lee, during a tenure in London as American military attaché, recorded the British dilemma in dealing with doubts about London’s ability to survive. Lee’s primary task was to provide a running commentary on British military fitness and to provide liaison for secret contacts. His reports to Washington also provided Stephenson with a welcome guide to how an independent and shrewd observer saw the changing situation. Lee sensed it was only a question of time before he would be helping the American counterpart to BSC to build a base in London. Operations born in secrecy in New York would be fulfilled in Europe, but he could not divine when or how.

  Nelson Rockefeller had persuaded Roosevelt to let him start a new agency in the unguarded vastness of South America—“our soft underbelly,” Lee called it—where Stephenson operated a network, hampered by shortages of equipment and money. This new Office of the Co-ordinator of Inter-American Affairs acted covertly on information from BSC on Nazi sympathizers in sensitive jobs. Millions of Rockefeller dollars went into various schemes to discredit, depose, or in other ways damage the pawns of Axis conspirators in South America. The FBI and the State Department were at loggerheads over who had jurisdiction in the region; it was easier for Rockefeller to show personal initiative and foot the bill than settle an argument about counterespionage in foreign lands. This also protected FDR’s public stance of noninvolvement until Americans would demand to go to war.

  Hoover was right to feel uneasy. The surreptitious scope of the Coordinator, worked out by Rockefeller with Stephenson, foreshadowed the global agency under Donovan. But Hoover now got some experience in the President’s methods of inserting the thin end of a wedge.

  In early 1941, Hoover saw yet another sign in advertisements appearing in Canadian newspapers. A typical “Help Wanted” notice appeared in the Toronto Telegram:

  TO WORK FOR BRITAIN

  A department of the British Government in New York City requires several young women, fully competent in secretarial work and of matriculation or better educational standing. The chief need is for expert file clerks and for typists and stenographers. . . . Those selected can expect to serve for the duration of the war. . . .

  Hoover knew what this meant. Canadians were being recruited for BSC’s overt operations to get around a ban on American citizens working for belligerents in a foreign war. Hoover was publicized as the world’s most powerful policeman, but now he was being forced to turn a blind eye when the laws were bent. His personal vanity and professional pride were naturally involved. “The price of Hoover’s cooperation was always conditioned by his overwhelming ambition for the FBI,” noted the BSC Papers. “He wanted to retain a monopoly of liaison with BSC and this became progressively less possible.”

  To expand the FBI into an international agency like the British secret services, Hoover needed backing by Congress, and this was not forthcoming. He had no legal right to employ agents outside the United States. He directed FBI agents in Latin America secretly, took elaborate precautions against the State Department finding out, maintaining his own FBI liaison office midway between Rockefeller’s Coordinator suite and BSC in Rockefeller Center. How this worked in practice was described later by a double agent known as TRICYCLE, actually a Yugoslav named Dusko Popov. “I walked slowly to Rockefeller Center, running a check on a possible tail. Inside, I spotted my contact scanning the directory. I followed him into an elevator and at the twenty-ninth floor we got out, neither speaking. He circled the floor and pressed an UP button but let the first elevator pass. Then he pressed again. This time a civilian in the cage nodded slightly and we rode to the forty-fourth floor where I was now recognized and escorted to the FBI.”* TRICYCLE had just arrived back from Europe by way of South America, and his reports were of consequence to all three groups. Others who dealt with FBI agents, especially the Canadian security men, had nothing but praise for their discretion, efficiency, and willingness to admit ignorance of what were then new and startling espionage techniques.

  A substantially different picture was given by a Baker Street Irregular who turned out to be one of the Soviet Union’s top-ranking spies, Kim Philby. He wrote in My Silent War:

  Stephenson’s activity in the United States was regarded sourly enough by J. Edgar Hoover. The implication that the FBI was not capable of dealing with sabotage on American soil was wounding to a man of his raging vanity. He was incensed when Stephenson’s strong boys beat up or intoxicated the crews of ships loading Axis supplies. But the real reason for his suspicious resentment, which he never lost, was that Stephenson was playing politics in his own yard, and playing them pretty well. Hoover foresaw that the creation of Bill Donovan’s OSS would involve him in endless jurisdictional disputes. The new office would compete with the FBI for Federal funds. It would destroy his monopoly of the investigative field. The creation and survival of the new OSS organization was to be the only serious defeat suffered by Hoover in his political career—and his career has been all politics. He never forgave Stephenson for the part he played as midwife and nurse to OSS.

  Philby gave a Soviet propaganda version. Hoover and the FBI actually provided Stephenson with enormous help during these frantic months. Russian agents, even after the Soviet Union was forced into alliance by German invaders, never ceased their efforts to sow distrust between the FBI and the British.

  “Hoover is a man of great singleness of purpose, and his purpose is the welfare of the Federal Bureau of Investigation,” Stephenson told Churchill. “The FBI was in existence when Hoover, at 29, took over; but the Bureau was a slovenly outfit. Hoover insisted that if he took the job, it would have to be completely divorced from politics and the civil service. He established absolute authority from the start. In the course of almost a quarter-century he has made it a national institution. As a result, the FBI does not have to endure the newspaper sniping to which other federal agencies, almost without exception, are periodically subjected. Its record is above criticism.” Hoover’s job was both his pride and his vanity. He was the son of a Washington civil servant and he had taken night courses in law while working as a library clerk. The facts of his personal life were emphasized because Stephenson “regarded them as fundamental to any understanding in London of a relationship that does not always run smoothly.”

  The BSC Papers commented: “Hoover needed courage and foresight to cooperate so wholeheartedly. His insistence that the liaison be kept secret is proof of his awareness that he was running a considerable risk that his connection with British Intelligence would be exposed and embroil him in a major political upheaval, with every isolationist and non-interventionist in the country after his blood.”

  Stephenson won over Hoover by assuring him that a time would come when the American public could be told of FBI accomplishments. The British desired neither recognition nor credit. The BSC Papers commented: “The truth was that internal security and foreign intelligence do not mix well. The FBI had to be flanked with teams of experts from different backgrounds.”

  Hoover had been outflanked already. FDR’s private presidential intelligence service was introduced on the day Roosevelt wrote the letter to Churchill inviting the confidences that burgeon
ed into the momentous correspondence between Naval Person and POTUS. On September 8, 1939, after Hitler’s armored columns charged deep into Poland, a “Limited Emergency” was proclaimed which covered the reorganization of the President’s Executive Office. The Bureau of the Budget was transferred from the Treasury Department to this reorganized Executive Office. The Bureau’s agents went into every branch of government, and their reports came directly back to the President. His special aide, Harry Hopkins, became a civilian chief of staff, with no legal authority and nothing more than a card table for a desk. Hopkins was, in Stephenson’s words, “the President’s own private Foreign Office.” As the European war gathered momentum, more had to be done to protect the legitimate but clandestine intercourse between London and Washington. The President required an aide similar to Hopkins in the new sphere of secret warfare. Anyone who functioned as the President’s secret-intelligence aide had to be willing to make decisions and risk being disowned. His patriotism and personal integrity had to be beyond dispute. Nobody seemed better fitted for that thankless task than Bill Donovan.