“For this reason,” recorded the BSC diarists, Stephenson “worked to build up Donovan’s authority while preserving his special relationship with J. Edgar Hoover. This became increasingly difficult. From time to time, the FBI actively tried to suppress BSC activities.”
Hoover, sensing a decline in his own prospects, fell back on legalities. He said BSC was breaking American laws, besides contributing to what some historians would later describe as Roosevelt’s autocracy in the field of foreign relations. Hoover’s dangerous hostility was overcome, but there were occasions when London rekindled his jealousy by withholding information for bureaucratic reasons—but, from Hoover’s viewpoint, seemingly out of distrust. Some idea of the tightrope Stephenson walked is conveyed in the BSC Papers: “Stephenson needed something in the United States which did not exist at the time he founded BSC . . . an agency with which he could collaborate fully by virtue of its being patterned, in the matter of coordinated functions, exactly after his own organization. He needed as its chief a man less rigid and sensitive to potential rivals.”
Yet Hoover could be a good man to have on your side. “He was protective of Stephenson’s position, on the principle of Better-the-Devil-You-Know,” said Ian Fleming, who flew over with the British Director of Naval Intelligence in 1941 to a cool reception. He found Hoover to be “a chunky enigmatic man with slow eyes and a trap of a mouth who received us graciously, listened with close attention (and a witness) to our exposé of certain security problems, and expressed himself firmly but politely as being uninterested in our mission.” Hoover made it clear that it would be foolish to develop separate channels with London that would bypass Stephenson or the Office of U.S. Naval Intelligence. The brush-off was conducted with a certain courtesy. “Hoover’s negative response was soft as a cat’s paw. With the air of doing us a favor, he had us piloted through the FBI Laboratory and Record Department and down to the basement shooting range,” Fleming said later. “Even now I can hear the shattering roar of the Thompsons in the big dark cellar as the instructor demonstrated on the trick targets. Then with a firm, dry handclasp we were shown the door.”
* Spy/Counterspy: The Master Intelligence Agent of the Second World War.
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The need for cross-Atlantic consultations rose with the tempo of Anglo-American secret warfare. Stephenson flew at least once a month to London to unscramble problems. Again he needed Hoover’s good will, because the traffic in agents and couriers could have been so easily interrupted by FBI hair-splitting.
There were two fast routes between Washington and London. One required crossing the border into Canada, incognito, with help from the FBI and Canadian authorities forewarned by BSC. The traveler then joined a Ferry Command flight from Montreal by way of Labrador to Scotland. Couriers, atomic scientists, even spy masters went this way in extreme discomfort aboard bombers stripped of nonessentials. Passengers squeezed into gun turrets, and confidential mail was stuffed into bomb bays. The dangers varied. A famous magician, Jasper Maskelyne, whose talents were required for creating illusionary weapons, almost died from oxygen starvation. The song writer Eric Maschwitz, hired to direct the fabrication of documents, nearly froze to death when his transport was forced down in Iceland. A four-engined British plane loaded with VIPs was mistaken for a Focke-Wulf Kurier shadowing a convoy; a British carrier pilot was vectored onto the plane and, coming upon it in clouds, shot it down, with the resultant loss of all aboard. Flights were surrounded by such secrecy that the sudden appearance of large unidentified aircraft, observing radio silence, easily triggered such fatal reactions.
The southern route was just as dangerous. A doubly tragic incident was the killing of Leslie Howard, the British actor known to thousands of Americans as the harmless Ashley Wilkes in Gone With the Wind. He boarded an aircraft on a secret mission for Stephenson. The Germans knew about it and shot down the unarmed plane. The British knew beforehand that the Germans knew, but to protect the secret of how they knew, Bletchley, which had monitored the German Air Force orders, let the plane go down. The secret was so well preserved that this account of the true background to what was vaguely known to be a story of espionage never came before the public. In the skies over the Bay of Biscay, where Howard was shot down, Churchill was intercepted on another occasion by British fighters who were told the “unidentified object” was “hostile.” Fortunately, Churchill’s flying boat eluded the hunters by flying into thick cloud—or Britain might have been robbed of its chief inspiration at a critical moment in the war. Six RAF Hurricanes pursued the Prime Minister on the last leg of his flight back from Bermuda to deal with parliamentary accusations of bungling and mismanaging military affairs in the winter of 1941. History did not record Churchill’s comments on this unsuccessful attempt to shoot him down.
The southerly route across the Atlantic was flown mostly by British Imperial Airways, whose Clippers took twenty-one hours to cross from New York, by way of Bermuda and Lisbon, to southern England. The Pan-American Boeing 314 flying boats were rated as merchant vessels and could not land in belligerent countries. One covert flight taken by Harry Hopkins left him too fatigued to unfasten his safety belt after landing. Nor was his ordeal at an end. German bombs followed his train to London. Within minutes of his arrival at Waterloo Station, hundreds of incendiaries blocked the tracks he recently had rolled over.
As a roving ambassador, Hopkins saw the need for a diplomatic repair job when he confronted Churchill on a bleak January day in 1941. He arrived at 10 Downing Street and found most of the windows blown out by bomb blast. He was led down to the basement, where “a rotund—smiling—red faced gentleman appeared—extended a fat but convincing hand and wished me welcome to England.” The first meeting went smoothly, the Prime Minister concerned that Hopkins ate so frugally at lunch and expressing delight at the prospect of an “accidental” encounter with the President in Bermuda. But when Hopkins said there was a feeling in some quarters that Churchill did not like America or Roosevelt, the jolly gentleman’s jaw stiffened and he went into a bitter attack on Ambassador Kennedy for misrepresenting so much and for creating so many false impressions.
The fascination of secret intelligence was, in Churchill, never ending but seldom openly disclosed. He sensed Donovan’s instinct for the work and encouraged Stephenson to “fly him over” whenever possible. A glimpse of these “illicit trysts” came from the American intelligence agent Ernest Cuneo, who in those days was called the President’s special liaison officer. He had flown over with Stephenson and Donovan, and confided his secret ambition to meet the Prime Minister. He had to visit a base next day. The two Bills reported to 10 Downing Street. They were walking back to the hotel, Claridge’s, in the early hours when they saw Cuneo at the corner of Grosvenor Square and Brooke Street.
“Come along, Ernie. We’re going to see the PM.”
“Good God . . . it’s four o’clock in the morning!”
He was taken firmly by the elbow and told: “Yes, Ernie. The darkest hour before the dawn. The best time of all—”
Cuneo found Churchill in a romper suit, looking like a chubby spy waiting to drop into Europe. He was impressed by the Prime Minister’s nonchalant greeting when he answered their knocking at the door. “Your name’s Cuneo? Any relation to Cuneo the navigator who served with Columbus?”
“A direct descendant,” Cuneo replied.
“Jolly good,” said Churchill. “Let’s drink to him. . . .”
Churchill was impetuous and kept grueling hours. Roosevelt was predictable and went to bed early. Moving between them, one had to shift mental gears. There were all kinds of peculiar differences. When the moon was full and bright, Churchill did not go to Chequers for the weekend; the house was known to the Germans and provided a conspicuous target. When he did follow the traditional weekend ritual, Churchill carried with him into retreat an umbilical cord of telephone lines and cables linking him to the world at war. He believed the enemy chose weekends for major operations, hoping to catch
his War Cabinet napping. Consequently, weekends with Churchill were turmoil. When, in his own dramatic phrase, “the moon was high,” he switched to Ditchley, near Oxford. There were three stately rooms on the ground floor of this seventeenth-century mansion equipped with all the electronics needed to conduct war from a distance. “Wherever he was, there was the battle front,” said Stephenson. “Churchill was always at the command post, firing off memos like bullets. Roosevelt wrapped himself in tranquillity at regular intervals. Churchill required little sleep. He’d start revving up as midnight approached. Roosevelt worked in concentrated periods throughout the day and was ready for bed by ten.”
Stephenson recalls one conference with Donovan in the Prime Minister’s bathroom. Churchill was draped in a large bath towel, which he discarded to dress, revealing himself as an outsize cherub. They were joined by General Alan Brooke, the Chief of Staff, and perched themselves along the edge of the tub and on the toilet while the War Lord fought with a shirt that refused to join at the neck. He plodded up and down the room like a giant Humpty Dumpty and delivered his opinion on how Donovan might use his neutrality to get into a Nazi-run part of Europe to stir up a diversion. Stephenson reminded him that this should be discussed first with the President. The remonstrance was meekly accepted. “I’ve got it!” cried Churchill, succeeding at last in holding the shirt together with a bowtie. They dined amiably on plovers’ eggs, chicken pie, and chocolate pudding, with champagne, port, and brandy, and with whiskies to top things off. Donovan noted that Churchill heeded those who stood up to him and held in contempt those who felt intimidated by personal friendship. “War is a business of terrible pressures and persons who take part in it must fail if they are not strong enough to withstand them,” Churchill had written in The World Crisis, and he continued to dispense with anyone who broke under the strain of his own pressure.
The President’s style was more relaxed, spiced with good humor, and his conduct “never less than heroic,” Stephenson told Churchill, who was growing more impatient by the day for a first meeting with Roosevelt. Stephenson described that moment when Roosevelt left his bedroom to begin the day’s business: “Signal bells ring. Aides stand back. He sails by, chin up, cigaret holder tilted high, radiating confidence and energy. Yet he sits in an uncomfortable wheelchair without cushions or armrests, and depends upon a Negro valet to push him along at a good pace, followed by Secret Service men with wire baskets of papers.”
Churchill confided in a letter to Field Marshal J. C. Smuts, then Prime Minister of South Africa: “I do not think it would be any use to make a personal appeal to Roosevelt at this juncture to enter the war. . . . We must not underrate his constitutional difficulties. He may take action as Chief Executive, but only Congress can declare war. He went so far as to say to me, ‘I may never declare war; I may make war. . . .’ Public opinion in the United States has advanced lately, but with Congress it is all a matter of counting heads. Naturally, if I saw any way of helping to lift this situation on to a higher plane I would do so.”
A graphic account of how Stephenson and BSC operated in this sensitive period was given by one of his staff. Roald Dahl was introduced into the Roosevelt family circle. A tall young man, he had been badly injured as a fighter pilot and was first sent to Washington as a British air attaché. The prospect of going back to peacetime conditions appalled him. “I said to the Under-Secretary for Air ‘O no, sir, please, sir—anything but that, sir!’ But he said it was an order, the job was jolly important. I found it was a most ungodly unimportant job. I’d just come from the war. People were getting killed. I had been flying around, seeing horrible things. Now, almost instantly, I found myself in the middle of a pre-war cocktail mob in America. I had to dress up in ghastly gold braid and tassles. The result was, I became rather outspoken and brash. The senior people decided I wasn’t a very good fellow to have around. An RAF Air Chief Marshal there arranged that I get the sack and be sent home to England.”
Dahl was, in effect, a misplaced Battle of Britain pilot. He could hardly help make the comparison between his comrades still fighting desperately to blunt the renewed German bomber offensive and the “whiskey warriors” in Washington. But his failure as a diplomat was his strength, too. Americans who considered that Britain was playing at war (strengthened in that impression by the more unctuous representatives sent out from London because they were of little use elsewhere) found Dahl more to their liking. They talked to him frankly about how they would invigorate the British war effort if allowed to cut through red tape; and before he left, his reputation as an outspoken voice for the ordinary British fighting man had reached Stephenson. “He sent word: ‘Go home, you’ll be contacted, and you’ll come back for me.’ So I went to London as a squadron leader and I was back in a week as a wing commander. I went to a party, and at the other end of the room was the Air Chief Marshal who’d kicked me out. He strode across and said, ‘What the hell are you doing here?’
“I said, ‘I’m afraid, sir, you’ll have to ask Bill Stephenson.’ And he went even darker purple and walked away. It showed Stephenson’s power. The Air Chief Marshal was struck absolutely dumb. Couldn’t say a word. Couldn’t do a thing about it.”
Eleanor Roosevelt had been reading The Gremlins, one of Dahl’s many successful children’s books, to her grandchildren. When she heard that the author was in Washington, she invited him to dinner with the President.
“I was working entirely for Bill Stephenson then,” Dahl later said. “My job was to try and oil the wheels between the British and the Americans. After that first dinner with the President, I used to go out to Hyde Park at weekends. There were always Roosevelts there, and people like Henry Morgenthau. I was able to ask pointed questions and get equally pointed replies because, theoretically, I was a nobody.
“For instance, there might be some argument officially between London and Washington about future operations. I could ask FDR over lunch what he thought, and he could tell me quite openly, far more than he could say in a formal way. Bleeding this information on the highest level from the Americans was not for nefarious purposes, but for the war effort. That’s why Bill planted fellows like us.”
Roosevelt knew that the young RAF officer was yet another informal channel to Stephenson. It was part of the game never to make formal acknowledgment of this. “I’d walk into FDR’s little side room on a Sunday morning in Hyde Park and he’d be making Martinis, as he always did. And I would say ‘Good morning, Mr. President’ and we’d pass the time of day. He treated me as just a friend of Eleanor. And he’d say, naïvely, as if I was nobody much and he was making idle gossip, ‘I had an interesting communication from Winston today. . . .’ ”
In this way, questions were posed and answered that, officially raised, might cause trouble. None doubted the absolute security of Stephenson’s communications. They were, as Donovan was to say, the only communications for a time that were as leakproof as human endeavor could make them. It was for this reason that Donovan himself played the game and became in his turn a man “put in place” by the unseen coordinator of intelligence in New York, knowing that the President himself approved.
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Big as the INTREPID network in Manhattan had grown by 1941, Stephenson needed satellite bases to support his operations and, in an emergency, to which he could retreat. At least one had to be controllable from London. The choice fell upon islands scattered in the Atlantic and the Caribbean. The handiest was Bermuda. In the front line of the critical war at sea, the Bermuda Station became an extension of BSC. Flying there from New York, one sensed a promise of entry into enemy lines.
Years later, Ian Fleming wove Bermuda into the James Bond novels, where it obviously belonged. After Fleming died, a book, John Pearson’s 007-James Bond: The Authorized Biography, serialized in the London Sunday Telegraph in 1974, claimed Commander Bond really did exist and was turned into fiction to deceive his enemies. The alleged Bond was “unmasked” in one of Bermuda’s oldest and poshest hotels, the
Hamilton Princess, where he was said to occupy a private suite belonging to Sir William Stephenson, his chief. The book became a lively topic of talk in the hotel’s Gazebo Bar, where one wall consists of a giant fish tank reminiscent of the glass wall that separated 007 from Dr. No’s sharks. Tourists inquired about the private elevator to Stephenson’s penthouse and watched for the gold-plated Cadillac in which he was said to glide. It was true that the name INTREPID BERMUDA was registered with cable companies around the world; Stephenson kept the code name Churchill gave him, and Bermuda was indeed where Stephenson lived—but modestly. Otherwise this entirely fictitious story fell short of a much more tantalizing reality. Bermuda had once been a center for intense intelligence operations, and the Hamilton Princess did once buzz with Allied secret agents.
The offshore island intercepted postal, telegraph, and radio traffic between the Western Hemisphere and enemy-occupied Europe. It was an exotic satellite of the ULTRA establishment at Bletchley. Under the pink colonial-style Princess Hotel, 1,200 British experts worked in dungeonlike cellars, unknown to the American public. The growth of these facilities had been forced by the official ban, at the outbreak of Britain’s war, on co-operation between the FBI and British intelligence. Within months, Hoover was beginning to benefit from Bermuda’s study of clandestine radio stations serving Axis espionage.
The men and women at “Bletchley-in-the-Tropics” became almost as skilled in reading orders to Nazi secret-warfare units as the ULTRA teams. During the ups and downs of FBI relations with BSC, Hoover was always mindful of this early assistance and the probability that operations would continually improve. He was also aware that if cooperation broke down, Stephenson had this large island organization to fall back on from New York. He knew enough about the Bermuda operation to believe that he might need it more than BSC needed him. Moreover, Roosevelt had told the FBI that overseas communications were to be nudged through the British screen established on these offshore islands.
A Man Called Intrepid Page 21