A Man Called Intrepid

by William Stevenson

  As business grew, new quarters were sought in North America. Make-up artists, wardrobe mistresses, magicians, and comedians began to trek to New York or followed the Korda brothers to Camp X. One recruit was the husband of actress Constance Cummings. “I was given a code name and a phone number to call when I reached New York. By the time I reached New York I remembered the number but forgot my name. I dialed the number and then my mind went blank. There was an ugly pause. I said, ‘Half a minute, I’ll try to think.’ Eventually the girl at the other end said, ‘Well, never mind, because I know who you are anyway.’ ” He was Benn Levy, the playwright.

  Even the pilots who flew some of these exotic creatures had the smell of grease paint on them. A captain ferrying planes through Montreal was Hughie Green, who had toured the music halls at the age of thirteen with his own road show and shared star billing in prewar movies with Freddie Bartholomew, and who would become one of Britain’s best-known television personalities in the 1970s. As a young pilot attached to the Royal Canadian Air Force, he recognized some of his bomb-bay and gun-turret passengers despite their padded overalls and helmets. When he saw one of his old film producers, it was difficult pretending they had never met—especially someone like Carol Reed, who starred him when he was fifteen in his first movie, Mr. Midshipman Easy. It was pretty bizarre. A few years earlier, Green might have done almost anything to catch the attention of these movie moguls. Now he was the pipsqueak pilot taking their lives in his hands and they couldn’t even admit knowing him, ex-star or not.

  Noel Coward was sent to join Stephenson in New York after the French debacle. “I was awfully bewildered,” he later said. “I thought it would be more Mata Hari—and then I told myself, ‘Well, hardly that. I couldn’t wear a jewel in my navel, which I believe she was given to doing.’

  “I’d had a confusing talk with Winston Churchill before I left. He knew I’d done something in France for intelligence but he couldn’t get it in his head that what I wanted was to use my intelligence—I kept saying, ‘Winston, they want to use my creative intelligence.’ But he’d got it in his head that Bill Stephenson was aiming for Mata Hari and he kept saying, ‘No use, you’d be no good—too well known.’

  “I said, ‘That’s the whole point. I’ll be so well known nobody will think I’m doing anything special.’ And Winston just kept shaking his head and insisting I’d never make a spy.

  “Eventually I got it through to him—I was fluent in Spanish and could do the whole of Latin America, where the Germans were very active preparing their campaigns in the United States. And so that’s where I started.”

  Coward’s career in secret intelligence must have been one of the best-kept secrets involving internationally known entertainers who reported to Stephenson and then were shot off into the unknown. He was knighted years later. As Sir Noel, on the eve of his death in 1973, he discussed that career for the first time and conveyed the flavor, the mixture of mock bravado, self-deriding, and understatement that characterized these talented amateurs.*

  “My celebrity value was wonderful cover,” he recalled. “So many career intelligence officers went around looking terribly mysterious—long black boots and sinister smiles. Nobody ever issued me with a false beard. And invisible ink—? I can’t read my own writing when it’s supposed to be visible. My disguise was my own reputation as a bit of an idiot.

  “In the United States I just talked about Britain under bombing. Some of those senators—one or two who thought we were finished—did accuse me of being a spy. I said I would hardly be spying on my own people. It didn’t make sense. But then in Latin America, I reported directly to Bill Stephenson while I sang my songs and spoke nicely to my hosts. A whole lot of tiny things are the stuff of intelligence. Smallest details fit into a big picture, and sometimes you repeat things and wonder if it’s worth it. I traveled wherever I could go—Asia and what was left of Europe. And I ridiculed the whole business of intelligence, because that’s the best way to get on with it—ridicule and belittle ourselves, and say what an awful lot of duffers we are, can’t get the facts straight, all that sort of thing.

  “Americans are my own people, speak the same language, believe in the same things. But I don’t think they ever understood my own approach. I learned a lot from their technical people, became expert, could have made a career in espionage, except my life’s been full enough of intrigue as it is. All that technical expertise isn’t worth a damn if you don’t get the best out of people, though. Winston did understand that—and so did Roosevelt. I’d have done anything for Roosevelt. As for Bill Stephenson, if he was against you, there wasn’t a chance for you—but if he was for you, Little Bill was for you until the last shot! These were leaders who saw the strength in ordinary people. Camp X did that—took ordinary people and showed them how to break tyranny.”

  Noel Coward was one of hundreds who had direct access to influential figures in “neutral” countries. Stephenson picked them to collect opinions, catch a whiff of political bonfires, plant rumors, and help fit the pieces into a mosaic of undercover Nazi activities. But the main thrust of operations was directed toward building popular resistance to the oppressors in occupied countries. “The wars of people will be more terrible than those of kings,” Churchill had warned the House of Commons way back in 1901. His premonition shaped itself forty years later.

  * In these taped conversations with the author, Noel Coward anticipated his approaching death and wished to put his recollections on record.

  26

  “The people’s wars began in Yugoslavia. Tito’s Communist armies fought guerrilla campaigns and humiliated what Churchill called ‘the dulled, drilled, docile, brutish masses of the Hun soldiery plodding on like a swarm of crawling locusts.’ Hitler thought himself Barbarossa, the great medieval conqueror. When he named his invasion of Russia BARBAROSSA, we calculated that his superstitious mind could be unbalanced by its failure,” said Stephenson.

  He was commenting on what Churchill called “the single outstanding intelligence coup of any war.” This was to create the diversion that delayed BARBAROSSA, trapped the German armies, and brought them defeat.

  The BSC Papers record: “Mr. Churchill had requested Mr. Donovan to visit the Balkans in Britain’s behalf. The general pattern of future German aggression was already apparent, and what Mr. Churchill wanted was some upset in Hitler’s timetable to delay his contemplated attack on Russia. In this way, it was thought Hitler would face defeat.”

  When President Roosevelt sunned himself in the Caribbean that winter of 1940, observers feared he had forgotten the war. He had in fact dispatched Big Bill Donovan with Little Bill Stephenson to Bermuda. Only Donovan was seen to go. He flew from Baltimore under the name of Donald Williams. Yet his bags bore the telltale initials WJD, so that within hours the New York newspapers bore headlines such as AMERICA’S SECRET ENVOY FLIES ON MYSTERY MISSION. Then he vanished for two weeks, delayed by diplomatically bad weather in Bermuda. While he was there, ULTRA’S recovery of Hitler’s fateful Directive 21: Operation Barbarossa was submitted for analysis. It confirmed what had been anticipated for a long time. Germany would turn east against Russia.

  Donovan resumed his journey and the intended security leaks began again. “Don’t make me mysterious or important,” he pleaded with reporters in London. Naturally, this had the effect of redoubling the speculation. It diverted attention from the little man never far away, springy of step, looking a great deal younger than middle age, a small man who said nothing and escaped through the port security net by a side exit, helped by two Scotland Yard men.

  Donovan was teased by the newsmen for carrying false identity papers and leaving his initials on his bags. “FDR’s enigmatic agent” wasn’t so very enigmatic after all. Arthur Krock, of the New York Times, aired a State Department gripe: “Donovan is the kind of foreign emissary who causes difficulties for the foreign service.” The columnist Westbrook Pegler sneered that “our Colonel Wild Bill Donovan seems to have a 50-ticket Pan-Am
Clipper voucher to be used up within a certain time or he will forfeit the rest.”

  The Germans learned through their New York press-clipping service that the presidential agent was on another mission. They had a code name for him at the Intelligence Overseas Message Center, near Hamburg, which had him tagged as Roosevelt’s eyes and ears since 1937, after journeys he had made abroad. In a rare exercise of humor, they called him MARY. Their jargon for a “tail” trained to follow suspects was Lamm. From now on, everywhere that MARY went, Lamm was sure to go. He went, they followed, and Hitler was led into a trap.

  Donovan scattered clues right and left; Stephenson left no clues at all. When Little Bill later reported to Churchill, he received a wintry smile. “You have all the fun, Bill.”

  The real fun, if that was a fair description, was Donovan’s. He never revealed this particular bit of deliberate clowning. Later, he told the story of his own initialed bags as a warning to young U.S. intelligence agents in training, and did not confess that the mistake had been calculated.

  This first combined Anglo-American intelligence operation began a year before the United States entered the war. Donovan’s overt mission was to seek proof for Roosevelt that Britain could survive long enough to benefit from more aid. This required a visit to the Middle East, where the threat to British naval power was acute.

  When Charles Lindbergh told an America First rally that Britain’s shipping losses placed her in danger of starvation, that her cities were “devastated by bombing,” that her situation was desperate, and that America should have a separate destiny from Europe’s, the papers reported that “he got furious applause.” The President’s strategy now was to demonstrate that America’s first line of defense was overseas. Donovan’s accepted purpose was to confirm the practical value of strengthening the British in the Mediterranean. This mission was the cover for an enterprise more delicate.

  While Donovan talked with Churchill about “upsetting Hitler’s timetable for the attack on Russia,” Stephenson prepared a secondary cover story that would also explain Donovan’s use of British facilities and his appearance at the eastern end of the Mediterranean. It was an investigation of the kind Donovan had conducted often for the President. It was opportune for disguising, even to service intelligence organizations, his political role.

  Stephenson dictated a signal. It went through British Naval Intelligence channels, never hinting at the deeper secret. His message read:

  FROM BRITISH DIRECTOR OF NAVAL INTELLIGENCE TO COMMANDER-IN-CHIEF MEDITERRANEAN FLEET . . . DONOVAN GOT US BOMBSIGHTS CMA DESTROYERS AND OTHER URGENT REQUIREMENTS. . . . WE CAN ACHIEVE MORE THROUGH DONOVAN THAN ANY OTHER INDIVIDUAL. . . . HE CAN BE TRUSTED TO REPRESENT OUR NEEDS IN THE RIGHT QUARTERS AND IN THE RIGHT WAY IN USA. . . .

  This guaranteed help of a practical kind. Donovan would need it when he moved around the war zones. There were none of the facilities taken for granted today: no large, self-contained U.S. fleet within which Donovan could disappear, no fast forms of transport by which passage could be arranged at a moment’s notice. He would have to depend on British bombers and base facilities. The message was just enough to explain an important American civilian’s requirements to the operational intelligence echelons who would be nervous about a neutral moving freely through their most secret camps.

  Churchill, meanwhile, had been following the redeployment of Panzer divisions. The movement orders for supply units and dive-bomber squadrons convinced him that Hitler would move in May 1941. The British Joint Intelligence Committee and the chiefs of the Imperial General Staff held firmly to the view that Hitler would not be so reckless as to attack Russia before polishing off Britain. Where all agreed was in regarding a Russo-German war as inevitable, in view of Hitler’s ideological view of Bolshevism as the final enemy.

  All evidence gathered by the INTREPID apparatus led to Churchill’s conclusion. On this issue, Stephenson and he were in complete agreement. They knew Hitler planned to invade Russia. They had the text of what Hitler called “the greatest deception plan in the history of war” to disguise his preparations. But they could not convince Stalin. Was it because Hitler’s deception plan was working? It seemed so. In that case, it was necessary to save Stalin from his own folly.

  Churchill threw himself into this task unreservedly, although Russia would later allege that the Allies deliberately pushed Germany into conflict with the Soviet Union. “If Hitler invaded Hell, I should make at least a friendly reference to the Devil in the House of Commons” was Churchill’s philosophy. His prime concern was to win time for the Russians to recover from the first surprise attack. The place to do it was the Balkans. Someone was needed who could speak with authority to the leaders of nations who were tempted by Hitler’s most recent gambit, a tripartite pact that would bring East Europe into line with Germany. Donovan was the right man. His actual objective was Belgrade. There, Yugoslav rebels might draw German strength into a quagmire. It seemed a forlorn hope. Marshal Tito, the Communist Partisan leader, was to write later: “Hitler attempted to gain control over the south-eastern part of Europe with the help of pro-fascist regimes in the Balkans and thereby to protect the southern flank of his forces before they went into battle against the Soviet Union. In November 1940 the Tri-Partite Pact was joined by Hungary and Rumania, and later Bulgaria. Thus we found ourselves surrounded.” Tito was then underground and his name unknown. The Yugoslav monarchy still ruled.

  The German plans had been known through ULTRA for some time. The British were in the infuriating position of being unable to disclose sources, and therefore they could not do more than warn Stalin and make whatever moves they could in the Balkans. Anything that revealed ULTRA meant abandoning the critical advantage it gave, and would continue to give, British forces in the field and in secret. The full recovery of Hitler’s directive on BARBAROSSA, issued on December 18, 1940, could not be disclosed to the Russians or to the leaders of the threatened countries in southeast Europe.

  Hitler was preparing a complete strategic surprise. Stalin was unwittingly a collaborator. If the Russians were to be taken this way, then, Churchill argued, let the Nazi blitzkrieg bog down in the same Russian snows that defeated Napoleon. As it turned out, Donovan’s intervention succeeded. Hitler was forced to postpone the attack until the very anniversary of Napoleon’s own catastrophic invasion—to the very day and hour—an ill omen that nobody, least of all Hitler, should have ignored.

  President Roosevelt had advance warning of Hitler’s plans for invading Russia from an unexpected quarter. The Führer’s companion between the wars had become the German Consul-General in San Francisco, and he informed British contacts there of the Nazi strategy. He was Captain Fritz Wiedemann. According to the BSC Papers, Wiedemann “was Hitler’s commanding officer at the end of the first world war and became his right-hand man until the outbreak of the second.” In April 1940, he had approached fellow diplomats in San Francisco with a request to be allowed to go to Britain. He claimed to be disenchanted with Hitler and opposed to Nazism.

  But Wiedemann’s record was not reassuring. Hitler had sent him to the United States in 1937 to report on the possibilities of spreading Nazi influence. His appointment to the consular post in San Francisco placed him in a good position to co-ordinate Nazi intelligence with that of the Japanese in the Pacific. The FBI had copies of his reports to Berlin in which he described Roosevelt as the Führer’s “most dangerous opponent.”

  This complex man had, however, provided the British Joint Intelligence Committee with a summary of the conference on August 22, 1939, at which Hitler explained “the historical necessity to conquer Russia.” How Wiedemann obtained this was almost as much of a mystery as his reasons for collaboration. The FBI leaned to the view that he was deliberately feeding reports to the West of Hitler’s anti-Bolshevik policy in order to make Nazism palatable to those who feared Russia. But if he was actually still Hitler’s stooge, why should he talk about plots to overthrow Hitler?

  The FBI’s puzzlem
ent was increased after a self-styled “princess” joined Wiedemann in San Francisco. She called herself Her Serene Highness the Princess Hohenlohe-Waldenberg-Schillingsfurst, but she was in reality Steffi Richter, daughter of an undistinguished Viennese lawyer. She had been living in London until she was publicly denounced as “a notorious member of the Hitler spy-ring.” Then she moved to the United States and became Wiedemann’s mistress. When British agents in San Francisco reported that Wiedemann was frightened of returning to Germany, the FBI confirmed that he seemed to be at swords’ points with good Nazis, but expressed misgivings about his alliance with this notoriously pro-Nazi “princess.”

  Something mind-boggling then happened. The man who had played a role similar to that of Stephenson in World War I, Sir William Wiseman, was asked to make discreet contact with this possible defector in October 1940. Negotiations were conducted by the Princess in the Mark Hopkins Hotel, Room 1026, a number now embalmed in FBI files along with transcripts of the conversations, recorded with Wiseman’s knowledge. Her Serene Highness suggested that she should go to Berlin to persuade Hitler that lasting peace could be achieved through an alignment with England.

  Then the State Department shook everyone by requesting Wiseman’s deportation to Britain for abuse of American neutrality. There was a long incredulous silence on the British side. Wiseman had played an essential role as a trouble shooter in Anglo-American relations during World War I. Now, suddenly, Washington threatened to deport this top-level personal agent for abusing U.S. neutrality to negotiate with a belligerent.

  Stephenson appealed to J. Edgar Hoover, who testified that the German Consul-General’s meetings with the British were made with FBI knowledge and approval. This intensified State Department hostility. But the friction was more than mere bureaucratic discomfort. Hitler’s former adjutant, in conversation with Wiseman, had specifically named members of influential Anglo-American groups who did not think Hitler was too bad if he could get rid of the Jews and destroy Communist Russia.