It occasionally happened that a Washington bureaucrat inquired about how exactly the British proposed to cover their borrowings. Stephenson had prepared for just such an inquiry by drawing up detailed and convincing plans for seizing Martinique with the help of agents he had placed there. Whenever the possibility of such an operation was mentioned, the State Department raised violent objections, remembering De Gaulle’s seizure of the islands of St. Pierre and Miquelon and the subsequent furore. Then BSC gracefully withdrew, a fresh loan in hand. “It was,” commented a BSC historian, “an exercise in constructive blackmail.”
* Churchill has been accused of employing the devices of suggestio falsi and suppressio veri in his history of World War II to enhance his own standing. On the contrary, he concealed information that might redound to his own credit in order to protect those who might be considered his enemies. He carefully omitted reference to Lord Halifax’s near-sabotage of the war effort, which became apparent to the public many years later with the opening of the Public Record Office archive. The BSC Papers and Stephenson’s files and recollections make clear the size of the appeasement movement in Britain. Halifax replaced Lothian as ambassador to the United States in 1941, and gave Stephenson his full support once the die was cast.
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The Martinique maneuvers were helped by CYNTHIA’s service of Vichy plain-text telegrams. Captain Charles Brousse, her source, must have been in an agony of indecision. Having worked with Anglo-French Air Intelligence before France collapsed, and being an admirer of British resistance, his emotions were not hard to imagine when he handled Telegram 4093, of June 15, 1941, from Admiral François Darlan, Vichy’s Minister of Marine. The telegram required details of repairs performed on British ships in U.S. dockyards; it was one of hundreds inspired by German intelligence.
Ambassador Henry-Haye was in a position to sink great battleships. Although in peacetime he might have risen no higher than a market-town mayor rowing across le petit lac for the annual gala, he exercised his powers of betrayal almost as gleefully as Darlan, who passed on information from Embassy sources in Washington to the Germans and was more passionately anti-British than most collaborators. Telegrams 1236–1237 from Vichy’s embassy in Washington disclosed that the British carrier Illustrious was at Norfolk for repair, the battleship Repulse at Philadelphia, and the cruiser Malaya at New York. The subsequent sinking of the Repulse was, said Churchill, “the most direct shock I ever suffered.”
The telegrams must have seemed revolting enough at the time to Captain Brousse. His tortured conscience displayed to Stephenson the kind of psychological disturbance that would soon shake all Europe despite the dictators’ controls. Was Brousse a traitor for resisting Vichy’s requests for information? He suffered from the same confusions of loyalty that perplexed the French garrison in Martinique. Fortress Europe was full of such people, reconsidering their loyalties.
Henry-Haye decided in July to dispense with the services of Captain Brousse as press officer but keep him as an aide paid from secret funds. This meant a cut in Brousse’s salary. It was a good time for CYNTHIA to suggest she might find ways to augment it. Brousse agreed to take a weekly fee for daily reports on events inside Vichy’s embassy. This produced a multitude of new leads. BSC in New York found itself with more investigations than it could manage. One example indicates the sudden snowballing of work.
Vichy’s funds were closely watched, since they worked for Nazi purposes. The Embassy’s financial staff and other commercial posts in the United States were outlets for money to pay agents, and inlets for economic intelligence useful to Berlin. In the French Consulate in New York, the financial attaché was particularly active. His secretary was a bright young woman, married but not without outside interests. Because she is still alive, still married, and with a large family, she remains Mme. Cadet, the name used in the BSC Papers. A BSC agent was given the agreeable task of having an affair with her. Soon she was bringing him copies of correspondence that confirmed that Nazi sympathizers existed in Quebec. This was explosive stuff in Canada, where the federal government was touchy about its independence of Britain—and often went to ludicrous lengths to demonstrate it. A direct appeal to the government in Ottawa was likely to be neglected. Like Roosevelt, the Canadian Prime Minister had to put national unity first. A separate section of BSC was created to work with Canadian security on the threat posed by this fifth column. Mme. Cadet was later transferred to Washington, where she provided another BSC agent with documents, rubber stamps, and blank passports, invaluable in “papering” agents. She saved many lives by disclosing that secret marks were made on Vichy visas, indicating their validity and the degree of reliability of the holder. Station M’s forgery experts in Toronto were duly grateful.
CYNTHIA had now moved out of the Georgetown house into a room at the Wardman Park Hotel, where Brousse lived with his wife. “It made things tidier all around,” she wrote later. “Also, this was a period when the FBI were becoming altogether too curious about me. Quite unconsciously, because they knew nothing of my work for BSC, they could foul my lines. . . .”
She had to drop one of her contacts, the French-American controlling the Vichy Gestapo, Jean-Louis Musa; a warning had been passed along that Musa was already under the surveillance of the FBI. Hoover’s men knew nothing about CYNTHIA’s true role, and they might regard her as another Nazi agent.
Musa was being paid $300 a month plus $200 for expenses by the Vichy embassy—a lot of money in those days, though not a princely sum. His business activities were also primed by Nazi funds. A French BSC agent was put to work, equipped with an international-trading corporation in New York, a cramped office and a brass plaque, and an impressive file of correspondence, all of it painstakingly composed and counterfeited by Station M. An accidental encounter with Musa, a couple of drinks in a bar, a few indiscretions, and he was suddenly alert and interested in the prospect of a little private enterprise. The BSC man in a burst of “drunken” candor confided that he loathed Americans, loved Germans, and wished to hell he’d stayed in France to serve the new fascist union. Musa confessed himself pleased to hear these sentiments. In that case, said the BSC agent, would Musa like to go into business with him? He could provide an office and secretarial help—both scarce in New York. Musa agreed. It seemed an opportunity to enlarge his undercover activities.
Musa, vain as well as greedy, believed the BSC agent’s expressions of delight upon acquiring such a resourceful partner. Musa talked to him about Vichy; about the necessity to be realistic with regard to Hitler; about the importance of remembering he was a Frenchman. “After all,” said Musa, “I may be an American citizen but I am French at heart.” He was flattered but not surprised when this new friend declared that Musa had helped him straighten out his own thinking and that he would like to be in on spreading the Vichy gospel. Musa thus unknowingly recruited a BSC man into his camp, with results that were catastrophic for Musa. His office was bugged from top to bottom. His phone calls, correspondence, conversations, and contacts were under twenty-four-hour-a-day scrutiny—which, among other things, produced the details of a Vichy proposal to make use of St. Pierre.
It looked like a simple commercial enterprise. Western Union was to receive from the French government a long-term concession and sufficient ground in the French colony of St. Pierre to put up a radio station with transmitters powerful enough to reach anywhere in the world. Western Union’s 34,000 offices in the United States would be linked by cable with the station. This meant Western Union could offer a worldwide service without depending upon rival overseas-cable companies. However, it meant a great deal more to the Nazi controllers of Europe, as Stephenson soon explained to Vincent Astor, who had been appointed a special BSC liaison officer by President Roosevelt. His special value was that the family’s business interests extended into fields that provided the British with covert aid and cover. They held a controlling interest, for instance, in the St. Regis Hotel, which became the Manhattan rendezvous for
Stephenson and distinguished figures like Albert Einstein, whose connection with British intelligence at that time, however peripheral, could not be advertised. (There was a certain irony in the role Lady Astor, on the British side of the family, had played as a leader of the Cliveden Set of appeasement-minded influences. Vincent directed certain British antisabotage operations and later became a captain in the U.S. Navy.)
Vincent Astor was also a director of Western Union, and in April 1941, he recommended that the seemingly harmless deal be called off. His fellow directors knew he was a confidential adviser to Roosevelt and accepted assurances that the decision was a matter of national security. The decision cost Western Union an opportunity to expand its services and greatly expand its profits. But Stephenson had produced evidence that the St. Pierre station would be used by Nazi agents to communicate through Vichy without censorship. Musa’s own correspondence betrayed the real purpose of the station.
Musa tried to buy into the U.S. manufacture of the Bren submachine gun with German money. He bought forged passports and visas for German agents. He hired a defector from the British Purchasing Commission, Paul Seguin, to run a pro-Nazi newssheet. He set up the Vichy French news service, Havas, which distributed thinly disguised Nazi propaganda throughout the Western Hemisphere. His efforts to influence the media reached as far as Montreal, where French-language newspapers were discouraged from hiring refugee French journalists with anti-Nazi views. He was an operator whose amorality happened to find a satisfactory sponsor in fascism. He knew how to get around currency controls. He did a little pimping on the side and found himself working with French girls willing to pass along information useful to Vichy’s economic-intelligence unit. He had a scheme for chartering ships that would carry refugees from Europe to Mexico, returning to ports in Unoccupied France with cargoes that could not be shipped directly to Germany because of trade controls. The trouble with Musa was that he proved to be too clever by half.
Armed with evidence against him, and copies of several thousand incriminating documents on Vichy operations from other sources, Stephenson put an argument to Churchill that summer of 1941. Surely it was time to expose Vichy’s perfidy? American rearmament was still halfhearted. The country was badly prepared for war, and likely to become FDR’s Arsenal of Democracy too late. War-aid charities gave well-meaning Americans a comfortable sense of doing something while doing nothing. The war production program was in chaos. The U.S. armed forces lacked equipment. The troops felt futile. If the Vichy embassy was revealed as the cover for large-scale Nazi efforts to subvert the United States, Americans might be shocked into a more warlike mood.
This was fine with Churchill, then sharpening his wits for the Atlantic Charter conference with the President. The Prime Minister thought “it might be well if the President saw photostats and transcripts of documents in the case.” Roosevelt duly got them. He told Stephenson: “Publicity should help our people see the danger in our midst.”
Stephenson’s Political-Warfare Division was preparing the publicity campaign when the Free French created a diversion. General Charles de Gaulle had been in Cairo during the Roosevelt-Churchill meeting at sea. His pride wounded, and suspicious of decisions being made behind his back, he apparently concluded that the British were about to barter away French possessions. He threatened to withdraw his Free French fighting forces from British command. Once again the French islands along America’s eastern seaboard stirred controversy.
A week after Roosevelt returned from signing the Atlantic Charter with Churchill, British intelligence reports on Vichy France were leaked to the New York Herald Tribune and distributed through the BSC-subsidized Overseas News Agency (originally a branch of the Jewish Telegraph Agency), which serviced forty-five U.S. newspapers and a significant percentage of the U.S. ethnic press.* The series of exposés accused the French Embassy in Washington of conspiracies against the nation’s well-being and in support of Nazi Germany’s ambitions. Although this was a well-orchestrated propaganda campaign, the facts were indisputable. They stirred a nationwide furore, VICHY AGENTS SOUGHT PLANS ran a September 4, 1941 headline in the Herald Tribune. TRIED TO GET BLUE-PRINTS OF WEAPON DEFENDING BRITAIN FROM INVASION. Ambassador Henry-Haye was stung into charging that the whole affair was a “de Gaullist-Jewish-FBI-British intrigue.”
If events in the Pacific had not been approaching their climax at Pearl Harbor, this might have proved to be the incident that Roosevelt told Churchill he was seeking “to get America into the war openly.”
* The Overseas News Agency, after Stephenson’s negotiations with the New York owners in April 1941, dispatched fifteen newly recruited correspondents to key foreign posts. They were all BSC agents. Another agency, Overseas Features, set up office in Rockefeller Center, complete with ticker tapes. Britanova, another news agency covering these operations, disseminated stories planted by BSC in U.S. newspapers. Czech, Italian, Polish, and Spanish foreign-language bureaus supplied news to the dozens of foreign-language newspapers published in the United States and South America. These overseas bureaus, while providing cover for BSC agents, were instructed to file for publication.
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CYNTHIA continued her work. The exposés did not cause any break in Washington’s diplomatic relations with Vichy. Jean-Louis Musa was arrested by the FBI for failing to register as a foreign agent. The French Ambassador curtailed secret-police activities. Captain Charles Brousse continued to confide to his mistress the secrets of the Embassy.
The climate of American public opinion had been changed dramatically by Pearl Harbor, but the Vichy French survived in Washington. CYNTHIA was told to fly to New York in March of 1942. She checked into the Ritz-Carlton Hotel, then on Madison Avenue, and was unpacking when someone knocked on the door. It was HOWARD. His request was brief: Can you get the new Vichy French naval cryptosystem?
It seemed a staggering challenge: steal ciphers, code books, and superenciphering equipment from an embassy safe in a code room to which only the chief cipher officer and his assistant had access. The Vichy Foreign Ministry’s orders were that the room be kept under guard night and day. Even if she broke through the security measures, somehow unlocked the code room, and finally cracked the safe, she would have to find a way of removing the bulky cipher books. It all seemed impossible. And surely the ciphers were not more important than preserving her ability to keep BSC informed on the daily traffic of telegrams to Vichy?
What CYNTHIA could not be told was that the ciphers seemed essential for the success of the plan for clearing North Africa of Axis forces in preparation for the assault on Europe. This meant intervention in French North Africa. To the British, this appeared as almost the only effective demonstration of military competence and resolve open to them in a period of disasters in every theater of the war.
She was aware of the possible moves the Nazis could make to complete their stranglehold on British marine life lines. The German Navy hoped to acquire U-boat bases in the Vichy ports of Casablanca and Dakar, on the West African coast, and to expand into the Indian Ocean through Vichy-controlled Madagascar, seriously considered by Hitler as a place to confine Europe’s Jews, before he decided to liquidate them instead. Finally, the Vichy French proposed to close the Mediterranean to democratic forces by a move through Spain. She was aware, too, of Churchill’s personal appeal to Roosevelt for help: “When I reflect how I have longed and prayed for the entry of the United States into the war, I find it difficult to realize how gravely our British affairs have deteriorated.” Her new assignment might lift a burden from the Prime Minister, whose man at the Foreign Office, Alexander Cadogan, had written Stephenson: “Poor old Winston, feeling deeply the present situation. . . . Outlook pretty bloody.”
CYNTHIA left New York with her new orders on March 10. Admiral Harold Stark, U.S. Chief of Naval Operations, had just swung his powerful support behind the proposed operation in North Africa, because French Navy forces loyal to Vichy, and secure in the French colonies there, could be neutralize
d. Here, thought Stark, was the key to the Middle East, “the loss of which would be much more serious to the United States than the loss of the Far East.”
CYNTHIA called Brousse when she arrived back in Washington. They met in her hotel room. She came straight to the point. “I want the naval ciphers.”
The French diplomat slumped into a chair. “It’s impossible.”
“Perhaps. You’ll have to try.”
“Me?” Brousse lifted his head.
“With my help.”
“But the only member of the Embassy with access to the code room is the chief cipher officer, old Benoit. He has the civil-service disease of loyalty in all circumstances.”
“Let me work on him.”
Brousse laughed. “On Benoit? He’s forgotten what it’s for. Even you could never excite him to forget his damned duty.”
She went, nonetheless, to visit the chief cipher officer at home. He talked like the patriotic Frenchmen typical of the times: Marshal Pétain was chief of state, no matter what wrongs were done by Laval. It was not Benoit’s job to judge policies or question superiors. Benoit was in the service of the government. Perhaps he was old-fashioned, but if governments could not depend upon total loyalty, where would it all end? In anarchy, without a doubt.
CYNTHIA nodded. She had a loyalty, too—to a principle of justice that transcended nationalism and narrow codes of discipline. She was not, she said, asking him to betray his country. On the contrary, she was appealing to his humanity. Good French patriots were dying every day fighting with the secret armies. Benoit listened courteously and then gave his answer: “The ciphers have been my responsibility. On principle, I cannot betray them. This is not a question of larger issues. My job is to protect Embassy secrets. I quarrel with the policies that the Embassy serves. But my first and only obligation is to myself as a man of honor. I cannot now give away what I protected before.”
A Man Called Intrepid Page 40