Donovan later described to a friend his terms for taking the job: “It is sufficient to say that I told the President that I did not want to do it and that I would only do it on three conditions: 1. That I would report only to him. 2. That his secret funds would be available. 3. That all the Departments of the government would be instructed to give me what I wanted.” Donovan, unconvincingly, wanted it understood that he had not reached out for the job; the President had reached out to him.
On July 14, nearly a month after FDR had picked Donovan as his intelligence chief, word went out to relevant federal agencies, announcing fuzzily, that Colonel William J. Donovan, as coordinator of information, would be “assembling and correlating information which may be useful in the formulation of basic plans for the defense of the nation.” The Office of the Coordinator of Information became the latest of 136 emergency agencies that FDR had created. News of Donovan’s appointment earned a third of a column on page 5 of The New York Times. Guesses by journalists as to what the coordinator’s duties actually meant ranged from espionage to controlling the gasoline supply. It seemed a thin start for a spy service, but as a colleague observed of Donovan, he had the “power to visualize an oak where he saw an acorn.” Despite their past political differences, the new coordinator fit a profile visible in many of the people surrounding FDR. Like Roosevelt, Donovan was a magnetic personality, full of charm, brimming with ideas and energy, possessed of an irrepressible optimism. Both men had faced acid tests of courage and prevailed—Roosevelt overcoming the crippling effects of polio, and Donovan displaying a bravery in combat that scoffed at death. The two men differed in politics, not in character. Bill Donovan was FDR’s kind of man.
On June 18, William Stephenson, the BSC chief, cabled London, “Donovan saw President today and after long discussion where in all points were agreed, he accepted appointment. He will be coordinator of all forms [of] intelligence including offensive operations … you can imagine how relieved I am after three months of battle and jockeying for position in Washington that our man is in such a position of importance to our efforts.” The jubilation reached even higher and prompted an astonishing claim. Major Desmond Morton, Churchill’s liaison officer with the British secret service, wrote after Donovan’s COI had been in existence for two months, “[A] most secret fact of which the Prime Minister is aware but not all other persons concerned, is that to all intents and purposes U.S. Security is being run for them at the President’s request by the British. A British officer [Stephenson] sits in Washington with Mr. Edgar Hoover and General [sic] Bill Donovan for this purpose and reports regularly to the President. It is of course essential that this fact should not be known in view of the furious uproar it would cause if known to the Isolationists.”
Who was this “Wild Bill” whom Roosevelt had made the country’s first spymaster? He had been born to first-generation Irish Catholic parents on New Year’s Day 1883 in Buffalo, New York, the first of nine children, of whom five survived to adulthood. Young Donovan was a natural athlete with a bookish bent. He began keeping notebooks, in one of which he copied a revealing passage attributed to Ralph Waldo Emerson: “He had read the inscription on the gates of Busyrane—‘Be bold’; and on the second gate—‘Be bold, be bold, and evermore be bold’; and then again had paused well at the third gate—‘But not too bold.’”
Donovan first enrolled in Niagara University because it was affiliated with a diocesan seminary, and he wanted to become a Dominican priest. At the end of his third year, after quarterbacking the football team, he decided that he lacked the calling for the priesthood and transferred to Columbia University to study law. He did not cut much of an academic swath, but won campus glory as the star quarterback for the Columbia Lions. Donovan scraped through law school with nary an A or a B. His single distinction outside sports was as a debater. He won the George William Curtis Medal for Public Speaking with a talk prophetically entitled “The Awakening of Japan.” Franklin Roosevelt had indeed been a law school classmate, but he and Donovan moved in separate social orbits.
After Columbia, Donovan returned to Buffalo and was soon asked to join one of the city’s leading firms, followed by an invitation to the exclusive Saturn Club. In 1912, hungry for adventure beyond the decorous walls of a law office, he organized a cavalry troop of forty-two socially prominent Buffalonians. The unit, christened the Silk Stocking Boys, was accepted into the National Guard, and his comrades elected Donovan their captain.
At age thirty, still a bachelor, he met Ruth Rumsey, a diminutive stunner, platinum blonde, slim, smart, and aristocratic from head to toe. They were married on July 14, 1914. The descendant of starving Irish peasants had made it. He was a leader in his profession, belonged to the best clubs, and had married into the town’s Protestant elite, though he insisted that he and Ruth must marry and rear their children in the Catholic faith.
In 1916, Donovan’s Silk Stocking Boys were called to active duty under General John “Black Jack” Pershing to help capture the Mexican revolutionary General Pancho Villa. The expedition never caught Villa, but Donovan had the time of his life, driving his men and himself mercilessly, sitting around the campfire at night, singing and swapping tales. The Silk Stocking Boys returned to Buffalo on March 12, 1917. Three days later, Donovan had to tell a disbelieving Ruth that he was off again. He had orders to report to the New York National Guard armory in Manhattan. Less than a month later, on April 6, the United States entered the war in Europe, and Donovan was given command of the 1st Battalion of the 69th Infantry Regiment, the fabled “Fighting Irish.”
The 69th Regiment sailed for France on October 24, 1917, and, on its arrival, went directly to the front. The bloodying of the regiment was swift. At the Battle of Ourcq, in Donovan’s battalion of approximately 1,000 men, 600 were killed, wounded, or missing. Donovan appeared to lack a fear nerve, exposing himself repeatedly to enemy fire in what seemed to his men a contempt for death. He was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross at Ourcq, the nation’s second highest medal.
The regiment’s chaplain, Father Francis P. Duffy, recalled how after the battle he heard one of Donovan’s men exclaim, “Wild Bill is a son of a b——, but he’s a game one.” Thus, according to Father Duffy, “Wild Bill” Donovan was born. An earlier version, however, had it that while Donovan was chasing Pancho Villa, his men complained about the exhausting pace he set. “Look at me,” their commander taunted them, “I’m not even panting. If I can take it, why can’t you?” From one of the tired troopers came a plaintive cry, “We ain’t as wild as you are, Bill,” and the name apparently stuck.
On October 19, in the Meuse-Argonne sector, Donovan’s battalion was ordered to advance against a strong German position. Wearing dress uniform, waving his pistol aloft, Donovan rose from a shell hole to lead the attack. He fell, seriously wounded, the nerves and blood vessels in his knee shattered. He refused to be taken from the field. Soon, gray-clad figures of German infantry emerged from the smoke of an artillery barrage. The American line began to sag. Donovan shouted to his men, “They can’t get me and they can’t get you.” Inspired, the Fighting Irish rose up and repulsed the Germans. For this performance, Wild Bill was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor.
After the war Donovan returned to Buffalo and the law. He was first drawn into public service as U.S. attorney for the Western District of New York in 1922. In that era of Prohibition, he authorized a raid on his own Saturn Club, outraging his fellow members who denounced him as “a common mick” and who expected him to resign from the club. “The law is the law,” he told reporters, “and I have sworn to uphold it.” And, seeing no reason to deprive himself of the pleasures of membership, he remained in the Saturn Club.
In 1924, Donovan was promoted to assistant attorney general and went to Washington, where he became nominal boss of the rising J. Edgar Hoover, a relationship that fit poorly from day one. It was during this period that Donovan experienced the rebuff that FDR later recalled, the refusal of President Herbert
Hoover, after making him acting attorney general, to appoint Wild Bill to the full post.
In 1932 politics beguiled him, and Donovan won the Republican nomination as candidate for governor of New York. But that year, with the Depression deepening, was a lean season for Republicans. Donovan was pulled under by the same voter tide that swept FDR into the White House.
His political ambitions frustrated, Donovan returned to New York and established a Wall Street law firm, heavy with international clients. While becoming rich at the law, he still retained his avidity for public issues. In 1936 he left the practice to his partners and went off to observe firsthand the fighting between Italy and Ethiopia. His wife by now accepted, if she did not embrace, his absences. Thus far, in their marriage, eighteen months was the longest period during which he had stayed at home.
This was the man who had come into FDR’s orbit in 1940, a multimillionaire Wall Street lawyer, globe-trotting student of world affairs, a mover at the summit of society with connections to practically everyone who mattered. Now in his late fifties, the man still retained a restless, curious, devouring mind that leaped from enthusiasm to enthusiasm, giving ideas, the brilliant and harebrained, an equal hearing. A colleague remembered of Donovan, “He was soft-spoken, but determined. He would persuade you with logic, charm, and presence, but always persuade you.” Indeed, he had persuaded FDR that America needed an intelligence service and that the obvious choice to head it was himself.
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A president turning to espionage to strengthen his country’s defenses followed in a long tradition. Phillip Knightley writes in The Second Oldest Profession: “The spy is as old as history… . The Old Testament names the twelve spies Moses sent on a mission to the land of Canaan… . Alfred the Great was always interested in the Danish threat … he went into the enemy encampment himself disguised as a bard.” The fourth-century B.C. Chinese general and military thinker Sun-tzu writes: “One good spy is worth a regiment of troops.” Roosevelt was also pursuing the path of his earliest predecessor. George Washington, “first in war, first in peace,” was also early to engage in espionage. In 1753, just turned twenty-one, Washington entered the Ohio wilderness to ascertain for the British if any French had penetrated British colonial soil. He managed to dine with French officers at a fort called Venanges. Washington merely sipped while the Frenchmen “dos’d themselves pretty plentifully,” he later wrote. He went on, “The Wine … soon banished the restraint which at first appeared in their Conversation, and gave license to their Tongues to reveal their Sentiments more freely. They told me it was their absolute Design to take Possession of the Ohio… .”
When in 1775 Washington became commander of American Revolutionary forces, he declared that gaining intelligence about the British was one of his “immediate and pressing Duties.” He paid over three hundred dollars to an undercover agent who entered British-occupied Boston “to establish a secret correspondence for the purpose of conveying intelligence on the Enemy’s movements and designs.” The amount was substantial at the time, but as King Frederick II of Prussia once noted, “A man who risks being hanged in your service merits being well paid,” which was precisely the risk run by Nathan Hale, America’s first national hero, hanged regretting only that he had but one life to spy for his country. Hale’s statue today stands in front of the headquarters of the Central Intelligence Agency.
President Abraham Lincoln had no formal espionage service during the Civil War, but he did engage Allan Pinkerton’s detective agency to spy for the Union. The Confederates employed women, including Belle Boyd, who outwitted Pinkerton, and Rose O’Neill Greenhow, a rich Washington hostess who gathered intelligence at parties she gave and passed it along to Confederate agents, including Lincoln’s assassin, John Wilkes Booth.
The first country to create a permanent, publicly funded spy service had been Great Britain in 1909, although British espionage dates back to Queen Elizabeth’s secretary of state, Sir Francis Walsingham. Sir Francis developed an organization that ran agents into France, the Low Countries, Italy, Germany, even Turkey, and penetrated the Spanish Armada, costly operations paid for out of his own pocket. England’s lead in entering the permanent spy business was soon followed by Germany in 1913, Russia in 1917, and France in 1935.
America’s Office of Naval Intelligence was founded in 1882. It was followed soon after by the Army’s Military Intelligence Division, which was largely a housekeeping service, running loyalty checks on War Department personnel, protecting government buildings, bridges, and other facilities, and conducting meager intelligence.
During World War I the United States entered the codebreaking field when a short, balding, brilliant, fanatic poker player named Herbert O. Yardley launched a cryptographic service that came to be known as the Black Chamber. But in the era of peace that followed, Yardley found his chamber choked for funds. In 1929, when Henry Stimson became President Hoover’s secretary of state, Stimson was appalled to have deciphered Japanese messages delivered to his desk. He shut down the Black Chamber for engaging in what he regarded as unethical conduct. As he famously notes in his memoirs, “Gentlemen do not read each other’s mail.”
By the 1930s, the Army’s foreign intelligence branch had fewer than seventy agents to cover the world. When war broke out in Europe, America’s Office of Naval Intelligence reported “a real undercover foreign intelligence service, equipped and able to carry on espionage, counterespionage, etc. does not exist.” Now, with creation of Donovan’s COI, America was in the game. How this official entry would mesh with Roosevelt’s informal rings of agents, led by Vincent Astor and John Franklin Carter, remained to be tested.
One point was clear. Few leaders were better adapted temperamentally to espionage than Franklin Roosevelt. No one, not even his closest associates, ever fully penetrated the President’s core being. His speechwriter, the insightful Robert Sherwood, admitted, “I could never really understand what was going on in Roosevelt’s heavily forested interior.” Information was compartmentalized according to unfathomable boundaries existing only inside FDR’s mind. Henry Stimson did not always know what Pa Watson knew. Watson did not know what Harry Hopkins knew. And Hopkins, closer to FDR than anyone else, did not necessarily know what FDR told Henry Morgenthau Jr. Secretary of State Hull might not have so hated his undersecretary, Sumner Welles, if FDR had not given secret assignments to Welles behind Hull’s back. Blunt-speaking Harold Ickes, secretary of the interior, once told FDR, “You are one of the most difficult men to work with that I have ever known.” “Because I get too hard at times?” Roosevelt asked. “No,” Ickes answered, because “… you won’t talk frankly even with people who are loyal to you.”
What had produced a character that suggested Machiavelli in Byzantium? In his Roosevelt in Retrospect, John Gunther attempts to decipher FDR, calling him a “cryptic giant.” “The central point of his character as a youth was that he was a ‘good boy,’” Gunther observes. “Later, as the psychologists would say, he overcompensated for this by being unconventional and daring, by upsetting applecarts.” Gunther concluded that FDR “went north by going south and loved it. He was tricky for fun.” The novelist John Steinbeck, whom the President once asked to do some spying in Mexico, concurred, noting, “[H]e simply liked mystery, subterfuge, and indirect tactics … for their own sake.” Steinbeck also offered an ironic but shrewd perception. He believed that deviousness usually derives from cowardice, but, Gunther knew, “Roosevelt had the courage of a lion. Why, then, should he have been so fond of techniques and maneuvers that, to put it bluntly, verged on deceit?” Gunther concluded that Roosevelt was so clever and confident that he thought people would never catch on to him. Unwelcome petitioners to his office were not even given the chance to present their case, but were overcome by a flood of FDR meanderings, then ushered out, before they realized what had happened. Others, encouraged by a nodding and smiling FDR, believed that they had won his agreement, when all he meant was, I hear what you are saying. Yet, this maste
r of dissembling and deception was no warped personality. Sherwood concluded, “[A]lthough crippled physically and prey to various infections, he was spiritually the healthiest man I have ever known. He was gloriously and happily free of the various forms of psychic maladjustment… .” His personal physician, Admiral Ross McIntire, said of his patient in 1940, that his health was “the best in many years.” The President ate heartily, drank temperately, slept soundly, exercised regularly by swimming, and kept his weight at a steady 1871⁄2 pounds.
Franklin Roosevelt was the architect who sat above, looking down onto a cross section of the compartments he had created, the only one who knew what was going on in all of them, while his subordinates could barely see beyond the walls surrounding them.
Chapter VII
Spies Versus Ciphers
FDR WAS the first world figure to learn one of the great strategic secrets of the war. He came to know it, not through Donovan, Carter, Astor, the FBI, or the military intelligence branches, but from an unlikely source.
Joseph E. Persico Page 14