Joseph E. Persico

by Roosevelt's Secret War: FDR;World War II Espionage

  On May 6 the Magic codebreakers decrypted a message from Oshima in Berlin relaying what Thomsen had discovered. Thomsen had also alerted Nomura in Washington, and on May 20 the Japanese ambassador reported to Tokyo, “I have discovered that the United States is reading some of our codes though I do not know which ones.” Astonishingly, after a perfunctory investigation, the Japanese concluded that their top ciphers were still unbreakable. Only some of their less important and less secure systems, they concluded, had been penetrated. They continued to send their top-secret diplomatic traffic via Purple, and the President continued to read it via Magic. After the Japanese invaded Indochina in mid-July, FDR slapped an oil and cotton embargo on the country. And because the Japanese continued to use the compromised Purple, he knew almost immediately how far he had pushed Japan. In another intercepted cable to Ambassador Nomura, dated July 31, Tokyo warned, “There is more reason than ever before for us to arm ourselves to the teeth for all-out war.”

  Relations between the United States and Japan continued to deteriorate. On October 16 the Konoye government was displaced by the even more bellicose regime of General Hideki Tojo. That October, a Navy month, the Magic decrypts continued to arrive at the President’s desk. But in November, an Army month, the traffic stopped, except for Captain Beardall’s secondhand summaries. FDR, a man dismissive of bureaucratic channels, particularly foolish contortions generated by interservice rivalries, had had enough. He now demanded to see the full text of Magic intercepts, a seemingly reasonable request by the commander in chief of the nation’s armed forces. Beardall uneasily pointed out that November was an Army month in which he was only to give the President summaries. An exasperated FDR told him to bring him all the Magic traffic. After hurried consultations between the Army and Navy, General Miles reluctantly agreed that his service, during its delivery months, would allow the President to see the decrypts. But by now, Roosevelt had tired of the internecine nonsense of Army months and Navy months. Henceforth, he ordered all Magic traffic, in the original, to be delivered to him by Captain Beardall, his naval aide.

  While FDR was just beginning to appreciate the value of signals intelligence, Winston Churchill had displayed an absolute hunger for it from the start. The Prime Minister grabbed the red lacquered boxes from his courier’s hand and devoured the decrypts inside which were stamped across the top in bold red letters, ULTRA. While American cryptographers at Arlington Hall had been wrestling with Purple, eccentrics and a smattering of geniuses at Bletchley Park, Sir Herbert Leon’s sprawling estate, had succeeded in breaking the traffic in a cipher system that the Germans considered impenetrable. The radio transmissions of the German military and government ministries were encrypted on a machine called the Enigma. Superficially, the Enigma resembled a portable typewriter with a standard keyboard. The machine had been invented in the 1920s by two German engineers, Arthur Scherbius and Boris Hagelin, for use by business firms wanting to conceal their trade secrets. The name reportedly derived from the convoluted Enigma Variations by the English composer Sir Edward Elgar. The machine was first used by German banks and the national railway system; but by 1928, the German army and navy were employing the Enigma to encode classified messages. The Luftwaffe adopted the system in 1935.

  The Enigma machine had a space where three or more removable rotors could be placed. In addition, movable wire plugs ran from the machine to an electrical plugboard. Thus, as each letter of a plain language message was being typed, the rotors and the settings of the plugboards caused a different letter to emerge. These settings could be changed, even several times a day, which meant that the possible permutations for each letter became astronomical. With five rotors they reached six sextillion. The Germans calculated that it would take 1,000 codebreakers 900 million years to figure out all the potential key combinations.

  The Poles, ever distrustful of their German neighbor, had been attacking the system for years, and in 1932 broke their first Enigma message. However, the ability of the Germans to keep changing rotors and plugboard settings made cracking the Enigma an endless challenge. After Poland was defeated in the fall of 1939, a few Polish cryptanalysts managed to flee to Britain, where they shared their knowledge of Enigma with the Government Code and Cypher School at Bletchley Park. The British quickly took the lead, and by 1940 the park’s stately lawns and croquet course had sprouted utilitarian Nissen huts, where mathematicians, physicists, linguists, novelists, chess champions, and Oxford and Cambridge dons labored over Enigma. Among them was Alan Turing, King’s College mathematician, whose attack on the system planted the seed for the modern-day computer. One of Turing’s colleagues offered a striking definition of the man’s genius. Upon hearing an idea hatched by one of his other colleagues, he would say to himself, why hadn’t he thought of that? But upon hearing one of Turing’s ideas, he concluded that he could never have thought of it. Among Turing’s associates were Leonard Palmer, decoder of ancient Minoan and Mycenaean inscriptions, and the offbeat novelist Angus Wilson, once sighted frolicking about the Bletchley swan pool at midnight stark naked.

  Ultra was the designation chosen for Enigma messages intercepted and decrypted at Bletchley, the arrival of which so stirred Churchill’s anticipation. Wrens, members of the Women’s Royal Naval Service, performed most of the work. Eventually, over a thousand of these young women labored among the “bombes,” huge (eight- by eight-foot) electronic contraptions of lights, plugs, wires, and whirring wheels that could solve the Enigma rotor and plugboard settings, and thus enable the cryptanalysts to break the messages. It was a convent-like life for these young women and almost equally monastic for the Bletchley men. The staff, which by war’s end, numbered over ten thousand, were quartered in two adjacent RAF bases or crowded into nearby village boardinghouses. So paramount was secrecy that once assigned to Bletchley one could virtually abandon all hope of being reassigned elsewhere. At its peak, the Bletchley staff was decrypting over eighty-four thousand messages every month that the Germans regarded as unbreakable. Churchill demanded to see so much of this traffic that a Mrs. Owens of the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force, was assigned full time to do nothing but oversee the PM’s Ultra deliveries.

  The British were prepared to go to extraordinary lengths to safeguard the secrecy of Ultra. The ultimate example, claimed by writers after the war, supposedly occurred when Churchill, knowing through Ultra that Coventry had been targeted by Luftwaffe bombers, declined to warn the city. Coventry’s air defenses, by being ready for an attack, might tip off the Germans that their codes were being broken. Better to sacrifice a city than to compromise Ultra, the reasoning went. Coventry was indeed raided on November 14, 1940, during which the city’s center was leveled, its magnificent cathedral destroyed, and over five hundred civilians killed. But the story of Churchill’s alleged coldhearted calculus in leaving the city unprepared was untrue. Three days before the raid, Ultra had indeed identified a major Luftwaffe strike, code-named Moonlight Sonata. But the decryption yielded neither the date nor the target. Churchill’s intelligence analysts first led him to think that London was to be attacked, and in this mistaken belief, he canceled a trip to the country and ordered his staff to take shelter in a nearby underground station. “You are too young to die,” he told them. Coventry was discovered to be the target just four hours before the Germans struck, but not through Ultra. The RAF had learned how to intercept the Luftwaffe’s system for guiding bombers to their destination via radio beams. What doomed Coventry was that the RAF’s countermeasure—jamming the beams, thus misleading the German bombers—had used the wrong frequency. Nevertheless, secrecy was a fanatic obsession at Bletchley Park, and the Churchill/Coventry story provided an apocryphal example.

  The Americans were eager to share in Britain’s codebreaking feats. The British, in the sphere of cryptanalysis, however, believed it better to receive than give. In February 1941 a team of four American cryptographers, led by William Friedman, the dean of U.S. codebreakers, was driven through blacked-out London acc
ompanied by four crates in the back of a truck. The crates contained the components to construct a copy of the machine on which the Japanese enciphered messages in the Purple code. It was a gift for the Government Code and Cypher School. In exchange, their Bletchley counterparts provided the Americans with a few secrets, but revealed nothing of the bombes that enabled them to break into Enigma.

  Two reasons account for Britain’s unwillingness to be more forthcoming. First, “C,” Stewart Menzies, head of MI6, told Churchill that the Americans “were not as security minded as one would wish.” Thus, while Roosevelt was putting U.S. neutrality on the line by having American ships patrol for British convoys, Menzies was advising the PM against “divulging to the President the information regarding U.S. Naval Units being chased by U Boats.” If the Americans were told which U-boats were pursuing them, they might well deduce that the source of this intelligence was British penetration of German naval codes. It was impossible, Menzies claimed, to “devise any safe means of wrapping up the information in a manner which would not imperil this source [Ultra]… .” The second reason the British were reluctant to make the Americans full cryptanalytic partners was more cunning. Among the decrypts delivered daily by Mrs. Owens to Prime Minister Churchill were not only German secrets, but also broken American codes. Britain’s eavesdropping on a friend had been going on since the First World War, and it was not something that Churchill could comfortably risk having Roosevelt discover.

  Chapter VIII

  Donovan Enters the Game

  BILL DONOVAN, the man who would see an acorn and envision an oak, took his meager mandate as coordinator of information and quickly began to build the kind of espionage service inspired by his British mentors. His charter, in the numbing prose of federal bureaucrats, to “collect and analyze all information and data which may bear upon national security … and to make the same available to the President … and other Federal agencies,” made the COI sound like a paper-shuffling mill. But a subsequent FDR instruction gave Donovan pliable authority that he could stretch into an intelligence agency closer to his ambitions. He was “to carry out when requested by the President such supplementary activities as may facilitate the securing of information for national security not now available to the government.” In short, he could spy.

  It reflects Donovan’s sophistication that he did not turn immediately to shady foreigners, private detectives, or cast-off intelligence operatives from the military, FBI, or State Department to staff his nascent organization. Almost the first person he sought out was Archibald MacLeish, the poet-intellectual librarian of Congress. Despite the public’s movie screen image of espionage as shadowy, slouch-hatted figures writing in invisible ink and stealing secret plans, Donovan recognized that 95 percent of intelligence involved conventional research. MacLeish’s library offered a mother lode of information to be mined from the world’s largest collection of books, manuscripts, periodicals, films, and maps. Donovan’s first recruits went to work, at MacLeish’s invitation, in an annex of the Library of Congress. Ignoring civil service hiring procedures, Donovan also enlisted an impressive array of scholarly talent: James Phinney Baxter, president of Williams College and a leading authority on Germany; William Langer, Harvard professor of European history; Sherman Kent, Yale professor; Conyers Read of the University of Pennsylvania; James L. McConaughy, president of Wesleyan University and subsequently governor of Connecticut. McGeorge Bundy, later to become President John F. Kennedy’s national security advisor and president of the Ford Foundation, wrote, “It is a curious fact of academic history that the first great center of area studies in the United States was not located in any university, but in Washington, during the Second World War… .” Donovan had created, Bundy observed, “a remarkable institution, half cops and robbers and half faculty meeting.”

  Beyond the academic enlistees, other early recruits suggested the breadth of Donovan’s ambitions for the COI. He signed up to head a Field Photographic branch John Ford, the Hollywood director whose credits included Young Mr. Lincoln, Drums Along the Mohawk, How Green Was My Valley, and two films for which he won Oscars as best director, The Informer and The Grapes of Wrath. Gregg Toland, arguably the best cameraman in American filmmaking, with screen credits including Citizen Kane, Wuthering Heights, and The Grapes of Wrath, also joined the COI film unit.

  Later chroniclers who worked with Donovan, Stewart Alsop and Thomas Braden, found him “not a first rate administrator.” Stanley Lovell, a businessman-chemist picked to head the Research and Development branch, was more blunt: “All who knew him and worked under him recognized that Donovan was the worst organizer of all.” Wild Bill drove the professionals in the Bureau of the Budget mad. After only three weeks of COI’s existence, detecting early chaos, bureau officials drafted a memorandum asking the President to clarify for them just what this new agency was supposed to do. In the end, the budget chiefs recognized that kindred souls like FDR and Donovan did not bend to organization charts, fixed expenditures, or rules. The bureau initially earmarked $450,000 for a COI payroll of ninety-two employees. Within months the staff had ballooned to 596 people and kept growing. The joke in government circles was that a COI employee who missed a day was likely to return to find two new employees sitting at his desk. Most repellent to budget officials, who worshipped financial accountability, Donovan had, in effect, managed to receive a blank check from the President. Most of his funds were to be “unvouchered”; they could be spent secretly for whatever purpose Donovan deemed in the national interest.

  His staff first occupied a run-down apartment house at Twenty-third and E Streets, N.W. Washington, but soon spread like lava to engulf a complex of redbrick buildings originally belonging to the National Institutes of Health, then flowed over bleak temporary frame buildings in back of a brewery, all collected under the mailing address 2430 E Street, N.W. Donovan, who understood the power of first impressions, commissioned the noted architect Eero Saarinen to design, for visiting VIPs, the most impressive briefing room in Washington. It was equipped with air conditioning against the tropical Washington weather, sliding wall panels for map displays, fluted wooden room dividers, a revolving globe five feet in diameter, and a theater. Colonel Edwin L. Sibert, an Army intelligence officer, visited Donovan’s burgeoning empire and said it “closely resembled a cat house in Laredo on a Saturday night, with rivalries, jealousies, mad schemes, and everyone trying to get the ear of the director. But I felt that a professional organization was in the making… .”

  Bill Donovan, perhaps a managerial calamity, was, more importantly, a natural leader, a master of theater, a man who floated above the mundane, much like the President he served. He managed to have Marine Captain Jimmy Roosevelt assigned as his liaison between COI and all federal agencies. When young Roosevelt called, Donovan knew, his calls would be taken. As Life magazine put it, “[T]o get Jimmy Roosevelt into your show is as good as a seat at the White House breakfast table.” Donovan also hired Estelle Frankfurter, sister of Felix Frankfurter, the Supreme Court justice and FDR confidant. Donovan intuitively understood the strategies of success, even if he could not concentrate on an organization chart if someone held a gun to his head. The man’s brain was fertile, not orderly.

  In August 1941, Donovan had a visitor, Wallace Banta Phillips, whom Vincent Astor had tried unsuccessfully four months before to have FDR dump. Phillips was running a string of agents abroad for ONI, the “K Organization,” operating in twelve countries, he told Wild Bill. Though technically under the Navy, the K Organization reported to a committee representing State, War, Navy, and the FBI. This hydra-headed arrangement was not working, Phillips said, and he wanted Donovan to take it over. Instead of trying to crush a potential rival, as Astor had done, Donovan looked closely into the mouth of this gift horse and saw opportunity. He pressured the Bureau of the Budget to come up with $2.5 million for him to absorb the K Organization, thus buying himself an existing espionage unit for COI.

  Phillips’s uncontested divorce f
rom ONI and remarriage to the COI was symptomatic of a discomfort that the Army and Navy intelligence branches felt toward spying. An Army attaché spotting the latest tank model at a military parade or a naval attaché learning of a potential adversary’s battleship strength while watching foreign fleet maneuvers was their concept of espionage. Still, the services saw an opportune solution to their need for better intelligence, despite their reluctance to collect it. Let Bill Donovan and his new COI do the shady stuff. Donovan saw the opening and scooted through it like the college quarterback he had been. By October 11, he could inform FDR, “By joint action of the Military and Naval Intelligence Services there was consolidated under the Coordinator of Information the undercover intelligence of the two services.” His organization had been handed this assignment, he said, because “A civilian agency has distinct advantages over any military or naval agency.” He moved quickly to send COI personnel abroad. Their function was to recruit secret agents and conduct espionage even after “diplomatic relations are severed.” He was further preparing to conduct clandestine communications “both by radio and other means that will endure after the particular country has been closed to us diplomatically.” Roosevelt could admire the man’s bold maneuvering, as long as he himself still held the leash, which was not always visible to the person at the other end.

  Just two days later, on October 13, FDR seemed to put his stamp of approval on Donovan’s swelling authority. Adolf Berle informed the President that something was bothering the FBI, and he too was concerned. The bureau operated a shortwave station between the United States and England, and British intelligence in America had been permitted to use this link to transmit hundreds of messages to London, all in code. The FBI had not the foggiest idea of what was being sent over its own circuit, and was uncomfortable with the arrangement. FDR sent a memorandum giving Donovan responsibility to unsnarl the problem: “This seems to be a matter which you ought to look into, will you handle it with Berle, FBI and the British intelligence?”