During one of their nocturnal conversations, FDR and the PM discussed exchanging knowledge of their countries’ codes. Churchill remained a hungry consumer of signal intelligence far more than Roosevelt, who still favored the cloak-and-dagger over keyboards and rotors. At home, the Prime Minister insisted on having Ultra decrypts brought by special courier from Bletchley Park to 10 Downing Street several times a day. The stolen secrets of other nations had long been a Churchill passion. Before coming to power he had written, “I attach more importance to [decrypts] as a means of forming a true judgment of public policy in these spheres, than to any other source of knowledge at the disposal of the state.” His Bletchley codebreakers, in Churchill’s phrase, were “the geese who laid the golden eggs and never cackled.” An early Churchill name for the intercepted German codes had been Boniface, chosen to mislead the enemy into thinking that the source was an agent rather than a penetrated cipher system. The name, with its medieval ring, appealed to Churchill, who clung to it long after Ultra became used exclusively by everyone else in on the secret.
The Prime Minister accepted, in theory, that in codebreaking the Americans deserved to be Britain’s partner. Since February 1941 the British had been in possession of the Japanese machine for encoding Purple, along with keys for breaking the code, courtesy of their American colleagues. Thus, in the months preceding Pearl Harbor, the British were able to read essentially the same Japanese diplomatic secrets as did FDR. The Americans, however, remained decidedly junior, even limited partners, since the British questioned their ability to guard secrets. Though the Americans had given a Purple machine to Bletchley, the British did not turn over an Enigma machine to Arlington Hall. The Americans saw of Ultra decrypts only what the British chose to share.
Churchill, however, did have a confession to make. “Some time ago,” he cabled FDR after his return to London, “our experts claimed to have discovered the system and constructed some [code] tables used by your Diplomatic Corps. From the moment we became Allies, I gave instructions that this work should cease.” In fact, the British had been reading U.S. State Department codes for over two decades. The reason for Churchill’s admission and promise to stop the practice was hardly an instance of English fair play. Rather, he was warning FDR that if an ally was breaking America’s codes, the “… danger of our enemies having achieved a measure of success, cannot, I am advised, be dismissed. I shall be grateful if you will handle this matter entirely yourself, and if possible burn this letter when you have read it. The whole subject is secret in degree which affects the safety of both our countries. The fewest possible people should know.” The cable, however, was not burned.
Churchill’s preoccupation with code security was fully warranted. On February 1 the German navy had shifted to a new four-rotor enciphering combination for submarine traffic, replacing a system Bletchley had cracked. In intelligence parlance, British cryptanalysis had gone “blind,” and in subsequent months ship sinkings soared. A despairing Churchill told Roosevelt, “When I reflect how I have longed and prayed for the entry of the United States into the war I find it difficult to realise how greatly our British affairs have deteriorated since December 7.” His desperation was understandable. When U-boat torpedoes sank two average-size cargo vessels and one tanker loaded with American supplies bound for Britain, the loss amounted to approximately 42 tanks and 428 tons of tank parts and supplies, 236 artillery pieces, 24 armored cars, 5,210 tons of ammunition, 600 rifles, 2,000 tons of stores, and 1,000 tank loads of gasoline. To achieve similar destruction by bombing, it was estimated the enemy would have to conduct 3,000 sorties.
Part of the considerable baggage Churchill had brought during his White House stay included a portable version of his Map Room, the original located in a bombproof underground London headquarters at Storey’s Gate. The traveling Map Room had been installed in the Monroe Room of the White House, and Churchill later described FDR’s fascination with it: “He liked to come and study attentively the large maps of all the theatres of war which soon covered the walls, and on which the movement of fleets and armies was so swiftly and accurately recorded.” After Churchill’s departure, FDR had to have his own Map Room. Always more comfortable with Navy personnel, he turned the task over to his new naval aide, Captain John L. McCrea, who had replaced Captain Beardall. McCrea had been a reluctant recruit to the Roosevelt staff. The doughty sea dog had been slated for command of a cruiser when Admiral King, commander in chief of the U.S. Fleet, drafted him to serve FDR. McCrea had all the qualifications, one of his Navy pals kidded him; he was over six feet tall and had a strong back. McCrea protested the assignment to King and Navy secretary Knox. He had been raised a Republican, never voted, and was no fan of the New Deal, he complained. “Well, what do you think I am?” Knox replied.
From their first encounter in January 1942, Roosevelt blinded McCrea with his electric charm, nimble mind, and razor-sharp memory. FDR could recite the captain’s naval career over the preceding twenty years. McCrea began to relish his place within FDR’s inner circle. David Kahn, the preeminent American historian of cryptography, paints a vivid picture of the working arrangement between the President and his naval assistant: “When McCrea arrived in the morning, Roosevelt would usually be either in bed, in which case McCrea would hand him the papers, or in the bathroom shaving. If the latter, the naval officer would go in, close the toilet cover, sit down on it, and in that inglorious position read the leader of the most powerful nation in the world some of the most secret documents of the greatest war in history.” As they reviewed the deployment of the fleet, Roosevelt would astonish McCrea with his mastery of geography, down to remote specks on the globe. The President explained his expertise as a by-product of his hobby. “[I]f a stamp collector really studies his stamps,” the President told his aide, he would know the world. McCrea was amused by Roosevelt’s continuing references to “when I was in the Navy,” and the pleasure FDR took in reminding him that he had supervised all the current naval brass when they were junior officers—Stark, King, Leahy, Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, Halsey, and dozens of others whom he could recall by name, rank, and early assignments. What welded the anti–New Deal Navy officer most closely to his new chief was FDR’s habitual geniality, the utter lack of self-pity. McCrea was filled, he said, with admiration at “the patience with which he bore his affliction … with never a reference to it.”
McCrea attacked the President’s order for a map room with zeal. He expropriated a ladies’ room on the first floor of the White House ideally located across from the elevator the President used to reach the Oval Office and next to the room occupied by the President’s physician, Admiral McIntire, whom FDR saw almost daily. Within days of Churchill’s departure, the Map Room was functioning. Blowups of maps papered the walls from floor to ceiling. Lieutenant (Junior Grade) Robert Montgomery, the Hollywood actor now on active duty as McCrea’s assistant, added creative touches that delighted FDR. Montgomery designed pins to indicate where the major chiefs of state were at a given moment. Roosevelt’s pin was shaped like a cigarette holder, Churchill’s like a cigar, Stalin’s like a pipe. Other shapes and colors indicated the location of units of the U.S., Allied, and enemy fleets. One U.S. Navy vessel, the destroyer on which Franklin D. Roosevelt Jr. served, had its own pin. The maps were updated two and three times a day and hung at sitting level so that the President could study them from his wheelchair.
The Map Room gradually assumed a more sensitive function than merely presenting a pictorial plot of the war. The cables the President sent to other world leaders were encoded in the Map Room and their messages to him decoded there. War plans were filed in the onetime ladies’ room, along with records of all military discussions and decisions. The President had his Magic intercepts kept there in what he called “The Magic Book.” As Churchill had done in London, FDR made his Map Room America’s wartime nerve center. He was wheeled in and out of the room at least twice a day. He had a sign posted on the door, NO ADMITTANCE, and approved
a list of only six others allowed to pass in and out without permission. The former ambassador to Vichy France, the stolid, reliable Admiral William D. Leahy, whom FDR had brought back to serve as Chief of Staff to the commander in chief, headed the list. The other five were Captain McCrea, Admiral McIntire, Harry Hopkins, and William Rigdon, a former ship’s clerk who had risen to become an invaluable factotum to the President and whose duties ran from supervising the Filipino stewards on the presidential yacht to monitoring secret messages coming into the Map Room. The admissions policy was strictly enforced. Frank Knox complained bitterly to FDR when he was barred entrance. Mrs. Roosevelt casually walked in, past dumbfounded guards, to find Captain McCrea with his pants down in the one place he thought it safe to change uniforms. Grace Tully, whom the President often sent to the Map Room to pick up and deliver dispatches, remained unimpressed. She found the room a “hodge podge of varicolored pins, arrowhead lines, and generally confusing symbols.” But it was right up FDR’s alley. The President, she said, “took to that sort of thing like a duck to water.”
A young Navy watch officer, Robert Myers, received his initiation into the Roosevelt style when he had to deliver an urgent message from the Map Room to FDR after the President had gone to bed. Uneasy at disturbing him, Myers asked Roosevelt for future guidance when messages arrived at irregular hours. “Well, if they aren’t important and you come up and wake me,” the President answered, “you’re in trouble. And if they are important and you don’t come up and wake me, you’re in trouble. So you take it from there.”
The President set up communication procedures to serve another end. He sent all his outgoing messages through the Army Signal Corps. He received messages to him only through Navy personnel. Consequently, the Army knew some of what he knew. The Navy knew some. But only FDR knew it all.
*
One name not appearing on the list of those granted admittance to the most secure depository of secrets in America was that of the President’s chief of secret warfare, William J. Donovan, director of the COI. Still, other than that exclusion, Donovan appeared to enjoy the President’s favor. In his first six months in the post, Donovan had flooded the President with over 260 phone calls and written memoranda. Nine hand-delivered reports arrived at Grace Tully’s desk on December 15, 1941, alone and eleven more the next day. They rained down on the Oval Office so profusely that Donovan’s messages were identified by time as well as date—11 A.M., 1 P.M., 5 P.M., etc. The chief courier was twenty-nine-year-old Navy Lieutenant (Junior Grade) Edwin J. “Ned” Putzell, another lawyer out of Donovan’s New York law firm. As Putzell described his duties: “I’d be standing by while General Donovan dictated his messages to the President. Usually he classified them ‘Secret’ or ‘Top Secret.’ I put the memoranda, as many as five or six a day, into a zipped leather briefcase with a strap that I wound around my wrist. Freeman, the General’s black driver, then took me to the White House in an Army sedan where I was so familiar that the guards waved me through. I took the dispatches directly to Grace Tully. If the President was tied up, I left them with her. If he was free, she sent me right in. The President always greeted me like a long lost friend. On one occasion, I pulled out a pocket watch with my Phi Beta Kappa key attached. He said, ‘Lieutenant, that’s something I always aspired to.’ I’d wait while he read the memoranda. He’d ‘Mmmm’ over certain passages, or nod his head. Occasionally he might scribble something in the margin.” Of his countless deliveries, however, Putzell recalled, “I don’t remember him ever giving me specific instructions to take back to Donovan.”
Just days after Pearl Harbor, the President had received from Donovan a transcript of a radio talk made by E. D. Ward, described as “one of the two Americans broadcasting in the Nazi pay from Berlin.” Ward’s message expressed sorrow that his nation had been suckered into war against Germany. He repeated what an American professor in Berlin had told him: “Whatever happens, America will lose. Meaningless slogans about salvaging democracy and civilization are shibboleths which will lead to shambles. It is a war for control of European politics. The blessings of democracy will vanish in the war. The fusing of oligarchic England and Bolshevistic Russia cannot produce an American way of life.” Ward’s broadcast concluded: “The United States should, for its own good, remain aloof and mind its own business. However, more powerful influences and interested groups have decreed otherwise.” It seemed routine claptrap from a Nazi sympathizer and paid lackey. But in the post–Pearl Harbor climate, FDR took Ward’s behavior seriously. He directed Donovan, on the very day that he received the transcript, to have the State and Justice Departments investigate Americans working for the enemy. “I think they still come under some old law and can have their property in the United States confiscated,” he said, and “whether they automatically lose their citizenship should be looked into.”
Donovan forwarded to the President a five-page handwritten letter penned by Hollywood’s quintessential swashbuckler, Errol Flynn, suggesting an appropriately dashing adventure to be produced by the COI and starring Flynn himself. Noting that his father, T. Thomson-Flynn, dean of the faculty of science at Queen’s University, was esteemed in all of Ireland, Flynn wrote, “… [P]erhaps you know that the Irish, both North and South, are great movie goers. When last there, it was a constant source of astonishment to me that while Bridget O’Toole had only the foggiest notion whether the Panama Canal divides America or Africa, she did know without a shadow of a doubt that Clark Gable cherishes a marked antipathy for striped underwear and that Hedy Lamarr wears a false bust… . Now in view both of this well disposed attitude toward me personally as a Hollywood figure plus my father’s position there … it seems to me that if Uncle Sam were to put me in American Army uniform and send me over there I could be of value to your department. One presumes America needs the Irish bases in the South … I could work well perhaps better than most to this end… .” Flynn saw himself ideally cast as a spy because of “… the excellent opportunities which seem to come, almost without effort on my part, to a man in my peculiar position in life, to acquire a certain sort of intimate information that would be of use to your department… . If I were to go there openly as a Hollywood figure in an American Army uniform, I would be far less suspected of gathering information than the usual sort of agent.”
FDR knew that Flynn was a friend of his son Franklin Jr. and that the actor knew Eleanor Roosevelt because of his work helping polio victims through the March of Dimes. But Franklin Jr.’s opinion did not advance Flynn’s cause. “Errol used to join me and the Whitneys in fox hunting in Virginia,” young Roosevelt said. “Knowing how he hated Jews, we used to call him ‘Flynnberg’ to annoy him.” More damaging, the year before Flynn had exploited his acquaintance with the President’s wife to try to stop a citizenship revocation proceeding against Dr. Hermann Erben, a physician suspected by the FBI of being a Nazi spy. Much of the Irish hatred for England translated into sympathy for Germany. Exactly who Flynn might be working for in the Emerald Isle was thus questionable. FDR did not accept Flynn’s offer to take on a new role as a spy.
Bill Donovan did not limit himself merely to reporting intelligence and passing along agent candidates to the President. He showered Roosevelt with strategies bred in his hothouse mind. Less than a month after Pearl Harbor, he urged that the President use what was left of the Pacific Fleet to transport fifteen thousand American commandos—which the United States did not have—for an “out of the blue strike” against the Japanese home island of Hokkaido. That same January, Donovan had another brainstorm. He suggested to the President that the United States should announce that Japan intended to attack Singapore or the Panama Canal. Then, when the Japanese failed to do so, which Donovan assured FDR was the case, the United States could trumpet this “failure” as the turning point of the war. Alas, Japan did attack Singapore and capture it on February 15. Two days later, Wild Bill rushed the President a warning from an agent who “has previously given correct information regarding move
s of the Axis in Europe and the Orient.” This informant reported, “Next move of the Nazis will be frontal attack on New York, synchronized with general Nazi organized revolution in all South American countries, timed to follow closely the fall of Singapore.” Donovan also passed along information that leading Nazis—Göring, Rudolf Hess, von Ribbentrop, and Goebbels—had made large secret bank deposits in Latin America, Holland, Switzerland, and even the United States. He proposed that this information be broadcast over his own COI shortwave radio service to demonstrate the top Nazis’ lack of faith in their own regime.
The man who pressed these ideas is perhaps best understood in the way he went about recruiting a New England chemist and businessman, Stanley Lovell, to run COI’s Research and Development branch. Lovell, then age fifty-two, was heading his own Lovell Chemical Company when he was persuaded to go to Washington early in 1942 to talk to Colonel Donovan. Upon their meeting, Donovan told Lovell, “Professor Moriarty is the man I want… . I think you’re it.” What Donovan had in mind, he said, was a laboratory of dirty tricks. Lovell left to think over whether or not he wanted to pattern his life after the evil genius of the Sherlock Holmes stories. A few days later, he returned to Donovan’s home and pointed out: “Dirty tricks are simply not tolerated in the American code of ethics.” “Don’t be so goddamn naive, Lovell,” Donovan responded. “If you think America won’t rise in applause to what is so easily called ‘un-American’ you’re not my man.” Lovell signed on and caught on. He was soon exploring schemes, including one to inject Hitler’s vegetarian diet with female hormones that would cause his mustache to fall out and his voice to turn soprano.
Joseph E. Persico Page 23