Joseph E. Persico

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

  Berle not only supported the McKellar bill, he had helped write it. In urging the President to sign this act, he told FDR, “I do not see that any of us can safely take the position that we should grant blanket immunity for any spy system, no matter whose it is. Logically, why have it? If our interests diverge, it is adverse; if they are the same, our own people ought to be able to do the job… .” In his diary, Berle was more blunt. “No one has given us any effective reason why there should be a British espionage system in the United States. I believe now they [the British] have gone to Colonel Donovan and that Colonel Donovan is secretly trying to get the bill stopped… .”

  As the McKellar bill was coming up for a vote, Donovan called Grace Tully, to whom he always paid courtly attention, and asked to see the President. He was invited for dinner with the President on January 27, along with Jimmy Roosevelt’s wife, Betsey, and the socialite businessman Cornelius Vanderbilt “Jock” Whitney, now serving in the Army Air Corps. Tully was filling in as hostess to cover one of Mrs. Roosevelt’s frequent absences. Given a few minutes to speak in confidence with the President, Donovan was at his persuasive best. Yes, the McKellar bill had a laudable intent. It had grown out of a congressional investigation into enemy subversion and was designed to flush out fifth columnists operating in the United States. But in Congress’s rush to catch enemies, its net had snared a friend, the BSC, Donovan argued. He repeated to FDR Stephenson’s fears. “If our reading of the bill is correct,” Stephenson had told Donovan, “the future working in the United States of our office will become impossible. Our files would become a matter of ‘public record.’” BSC was not spying on the United States, Donovan told the President, “but simply supplies this government with information about other countries. Thus, their service is of direct benefit to us.” The bill did not have to be scrapped, Donovan suggested; it only had to make certain exceptions.

  He carried the day. Congress did pass the McKellar bill on January 28, but FDR vetoed it. The measure resurfaced with an exemption: It did not apply to foreign governments “the defense of which the President deems vital to the United States.” FDR signed the amended version early in February. BSC was saved, and, in Berle’s jaundiced view, so was its subsidiary, Donovan’s COI.

  To Stephenson, the McKellar battle had been a close call. The quietly combative Canadian was determined to make sure that Berle, clearly his enemy, could not threaten him again. The McKellar law had barely been on the books a week when, on February 13, Berle received an unsettling call from J. Edgar Hoover’s deputy Ed Tamm. The FBI had learned that a BSC agent, Denis Paine, was poking into Berle’s personal life to “get the dirt” on him. The purpose, Tamm reported, was to leak this information to American newspapers and thus drive Berle out of the State Department. Tamm reported that the FBI, consequently, had ordered Stephenson to get Paine out of the country by six o’clock that day or see him arrested. Stephenson, according to Berle’s diary, lamely expressed “surprise and horror that any of his men should do such a thing.” Nevertheless, Paine was on the next plane to Montreal. “It developed,” Berle noted, “that the only dirt they had dug up so far was a column about having twin bath tubs in our house.”

  Chapter XIII

  Premier Secret of the War

  ON THE day before Pearl Harbor, FDR made a decision that would ultimately decide Japan’s fate. He held a secret meeting, unrecorded even in the White House log, with Dr. Vannevar Bush, his science advisor, and four other men: Dr. Lyman J. Briggs, Dr. Ernest O. Lawrence, Dr. James B. Conant, the president of Harvard, and Dr. Arthur Compton, a Nobel laureate in physics for his discovery of the “Compton effect.” All were linked by a common interest in nuclear physics. They had come to persuade FDR that a bomb produced through atomic fission was a theoretical possibility. The clinching argument, made by Compton, was: “If atomic bombs could be made, only one plan was possible. We must get them first.” Compton, who had never met or voted for Roosevelt, remembered being impressed by the President’s instant grasp of the strategic significance of what the scientists were telling him. Before they left the White House, FDR asked them to explore every possible path to determine if such a weapon was feasible and to report back in six months. If their answer was yes, he assured them, they could count on the nation’s every resource to produce the bomb.

  This meeting took place almost two years after FDR was introduced to the atom. In the summer of 1939, a Hungarian Jewish refugee physicist, Leo Szilard, one of the first to conceive of a nuclear chain reaction used as a bomb, had driven out to Nassau Point on Long Island to meet the world’s preeminent physicist, Albert Einstein. Szilard was chauffeured by another young physicist, Edward Teller. Szilard had been persuaded by a Russian-born American financier, Alexander Sachs, that the way to get things done in America was to go directly to the President, whom Sachs claimed to know intimately. Consequently, Szilard had drafted a letter to President Roosevelt which he hoped to persuade Einstein to sign that described the workability of an atomic weapon. Einstein did sign the letter, and Sachs promised to deliver it to the White House personally.

  Alexander Sachs, forty-six at the time, was a self-important figure who, with his thick semicircle of curly hair and receding chin, resembled an intellectual Harpo Marx. He was given to tortured locutions, saying, for example, that he was “a member of the cognate older faith,” by which he meant that he was a Jew. He casually tossed off words such as “beblinkered,” referring to people who wore glasses. Nevertheless, Sachs’s boast that he knew Roosevelt was true. He had worked in FDR’s 1932 presidential campaign, contributing economic ideas to speeches, and his advice had been sought out from time to time by Roosevelt throughout the thirties.

  The letter that Einstein signed on August 2, 1939, read in part: “… [I]t may be possible to set up a nuclear chain reaction in a large mass of uranium, by which vast amounts of power … would be generated… . This new phenomenon would lead to the construction of bombs… . A single bomb of this type, carried by a boat and exploded in a port, might well destroy the whole port, together with some of the surrounding territory.” Einstein urged the President “to have some permanent contact maintained between the Administration and the group of physicists working on chain reactions.” The letter pointed out how scarce uranium was in America, while Czechoslovakia, now swallowed up by Germany, was rich in this ore. The letter closed on an ominous note: “I understand that Germany has stopped the sale of uranium from the Czechoslovakia mines which she has taken over.”

  Though Einstein had signed the letter in August, it was not until October 11 that Sachs managed to see Roosevelt. That Wednesday afternoon he waited outside the Oval Office, while the President’s aide Pa Watson thumbed through the papers Sachs had brought with him—the Einstein letter, an amplification of it by Szilard, and Sachs’s own digests of two pertinent scientific articles. Finally, Watson ushered Sachs in to see the President, where he was greeted with arms flung up and a grinning welcome, “Alex, what are you up to?” Despite the impression that Roosevelt was thrilled to see him, Sachs had trouble getting the President’s attention as FDR’s verbal fireworks dominated the visit and threatened to exhaust the time Pa Watson had allotted. Sachs, however, was a formidable adversary at repartee. He saucily reminded the President that he had paid for this trip to Washington himself, could not deduct it from his income tax, and expected to get his money’s worth. He caught the President’s attention with a parable about a young American inventor who had once written to Napoleon. He could build the emperor a fleet, the inventor claimed, that could move without sails, be powered without wind, and invade England in a few hours in any weather. Napoleon supposedly scoffed at Robert Fulton’s steamboat and dismissed the inventor with, “Bah! Away with your visionists.” The President must not now play Napoleon to his Fulton, Sachs explained, since he carried an idea that could revolutionize warfare. FDR sent, appropriately, for a bottle of Napoleon brandy, poured Sachs and himself a glass, and prepared to listen.

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sp; Sachs proceeded to read, not Einstein’s letter or Szilard’s memorandum, but his own eight-hundred-word summary of the articles on atomic fission. After reading his report, word for word, Sachs next pulled from his papers a lecture delivered by another scientist, Francis Aston, and read FDR its concluding paragraph: “… [T]here is no doubt that sub-atomic energy is available all around us, and that one day man will release its almost infinite power. We cannot prevent him from doing so and can only hope that he will not use it exclusively in blowing up his next door neighbor.” The President paused long and thoughtfully, and then said, “Alex, what you are after is to see that the Nazis don’t blow us up.”

  “Precisely,” Sachs answered.

  The President called Pa Watson in. “This requires action,” he said, handing him Sachs’s papers.

  FDR sent Einstein a thank-you note a week after Sachs’s visit. And, as a result of his instruction to Watson, expert committees were formed and studies conducted, culminating in the meeting that FDR held the day before Pearl Harbor with the scientists to whom he had given six months to decide if a bomb could work. Their answer came back an emphatic yes. Thereafter, the President moved with dispatch. He was motivated most by the likelihood that Germany could beat America to the bomb. Among the physicist cognoscenti, no doubt existed that Germany held the lead. Nuclear fission had been conceived in Germany. The Einstein letter had warned of uranium mines in Czechoslovakia, now in the Nazi grip. The world’s only heavy-water plant, crucial to atomic development, was in Nazi-occupied Norway. Above all, Germany possessed the expertise of a half-dozen major world physicists, among them Werner Heisenberg, considered by one British scientist as “the most dangerous possible German in the field because of his brain power.” When asked by a deputy of Albert Speer, Germany’s arms czar, how big an atom bomb would be required to destroy a city, Heisenberg cupped his hands and said, “As large as a pineapple.” Speer thereafter ordered the physicist to let him know “the measures, the sums of money and the materials they would need to further nuclear research.” Heisenberg indicated that, given maximum support, it would take at least two years to build a bomb. Speer immediately reported to Hitler the stupefying power of an atomic weapon, but, as he later stated, “the idea quite obviously strained his intellectual capacity.” Nevertheless, Heisenberg was to proceed and the effort to produce a German atomic bomb rested substantially with him.

  In America, Roosevelt assigned the bomb’s development to Secretary of War Henry Stimson. He also took Harry Hopkins and Vice President Henry Wallace into his confidence. This appears to be one occasion where Wallace did not confide to his Swiss diplomat brother-in-law a secret he learned of in the Oval Office. As Stimson passed along FDR’s orders, some military leaders balked. What was this thing? What would it cost? Wouldn’t it swallow up resources needed elsewhere? Pa Watson told the doubters, “The boss wants it, boys. Get it done.”

  By May, Stimson told a mystified Treasury secretary, Henry Morgenthau, to loan 40,000 of his department’s 47,000 tons of silver to something called the Defense Plant Corporation. Next Stimson wanted 6,000 tons of silver for electromagnets released to a secret plant somewhere in the South. When Stimson subsequently asked Morgenthau to put $12 million into a Federal Reserve Bank account in New York, without explaining why, the Treasury secretary angrily insisted on knowing the reason. Stimson held his ground. The matter was “so much more secret than anything else that I’ve ever had that I don’t feel able to do that,” he answered. In August the President approved the creation of a new division within the Army Corps of Engineers, “The Manhattan Engineering District,” to carry out the mysterious project.

  Grace Tully had no idea what the Manhattan Project was about, though she worked at the President’s side every day. When FDR finished reading a progress report on what he referred to as “atomistics,” he told her, “Grace, this is red hot. Put it in a sealed envelope and deliver it to Admiral Brown. Tell him to lock it in his safe. It is for nobody’s eyes.” On another occasion, Roosevelt told her to put a similar document in a sealed envelope and to lock it up, adding, “I can’t tell you what this is, Grace, but if it works, and pray God it does, it will save many American lives.”

  The cerebral, left-leaning physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer had been chosen as the Manhattan Project’s scientific leader. As Oppenheimer began building his team, the President sent him a warning. He reminded Oppenheimer that he was engaged in “a hazardous matter under unusual circumstances … of such great significance to the nation.” The President assured Oppenheimer that he would allot the project whatever budget it needed. He wanted it “pushed not only in regard to the development, but also with due regard to time.” He reiterated his conviction that American science was in a race with Nazi science. “Whatever the enemy may be planning, American science will be equal to the challenge,” he assured the physicist. Oppenheimer replied that the secret would be safe and the progress swift. “[W]e as a group are profoundly aware of our responsibility, for the security of our project as well as its rapid completion,” he assured the President, with more confidence than future events would warrant.

  Chapter XIV

  Enter the OSS

  THE PRESIDENT had appointed Bill Donovan head of COI to coordinate intelligence within the bureaucracy and to conduct espionage. Donovan acted with particular energy on the latter. Within six months, his payroll already topped over a thousand and was still swelling. But Donovan was hemmed in by peculiar boundaries set in Franklin Roosevelt’s mind. Robert Sherwood well captured this enigmatic terrain. “Being a writer by trade,” Sherwood wrote, “I tried to look beyond his charming and amusing and warmly affectionate surface into his heavily forested interior. But I could never really understand what was going on in there. His character was not only multiplex, it was contradictory to a bewildering degree.” One decision that emerged from that heavily forested interior was that the whole world was not to be Bill Donovan’s intelligence province.

  Young Nelson Rockefeller, age thirty-two, Roosevelt’s coordinator of inter-American affairs, had already elbowed Donovan out of radio propaganda in Latin America. Rockefeller was no silver spoon idler. Ruggedly handsome, bounding with energy, and aggressive, he saw the lands from the Rio Grande to Tierra del Fuego as his territory. He did not want Bill Donovan there in any role. Otherwise, he told the President, he would have to resign. Granted, J. Edgar Hoover had his Special Intelligence Service operating in Latin America, but Hoover was not a rampart that Rockefeller was about to storm. Instead, he became Hoover’s ally in excluding Donovan from the region. Hoover refused even to share with the nation’s supposed intelligence coordinator what his spies learned south of the border. Hoover and Rockefeller had another ally. Adolf Berle warned the President, “Bill Donovan wants to take over the FBI work in South America. At least he does not say so, but he wants to put his own man in. He does not even say that, but you can never pin him down to saying what he really wants to do.”

  To FDR, Nelson Rockefeller was like family, a scion from his own social station. Hoover was useful and too cunning to rebuff. In the contest for Latin America, Donovan was sacrificed to these two. On January 16, 1942, the President issued a directive that the COI was to stay out of the region. Further, Donovan was not to carry out any intelligence operations within the United States; this remained strictly Hoover’s bailiwick. For Donovan, being excluded from Latin America amounted to an amputation. But this was not enough for his military rivals, who went beyond Rockefeller and Hoover. They sensed an opportune moment for total dismemberment. The Joint Chiefs of Staff assigned Navy Captain Francis C. Denebrink to investigate the COI and make recommendations for its future. While Denebrink was studying Donovan’s fate, Wild Bill counterattacked. He went to the President with a proposal not to retrench, but to expand. “In order to give privacy and security to both our Special Intelligence service [SI] and our Special Operations group [SO], we have to have a separate building,” Donovan argued. “It has occurred to me tha
t if the State Department passes upon the legality and wisdom of seizure, we would, with your permission, like to obtain the use of the Japanese Embassy.” Donovan had about as many friends at State as he did in the armed services and the FBI. They all united to thwart his latest ambition, and FDR left the Japanese embassy empty.

  Captain Denebrink’s report, submitted on March 8, went for the jugular. He recommended scrapping the COI. The Joint Chiefs happily endorsed the captain’s proposals, which were about to go to FDR, when General Walter Bedell Smith, the politically astute JCS secretary, had second thoughts. Donovan, Smith knew, had standing in the Oval Office. A plan simply to boot Wild Bill out would never win FDR’s approval. It might be wiser to bring the COI, currently a civilian body flowing freely between the JCS and the White House, firmly under military control. That way the military could benefit from COI’s virtues while controlling Donovan’s ambitions.

  When Donovan got wind of General Smith’s intention, he was not unhappy. He recognized that his dependence on a president with a thousand other cares was thin protection against his enemies. The strength of that enmity is reflected in what Assistant Secretary of State Breckinridge Long penned in his diary that April: “Donovan has been a thorn in the side of a number of the regular agencies of the government—including the Department of State. He is into everybody’s business—knows no bounds or jurisdiction—tries to fill the shoes of each agency charged with responsibility for a war activity.” Long then added, reflecting the mythology growing around Donovan, “He has almost unlimited money and a regular army at work and agents all over the world.” While the Bedell Smith suggestion to absorb the COI under the JCS was still before the President, a new adversary emerged in the very military Donovan hoped would adopt him. General George Veazey Strong was a lean, leathery West Pointer who began his career as a cavalryman fighting Ute Indians. Strong earned a law degree, taught law at West Point, and now in his mid-fifties, still smooth-faced and fit, had been picked personally by General Marshall to head the Army’s Military Intelligence Division. Strong veritably glowed hot with ambition, and was known around Washington as King George for his authoritarian manner. His distrust, dislike, and disdain for Donovan had been instantaneous. In Strong’s eyes, the honorary colonel was still a civilian poking into military matters; Donovan employed a bunch of socially connected amateurs; he had a secret cache of funds; he used Communists. Though Donovan did hire Communists with the President’s permission, this fact did not assuage Strong. He rejected Donovan’s rationale for employing Reds, which ran roughly: Roosevelt and Churchill consort with top Communists, beginning with Joe Stalin, in order to defeat Hitler. Why not use lesser fry to the same end? But most sinful to Strong, Donovan was a rival. The Army intelligence chief set about to destroy the COI and its director with a malevolence better applied to the enemy.