Among Strong’s powers was control of the distribution of Magic and Ultra within the United States. The enemy intentions that these decrypts revealed were as priceless to the Allies as divisions or fleets. Donovan may have been impetuous, but he was no fool. He knew that no spy, however crafty, could surpass the value of signal intelligence. Denied access to these decrypts, Donovan could never be the player in secret warfare that he hungered to be. Yet, the keeper of these jewels was his visceral foe, George Strong, who continued to keep him off the distribution list. Strong’s given reason was that the COI was too careless to handle classified material. This charge was not wholly without merit, at least at the top. Donovan was always hectoring his subordinates about security—“Stanley, not a word to anyone for twenty years!” he once warned his science chief, Stanley Lovell. Yet, he drove his security officers to despair, blabbing about the most sanctified secrets for the titillation of guests at cocktail parties. Donovan’s carelessness gave Strong a good reason to deprive the colonel of Ultra and Magic; but his real reason remained to starve the COI of vital intelligence and drive it from the field. Paper missiles began winging across this bureaucratic no-man’s-land. Donovan sent a protest to the JCS arguing, “To exclude this agency from the processed intercepts can imply only that the material is not considered pertinent to the work of [COI] or that there is a question as to the loyalty, the intelligence or discretion of [COI] or the manner in which it would guard its security.” The fight was bucked up to the President, to whom Donovan complained that his espionage wing, SI, could barely function without access to the intercepts. General Strong responded by trying to tighten the noose further around Wild Bill’s neck. He drafted a memorandum for Marshall to send to FDR not only excluding the COI from Magic and Ultra, but specifically prohibiting Donovan’s agency from engaging in its own codebreaking.
For the President, resolving the rivalry meant a juggling act. Donovan was useful and FDR liked him. But Marshall’s staff, including Strong, was indispensable. Roosevelt ruled Donovan out of codebreaking. But he also directed that the COI could receive Magic and Ultra under one condition, a restriction that put Donovan back to square one. Strong’s special branch, which handled the intercepts, would decide what the COI could see.
*
The intelligence that Hitler and his military commanders sought most eagerly in the spring of 1942 was to know whether or not the Western allies intended to invade Europe that year, launching the second front that Stalin kept demanding. The President had swung back and forth, but essentially favored going ahead “to draw off pressure on the Russians.” As he reminded Churchill, “… [T]he Russians are today killing more Germans and destroying more equipment than you and I put together.” Churchill believed the Allies were wholly unprepared to invade the Continent before 1943 at the earliest. Whose view would prevail was vital intelligence to the Nazis, since it would determine how many divisions and what armor and aircraft Hitler dared pull out of occupied Western Europe for use in his 1942 summer offensive against the Soviet Union.
On May 24, Germany seemed to have its answer. On that date, Major Hermann Baun, chief of the Eastern Desk of the Abwehr, sent a secret dispatch to German commanders in Poland and Russia and to General Reinhard Gehlen, the Army’s intelligence chief on the eastern front. “From reliable sources, the views of American government circles, expressed in a conversation between a foreign diplomat and the American Colonel Donovan can be ascertained,” Baun’s message began. What this conversation revealed, he said, was, “The American government expects with certainty that Russia will hold out until the arms production of the U.S.A., which is now well underway, performs up to the requirements of the present war.” Colonel Donovan further allegedly revealed, “… [T]he Russian Army should have over 360 divisions at its disposal for the coming summer offensive.” Most astonishing, Baun reported, “Regarding Allied invasion plans in Europe during the coming summer, Donovan declared that efforts of great magnitude are out of the question. British and American diplomatic representatives in Europe, however, would spread reports of ostensibly planned large scale operations in order to mislead Germany.” The intelligence was essentially correct, confirmed by other sources. The German army was relatively safe in resuming the offensive in Russia. It would not be facing a second front that season.
It is all but certain that this critical intelligence indeed came into German hands through Bill Donovan’s indiscretion. A report in the files of the German foreign ministry found after the war traces the Donovan disclosures to a conversation between Wild Bill and a Polish intelligence officer, Count Mohl, which took place in Washington. Baun’s information is also repeated in reports prepared by the German embassy in Lisbon. Thus, two possibilities open. Mohl may have unwittingly or deliberately passed revelations made by Donovan to a German agent in America, who relayed the information to the Abwehr. Or Donovan may have had a similar conversation with a Portuguese diplomat in Washington, who reported it to his foreign office in Lisbon, where the Germans had informants. However it happened, the journey of this vital secret, likely from Donovan’s lips ultimately to German intelligence agents, was a breach of security of staggering proportions and priceless to enemy strategists. Nothing General Strong concocted could have more surely destroyed Donovan. But neither Strong, nor the President, nor anyone on the Allied side ever knew during the war of this loose-tongued blunder.
Donovan stayed on, though his road continued rocky. He tried to get into the South Pacific, but General Douglas MacArthur, then commanding the Southeast Pacific area, did not want him. Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, the Pacific Fleet commander, also turned him down. Wild Bill remained undeterred. He continued to lobby the President to transfer the COI to the Joint Chiefs of Staff. At one meeting FDR warned him, “They’ll absorb you.” “You leave that to me,” Donovan replied. In the meantime, FDR quietly canvassed Sumner Welles, General Marshall, Sam Rosenman, and Robert Sherwood as to whether he should scuttle the COI. But he kept his own counsel.
Early in May, Adolf Berle met with Roosevelt. Over a lunch of trout and eggs Benedict, Berle patiently provided an audience for FDR’s engaging ramble. The best trout, the President said, came from Germany, caught fresh in the brooks running alongside country inns. His mind leaped from frying trout to firewood. He had his birch sprout at Hyde Park cut and stacked and sold it for six dollars a cord, he boasted. Berle finally managed to turn the conversation to business. “I asked whether he had finally come to an arrangement on the Donovan outfit,” Berle later wrote in his diary. “He said that, as I perhaps knew, that he had been trying to get a brigadier-generalship for the colonel; after which he was thinking of putting him on some nice, quiet, isolated island, where he could have a scrap with some Japs every morning, before breakfast. Then he thought the Colonel would be out of trouble and be entirely happy.” The jest reaffirmed what Berle already knew. FDR was a canny judge of people, their strengths and flaws. Donovan possessed imagination, but too much zeal. The President began to think out loud about how he might reorganize the COI. Berle held his tongue. He was no Donovan fan and later wrote in the diary, “I had some ideas on that subject, but decided to keep them to myself.”
A month later, and typically out of the blue, FDR decided. Donovan had left the country at the time, having gone to London on June 10 to meet with officials of Britain’s Special Operations Executive, the SOE, a clandestine outfit organized to infiltrate agents into occupied Europe. The President had determined to dissolve COI, but he was going to reorganize it as something new, the Office of Strategic Services. The shake-up included taking away COI’s radio arm, the Foreign Information Service, which would cost Donovan roughly half of his staff, now up to 1,630 persons. Roosevelt told Sherwood, who had gone to head the propaganda operation, “You are aware of course of what I am doing… . I strongly feel that your work is essentially information and not espionage or subversive activity … I know Bill Donovan does not agree with this.”
Donovan uttered the cr
ies of protest expected of an empire builder shorn of 50 percent of his empire. But FDR’s decision presented him with a strategic retreat. The Joint Chiefs did not want Donovan’s propaganda machinery in the military. But with it jettisoned, they might agree to take over the proposed OSS. Snooping, sneaking about, and sabotage did not rank high among the martial arts, and the generals and admirals were only too eager to avoid the dirty work. The JCS thus agreed to absorb the OSS without its propaganda branch and to give it two functions, to collect and analyze intelligence and to carry out special operations. Wild Bill saw in this new job description the opportunity to carry out both espionage and sabotage, functions in Britain requiring both MI6 and SOE. On June 13, 1942, the President made it official. He issued an executive order creating the Office of Strategic Services. On the same day he issued another order creating the Office of War Information, sliced off from Donovan’s propaganda operation. Though now part of the military, Wild Bill did not immediately press for rank. He wrote to a British friend, General Sir Archibald Wavell, “[T]hese admirals and generals might be willing to sit down with citizen Donovan, but not with General Donovan.”
If he believed his new status would keep his enemies at bay, Donovan was almost immediately disabused of that hope. That summer, FDR received an urgent request for a meeting with his upgraded spymaster. Mrs. Ruth Shipley ran the State Department’s Passport Office like an absolutist monarch. Donovan came complaining to FDR that Mrs. Shipley insisted on stamping “OSS” on the passports of agents he was sending abroad. The grim joke around his headquarters was that they might as well wear a sign on their backs reading I’M A SPY. Roosevelt managed to reverse the redoubtable Mrs. Shipley, and Donovan’s operatives went abroad under protective cover.
*
By the summer of 1942, most of the absurdities of delivering Magic to the President had been eliminated. The system by which the Army decrypted Japanese diplomatic traffic on one day and the Navy on the next was finally discarded by the secretary of war. Henceforth, the Army was to do all the Magic decrypting. But Navy pride had to be assuaged. The codes the Army broke continued to be delivered to the President by his naval aide. The Navy also managed to maintain control over another cryptanalytic triumph. Its codebreakers had begun to crack the latest version of JN25, the Japanese navy cipher. Purple had bared the secrets of the enemy’s diplomatic communication. JN25 now began to bare the movements of Japan’s fleet.
On May 24 an untidy Navy commander, Joseph J. Rochefort Jr., left his equally messy, windowless basement office in the Naval Administration Building in Pearl Harbor and trotted up to the headquarters of Admiral Nimitz, the Pacific Fleet commander. Only Rochefort’s genius as a codebreaker, exemplified by what he was about to deliver, excused his unmilitary appearance. Penetration of JN25 had parted the curtain on the most ambitious Japanese naval offensive since Pearl Harbor. Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, chief of the Japanese fleet, the enemy’s ablest strategist, had conjured a plan to cap Japan’s string of victories in the Pacific and finally drive America out of the war. At the far end of the Hawaiian island chain stood the lonely American outpost of Midway. Yamamoto planned to capture Midway, thus achieving two objectives. The island would serve as his central Pacific base, blocking the American way to Japan. Further, an attack on Midway could be expected to lure what was left of the U.S. Pacific fleet to a place where Yamamoto’s far larger force, the very carriers and their aircraft that had struck Pearl Harbor, would polish off the American Navy. The defeat would drive the United States to the negotiating table and out of the Pacific war. American codebreakers knew that a major Japanese strategy was brewing, but not where, only that the location was designated by the enemy as “AF.” Commander W. J. Holmes, a Navy cryptologist, suspecting the site might be Midway, had an inspiration. Have Midway report to Pearl Harbor, in an easily decrypted U.S. code, that the islands’ water-distilling plant had broken down. Soon afterward, Navy codebreakers intercepted a Japanese message that “AF” was short of water. This intelligence formed part of the mosaic that enabled Commander Rochefort to report to Admiral Nimitz that Midway was Yamamoto’s objective. Subsequent intercepts showed Japanese army units confidently giving the islands as their next mailing address.
In Washington, the precision of the intelligence seemed too good to be true. Could the intercepts be trusted? Could Yamamoto’s plan be merely a feint to draw the weakened American fleet away from a more important Japanese target, the Hawaiian Islands? Chester Nimitz decided to gamble on Rochefort’s intercepts and to deploy his remaining three carriers 350 miles northeast of Midway. There they would wait. On the morning of June 4, an unsuspecting enemy came within range of Nimitz’s carrier-borne dive bombers. The planes inflicted horrific destruction on the Japanese. All four of Yamamoto’s irreplaceable aircraft carriers were sunk, along with one cruiser. Over 330 Japanese planes were lost. American casualties amounted to one carrier and 150 planes.
For the Japanese, far more than ships and planes lay at the bottom of the Pacific after the Battle of Midway. The whole Japanese strategy lay in ruins. After an unbroken round of victories—the conquest of the Philippines, Singapore, Hong Kong, Malaya, and the Dutch East Indies—the chain was snapped. Invasions planned for New Zealand, New Caledonia, and Fiji had to be scrapped. The threat to the Hawaiian Islands had been lifted. Midway marked the turning point in the Pacific war. From now on, the Japanese would be on the defensive. American sailors, crowded into cramped office corners amid the clatter of Teletypes, key punchers, collaters, and tabulators, laboring over seemingly meaningless jumbles of random letters, had enabled a surprise strike by the American Navy amounting practically to a Japanese Pearl Harbor, and, in the long run, more decisive. Admiral Nimitz had no doubt about the key to his epic triumph. Midway was, he said, “essentially a victory of intelligence.”
The Japanese were handed an unusual opportunity to end this disastrous leakage of their secrets. The opportunity was presented by the Chicago Tribune, published by the arch Roosevelt-hater Colonel Robert McCormick. Stanley Johnston, a Tribune war correspondent, had been sailing the cruiser New Orleans, en route to Pearl Harbor. While in the captain’s cabin, Johnston stole a look at a JN25 decrypt left on the desk, one revealing what the Navy knew about Yamamoto’s Midway strategy and fleet deployment. The story Johnston wrote three days after the battle carried the headline NAVY HAD WORD OF JAP PLAN TO STRIKE AT SEA. The same account appeared in McCormick’s New York Daily News and Washington Times-Herald.
Any reasonably alert reader would conclude that the United States had broken Japan’s naval code. So flagrant was the Tribune’s breach of security that a Chicago grand jury was convened to consider possible violations of the Espionage Act. But rather than reveal anything about its cryptographic coup, the Navy chose not to participate, and the probe had to be dropped. Had the Navy cooperated in the grand jury proceeding, the President might have tasted delicious revenge against his most virulent critic. Stanley Johnston, as the correspondent, and Colonel McCormick, as the publisher, might well have been convicted of treason. But FDR was far too shrewd a player to trade fleeting vengeance for loss of a priceless secret weapon. Still, anger at the newspaper persisted. A congressman denounced the Tribune on the floor of the House, charging, rightly, that the Tribune story could lead the Japanese to change their code.
With all this public uproar in the United States—the news stories, the grand jury, the speech in the Congress—the Japanese, still believing JN25 impenetrable, did not change the code and continued to use it to the war’s end. The Japanese may have spied brilliantly before Pearl Harbor, but afterward they had virtually no apparatus for espionage in the United States. Prior to hostilities, they had depended entirely on their American embassy and consulates. Once the war shut these down, the Japanese, in gauging their enemy’s moves, had lost their eyes and ears. As to the secret of the Midway victory, Japan could not believe what millions of American newspaper readers knew.
*
While at the
level of grand strategy the President was learning to appreciate the value of intercepted enemy ciphers, he retained his weakness for the gossipy products of agents like John Franklin Carter reporting to him personally. One can only wonder at some of the notions Carter relayed to the President from his nebulous sources. His “Secret Memorandum on U.S.S.R.” advised Roosevelt that three Americans served on Stalin’s secret strategy board, and one of them was helping the Russians to plan an air strike of eighty-three hundred planes hidden underground at Vladivostok that would burn “Japan and the islands from one end to the other.” On another occasion Carter informed the President that the Free French leader, General Charles de Gaulle, and the U.S. mine workers leader, John Lewis, were plotting to seize control of the U.S. government. Late in May 1942, Carter had lunch at New York’s Century Club with Harvey Davis, director of the Stevens Institute. Immediately afterward, Carter informed the President, “There has been a suggestion that our airmen spare a few bombs to drop down the craters of some of Japan’s nine hundred semi-active volcanoes. Davis said that seismologists and volcanologists were of the opinion that a hearty explosion of a semi-active volcano will start the lava flowing and might burst out of the sides.” To this bright idea, Carter added his own psychological warfare twist: “… [W]e could convince the mass of Japanese that their gods were angry with them, by dropping bombs down the craters and starting some nice local eruptions.” FDR did not dismiss the idea. He sent it to the Army Air Forces chief, Lieutenant General H. H. “Hap” Arnold. Arnold responded to FDR with admirable tact. “I do not feel that his [Carter’s] suggestion can be dismissed without serious consideration,” Arnold said. But, he cautioned, planes could not be spared until “our bombardment effort against Japan warrants directing our efforts toward anything but the most critical military objectives.” FDR never asked again about bombing volcanoes.
Joseph E. Persico Page 26