Joseph E. Persico

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

  Five days later, on a moon-bright night and a smooth sea, the British submarine P-219, the Seraph, surfaced in the Mediterranean and glided within two miles of an isolated beach seventy-five miles west of Algiers. High above a steep bluff, a light shone in one window of an otherwise darkened house. General Clark and four high-ranking officers slid down the side of the Seraph into bobbing foldboats, collapsible wood and canvas craft. Before leaving London, Clark had written a letter to his wife, Renie, in which he said, “I am leaving in twenty minutes on a mission which is extremely hazardous but one … I have volunteered to do.” He had scrawled across the envelope, to “Mrs. M. W. Clark. Deliver only in the event that I do not return.” He and the men boarding the foldboats carried five- and ten-dollar gold pieces and the equivalent of $10,000 in French francs should they have to bribe their way back to safety.

  By 6 A.M. Clark’s party, greeted by Robert Murphy, was conferring with General Mast in the remote house which belonged to the father of Lieutenant Jacques Teissier, a Mast aide, who had dismissed the Arab servants for the day. Clark repeated Murphy’s exaggeration that the invasion force would total a half million men. Mast asked if so powerful a force might also land in the south of France to stave off a German takeover of the unoccupied territory. That, Clark replied, was logistically impossible. Mast then asked for two thousand rifles, ammunition, and grenades for his troops, and five days’ advance notice of the invasion. Clark agreed to the weapons but still hedged on D-Day. Four and a half hours later, having made clear his willingness to side with the Americans, General Mast left.

  For Clark, extricating himself proved the most hazardous part of the mission. French police had been tipped off by suspicious Arabs that something was going on at the Teissier house. As the policemen approached, Clark and his group snatched up the papers strewn around the living room and hid themselves in a sour-smelling wine cellar. The police arrived but did not search the cellar. After they left, Clark’s party made it back to the beach only to encounter a raging surf. Clark’s foldboat capsized. Down to the bottom went the gold he was carrying. Not until the middle of the following night did the general, by now semi-naked, soaked, and trembling with cold, make it back aboard the Seraph and ultimately to London. There, Eisenhower decided to risk alerting General Mast four days before the invasion. If Clark had succeeded, a major French force would not be cutting down GIs on the Algerian beaches.

  On Saturday, November 7, FDR gathered Harry Hopkins and a handful of other trusted friends at Shangri-la. That evening, as the guests gathered for drinks and dinner, Roosevelt’s habitual geniality was absent, supplanted by a palpable unease. Earlier, the President had marked a passage from the Thirty-ninth Psalm of the Book of Psalms that read, “O spare me, that I may recover strength, before I go hence, and be no more.”

  The unflappable composure that FDR ordinarily exhibited was purchased at a high price. The fears that roiled beneath the aplomb can be glimpsed in a diary entry by Roosevelt’s frequent companion, the devoted and undemanding cousin Daisy Suckley. “The P. had an awful nightmare last night,” Suckley wrote during a visit to the White House. “I woke out of a sound sleep to hear him calling out for help in blood curdling sounds!” The next morning at breakfast the President told Daisy, “I thought a man was coming through the transom and was going to kill me.” Suckley ended the entry, “I wondered why the SS [Secret Service] didn’t rush in, but he says they are quite accustomed to such nightmares.”

  That November evening at Shangri-la the sudden ring of a telephone shattered the muted conversation. The President took the receiver from Grace Tully with a visibly shaking hand. The War Department was calling. The President listened, nodding vigorously, and hung up. He surveyed his guests, suddenly beaming, the anguish banished from his face. “We have landed in North Africa,” he announced, and early casualty reports were low. “We are striking back.” He grinned.

  Ironically, America’s first offensive in the European war was not against the declared enemy, Nazi Germany, but against the nation’s oldest friend, France. Nor was it the cakewalk predicted by the President’s intelligence sources, including Donovan’s OSS. Yes, the invasion had achieved total surprise. The first warning had been the throb of landing craft engines approaching the beaches. The deceptions succeeded too. As the forces landed, seven squadrons of German planes circled Cap Bon, three hundred miles from the nearest fighting, searching for a fictitious convoy, bound supposedly for Malta. But in answering the crucial question, would French forces resist the invasion? the Americans had been blinded by optimism. General Mast managed only to slow the French response to the landings in Algeria. But Allied troops had to fight their way ashore against fierce resistance, particularly in the port cities. Almost fifteen hundred Americans were killed, wounded, or missing in a stiff three-day engagement that cost the French triple that number of casualties. While the losses had not been catastrophic, Torch was hardly a dustup.

  A week after the invasion, on November 15, a self-satisfied President called his cabinet together. At times it seemed that FDR had been the only believer in Torch. Now, in victory, he was not averse to taking the lion’s share of the credit. The successful operation had combined strength with cunning. Torch confirmed another of the President’s gambles. He had created the COI/OSS against the resistance of every military and civilian organization with a hand in intelligence. He had sensed in Bill Donovan—despite the latter’s bent for stepping on toes, or because of it—the qualities of boldness and enterprise he wanted in a spymaster. He had stuck by Donovan when rivals wanted his head on a platter. And the OSS had played a respectable role in Torch. Colonel Eddy’s team had amassed an Everest of logistical data on tides, currents, depth of ports, locations of bridges, tunnels, and airfields, placement of coastal guns, the strength and deployment of French forces, and the most favorable landing sites. On certain beaches, OSS agents, waiting to greet the troops, handed them French military maps and guided them inland. The enemy was where these agents said it would be, armed as predicted and in the numbers estimated. Bill Donovan’s organization was now part of the military force, if still a decidedly junior partner.

  *

  The saboteurs’ landing in the United States had confirmed FDR’s nagging worry over subversion and fifth column infiltrators. That enemies could penetrate America’s shores seemed to validate J. Edgar Hoover’s repeated warnings to the President, echoed since 1938, that the Nazis had planted secret agents among the tens of thousands of Jews seeking to flee Germany. This possibility had shaped the President’s priority, which was not so much to help refugees enter America, but to keep spies out, a posture questionable in hindsight, but reflective of FDR’s state of mind at the time.

  Still, his behavior had to be measured against startling intelligence the President was receiving on the plight of the Jews, even before the war in Europe had begun. Bill Bullitt, his former ambassador to France, had come into possession of a document smuggled out of Germany, which he sent to the White House marked “Secret and Personal for the President.” On March 12, 1939, over five months before the war had started, Bullitt managed to obtain the transcript of remarks made by Hitler at a secret meeting of German officers, government officials, and Nazi Party leaders. In the privacy of his inner circle, Hitler had revealed his timetable. Germany had already acquired the Czech Sudetenland through the 1938 Munich Pact. Within the week, the remaining rump of Czechoslovakia was to be seized. “Poland will follow,” Hitler announced. “German domination is necessary in order to assure for Germany Polish supplies of agricultural products and coal. As far as Hungary and Romania are concerned, they belong without question to Germany’s vital space.” In 1940, certainly no later than 1941, Hitler assured his staff, “Germany will settle accounts once and for all with her hereditary enemy, France. That country will be obliterated from the map of Europe.” In his most brutal prediction, Hitler declared: “… [E]nemies of the German people must be exterminated radically: Jews, democracies and internat
ional powers.” Near hysteria marked his closing threat: “… We will settle accounts with the ‘dollar Jews’ in the United States. We will exterminate this Jewish democracy and Jewish blood will mix with the dollars.”

  Since it was impossible for FDR not to know what was happening to the Jews of Europe, the pertinent question is how he and his circle dealt with this knowledge. Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter, a Jew, was as close to the President as any figure in the administration, and had been something of a one-man recruiting agency for the New Deal. Frankfurter was all too familiar with the historic odyssey of the Jews. His parents had left Austria when Felix was twelve and settled on the Lower East Side of New York. Reared in poverty, the boy nevertheless displayed his brilliance, graduating from City College at age nineteen and going on to Harvard Law School, where he subsequently joined the faculty. His devotion to FDR was total. He had even braved the disfavor of his colleagues to support the President’s high-handed 1937 attempt to pack the Supreme Court. The Frankfurters still had relatives in Austria. In 1938, the year before Roosevelt elevated him to the Court, Frankfurter received word that his eighty-two-year-old uncle, Solomon Frankfurter, a distinguished Viennese scholar, had been hauled from his bed at 3 A.M. and jailed by the Nazis. Frankfurter’s first impulse had been to reach for the phone and call the President. But on second thought, he held back. Suppose the press got wind of the story and blew it out of proportion? Roosevelt was already attacked by his enemies as a tool of the Jews, even a Jew himself. Bigots parodied his New Deal as the “Jew Deal.” Frankfurter decided instead to turn to the State Department to help win his uncle’s release. He had chosen a poor ally. State’s visa division was notoriously unsympathetic toward Jews. Frankfurter was advised that intervention was impossible. In desperation, he appealed to the American-born Lady Nancy Astor in London. In that period, before war broke out, her Cliveden set favored appeasing Hitler, and this stance gave her some influence with the German ambassador to England, who did arrange for Solomon Frankfurter’s release. Roosevelt was never involved.

  Even closer to FDR, Sam Rosenman also hesitated to go directly to the President with his family’s problem. Rosenman had a refugee cousin living in America who came to him pleading for help in finding out what had happened to his wife and three children trapped in German-occupied Warsaw. Instead of going to Roosevelt, Rosenman chose to see Adolf Berle, a rare sympathetic listener at State, who tried to help.

  It is fair to ask if the President could have done more to save Jews seeking refuge in the United States. The transcript Bullitt had sent him exposed Hitler’s intentions. The Nuremberg laws were stripping Jews of their humanity. And the whole world knew of the anti-Semitic outrage of Kristallnacht. The answer to Roosevelt’s conduct in the face of these facts lies in part in his earliest formation. He had been shaped in some degree by the genteel prejudices of his class. His wife, Eleanor, who grew in character to become a paragon of liberal virtues, had herself exhibited a fashionable bigotry when she was younger. After an evening with Bernard Baruch, when she was thirty-three, she wrote her mother-in-law: “The Jew party [was] appalling. I never wish to hear money, jewels or labels mentioned again.” FDR had named Jews, an ethnic group that then represented only 3 percent of the U.S. population, to 15 percent of his top administration posts. But as his son Jimmy once observed, FDR took his social companionship almost wholly from his own class. “I now think he travelled with that group as an escape, back to the world of Groton, Harvard and Hyde Park. These people had everything, so they didn’t want anything from father,” Jimmy concluded. “He was more comfortable with them than he was with his political associates, who constantly pestered him with their problems.” Whatever his social preferences, Roosevelt remained foremost a politician who dared not get too far ahead of his constituents. Barely out of the Depression, still haunted by unemployment, most Americans were not eager to open the floodgates to job competition from immigrants, including oppressed Jews. A 1938 Roper poll posed the question, “What kinds of people do you object to?” The people most cited were Jews, singled out by 35 percent of the respondents.

  The tight immigration laws in place since the twenties allowed for only 153,774 immigrants annually, of which Germany’s quota was 25,957, a trickle compared to the flood of German Jews trying to reach America. At the State Department, these laws were applied not so much strictly as mean-spiritedly. Even unfilled quotas were bottled up and withheld from Jews seeking to flee Europe. Congress could be equally insensitive. A bill introduced in the House to make it easier for European Jews under age sixteen to get at least a tourist visitor’s visa to America never made it out of committee.

  The saga of the SS St. Louis illustrates the atmosphere of the era. The Hamburg-Amerika liner, carrying 930 Jewish refugees, left Germany for Cuba on May 13, 1939, before the war in Europe began. At Havana, however, Cuban officials refused to allow more than a handful to disembark. The captain then circled the Florida coast for days, close enough for the passengers to glimpse the lights of Miami, while negotiators sought permission to land the refugees. State and immigration authorities applied laws prohibiting the landing with chilling exactitude. The refugees dispatched a telegram to President Roosevelt pleading for help. It went unanswered. The St. Louis returned to Europe, where its passengers were resettled in Britain, France, the Netherlands, and Belgium. Many who landed in countries soon to be occupied by Hitler ultimately perished in the Holocaust.

  The President believed that the answer to the Jews’ dilemma lay outside the United States. “The whole trouble is in England,” he told Henry Morgenthau. Palestine was the obvious place to resettle Jewish refugees, FDR suggested. But the British would do nothing that might antagonize Middle East Arabs. Unable to overcome the resistance within the country and within himself to deal with the plight of European Jewry, Roosevelt thrashed about in futile speculation. As the situation worsened, Morgenthau came again to the President to see if something might be done. FDR offered that maybe the Jews could be settled in the Cameroons, on Africa’s western coast, where they would find “some very wonderful high land, table land, wonderful grass and … all of that country has been explored and it’s ready.” FDR mentioned that he had tried to talk the president of Paraguay into taking in more Jews. He also suggested to Morgenthau an idea that demonstrated a certain bleak clairvoyance: “I actually would put a barbed wire around Palestine, and I would begin to move the Arabs out of Palestine… . There are lots of places to which you could move the Arabs. All you have to do is drill a well because there is this large underground water supply.”

  As for early reports of Nazi barbarism, a seed of doubt existed in Roosevelt’s mind sown by memories of alleged German atrocities during World War I. The kaiser’s armies, depicted in the Allied press as bullnecked Huns, were accused of torturing the wounded, slaughtering innocent civilians, and impaling Belgian babies on the points of their bayonets for sheer sport. All had turned out to be British-inspired fabrications.

  Well into the war, on May 27, 1942, Donovan was feeding the President information confirming FDR’s early judgment that the British had been the impediment to rescuing the Jews. A movement was afoot to form a Jewish army in Palestine that would fight with the Allies. Unwise, Donovan’s experts cautioned. The State Department went further and drafted a release for the President to issue that read: “The post-war settlement cannot be prejudiced by commitments at the present time in respect of an army for Palestine which would be exclusively Jewish.” With Operation Torch in the planning stage at the time, how could the interest of hapless Jews compare to the need not to rile millions of Arabs living from North Africa to the Middle East? the opponents of a Jewish army argued.

  In England, the war, instead of increasing sympathy for the Jews, was having a contrary effect, according to further intelligence that Donovan supplied to the President. “From Midland and London areas and from police duty room reports,” Donovan noted, “an increase in anti-semitism, said to be due princip
ally to the frequent occurrence of Jewish names in news of black market cases. Other reasons cited for the increase or prevalence of anti-semitism are the many current stories of Jewish evasion of duties and regulations.”

  On July 10, 1942, John Franklin Carter delivered to the White House reports written by eyewitnesses to the horrors of daily life in concentration camps in Poland and Lithuania. One account described the mass electrocution of Jews in a place called Belzec. Bill Donovan’s people contributed further to the catalogue of horrors. His agents interrogated steamship passengers landing in New York, one of whom, a banker who had fled Berlin in November 1941, gave a harrowing account of how the Nazi regime went about rounding up Jews and transporting them to the camps.

  Solid intelligence of what was happening to the Jews mounted as Ultra intercepted Nazi dispatches. Decrypts forwarded to Churchill included a report from Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski, an SS general operating in occupied Russia, sent to his superior in Berlin. Dated July 18, 1941, it read: “Yesterday’s cleansing action in Slonim, carried out by Police Regiment Centre, 1,153 Jewish plunderers were shot.” Three weeks later Bach-Zelewski informed Berlin, again in code: “Up to today, midday, a further 3,600 have been executed… . Thus the figure of executions in my area now exceeds 30,000.” No records exist indicating whether or not these decrypts reached FDR as well as Churchill. Curiously, in the stream of secret messages passed directly between them throughout the war, no substantive mention was ever made of the atrocities against the Jews.