Early in the next year, a dumpy, washed-out figure, Elizabeth Bentley, an underground courier between American spies and their Soviet controllers, recalled meeting with Browder. He directed Bentley to extend her courier runs to a new ring serving the Soviets. As she later put it, “They had been engaged in some sort of espionage for Earl Browder” for a considerable time. By freeing Browder to placate the Russians, the President had unwittingly restored a key link in Russia’s spy chain in America.
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That fall of 1943, FDR’s desire was not merely to back the Soviets but to woo Stalin personally, to subject the Soviet dictator to the fatal Roosevelt charm that so rarely failed to conquer. He had finally persuaded Stalin to meet with him and Churchill outside the Soviet Union. Stalin had previously refused to do so, arguing that his country could not risk his absence, as if FDR and Churchill were less essential to their countries’ survival. More likely, Stalin feared turning his back on rivals, real or imagined, should he leave Russia. Indeed, the strongest proponent for Stalin’s staying home was his secret police chief, Beria. Finally, Stalin agreed to travel as far as neighboring Iran to meet his allies in the capital, Tehran, in November 1943. Roosevelt was so eager for an opportunity to deal with Stalin face-to-face that he would probably have agreed to a meeting in the Gobi Desert. At Tehran, Stalin could be expected to accelerate his steady drumbeat for a second front. But what FDR wanted went beyond the war in Europe; it was to realize a dream that he might go down in history as the man who brought democracy and communism together in peace. Nothing could shatter that dream more swiftly than the slightest suspicion on the part of the paranoid Stalin that Roosevelt and Churchill might cut a separate deal with Germany. It was precisely this worst fear, at the worst possible time, that a Bill Donovan alumnus nearly triggered.
Of all the individuals engaged in espionage on the American side in World War II, few could match Theodore Morde for sheer gall. Morde, at age thirty-two, had gone to Cairo in March 1942 with Donovan’s COI. When the Office of War Information split off from COI, Morde stayed with the former organization. At some point in 1943, for reasons best known to himself, Morde resigned and went to work in the Cairo office of the Reader’s Digest international organization. To Robert Sherwood, now with the OWI, it was good riddance since Morde “had been making a certain amount of trouble.” Morde next showed up in Istanbul posing as a war correspondent with no more credentials than an American passport. The smooth talker dropped names and spoke of his high-level experiences with a confidence that lent weight to otherwise invisible qualifications. The correspondent guise enabled Morde to win the trust of an anti-Nazi German professor in Turkey, who in turn led him to the German ambassador, Franz von Papen. During a meeting on October 5, 1943, Morde told the ambassador that he “had come on a highly secret and important mission from the United States for the sole purpose of seeing Von Papen.” His mission was so delicate, he explained, that he “carried no other credential than my passport.” The passport carried a notation that the bearer was “the assistant to the American minister” in Cairo, an out-of-date position left over from Morde’s OWI days. This identification, however, satisfied Papen. During a long conversation Morde proposed that the ambassador lead a plot to overthrow Hitler. If carried off, he could promise nothing for sure, Morde added modestly, but doubtless, the removal of Hitler would lead to peace and save Germany. Papen, a canny diplomatic survivor, and a former chancellor of Germany, took the opportunity to protest the indiscriminate Allied bombing of German cities, noting that only one bomb in ten struck a military target. He also warned Morde that Roosevelt’s policy of unconditional surrender was driving the German people in a direction the Western Allies could not possibly have intended. Because the bombing was destroying their material comforts, the German people, Papen claimed, were turning to communism. That concern vented, the ambassador then listened to the young American read from a formula for peace terms between Germany and the Western Allies, a twenty-six-page document born of the pen of Theodore Morde.
A week later, Morde was back in Cairo, where he managed to see Lieutenant Colonel Paul West, OSS operations chief for the Middle East. He confidently explained that he was engaged in a highly secret mission and was under orders to get back to Washington at once to report directly to President Roosevelt. So urgent a mission, Morde said, rated nothing less than a number one passenger priority on the next flight to the United States at a time when civilian airspace was next to unobtainable. OSS obligingly arranged the flight and Colonel West alerted General Donovan of the imminent arrival of this important figure. On his arrival in the United States in mid-October, Morde almost made it into the Oval Office. He did manage to see Pa Watson, who turned him over to Morde’s old OWI superior, Robert Sherwood. Morde told Sherwood that his mission to Papen had been sponsored by Brigadier General Patrick Hurley, FDR’s personal representative in Cairo. After Morde’s departure, Sherwood sent the President a report of his encounter with Morde. “The story he brought back was an amazing one,” Sherwood told FDR. “He said that under the sponsorship of General Pat Hurley he had been to Istanbul and had two interviews with Papen, in which he discussed a possible deal for the overthrow of Hitler and the Nazi Party.” But no more enamored of Morde than he had been earlier, Sherwood went on to say that he had checked out the self-anointed negotiator and his peace plan with the general. Hurley, he told FDR, “disclaims all responsibility for it and denounces Morde.” What infuriated Sherwood, apart from Morde’s brazen manipulation, was the anti-Roosevelt posture of the man’s present employer, Reader’s Digest. At this time, the magazine was printing huge editions for distribution to American troops abroad. Sherwood told Roosevelt that while supporting the war in general, “the Reader’s Digest has become more and more bitter and partisan in its attacks on this Administration. In its world-wide circulation it is, in effect, undoing the work that my outfit [OWI] is constantly trying to do overseas.” FDR, too, was incensed by the editorial direction of the Digest. But he was enraged most by the rashness of Morde’s talk of a separate peace with Germany on the eve of the Tehran conference with Stalin.
Just three days after Sherwood’s scuttling of Morde, FDR received a communication from Bill Donovan of stunning naïveté. Morde, as arranged by Lieutenant Colonel West, had indeed gone to see Donovan in Washington and had briefed him on his conversation with Papen and his peace proposal. Donovan then sent the twenty-six-page document to FDR with the following notation: “I beg you to read this carefully. It contains an idea that your skill and imagination could develop.” Donovan went on to repeat Morde’s fabrication that General Hurley knew of the plan and had even agreed to carry it out. It is difficult to understand how a spymaster could have been so far behind the curve of events and support a scheme so inimical to what the President hoped to achieve at Tehran, particularly the risk of dealing behind the Soviet Union’s back. West, in writing to his OSS chief about Morde, had added a postscript in longhand that read: “It is my understanding that Morde has orders to report to the President through General Strong.” Donovan may possibly have been ensnared by his own competitive impulses. The idea that Morde’s plan might reach the President through his mortal enemy may have led Wild Bill to elbow his way in, paying less attention to the validity of Morde’s intrigues than to beating Strong into the Oval Office.
On November 10, the day before he was to leave for Tehran, FDR rode out to National Airport to meet Cordell Hull, who was returning from a mission to Moscow. With the President were Mrs. Hull, and the acting secretary of state, Edward R. Stettinius. The trip out was cold and sunless as the heavy limousine lumbered through Washington’s gray streets. Previously, FDR had traveled in a car seized by the Treasury Department from Al Capone. But Mike Reilly, chief of the President’s Secret Service detail, concluded that while the automobile may have carried enough armor for a gangster, it was insecure for a president. Reilly had persuaded friends in the Ford Motor Company to build Roosevelt an 8,000-pound bullet- and b
ombproof vehicle. As they rode along, FDR fed Stettinius, page by page, Bob Sherwood’s denunciation of the Morde report, followed by Bill Donovan’s simplistic endorsement of it. The President wanted Theodore Morde’s passport yanked. People like him had no business causing mischief outside the country in the middle of a war, he told Stettinius. For anyone else, support of the discredited Morde would have marked a humiliating defeat. But not for the unsinkable Donovan. The President kept him on, and Wild Bill proceeded blithely on to the next rampart.
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What the high-spirited, high-living George Earle was telling the President from Istanbul in the fall of 1943 seemed farfetched, but nevertheless alarming. On October 14, Earle sent the White House a coded cable reading: “Turkish source of my last four telegrams gives me following just received. Devastating robot land torpedo plane attack on England will surely take place this month from Northern France and Belgium.” Earle, as an intelligence operative, had compiled a spotty record thus far. A few months before, in August, he had reported to the President that the U.S. raid launched from Libya by 178 B-24 bombers against Romania’s Ploe¸sti oil fields had been “a marvel of precision,” which it had not. The raid had caused substantial damage to fuel storage tanks and refineries; but Earle’s estimate that a year to eighteen months would be required to rebuild the refineries and that “one half of Rumanian production [was] lost for a year” proved highly inaccurate. Furthermore, the raid had been carried out at a horrific cost. Of 1,733 airmen, 446 were killed, and only 33 of the aircraft flew home intact. The rest of the planes were shot down or shot up beyond repair.
Still, Earle had tapped some valuable sources, including the assistant air attaché at the German embassy in Turkey, a covert Austrian anti-Nazi. And his prediction of “robot” aerial strikes on London was not hollow. Eleven days after Earle’s message, FDR received a confirming cable from Churchill, reading: “I ought to let you know that during the last six months evidence has continued to accumulate from many sources that the Germans are preparing an attack on England, particularly London, by means of very long-range rockets which may conceivably weigh 60 tons and carry an explosive charge of 10 to 20 tons.” Churchill further reported German experiments under way on a pilotless bomb-laden aircraft, Earle’s “robot land torpedo plane.” Earle’s intelligence had been essentially correct, but he was off in citing the year in which this weapon, the V-1, would strike Britain.
Churchill’s science advisors were split as to whether the Germans could actually produce a workable rocket or robot. The Prime Minister, however, was less sanguine. He told FDR, “I am personally as yet unconvinced that they cannot be made.” His fear, shared by the President, was that flying bombs and rockets would disrupt the military buildup under way in Britain, “rupturing the Anglo-American plans for a major cross-channel return to the Continent.” So concerned was Churchill that he wanted the V-weapons branded as an unlawful form of warfare, and if Roosevelt and Stalin concurred, he wanted to retaliate by using poison gas against the Germans. He was dissuaded only by the argument of his advisors, not that using gas was immoral, but that a better countermeasure existed. “For this reason,” Churchill continued in his message to FDR, “we raided Peenemünde, which was their main experimental station.”
What was happening at Peenemünde, a thumb of land extending into the Baltic Sea, was indeed a high Hitler priority. He personally inspected the installations in 1943. Churchill, in his memoirs, describes the Führer’s commitment to the work: “About June 10, he told his assembled military leaders that the Germans had only to hold out. By the end of 1943, London would be levelled to the ground and Britain forced to capitulate. October 20 was fixed as zero day for rocket attacks to begin.” But in the months between the Führer’s visit and the scheduled unleashing of the secret weapons, the Peenemünde raid took place. On the night of August 17–18, 600 RAF heavy bombers dropped high explosives and incendiary bombs on the supposedly secret installations. Over 120 scientists and 600 foreign workers perished, including several laborers from Luxembourg who had been spying for British intelligence. The strike had set Hitler’s timetable back; the question was by how long. On November 5, Roosevelt received an assessment from George Earle. “Austrian officer gives me following from his conversation yesterday with Dr. Zever Kuehn, Chief German war organization [in] Turkey,” Earle reported. The President quickly relayed verbatim to Churchill what Earle had told him, including misspellings. “We too have received many reports of the German rocket activity. Production is said to have been delayed due to death in bombing the experimental station at Peenemünde of Lieutenant General Shemiergembeinski. The only information recently coming to me, which might be of value to you, is a statement that factories manufacturing the rocket bomb are situated in Kania Friedrichshafen, Mixtgennerth Berlin, Kugellawerke Schwein-furt, Wiener Neustadt.” Earle had presented to FDR a typical spy’s report, a mélange of fact, rumor, and misinformation. No one, for example, with the near-unpronounceable name of the reportedly dead general was ever identified as involved in German rocket building. Despite the raid, Hitler’s confidence in and dependence on the super weapons did not waver. After Peenemünde was struck, he ordered that work be continued in an underground plant hollowed out of the Harz Mountains near Wordhausen in central Germany.
More alarming to FDR was what Earle further reported, that after the predicted aerial “torpedo” strike against England, “Stratospheric attack on America will follow.” Were Earle’s sources alarmist or merely premature? Did Germany possess weapons capable of reaching the United States? Magic decrypts available to the President in September and October 1943 from Ambassador Oshima’s embassy in Berlin to Tokyo seemed to confirm the possibility. Oshima described a high-performance, long-distance aircraft that Luftwaffe aeronautical engineers were working on, the Me-264. The objective, he revealed, was a bomber that could reach New York.
Chapter XIX
Deceivers and the Deceived
ON THE raw, drizzly night of November 11, 1943, the President left the White House to begin a multi-legged journey that would eventually bring him to Tehran to join Churchill and meet Stalin for the first time. He chose to spend the nine-day Atlantic crossing aboard the battleship Iowa, a floating fortress bristling with nine 16-inch guns and manned by a crew the size of a small city, twenty-six hundred officers and men, and commanded by his former naval aide Captain John McCrea. As the presidential party made its way up the gangway to furled banners and the boatswain’s pipe, Mike Reilly, the White House security chief, went over his checkoff list for presidential sea voyages. As Reilly once described this list, it included: “A supply of money to bank the President, he never carried any in his own pockets. A supply of special foods. FDR’s tastes were easily satisfied. Give him corned beef hash for breakfast, and coffee in his big cup, four and a half inches in diameter, and the day was well started.” Other presidential necessities included cases of Saratoga Springs mineral water, long wooden matches, the only kind FDR would use to light his cigarettes, deep-sea fishing gear, and enough movies to show one a night, particularly slapstick comedies, leggy musicals, and films starring Walter Huston, FDR’s favorite actor. For bedtime, Reilly laid by a well-stocked library of whodunits.
After the Iowa deposited him at Oran, Algeria, the President flew to Cairo, where he met briefly with Chiang Kai-shek. On Saturday, November 27, Roosevelt, an uneasy flier, boarded the presidential Douglas DC-4, the Sacred Cow, and long hours later touched down beneath the massif of the Elburz Mountains at a Soviet-controlled airfield outside Tehran. With him were Harry Hopkins, Averell Harriman, Pa Watson, Admiral William Leahy, General Marshall, FDR’s daughter, Anna, and her husband, Major John Boettiger. Hopkins saw his role regarding Roosevelt and Churchill as “a catalytic agent between two prima donnas.”
The Tehran script was largely foreordained. Stalin would press for an Anglo-American invasion of Europe at the earliest possible date. Churchill, though largely resigned to the landings in France, would c
ontinue to argue for a run up through the Balkans, and FDR would seek to please both. Further, the Big Three would try to design a strategy to draw Turkey into the conflict on their side. And they would toss back and forth the hand grenade of Poland’s postwar fate. FDR’s personal priority remained the political seduction of Joseph Stalin. As he once told a disbelieving Bill Bullitt, who thoroughly distrusted the Soviet dictator, “I think if I give [Stalin] everything I possibly can and ask for nothing from him in return … noblesse oblige, he won’t try to annex anything and will work with me for a world of democracy and peace.” The Stalin whom Roosevelt hoped to win over with sweet reason had, during the purges of the thirties, murdered all of Lenin’s Politburo, the exiled Leon Trotsky, the chief of the General Staff, and 25 percent of senior Soviet military officers, 1,108 of the 1,966 delegates to the Seventeenth Party Congress, 98 of 139 members of the 1934 Central Committee, 90 percent of Soviet ambassadors, and two secret police chiefs, Genrikh Yagoda and Nikolai Yezhov, who had produced the trumped-up evidence against the other victims. It was as if an American president upon coming to power would have had most of the House and Senate shot, along with opposition leaders and potential rivals within his own party, most of the generals, and the American ambassadors to nine out of ten countries.
Joseph E. Persico Page 37