At one point raids became so devastating that General Marshall warned the President that the Germans were threatening to try downed American and British airmen as war criminals. Marshall recommended that Roosevelt and Churchill issue a joint warning “that immediate retaliatory action will be taken if such threats are carried out.” FDR craftily told Marshall, “It seems to me that such action need not be announced before hand but that it should be put into effect the minute the Germans start anything. I think the American public would back this up… . I think I am right in saying that we and the British hold more German prisoners than they hold of ours.”
The Bletchley Park codebreakers contributed to the success of Allied raids. American bomber pilots, gathered in makeshift briefing rooms throughout southern England, heard their meteorological officer describe weather conditions all the way to the target and back. The airmen were unaware that the source of this data was not anemometers, barometers, or balloons, but Ultra decrypts of German weather reports.
On February 15, 1944, General Marshall sent FDR a memorandum concerning a German message out of Rome that Bletchley Hall had broken. The Wehrmacht commander had reported that thirty American bombers attacked a train while it was crossing a bridge near Orvieto, Italy. “Entire train on bridge when first bombs, including heaviest calibre, dropped on it,” the broken report read. Sixteen cars had been completely destroyed. The German commander described a hellish scene: “Half of these [cars] fell into the riverbed and other half burnt or shattered on the bridge. About five hundred prisoners, mainly English, killed. Salvage and rescue hampered or even prevented by considerable number of delayed action bombs so that some of the severely wounded, who would otherwise have been saved, also died.” Churchill, upon learning through this Ultra decrypt of the grisly, unwitting American assault on his own troops, instructed Sir Stewart Menzies, chief of the British secret service, “[T]his information should be given to President with assurance that no feeling of complaint whatsoever is implied.” The “Most Secret” message was to be seen by only General Marshall and the President, “and information should not (repeat not) be made available to any other person.” The British also made clear that knowledge of this catastrophe would be tightly circumscribed at their end. Beyond the Prime Minister, the secret was known to only a handful of top officials “and will not (repeat not) be passed down to lower levels.” Before passing Churchill’s message along to FDR, Marshall added a note: “The reason the British authorities are so insistent that no other eyes than yours, mine and [General Clayton] Bissell’s [Army G-2] see this, as a leak would point directly to British control of German code.”
The story of Churchill’s refusal to warn Coventry that it was to be bombed proved apocryphal. The hushed-up account of American bombers killing hundreds of British POWs, however, provided an actual instance of the Prime Minister’s determination to protect Ultra.
*
Two types of bodies circled the Roosevelt heavens—planets, such as General Marshall, Admiral Leahy, and Secretary Stimson, steady in their orbits, unspectacular, dependable; and shooting stars, fiery, unpredictable, occasionally burning out—a Bill Bullitt, a George Earle, a Wild Bill Donovan. The latter group exhibited a pattern. They were all mold breakers, channel jumpers, charmers, and high-wire artists, mirroring sides of FDR’s character. Late in 1943, Donovan embarked on one of his boldest gambits. With the President’s approval he flew to Russia to attempt to arrange a swap of American and Soviet intelligence missions—an OSS station in Moscow for an NKVD station in Washington. Donovan arrived in the snow-blanketed Soviet capital two days before Christmas, where he was taken in tow by FDR’s troubleshooting ambassador, Averell Harriman, and greeted warmly by the ordinarily dour Soviet foreign minister, Vyacheslav Molotov. Two days after Christmas, through Molotov’s intercession, Donovan and Harriman found themselves inside the NKVD headquarters, a grim, czarist structure at 2 Dzerzhinsky Street. There they met with the Soviet foreign intelligence chief, General Pavel Fitin, and a man introduced only as General Alexander Ossipov. The latter, unknown to the Americans, was Gaik Ovakimyan, the NKVD official in charge of subversion in foreign countries, including the United States. The two Soviets formed a classic good-cop bad-cop duo. Fitin, blond, blue-eyed, and soft-spoken, appeared an unlikely spymaster. Ossipov/Ovakimyan, however, was described by another American present as easily passing for “the boon companion of Boris Karloff.” Donovan proceeded to lay out his espionage exchange scheme, arguing that it would enable two allies fighting the same enemy to trade useful intelligence, to avoid operations that stepped on each other’s toes, and to swap methods for carrying out sabotage inside the Reich. As a sweetener, he immediately offered to share with the NKVD the OSS’s spy-training curriculum. By the end of the day, Fitin had agreed to the exchange and to allowing Donovan to set up an OSS mission in Moscow under Colonel John Haskell, a close Donovan associate, also present. The proposal was placed before Stalin, who approved with an alacrity that might have aroused suspicion. The Soviets soon announced that their candidate to head a seven-man NKVD office in Washington would be Colonel A. G. Grauer.
On January 6, 1944, in a raging snowstorm, Donovan flew out of Moscow. All that now remained for him was to win approval of his scheme from the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the President. But J. Edgar Hoover beat him to the punch. The FBI chief had quickly ferreted out what Donovan had been up to in Russia, likely tipped off by Army G-2, his ally in the turf battles against Donovan. He dictated a letter to his secretary, Helen Gandy, headed “Personal and Confidential” to “Dear Harry,” and had it hand-delivered to his tested conduit, Harry Hopkins. Hopkins read Hoover’s letter and told Grace Tully to make sure the President saw it “at once.” Hoover’s warning was dire. Donovan’s U.S.-Soviet intelligence swap was a Russian ruse, the FBI chief charged, “a highly dangerous and most undesirable procedure” that would “establish in the United States a unit of the Russian Secret Service which has admittedly for its purpose the penetration into the official secrets of various government agencies.”
Donovan did not get to the President until five days later, and was now on the defensive. He had not yet won approval for the exchange from the Joint Chiefs of Staff, but he gamely assured the President that his prospects looked good. The move was wise, he insisted, offering “[m]ilitary advantages accruing to the United States in the field of intelligence both in so far as Germany and Japan were concerned.” As for Hoover’s alarm over Soviet penetration of the United States, in Donovan’s judgment, the FBI chief displayed surprising naïveté. “I don’t need to suggest to you that the OGPU [predecessor of the NKVD] came here,” Donovan pointed out, “with the coming of Amtorg and is already here under the protection of the embassy… . I was not unmindful of someone’s trying to make capital of the OGPU’s coming here,” he added, “but I think the complete answer is 1. They are already here and 2. The military people who come here are in the open and under such rules as are imposed by us and here solely and only for military reasons and joint operations against our common enemy.” The President, Donovan thought, appeared to agree.
Hoover, however, was leaving nothing to chance. He began squeezing Donovan from another direction. He went to his nominal boss, Attorney General Francis Biddle, warning that the NKVD was already “engaged in attempting to obtain highly confidential information concerning War Department secrets.” Biddle sent Hoover’s letter to FDR, alerting the President to another danger. “Under the statutes, these Russian agents would probably have to register,” Biddle pointed out. “Public knowledge of such an arrangement might have serious consequences. I have been informed that you have approved the plan generally, but I do not know whether you have considered its implications.” The implication Biddle so delicately raised was that 1944 was a presidential election year, and Roosevelt must know that Hoover, if thwarted, was not above making damaging leaks to the press.
The President threw up his hands. He sent Biddle’s letter to Admiral William Leahy, his mili
tary chief of staff, asking, “What do we do next?” Three weeks of infighting ensued among the War Department, the OSS, and the FBI, but Donovan never had a chance. Hoover, in that era, was a national hero, the director whose G-men had triumphed over John Dillinger, “Pretty Boy” Floyd, “Baby Face” Nelson, and other arch criminals who had terrorized the country. Hoover’s capture of dozens of Nazi agents and saboteurs had been front-page stories. Donovan’s plan may have been good for intelligence but it was risky politics. Going into a possible fourth term campaign with the albatross around his neck that he had allowed Soviet spies to settle on the banks of the Potomac was not something Roosevelt relished. Leaving the delivery of the coup de grâce to Leahy, who also opposed Donovan’s scheme, FDR directed the admiral to inform the service chiefs and Bill Donovan that “an exchange of O.S.S. and N.K.V.D. missions between Moscow and Washington is not appropriate at the present time… .”
The irrepressible Donovan was not through. His plan to exchange missions had been torpedoed, but he went ahead, on his own hook, swapping intelligence with the NKVD. He provided the Russians with American special weapons manuals, miniature cameras, and microfilming equipment. The Russians, in turn, revealed their techniques for sabotaging German installations. Donovan also assured the Soviets that once the election was out of the way, he could get the mission exchange back on track.
*
One man who knew immediately of the President’s decision to kill off the spy swap was Duncan Lee, another lawyer protégé of Bill Donovan’s who had become the director’s executive assistant. Almost immediately upon formation of the OSS, Moscow had made the fledgling espionage service a priority target. The Soviet intelligence strategy for 1942 specifically stated: “[O]ur task is to insert there our people and carry out cultivation with their help.” The NKVD found a wedge in Lee, who epitomized the establishment figures inhabiting the upper reaches of the OSS. Thirty years old in 1944, he had been born to missionary parents in Nanking, China. He had returned home and graduated from the Woodbury Forest School in Virginia, took a B.A. from Yale, became a Rhodes scholar at Oxford, then received a law degree from Yale. A Communist intermediary described Lee as “[a]verage height, medium brown hair and light eyes, glasses, rather studious looking.” Though Lee was not a Communist, he would prove a profitably placed NKVD source. Immediately after graduating from law school, Lee had been snapped up by Wild Bill’s Manhattan law firm, Donovan & Leisure, and subsequently followed his boss to Washington. By the time the COI became the OSS, Lee had received a direct Army commission, risen to the rank of captain, and worked in the Donovan front office secretariat. Essentially, whatever happened in the OSS was known to Duncan Lee.
Early in 1943, Lee opened his fourth-floor apartment door at 3014 Dent Place in Washington to a plain-looking thirty-five-year-old who introduced herself as Helen Grant. “I am the gal who is going to be your contact,” she explained. The woman was Elizabeth Bentley, the Soviet courier. She would one day turn against communism, but at this point she was a steadfast party apparatchik. An FBI agent later described Bentley as “buxom, blue-eyed, had big feet, short, brown curly hair, poor taste in clothes and was neither attractive nor unattractive.” Her background was not dissimilar to Lee’s. She claimed ancestry from Mayflower forebears and was a bookish 1930 graduate of Vassar. During the Depression, Bentley had become disillusioned with capitalism and was drawn to the Communist Party. This product of a stern New England upbringing became a welcome recruit to the Soviets, one of whom described her as “a genuine American Aryan.” Her principal duty was to collect intelligence from a circle of sources in the American government and pass it on to her NKVD controllers.
Bentley and Lee began meeting in a drugstore on Wisconsin Avenue and once in a German beer hall on Fifteenth Street. Lee, according to the courier, passed to her “… highly secret information on what the OSS was doing, such as, for example, that they were trying to make secret negotiations in the Balkans … parachuting people into Hungary, that they were sending OSS people into Turkey… .” The Soviets were delighted with Lee. Bentley’s superior and lover, Jacob Golos, notified Moscow concerning Lee: “Cables coming to the State Department go through his hands. He collects them and shows them to Donovan at his discretion. All the agent information from Europe and the rest of the world also comes through his hands.”
Bentley, however, found Lee a difficult source. “He was one of the most nervous people with whom I had to deal,” she observed. Lee forbade Bentley to phone him, refused to turn over actual documents, and permitted her no note-taking in his presence. As Bentley described their routine to Moscow, “A long time ago, I had to promise him that I would not write down data communicated by him. Therefore, I have to remember his data, until I am elsewhere and can write it down… . [H]e is one of ‘the weakest of the weak sisters,’ nervous and fearing his own shadow.”
Still, Lee’s take proved worth her pains. On the delicate matter of Poland’s future, Lee described an OSS report crossing his desk that revealed Churchill was willing to cede Eastern Prussia to Poland. When Bentley asked Lee about activities at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, “… he told me,” she later claimed, “that he had word that something very secret was going on at that location. He did not know what, but he said it must be something supersecret because it was shrouded in such mystery and so heavily guarded.” Oak Ridge was the site of the Manhattan Project’s operation to separate U235 from U238 in sufficient quantity to make an atomic bomb. At one of their drugstore rendezvous, according to Bentley, Lee gave her a detailed account of a White House meeting over Donovan’s proposed OSS-NKVD exchange, including Admiral Leahy’s opposition. At the prospect of NKVD agents coming to Washington, Lee told her, “I’m finished. They’ll come to call on me, and when I let them in, they’ll shake my hand and say, ‘Well done, comrade.’”
Though fearing exposure, Lee continued to cooperate with Bentley. He told her that the OSS security staff had compiled a list entitled “Persons Suspected of Being Communists on the Agency’s Payroll.” A message from the NKVD New York station to General Fitin in Moscow read, “According to Kokh [Lee’s apparent code name] advice a list of ‘reds’ has been compiled by IZBA,” the code name for the OSS. Four of the names on the list of suspects, Lee revealed, were indeed providing intelligence to the Russians.
By 1944, Lee’s personal life was becoming messy and his paranoia mounting. His wife discovered that he was having an affair with another Communist courier, Mary Price. He feared Donovan had begun to suspect him. He distrusted Elizabeth Bentley. Another NKVD contact, code-named X, reported, after dealing with Lee, that he “came so scared to both meetings that he could not hold a cup of coffee since his hands trembled.” Lee eventually broke off with the NKVD and spied no more. The Soviets were just as happy to see this emotional wreck go away. Through him, however, for a period of over two years, whatever the OSS shared with the White House, and vice versa, was often available to the Soviet Union. While representing the prize Soviet catch in the OSS, Duncan Lee was hardly alone. Post–Cold War examination of NKVD documents suggests that the number of Soviet agents planted in the OSS ran into the double digits.
Elizabeth Bentley provides interesting glimpses into how the NKVD taught her to deal with contacts on her courier route. In order to avoid being followed, she was instructed to locate “drug stores with two exits, if possible, and movie theatres and other places that would be suitable for dodging in and out rather quickly, and thereby eluding any surveillance.” Another technique was to have a partner wait behind at a suitable distance to see if she was being followed. If a suspicious car appeared outside a building that she was exiting, Bentley was told to “memorize the last two numbers of the license plate, and then attempt to determine if this particular car was following you.” A way to shake a car tail was “to go down one or several one-way streets in the opposite direction to the regular vehicle traffic.” Bentley was advised to cross and recross the street to determine if anyone was following her
erratic movements. She was never to turn around, indicating that she was aware of being followed. As a last resort, if a tail could not be shaken, she was “to turn around and start following the person who was following you.” If she was meeting a fellow agent and suspected she was being followed, she should wait until her contact was in sight and then light a cigarette to warn her accomplice away.
If she had incriminating material in her apartment her instructions were to “place a book behind my front door… . In the event that anyone had entered my apartment in the meantime, this book, of course, would not be in the same place I left it.” If she kept sensitive papers or equipment in a trunk, “a thin black thread should be placed around the lock … in such a manner that if it were opened in my absence, I would be able to tell upon my return.” For her travels between New York and Washington, “I was to remove all identification marks from my clothing, and was also instructed not to carry anything that would indicate to anyone my real identity.” No conversation of substance was ever to be carried out over the telephone, and she was cautioned to listen for “any unusual buzzing or clicks” suggesting the line was tapped. When using a pay phone, she “should either use a phone booth in between two booths already occupied or else should select a booth which would allow observation of persons going in to occupy adjacent booths.” Either Bentley’s training was sound or she was a natural, since this nondescript woman, code-named Good Girl by her controllers, was never caught in the six years during which she carried microfilm and classified documents in her knitting bag between American spies in Washington and her NKVD handlers in New York.
Joseph E. Persico Page 40