Soviet agents like Elizabeth Bentley were cogs in a spy apparatus dating back to 1933, when Roosevelt granted diplomatic recognition to the Soviet Union. The image the President had of a Russian spy was of a wild-haired, hot-eyed labor agitator. The truth was startlingly different. Among those serving the Soviet cause, many, like Lee, were impeccable members of the American establishment, some known socially to the Roosevelts. Martha Dodd was the beautiful, flamboyant, reckless daughter of William E. Dodd, a historian from the University of Chicago who served as FDR’s ambassador to Germany from 1933 to 1938. Miss Dodd openly confessed, “I have a weakness for the Russians.” She displayed this penchant by plunging into a love affair with a Russian diplomat, Boris Vinogradov, a romance stage-managed by the NKVD. About her parent whom she was all too willing to betray, she proudly announced to her Soviet controllers, “[M]y father has great influence on Hull and Roosevelt… . I have access mainly to the personal, confidential correspondence of my father with the U.S. State Department and the U.S. President,” she boasted. As an NKVD officer put it, Martha “checks Ambassador Dodd’s reports to Roosevelt in the archive and communicates to us short summaries of the contents.” She did not hesitate to use her charms to seduce Nazis as well for whatever intelligence of use to the Soviets she could acquire in bed, numbering among her conquests General Ernst Udet, chief of Luftwaffe plane production.
When her father’s tenure as ambassador ended, Martha Dodd returned to America, where the Russians still found use for her. A 1942 cable instructed the New York NKVD station: “She should … be guided to approach and deepen her relationship with the President’s wife, Eleanor… .” Dodd would remain unwavering in her attachment to Marxism, fleeing after the war from FBI investigators to the USSR and Czechoslovakia during which time she and the wealthy Communist she had married, Alfred Stern, were convicted in absentia of spying for the Soviet Union.
Like Martha Dodd, another young socialite who shared her political sympathies had a close connection to the White House. Michael Straight was the son of wealthy parents who were founders of The New Republic magazine, and early friends of Franklin and Eleanor. Young Michael had gone to England to study at Cambridge in the thirties. There he joined the Communist Party and was drawn into the web of Soviet spies that included Donald Maclean, Guy Burgess, Harold “Kim” Philby, and Anthony Blunt, later curator of the queen’s art collection. The Roosevelt archives show at least five visits to the White House by Michael Straight, invitations to tea, dinner, and, on one occasion, a lone session with FDR. The usher’s log for October 21, 1941, lists Straight and his wife as houseguests along with “Mrs. Douglas Fairbanks, Jr.” According to The Haunted Wood by Weinstein and Vassiliev, who in 1994 were given access to NKVD wartime archives, Straight had discussed with the Roosevelts his interest in finding a job. The First Lady suggested that he take an agricultural credit post in the administration, which Straight found useless for his purposes. Thereafter, he wrote to Theodore Mally, chief of the London NKVD station, that he preferred Treasury or the Federal Reserve Board. “In those places,” he said, “possibilities are great because of the influence on Roosevelt… . Treasury has great significance. Its head is Henry Morgenthau, who knows my parents well.” Straight eventually managed a State Department post, but his deliveries to his Soviet contacts were disappointing. The Nazi-Soviet pact of August 23, 1939, disillusioned the idealistic Straight. By 1942, at age thirty-one, he broke completely with Soviet espionage. As the current chief of the NKVD New York station advised Moscow, Straight believed, “[O]ne should render assistance to the Soviet Union only as long as the war which the USSR wages is advantageous for England and the U.S.”
Next door to the White House, in the Treasury building, the NKVD had made another penetration. Well before Pearl Harbor, on July 2, 1941, Treasury secretary Henry Morgenthau, FDR’s garrulous Hyde Park neighbor, received a disquieting anonymous phone call. The next day, Morgenthau contacted Harry Dexter White, his advisor on international monetary policy, lend-lease, foreign funds, and later to become assistant Treasury secretary. “I got a very mysterious call last night,” Morgenthau explained to White. The caller had said that he had found some of White’s papers and “this fellow wanted a reward.” The papers contained highly confidential information, and the secretary had been particularly disturbed because the anonymous caller had a “strong German accent.” White, valued by Morgenthau as the man “in charge of all foreign affairs for me,” had an explanation. He had forgotten the classified papers in his government car on the ride home. The Secret Service investigated, but no German-accented caller was ever traced and the search petered out.
Morgenthau’s concern about a leak from his office was understandable, but in the wrong direction. Germany was not the threat in this case. Harry White was one of the American officials whom Whittaker Chambers had fingered as Communist agents at the home of Adolf Berle that long ago September night. No evidence exists that Berle ever alerted Morgenthau to this accusation. The Treasury secretary continued to have implicit faith in the man variously code-named by his Soviet controllers Lawyer, Richard, Jurist, and Reed.
Harry Dexter White, heavyset, full-faced, bespectacled, and mustachioed, was apparently a willing but timorous resource for the NKVD. After meeting with him, a Russian agent cabled Moscow that the Treasury official was “ready for any self-sacrifice; he does not think about his personal security, but a compromise would lead to a scandal… . Therefore he would have to be very cautious.” Rather than having a Soviet contact come to his apartment, White proposed “infrequent conversations lasting up to half an hour while driving in his automobile.” However gingerly handled, the Soviets knew what they wanted from the Treasury official. Pavel Fitin, after receiving a three-page draft memorandum written by White for Morgenthau, noted, “Timely receipt by us of these materials could turn out to be very useful… . [A] secret document of the [U.S.] Foreign Economic Administration about the future of Germany … would be of major interest to our leading government organizations… .”
Ironically, it was not a spy’s misstep but an ugly divorce and custody suit that almost blew the lid off Soviet espionage operations in the United States. Katherine Wills Perlo, wife of Victor Perlo, an American supplying secrets to the Soviets from the War Production Board, became so vengeful after the couple divorced and he won custody of their daughter that she warned Perlo she had written to President Roosevelt exposing his spy cell. No record of this letter has surfaced at the Roosevelt archives, though an NKVD source in the Justice Department, Judith Coplon, later claimed that it had indeed been sent. Coplon’s knowledge of the letter suggests that the White House bucked Mrs. Perlo’s denunciation to the Justice Department for disposal. If so, no action against the Perlo ring took place as a result.
What prompted privileged and sophisticated Americans, a Lee, a Hiss, a Dodd, a Straight, a White, to become servants of communism? The answer lies in an amalgam of their beliefs—capitalism, as demonstrated by the Great Depression, had failed; an American democracy that accommodated racism displayed rank hypocrisy; and a brighter future for mankind could be glimpsed in the example of the Soviet Union. They found little to forgive in their own country and everything to admire in a romanticized vision of Russia. And, doubtless, they savored the adrenaline rush of playing spy, of living double lives and taking risks in a presumably noble cause. If, as has been said, religion was the opiate of the masses, communism was the opiate of these intellectuals.
Their betrayal of their nation’s secrets seems malevolent after forty years of Cold War conditioning. But during the war years, their political godhead, the USSR, was America’s ally in the struggle against Nazism and fascism. They judged their actions not as treasonous, but simply as a way of making sure that the ally was not shortchanged. Roosevelt was highly sensitive to the fact that the Red Army was losing eight Ivans for every Allied soldier killed in battle. He told Donovan, “Bill, you must treat the Russians with the same trust you do the British. They’r
e killing Germans every day, you know.” As a gesture of solidarity, the President asked John Franklin Carter to get for him a recording of a Red Army marching song he liked. “Pappy thought American words could be put to the one he had heard about,” Carter noted in his diary. How much different were their meetings with and deliveries to Soviet agents, the American spies could argue, than Roosevelt and Churchill’s conferences with Stalin and military aid sent to the Soviet Union? Did they not all serve the same end?
What FDR felt about the nature of communism was best revealed in a note he sent to his Navy secretary, Frank Knox. They had been discussing hiring radio operators who were known Communists. Roosevelt was not opposed. “The Soviet people in Moscow,” he told Knox, “are said to have little liking for the American Communists and their methods—especially because it seems increasingly true that the communism of twenty years ago has practically ceased to exist in Russia. At the present time their system is much more like a form of the older Socialism, conducted, however, through a complete dictatorship combined with an overwhelming loyalty to the cause of throwing every German out of Russia.”
Not everyone in the administration was as sanguine about the USSR as Roosevelt. Adolf Berle described himself as “[h]aving had my fingers burned in Russian affairs several times in my life.” Berle felt no hesitation at blocking the Soviets. When they asked to send engineers into American war plants, he warned: “The list of the military secrets requested itself shows very efficient espionage.” He noted in his diary: “… [T]he engineers they have wished to let in the plants are the same ones who were doing espionage for Russia and Germany” until the Nazis attacked the USSR. As far as Berle was concerned, “The Russian denouement is unpredictable. There might be a Peace of Brest-Litovsk,” he warned the White House, referring to Russia’s dropping out of the fight against Germany in World War I.
The Army, Navy, and FBI, guided by Berle, allowed Soviet engineers into the United States to inspect only lend-lease equipment destined for the Soviet Union, and not another gun. It was not until the spring of 1944 that the United States shared the Norden bombsight with the Red Air Force. At one point, Russian navy officials asked the Soviet foreign office to pressure the U.S. embassy in Moscow not only to deliver “specifications of the latest [American] battleship, cruiser, destroyer, and submarine,” but to provide the American Navy’s secret coding devices. The U.S. naval attaché in Moscow, a Captain Duncan, upon learning of the request, warned Washington that only misplaced “sentiment or plain stupidity” could favor the Russians’ request.
How close the Soviets came to penetrating the American government at the highest level is suggested in Vice President Henry Wallace’s alleged intentions should he ever become president. Wallace is said to have planned to appoint Laurence Duggan as his secretary of state and Harry Dexter White as his secretary of the Treasury. Given that FDR did not live out his final term, only Harry Truman’s displacement of Wallace as vice president in 1944 derailed this possibility.
Chapter XXI
If Overlord Fails
AS 1944 opened, the fifth year of the war for Britain, the third for the United States, the great guessing game was on: Where and when would the Western Allies strike the inevitable blow against the Nazi-held continent, the second front? In the meantime, the offensive from the air continued to deliver fearsome punishment to Germany. City after city lay in ruin. In four consecutive raids on Hamburg, 50,000 civilians were killed and 800,000 left homeless. German towns were being incinerated at a rate of two per month. Given this relentless leveling, strategists pondered whether the enemy might be defeated more cheaply from the air than by a massive bloodletting on the ground. Early in the year, President Roosevelt received an imaginative assessment commissioned by General Hap Arnold. Arnold had asked several of the country’s leading historians to review “all secret and confidential intelligence in our possession.” The scholars, including Carl Becker of Cornell, Henry S. Commager of Columbia, and Dumas Malone of Harvard, concluded, “… [T]here is no substantial evidence that Germany can be bombed out of the war… . Surrender will come when, through lack of adequate air defense, Germany finds herself unable to maintain ground operations… .” In short, the war had to be won by the foot soldier; airmen could only speed the day.
Bill Donovan forwarded to FDR an Allen Dulles appraisal drawn from Fritz Kolbe and other anti-Nazi Germans traveling between their homeland and Switzerland. “The OSS representative in Bern sees no evidence that the German morale has been greatly affected by recent bombings… . There is no longer any such thing as morale in Germany, as we normally use the term,” Dulles reported. “There are in Germany millions of tired, discouraged, disillusioned, bewildered, but stubbornly obedient people who see no alternative other than to continue their struggle.”
Hitler’s detachment from reality was evident in a Magic decrypt of a cable Ambassador Oshima sent to Tokyo at the height of the Allied bombings. While thousand-plane armadas were turning Germany’s cities into rubble and ash, Oshima reported that Hitler had ordered his armaments minister, Albert Speer, to proceed at once with a plan for rebuilding Germany as soon as the war was won. Speer, a realist, put together a team of urban planners and went through the motions in order to indulge his Führer’s fantasy, while continuing to build tanks, guns, and planes.
The code word Overlord, thanks to Cicero, was now known to the enemy, but it existed in a vacuum, revealing neither time nor place. FDR’s military staff advised him that, if the Allies were to achieve tactical surprise, the invasion site and the moment had to be concealed from the enemy until four hours before the troops hit the beaches. Should the Germans divine the plan as little as forty-eight hours in advance, Overlord was doomed. The feints, twists, and deceptions of Bodyguard and Fortitude remained crucial.
An unhappy, though talented actor in the Fortitude charade was one of FDR’s favorite generals. The President had known George S. Patton Jr. since the latter’s days as a dashing cavalry officer at Washington’s Fort Myer. Patton was widely quoted around the capital for his response after spending the night in the company of a beautiful woman not his wife. “A man who does not screw will not fight,” was the general’s defense. Two weeks before the North African invasion, FDR had invited Patton to join him at the White House to hear what a soldier whose intelligence and bluntness he admired thought about Operation Torch. Soon after the desert victory, Patton regaled the President with a cabled account of a tea given by the sultan of Morocco. “During the tea some screams were heard followed by two shots,” Patton wrote the President. “The Sultan excused himself and walked out with great dignity and after a while returned… . He said that one of the panthers in the museum had made a very beautiful leap … and started to eat up one of the ladies of the harem, but some of the guards had shot it.” Patton closed, “The lady was only cut on the throat, and it made little difference as she was not a wife but a concubine. With this slight interruption the tea went on.” Finishing Patton’s account, FDR told his secretary, “This report must be kept secret until after the close of the war… . Patton is a joy and this report of his first days in French Morocco is a classic.”
But by 1944, Patton’s armor was badly tarnished. His brilliant generalship in North Africa and Sicily had been overshadowed by his slapping of two GIs hospitalized for combat fatigue. Eisenhower, consequently, sidelined him. On D-Day, Patton would not be storming the beaches of France with his onetime subordinate General Omar Bradley or with his detested rival Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery. Instead, the proud, haughty, theatrical soldier would serve as a decoy, a star in the Fortitude deceptions.
Two massive army groups, Montgomery’s 21st and what would later become General Omar Bradley’s 12th, began assembling in southern and southwestern England for the cross-Channel strike. A third force, the First United States Army Group, FUSAG, supposedly massing in southeastern England opposite the Pas de Calais, was commanded by Patton. One hitch spoiled the FUSAG command for this ambitious so
ldier. Its genuine units were not under his command but actually under his rivals, Bradley and Montgomery; and the armies he did command were fictitious, except for the Third Army, which was still in the States. To foster the impression that he commanded real troops, Patton moved around England with conspicuous secrecy. He made fire and brimstone speeches to authentic units, cautioning the GIs, on one occasion, “A man must be alert all the time if he expects to stay alive. If not, some German son of a bitch will sneak up behind him and beat him to death with a sock full of shit!” And after they had beaten the Germans, he told the GIs, they were going to lick those “purple-pissin’ Japs!”
Stalin, at Tehran, had agreed to perform as an accomplice in Bodyguard. Russia’s assignment was to leak intelligence suggesting that the Red Army could not possibly launch a major offensive on the eastern front until at least July; and the Western Allies added clues that D-Day could not take place until the landings could be coordinated with a Russian campaign. The Russians even agreed to make actual diversionary raids at misleading sites. For all the cooperation the Soviets offered, however, the Western Allies dragged their feet in confiding the D-Day secret to their partner. The initial policy had been to say nothing. As late as November 1943, the Joint Chiefs of Staff instructed General John R. Deane, heading the American military mission in Moscow, “… [D]etails for the preparation for the operation Overlord should not be disclosed to the Russians.” But this exclusion proved impractical after the deal made at Tehran to coordinate D-Day with a Soviet offensive in the East. Stalin demanded to be told the precise details and date of the invasion. On April 14, 1944, Churchill sent a cable asking FDR, “Would it not be well for you and me to send a notice to Uncle Joe [Stalin] about the date of Overlord?” Roosevelt cabled back that a message had already been sent to General Deane and to British General Brocas Burrows in Moscow instructing them to inform the Russians, “… [I]t is our firm intention to launch Overlord on the agreed date” May 31, which might be pushed back or forward a day or two depending on first light, the tides, the moon, and the weather. The President added that Burrows and Deane should “pay a handsome tribute to the magnificent progress of the Soviet armies” to encourage Stalin to begin carrying out the simultaneous attack.
Joseph E. Persico Page 41