Joseph E. Persico

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

  After exhaustively examining FDR at Bethesda, Doctor Bruenn came the next day to McIntire’s office next to the White House Map Room. The report he submitted was dismal. The President was suffering from hypertension, hypertensive heart disease, and failure of the heart’s left ventricle. His blood pressure was a stratospheric 218 over 120. The years of forced inactivity and limited exercise had taken their toll. Roosevelt was an old sixty-two. Bruenn estimated the life left to him at somewhere between months and, at the outside, two years. After the examination FDR had simply shaken his hand and said only, “Thanks, Doc.” He had not asked a single question. The admiral next arranged for the young physician to be transferred to the White House as FDR’s physician-in-attendance. Though the doctor examined his patient daily, Roosevelt still never asked why he had been assigned a full-time cardiologist. The only persons fully cognizant of the President’s condition were McIntire, Bruenn, and Anna, but not the First Lady.

  The mid-forties were not a favorable era for victims of heart disease. The first diagnosis that a patient had suffered a heart attack had not been made until 1910. Cardiology had not become a medical specialty until the early 1920s. And once cardiovascular disease was diagnosed, even a specialist such as Bruenn could do little. The drugs and surgical procedures that could prevent death from heart attacks and forestall strokes were a generation in the future.

  FDR’s decline remained a sometime thing. He still displayed flashes of the old exuberance. He continued to amaze Admiral Leahy with his near-photographic memory. Leahy was another recruit from FDR’s days as assistant Navy secretary. He had then been in command of Secretary Daniels’s dispatch boat, the Dolphin, which Roosevelt frequently commandeered. A strong favorable impression had stayed with FDR, and, after he became president, he appointed Leahy ambassador to France’s Vichy government and then brought him to the White House as chief of staff to the commander in chief. Leahy served as the President’s link to the armed forces. Of this duty, he once remarked, “He would ask my opinion. Sometimes my recollection was not functioning as fast as his own, but I always gave him some kind of answer… . He would look at me quizzically and say, ‘Bill, that’s not what you told me a year ago.’ I frequently wondered if he was doing it on purpose.”

  FDR sought to husband his depleting resources through his gift for turning instantly from work to play. He continued watching movies and reading the light novels that distracted him, though in this most burdensome year of the war he had less and less free time. When an aide asked if he had read Kathleen Winsor’s racy best-seller of the 1944 season, Forever Amber, he answered with a twinkling eye, “Only the dirty parts.” Still, much of the old élan was fading, as if he had rounded the track too many times. What was sapping his vitality was simple enough to describe, though difficult to treat. The hardening arteries of this essentially immobile man were delivering insufficient blood to the brain. Still, he continued with the routines of his life, yielding to Dr. Bruenn’s probing, poking, and thumping. And the charade went on. The President asked nothing about his condition, and Bruenn offered nothing. The rest of the staff remained in the dark as to what lay behind their chief’s shaking hands, the ashen pallor, the grape-colored cast of his sagging lips, the occasional lapses of mental acuity.

  FDR only appeared to be burying his head in the sand. He could level with one person as confidentially as if he were talking to himself—the discreet and devoted Daisy Suckley, as her diary was about to reveal. Early in May, Roosevelt was staying at Hobcaw, Bernard Baruch’s lavish South Carolina estate. At lunch with Baruch, Dr. Bruenn, and Daisy, FDR picked listlessly at a dish of minced chicken on toast. After the doctor and Baruch left the room, he asked Daisy to stay. She later recorded their conversation: “I had a good talk with the P. about himself. He said he discovered that the doctors had not agreed together about what to tell him, so that he found out that they were not telling him the whole truth and that he was evidently more sick than they said! It is foolish of them to attempt to put anything over on him.” The conspiracy of silence went on. Roosevelt, leading the nation into the crucial hour of the war, intended to keep the state of his fitness a part of the web of secrecy along with Overlord itself.

  *

  On Monday afternoon, June 5, the President seemed outwardly relaxed as he played with his Scottie, Fala, and watched his grandson Johnny Boettiger perform somersaults on the sofa. Still the tension in his study was palpable. Grace Tully noted that the President’s hands shook constantly, and his skin had taken on the color of cement.

  At eight-twenty, after dinner, his valet, Arthur Prettyman, wheeled FDR into the Diplomatic Reception Room and positioned him behind a clutch of microphones. The President glanced over his script and then began to deliver a fireside chat to the American people, the voice solemn, the pace deliberate, his principal subject being the fall of Rome to the Allies that day. Left unsaid, but consuming his thoughts, was what was about to happen the following morning some eight hundred miles northwest of the Italian capital.

  After the broadcast, Eleanor, Anna and her husband, Major John Boettiger, and Daisy Suckley joined FDR for a movie in the makeshift projection room set up in the colonnade leading to the White House East Wing. The fare this evening was not the comedies or musicals the President favored, but newsreels dealing with the war. At five minutes past 11 P.M. FDR retired to his study, followed by Eleanor and Daisy. As he sipped at a glass of orange juice, he told them he had a secret he wanted to share. Within hours, American GIs would be storming the beaches of Normandy. Eleanor responded that now she would not be able to sleep and almost wished he had not confided in them. Sensing the pall that his words had cast, FDR shifted his mood and began making jokes about what he was going to do to Hitler the moment the Führer surrendered.

  As he spoke, the mightiest armada ever assembled was already crossing the English Channel—6,500 vessels, ranging from a half dozen battleships to 4,250 landing craft carrying 57,500 American troops and 75,215 British and Canadians, accompanied by 20,000 vehicles and 1,500 tanks, a flotilla one hundred miles wide and five miles deep. Overhead, 10,000 planes blackened the sky. FDR, usually so quick to nod off, did not sleep that night. He kept picking up his bedside phone, asking, “Hackie,” Louise Hackmeister, the chief White House telephone operator, to put him through to the Pentagon for whatever scrap of information on the progress of the invasion force he could glean.

  On the other side of the Atlantic, as troops waded ashore at Omaha, Utah, Sword, Gold, and Juno Beaches, all had not gone without mishap. Paratrooper units missed their drop zones; gliders crashed on landing, spilling troops from fragile wooden hulls; at Omaha Beach, German guns began cutting down American infantrymen the instant the Higgins boats dropped their ramps and until the GIs found scant shelter under the cliffs of Pointe du Hoc. Still, the major objective of the enterprise was stunningly achieved. Surprise had been total. A fleet covering approximately 500 square miles had crossed the Channel undetected. Allied casualties—a substantial 10,300 killed, wounded, and missing on that longest day—were one seventh of the worst estimates.

  For all the elaborate machinations of Bodyguard and Fortitude, the greatest deception had been a gift of nature. June 5, Eisenhower’s original invasion date, had proved so stormy, the winds so strong, the rains so heavy, the skies so overcast, that his meteorologists persuaded him to postpone the landing, even though part of the fleet had already set sail and would have to be recalled. June 7 was predicted to be equally inhospitable. So certain was Field Marshal Erwin Rommel that the Channel was too rough to permit an invasion that he had left France on June 4 to celebrate his wife’s birthday at their hillside home in the fairy-tale town of Herrlingen. There Rommel presented Lucie-Maria with a pair of Parisian shoes, and then went to Berchtesgaden to discuss the Atlantic defenses with Hitler. But on June 5, at Suffolk House in Portsmouth, Ike’s senior meteorologist, Captain J. M. Stagg of the Royal Air Force, spotted a narrow window of milder weather the next day. The rain should s
top, the seas should calm slightly and remain so, at least throughout the morning before they rose again. The opening was fleeting, hardly ideal. Still Eisenhower wondered aloud to his staff, “… [J]ust how long you can hang this operation on the end of a limb and let it hang there.” “OK, let’s go,” he said. Overlord began the following morning.

  That night, Roosevelt made a fifteen-minute radio broadcast, leading the nation in a prayer for the young Americans committed to the battle. “They will need thy blessings,” he said. “Their road will be long and hard. For the enemy is strong.” And then he made his final contribution to the Bodyguard deception. “The Germans appear to expect landings elsewhere,” he said. “Let them speculate. We are content to wait on events.” Indeed, the enemy was still waiting for the real blow after the presumed feint at Normandy. The Wehrmacht’s Foreign Armies West intelligence chief, Baron Von Roenne, reported: “Not a single unit of the 1st United States Army Group [FUSAG], which comprises around 25 large formations … has so far been committed.” Much of the German strength remained rooted at the Pas de Calais, waiting for Patton’s ghost army. Three days after the invasion, Hitler still rejected the plea of his commander in France, Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt, to engage the 1st SS Panzer Division in Normandy. Instead, Hitler ordered the division to back up the Fifteenth Army for an expected main assault across the Dover Straits.

  Through an OSS source in Bern rated “fairly dependable,” Bill Donovan was able to inform the President that Hitler had called Rommel and Rundstedt on the carpet, demanding that they mend their destructive rivalry. “Rommel had insisted on bringing up the full German reserves,” the informant reported, “while Rundstedt wanted to retain sizeable concentrations of troops in the Black Forest and to the North and East of Paris, where he feared paratroop landings… .” After Hitler issued an order to hold the key port of Cherbourg to the last man, Rundstedt tried to explain to the Führer’s chief toady, Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, that the order meant lives wasted. “What shall we do?” moaned Keitel. “Make peace, you fools,” Rundstedt replied. The next day, Hitler removed the old soldier from his command.

  Fortitude continued to enjoy a remarkable shelf life. Not until nearly two months after the Normandy assault, after Field Marshal Guenther von Kluge had replaced Rundstedt, did Hitler accept the hard truth. He had been duped. The tens of thousands of troops who might have thrown the D-Day invaders back into the sea had waited futilely for the “real” strike at the Pas de Calais. On August 3, Hitler allowed Kluge to shift forces from the strait to face the steadily swelling Allied armies in Normandy. On August 7, Kluge conceded that a second major landing was “improbable.” By then, the Allies had well over a million troops in France, including George Patton, now commanding an authentic force, his Third Army.

  *

  The capacity of Germany to fight on so stubbornly on two fronts—to keep its armies well equipped, supplied, and refurbished—opens one of the great moral quandaries of the war, the behavior of neutral countries in supporting, even prolonging, the ability of the Nazi war machine to fight on. In light of revelations over half a century later, particularly pointed at Switzerland, the question arises: through the intelligence available to President Roosevelt, what did he know of the decidedly unneutral behavior of certain nonbelligerents, and what did he do about it?

  Over two years before D-Day, an unhappy Charles Bruggmann, the Swiss minister to Washington and recipient of the confidences of his brother-in-law, Vice President Henry Wallace, came to see Adolf Berle. The New York Post, Bruggmann complained, had published an article defaming Switzerland and questioning its neutrality. The Post story charged that the Swiss National Bank and the Swiss government were providing U.S. dollars to Germany to purchase the matériel of war. Bruggmann claimed to know the source of this report, FDR’s Jewish Treasury secretary, Henry Morgenthau Jr., who had tried to freeze Swiss bank accounts in the United States from the moment America entered the war, believing that Switzerland was already collaborating with the Nazis. “I said that in a country which had a free press, there was not a great deal that could be done,” Berle later wrote of his response to Bruggmann. What FDR’s intelligence representative at State was too tactful to say was that the Post’s story was essentially accurate.

  As the war progressed, FDR learned, through the OSS, that Allied attempts to block neutral countries from aiding Germany were having all the effectiveness of a sieve. On July 10, 1944, Bill Donovan sent the President a report, one of nine that day, obtained from “a high German official in Switzerland.” Donovan’s source revealed that while the Allies had been negotiating with its officials urging “that the Swiss should halt gold transactions between the Swiss and Reichsbank,” the president of the country’s National Bank, a man named Weber, was simultaneously making secret deals to accept German gold for over forty million Swiss francs per month. In effect, the deal amounted to money laundering. Certain suppliers of war matériel to Germany refused to accept gold in payment, rightly suspecting the Nazis had stolen it. But they would accept Swiss francs. The Germans had, in fact, looted gold from the central banks of France, Belgium, the Netherlands, other occupied countries, and Italy. Their rapacity surfaced in a message sent from the Irish minister in Rome to the foreign office in Dublin, a cable intercepted by Magic. “Roman Jews were obliged to furnish 50 kilogrammes of gold within 24 hours,” it read. “Otherwise 200 of their young men would be sent as hostages to Germany.” The communication sheds further light on the checkered record of the Catholic Church regarding the plight of the Jews. If the Roman Jews could not raise that much gold, the Irish diplomat reported, the Vatican offered to help them pay. A cryptic intercept from Tokyo to Berlin suggested a surprising additional source of gold for the Third Reich. “At our last meeting,” Japan’s foreign minister informed Ambassador Oshima in Berlin, “it was decided informally to send about 2 tons of gold at the next opportunity. The Navy has no doubt already studied this and made provision for transportation.”

  The President and his informants did not then know the most unspeakable source of Germany’s bullion, gold stripped from the Jews in concentration camps, from their jewelry, from gold teeth and fillings pulled from the mouths of the murdered. The Swiss would later deny knowledge of this source, and likely told the truth, since the Germans did not trumpet their barbarism. However, that the gold ingots traded for Swiss francs and other currencies were stolen had to be known by Europe’s bankers. The Germans had entered 1940 with approximately $200 million in monetary gold, yet during the war somehow acquired $909 million worth.

  Five days after Donovan’s July 10 report, FDR had another message from the general. “We would like to warn you especially about using this material,” Wild Bill cautioned, “for it could be easily traced back to the source.” Allen Dulles had been tipped off that the Germans were using a loophole in Swiss customs regulations to buy an additional three million Swiss francs’ worth of ball bearings for their combat aircraft. Twice in 1943, the U.S. Eighth Air Force had conducted raids targeted at German ball bearing production in Schweinfurt. The cost had been frightful, over 120 bombers lost, which meant 1,200 American fliers dead, captured, or missing. And here were the Swiss, taking up the slack, trading ball bearings for Nazi gold.

  The Swiss had a rationale for their conduct. Switzerland occupied a geopolitical position as precarious as the peaks of its Alps. The country was completely surrounded by Nazi-controlled territory. A Wehrmacht that had subdued most of Europe could surely have overrun tiny Switzerland. The Swiss saw themselves as a small creature in the embrace of a great beast that could devour it at will. Their objective was to comply with the beast’s wishes and do nothing to goad it to rashness. Furthermore, war or no war, the Swiss were tied economically to the Germans. Switzerland sold electrical power to Germany, and in return received the coal and fuel that the Swiss lacked. Actually Switzerland had a foot in both camps. While it was selling Germany weapons, ammunition, aluminum for aircraft and locomotives, and
even allowing bombed-out German plants to rebuild on Swiss soil, it also traded with the Allies. Switzerland exchanged more gold with Germany’s enemies than with the Reich, the distinction being that the Allied gold was not stolen or yanked from people’s mouths. The Swiss had also been evenhanded in allowing their nation to become an espionage hotbed for all sides, including the OSS operation under Allen Dulles. They had allowed American fliers who crash-landed in Switzerland to stay in Dulles’s compound, where they were put to work radioing to Washington the bundles of intelligence that Fritz Kolbe smuggled out of the foreign office in Berlin. The unspoken Swiss attitude was, spy if you must, but do so discreetly. Don’t let us catch you and have to intern you.

  On April 11, 1944, the American Eighth Air Force accidentally bombed the Swiss city of Schaffhausen in a raid on southwest Germany, damaging the railroad station, factories, a museum, and homes, and killing numerous civilians. Rumors whispered in the Bern diplomatic circle had it that the raid had been deliberate, to knock out Swiss ball bearing production going to Germany. Yet, so determined was the United States to respect Swiss neutrality, that FDR secretly paid $1 million out of the President’s emergency fund to mollify the Swiss and downplay the blunder.