Joseph E. Persico

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

  A physically failing FDR had hoped to achieve his ends without making another exhausting journey abroad. Months before, he had confided to Daisy Suckley that he thought this time he could persuade Stalin to come to him. “When I first got to Tehran,” he told her, “Stalin came to call on me. Of course I did not get up when he came into the room. We shook hands and he sat down, and I caught him looking curiously at my legs and ankles.” Later at dinner, “when Stalin was seated on my right, he turned to the interpreter and said, ‘Tell the President that I now understand what it has meant for him to make the effort to come on such a long journey. Tell him that the next time I will come to him.’” It was not to be. As plans for the three-power summit advanced, Roosevelt cabled Churchill, “I have received a reply from U.J. [Uncle Joe] which is not very helpful in the selection of a place for our next meeting. He stated that if our next meeting on the Black Sea is acceptable, he considers it an extremely desirable plan. His doctors to whose opinion he must give consideration do not wish him to make any big trips.” Thus the paraplegic with the failing heart agreed to travel over seven thousand miles to accommodate the Soviet leader who still had eight years to live.

  On January 23, 1945, FDR boarded the cruiser USS Quincy for the first leg of his journey. He sailed the Quincy to Malta and from there flew the presidential plane, the Sacred Cow, for seven hours to an airfield at Saki in the Crimea. The field was crusted with snow and the Soviets had marked off its perimeter with soldiers placed shoulder to shoulder. FDR was lowered by a makeshift elevator from the plane to a waiting automobile. The worst was yet to come. The President, to whom the swaying of a train was agonizing, began a jolting eighty-mile odyssey mostly over dirt roads across the steppes and through the Yalta Mountains. As Admiral Leahy described the journey, “That mountain road had been built in the era of the horse when long base cars had never been dreamed of. The curves were short and sharp without retaining walls, and jutted out to the very edge of the continuous precipice.”

  The route was littered with the waste of war, burnt-out houses, charred tanks, upended railroad cars, and rotting animal carcasses, resulting from fierce fighting to drive the Germans out of the Crimea. The visible suffering of the people, the ruination of their farms and villages, and the massive casualties reconfirmed FDR’s long-held conviction that the Russians still bore the brunt of the war. On reaching Yalta, he was put up at the Livadia Palace, the three-storied marble summer retreat of the last czar, Nicholas II, one of a handful of buildings still standing in the city. Churchill, on his arrival, observed, “… [I]f we had spent ten years on research, we could not have found a worse place than Magneto [code name for Yalta].” He told his aides that he could survive only “by bringing an adequate supply of whiskey.”

  The three powers each brought its priority to Yalta: the British to maintain their empire, the Soviets to solidify their conquests in Europe and seize land in the Far East, and the Americans to bring Russia into the Pacific war. The last goal represented a serious miscalculation by FDR. He believed that he had to persuade Stalin to join the fight against Japan and was prepared to grant concessions, hold out enticements, and otherwise bait the hook. Consequently, Roosevelt supported and Churchill reluctantly agreed to Stalin’s demand that Russia be allowed to take back all the territory it had lost in the 1904–1905 war with Japan, plus the Kuril Islands and the southern half of Sakhalin Island. The truth, so clear in retrospect, is that nothing could have kept the Soviet Union out of the Asian war once Germany was beaten. The Russians were keen to assuage the humiliation of their long ago defeat by Japan. They wanted back the lost territories and more. They wanted access to the warm water harbor of Port Arthur. Spoils were to be won in the Pacific, and Stalin expected his share. Churchill’s foreign minister, Anthony Eden, observed that the Western Allies needed to concede nothing to get Russia into the Pacific. But Roosevelt was operating not on the premise of Japanese cities soon to be reduced to ash by atomic bombs, but by the projection of tens of thousands of American bodies carpeting the beaches of Kyushu and Honshu. He was ready to meet Stalin’s price.

  FDR was performing under enormous physical and mental stress. Both his regular physician, Admiral Ross McIntire, and his full-time cardiologist, Lieutenant Commander Howard Bruenn, accompanied him to Yalta. The President also brought along his daughter, Anna, who wrote to her husband, back in Washington, about the most zealously guarded secret in the Roosevelt White House. “Ross and Bruenn are both worried because of the old ‘ticker’ trouble—which, of course, no one knows about but those two and me… . I have found out thru Bruenn (who won’t let me tell Ross that I know) that this ‘ticker’ situation is far more serious than I ever knew. And the biggest difficulty in handling the situation here is that we can, of course, tell no one of the ‘ticker’ trouble. It’s truly worrisome—and there’s not a heluva [sic] lot anyone can do about it.” She closed with a warning to her husband, “(Better tear off and destroy this paragraph.)”

  The secret was far less hidden from a professional eye. Lord Moran, Churchill’s personal physician, wrote after seeing FDR at Yalta, “… [T]he President appears a very sick man. He has all the symptoms of hardening of the arteries of the brain in an advanced stage, so that I give him only a few months to live. But men shut their eyes when they do not want to see, and the Americans here cannot bring themselves to believe that he is finished.” One intimate, however, had fooled Moran. “His daughter thinks he is not really ill,” the doctor added to his diagnosis.

  The Yalta conference ended on February 12. FDR left frail in body but buoyant in spirit. The Russians had promised to break their nonaggression pact with Japan and come into the war within two or three months of the defeat of Germany. Occupation zones for the vanquished Reich were confirmed and unconditional surrender remained the demand for ending the fighting.

  The tall, patrician Alger Hiss, onetime law clerk for Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes and now a rising star in the State Department, had been among the President’s advisors at Yalta. After the conference, Hiss traveled to Moscow to confer with Andrei Vyshinsky, Soviet commissar for foreign affairs. Hiss was one of the men whom Whittaker Chambers had denounced to Adolf Berle before the war as a Soviet agent. At the time, Berle had done nothing to investigate this accusation. Hiss’s impeccable credentials and blue ribbon sponsors, in Berle’s judgment, lifted the man above suspicion. Among the stacks of intercepted but still undecipherable Soviet messages gathering at Arlington Hall was one from Vasili Zarubin, the NKVD rezident in Washington, sent to Moscow and dealing with someone code-named Ales. Had the American cryptanalysts been able to crack the code, they would have read: “After the Yalta conference a Soviet personage in a very responsible position (Ales gave us to understand that it was Comrade Vyshinsky) allegedly got in touch with Ales and at the behest of the military NEIGHBORS [GRU, Soviet military intelligence] passed on to him their gratitude and so on.” The telegram noted further, “Ales has been working with the Neighbors continuously since 1935,” and “Recently Ales and his whole group were awarded Soviet decorations.” Years later, when the Venona project had succeeded in breaking the Soviet ciphers, this message was decrypted, with the notation, “Ales: probably Alger Hiss.”

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  Opening the Chicago Tribune was a chore the President approached with loathing and trepidation. He had still been out of the country at Yalta when on February 9 the Tribune carried a lead story that seemed calculated to drive up FDR’s blood pressure, already at a level that troubled his physicians. The newspaper had obtained Bill Donovan’s secret draft proposal for a postwar intelligence service. Emblazoned across the front page, the headline read, NEW DEAL PLANS SUPER SPY SYSTEM. The subhead went on, SLEUTHS WOULD SNOOP ON U.S. AND THE WORLD. The jump to an inside page proclaimed, SUPER GESTAPO AGENCY IS UNDER CONSIDERATION. The exclusive, carried in the Tribune and its sister papers, The Washington Times-Herald and the New York Daily News, had been written by Walter Trohan, a resourceful, well-connect
ed Washington correspondent. “Creation of an all-powerful intelligence service to spy on the postwar world and to pry into the lives of citizens at home is under consideration by the New Deal,” the article began. So sweeping were the powers of the proposed spy organization that its “director might employ the FBI on some task and charge the G-men not to report to J. Edgar Hoover, their chief… .” The agency would “presumably have secret funds for spy work along the lines of bribing and luxury living described in the novels of E. Phillips Oppenheim.” Among those in the know, the article went on, “the proposed unit is known as ‘Frankfurter’s Gestapo’ because the sister of Supreme Court Justice Frankfurter is said to hold a confidential personnel post in OSS. It is assumed she would pick key personnel, at the suggestion of her brother.” Most startling, along with the Trohan article, the paper printed Donovan’s plan, classified “Top Secret,” verbatim.

  Indiana’s Republican senator, Homer Capehart, deplored “any new superduper Gestapo.” Senate Democrat Edwin Johnson of Colorado declared that the country did not want “any Democratic Gestapo.” Clare Hoffman, a House Republican, branded the Donovan plan “another New Deal move right along the Hitler line.” London’s Economist positively gloated at American bumbling. “[T]his document, emanating from an office wrapped in secrecy, and dealing with a matter retailed only in whispers, has been published in full on the front pages of the McCormick-Patterson newspapers,” proving that American innocents were incapable of keeping a confidence, a columnist for The Economist wrote. “Once upon a time,” the writer went on, “President Cleveland was asked if he thought a certain secret well kept. ‘I find the White House cat knew all about it,’ Cleveland said.” The writer had parting advice for Britain’s American cousins: “… how many more water mains are to be pierced before the United States Congress passes an Official Secrets Act to protect itself and its Allies. Is freedom to blab essential to democracy?”

  Even the German news service, DNB, pounced on the Trohan story. A commentator asked, “What is happening here? Despite the bitter frost and snowstorm the people are stopping in front of the Daily News building. Similar crowds are gathering in Washington in front of the Times-Herald and in Chicago in front of the Tribune. All of these people are gazing at the neon letters and can hardly believe their own eyes. One of [the organization’s] functions is to act as a police instrument, which is to suppress and eliminate in good time all criticism of the Roosevelt dictatorship.”

  Two days later, Trohan fired a second salvo, carried on the front page of the Sunday editions of the McCormick-Patterson papers. “The joint chiefs of staff,” Trohan wrote, “have declared war on Brigadier General William J. Donovan OSS Director, who advanced a scheme, at the behest of President Roosevelt, for unification of intelligence activities abroad and superseding existing intelligence agencies at home.” The Joint Chiefs, the article went on, had submitted “a highly secret letter from the generals and admirals to the President urging rejection of the plan.” The reporter had again secured a copy of this classified letter, and, as in the case of Donovan’s proposal, the papers printed it word for word.

  Donovan had been out of the country when both torpedoes struck, but his top aides immediately launched a damage-control operation. On February 13, The New York Times carried a story that read, “Comparing the proposal of Major General William J. Donovan to coordinate United States intelligence services to the organizing of an ‘American Gestapo’ was received with surprise and not a little disapprobation in informed circles today.” The report went on to reject the idea that “such an organization could be turned into an agency for intimidation or inquisition over the American public… .” It was an unusual story, sourced only by the anonymous “informed circles,” and read more like an editorial than news. OSS’s upper echelon was staffed with well-connected people to whom gaining the ear of The New York Times did not pose insuperable problems. Similar spadework preceded an editorial in The Washington Post. “Donovan is one of the trail blazers in our war organization,” the Post declared. His OSS is “a kind of brain trust for the men charged with making decisions based upon exact knowledge of all the detailed elements in hitherto unknown situations.”

  Donovan was soon back in Washington to fight his own battles. He confronted the Joint Chiefs of Staff and charged that the Trohan exposé “was not the result of an accident or a ‘leak,’ but a deliberate plan of sabotage… .” The accusation that Frankfurter, a Jew on the Supreme Court, intended to run an American “Gestapo” was particularly enraging. Odder still was the story’s presumption that the ambitious Donovan would allow the judge, through his sister, to pick key staff for an organization that Wild Bill expected to run. He continued his counterattack: “The falsehood concerning the Frankfurter appointment, the characterization of the proposal as a ‘Gestapo’ and ‘Superspy’ scheme of the President, the immediate canvassing of Congress based on misstatements and distortions of fact, all make clear, a design and intent, through the incitement of suspicion and antagonism to prevent adoption of my proposal.” He found the affair treasonable and demanded an investigation “by a judicial or quasi-judicial body armed with the power of subpoena and to compel testimony under oath.” The chiefs agreed to act.

  Still fuming, Donovan did not wait until the President was back from Yalta before taking his case to FDR via airborne pouch. But first he conducted a little detective work. He had sent an assistant to the Joint Chiefs of Staff to compare the postwar plan that he had submitted with the version appearing in the Trohan story. The JCS staff had made changes to Donovan’s proposal, then redesignated it “JCS 1181,” classified it “Top Secret,” and distributed only fifteen numbered copies among State, the FBI, the Secret Service, and military branches involved in intelligence. Wild Bill’s assistant, dispatched to the JCS, found that the version printed in the newspapers contained changes made after Donovan had submitted his plan to the chiefs, making clear that the leak had come from within the JCS or from a recipient of the classified document. Donovan was thus able to write the President: “A reading of these articles makes clear that the disclosure was no mere leak but a deliberate plan to sabotage any attempt at reorganization of this government’s intelligence services… . The entire situation is most disturbing because it looks like ‘an inside job’ or at least it was abetted by someone on the inside.”

  How had the Chicago Tribune correspondent obtained copies of a top-secret proposal? Since Donovan’s arch rival, J. Edgar Hoover, was on the distribution list for JCS 1181, the shadow of suspicion fell not surprisingly on him. Hoover “goes to the White House,” Henry Stimson had earlier noted in his diary, “and poisons the mind of the President.” Yet, no evidence was ever turned up connecting the FBI director to the leak. Walter Trohan always maintained that he had obtained the documents from an astonishing source, the White House itself. He and Steve Early, the President’s press secretary, were longstanding friends who had traded journalistic favors in the past. Trohan explained their friendship, noting that in the “New Deal environment, we were both anti-Socialist.” As the reporter described the affair, Early had given him the classified papers because “Roosevelt thought Donovan was getting too big for his britches.” By deliberately leaking the documents FDR would also, Trohan claimed, have a chance to see how Donovan’s postwar intelligence agency played before the American public. The explanation rings hollow, particularly since the President and Early were in Yalta when the Trohan stories were being prepared.

  Technically, the leaks may well have come out of the White House since the Map Room appears the specific source. Colonel Park, running that nerve center, had access to JCS 1181. He was also at the time conducting his investigation of the OSS, which was dispatching the fox to clean up the henhouse. Park’s report was already in draft form at the time of the Trohan stories. A close reading of it seems to solve the question of where Walter Trohan managed to obtain Donovan’s postwar plan. Park’s draft read in part, “[T]he British were believed to know almost withou
t exception, the name, location, cover, and assignment of OSS agents throughout the world.” Trohan’s story read: “The British knew almost without exception the name, location, cover and assignment of every OSS man in the world.” Trohan’s article was peppered with similar nearly identical passages from Park’s “Top Secret” document. Park, as the likely leaker, had performed his role in the covert campaign of Army intelligence to kill off Wild Bill Donovan and his offspring. Trohan’s stories were not the first time that someone in the military had leaked sensitive secrets to the President’s journalistic nemesis. The same thing had happened nearly three years before when the Chicago Tribune recklessly revealed that the victory at Midway had been made possible by Magic.

  Once the Donovan plan had been leaked, FDR did have an unintended opportunity to gauge public reaction to a permanent espionage agency, and he could sense a split decision. During this period, while Donovan was taking the heaviest pounding of his tempestuous career, the President never uttered a word in his defense. As for Wild Bill’s demand that the JCS investigate the incident, a halfhearted inquiry was made, then allowed to wither, with no perpetrator ever identified.

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  The President’s reversal of Donovan on the purchase of the Soviet codes followed by the Chicago Tribune debacle might have been staggering blows to anyone lacking the general’s resilience. Instead he believed he was about to deliver an espionage triumph that must overcome any misgivings the President may have had about the OSS, one ranking with Magic’s piercing of Japanese ciphers and Fritz Kolbe’s spying from inside the Nazi foreign office. The key lay in Rome.