Despite Roosevelt’s persisting concern, atomic developments in the Third Reich posed no threat to the Allies, as Boris Pash was finding out in Europe. By the spring of 1945, this research was invested primarily in attempting to discover the atom’s potential for generating power. The last time uranium had been considered for a military purpose had occurred nearly two years before, and had nothing to do with an atomic bomb. In the summer of 1943, Albert Speer approved an experiment by the Wehrmacht to test the effect of adding uranium to armor-piercing shells to make them penetrate more deeply. As Thomas Powers puts it in Heisenberg’s War, “… [H]ope for a German bomb was so utterly extinct that the precious metal seized in Belgium in 1940—source of so much anxiety in Britain and America—was to be thrown at the enemy.”
*
Franklin Roosevelt was a devout anti-imperialist. He believed in what he and Churchill had enunciated in the Atlantic Charter in 1941: “… [R]espect the right of all peoples to choose the form of government under which they will live.” This sentiment hardly reflected what Churchill felt in his heart. But in those dark early days, the Prime Minister would have been willing to sign practically anything that linked America to Britain. A year later, with the United States in the war, Churchill made a speech at home expressing his true sentiments, including the oft-quoted, “Let me, however, make this clear, in case there should be any mistake about it in any quarter. We mean to hold our own. I have not become the King’s First Minister in order to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire.” He had been particularly irked when Roosevelt urged that he grant India independence on the principle that the Atlantic Charter extended to the Indian Ocean, to Asia, indeed throughout the globe. Churchill complained to his foreign minister, Anthony Eden, “I imagine it is one of his [Roosevelt’s] principal war aims to liberate Indo-China from France,” which was true. To Roosevelt, Churchill’s imperialism was something he had to tolerate while the war went on and deal with when the war was over. He knew to be true, even if he could not publicly echo it, the sentiment of an OSS officer who wrote from India, “… [I]f we really believed our own propaganda, we would have to declare war on the British, for they have set themselves up as the master race in India. British rule in India is fascism; there is no dodging that.” Of all the colonial masters, FDR found the French particularly reprehensible. He had confided to his son Elliott at the Casablanca conference that he considered French rule so exploitive that the Indochinese might prefer their Japanese occupiers. To Roosevelt the war was a crusade to free all oppressed peoples, including the colonies even of America’s allies.
The President’s anti-imperialist stand had its espionage dimension. Bill Donovan had long wanted to extend his reach into Asia, thus far with little success. One OSS strategy was actually designated “Project Penetrate MacArthur,” but the general continued to rebuff Donovan. Even OSS intelligence that could have shortened battles and saved lives in the Pacific went unused. On February 19, 1945, two U.S. Marine divisions invaded Iwo Jima. They encountered beaches composed of volcanic ash rather than the anticipated sand. This ash, lacking any binding element, afforded poor traction to armored vehicles. The OSS, among its array of talents, included geologists in the Research and Analysis branch who had determined the composition of Iwo Jima’s beaches before the invasion. But this intelligence never reached the invading Marines. An angered Bill Donovan shot off a query to his third in command, Charles Cheston, demanding to know, “Had we passed this along? If so—when, if not, why not?” The eagerness of the staff had doubtlessly been dulled by repeated rejections in the Pacific.
Donovan tried to win FDR’s approval for limited OSS cooperation with the French resistance fighting the Japanese in Indochina. These remnants of colonial rule eagerly sought any opportunity to draw the Americans to their side. They offered to conduct joint sabotage missions and provide weather information to U.S. vessels operating in the Southwest Pacific. Roosevelt remained adamant. He viewed any such alliance as a wedge that the French would exploit to reinsert themselves into the region. He warned the State Department, “I do not want to get mixed up in any military effort toward the liberation of Indochina from the Japanese.” Reflecting the President’s wishes, General Marshall instructed General Daniel Sultan in India: “OSS personnel not to be employed in Indochina at present.” FDR made one exception. He informed General John E. Hull, the War Department’s chief of plans and operations, that he had no objection to espionage or sabotage in Indochina uncontaminated by colonialists. He told Hull that he favored “anything that was against the Japs provided that we do not align ourselves with the French.” Much of the OSS leadership reflected the President’s distaste for rejuvenated imperialism. They were appalled by the British attitude, so nakedly expressed by Colonel Sir Ronald Wingate of Churchill’s staff: “We had been at war with Germany longer than any other power, we had suffered more, we had sacrificed more, and in the end we would lose more than any other power. Yet here were these God-awful American academics rushing about, talking about the four freedoms and the Atlantic Charter.”
Churchill complained to FDR that OSS teams were working against the British Empire’s interests in another quarter of the world. American clandestine operations in Greece, the Prime Minister charged, were designed to keep the Greek king from regaining his throne, while Churchill’s aim was to reinstall him as a reliable ally along Britain’s Mediterranean route of empire. FDR, however, was not about to chastise the OSS for practicing what he preached. The President found it an uninspiring battle cry to tell Americans that when all the sacrifice, hardship, and bloodshed had ended, the world would be much the same as before. He supported the sentiments expressed by another friend. The onetime OSS chief in London, William Phillips, wrote an appreciative FDR that the colonial peoples deserved “something better to look forward to than simply a return to their old masters.”
In China, the OSS worked both the Nationalist and Communist sides of the street. With characteristic bravado, Donovan informed General Tai Li, director of Nationalist Chinese counterintelligence, “I want you to know that I am going to send my men into China whether you like it or not. I know that you can have them murdered one by one, but I want you to know that will not deter me.” At the same time, Donovan’s agents were providing FDR with a firsthand assessment of the Chinese Communists. An operative working with Mao Tse-tung’s forces at Yenan in Shensi Province reported that Mao commanded an army totaling, between regular and militia forces, 2.5 million men. “Morale is very high,” Donovan informed the President through his source. “The troops know what they are fighting for… . Discipline is essentially good, and orders are carried out even to death. Popular support of the Armed Forces is extremely good… . In the guerrilla areas the government is underground, sometimes literally so in caves and tunnels… .”
Bill Donovan did manage one penetration into Indochina. His agents began working with a figure determined not to have his people recolonized by the French, a Communist named Ho Chi Minh. In years to come, in a divided land called Vietnam, Ho’s army and guerrilla forces would sound remarkably like the Chinese described to FDR.
Chapter XXVIII
“Stalin Has Been Deceiving Me All Along”
INITIALLY, THE only information available to the Allies on the failed twentieth of July attempt on Adolf Hitler’s life had been what the Nazi propaganda minister, Josef Goebbels, chose to tell the German people and the world, a story of almost divine salvation of the Führer. A narrow window into the plot opened two months afterward. Otto John, a lawyer with Lufthansa, the German passenger airline, who worked undercover for the Abwehr and who was a member of the conspiracy, provided an eyewitness account. Previously, while moving between Berlin and Lisbon, John had delivered intelligence to the Allies on German atomic research and on rocket and missile testing conducted at Peenemünde. He had managed to escape to Madrid four days after the coup collapsed. There he told his story to the OSS chief in Spain, an account subsequently relayed to F
DR.
John described how he had arrived in Berlin on July 19, 1944, to play his part in the overthrow of the Nazis. The next day, at 6 P.M., he went to the Bendlerstrasse, the German General Staff headquarters. There he saw Lieutenant Colonel Count Klaus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg, who, five and a half hours before, had planted the bomb to kill Hitler at the Wolfsschanze, the Führer’s military headquarters in East Prussia. After Stauffenberg had returned to the Bendlerstrasse, he announced confidently that the Führer had been killed. “I myself saw Hitler being carried out dead,” he said, which was not true. But thereafter his authority was accepted unquestioningly by far senior officers. John was struck by Stauffenberg’s cool self-possession as he reeled off orders and made phone calls to set in motion a strategy to seize the levers of government. John was especially surprised to hear Stauffenberg take a call from Albert Speer, the Reich’s armaments czar and Hitler favorite. In an organization chart that the conspirators had drawn up for their new government, Speer’s name appeared in a box marked “Armaments.” If Speer was coming over to them, the plotters reasoned, that would spell success.
They had, however, already committed fatal blunders. Despite Stauffenberg’s assurances, Hitler was not dead, not even seriously hurt. Secondly, the plotters failed to cut communications between the Wolfsschanze and Berlin. Consequently, Stauffenberg’s orders were countermanded almost instantly by Hitler’s chief military aide, Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel. Sensing that the plot was unraveling, John slipped out of the Bendlerstrasse. Upon his arrival home, as he recounted, “I heard the radio announce a message by Hitler. I could not believe my ears and was convinced that the Nazis were using a double.” They were not. The conspirators had also failed to seize control of Berlin’s radio stations, and Goebbels quickly exploited the blunder by putting the Führer on the air.
Upon telling his story to the OSS in Madrid, John turned over a list of the plotters and their sympathizers, adding a fervent plea: “The following information must not be used as propaganda. It must be placed only at the disposal of such persons who will promise that the names followed by X will remain secret, as the fate of these persons is still uncertain, and they would run the risk of being exposed to reprisal action by the Nazi terror if their names were to be linked in a general way with the attempt against Hitler.”
John’s and Ambassador Oshima’s were the only insider accounts available to Roosevelt until Allen Dulles obtained a report from Hans Bernd Gisevius. The hulking, half-blind Abwehr agent and conspirator assigned to the German consulate in Zurich had, without a word to Dulles, suddenly disappeared back into Germany on July 12. Three weeks after the failure, a German undercover courier arrived at Herrengasse 23 with a message for Dulles from Gisevius. The American was happily surprised. He had assumed that the man had perished in the massacre the Gestapo was conducting against the plotters. Yes, the coup had failed, Gisevius wrote, but conditions within Germany were still unstable. “… [I]t is only necessary for the Allies to strike hard and the entire German structure will collapse,” he claimed. When five more months passed and nothing further was heard, Dulles again concluded that Gisevius had been caught and executed. Just days after the thwarted coup, Dulles had cabled Washington, “The blood purge will be ruthless.” The Gestapo had indeed continued its remorseless manhunt, arresting anyone however distantly connectable to the plot while the Nazi People’s Courts dispensed drumhead justice. The vendetta ultimately cost the lives of 4,980 officers and civilians, with Count von Stauffenberg and Otto John’s brother among the earliest victims. In the end, all that the twentieth of July plot achieved was to enable the Gestapo to solidify its grip on the German populace.
The courier from Berlin returned again, and Dulles was amazed to learn that Gisevius was still alive, hiding in the apartment of his girlfriend, Gerda. The Bern spy chief notified the OSS mission in London, which set a rescue strategy in motion. The plan demonstrated how far OSS technical sophistication had advanced in just two and a half years. Since Gisevius had once been an early member of the Gestapo, the London station forged papers to cast him again as an agent of that organization. The first obstacle was to locate a photograph. Gisevius’s face could be found only in a group shot. The London counterfeiting section managed to enlarge the image of his head to passport size. Stationery seized from Gestapo headquarters in liberated areas was rushed to London and used to produce phony orders. The thorniest challenge was to replicate the Gestapo’s Silver Warrant Identity Disk, a gray medallion of unknown alloys, and serially numbered. Possession of the medallion provided the bearer with unlimited access anywhere and the power to arrest.
On January 20, 1945, the six-month anniversary of the failed plot, Gisevius heard the bell ring in Gerda’s apartment. He opened the door a crack and spotted a package on the doorstep. In it he found the medallion, Gestapo ID, a German passport, and orders to proceed from Berlin to Switzerland as Dr. Hoffmann of the secret police. Thus armed, the huge and imperious Gisevius managed to bully his way through several checkpoints, and by January 22, he was at Herrengasse 23 giving Allen Dulles the fullest firsthand account yet of what had happened at the Bendlerstrasse. Five days later, the conspirator’s report was on the President’s desk. Gisevius explained that the July 20 attempt on Hitler’s life had been the third that month. An earlier bomb had been set to go off during the Führer’s visit to Munich on July 6, but an Allied air raid upset this plot. Ten days later, General Helmuth Stieff brought a concealed explosive into the Wolfsschanze, but at the last minute lost his nerve and left. Four days later, Stauffenberg carried out the attempt that Hitler miraculously survived. Gisevius confirmed Otto John’s identification of the fatal flaws in the coup, particularly the failure “to destroy Central Information office including all communications installations of East Prussian Headquarters to prevent any communication. So that even if Hitler was not killed, he would not be able to make this known until plotters had control of the situation.”
Gisevius’s most startling revelation was contained in another report Donovan relayed to FDR on January 27, five days after the German’s escape. It dealt not with the mechanics of the plot, but with its politics. Until now, the assumption in the White House had been that anti-Nazi conspirators were interested only in making peace with the Western Allies in order to keep the Russians out of Germany. But Gisevius revealed that Count von Stauffenberg intended to conclude a peace with the Soviets if the putsch were successful, and proposed to announce the establishment of a “workers and peasants” regime in Germany. “The present situation on the Eastern Front and the general trend of the situation in Germany,” Gisevius concluded, “indicate that an eastern solution of the war may be more attractive to Germany.” He claimed further that Stauffenberg had been in secret contact with the Seydlitz Committee, led by General Walter von Seydlitz, who was captured at Stalingrad and had gone over to the Russians. Seydlitz had assured Stauffenberg that the Soviet Union would accept fair peace terms and not demand that the Wehrmacht disarm completely. The Seydlitz conditions could have been extended only with Moscow’s approval and made one thing clear: for all of FDR’s scrupulous determination never to give even the appearance of abandoning the Soviet Union, Stalin was evidently willing to consider a separate peace that would leave Britain and America to fight on alone.
Donovan urged the President to change course. FDR’s insistence on unconditional surrender, the general argued, could drive Germany into the Russians’ arms. He suggested “a subtle psychological approach” to turn anti-Nazi Germans toward the West while still sticking to unconditional surrender. Under Donovan’s formula, if the German officer class would give up a hopeless struggle and end further bloodshed, “Wehrmacht officers who contribute to such a constructive policy… would be treated with the consideration due their rank and according to the services which they render in the liquidation of the Nazi regime… . “ Roosevelt disregarded Donovan’s recommendation to soften unconditional surrender by so much as a word, just as he had rejec
ted every other suggestion that might conceivably trigger Stalin’s distrust.
The fact that Hitler had utterly crushed his opponents after the conspiracy became manifest five months later when he was able to mobilize the Wehrmacht for its stunning offensive through the Ardennes. Even before the Battle of the Bulge, OSS Bern had produced troubling evidence of Hitler’s intention to fight to the death. The Germans were reportedly building a “National Redoubt” centered in the Salzkammergut, rugged and inaccessible mountain terrain in western Austria and bordering southern Germany. There, according to Bern, “vast underground factories, invulnerable in their rocky depths,” were being hewn from the mountainsides. Preparations were said to be under way to enable Nazi leaders to withdraw into this impenetrable fastness where elite troops, sustained by huge, buried stores of food, fuel, arms, and ammunition, would carry on the struggle. Bern predicted that subjugation of the Redoubt could extend the war from six months to two years and exact more casualties than all the previous fighting on the western front.
The superheated rhetoric of an Alpine rampart “defended by nature and by the most efficient secret weapons yet invented” had the ring of thriller fiction. General Eisenhower, however, did not dismiss the threat. “If the German was permitted to establish the Redoubt, he might possibly force us to engage in a long, drawn-out guerrilla type of warfare, or a costly siege,” he wrote in his memoirs. “Thus, he could keep alive his desperate hope that through disagreement among the Allies, he might yet be able to secure terms more favorable than those of unconditional surrender.” Eisenhower concluded: “The evidence was clear that the Nazi intended to make the attempt… .”
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