Joseph E. Persico

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

  A Venona decrypt handed over to the FBI in 1950 unveiled Theodore Hall, the boy physicist who had worked at Los Alamos unsuspected, as a Soviet source of crucial atomic secrets. Upon being questioned, Hall refused to admit guilt. The bureau then faced the predicament that would allow several spies to escape prosecution. To introduce evidence based on broken Soviet codes before a grand jury meant exposing Venona. In the end, maintaining the secret was deemed more important than prosecuting the suspects. Hall eventually went to live in England. Of his days as a Soviet spy he later said, “I recognize that I could easily have been wrong … about some things, in particular my view of the nature of the Soviet Union… . But in essence, from the perspective of my seventy-one years, I still think that brash youth had the right end of the stick. I am no longer that person; but I am by no means ashamed of him.”

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  As for Nazi spies, FDR never relaxed his clenched fist, however feckless these agents proved. Throughout the war, Tyler Kent’s mother waged an unsuccessful campaign, lobbying the President and Congress for her son’s release, after a British court had convicted the American embassy code clerk of espionage in 1940. In December 1945, the British deported Kent to the United States. His former employer, the State Department, showed no interest in prosecuting him. As one department official put it, “We do not give a damn what happens to him.” Kent ended his days in a Texas trailer park and died in 1988 at the age of seventy-seven.

  Hermann Lang, the German immigrant who stole the plans for the Norden bombsight, served nine years of a fourteen-year sentence before being deported to his homeland in 1950. A defeated nation felt no obligation to someone who had spied in its service, and Lang suffered long stretches of unemployment. The highly skilled optics technician finally found a job as a factory hand. To the end, Lang maintained, “Believe me, I was never a German spy.” He was, in his eyes, simply a German patriot.

  Not until the war ended was it revealed that two of the German saboteurs from Operation Pastorius had saved their skins by betraying their six comrades to the FBI. Georg Johann Dasch was sentenced to thirty years and Ernest Burger to life. Both were deported to Germany in 1948. There they became double pariahs, convicted spies to the occupying Americans and traitors to their fellow Germans for sending the other members of the mission to the electric chair. William Colepaugh and Erich Gimpel, the two agents put ashore in Maine in 1944 in likely the Third Reich’s last attempt to penetrate the American mainland, had their death sentences commuted to life. Gimpel was released for deportation in 1955. Colepaugh’s freedom followed five years later.

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  Even before FDR’s death, John Franklin Carter continued to arouse suspicion and resentment inside the administration. In January 1945, Secretary of State Stettinius resisted renewing Carter’s contract for a reduced $24,000. He would sign, Stettinius said, only if the President ordered him to do so. Twelve days after FDR died, Carter sent a secret memo to President Truman. He wanted to acquaint him, he said, with the “small special intelligence and fact-finding unit” that he had run for FDR. “I simply wish at this occasion to spare you the possible embarrassment of being consulted on a matter concerning which only President Roosevelt and myself had full knowledge.” Carter’s approach failed to overcome Truman’s visceral distrust of anything covert, and, after six months, the ring was shut down. The journalist’s facile pen, however, proved useful to the new president. During Truman’s 1948 upset campaign of Tom Dewey, Carter served in the candidate’s speechwriting stable. He was dropped, however, for taking too much credit for Truman’s successful “give ’em hell” strategy. Christopher Andrew, a British writer on espionage, has credited Carter with “the booby prize for providing, against stiff competition, the most absurd U.S. intelligence report of the war.” This nadir, in Andrew’s judgment, was reached in Carter’s “Secret Memorandum on U.S.S.R.” informing Roosevelt that Stalin was being advised on foreign policy by three Americans and that Russia planned a raid on Tokyo by more than eight thousand bombers. Andrew’s dismissal of Carter is too harsh. His reports on the essential loyalty of Japanese Americans, if heeded, could have forestalled a dark chapter in American history. It was Carter who alerted FDR, early in the war, that enemy agents in the United States could merely pick up the phone and relay intelligence on Allied convoys to their counterparts in neutral Switzerland via commercial telephone lines. While the Putzi Hanfstaengl operation bordered at times on opéra bouffe, the man did offer a unique vision into the Third Reich, and he was instrumental in a joint Carter-OSS project that created a biographic register of hundreds of leading Nazis, a useful tool in the denazification effort after the war. And Carter’s well-placed business and journalist contacts abroad provided interim intelligence antennae until a more professional service was put in place. Carter evidently viewed his service as a spy for the President as something of a lark. As he later described those days, “It was a picturesque and wildly funny affair at times. Very fantastically amusing things happened as they always do in an off-beat operation and I think we all had fun.” Carter died in 1967 at the age of seventy.

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  A more formidable rival for FDR’s favor in the aptly named game of the foxes, J. Edgar Hoover, outlasted them all. Hoover was still running the FBI twenty-seven years after Roosevelt’s death. A mutual usefulness, friendship is perhaps not quite the word, marked the relationship between the President and the director to the end of FDR’s life. But Hoover, an implacable scorekeeper, could never forgive slights against him by Eleanor Roosevelt. Until his death in 1972 at age seventy-seven, he kept in his personal file the lone copy of the scurrilous Army Counter-Intelligence Corps report supposedly proving that Mrs. Roosevelt had a tryst with her young protégé Joe Lash in Chicago’s Hotel Blackstone.

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  What exactly FDR may have told Colonel Richard Park Jr., the Map Room chief, is not known, other than the officer’s claim that Roosevelt “authorized me to make an informal investigation of the Office of Strategic Services.” Park’s report, not completed until after FDR’s death, constituted a damning indictment of the OSS. Park’s description of the agency’s training confirmed every suspicion of playboys at play. A training camp, the colonel claimed, was maintained at a country club in nearby Virginia where “the main purpose of this school was to subject a man to liquor tests to see how he would react to drinking.” Park reported that the OSS had a greater number of jobs paying $8,000 per year or more than any other government agency. “In Portugal,” he stated, “business people had a joke to the effect that when one saw all the Portuguese people on the streets in a happy frame of mind, it was because it was payday for OSS informants.” The agency’s amateurism, Park charged, began at the top. “Before Pearl Harbor General Donovan made a trip to the Balkans and lost his briefcase containing important papers in Bucharest,” Park reported. “The briefcase was turned over to the Gestapo by a Rumanian dancer who was invited to attend a party at which [Donovan] was present.”

  After detailing 136 failings, Park added one paragraph reading: “… [T]here are some examples of excellent sabotage and rescue work… . Also the Research and Analysis Branch of OSS has been of great value in supplying necessary background material and maps.” Some of Park’s findings were accurate, more were speculative, and many maliciously untrue. He stated, “… [O]nly a few, if any, OSS operatives were known to be in any occupied country in Europe.” This statement was patently false. OSS missions into occupied France alone numbered in the hundreds, and as Park was drafting his report, the OSS was engaged in putting 102 secret missions into Germany itself.

  Park’s recommendation was unambiguous. “If the OSS is permitted to continue with its present organization,” he warned, “it may do serious harm to citizens, business interests and national interests of the United States.” As for the postwar plan that Donovan had submitted before FDR’s death, “It has,” Park charged, “all the earmarks of a Gestapo system… . It is therefore recommended that General Donovan be repla
ced at the earliest possible moment by a person who shall be recommended by the Joint Chiefs of Staff.”

  It is difficult to believe that Roosevelt—had he lived—would have taken Park’s hatchet job at face value. However, FDR had not lived, and Park moved quickly to make his investigation known to the new administration. The day after Roosevelt’s death, the colonel left the Map Room for his first encounter with President Truman. He carried with him in a locked leather Army briefcase his investigation of the OSS which he had classified “Top Secret” and which he left with Truman after a brief explanation of his alleged mandate from Roosevelt. Truman had a plain-speaking midwesterner’s dislike of anything that smacked of deception, subterfuge, and double-dealing. Further, he saw the OSS as a Republican preserve and harbored little love for its chief. After Donovan’s only visit to the Truman White House, an encounter lasting just fifteen minutes, the President wrote in his appointments book under the general’s name, “Came in to tell how important the Secret Service is and how much he could do to run the government.”

  Park’s report doubtless influenced what Truman was about to do. Within three weeks of Japan’s surrender, the President turned the OSS’s fate over to a “Committee on Agency Liquidation.” The power on the committee was the Budget director, Harold Smith, who had always held a jaundiced view of Donovan’s unregulated expenditures. Despite Wild Bill’s struggle to keep it alive, his agency lacked a constituency. Offering no pool of jobs, no pork barrel construction projects, delivering no bloc of voters, the OSS had few champions on Capitol Hill. It was the child of a deceased president and the unloved stepchild of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The death of Roosevelt marked the death of the OSS. By September 10, Harold Smith’s staff had prepared Executive Order 9621, which transferred the OSS’s admired Research and Analysis branch to State and moved its foreign intelligence agents into the War Department as the Strategic Services Unit. The rest of the OSS was dissolved. The executive order followed Colonel Park’s recommendations to the letter.

  How wise had FDR’s creation of the OSS been? How well, on balance, did it perform? Wild Bill can be faulted for egregious failings, but in one crucial measure of leadership he proved superb. He was a magnet in attracting first-rate people. Along with the society set, he recruited Arthur Goldberg, a future Supreme Court justice; Robert Sherwood, Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright and presidential speechwriter; Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Pulitzer Prize–winning historian; James P. Baxter, president of Williams College; Archibald MacLeish, Pulitzer Prize–winning poet; William Vanderbilt, former governor of Rhode Island; John Ford, Oscar-winning movie director; John W. Gardner, later founder of Common Cause; Sterling Hayden, actor; Dr. Henry A. Murray, distinguished Harvard psychologist; Gene Fodor, travel writer; James Warburg, investment banker; Julia Child, television chef; and leading authorities in every imaginable specialty. Three OSS alumni, Richard Helms, William Colby, and William J. Casey, would go on to become directors of Central Intelligence.

  FDR, in his opaque style, has left little trace of what he thought of Donovan or the intelligence fed to him. The general undeniably served up a good deal of twaddle, the Vessel messages being the most egregious example. But so did Vincent Astor, John Franklin Carter, and George Earle. Nevertheless, FDR’s habit was to keep all his pores open.

  One point is fairly certain: Roosevelt would not have summarily lopped off the nation’s intelligence arm as Harry Truman did. FDR had given a great deal of thought to postwar espionage, and discussed the matter with top aides on numerous occasions. Just a week before his death, he had issued the instruction for Donovan to pull together all the government’s intelligence elements and start mapping a permanent service. These actions hardly suggest that either Donovan or espionage after the war was finished.

  Only four months after Truman killed off the OSS, a whimsical ceremony took place in the White House. On January 24, 1946, the President presented Admiral Leahy and Rear Admiral Sidney Souers with black cloaks, black hats, and wooden daggers. He then read a mock directive to the “Cloak and Dagger Group of Snoopers.” The horseplay masked the moment’s serious purpose, the appointment of Souers as the nation’s first director of central intelligence and creation of the Central Intelligence Group, which within twenty months would metamorphose into the Central Intelligence Agency. Truman had felt chill winds blowing from the East and accepted that in the emerging Cold War the United States had to rearm and reenter the clandestine battleground.

  In 1952, Donovan, then sixty-nine, thought he saw an opportunity to become the next director of the CIA. But his old nemesis, J. Edgar Hoover, remained unappeased. Hoover told Clyde Tolson, “I stopped him from becoming AG [Attorney General] in 1929, and I’ll stop him now.” Whether through Hoover’s machinations or composite reasons, Donovan was never again to become the nation’s spy chief. He died on February 8, 1959, his Dominican priest brother administering the last rites. On learning of Wild Bill’s death, President Eisenhower remarked, “What a man! We have lost the last hero.”

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  Deep in the makeup of FDR something reveled in the whispered secret, the clandestine mission, the mysterious agent. He delighted in his midnight rides through back streets to the obscure railroad siding under the Bureau of Engraving and Printing for dead of night departures from Washington. Merriman Smith, the veteran White House reporter, observed, “Mr. Roosevelt made a fetish of his privacy during the war.” It was FDR who chose the exotic Shangri-la as the name for his hideaway in Maryland’s Catoctin Mountains. After Tehran, he gleefully embroidered on the alleged plot to assassinate him there. Psychohistorians may explain this penchant for the covert as providing the vicarious adventure that FDR’s useless legs denied him. But the predilection was present long before his paralysis, in the enthusiasm with which he directed the Office of Naval Intelligence as assistant secretary of the Navy, in the wide-eyed wonder with which he swallowed Admiral Blinker Hall’s fabrications in England. It was evident even earlier in his invention of a code for concealing intimate entries in his college diary.

  By the time FDR entered the White House, his attraction to the circuitous and byzantine had evolved into a reflexive behavior. The bureaucratic fog that he laid down was deliberate. As the onetime Brain Truster Rexford Tugwell described FDR, “He had long ago learned to conceal from friend and enemy alike his thinking and deciding processes and even many of his convictions… .” He did not want anyone to know how he did it. A frustrated Raymond Moley, another early New Dealer, concluded, “[F]ewer friends would have been lost by bluntness than by the misunderstandings that arose from engaging ambiguity.”

  FDR’s preference for talking and his reluctance to commit anything to paper have created a maddening situation for scholars. Roosevelt forbade any note-taking in his presence. When George Marshall instructed General John Deane to bring a notebook to a White House briefing, “The President,” according to Marshall, “blew up.” Roosevelt himself rarely recorded his discussions, no matter how significant the issue or elevated the participants, even during private sessions with the heads of nations, to the frustration of State Department historians. Of his confidential talks with Churchill at the White House or Hyde Park, the department’s history notes dryly, “[T]here took place a number of informal and unscheduled conferences between [Churchill] and Roosevelt, and the President, as was his custom, prepared no minutes or memoranda of conversations on them.” Tugwell has summed up the scholar’s frustration. “There is hardly a dependable record of a conversation in Franklin Roosevelt’s whole life.” The choicest secrets remained locked inside his head.

  The President’s personal predilections also explain his greatest weakness as a participant in secret warfare, his preference for working with human sources over signals intelligence, for “humint” over “sigint” in the shorthand of the trade. Magic, through Ambassador Oshima, provided access to the most intimate councils of war, inside Germany. Arlington Hall also broke the codes of Brazil, Chile, Egypt, Finland, Greece, Iran,
Ireland, Italy, Mexico, Portugal, and Turkey. FDR’s attitude toward human intelligence versus signals intelligence mirrored his character. The broken enemy codes set before him were the product of a laborious alphanumeric science. But FDR’s character was drawn to intuition over analysis, boldness over methodology, romance over technology. He could grasp the terrifying potential of atomic weaponry when it was described to him and set the Manhattan Project in motion; but, day to day, he preferred the liveliness of personal contact to the detachment of science.

  What cannot be gainsaid, for better or worse, is that FDR built espionage into the structure of American government when he created the OSS. He was present at the creation, was indeed the creator. The OSS, only temporarily scuttled, was essentially refloated by Harry Truman. In a generation, the United States went from no intelligence service to a permanent service; from dilettante amateurs to careerist professionals; from no spending and no personnel to a CIA which at the peak of the Cold War had a budget approaching $3 billion and employed approximately seventeen thousand persons; from attaché chatter picked up at embassy parties to billion-dollar satellites spying from space to Earth; from the almost homey codebreaking club at Arlington Hall to the ultra-secret National Security Agency, referred to as “No Such Agency,” whose intelligence collection and codebreaking enterprises far outstripped the budget even of the CIA. In short, America went from a nation innocent of espionage to one embracing its inevitability.

  Wars are not won by spies pilfering documents or math professors cracking codes. They are won by forces engaged in bloodletting, by combatants bombing targets, sinking ships, and seizing ground. How long these forces are engaged and how much blood is spilled, however, can be shortened by the spy and the codebreaker. The advantage of Magic alone is proof. It revealed the Japanese fleet’s movements that led to the pivotal Pacific victory at Midway. Magic tracked and doomed Admiral Yamamoto, whose loss to the Japanese has been equated with the Allies losing Eisenhower. In the final tally, both America’s and Britain’s intelligence operations far outstripped the performance of the enemy for political and psychological as much as technological reasons. Hitler’s megalomania and the fear the Führer planted in his subordinates discouraged their delivering bad news. Hitler once pronounced accurate intelligence on Soviet troop concentrations “completely idiotic.” Across a report on Russian agricultural output he scrawled, “This cannot be!” In time, his lieutenants spared themselves grief and merely omitted the bitter dishes of German espionage from the Führer’s menu. Joseph Stalin was much the same throughout World War II and into the Cold War. NKVD officials watered down the unpalatable since by telling Stalin the truth one risked transfer to the Gulag. This denial of reality by despots rendered even the best intelligence valueless, a point worth remembering when democracies tend to ascribe the advantage in covert activity to authoritarian regimes. The truth, the welcome and the unwelcome, is more difficult to suppress in open societies. The ironic conclusion is that, like individual freedom, espionage ultimately fares best in free nations.