“The basic purpose of this Service of Strategic Information,” he concluded, “is to constitute means by which the President as Commander-in-Chief and his strategic board would have available accurate and complete reports upon which military operational decisions could be based.”
While Donovan was working on his report, Admiral Godfrey was unsuccessfully attempting to make an appointment to see the President. When Arthur Sulzberger of the New York Times said that he could arrange for Godfrey to meet with Mrs. Roosevelt, the British intelligence officer agreed that this was the next best thing. Sulzberger phoned the White House and made the necessary arrangements. On the very day that Donovan sent his report to the President, Mrs. Roosevelt welcomed Godfrey to dinner at the White House, and in the presence of two aides listened to what he had to say.
Suddenly the President rolled his wheelchair into the room. The man who had seemed impossible to see was in a puckish mood.
“Hello, Admiral,” he said. “How did you come out?”
Godfrey replied that he had come out on the Clipper via Bermuda.
“Oh yes, those West Indies Islands; we’re going to show you how to look after them, and not only you but the Portuguese and the Dutch!”
Godfrey had little choice but to laugh. The Roosevelts and the admiral went into the drawing room, where they watched a movie on snake worship in Laos. When Mrs. Roosevelt remarked that it was getting time to go to bed, the President wheeled his chair into the oval room. He waved Godfrey into the chair that Lincoln had preferred when he occupied the White House, and sat behind his desk. The President reminisced about his stay in London in 1917, when he was the under secretary of the navy, and the admiral, realizing that now was the right time to get to the point, explained from one navy man to another exactly why America had to have a unified intelligence service and why it must have it soon. Roosevelt listened intently.
Up until this evening Roosevelt had been considering Donovan for a variety of other key jobs in the administration, all dealing with the war. While pushing the President to establish a central intelligence agency Donovan, characteristically, had refused to push himself as the essential director. Talking with Admiral Godfrey, Roosevelt decided to establish the agency and to make Donovan its director. In the morning he directed his secretary, Grace Tully, to inform his appointments secretary that he wanted both Donovan and Benjamin Cohen, counsel for the National Power Policy Committee, to see him before Cohen left on a trip to England. Cohen had drafted many executive orders for the President, and FDR now had in mind a particularly momentous paper.
At 12:30 P.M. on June 18, Frank Knox, Donovan, and Cohen met with the President. After a discussion of the intelligence confusion that existed in Washington, the talk turned to Donovan’s proposal, which Roosevelt accepted in principle. To the dismay and surprise of the others present, Donovan suddenly said that even if the President were to ask him, he did not wish to serve as director. Roosevelt was not deterred. Donovan later told Stimson that he agreed to accept the President’s appointment only when it was understood that the new organization would be “essentially and entirely civilian” and that he would report directly to the President. He consented to the military rank of major general simply to accommodate the President, who had suggested it. The President and Donovan agreed that there would be nothing in writing pertaining to the secret activities, as Donovan reminded Roosevelt later, “especially about the use of radio in the procurement of vitally needed information.”
On the cover sheet of Donovan’s original memorandum Roosevelt wrote a note to the acting director of the Bureau of the Budget, John B. Blandford, Jr.: “Please set this up confidentially with Ben Cohen—Military—not OEM. FDR.”
Explained Thomas Troy: “The ‘confidentially’ probably referred to the use of secret funds, and vague language in laying out the new organization’s purpose and functions. ‘Military’ meant that Donovan would be a major general. ‘Not OEM’ meant that he would not be bracketed with the numerous new war agencies under the OEM [Office for Emergency Management] umbrella, but would report directly to FDR.”
As soon as he left the President, Donovan got in touch with William Stephenson in New York and informed him that he was to direct the new American strategic intelligence service. “You can imagine how relieved I am after three months of battle and jockeying for position in Washington,” Stephenson immediately cabled London, “that our man is in a position of such importance to our efforts.”
The next day Cohen and Budget Bureau aides began to draft the order to establish the “Service of Strategic Information.” The work went ahead without a hitch, and the order establishing the new agency might have been issued weeks before it finally came out, but Military Intelligence now entered the picture. Both Knox and Stimson had been pleased by the President’s intentions, but General Miles, chief of Army Intelligence, was greatly disturbed. He had shown concern early in the spring when he first had an inkling of Donovan’s plans. Now on June 24, Army Chief of Staff Marshall, who had been infected by Miles’s fears, thundered into Stimson’s office, which was right next to his own in the old Munitions Building on Constitution Avenue. General Marshall, wrote Stimson in his journal, angrily branded the plan “an effort to supplant his responsibilities and duties in direct connection with the Commander-in-Chief,” which was a clear indication that Marshall saw himself losing out in the military politics of the summer.
War Secretary Stimson attempted to placate Marshall by partially agreeing with him. Later, after Ben Cohen brought the draft in for him to consider, Stimson recorded in his journal that he studied it with a jaundiced eye before finally giving Cohen his response:
[I told him that] I thought it was such bad planning from the standpoint of military administration that I should not favor it unless Donovan was kept in a purely civilian capacity; that I disapproved wholly of having him made a Major General simultaneously with the assumption of the position. The proposed draft was full of language treating the function as if it were a military one. I told Cohen that this plainly resulted in giving the President two Chiefs of Staff; one, the regular one, and one, an irregular one, because no military man could go to the President with military information without giving at the same time some views in the nature of advice based upon that information. I told Cohen that I thought the thing might be worked out if the Coordinator were kept purely as a civilian. I told him also that I was a friend of Donovan’s and that I sympathized with his ultimate ambition to get into the fighting if fighting came, and that I would have no objection to recommending him at that time as a Major General; but that I was wholly against combining in his person the function of being a Major General and being a Coordinator of Information.
Donovan had anticipated this reaction from the military bureaucracy and had attempted to keep the new agency out of the hands of the military and to avoid assuming military rank himself. Cohen had no choice but to agree with Stimson and to take out the paragraphs giving a military aspect to the proposed coordinator of information (COI). The Budget Bureau worked on the paper too, and revisions followed revisions. Donovan consulted with Stimson and with Knox.
On June 24, President Roosevelt held a press conference.
“Mr. President, there have been reports that Colonel Donovan has been given a high position in the military intelligence, or will be given,” a White House correspondent said.
“I read that too in the paper,” remarked Roosevelt. “I have had nothing come to my desk on it.”
The President was being honest. He had spent the last week in June at Hyde Park while in Washington Stimson and Marshall backed and filled. On June 22, as Donovan had told Roosevelt would happen, Germany attacked the Soviet Union. The intensified war in Europe had something of a sobering effect on the military careerists who felt challenged by the proposed COI. Assistant Secretary of War McCloy, General Marshall, and Secretary Stimson argued over the details most of July 2. Marshall, just as irascible as ever, sketched a diagram that s
howed COI reports going through military and naval channels to the President. In this way General Miles could control what Roosevelt was given. The next morning Donovan went to see Stimson and McCloy at 8:30 to try and set the matter to rest.
When Donovan explained that the military title was Roosevelt’s suggestion and that he himself had proposed in the first place that the new agency be entirely separate from the army and navy, Stimson and McCloy judged him fair-minded. Stimson offered to make Donovan a major general any time he wanted to take up a military command; in fact, he could command the 44th Division, but military rank could not go with the directorship of the COI. Donovan admitted that he planned to “make something real” of the COI, but that later he might indeed want to take a try at a command since he had some ideas on guerrilla warfare that needed testing.
Then McCloy took out Marshall’s diagram showing the channels through which intelligence would be submitted to the President, and it was Donovan’s turn to be angry. Finally a compromise was reached. As a rule, intelligence would go to the President through channels, but Donovan could also submit important reports directly to the President because, as Stimson wrote in his diary, “of the relationship necessary to his position and the President’s temperament and characteristics.”
Now that the War Department agreed to the COI proposal, Donovan could go to the Bureau of the Budget to meet with Cohen and Blandford and his aides to finish a revised draft. There were still more anguished hours ahead before the army would agree to the revisions, but on July 3, the document was placed on the President’s desk. The plan, which J. Edgar Hoover was to label Roosevelt’s Folly, now awaited the President’s signature.
On July 6, the New York Times ran an article under the headline, “Col. Donovan, Who Studied Nazi Espionage, Is Slated for a Big Post, Capital Reports.” The article speculated that Donovan was to head a new antispy agency. On July 10, the Times ran a second article, saying that Donovan would soon be named the coordinator of intelligence information. His nomination would be sent to the Senate the next day, and Roosevelt would soon issue an order establishing the new office, “the functions of which have been outlined in a formal order,” and which “is without precedent in the government’s operations.”
Donovan would be accountable only to the President. Heretofore, intelligence reports had been reaching the White House in the form of short digests of long, original reports. Sometimes these lend themselves to easy coordination, but more often it is understood, the varying emphasis placed by observers on related incidents suffers in the digesting, since each digest is prepared by an official necessarily preoccupied with the special interests of his own department.
It will be the primary task of Colonel Donovan, therefore, to take original reports and analyze them in relation to each other, in a manner impossible at present, simply because there is no agency of the government with the freedom from other routine necessary to this task.
The new office, incidentally, is being created with the approval and general cooperation of the various intelligence agencies which will feed reports into it.
The approval of the various intelligence agencies was not exactly enthusiastic, and their cooperation promised to be dilatory, but the New York Times was essentially correct. On July 11 President Roosevelt signed the COI order, and the White House announced the new agency to the nation.
The President today, as Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces, appointed William J. Donovan Coordinator of Information.
In his capacity as coordinator Mr. Donovan will collect and assemble information and data bearing on national security from the various departments and agencies of the government and will analyze and collate such materials for the use of the President and such other officials as the President may designate.
Mr. Donovan’s task will be to coordinate and correlate defense information, but his work is not intended to supersede or to duplicate or to involve any direction of or interference with the activities of the General Staff, the regular intelligence services, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, or of other existing departments and agencies.
Originally, White House Press Secretary Steve Early had planned to release an additional statement that “Mr. Donovan may from time to time be requested by the President to undertake activities helpful in the securing of defense information not available to the government through existing departments and agencies.” Early, it is said, deleted this statement to avoid confusing the issue, and therefore much of the scope and true purpose of the COI was not announced. The Executive Order designating a coordinator of information did not mention subversive operations, guerrilla warfare, or psychological warfare, except as might be included in the terms “supplementary activities.” Donovan also had insured, for all effects and purposes, that he should report only to the President, that the President’s secret unvouchered funds could be employed, and that all departments of government would be instructed to give him the materials he asked for.
Orally, so as not to stir up a hornet’s nest in and out of the administration, Roosevelt had given Donovan responsibility to carry on political warfare against the enemies of the United States. He had told Donovan that there were four things that he required of him: (1) Plan his strategy with the Chief of Staff; (2) Accept guidance from the White House on aims; (3) Find out who in the government was planning postwar policy; (4) Have control of short-wave stations to be sure they said what needed to be said.
Donovan soon discovered that there were enormous obstacles to meeting the requirements of all four points imposed by the President.
PART THREE
Wartime Spymaster
1941–1945
24
Donovan’s Brain Trust
DONOVAN DID NOT WAIT for Roosevelt’s public announcement of the COI to begin his work. He asked for space at the Bureau of the Budget and was assigned a minuscule office. There was one telephone for Donovan and his first few assistants, and it was on his desk. Everybody scrambled for it when it rang.
Henry Field, then curator of anthropology at the Field Museum in Chicago, recalled that it was late in May when Donovan invited him to breakfast at his Georgetown home. At first Donovan questioned Field about his travels and experiences in Europe and the Near East, particularly the latter. He asked searching questions. The two men pored over a Bartholomew map that Field had brought as they considered problems from the Suez Canal to Iran.
As the clock struck eleven, Donovan suddenly changed the subject. “The President is going to appoint me coordinator of information reporting directly to him,” Field recalled Donovan saying. “He finds that the flow of documents is too large for him to read. When he asks for special information on a problem, the reports from many branches of the government require analysis and condensation. He wants me to set up an organization to do this for him. I have authority to employ anyone. I want you to help me to set up the Near East division. Can you start right away?”
“I’m afraid not, Colonel.”
“But I have here a letter of authorization from the President.” Donovan tapped the inside pocket of his suit; his temper seemed to be rising.
“Colonel, I cannot accept because I am already working for the President.”
Donovan’s eyes showed surprise. Then he smiled. “I did not know that. In that event can you work part-time for me? I will give you an office in COI.”
“May I write a memorandum to the President for instructions?”
“Yes, and I will speak to him about you today. I hope you can start to make a plan for Near East division this evening. Now I have to go. Thank you for coming to see me. I want you on my top team.”
That evening Field started to draft a plan. Shortly thereafter, he received a telephoned answer to his memorandum to Roosevelt. The President ordered Field to work part-time for Donovan.
During June and early July, Donovan recruited aides and made plans wherever he happened to be. In New York he worked out of his law office on Wall Street and his Bee
kman Place apartment; in Washington, out of his law office in the Bowen Building on 15th Street and his Georgetown home. He recruited at cocktail parties, in offices, at military bases. He pressed his law partners, his assistants, and his friends into service. Since there was no time to make exhaustive security checks, he turned to the people he knew best, for both their outstanding abilities and their unquestionable loyalty.
One of his first assistants was Jim Murphy, who joined Donovan to help protect him from political treachery (as Murphy put it later, to “keep the knives out of his back”). “I phoned the Colonel,” he said. “If he was going to be involved, I wanted to be with him. I met him on a Saturday morning and just went to work. I worked right through the first weekend.”
For two weeks Murphy could not get back to his law office to finish up his own affairs. He had no title and was given no pay, but he interviewed job applicants and took care of Donovan’s correspondence, which swelled daily in volume and contained information of a highly confidential nature.
Others of the first COI men were suggested by the President. One of these was Robert Sherwood, playwright and presidential speech writer, whom Donovan picked in June to head up the Foreign Information Service. Sherwood had been planning his staff for a month before the actual order establishing the COI was issued. Among his recruits were Stephen Vincent Benét and Thornton Wilder. In June Donovan also talked to Elmo Roper, nationally known for his public opinion surveys, and asked him to work with the chiefs of the various divisions in setting up their organizations, beginning with the propaganda branch. Roper’s job thereafter would be to visit each branch in succession to check on its operation. In this way Donovan tried from the start to establish and insure organizational efficiency.
Donovan Page 40