Donovan

by Richard Dunlop

  Donovan’s intelligence section had made some progress by the summer of 1942. It was under the immediate control of one of the most charming and certainly one of the most able Americans I have ever met, called David Bruce. . . . He was surrounded by a galaxy of talent which seemed to expand daily, but then included Whitney Shepardson, Paul Vanderstricht, Russell Doensch, and Henry Hyde. The operations division, with which I had to deal, had lagged behind, perhaps because the conception of secret operations was harder to grasp than that of secret intelligence. Its commander was a professional army colonel called Goodfellow assisted by one of the Vanderbilts, who was a commander in the U.S. Navy. Below these two there was a small group of men which then included Jimmy Lawrence, Warwick Potter, and John Bross. New faces appeared daily.

  Donovan himself said of this period when the OSS was rapidly expanding overseas:

  In the OSS we quickly learned that you can’t collect all of the information needed in war by sitting in Washington. And you can’t deliver your information to the man who needs it from a Washington desk. So OSS headquarters were established in every theater, in England, North Africa, Switzerland, and Sweden, from which we sent agents and guerrilla fighters into occupied France, Belgium, Holland, Germany, Austria, Yugoslavia and Italy—and on the other side of the globe we operated in Siam, China, Burma, and Indochina. That was an effective wartime intelligence system. Information gatherers and fighters behind enemy lines, and scholars placed all the way from Washington to the front lines. Men who could interpret the information received and gave it to the official or commander who needed it.

  Donovan now reported to the JCS, whom he furnished with a torrent of information from his agents abroad. “Donovan also sent his reports directly to FDR even after it was decided he should report to the Joint Chiefs,” said Charles Bane, an OSS man who was charged with delivering top-secret “eyes only” reports directly to the President.

  At OSS headquarters Donovan was a typhoon of activity. He briefed agents and special operations teams before they went overseas. “He made me feel,” said one agent who went on a hazardous mission into the Balkans, “as though it was all going to be perfectly simple. He talked to me quietly for half an hour, and I walked out of his office convinced I could do the job.”

  “Everything seemed planned so well, that if you got hurt it was your own damned fault,” remembered another OSS man, who served in Southeast Asia.

  Invariably, Donovan finished his talk with the man he was sending into danger by saying, “Believe me, I wish I were going with you.”

  “In view of his fantastic record for bravery in World War I, no one doubted he meant it,” observed OSS man John Beaudouin.

  Donovan’s preference for action overseas infected the young men of the OSS, and they resented being kept in Washington when there was a world of adventure awaiting them abroad.

  Sam Schreiner, later to be an editor of Reader’s Digest and a novelist, first joined the OSS as a courier for J. Freeman Lincoln, who in peacetime wrote sea stories. To Schreiner and countless other young men, Lincoln became the Great Emancipator not because of his name but because, as Schreiner put it, “he freed us from slavery by arranging that we escape Washington and go overseas.”

  In the OSS there was indeed a world of adventure. Count Ilya Tolstoi, grandson of the great Russian novelist, and Lieutenant Brook Dolan were dispatched by Donovan to follow the old caravan route across Tibet to see if it could be used as an overland supply route from India to China. After experiences that seemed to come from the pages of fiction, they arrived at Lanchow, China, on July 4, 1943, bringing not only economic, political, and topographical data, but a presentation scarf, a framed picture of the Dalai Lama, four tanghas of piece brocade, three old coins, and some old and new Tibetan stamps as gifts from the regent to the “King of the United States.” Donovan arranged for Goodfellow to present the gifts to the “King” at the White House, much to Roosevelt’s delight.

  Other OSS men of Detachment 101 penetrated into the Burma jungles behind Japanese lines to contact Zhing Htaw Naw, leader of the Kachin tribes of the remote interior, and to establish a formidable guerrilla force that played a critical role in the defeat of the Japanese in Southeast Asia. Nicol Smith and 21 young Thais infiltrated into Thailand, where Smith was secreted by the Thais in a palace close to Japanese headquarters. He radioed vital intelligence information gathered for him by a network of Thai agents.

  In Asia the OSS had much to contend with. There were the machinations of China’s Tai Li, Chiang Kai-shek’s director of the bureau of investigation and statistics. According to an OSS intelligence report from London, Tai Li was the “head of an intelligence organization modeled on the German Gestapo and . . . has strong German sympathies.” There was a German intercept system based in Shanghai. And there was the problem of stationing agents in such places as Manila, Hong Kong, Singapore, Korea, Manchukuo, and even in Tokyo itself.

  “The operators in the most dangerous places use a very ingenious adapter,” Al Lusey, who had been a foreign correspondent for Globe Wireless in Shanghai, reported to Donovan from Chungking. The adapter “is plugged into the final amplifier stage of an ordinary medium band broadcast receiver. With this adapter they reckon to develop about ten watts of power. The message is sent out two or three times. The agents use one of several Japanese ciphers. The preamble of the message is in Japanese Kana code so that the messages will attract a minimum of attention. The message from Tokyo night before last contained the information that two of their agents had been caught and executed—they tell me that makes six in two weeks they have lost.”

  From all over the world such messages flowed in to Donovan, making his late-night reading anything but dull. He passed on everything of importance to a fascinated FDR.

  Donovan studied reports, presided over meetings, and found time to step into the telephone room to tell the operators, “Without you girls, what would I do?” The Message Center was situated in the basement just beneath his office, and he would sometimes let himself in with his own key at 3:00 A.M. and hand the navy code clerk on duty a sheaf of messages. “Sailor, will you get this out for me top priority quickly,” he would direct.

  He was always good-natured and friendly to the cryptographers at work in the Message Center. “Several times he took a few of us out for a beer at a local tavern,” recalled Leonard Laundergan, who at the age of 20 worked in the Message Center, enciphering and deciphering secret messages.

  Elizabeth Sipe and Anne Boyd, young OSS women, finished lunch at the 1925 F Street Restaurant one noon that summer and were preparing to walk back to the OSS when the democratic OSS chief invited them to ride back in his limousine. “He was absolutely charming the entire way,” Elizabeth Sipe recalled. “We were so thrilled.” Donovan, always appreciative of feminine charms, doubtless enjoyed the ride as much as the girls did.

  Sometimes at an OSS party, in the hall, or in an office, his eyes would meet those of an attractive OSS woman. “Their eyes would just seem to click,” remembered one OSS woman, “and Donovan and the girl would somehow go off together.”

  Today most women who served in the OSS at headquarters or in the field where Donovan traveled so incessantly say that many other OSS women had affairs with the general, but they never admit that they themselves did. With Ruth almost constantly in New York, Bill Donovan felt free to enjoy the company of some of the most engaging and talented young women in Washington.

  Although he could not straighten out his own marital difficulties, Donovan attempted to solve those of his staff. James Donovan (who was not related to his chief) and John English and their wives shared a large house in Virginia. Donovan’s wife was of English ancestry and English’s wife was of German descent. English complained to Donovan one day that the two wives were quarreling.

  “You can’t put a German girl and an English girl in one house and expect them to get along,” said Donovan. “You’re just fools.”

  Donovan found time to be concerned
about the fate of May Emereine, a typist whose husband was a short-order cook in a diner in Kansas.

  “She met the driver on a Washington bus,” remembered Margaret Griggs Setton, who directed the Central Intelligence files. “May lived with the driver, which was difficult from an OSS point of view. One day she came to me and said she was pregnant. I had dinner with Donovan, and I told him about her. He liked to hear about his people’s problems.”

  “Tell her to get a divorce from her husband,” said Donovan. “Then marry her driver.”

  He made arrangements for his law firm of Donovan and Leisure to take care of the divorce proceedings. Donovan held off the OSS security investigation until her divorce was final because he knew she’d fail to pass the check and would be fired.

  “She got her divorce,” recalled Mrs. Setton, “but she would bicker with her driver. She went to Baltimore and had an abortion. Donovan was horrified, but he still stuck with her. Finally the typist married her driver, but then went back to Kansas to live with her former husband.”

  After his auto accident, Donovan gave up squash for a time and boxed daily with a fighter who had joined the OSS. Still, he put on weight, and when OSS woman Betty McDonald drafted a book about the OSS and referred to him as “penguin-shaped,” he called her into the office where he had been giving her manuscript a security check. He read the offending passage out loud to her. “May the Lord forgive you for this,” he said.

  Freeman, Donovan’s black chauffeur, was known for his discretion and his complete loyalty to Donovan. One day Bill Langer and Ed Mason stepped out of the Administration Building to take a cab to a meeting of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. They saw Donovan’s limousine waiting outside the building. “Freeman, General Donovan is supposed to be at the Joint Chiefs of Staff,” said Langer.

  “Where the general is, is where the general wants to be,” opined Freeman. “Where the general is supposed to be is no mind.”

  Donovan thought nothing of keeping the brass waiting. Once, while an aide fumed, knowing that he was due at the War Department for a high-level meeting, Donovan talked to a “nondescript little man with a foreign accent.” A half hour later he explained, “That man is going to jump into Berlin pretty soon. The meeting isn’t going anywhere; it can wait.”

  On the way from his Georgetown house to headquarters, Donovan would sometimes ask Freeman to stop the car. He’d jump out and hike through Rock Creek Park to the office, or, if there was insufficient time to go the entire way, he’d ask Freeman to pick him up again on a certain corner along the route. His staff was appalled at how few hours he slept at night, and amazed by his ability to catnap for ten minutes in the car and be ready to take on the world.

  “It was something about his metabolism that gave him such furious energy,” says Jim Murphy, first his executive assistant and then later chief of Counterintelligence (X-2).

  One day Murphy tore out a magazine article on metabolism. He handed it to Donovan. “You’re not like the rest of us,” he said.

  It did him little good. Donovan phoned him late that night to ask a question. He drove everybody around him unmercifully, but was at the same time considerate of other people’s feelings.

  “I’d been particularly driven,” remembered Murphy, “and I was staying at his house. He came into my room late at night and handed me a beat-up book of Greek history.”

  “I want you to read this,” Donovan said, pointing out a passage that explained how Alexander the Great drove his subordinates to accomplish an essential purpose.

  “General Donovan himself was a mobile unit of the first magnitude. Space was no barrier to him—the Sahara Desert was a little stretch of sand, the Himalayas were a bank of snow, the Pacific was a mere ditch,” said one awed member of the OSS assessment staff.

  And, what is more, time was no problem. Circling the globe, according to good evidence, he would catch up with Time and pass it. No one was at all surprised if he left one morning and returned the previous afternoon.

  The General’s triumph over the two fundamental dimensions of our universe is certainly the leading reason why OSS men, seen or unseen, were operating on most of the strategic surfaces of the earth.

  But more elementary than this—for none has to explain why he was inclined to fly about the way he did—was General Donovan’s power to visualize an oak when he saw an acorn. For him the day was never sufficient unto itself; it was always teeming with the seeds of a boundless future. Like Nature, he was prodigal, uncontainable, forelooking, and every completed project bred a host of new ones. His imagination shot ahead, outflying days and distances, and where his imagination went, there would his body go soon afterward, and at every stop, brief as it might be, he would leave a litter of young schemes to be reared and fashioned by his lieutenants and transmuted finally into deeds of daring. This is the key to the problem. It explains why OSS undertook and carried out more different types of enterprises calling for more varied skills than any other single organization of its size in the history of our country.

  He was called a Renaissance man by some and “a character left over from the days of the Condottieri of 15th century Italy” by Calvin Hoover, the Duke University savant who served in the OSS. According to Hubert Will, another aide, Donovan “deliberately moved fast and kept a number of people involved in his undertakings. He didn’t tell a lot to any one of them.”

  Donovan told General Wavell that he welcomed the loss of the information activities, now in the OWI, because it meant he could see more of the war. Beginning that summer of 1942, he went off to the battlefronts and to OSS outposts all over the world. His aides were accustomed to being hauled out of bed in the middle of the night to be told they were leaving with him in a few hours for London or Chungking. R&A researchers in the South Building would peer out the windows and watch Donovan being driven up to his headquarters in the building next door.

  “When a couple of days went by without him putting in an appearance,” recalled geographer George Beishlag, “we suspected he was off on a trip.”

  By the end of 1942, Donovan drew up guidelines, based upon his observations of the British commandos in June, on how to organize “operational nuclei for guerrillas operating behind enemy lines.”

  “Recruiting,” said Donovan later, “was accomplished with the cooperation of the War Department. All men had to be volunteers for ‘extra hazardous duty behind enemy lines,’ had to volunteer for parachute training, have language qualifications for the particular group they were joining, and had to have basic military training. High mental and physical standards were also invoked.”

  When Donovan encountered a young man he considered promising, he recruited him on the spot. “We need young people like you with imagination and daring,” Donovan told Manly Fleischmann of Buffalo. “Nine of our people were shot in Greece just yesterday.”

  Fleischmann avowed that he was not “as excited as the general over the prospect of being shot at,” but he accepted a navy commission and ended up running a spy net in Burma.

  OSS recruited safecrackers, college boys, steel-mill workers, economists, scions of old-line American families, and recent immigrants from Europe. “Let me say a word about these men,” Donovan declared after the war. “They were all Americans. Many of them are of French, Italian, German, Siamese, Chinese origin. But now all Americans. We had often been told by our Allies that this mixture of nationalities in America was a weakness and could be penetrated and exploited by our enemies. But we did convert that so-called liability into a great asset. Only the American melting pot could mobilize such a body of experts in the knowledge of other countries, and we did it to the great advantage of our war effort.”

  Donovan had a particular belief in the value of refugees. Riding on the train from New York to Washington, he told Ladislas Farago that he had been reading Arthur Koestler’s Scum of the Earth. Donovan commented on how foolish nations were to refuse new citizens who were fleeing from oppression.

  “I will never make that
mistake,” he said. “Every man or woman who can hurt the Hun is okay with me.”

  President Roosevelt initiated one of the OSS missions in 1942. On June 24, he gave a White House dinner for young King Peter of Yugoslavia. FDR toasted the king and paid tribute to Draža Mihajlović, who was leading his guerrilla bands, or Chetniks, against the Germans. Before King Peter left the White House that night, the President asked him to get in touch with Bill Donovan, who would arrange for supplies and an OSS officer to be sent to Mihajlović. King Peter and Donovan met upon the OSS director’s return from London at the end of June, and they conferred frequently over the next several months in Washington and New York to work out plans for OSS support of the Chetniks. Donovan placed OSS men with Mihajlović.

  Later Donovan also put Louis Huot, a sometime Chicago Tribune reporter, ashore from an OSS maritime unit in the Adriatic. Huot was taken to headquarters of the Partisans, the communist resistance fighters led by Josip Broz Tito. “Here was no simple warrior,” Huot reported of Tito, “no primitive leader or fighting man. He might be that, but he was much more besides. Thinker, statesman, artist, he appeared to be all these, and soldier as well; and there was a light in his face that glowed and flickered and subsided as he talked, but never went away—a light that comes only from long service in the tyranny of dreams. Whatever this man might be and no matter what he signified, here was a force to reckon with, a leader men would follow through the very gates of hell.”

  For the time being Donovan gave support to both the Chetniks and the Partisans, but there was no denying that in his view Tito was bound to succeed where Mihajlović, who sent negative messages imploring him for help, was bound to lose.

  Donovan’s life was more kaleidoscopic than ever. His mind teemed with ideas on how to gather vital intelligence. It was important to learn the strength of German combat manpower. “We found that small-town newspapers carried obituaries of German officers killed in action,” Donovan said.