I pointed out that the value of such an undertaking would be highly uncertain since, to a large extent, we would have to glean our information from the literature. The literature, although extensive, was mostly unreliable, and it was difficult, at this time, to know how much pertinent material it would reveal. Furthermore, I pointed out, neither psychological nor psychoanalytic techniques were designed or readily adaptable to such an enterprise. But General Donovan was not one to be deterred by such considerations.
“Well, give it a try and see what you can come up with,” he said. “Hire what help you need and get it done as soon as possible. Keep it brief and make it readable to the layman.”
Langer got up to leave, but Donovan was not finished. “Remember, we’ll be face to face with Hitler at the peace table,” he said.
“You’ll never meet him at the peace table,” Langer remarked with certainty.
In May 1943, Donovan had good reason to wonder about the mind of Adolf Hitler and his hold on the German people. Early in the month, Donovan had received an incredible report from Arthur Goldberg in London. “I met Samuel Zygelbojm, the representative of the Jewish Board in the Polish government-in-exile in London,” recalled Goldberg. “Zygelbojm gave me the first fully documented proof of the Nazi death camps. Late in 1942 there had been stories from refugees who had managed to escape the death camps, but there had been no supporting evidence. Now I was given pictures and affidavits, overwhelming evidence of the terrible horrors at the heart of Hitler’s Reich.”
Zygelbojm, a socialist labor leader before the war, begged Goldberg to do something to stop the extermination of a whole people. At least, he argued, the Allies could bomb the camps so that the Germans would understand that the Allies knew the camps existed. If innocent Jews were to die in the Allied attack, it would be tragic; but they were going to die anyway, and in the bombing some of their Nazi murderers would die too. Other Germans might be warned that if their country lost the war, there would be retribution for their inhumanity.
Goldberg promised to inform Washington. He sent a detailed report, complete with the affidavits and grim photos, to Donovan.
“Donovan forwarded the report, together with the documents and pictures, to Roosevelt,” stated Goldberg. “He asked that the U.S. Air Force bomb the death camps. ‘No,’ replied Roosevelt. Donovan informed me that President Roosevelt was strongly of the mind that our planes could not be diverted from the attack on Hitler. This was senseless, since some of the targets being struck were only five miles away from the camps.”
Goldberg invited Zygelbojm to dine at Claridge’s on May 11. During dinner he told the Jewish representative of the President’s decision. The next day Samuel Zygelbojm died of an overdose of pills, his response to the President of the United States.
Although Donovan’s principal concern in 1943 was with the Mediterranean, he managed to fly on from Cairo to New Delhi and to Kandy, Ceylon, to keep abreast of developments in Asia. On January 11, 1943, he called Col. Nicol Smith into his office and pointed to a map of Thailand. “Here we have an area of more than 200,000 square miles with not a single Allied agent. We need weather information for the 14th Air Force in Yunnan and the 10th in Burma; we also need information on troop movements across this vast country, and we need much more than that.” Stilwell and British commanders in Southeast Asia had informed Donovan of their urgent need for information on the Japanese strength in Thailand, the location of Japanese installations so they could be bombed without injuring the Thai population, whether there was a Thai underground, and if it would be possible to rescue Allied prisoners of war who had been captured during the triumphant Japanese advance through the region.
“How are we going to get in there?” asked Smith, who had recently returned from a mission to France.
“You’re going to get in there. I know you don’t know anything in particular about Thailand, but you are the best man for the job.”
Donovan knew that Smith was the son of a wealthy San Francisco family who had lived a life of adventure since the age of 17, when he had run away from a boy’s school in Switzerland to go down the Danube River on a raft. In the years just before Pearl Harbor, Smith had traveled over the Burma Road to write a bestselling book. His perceptive reports from Vichy had impressed the OSS chief. Donovan pressed a button on his desk, and Douglas Diamond, the officer in charge of special funds, entered the room.
“Doug has $500,000 for you,” Donovan told Smith. The money was from the Free Thais in Washington, who, at the urging of Preston Goodfellow, had unfrozen $11 million in funds to help drive the Japanese out of their country.
“You can’t go to the Army Quartermaster and outfit a secret Thai force. You’ll have to do your shopping at Abercrombie and Fitch,” observed Donovan.
Diamond handed Smith ten checks for $50,000 each.
“You’re a little bit startled?” blandly inquired Donovan with a slight glint in his eyes. “You’ll manage the assignment.”
Smith took the money to the Bank of New York, where an old friend was a vice-president. The bank officer warned him that unless depositors kept a minimum of $300 in an account, they would have to pay a fee of five cents on each check. “And with what amount do you propose to initiate your account?” he finished.
“Fifty thousand dollars. Next week I’ll wish to deposit an equivalent sum, and by the end of the year will probably make it half a million.”
Having, as he put it later, “rippled the world of finance,” Smith proceeded to start shopping for arms for 20 Thais, all of them students in America, who were to go with him to Thailand.
Kenneth Landon briefed Smith on the intricacies of Thai politics and advised him as to which political leaders might be trusted. Then Smith and his Thais left for India, where they trained at Detachment 101’s forward base at Nazira, Assam, and then infiltrated into Thailand.
Donovan had reason to be pleased; the reports from the Thai underground proved remarkably accurate. Thai sources provided weather reports, designated bomber targets, and gave information to help in the rescue of downed air crews and prisoners of war. This might be expected in a nation where the number two man in the underground was the head of the country’s secret police. The number one man, who was known only as Ruth, turned out after the war to have been Pridi Phanomyong, the prime minister.
“The Siamese Prime Minister was skilled in this kind of warfare,” Donovan said after the war. “He pretended to be pro-Japanese but was really on our side. In his own palace he gave shelter and protection for two OSS men and set up a radio transmitter by which they reported.”
Ruth not only contributed significantly to the defeat of the Japanese in Southeast Asia, but after the war he was to prove very helpful to Donovan when he went to Thailand for President Eisenhower on his last important mission abroad.
31
Tangled Webs
LUCKY LUCIANO HOPED for a parole. Toward the end of 1942 his emissaries approached the OSS as well as the Office of Naval Intelligence. If Donovan could arrange his release from prison, Luciano promised, his followers in the Mafia would set up an intelligence apparatus on their ancestral island of Sicily and supply the OSS with information. After all, Donovan had sprung counterfeiters and safecrackers. Why not a godfather?
Donovan recalled all too well his early 1920s crusade against the syndicate interests in western New York, and he refused to make a deal. Neither Donovan nor George White, director of X-2 training and a former narcotics bureau agent, believed they could trust the Mafia because it was a supranational conspiracy without any allegiance to the United States. Other OSS agents were also in touch with Mafia chiefs who had been driven out of Sicily by Mussolini and were hiding in Toronto. But nothing came of these negotiations either.
Someone in Washington dubbed the OSS group that finally did undertake the intelligence penetration of Sicily the Italians in Algiers, probably in imitation of Rossini’s opera L’Italiana in Algeri. In reality, the Italians were Sicilian-Americans
recruited from the Italian neighborhoods of Hartford and Middletown, Connecticut, by a young OSS man, Max Corvo, who was rarely at a loss for words in either English or Italian. Corvo and one of his recruits, a Hartford lawyer named Vincent Scamporino, brought their band to Algiers early in 1943. They placed agents in Sicily, from where the Germans and Italians supported their forces in North Africa. Information began to flow back to OSS in North Africa about Italian troop dispositions and fortifications in Sicily.
By July 9 an Allied invasion fleet had gathered in North African ports. Sicily was to be the target. Navy Lt. Comdr. David Donovan was aboard the flagship Samuel Chase in the port of Algiers. Orders to cast off had already been given.
“Hold everything,” came a new order. “Some brass arriving from Washington!”
The crew felt the usual annoyance at the arrival of military brass when everybody had the coming battle on his mind. David Donovan, standing at the rail, saw a jeep race onto the pier and come to a squealing halt at the gangplank. He recognized the unmistakable burly figure of his father as he bounced out of the jeep and rushed up the gangplank. After him hurried Ray Kellogg, a Field Photo cameraman. Now that the brass from Washington was aboard, the crew cast off, and soon the ship was on the high seas heading toward Sicily.
The British and American naval guns bombarded the attack points on the south and east coasts of the island. Allied planes roared in to drop salvos of bombs. The landing craft headed for the beach and secured a beachhead. Right after the first wave of landing craft, Bill Donovan, wearing borrowed jungle fatigues much too large for him, climbed into a boat and went ashore to find out for himself how things were going. He soon discovered that OSS agents recruited and trained in the United States could not be counted on for combat intelligence missions; it was necessary to recruit local Sicilians, who understood the terrain and could cross into enemy territory undiscovered. Sicilian-Americans, Donovan’s Italians in Algiers, proved to be invaluable, however, since they knew the dialects and could be used as forward interpreters and to recruit Sicilians for OSS work behind the lines.
Captain Paul Gale, later an OSS man, was on the First Division staff of Gen. Theodore Roosevelt, Jr. “Teddy called me and said he had a general officer at headquarters, and he would appreciate my showing him some of the operations,” recalled Gale. “Here was General Donovan, ruddy cheeks, blue eyes. We climbed into a jeep. I had a light machine gun beside me on the seat. Off we went. He wanted to go farther and farther.”
“General,” objected Gale, “we’re getting where Italian patrols are active.”
“Fine,” replied Donovan, his eyes sparkling with pleasure.
The jeep dashed on down the road and into an Italian patrol. The Italians opened up with automatic weapons.
“Donovan got behind my machine gun and had a field day,” recalled Gale. “He shot up the Italians single-handed. He was happy as a clam when we got back. I’d been bloodied in North Africa, and I knew this guy was something. We had a hell of a fire fight.”
When Gale got back to headquarters, Roosevelt chewed him out without mercy “for getting such an important man into such a bad position.”
As for Donovan, he never forgot Gale, and he later lured him into the OSS. In fact, he liked Gale so much that he sent him behind the lines in China with the task of replacing Tai Li’s prejudiced agents with trustworthy OSS sources. In China, Gale not only discovered the “sweetheart arrangements between Japanese and Chinese commanders, who took and retook certain towns without a shot being fired to impress their governments in Tokyo and Chungking,” but also Chiang Kai-shek’s penchant for selling U.S.-supplied arms to the Japanese.
Things were going well in Sicily, and on July 23 Palermo fell to the Allies. German and Italian troops withdrew from Catania on August 5, and 12 days later Messina capitulated. The conquest of Sicily, the stepping-stone from North Africa to Europe, was completed.
Donovan flew back to Algiers with Gen. Albert Wedemeyer. He continued on to Morocco to confer with Gen. Mark Clark at Fifth Army headquarters. The Allied invasion of the Italian mainland was planned for early September, and Donovan assured Clark that the OSS was already at work in Italy preparing the way.
“He was very obviously a can-do sort of fellow,” said Clark, recalling the conference. Clark, who had seen firsthand the outstanding OSS counterespionage work done on the Spanish Moroccan border, was enthusiastic about OSS help. He was less enthusiastic about some of Donovan’s ideas.
“Donovan wanted the army to land north of Rome and not at Salerno, where he insisted that his intelligence sources made it clear the landings would be bloody,” said David Crockett, one of Donovan’s aides at the time. “Donovan found Clark to be vain, proud, and superficial,” added Crockett, “but he had no alternative but to cooperate with him.”
During their conference Donovan and Clark and his G-2 aide, Colonel Howard, agreed to form the 2677th Special Reconnaissance Battalion of the OSS. The 2677th was to be assigned to G-2 at Clark’s headquarters. It would, reported Donovan, “brief combat intelligence teams, contact pro-American and anti-Fascist organizations, and recruit likely personnel for informers, coup de main groups, censorship work, guides, interpreters, translators, or leaders to be subsidized.”
Donovan was delighted that the OSS was now undertaking to provide not only strategic intelligence about Italy but also behind-the-lines intelligence of immediate use to Mark Clark and his officers. The sweep of Allied arms through Sicily had proved to be a fatal blow to Mussolini’s regime. On July 25, as Mussolini left the Royal Palace after a bitter wrangle with King Victor Emmanuel III, police acting on the king’s orders seized him. Marshal Pietro Badoglio, Donovan’s old friend, was asked by the king to form a new government.
“Badoglio lost no time in letting Hitler know that he would maintain the Axis alliance and that Italian soldiers would fight side by side with the Germans, but at the same time he dispatched secret ambassadors to the Allies to discuss surrender,” Donovan said after the war.
As Italian crowds raced through the streets of Rome, smashing statues of Mussolini and chanting “Death to the Fascisti,” Hitler had no illusions as to Badoglio’s true intentions. The Germans, cursing all things Italian, began to move their troops into strong positions to resist the inevitable Allied attack. Mussolini was bundled off into captivity, and the Italian Resistance prepared feverishly to help the Allies dislodge the German Army. Donovan directed his agents in Italy to establish a working liaison with the underground and to step up the flow of intelligence back to North Africa.
Donovan flew back to Washington to attend an August 19 meeting of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The JCS listened to his reports and authorized him to test his fifth column techniques in Sardinia. On August 23 General Marshall ordered Eisenhower, “Give Donovan a chance to do his stuff without fear of compromising some operations in prospect. If he succeeds, fine; if not, nothing would be lost.”
Donovan was anxious to get back to the Mediterranean, but another critical matter demanded his attention. Earlier in the year, Allen Dulles, code number 110, had informed 109 from Switzerland that “one of my men got dry clothes and a breakfast for a French worker who swam the Rhine to Rehn last night. Told following improbable story. Said he was forced labor guard for cask of water from Rjukan in Norway to island of Peenemünde in Baltic Sea.”
Stanley Lovell pondered the report in his South Building cubbyhole. He knew there was a huge hydroelectric plant at Rjukan. The only water worth guarding would be heavy water needed for an atomic explosive. Lovell suspected that the Nazis might be working on an atomic bomb at Peenemünde. He rushed to Donovan’s office and threw down a brace of maps on his desk.
“Bill,” he said, “this may be vitally important.”
One map showed Peenemünde in the Baltic; the other showed the northern coast of France. On the latter Lovell had drawn in the locations of curious ski-like runways, with odd curved twists at the ends, that Allied planes had photographed. From wes
t of Boulogne to south of Cherbourg, these strange runways seemed to be aimed at the British cities of London, Bristol, Birmingham, and Liverpool.
“What do you mean?” asked Donovan.
“This little French workman has told us where the German heavy water comes from,” explained Lovell, “but vastly more important, where the German physicists are working to make a bomb employing nuclear fission. It all adds up perfectly.”
“Adds up to what?”
“To a catastrophic Nazi victory. This explains the ski sites. The Germans are going to attack Britain from those odd-looking launching sites with a secret weapon.”
As it turned out, Lovell was wrong in several important respects. Subsequent OSS reports showed that the heavy water was not going to Peenemünde at all; instead, the ships the French captive worker had guarded were taking the water to Wolgast, where it was unloaded and shipped by rail to the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin and other places where atomic experimentation was going on. The heavy water had nothing to do with Peenemünde, but neither Donovan nor Lovell knew this. Donovan ordered Lovell to fly to London and brief the OSS European chief, David Bruce, about his suspicions.
According to Lovell, Bruce immediately met with Lord Portal of the Royal Air Force and Gen. Carl Spaatz of the U.S. Air Force. The RAF took to the air en masse on August 17, 1943, and attacked Peenemünde in one of the war’s most devastating raids. A thousand Germans, many of them scientists and technicians, died in the attack, and the mysterious facilities on the island were obliterated. There was no atomic research on the island whatsoever, but the attack knocked out the experimental plants developing the V-1s and V-2s, delaying the appearance of these rockets over Britain until June of 1944.
MacArthur had refused to cooperate with Donovan in the South Pacific. Major Charles A. Willoughby, MacArthur’s intelligence chief, claimed that
Wild Bill Donovan’s Office of Strategic Service operatives had a fixed idea that they were arbitrarily kept out of MacArthur’s Southwest Pacific Theater. Actually, MacArthur had to go along without the help of the Office of Strategic Services, because he couldn’t afford to wait for it. Unlike the war in Europe, the United States war in Asia was a “shooting war” from the start. Where the OSS in Washington had time to gather information about North Africa, about the soft underbelly of Europe in general, long before a single landing craft or soldier was ever risked in battle, MacArthur had to improvise with the Japanese breathing down his neck. He couldn’t sit back and ransack libraries, even assuming the data was there; he had to have his reports from a 3,000-mile battle arc long before Roosevelt had even given Bill Donovan his basic directives on Europe.
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