Donovan

by Richard Dunlop

  That afternoon Harriman saw Molotov again, and at last the Soviet foreign minister gave Donovan permission to fly in the embassy plane. Donovan flew off over the storm to Teheran, finally on his way back to Cairo.

  A New York Times correspondent who had caught up with Donovan in Moscow filed a brief dispatch. In it he reported that Harriman described General Donovan’s visit as the “natural result of the Teheran conferences.”

  The dispatch concluded, “Nothing was given out concerning whom he saw.”

  33

  “The Wine Is Red”

  ON HIS WAY to Italy, Donovan stopped at OSS Cairo, code-named Gustav, and sent a message to Washington telling of his successful visit to NKVD headquarters.

  “He became the only Western intelligence man ever to go into the Lubyanka and emerge alive,” said one OSS man.

  Donovan had hopes of Soviet cooperation, particularly in the Balkans, where OSS and NKVD agents were encountering one another. “At the same time it now would be possible to judge from how well the Soviets cooperated on intelligence matters as to how well they would cooperate after the war was over,” he observed.

  Donovan also brought back a virus from wintry Moscow, and he became increasingly ill as he flew to the OSS base at Caserta, Italy. At Caserta, completely exhausted, running a high fever, and delirious, he went to bed.

  “I don’t trust doctors,” he told David Crockett. “I don’t like doctors, and I’m too busy to be ill.”

  Crockett sat by 109’s bedside all night. In the morning Donovan did go to the OSS hospital. When Donovan arrived, OSS medic Constantin Bertakis was “in a squatting position administering first aid to an Italian child with injured legs,” as Bertakis remembered.

  “The first glance was convincing,” he said. “This is the General. Impulsively I stood up, and before my right hand could reach my eyebrow for a military salute, the General extended his arms toward me, saying, ‘Continue your work, Sergeant.’ Hastily I completed my salute and turned toward my little patient.”

  Donovan refused treatment until the child was attended to. He stayed in the hospital for two days. There was still a little more than a week to go before the Allied assault at Anzio. The American and British advance had been stalled for months at Monte Cassino by Field Marshal Albrecht Kesselring’s formidable Tenth Army. By landing at Anzio the Allies intended to outflank the German positions, and Donovan was anxious for his OSS agents to contribute the intelligence needed for victory.

  As soon as he could leave the hospital, Donovan appeared without warning at the OSS palazzo in Naples. There he joined the OSS men for fettuccine made of powdered eggs and washed down with splendid wines from a Fascist industrialist’s private cellar. He glanced at the gilded mirrors reflecting the candlelight and with typical courtesy declined to be seated at the head of the well-set table.

  “You’re the host,” he said to Peter Tompkins, who was in charge of the mission. “I’ll sit at your right.”

  When coffee was served, Donovan explained to Tompkins his next assignment. Tompkins was to contact the OSS team already in Rome and, working with the Italian underground, sabotage German defense efforts while preventing Kesselring’s forces from destroying either basic utilities needed for the life of the city or its art and historic treasures. Donovan gave Tompkins the code name of Pietro and had him flown to Corsica in his own plane. From there Tompkins was taken in a rubber boat to the mainland at Fossa del Telefone and smuggled into Rome by car just a few days before the Anzio landings. He contacted the Italian underground.

  On January 21 the British and American troops stormed the Anzio beaches. On the next day Donovan watched from a P T boat as an OSS team went ashore with the Rangers.

  “He sat on the deck of the P T boat in a director’s chair,” said Mike Jimenez, an OSS man assigned to Donovan, “and watched the landings as if it was a Fourth of July celebration. The flak from the fleet antiaircraft guns was pinging all around him during the incessant German air attacks. I hid in a torpedo tube.”

  “He was talking to a hard-bitten lieutenant beside him when the German shore batteries opened up,” said another OSS man. “Everybody jumped behind what little protection the boat afforded, but not Bill. He just stood there looking at the shore.”

  Donovan turned to the lieutenant who had ducked down on the deck of the boat. “Lieutenant, what do you suppose is the caliber of those shells?”

  Once the OSS men were ashore they ran into total confusion on the beaches. The commanders had been slow in getting the men moving off the beach, and as a result, the Germans were able to forge new defenses in hills overlooking the Allies and mount a deadly counterattack. John Croze, leading the OSS team ashore, desperately needed information about German troop movements. He raised Tompkins, by then in Rome, and Tompkins turned to the Italian Resistance for help. OSS Radio Vittorio in Rome flashed information to the OSS men on the beach about the route the German reinforcements were taking and correctly predicted that the German counterattack would come from Albano, not Cisterna.

  “Messages from Vittorio were decoded and passed to G-2 on the beachhead as soon as they were received,” said Kermit Roosevelt. “Since one of the sources was an Italian liaison officer in Kesselring’s headquarters, much of the information from Vittorio was of great value in supplying data on the movement of German troops.”

  The OSS men on the beach infiltrated through the German lines and returned with other combat intelligence. The log of the USS Biscayne for January 22 indicates that “at 0937 Generals Lemnitzer, House, Donovan, and Alexander came aboard to join the conference,” which was being held by Allied leaders. While the generals talked, “the USS Portent hit a mine and sank at 1010 approximately two miles off the beach. Survivors were taken to various units of Task Force 81, forty of them being brought aboard the Biscayne for medical treatment, food, and survivors’ clothing.”

  At 1300 generals Clark, Lemnitzer, Donovan, House, and Alexander left the ship. As they disembarked, the Luftwaffe swept in for the attack.

  “Donovan found the situation frustrating,” said Ned Putzell. “He went ashore with General Clark and observed the turmoil on the beach. He contacted an OSS team on the beach to be sure that they were doing a good job. Richard Kelly, head of SO, and an OSS colonel were with Donovan.”

  “The general had no use for the colonel, and he was exasperated by his officious conduct on the beach,” said David Crockett. “When it was time to go back to the ship, there was not enough room on the P T boat to take everybody.”

  “You stay, Colonel,” said Donovan, “and give me reports every day on what’s happening. It’ll be a good experience for you.”

  He waved his fingers tauntingly at the colonel as the boat put out to sea.

  While German firepower slaughtered Allied soldiers on the beach at Anzio, Donovan loaded a new team of OSS agents into an amphibious landing craft and ferried them to Pontevecchia, to the north. Their assignment was to do all they could to help the men who were dying on the beach, in what the onetime commander of the Fighting 69th knew was a costly military blunder. The Allies had landed with relative ease, but bungling and indecisive commanders had failed to get the men into the interior quickly enough to elude the deadly German counterattack.

  From Pontevecchia, Donovan and Mike Jimenez went to Corsica, where OSS man Anthony Scariano welcomed them to his villa. They sat over dinner and talked.

  “Some generals regarded OSS as a nuisance,” said Scariano, who listened to 109’s angry complaints about the stupidity of the Allied commanders at Anzio. “They were so used to warfare by the books that Donovan’s approach to warfare seemed too unorthodox. They were not cooperative, but when they let Donovan know they needed something, they always got it.”

  Donovan concerned himself with deploying his agents with the Maquis and with the Resistance in the north of Italy. Then he returned to Washington.

  On February 10, J. Edgar Hoover sent the following confidential message to Harry Hopkin
s at the White House:

  I have just learned from a confidential but reliable source that a liaison arrangement has been perfected between the OSS and the Soviet Secret Police (NKVD) whereby officers will be exchanged between these services. The OSS is going to assign men in Moscow and in turn the NKVD will set up an office in Washington, D.C.

  I wanted to bring this situation to your attention at once because I think it is a highly dangerous and most undesirable procedure to establish in the United States a unit of the Russian secret service which has admittedly for its purpose the penetration into the official secrets of various government agencies.

  Hoover also informed Attorney General Francis Biddle of his discovery. Hopkins showed Hoover’s message to Roosevelt, and the President reversed his previous position, notifying Donovan that the NKVD would not be welcome in America. On March 16, 1944, Roosevelt sent a telegram to Ambassador Harriman in Moscow instructing him to hold off on the intelligence liaison arranged by Donovan. Harriman was shocked at the sudden shift in policy, and demurred, but on March 30 Roosevelt telegraphed again. The exchange between the NKVD and the OSS must not take place because of domestic political considerations. It was an election year, and Roosevelt knew full well that J. Edgar Hoover was capable of making a public furor over the plan. Donovan was angry. He believed the United States was losing a magnificent opportunity to penetrate the Kremlin. He knew that the Soviets had long since penetrated Washington, and felt sure that America would have gained much more than the Russians from an exchange of intelligence liaison officers.

  Although he appeared to have abandoned the plan, Donovan continued to talk to the NKVD. The OSS was intriguing to separate Bulgaria from the Axis, and Donovan needed Soviet cooperation. Roosevelt understood this and supported him. Donovan sent a message to Cairo on March 2:

  “We have today been directed and authorized by high authority to empower and instruct the so-called Jadwin mission to inform the Minister of Bulgaria that the representatives of the three Allies are prepared to confer in Cairo with a fully qualified Bulgarian mission. The OSS mission is directed in the same manner to accept any answer the Bulgarian Minister may give and relay it through OSS channels to Washington as quickly as possible.”

  The OSS plot progressed in both Cairo and Istanbul in the spring of 1944. Lieutenant General Fitin in Moscow had transmitted valuable information on the situation in Bulgaria to Donovan, and on March 31 he in turn sent the NKVD OSS reports from Bulgaria, including a report from Karl von Kelokowski, a German agent who had defected to the OSS. Major General John Deane, chief of the U.S. military mission in Moscow, acted as intermediary.

  “Kindly convey my thanks to our Russian friends for the prompt fashion in which they responded to our request,” wrote Donovan to Deane.

  Later in the spring Soviet intelligence helped OSS agents in Bulgaria to blow up two railway bridges across the Maritsa River, blocking the shipment of chrome to German factories. At the same time Donovan’s agents were letting him know that the Soviets often hindered more than they helped.

  In early 1944 the OSS collaborated with the State Department in developing a new series of maps that would be useful in intelligence work, and on March 27 Donovan reported to the President on OSS progress in photo interpretation.

  “Some of it,” he told FDR, “was carried on in the field with your son Elliott’s North African Photo Reconnaissance Wing.

  “The principles have other uses than photo interpretation. For example, they provide a new method of underwater depth determination, a means for enabling pilots to make accurate estimates of the sizes of ships they sight and a method which enables a person with no knowledge of perspective to draw panoramic field sketches and perspective target maps in a fraction of the time formerly required by trained personnel.”

  The OSS was bound to be a chaotic sort of place, and this exasperated some of the business executives whom Donovan brought into the operation. One day in the spring of 1944 Donovan asked Atherton Richards, “What changes do you think I should make in the OSS?”

  “Run it the way I used to run the pineapple company,” replied Richards, who had come to the OSS from the presidency of Hawaiian Pineapple.

  Donovan knew that some of his staff were restless, but he was not prepared for what happened in early April. A group of top aides, including Larry Lowman, John Magruder, and Ned Buxton, stopped him in Union Station, Washington, as he and assistant Ned Putzell were catching a train for the West Coast.

  “This junta tried to dethrone the General,” said Putzell. “They tried to tell him that he shouldn’t be running the OSS. They accused him of lack of administrative ability. There were problems in the office, and he was running off in different directions.”

  Donovan listened to the rebellious men, and his eyes flashed anger.

  “We were en route to an important meeting with MacArthur,” said Putzell. “I was the only one with him on the train, and it was a tough damn trip. Donovan felt that they were so very unfair. They had accused him of lack of administrative ability, and he was always off putting out more fires in the different theaters of war while trying to expand operations.”

  Putzell and Donovan met MacArthur in Honolulu on Easter Sunday. Once again, MacArthur was as charming as could be but was not willing to call upon the OSS for intelligence and irregular warfare assistance.

  When the two men returned to Washington, Donovan acted as if there had been no encounter at the railroad station. After the war, he said, “I was hurt, but then I realized that they were good men who honestly believed that you could run the OSS as if it were the Columbia Broadcasting System or a textile company. They went back to their jobs, and I went back to mine.”

  On April 28 Frank Knox died. Donovan lost one of his dearest friends, a man who had come closest of all the leading Americans of the time to sharing his own view of life. Donovan and Knox, each in his own way a disciple of Theodore Roosevelt, had come a long way together. Now Donovan had no choice but to continue on alone.

  Donovan had to find time to monitor what the OSS was doing in the Balkans, in Asia, in Scandinavia, and in such remote places as Kurdistan and South Africa. But during the spring of 1944 most of his attention was directed toward Normandy. Donovan’s agents entered France through the Pyrenees and slipped ashore from submarines or fast P T boats. In one month alone 52 agents jumped into France; seven suffered injuries when they plummeted to the earth, injuries ranging from broken ankles to a broken back. Other agents managed to cross the closely guarded border from Switzerland, and they even crept into France from Germany. Some 375 American and more than 500 French OSS agents were working in France during this period, sheltered by a network of friendly houses and underground hideouts throughout the country where they could eat, sleep, and set up their secret radios.

  OSS spies were everywhere. They identified the crack Panzer Lehr Division deployed in France when it was supposed to be on the Russian front, and Eisenhower was able to bring the weight of a top American division against it. An OSS team working near Le Bourget Airport, near Paris, obtained the plans of two secret war production plants. Allied planes targeted one of them, an explosives factory, and leveled it, and a week later blew up the other, a refinery making oil for aircraft and submarines.

  At first the OSS role in the French Resistance was restricted to supplying arms and materials and a few agents to work under French and British orders. In 1943 the OSS intensified its air drops of supplies and sent agents into France in large numbers. OSS dropped 20,000 tons of ammunition, weapons, and food to the Resistance. In September 1943, the OSS and SOE together dropped 5,570 containers of arms to the French fighting against Hitler, and in most months preceding the Normandy invasion they dropped at least 5,000 containers of arms.

  In time there were 90 Jedburgh teams in the field in France, each made up of an OSS agent, a British SOE agent, and a member of the French Resistance. Each group of three Allied officers and a radio operator worked with units of from 30 to 50 r
esistance fighters. Equipped with jeeps, bazookas, and heavy machine guns—all dropped from Allied planes—the Jedburgh teams soon became a major factor in upsetting the German defense plans. They were trained so that basic 32-man units could quickly break into eight-man units, each self-sufficient and cross-trained so that every man was equally at home with espionage, explosives, medical care, or a rifle. Of the 90 OSS men parachuted into France in these teams, 53 were decorated for their valor, an unfortunately large number of them posthumously.

  Late in May, as the Allies moved their great armada into position for the cross-Channel invasion by which they intended to wrest control of the Continent from the Nazis, Donovan drove the OSS hard to collect every scrap of hard intelligence that would make Allied success more certain. Paul Ludington was working the graveyard shift at the Reproduction branch of the OSS in the basement of the South Building.

  An officer dashed down the stairs, Ludington later recounted. “He told me to unlock certain rooms. That the General would be down in a minute. Before I was through unlocking the doors, the General and four of his staff officers came down. They worked rapidly all night getting papers ready. The General was busy arranging his briefcase and filing the papers and maps they were printing. They worked steadily until about 4:30 in the morning. I learned that the General was leaving on a plane to fly to Europe to report to General Eisenhower before the invasion. I was to tell no one.”

  When Donovan arrived in London, he conferred with David Bruce and other London people. Then he went to brief Eisenhower. OSS agents throughout France were alerted to act. David Bruce and SOE chief Gubbins called on French Gen. Marie Pierre Koenig and asked if he had any objection to sending a message to the Maquis for a general rising. Koenig had no objection, which was just as well since the message had already been sent.