by Max Hastings
The department started its life in the annexe of the Library of Congress, then moved to a building at 23rd and E Street which eventually housed nine hundred analysts, covering every corner of the globe, together with clerical and support staff. The academics who dominated the payroll included a dozen enemy aliens and forty historians, seven of them past or future presidents of the American Historical Institution. When Donovan quizzed one recruit, Paul Sweezy, following warnings that he was a notorious Stalinist, Sweezy soothed the colonel without much difficulty, saying that he was a mere socialist, ‘more or less like [Britain’s Harold] Laski and Nye Bevan. The only thing [Donovan] was interested in was whether I was in favour of throwing bombs and street rioting. I assured him I was not, which seemed to satisfy him.’ R&A also hired such well-known Marxists as Franz Neumann, Herbert Marcuse – OSS’s leading analyst on Germany – and Otto Kirchheimer.
They read press reports, transcripts of enemy broadcasts monitored by the Federal Communications Commission, PoW interrogations and cables from OSS stations. In the last year of the war they also addressed likely post-war problems. R&A produced reports on subjects as diverse as rail transport on the Eastern Front, the political views of Charles de Gaulle, inflation in Burma and the guerrilla campaign in the Philippines – though SWAPO’s C-in-C General Douglas MacArthur refused to allow Donovan’s people to operate in his theatre.
Some R&A analysts shared the OSS’s collective delusions about the potential of guerrilla action to influence grand outcomes. The Central European section asserted that internal political Resistance would contribute as much as external military force to the final collapse of Nazi Germany: ‘The record [of Resistance] is a tribute to human endurance and courage, and the revelation of a great hope.’ This view reflected the visionary hopes of its German-born authors, rather than representing an evidence-based political judgement. They were on stronger ground in their opposition to the Allied doctrine of unconditional surrender, which they said fostered Nazi claims that the only choices for Germany were victory or annihilation: ‘What is wanted is a positive goal for Germany which will dispel this fear and encourage German soldiers and citizens alike to revolt against their Nazi leaders.’
The analysts suggested that the only credible grouping around whom to form a domestic Resistance to Hitler were the communists. They urged telling the German people that if they overthrew the Nazis their country could escape Allied invasion. When the chiefs of staff declared that the Allies should aspire to occupy Germany ahead of any internal revolution, Franz Neumann strongly dissented: ‘A revolutionary movement aiming at the eradication of Nazism may be highly desirable.’ In August 1944, when SHAEF issued a ‘Handbook for Military Government’, the content of which was much influenced by R&A, US Treasury secretary Henry Morgenthau was outraged to discover that it included proposals for reviving the German economy – he himself was the principal advocate of pastoralising the entire country. The department was more conscious than any other government body on either side of the Atlantic about what Hitler was doing to the Jews, for many of its staff were themselves Jewish. In October 1943 Leonard Kreiger noted in a widely circulated paper that a visit to Denmark by Adolf Eichmann indicated that ‘the Danish pogrom is the beginning of the final campaign to rid Europe of the Jews’.
The OSS team researching the Eastern Front was handicapped by the wall of silence behind which the Soviet Union conducted its war – even copies of Pravda and Izvestia reached Washington six weeks late. So little data was provided by Moscow that it proved easier to estimate German offensive potential than Soviet defensive capabilities. Averell Harriman, US ambassador in Moscow, refused to accept OSS men on his staff, judging that he had difficulties and embarrassments enough already; only in April 1944 did a young analyst, Robert Tucker, join the embassy to monitor Soviet foreign policy. R&A nonetheless produced some prescient reports on Hitler’s predicament and difficulties in Russia, the first of them in 1942. Through many months during which the military leaders of Britain and the US were chronically sceptical about Russia’s prospects of survival, Donovan’s men emphasised the Germans’ huge supply difficulties, and questioned their likelihood of success. The study’s methodology was remarkable, including the use of technical information on the efficiency of locomotives at sub-zero temperatures, and the problems of converting European rolling stock to Russian track gauge. In overcrowded Washington back offices, OSS researchers studied the daily forage requirements of the type of horses used by German infantry and computed ammunition expenditure by infantry, panzer and motorised divisions respectively, at different intensities of combat activity. They deployed meteorological data to assess the supply requirements of two hundred divisions fighting across a 1,500-mile front for 167 days. A two-hundred-page study of the Eastern Front produced in the midst of the 1942–43 Stalingrad battle correctly identified the insuperable logistical problems facing Paulus’s beleaguered Sixth Army.
R&A’s economic sub-division, headed by Emile Despres, at the outset made many of the same mistakes as the British, supposing Hitler’s industrial base fully mobilised in 1941; throughout the year that followed, OSS continued to underestimate German production. Later in the war it did better, tearing up British intelligence estimates of German aircraft and tank production in favour of its own ‘deductive productive curves’. OSS economists rightly judged that manpower, rather than oil or food, would prove the key bottleneck. Svend Larsen, an economist of Danish origin, decided that British intelligence estimates of enemy battle casualties were too high. He began to extrapolate from the death notices of officers in Germany’s press – OSS in Bern forwarded fifty-seven German newspapers – and Larsen’s estimates were afterwards found to have been amazingly accurate. Meanwhile R&A became fascinated by the possibilities of tabulating vehicle serial numbers to compute German production. After one of its field researchers checked every wrecked panzer on the Tunisian battlefield in 1943, the department reported – correctly – that while German production was lower than had been thought, it was still increasing. There was an in-house joke that when an R&A man was asked for a phone number he replied, ‘Don’t know, but I can estimate it.’
R&A’s judgement was least impressive, most naïve, about the prospects for future Western relations with the Soviet Union, though this is unsurprising when so many of its leading lights were communists. Their reports adopted an almost uniformly benign view of Stalin’s polity. Paul Sweezy warned that the imperialistic British might force America into an unnecessary confrontation with Stalin. The department pressed for US policy to distance itself from that of Britain. Geroid Robinson cabled the London OSS team on 20 May 1944, expressing his conviction ‘that everything possible should be done to avoid a clash of interests between the British and the Americans on the one hand, and the Russians on the other’, though he admitted: ‘It will not be easy to develop a working compromise between an expanding and dynamic power (the Soviet Union), a developing but essentially satisfied power (the United States), and a power that shows symptoms of decline (the British Empire).’ He argued that it behoved the West to err on the side of generosity in making concessions to Stalin. Given wisdom and energy in London and Washington, he said, peaceful co-existence was attainable.
Before Yalta, R&A produced a report asserting that at the end of the war ‘Russia will have neither the resources nor, as far as economic factors are concerned, the inclination to embark on adventurist foreign policies which, in the opinion of Soviet leaders, might involve the USSR in a conflict or a critical armaments race with the Western Powers.’ They were correct, however, in predicting that the USSR could, if it chose, pursue its post-war economic and industrial reconstruction without need for American cash, which the State Department still assumed would prove an invincible force in Washington’s dealings with Moscow. R&A was right also to acknowledge the need for the US to treat the USSR as an equal in the new world.
R&A came nearer than any other organisation in the world to fulfilling the Britis
h naval officer Donald McLachlan’s vision that properly conducted intelligence work should be a scholarly process. Some of its reports were fanciful, but others reflected the remarkable gifts of their authors. R&A produced material more impressive than anything issued by MI6, the Abwehr or – so far as we know – the NKVD and GRU. Unless intelligence services achieve extraordinary access to the high places of enemies or prospective enemies, as did Richard Sorge, in Hugh Trevor-Roper’s words ‘more can be deduced from an intelligent study of public sources than by any number of “reliable” but unintelligent “agents” listening at keyholes or swapping drinks at bars’. A significant part of R&A’s achievement was its exploitation of open sources alongside, and indeed more intensively than, secret ones.
How much did this terrific concentration of brainpower influence the war effort? OSS’s reports were routinely circulated across the administration. Unfortunately, however, and like all intelligence material, few of them got read by decision-makers. America’s generals in the field were chronically sceptical about OSS-generated data. One of the complaints about R&A’s output was that operations staffs found it hard to persuade the scholars to produce quick briefs in real time about issues that commanders were obliged to address within hours or days. The division’s intellectuals preferred instead to labour for weeks or even months on ‘big-picture’ themes. Barry Katz, the historian of R&A, acknowledges that its activities had ‘at best a limited influence on the prosecution of the war’, though he is consoled by the reflection that it represented ‘an indisputably brilliant episode in the history of ideas, of intellectuals, and of intelligence’.
The British intelligence machine benefited in the second half of the war from retaining a leavening of professional soldiers among its clever civilians, who imposed a minimum of discipline and emphasised operational imperatives. The uniformed contingent understood how to secure an audience for their wares among the chiefs of staff and – on the whole – contributed some common sense to the heady deliberations of the academics. OSS’s R&A might have made more impact on the war had it pursued the same personnel policy, rather than leaving its eggheads to plough their furrows in isolation from the armed forces’ hierarchy.
One of the NKVD’s highly placed American informants, identified only as ‘Z’, reported in late July 1944: ‘The main principle of the entire OSS is the principle of amateurism … poorly trained … the Cinderella of the American secret services … The OSS owes its existence only to General Donovan’s personal popularity and not to its work.’ Donovan and his station heads occasionally caught the attention of Allied warlords with a remark, signal or report. But no national leader or chief of staff had time or inclination routinely to study the cerebrations of R&A, and most of OSS’s output was ignored by its intended consumers. America’s military leaders, like their British counterparts, focused overwhelmingly on enemy wireless intercepts as their principal source of intelligence, and it is hard to argue that they were wrong to do so.
No one individual, not even Roosevelt or Marshall, exercised the same authority over the US war effort as did Churchill in Britain, and thus there was nobody in Washington to impose overarching discipline on the intelligence community, to curb the rivalry and indeed animosity between the US Army and Navy, and tame the excesses of Donovan’s organisation in a fashion that might have helped it to secure more respect. Because America is a much larger country, its intellectual community is less intimate and more diffuse. During the war years its codebreakers recorded extraordinary achievements, but they never mobilised and deployed their nation’s civilian brains as effectively as Britain used its Oxbridge villages.
The mindset and conduct of OSS reflected that of America at large. Its men and women exuded a confidence unharrowed by the horrors of Blitzkrieg and of defeats such as Russia, Britain and many other wartorn nations had known. They took for granted a wealth of resources no other belligerent could match. Arthur Schlesinger, one of the many academics on the OSS payroll, made the case for its chief’s defence: ‘Donovan was in his eccentric way a remarkable man, a winning combination of charm, audacity, imagination, optimism and energy – above all energy. He was a disorderly administrator and an impetuous policymaker, racing from here to there with ideas and initiatives and then cheerfully moving on to something else … He was exasperating but adorable.’
Stewart Alsop and Thomas Braden, who served as field agents, declared, ‘he ran OSS like a country editor’. Most of Donovan’s officers reached active theatres only when the darkest days of the conflict were over, and victory was not in doubt. Their belief that nothing was impossible was in many ways admirable. But their impatience with the cautious and sceptical British reflected a lack of understanding of what Churchill’s people had been through, and of the constraints which Britain’s relative poverty imposed on its war-making. Moreover, if some of the political difficulties and dilemmas identified by the British became excuses for inertia, the OSS’s lunges into action were not infrequently ill-judged. The organisation’s most impressive contribution was that of its economic analysts, who did better than anyone else in the Allied camp, British or American, in probing the realities and vulnerabilities of Hitler’s war economy. By 1945 Donovan’s men had learned a lot. Bickham Sweet-Escott of SOE wrote: ‘[OSS’s] bitterest detractors would be forced to admit that they had become quite as good as the British at getting secret intelligence and carrying out special operations, and I personally thought they were doing it better.’
It is easy to lavish scepticism, even scorn, on the excesses of both American and British wartime special forces, OSS and SOE foremost among them. The Germans made little use of irregular units, though the Nazi leadership sometimes fantasised about them: Himmler was sufficiently impressed by Russia’s partisans that in 1942 he ordered Walter Schellenberg to set up a similar organisation, codenamed ‘Zeppelin’, which trained and dispatched reconnaissance groups behind the Russian lines, though not to much purpose. In 1943 the SS chief instructed Schellenberg to contact a famous pre-war mountaineer, Max Schaefer, and instruct him to organise a new Himalayan expedition, to include agents who could operate inside India. In reality, however, only the Brandenburg Regiment and such buccaneers as the SS’s Otto Skorzeny carried out significant special operations; the Wehrmacht remained institutionally sceptical about them.
Yet it is interesting to speculate about the consequences had the Germans done more sooner, when they had both means and opportunities. If Britain had been raided in 1940–41, large resources would have had to be diverted to domestic security: the Home Guard – ‘Dad’s Army’ – would not have sufficed. A paratroop assault on Churchill, most plausibly at Chequers, could have paid enormous dividends. Likewise, a few U-boat-launched commando raids on the United States’s shoreline could have wreaked havoc and panic, however slight the material damage they inflicted. The Allied approach to secret war may often have been wasteful and misguided, but it was more imaginative than that of the Wehrmacht, and delivered some real successes, especially during the long years before D-Day in June 1944, when only relatively small British and American ground forces were engaging the Axis. As Winston Churchill brilliantly understood, special operations sustained a sense of momentum in the war effort which was partly spurious, but morally important. The activities of SOE, OSS and the armed forces’ ‘private armies’ consumed extravagant resources and sometimes degenerated into juvenile theatricals. But they made a propaganda contribution larger and more useful than their military one.
3 ALLEN DULLES: TALKING TO GERMANS
One American gained more personal credit from the secret war than any other. Allen Dulles, ‘Mr Burns’, OSS code number 110, a future chief of the CIA, was hailed in 1945 as the nearest thing to a masterspy his nation had produced. He was a New Yorker, son of a liberal Presbyterian minister with influential family connections in Washington, who attended Princeton and travelled widely in Europe, including a diplomatic posting in Switzerland. He served with the US delegation to the 1919 Ve
rsailles peace conference, and thereafter spent some years at the State Department before taking up a career as a corporate and international-relations lawyer. In that role he met politicians including Neville Chamberlain, Ramsay MacDonald, Léon Blum – and Adolf Hitler. A prominent interventionist long before Pearl Harbor, for some months in 1941–42 he served as New York bureau chief of the COI, forerunner of OSS, located in the Rockefeller Center alongside ‘Little Bill’ Stephenson’s British Security Coordination.
In November 1942 Donovan posted Dulles, then aged forty-nine, to become OSS’s man in Bern, under diplomatic cover as special assistant to the US minister, Leland Harrison. He accepted no salary, but received $1,000 a month in expenses to sustain a modestly luxurious lifestyle. His wife Clover stayed at home, probably no great sorrow to the embryo spymaster, whose infidelities were many and various: in Switzerland he formed a close relationship with Countess Wally Toscanini, wife of an Italian politician who spent the war there, supposedly engaged on relief work.
Dulles was a smart man, whose benign, avuncular, pipe-smoking manner inspired confidence. He established himself in a flat at 23 Herrengrasse, assisted by Gero von Gaevernitz, a resident German businessman with a US passport. Until the August 1944 liberation of France, the OSS staff in Switzerland was restricted to five officers and twelve cipherenes and secretaries, because of the logistical problems of transporting Americans into the landlocked country. Beyond order-of-battle reports, a dominant theme in Dulles’ cables to Washington was funding. Getting cash into Bern was complicated, and the OSS team spent plenty: by 1944, the station had forty informants on generous salaries. Dulles complained bitterly about the shortage of credible Swiss sources, claiming that he had to pay the price of being a Johnny-come-lately; between 1939 and 1942 other Allied secret services had swept up all the available local informants – indeed many, including Rudolf Rössler, multi-tasked for several nations. The OSS station chief had many American friends in common with Frederick ‘Fanny’ vanden Heuvel, his MI6 counterpart, but their relationship was characterised by rivalry rather than collaboration.