The Irregulars

by Jennet Conant

  By all accounts, Stephenson was the magnetic core around which these myriad stars rotated. A workaholic, he had almost no life outside the section, remaining largely anonymous and invisible in the city. No one seeing this short, square, sagacious-looking man in the elevator would have mistaken him for anything but a businessman, albeit one who kept very long hours. It was not unusual for him to work until midnight and to be back at his desk by dawn. As one BSC subordinate recalled, “It took eleven secretaries to keep up with him.” He rarely left the building unless it was to liaise with British and American intelligence in Washington, and more often than not people were expected to make the trip up to New York to be briefed. To facilitate communications between New York and the Washington office, Stephenson had installed a state-of-the-art teleprinter, known as the Telekrypton ciphering machine, or TK, which instantaneously coded or decoded the messages passed between the two bureaus.

  When Ian Fleming met the BSC director the following spring, while on an assignment for British Naval Intelligence, he knew at once that he was in the presence of an extraordinary individual—a very tough, very rich, single-minded patriot, and “a man of few words.” Fleming was completely captivated by Stephenson’s elaborate setup and the vast array of sophisticated equipment he had accumulated, particularly the mechanical ciphering machines. Drawing on his background in radio and electronics, Stephenson had made improving the communications division one of his priorities, and he boasted it was “by far the largest of its type in operation.” Fleming, who was fascinated by gadgets of all kinds, carried a small commando knife with him on most foreign assignments, along with a trick fountain pen that ejected a cloud of tear gas when the clip was pressed. In Stephenson, he had finally found someone whose passion for sophisticated weaponry surpassed even his own, and his frank admiration led to a quick rapport and a rapidly developing friendship. Within a short time of their meeting, Fleming came to regard the Canadian as “one of the great secret agents” and a man who had “the quality of making anyone ready to follow him to the ends of the earth.” A mere commander and a comparative newcomer to the intelligence world, Fleming was self-conscious about his late start. He had failed the Foreign Office exam and was anxious to prove himself. He had also lost his father early in life—he was nine when Robert Fleming was killed in the First World War—and looked up to the BSC chief as a role model and mentor.

  Until the spring of 1939, Fleming had been happily employed as a stockbroker in the old London firm of Rowe and Pitman, when he had been invited to a luncheon with Rear Admiral John Godfrey, the newly appointed director of Naval Intelligence, and informed that he had been appointed a lieutenant in the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve, and that his duty from then on lay in serving as the admiral’s personal assistant. He most likely owed his sudden career change to his older brother, Peter Fleming, a well-known explorer and author who had already been recruited by the SOE because of his extensive travels in and knowledge of the Middle East. Aged thirty-two and thirty-one respectively, the Fleming brothers were considered too old and inexperienced for frontline commands, but their Eton education and facility with languages singled them out as agent material. In the small, interlocking establishment circles at Whitehall and the City, the Fleming name was known. It did not hurt that Ian had done a stint at the Reuters news service, where he had volunteered to take on a little espionage assignment in the Soviet Union, and in the process earned a reputation as a fellow who could think on his feet.

  Ian was tall and strikingly handsome, with blue eyes, thick brown hair, and a long nose that was somehow more attractive for having been broken. He was so impossibly clean-cut and square-jawed that when he reported to the Ministry of Defense in his blue serge uniform, he was promptly dubbed “the chocolate sailor” by an envious colleague. While his operational experience was limited to one brief mission in France, he was an extremely energetic and efficient administrator, becoming the chief contact between the Admiralty and the SOE. He also turned out to be highly imaginative when it came to devising espionage schemes, and while most of his proposals were too far-fetched to be practical, some were just crazy enough to be worth trying. One bright idea that got provisional approval before being scrapped was a detailed plan to capture German codebooks—of great value to the cryptographers—which involved staging a dummy crash of a Luftwaffe plane, which in theory would lure in one of the high-speed German launches patrolling the Channel and allow a team of saboteurs to overpower the crew before they realized it was a trap.

  Fleming knew from his access to eyes-only documents that Stephenson, by carefully nurturing his unofficial relationship with the FBI, had already rendered “innumerable services to the Royal Navy that could not have been asked for, let alone executed, through normal channels.” On that first trip to the United States in May 1941, Fleming had accompanied Admiral Godfrey on a covert mission to Washington aimed at strengthening the ties between the British Admiralty and U.S. Naval Intelligence. It was, in essence, an attempt to initiate the same backstairs dialogue Stephenson had so successfully established with the Americans. They never had a chance. After listening to their exposé of security problems “with the air of doing [him] a favor,” Hoover made it clear he had no interest in accommodating the British any further and politely but firmly showed them the door. “Hoover had his channels with Bill Stephenson,” recalled Fleming, “and his common-sense, legalistic mind told him it would be unwise to open separate channels with us.”

  Godfrey’s snubbed overture to Hoover had served only to highlight British intelligence’s frustration with the clumsy, one-sided arrangement, in which all of their useful information and requests for action had to be transmitted through the FBI. Increasingly touchy about incursions on his turf, Hoover had become close-fisted and combative, and in the absence of an American counterpart to the SOE, there was no other authority the British could turn to for assistance. The FBI had been created under the New Deal to fight crime, and while Hoover had added counterespionage to his roster of responsibilities, the FBI made no organized effort to collect secret intelligence from friendly and neutral countries, to say nothing of the enemy. The U.S. Army’s Signal Intelligence Service was an outdated and understaffed organization, a relic of the First World War and the prevailing isolationism that followed in its wake. As a result, the Roosevelt administration was poorly informed, and almost entirely dependant on tip-offs from its embassies and service attaches abroad, and the kindness of its allies. Vincent Astor, in his waning days as the president’s intelligence adviser, reported the British complaints to the president and lamented the bureaucratic delays and lost opportunities: “It is certainly a bit difficult to conduct an effective blitzkrieg of our own against malefactors when information becomes stymied in department files for six weeks.”

  Prescient as ever, Stephenson had been arguing for the creation of an American secret service organization, to be headed by someone sympathetic to the British government—or, more to the point, someone with whom he could work—and had been assiduously pushing his own candidate to run the new agency. Colonel William Donovan was a prominent attorney and Columbia Law School classmate of Roosevelt’s, an irresistible Irishman with a forceful personality and immense charm, who had already run for office several times as a Republican. He had won a jacket full of medals in World War I, ended up as commander of the legendary “Fighting 69th,” and was affectionately known to the press as “Wild Bill.” Donovan, at the request of the president, had traveled to London in July 1940 on a fact-finding mission to survey fifth column activity in England. His “real object,” however, was to assess the state of the British defenses, as well as the underlying morale, with an eye to collecting as much information as possible in the event America entered the war: Would England fight on at all costs or, as the defeatist ambassador Joseph Kennedy kept warning Washington, would the country surrender in a matter of months? Stephenson, aware of the importance of his visit, had arranged for the American lawyer to meet with everyone
who could help his inquiries, including an interview with Churchill.* Donovan found the British still full of grit and determination and in turn assured them that he was an experienced and influential adviser on whom they could rely. Acting as a middleman, Donovan reported back to Washington that England could hold out, and in December he returned to London with Stephenson for another round of talks about Britain’s urgent need for supplies and military support, with destroyers topping the list.

  Throughout that autumn, the two men were in regular contact as they evaluated the British prospects, the imminence of the Nazi assault, and a German fifth column that they believed threatened not only Europe but the whole Western Hemisphere, which Donovan proceeded to describe in a series of articles that ran in newspapers across the country. Both men pressed hard at the highest levels, for the badly needed supplies and lobbied tirelessly for the destroyers-for-bases agreement that ultimately provided England with fifty-four aging destroyers at a time when they were desperate for combat escorts to protect their convoys from U-boats. In the months that followed, Stephenson continued to cultivate Donovan, who had already proven his value and promised to be of great importance to him in the future, not only as a personable and vigorous figure close to the administration but as someone who had earned the trust and gratitude of the British government. If Stephenson had not yet fully conceived of the kind of sister organization the BSC required to function more efficiently in America, he was astute enough to identify the man he wanted to lead it early on. To make sure Donovan remained the front-runner, Stephenson exerted his influence on both sides of the pond and later admitted that some in the old-school circles of the SIS would have been horrified to learn the extent to which he was “supplying our friend with secret information to build up his candidacy for the position I wanted to see him achieve here.”

  On June 18, 1941, Stephenson got his way, and Roosevelt appointed Donovan to the newly created office of coordinator of information (COI), acting as an adviser to the president on all matters concerned with intelligence, propaganda, and special operations. It was a huge assignment, and it was almost impossible to expect Donovan to be able to come up with a complete outline for the wartime organization at once. Stephenson offered Donovan his help in getting the new agency off the ground and “pressed his view” that it should be patterned after his own organization. Donovan, for his part, acknowledged Stephenson’s role as “the earliest collaborator with and chief supporter of the early movement” to expand the country’s secret activities, “whose early discussions with the Coordinator were largely instrumental in bringing about a clearer conception of the need for a properly coordinated American intelligence service.”

  During this same period, Admiral Godfrey, who had befriended Donovan during his recent trip to London, was staying at his house in Washington and finding all his efforts to coordinate the two countries’ intelligence services frustrated at every turn, until Stephenson advised him that his host might be the answer to all their problems and that he was on the point of having him installed in power. To cut through red tape and speed up the process, Stephenson then maneuvered to have Sir William Wiseman, the SIS’s man in New York during World War I and one-time liaison to President Woodrow Wilson, explain the British Admiralty’s predicament to Roosevelt. This was done during a dinner party at the home of Roosevelt friends on Long Island. The result, Godfrey recalled, was that three weeks later Donovan received “$3,000,000 to play with as head of a new department.”

  Having done what he could, Godfrey returned to England alone, leaving Fleming behind with instructions to do everything within his power to help establish the joint intelligence machinery. Godfrey approved of Fleming’s friendship with “Little Bill” (Stephenson) and “Big Bill” (Donovan) and thought that the more his assistant could learn about their ally’s point of view, the more he could do to improve their relations. “Ian got on well with the Americans,” recalled Godfrey, and “operating on a slightly different plane to mine, he was able to discover how that land lay and warn me of the pitfalls.” His energy and flair also appealed to Donovan, who found the young commander far more amenable and productive than the more deliberate, slow-moving admiral. “Fleming suffered not at all from Very Senior Officer Veneration,” observed Donald MacLachlan, a colleague in naval intelligence. “He was ready—indeed, more ready than Godfrey himself—to stand up for a case against a Vice-Chief of Naval Staff or Director of Plans. This easy confidence made him very effective in defense of the DNI’s sideshows, some of which were to expand famously and create all kinds of unfamiliar problems for the Admiralty’s civil servants.”

  Fleming thought Donovan a “splendid American” and was eager to help him in any way he could. Over a period of several days, he worked with him while staying at Donovan’s Georgetown residence, drafting what he later described as the “original charter of the OSS,” as well as a second document he called “my memorandum to Bill on how to create an American Secret Service.” While neither of these memos fully qualified as “the cornerstone of the future OSS,” as Fleming later claimed, they comprised a thoughtful, practical outline of the kind of wartime organization the Americans needed, informed by the British service’s century of experience.

  Ivar Bryce, Fleming’s Eton classmate and closest friend, recalled Fleming telling him that he wrote the charter out in longhand, “as a sort of imaginary exercise describing in detail all the arrangements necessary for financing, paying, organizing, controlling and training a secret service in a country that had never had one before. And it included a mass of practical detail on how much use could be made of diplomatic sources of intelligence, how agents could be run in the field, how records could be kept, and how liaison could be established with other governments.” Fleming even sketched his notion of the ideal American intelligence officer: “[He] must have trained powers of observation, analysis and evaluation; absolute discretion, sobriety, devotion to duty; language and wide experience; and be aged about 40 to 50.” Donovan greatly appreciated Fleming’s advice and before he left Washington presented him with him a small souvenir—a .38 Colt Police Positive revolver with the inscription “For Special Services.” Fleming would later imply he received the gun as a reward for far more dangerous work than being a pen pusher.

  It took only a word from Fleming, and Bryce, a wealthy playboy from a good family, found himself working for Stephenson in New York, after what he later recalled as a remarkably short interview at the Westbury Hotel. The man who vetted him, and subsequently became his immediate superior, was Dick Coit—known affectionately to his staff as Coitus Interruptus—“a cherubic sixty-year-old” with a pink face and fiery disposition who helped oversee the BSC’s Special Operations Section. As Bryce would later write in a book of reminiscences of his adventures with Fleming, Coit told him the BSC could use someone like him, “if you are willing to follow any orders, and accept whatever happens to you, and on no account ever to reveal the smallest detail concerning your work.” Bryce then signed the Official Secrets Act, “a terrifying document,” and swore “total and blind and everlasting obedience.”

  As he had joined around the time when the BSC was taking over the SOE’s responsibilities for Latin America, Bryce spent the first few months working in what he said felt like “an export office,” sitting behind an accountant’s desk and dealing with dreary commercial and cultural matters in Venezuela, Brazil, Cuba, Colombia, and Peru. His first real assignment was to help find and train “bodies,” the term for agents, that the SOE needed to carry out risky missions to disrupt Nazi and anti-Allied activities in the area. The Latin countries were honeycombed with German organizations such as Auslands Deutsch, and the Reich had even gone so far as to establish some secret military training camps in the continent’s interior. At the time, it had seemed probable that the Germans would invade South America using the Vichy French territory of Senegal as a staging area. Given the scant opposition in the area, military strategists estimated that the German conquest of the co
ntinent would take less than a month. With that threat in mind, Stephenson thought it was worth trying to mount at least a skeleton resistance force. Of the twenty young men whom Bryce managed to recruit in Latin America for the BSC’s operation, more than half were rejected for one reason or another. Of the small pool who eventually passed muster, only a handful successfully completed their hair-raising missions and returned home safely. Most of those who were caught were tortured, then shot. One, a young Dutch friend from Brazil named Jan van Schelle, was reported killed. He had parachuted into Holland after his underground operation was exposed and had the misfortune to put down among a reception party of Gestapo agents. Bryce felt “the dreadful responsibility” of selecting these candidates given the catastrophes that might befall them. His friend had enjoyed a happy and useful life in Brazil, and it was he “who suggested to him what he might exchange it for.”*

  The BSC’s anti-Nazi underground was from the start “a shoe-string operation,” and relatively little had been accomplished by the spring of 1942 when Hoover moved to rein in Stephenson’s activities and ordered him to curtail their defensive efforts in the southern republics. Hoover, Bryce noted, was a man for whom “jealousies and petty rivalries meant more than great causes.” Although the FBI director was “on good terms” with Stephenson, “he was immensely touchy at the thought of any British interference in what he regarded as ‘his territory.’” In March, Bryce alerted Lippmann to the gravity of the situation: “If you felt at all inclined to write anything about the danger to S. America, I could give you any number of facts which have never been published, but which my friends here would like to see judiciously made public, at this point.”

  Still preoccupied with Nazi designs on Latin America, Bryce, holed up in his BSC office, took to sketching worst-case scenarios on his blotter showing what the area would look like if forced to submit to Nazi rule. There would be the inevitable rearrangement of national borders, with Nazi-oriented governments probably gaining territories, while some homelands might be totally eradicated. In his trial maps, he imagined what would happen if Hitler got his way, and drew a logical extension of the idea: “The obvious aggrandizement of Paraguay, the land-locked and poverty-stricken but immensely militaristic kingdom of the great German dictator Stroessner, would of course be enlarged: a great corridor to the Pacific, at the expense of Chile, Paraguay’s old enemy. The abolition of Uruguay, the Switzerland of South America.”