The first Dahl heard of this new assignment was an unequivocal request from the chief himself. He wanted the acclaimed young writer to apply his storytelling skills to render the material a little more palatable than Highet’s dry, academic text. Stephenson reportedly had something considerably more dramatic in mind and expected them to somehow condense the hundreds of thousands of wartime documents into a colorful, compelling narrative. He had already tapped another BSC staffer by the name of Thomas H. Hill. A journalist by training, Hill had edited trade publications in Canada and had been drafted by the BSC to edit the Western Hemisphere Weekly Bulletin, a sort of in-house organ that trumpeted the BSC’s unclassified successes in various countries and made the case for their importance to SIS in London.
Stephenson also brought in an editor named Giles Playfair, the son of actor-producer Sir Nigel Playfair, who had been a radio journalist for the Malaysian Broadcasting Company. Playfair had escaped during the fall of Singapore and had written an exciting eyewitness account of the Japanese invasion entitled Singapore Goes Off the Air. He had subsequently been recruited by the BSC and worked on counterespionage in the New York office. Stephenson thought he was just the man to punch up the copy. As soon as each chapter was finished, it was handed off to Playfair for a final polish before being submitted to Stephenson for approval. To this odd assortment of talents, Stephenson added two of his Canadian secretaries, Grace Garner and Eleanor Fleming, who had worked for him for most of the war. The head of his filing section, Merle Cameron, rounded out the team.
Dahl was amazed at the extraordinarily elaborate security precautions Stephenson ordered to safeguard his secret history. He insisted that all the work be done at their isolated Camp X site, on the northern shore of Lake Ontario, where he could guarantee that both his papers and personnel were protected. “The thing I always remember,” said Dahl, “was how Bill had all these archives sent up from New York in some sort of wonderful security truck with an escort.” The operation was vintage Stephenson, taking place under the cover of darkness, with the armed guards stealthily transferring hundreds of cartons of files into trucks waiting outside Rockefeller Plaza sometime after midnight. Ten hours later, a Canadian army captain handed the border guards his name and code number, and the convoy was waved across the border into Canada, where it proceeded to the Oshawa training facility. Stephenson had already been using some of the school’s outbuildings as cold storage for some BSC records, so in his mind it was a logical place to set up shop.
Having only just returned to Washington, Dahl did not relish spending the summer in the Canadian wilderness, surrounded by flat, gray scrub brush and marshlands. He quickly grew bored in the cloistered environs of Oshawa and Whitby, where a night out consisted of dinner at the Genosha Hotel. The job of cataloging the BSC’s myriad operations proved laborious and dull, and in his own words, he “copped out” and left the majority of the work to Hill. Whenever possible, he sneaked back to New York for a few days, always on the pretext of business.
In early July, Dahl dashed off a quick note to Claudia, making no reference to his mysterious work and furnishing no details of his whereabouts beyond a post office box in Toronto. He reported that he was working too hard to do any writing of his own, but that he hoped to be finished by the end of August. Adding to his impatience to be off was that Hitchcock had accepted ten stories based on his combat experiences in the RAF and would be publishing them in a collection to be entitled Over to You. The book was already in galleys, and fairly crowing with excitement, Dahl told Marsh that as the “official go-between” between himself and his literary editor, he should be the first to hear the news, and he proudly enclosed copies of the advertising pulls that were soon to appear in the Times Literary Supplement.
After complaining of a dearth of letters from R Street during his exile in Canada, Dahl received his due the following week. Marsh wrote that he had spent the previous ten days in New York and that Dahl had been in his thoughts much of the time, as he was involved in work “which you would have so very much enjoyed being around.” He referred obliquely to a meeting at the Hay Adams, where he finally worked out a divorce settlement that, at long last, “may help the flickering light of a liberal life.”*
Just as he had earlier vowed, Marsh had freed himself of both Glass sisters: Alice got Longlea and a large cut of his net worth; Mary Louise, who reportedly quit in a fit of pique over a rude comment of Charles’, eventually married Wallace’s assistant, Harold Young. Marsh made it clear in his own distinctive way that Claudia was graduating from secretary to mistress, at one point even stopping to acknowledge the lady faithfully taking down his every word: “She is a martinet, she is a cruel and decisive woman, we all look for them, don’t we?” Instructing Dahl that he should henceforth write to her at a separate address—for the sake of propriety, she insisted on having her own place until they could be married—Marsh added: “Claudia is too conceited to call herself your Mother. She will settle on the Aunt position. But I strongly suspect that she wants to be more than a big sister. No woman will settle for anything less than being a woman.”
By late summer, Hill, Dahl, and Playfair had completed a five-hundred-page manuscript. Stephenson, who was obsessed with safeguarding the manuscript, contracted a small Oshawa printing company, located four miles from the camp, to do the job, but not before the place was carefully vetted by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. “It became quite a little feat of logistics,” recalled Hill, describing how they proofread the galley pages by day and then at night would take the typescript back to the printer’s under armed guard, shuttling back and forth in military vehicles. The entire print run was restricted to twenty copies, and as soon as the last set of signatures was boxed and sealed, they were taken directly to a bookbinder in Toronto. Stephenson had arranged for each leather-bound volume to be carefully placed in an individual locked box of his own design. Believing the original records too sensitive to risk preserving—particularly the details of British intelligence’s activities prior to America’s entry into the war, during a period of neutrality, which if ever made public would seriously damage Anglo-American relations—he ordered Hill and his wife to burn the lot. Thousands of tons of BSC documents were heaped into a homemade concrete furnace at the camp, specially outfitted with grate to prevent any partially charred pages from escaping, and went up in flames.
Needless to say, Dahl did not get to take home a sample of his handiwork. Stephenson personally took charge of all twenty volumes of the official history, which was referred to from then on as “the bible” but which he gave the riveting title, British Security Coordination (BSC): An Account of Secret Activities in the Western Hemisphere, 1940–45. It was understood that he would be keeping two for himself, and distributing copies to Roosevelt, Churchill, and “C,” along with a handful of other high officials in the SIS and SOE in London. The remaining ten were reportedly locked in a bank vault in Montreal.*
By the time Dahl got back to Washington, the war was over. It was a strangely blank sensation. The tension, which had been a constant in his life for so long, was suddenly gone. Cuneo put it best when he said it felt like the power had been “switched off.” For more than four years, the rotund White House liaison had called on Stephenson on practically a daily basis, so the following afternoon he stopped by the BSC chief’s Rockefeller Plaza office as usual. Without a word, Stephenson shoved a copy of the London Times across his desk and pointed with a finger to a single line: “The Home Secretary told the Commons last night that the emergency having ended, habeas corpus was restored.” Stephenson remarked, “I guess that’s what it was all about.” “I guess it was,” Cuneo agreed, and because there was nothing else to be said, they headed to the 21 Club for a drink.
Dahl found that the euphoria of V-E Day and V-J Day had quickly passed and given way to a mood of nervous distrust. Victory in Europe, so long anticipated, had come in May. Then in August, victory over Japan was achieved with shocking finality by the atom bomb. Ameri
ca was already looking to the future and was tired of feeling Britain’s hand at their back. The mounting differences between Russia and the West, exacerbated by America’s possession of the A-bomb, did not bode well for postwar cooperation. The Georgetown drawing rooms that Dahl frequented echoed with anti-Russian talk. The Truman administration had adopted a view of Russia as aggressive and expansionist and blamed it for the breakdown of the wartime alliance. The administration was following an increasingly hard line, abruptly terminating Lend-Lease the minute the European war was over, paring down the loans to Britain for reconstruction, and repudiating Russia’s request for funds to help jump-start its shattered economy. Ships bearing Lend-Lease cargoes to Britain remained docked, and those already under way had to be recalled.
America was letting it be known that there would be no unconditional postwar handouts—not to Britain, not to anyone. Uncle Sam was not going to play “Uncle Sucker” a second time. As the British Embassy cabled London: “The dollar sign is back in the Anglo-American equation.” The sudden loss of Lend-Lease funds shocked Britain, and relations between the two countries became increasingly strained and contentious. Churchill, who had been assured of ongoing American support by Roosevelt, was deeply disappointed, and, believing Truman reneged on their deal, called the move “rough and harsh.” Clement Attlee, who had just been made prime minister in the recent British elections, echoed regret at Truman’s precipitate action with no prior consultation and voiced concerns about the degree to which the Americans planned to work with their allies in the future. Stalin made it clear that Russia regarded Truman’s cut-off of rehabilitation funds as a deliberately hostile act.
In this atmosphere of mutual suspicion, Donovan and his people had wasted no time in turning the OSS, which still had the temporary status of a wartime agency, into a far more hawkish outfit, letting go many of Roosevelt’s more liberal appointments and weeding out the British officers brought in during the formative days of the organization. In doing so, Donovan was not only trying to assert his independence but also seeking to silence the critics who were uncomfortable with the OSS’s dependence on British intelligence. There was a sizable anti-British element within the FBI and State Department, as well as military intelligence, who felt it was time for sweeping change. Those who had long nursed a grudge against the BSC were quick to revive old complaints about the competition between the American and British intelligence agencies and fears that the British wanted to limit the OSS’s operations and reduce them to a lesser role, or “Cinderella status.” Part of their new adversarial attitude toward their British allies stemmed from the growing conviction that only America was somehow strong and true enough to command the powerful new arsenal of atomic weapons. While the British had initially shared their scientific knowledge with the Americans, it had become an essentially American effort—an American breakthrough, an American bomb. Fears that any breach in security could lead to the Soviets acquiring nuclear secrets drove the president and military planners to adopt an increasingly fortresslike mentality.
Donovan, however, still had a high regard for Stephenson and the British and was pushing for a permanent, coordinated overseas intelligence service under his direction. Dahl and Marsh, who had debated the postwar future of the BSC and the OSS dozens of times over, producing the usual trail of reports and memos, fancied themselves experts on the subject. Now that the administration was at last “catching up” with this idea, Marsh sent Wallace a memorandum on what he termed “the matter of the President’s eyes and ears,” advocating Donovan’s “set up” and including a second unsigned report, presumably furnished by Dahl, representing the British point of view. Dahl, who was by then completely in Stephenson’s thrall, was convinced that the United States should approve a peacetime extension of Donovan’s organization and urged “the establishment of a world wide secret economic and political intelligence organization.” Writing from his “experience of the British government in the intelligence field,” Dahl argued that the new organization should not be under the authority of either the Foreign Office or the Board of Trade but should instead function as an independent agency reporting directly to the prime minister, so that he could have some “check” on his diplomatic and consular representatives abroad. (No doubt Halifax was foremost in his mind.) Dahl also contended that the FBI was not qualified to take over for the OSS and that while their policing was above reproach, the training for their “cops and robbers” role was inadequate for the investigation of “intricate economic and political situations” in the foreign field. The OSS, in its present form, was admittedly less than perfect, he concluded, but was a temporary solution and could be expected to evolve in the months after the war, especially since so many top personnel would be returning to private life.
The much-decorated Donovan, who had up until then always enjoyed good publicity, was not prepared for the storm of controversy that greeted his efforts to preserve his wartime agency. Most of it was stirred up by the die-hard isolationist press. Blazing the way, as usual, were the McCormick-Patterson papers—the Times-Herald, the Daily News, and the Tribune—in a series of sensational front-page stories by Walter Trohan. The OSS-bashing campaign had begun back in January when copies of Donovan’s proposals were mysteriously leaked to Trohan, who painted a frightening picture of “an all-powerful intelligence service to spy on the postwar world and pry into the lives of ordinary citizens at home.” Inflammatory headlines accused Donovan of trying to create a “Super Spy System” and “Super Gestapo Agency.” There were more damning details: it was rumored the OSS would have “secret funds for spy work along the lines of bribing, and luxury living described in novels.” British Embassy sources suggested the information was leaked deliberately, if not “maliciously,” by military intelligence, which had long been jealous of the OSS. Hoover, who also had no use for the OSS, was causing trouble and wanted a “piece of the action” for his agency.
Donovan’s plan for a postwar intelligence organization had continued to be the subject of rumors and speculation in the press until May, when Trohan launched another major attack, this time “exposing” serious flaws within the OSS, tagging it “the glamour set,” composed of members who took “oaths of secrecy ‘as awesome as [those in] a fraternity institution.’” Two stories took direct aim at the so-called tie-up between the OSS and the British: the Washington Times-Herald charged that the “OSS Is Branded British Agency to Legislators,” and the next day the Chicago Tribune proclaimed that “British Control of OSS Bared In Congress Probe.” Trohan, quoting unidentified members of Congress, provided ample evidence of the “tie-up”: the facts that OSS agents were trained in England, that the British had access to OSS information otherwise denied to them by the United States, and that the OSS and the British Passport Control Office in New York, known to be “the headquarters of British intelligence in the U.S.,” had a close relationship.
The final nail in the coffin was Trohan’s claim that the OSS had spent “more than $125,000,000 in propagandizing and intelligence work around the world” but was “scarcely more than an arm of the British Intelligence Service.” Trohan’s timing was impeccable. The House Appropriations Committee was in the midst of hashing out the OSS budget for 1946, and every day the papers put another black mark next to the agency’s name, printing allegations of Communist infiltration and the ultraliberal bias that repeatedly brought Donovan to Capitol Hill to defend his staff.
By September, Donovan, tired of being on the defensive, came out swinging. An Irish charmer with many friends in the press, he met personally with dozens of reporters and columnists and gave rousing public statements in support of his plan for a new unified agency. He argued that the OSS concept was new only in America and that both Britain and Russia had possessed good intelligence agencies before the war and continued to retain their services as a matter of course. As one of the largest, most responsible, and influential nations in the world, America, he maintained, could no longer afford the mistakes of the past—tha
t is, Pearl Harbor—or the kind of mistakes that might arise from bad information or bad judgment. Donovan pledged that the intelligence-gathering part of the OSS would be as valuable in peacetime as it had been during the war, not as a means to investigate the folks at home, or to spy on and destroy the enemy, but as a vital measure of defense. His counteroffensive worked, up to a point. The New York Times ran stories on the OSS’s “cloak and dagger” heroics, and the Washington Post reported on a mission to rescue “4000 stranded fliers” and other bold exploits. On September 12 Donovan released the names of twenty-seven OSS men whom he decorated for outstanding service to their country.
Although Donovan had succeeded in subduing his most vocal critics, Cuneo doubted the cease-fire would last for long. Even before this last skirmish, he knew there was entrenched opposition to Donovan’s unit in the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Cuneo liked and admired Donovan and had worked hand in glove with the OSS and the BSC throughout the war, but even he was not convinced that the coordinated service was a marriage made in heaven. “To put it mildly, I was chary,” he recalled. Since the British taught in their intelligence-training schools that all neutrals could be enemies, he “naturally drew the corollary that all allies could be potential enemies.” He told Donovan that as far as he could ascertain, “England was not a country but a religion, and that where England was concerned, every Englishman was a Jesuit who believed the end justifies the means.”
The Irregulars Page 31