Burn After Reading

by Ladislas Farago

  The other event could not be surpassed in its ingenuity and melodrama. The center of German espionage in the United States was the Consulate General in downtown New York. When the Consulate was closed down months before Pearl Harbor, in another smart measure of prophylaxis, the Abwehr-men posing as consuls had to burn their papers. They called in the janitor of the building, a man named Dick Holland, and asked him to make a fire in the furnace, for this was summer and the furnace was cold. Holland (who almost certainly was an agent of the FBI) made the fire so that it burned in only one side of the furnace. When the Germans came down with their papers and gave them to Holland for burning, the ingenious janitor dumped them into that side of the furnace where there was no fire. In this manner, the papers, only slightly seared, came into the possession of the Bureau.

  Among the papers was the complete roster of German spies and informants active in the United States.

  18

  Donovan’s Brain

  On a January afternoon in 1942, President Roosevelt called William J. Donovan to the White House and told him bluntly, almost bitterly: “We have no Intelligence Service!”

  What the President thus compressed into just five words, General Dwight D. Eisenhower spelled out in detail after the war. He wrote :

  “Europe had been at war for a full year before America became alarmed over its pitifully inadequate defenses … the greatest obstacle was psychological: complacency still persisted! Even the fall of France in May, 1940, failed to awaken us—and by ‘us’ I mean every professional soldier, as well as others—to a full realization of danger.

  “Within the War Department a shocking deficiency that impeded all constructive planning existed in the field of Intelligence. Between the two World Wars no funds were provided with which to establish the basic requirement of an Intelligence system, a far-flung organization of fact finders. Our one feeble gesture in this direction was the maintenance of military attachés in most foreign capitals, and, since public funds were not available to meet the unusual expenses of this type of duty, only officers with independent means could normally be detailed to these posts. Usually they were estimable, socially acceptable gentlemen; few knew the essentials of intelligence work. Results were almost completely negative, and the situation was not helped by the custom of making long service as a military attaché, rather than ability, the essential qualification for appointment as head of the Intelligence Division in the War Department.

  “The stepchild position of G-2 in our General Staff system was emphasized in many ways. For example, the number of general officers within the War Department was so limited by peacetime law that one of the principal divisions had to be headed by a colonel. Almost without exception the G-2 Division got the colonel. This in itself would not necessarily have been serious, since it would have been far preferable to assign to the post a highly qualified colonel than a mediocre general, but the practice clearly indicated the Army’s failure to emphasize the intelligence function. This was reflected also in our schools, where, despite some technical training in battlefield reconnaissance and intelligence, the broader phases of the work were almost completely ignored. We had few men capable of analyzing intelligently such information as did come to the notice of the War Department, and this applied particularly to what has become the very core of Intelligence research and analysis—namely, industry.

  “In the first winter of the war these accumulated and glaring deficiencies were serious handicaps. Initially the Intelligence Division could not even develop a clear plan for its own organization nor could it classify the type of information it deemed essential in determining the purposes and capabilities of our enemies. The chief of the division could do little more than come to the planning and operating sections of the staff and in a rather pitiful way ask if there was anything he could do for us.”

  This brutally frank appraisal by Eisenhower was presented six years after the events he described took place and three years after the war he helped to win. His scathing criticism was confined to G-2, and rightly so, because, even during the period he described, the over-all intelligence picture was not so bad as the one he painted. Neither was President Roosevelt apparently well informed, nor was he quite fair, when he told Donovan that the United States had “no intelligence service.”

  For one thing, the amazing cryptographic espionage organization of the Army and Navy was functioning better than ever, reading the enemies’ most confidential dispatches almost at will. It was during this period that the Navy’s cryptoanalysts began to collect the data which enabled Admiral Chester W. Nimitz to repay the debt of Pearl Harbor astonishingly early in the war, and which actually turned the tide in the Pacific. Perhaps this is the place to tell that story so that the reader will have a balanced picture—both the good and the bad—of the state of U.S. intelligence at the time.

  In the immediate wake of Pearl Harbor, Nimitz had to figure out what the enemy’s next move would be. Nimitz allowed full scope to his intuition and assumed that the Japanese would next move against Midway, a lonely atoll one thousand one hundred sea miles west-northwest of Oahu, covered with a lush blanket of dwarf magnolia and inhabited by the gooney bird, a comic member of the albatross family.

  Nimitz’s intuition was inspired. In Tokyo, the move he suspected had, in fact, been decided upon by Yamamoto. He hoped to capture Midway and to destroy whatever was left afloat of the U.S. Pacific Fleet.

  Nimitz’s intelligence officers had very little hard intelligence and even what they had was deficient in the estimate of the Japanese strength. Where Yamamoto had eleven battleships, Nimitz was told he had only two to four. No light cruisers were identified in the Japanese force, although it contained six. The Americans counted sixteen to twenty-four Japanese destroyers, but Yamamoto had forty-nine; and he had sixteen submarines as against the American estimate of eight to twelve. Only our estimates of his carrier and heavy cruiser strength were approximately accurate.

  In one sense, this underestimation of Yamamoto’s fleet was fortunate for the U.S. Nimitz would have thought twice before devising his bold and brilliant plan to meet Yamamoto in a head-on clash had he known how prodigious his adversary’s power really was. But Nimitz had a powerful weapon of his own—cryptoanalysis.

  After the commencement of hostilities, each Japanese fleet was assigned several coding systems and each code was changed at intervals. Even so, the American cryptoanalysts found enough clues in this wireless traffic to obtain a fair idea of Japanese intentions and arrangements. The clues included the volume of traffic, the repetition of call letters, the length of the messages, the types of the codes used. All these telltale clues were catalogued by Commander Rochefort and his staff, until they presented a clear pattern: Yamamoto was getting ready for another major move. But the target of their preparations, referred to in Japanese messages as “AF” and “AF,” could mean any of several places—Midway, to be sure, but also perhaps Hawaii or the Aleutians or New Caledonia or even Sydney, Australia.

  At this point, in the spring of 1942, it became imperative to find out. Nimitz hit upon an idea. He instructed Commander Cyril T. Simard, his man on Midway, to report to Pearl Harbor by radio that the atoll’s water system had broken down. The signal was sent in plain language that the Japanese (who, of course, were just as busy monitoring our traffic as we were intercepting theirs) could pick up and read. For two days Rochefort and his staff were glued to their sets, waiting for the Japanese to fall into the trap. On the third day it happened. One of the intercepted messages about “AF” included a passing reference that the place was having difficulties with its freshwater supply.

  Now Nimitz could make his plans in the definitive knowledge that Midway was the target. Now cryptoanalysis had no dark areas left; virtually everything could be intercepted with pinpoint accuracy. The plan that Nimitz devised was exceptional for its ingenuity and daring. It will remain forever a classic blueprint of the war at sea. The description of the great battle of June 4, 1942, is beyond the scop
e of this book, but Nimitz knew that it was won when, early in the morning of June 5, Commander Rochefort handed him an intercepted signal from Yamamoto’s flagship. In translation it consisted of but five words: “Occupation of Midway is canceled.”

  After Midway, Admiral Yamamoto went to bed for a week with a stomach ailment for which his doctor could find no physical cause. It was clearly a psychosomatic attack, for Yamamoto realized, sooner and more clearly than anybody else at his level, that in essence Japan had lost the war when he lost the Battle of Midway. “Yamamoto’s failure to take Midway was bad enough,” wrote Thaddeus Tuleja. “What made it worse was the fact that this failure resulted in the loss of four fleet carriers with all their planes and most of their pilots. For a nation like Japan, with limited industrial capacities, this was an insupportable loss.”

  Yamamoto had been defeated by American cryptography. In the end, he was to perish by it. In the late spring of 1943, almost exactly on the anniversary of the great battle, Yamamoto went on an inspection trip to the embattled Solomons. The exact itinerary of his trip was intercepted by American cryptoanalysts. Naval Intelligence prepared a lethal ambush for Yamamoto. He flew into it on schedule, his plane was shot down, and he was killed.

  Cryptoanalysis continued to play a decisive role through the Pacific War. The system was jeopardized once when the Chicago Tribune triumphantly revealed the decisive part it had played in winning the Midway battle. It was compromised again when an overzealous team of O.S.S. agents raided the office of the Japanese military attaché in Lisbon, Portugal, cracked his safe and went off with his code books. Both events caused the Japanese to change their codes. The system was endangered a third time when certain intercepts based on monitored Japanese communications were removed from the Office of Naval Intelligence in Washington. Some of their contents later showed up in articles in Collier’s magazine, thus tipping off the enemy, if only by inference, that his code was not as safe as it might be.

  After each indiscretion, the cryptoanalysts had to start again from scratch, but they always succeeded in penetrating the enemy’s system anew.

  But if these men were the bright stars of American intelligence at the beginning of the war, they were not quite the only useful group; the United States also had by then a quasi-intelligence organization. This was the department known as the Co-ordinator of Information, set up before Pearl Harbor at the prodding and under the leadership of Donovan. It was a somewhat nebulous agency with a strictly civilian status, consisting largely, as John Chamberlain put it, “of the so-called ‘One Hundred professors’—a group of middle-aged specialists in anthropology, economics and a dozen other fields, plus a few young instructors who had had Ph.D. training in applying the seat of the pants to the seat of the chair in libraries.”

  Ridiculed, sniped at and ignored by the professionals, these newcomers were far better than their reputation. Those one hundred professors and their young assistants were fact-grubbing researchers who understood how to cull significant intelligence from library books and between the lines of newspapers. Most important was the New York outpost, headed by William Vanderbilt, former Governor of Rhode Island. Left to its own resources, it began the collection of intelligence from sources the professionals neglected, tapping individuals who had specific knowledge of certain areas of installations, collecting so-called “Aunt Minnies”—photographs taken on peacetime trips in what now were enemy countries, and buttonholing arriving travelers from abroad.

  Much later, during the bombing of Germany, a certain factory in the Reich could be pinpointed for the raiders from a blown-up picture that was originally acquired by someone in the Co-ordinator’s office. He remembered that big firms frequently printed pictures of their plants on their stationery and made it his specialty to collect such foreign letterheads. The picture of that key factory was such a collector’s item.

  Another outstanding contribution of the Co-ordinator’s office was vital information needed for the capture of the city of Bone in North Africa. It was procured in the New York office by the multi-lingual wife of a prominent psychoanalyst during the routine interrogation of a French refugee engineer from Bône.

  Even so, in the first half of 1942, Roosevelt was fundamentally correct; the United States did not have the intelligence apparatus that a major power needed for the prosecution of a major war. In the first line of the intelligence establishment still stood, as Eisenhower pointed out, the military and naval attachés. In both the Army and the Navy, the service attachés first formed an elite, then became a clique. Much of their time was spent upon asinine social amenities. They were prone to adapt their own thinking to prevailing trends in the countries in which they served, instead of maintaining an open mind. President Roosevelt, exasperated, not so much by their frequent ignorance as by their notorious bias, could be heard frequently complaining on this score.

  There is nothing on the record to indicate, for instance, that Captain Henry H. Smith-Hutton, the Naval Attaché in Tokyo, was able to give the Navy Department any clear warning of the impending Japanese attack in December, 1941, although it is known that he had on his own burned his codes on the 5th. In his final evaluation of the imminent future, he was misled by outward appearances, the true meaning of which he could not fathom. During the days immediately preceding the attack, a large number of Japanese sailors showed up in the streets of Tokyo and Yokohama, apparently crews of the ships that were supposed to be at Yokosuka. In fact, the sailors were soldiers. They had been sent out in naval uniforms as dress-extras to mislead observers.

  Colonel Ivan Yates was an American Military Attaché in Moscow at the time of Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union and he flew back to Washington in the summer of 1941, to advise General Marshall, giving a totally erroneous evaluation of the situation. In this connection, Eisenhower had another characteristic little incident to relate:

  “An example of the eagerness,” he wrote, “with which we seized upon every bit of seemingly authentic information was provided by the arrival in Washington of Colonel John P. Ratay, who, at the beginning of the war, had been our military attaché in Rumania. The colonel was an extremely energetic officer, one of our better attachés. After Rumania joined the Axis in November, 1940, he had been interned and eventually transferred through a neutral port to the United States.

  “The Operations Division learned of his arrival and immediately called upon him for such information as he could provide. He was thoroughly convinced that the German military power had not yet been fully exerted and was so great that Russia and Great Britain would most certainly be defeated before the United States could intervene effectively. He believed that the Germans had then forty thousand combat airplanes in reserve, ready with trained crews to operate at any moment….

  “In the Operations Division we refused to give credence to Ratay’s information concerning the forty thousand operational planes. The German Army had just been halted in front of Moscow, and we were convinced that no army possessing a weapon of this overwhelming strength would have withheld it merely because of a future plan for its use, particularly when its employment would have insured the destruction of such an important objective as Moscow.”

  The situation in O.N.I. was pungently described in a letter a frustrated intelligence officer, Colonel John W. Thomason, Jr., of the Marine Corps, felt compelled to write during those early war days in 1942 to a friend at sea:

  “Our department resembles more than anything the outside fringe of a cyclonic or whirling storm. Everything being tossed about. [Admiral Ernest J.] King is superimposed on [Admiral Harold C. ‘Betty’] Stark, having absorbed most of the latter’s functions: simply another planet of the first magnitude added to our galaxy; both shine, perplexing the navigator.

  “[Admiral Theodore S.] Wilkinson has O.N.I., the third chief in a year and a half. Bill [Captain William] Heard has the Foreign Branch; [Captain J. B. W.] Waller, Domestic. Your old [Far Eastern] desk is in the entirely capable hands of [Captain Arthur H.] McCollum
. We are swollen enormously: never was there such a haven for the ignorant and well connected. As a matter of fact, O.N.I. isn’t bad, so far as collecting information goes. But what good is information if it isn’t used? Here the museum idea seems to prevail.”

  Aside from the museum spirit, the situation was aggravated by the fact that O.N.I. also had its peculiar philosophy and quota of prejudices. The officer personnel of O.N.I. was traditionally anti-Communistic and, therefore, their assessment of Stalin’s chances could have been somewhat colored by their prejudices and desires.

  There was only one exception to this point of view, represented by the officer-in-charge of O.N.I.’s Soviet desk, the one man who should have known best and who actually knew. He was the scion of a great naval family, himself a major in the Marine Corps, Andrew C. Wiley by name. The entire Russian branch consisted of the major and his yeoman.

  They had a single room in the Navy Department Building in Washington. Major Wiley turned it into a small Russian oasis. He was as opposed to Communism as any man on that deck—probably even more so because he actually knew what he was opposing—but he had a weakness for the Russians as a people. In his enthusiasm for their splendid showing, he decorated the walls of his office with Soviet posters which the Soviet Naval Attaché had given him. He had a phonograph in his room and kept a collection of recorded Red Army songs on tap.

  The major was very much ostracized for his views about the war in the Soviet Union. This ostracism went so far as to exclude him as a reporter of the war in Russia in the plot room during the daily situation conferences. His fellow O.N.I. officers were not inclined to listen to him and imported a colonel from G-2 to give them a more pessimistic presentation.