Wild Bill Donovan
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“Contemporary history is seldom as relevant and engaging as ... Wild Bill Donovan, which is—by turns—fascinatingly instructive and thoroughly entertaining.”
—Los Angeles Times
“In this fast-paced, entertaining and engrossing biography, the author delivers a portrait of a hard-driving, Type A extrovert willing to take on political enemies ... A well-calibrated assessment of Donovan and the impact of the OSS on the war ... The book is replete with fascinating anecdotes and tales of derring-do.”
—Associated Press
He was one of America’s most exciting and secretive generals—the man Franklin Roosevelt made his top spy in World War II. A mythic figure whose legacy is still intensely debated, “Wild Bill” Donovan was director of the Office of Strategic Services (the country’s first nationalintelligence agency) and the father of today’s CIA. Veteran journalist Douglas Waller has mined government and private archives throughout the United States and England, drawn on thousands of pages of recently declassified documents, and interviewed scores of Donovan relatives, friends, and associates to produce a riveting biography of one of the most powerful men in modern espionage.
A former veteran correspondent for Newsweek and Time, Douglas Waller reported on the CIA for six years. A seasoned Washington hand, Waller also covered the Pentagon, State Department, White House, and Congress. Before reporting for Newsweek and Time, Waller served eight years as a legislative assistant on the staffs of Rep. Edward J. Markey and Sen. William Proxmire. He is the author of the best sellers The Commandos: The Inside Story of America’s Secret Soldiers, which chronicled U.S. special operations forces, whose lineage goes back to the OSS, and Big Red: The Three-Month Voyage of a Trident Nuclear Submarine. He is also the author of A Question of Loyalty, the critically acclaimed biography of General Billy Mitchell.
Born in Norfolk, Virginia, in 1949, Waller comes from a military family. He also served as a captain in the U.S. Army Reserves. He lives in Annandale, Virginia, with his wife, Judy, and has three children and two grandchildren.
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Praise for Wild Bill Donovan
“Entertaining history … As [Waller] amply shows, Donovan was a combination of bold innovator and imprudent rule bender, which made him not only a remarkable wartime leader but also an extraordinary figure in American history.”
—The New York Times Book Review
“Contemporary history is seldom as relevant and engaging as Douglas Waller’s new biography, Wild Bill Donovan: The Spymaster Who Created the OSS and Modern American Espionage, which is—by turns–fascinatingly instructive and thoroughly entertaining.”
—Los Angeles Times
“Drawing on government documents and the interviews conducted with Donovan’s relatives and friends, Waller delivers a rollicking read that uncovers the myths surrounding one of America’s greatest legends.”
—The Daily Beast
“Fast-moving and well-written biography … Mr. Waller … makes a powerful case that Donovan was a great American.”
—The Wall Street Journal
“An exhaustive but never dull account of the founder of America’s original intelligence agency, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) … A wholly satisfying biography of the man whose vision continues to guide American intelligence operations–both the daring and unconventional thinking and the delusions.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“An extraordinary portrait of an extraordinary figure in 20th-century American history, a man beyond the power of fiction to invent. Wild Bill Donovan is brilliantly researched and beautifully told, as evocative and enlightening as it is entertaining.”
—Rick Atkinson, author of An Army at Dawn and The Day of Battle
“Waller brings to his latest biography the high skills as a biographer … Exhaustively researched but not exhaustingly written, this will probably stand as the definitive biography of a seminal figure in the history of American intelligence.”
—Booklist
“Waller’s extensively researched and highly entertaining book takes the reader back to the days when spying meant sending dedicated agents behind enemy lines to risk their lives to steal secrets and help win the war.”
—James Bamford, bestselling author of Body of Secrets and The Shadow Factory
“Wild Bill Donovan, the founding father of American espionage, jumps off the page in Douglas Waller’s superb biography of one of the nation’s most important and least understood leaders of the 20th century. Waller marvelously evokes an era when a matinee-idol character like Donovan could turn Washington into his own secret playground even as he ended America’s naïveté about the necessity of stealing the secrets of other gentlemen. Waller takes us back to a time, long before bureaucratic sclerosis set in at the Central Intelligence Agency, when American spies lived in Technicolor.”
—James Risen, author of State of War: The Secret History
of the CIA and the Bush Administration
“Douglas Waller gives us the definitive portrait of the fascinating, creative, disorganized, brave man who–starting from nothing during our biggest war–created our modern capacity for human intelligence and covert operations. A must for all who would understand American intelligence.”
—R. James Woolsey, Chair, Woolsey Partners, LLC, and Director of Central Intelligence, 1993—1995
“Waller’s impressive skill as a journalist, his expertise about the U.S. intelligence community, and a remarkable writing ability complement one another in this fascinating and insightful portrait of Donovan the man, not the myth, enhancing our appreciation of his remarkable legacy. General Donovan attributed much of the success of the Office of Strategic Services to ‘good old-fashioned intellectual sweat.’ This informative, enjoyable, and important book deserves the same compliment.”
—Charles Pinck, President, The OSS Society
“In Wild Bill Donovan, Douglas Waller’s impressive research and riveting writing bring the ‘Father of American Intelligence’ to life, drawing the reader into one of the most thrilling and remarkable periods in American history.”
—Lee H. Hamilton, Director, The Center on Congress at Indiana University,
and former Chairman, House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence “Waller captures it all in this meticulously researched biography of the man most recognized as Wild Bill.”
—The Buffalo News
ALSO BY DOUGLAS WALLER
The Commandos
The Inside Story of America’s Secret Soldiers
Air Warriors
The Inside Story of the Making of a Navy Pilot
Big Red
The Three-Month Voyage of a Trident Nuclear Submarine
A Question of Loyalty
Gen. Billy Mitchell and the Court-Martial That Gripped the Nation
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Waller, Douglas. Wild Bill Donovan: the spymaster who created the OSS and modern American espionage
p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Donovan, William J. (William Joseph), 1883–1959. 2. Intelligence officers—United States—Biography. 3. United States. Office of Strategic Services—Biography. 4. World War, 1939–1945—Secret service. I. Title. JK468.I6D638 2010 940.54'8673092—dc22 [B] 2010024986
ISBN 978-1-4165-6744-8 ISBN 978-1-4165-6805-6 (eBook)
To Thomas and Jack
Contents
Prologue
PART ONE: PRELUDE
1. First Ward
2. The Great War
3. The Prosecutor
4. Politics
5. Family
6. War Clouds
7. Envoy
8. Spy Service
PART TWO: WAR
9. Pearl Harbor
10. The Beehive
11. Adolf Hitler
12. Enemies
13. The Embassies
14. Torch
15. Bern
16. The Neutrals
17. Infiltration
18. Sicily and Italy
19. The Balkans
20. Peace Feelers
21. Asia
22. The Russians
23. Normandy
24. Intelligence Failures
25. The Plot
26. The Sideshow
27. Stockholm
28. The Vatican
29. The Leak
30. Harry Truman
PART THREE: AFTERMATH
31. Nuremberg
32. Recovery
33. Thailand
34. Walter Reed
Epilogue
Selected Bibliography for Source Notes
Source Notes
Acknowledgments
Index
WILD BILL DONOVAN
Prologue
AS FRIDAY EVENING fell, more than seven hundred members of America’s clandestine service trooped quietly into the Riverside ice skating rink. They were undercover spies, battle-hardened commandos, and intelligence analysts, along with an assortment of secretaries, cable clerks, receptionists, and telephone operators from headquarters. The converted skating rink, one of many in Washington whose ice had been melted and floor covered with plywood for much needed federal office space during the war, was just a short walk for them down the hill from their headquarters on E Street.
It had been a hot, muggy day that September 28, 1945, typical for the beginning of fall in Washington. But the capital, like the rest of the nation, had come alive now, barely two months after atomic bombs dropped over Hiroshima and Nagasaki had ended World War II. Transport ships had just deposited another six thousand war-weary troops from overseas at East and West Coast ports, the services promising to beat deadlines for processing them out of uniform. Washington’s government workers were being given time off to attend a parade for Fleet Admiral Chester Nimitz, hero of the Pacific. Paced by surging auto production, the stock market set a new high. The University of Maryland football team, led by a new coach named Paul “Bear” Bryant, trounced the Guilford College Quakers 60 to 6 at Byrd Stadium north of the capital. Military bands filled the amphitheater near the Lincoln Memorial with music. Newspaper classified sections bulged with employers begging for employees. Downtown store shelves and racks began filling up with consumer goods—sport jackets at Kann’s for $19.75, Gershwin albums at Hecht’s for $1.25.
Mixed emotions filled the men and women who filed into the Riverside rink Friday evening. They were there to mark the peace but also the end of the country’s first national spy agency, the Office of Strategic Services. The new president, Harry Truman, had ordered the service disbanded by the end of the month, its intelligence functions that would be needed after the war to be scattered among the State Department and military. That morning each of the OSS employees had been given a certificate and offered a gold lapel pin with “OSS” stamped on it to commemorate their service, but it did little to lift their spirits. They had to pay a dollar for the pin.
After they settled into the rows of chairs, Major General William J. Donovan, their leader the previous four years, stood up. He fiddled with a gold Hamilton pocket watch given to him by the crew of the USS Enterprise aircraft carrier, on which he had once landed, and unfolded his notes before a lectern. Not a particularly tall man and, at sixty-two, somewhat overweight with a face grown pudgy, Donovan hardly fit the nickname, “Wild Bill,” which he had earned over the years. Elizabeth MacDonald, one of his propaganda officers in Asia, had been captivated as all women were by Donovan’s piercing blue eyes, but he now appeared “penguin-shaped” to her. Mary Bancroft, one of his operatives in Switzerland, thought he looked more like a “kewpie doll” than a glamorous spymaster.
Donovan’s life up to that point indeed had been storybook. A poor Irish Catholic kid from Buffalo, New York, he had worked his way through law school, married into a wealthy Protestant family, and marched off to World War I, where he earned a Medal of Honor for heroism on the battlefield. After the war he made headlines as a crime-busting prosecutor, earned a fortune as a corporate lawyer on Wall Street, then finally caught the eye of Franklin Roosevelt, who tapped him to head a new national spy agency in the summer of 1941. Over the next four years, Donovan built that agency, the Office of Strategic Services, into a worldwide intelligence organization with over ten thousand operatives, a remarkable achievement by itself considering he started with just one person—Donovan.
Friends found the spy chief a rich personality. He slept five hours or less a night, could speed-read at least three books a week—mostly on military history and politics but also Shakespeare plays (his favorites)—and filled notebooks with lines he wanted to remember. He was fearless under fire; Father Francis Duffy, his chaplain in World War I, believed Donovan was one of the few men who actually enjoyed combat. He was deeply religious—at one point seriously thinking about becoming a priest. A football player in college, he was an excellent ballroom dancer, loved to sing Irish songs in his baritone voice, and bought up sheet music to learn the latest Broadway tunes. He didn’t smoke, rarely drank alcohol, but enjoyed fine dining, which added weight. He spent lavishly with little concept of the value of a dollar; aides who traveled with him always carried cash because he did not. He was witty, often breaking into a broad grin over something he found amusing, but he seldom laughed out loud and rarely told a dirty joke. He hardly ever showed anger, letting it boil inside him instead. He had a quiet unassuming manner that charmed most people instantly and he was a charismatic leader who inspired nearly blind devotion from his OSS agents. Most of the time he asked, rather than commanded, and they followed him loyally.
“We have come to the end of an unusual experiment,” Donovan now told the audience in the skating rink, his voice deep, soft, patrician, almost singsong. “This experiment was to determine whether a group of Americans constituting a cross section of racial origins, of abilities, temperaments and talents could meet and risk an encounter with the long-established and well-trained enemy organizations. How well that experiment has succeeded is measured by your accomplishments and by the recognition of your achievements.” He went on to describe how they had been able to “fuse” themselves “into a team—a team that was made up not only of scholars and research expe
rts and of the active units in operations and intelligence.” Yes, they had made mistakes but only “because we were not afraid to try things that had not been tried before.” Though they were being disbanded, the men and women in this room could leave knowing they “have made a beginning in showing the people of America that only by decisions of national policy based upon accurate information can we have the chance of a peace that will endure.”
Donovan’s speech was short, and given the emotions swirling among the men and women in that room, it was uninspiring. After pinning medals on fourteen OSS commandos lined up by the lectern, he shook the hand of every person in the rink. The bland farewell to his troops, however, masked a deep disappointment and burning anger that Donovan felt toward Truman for breaking up the OSS. Resentment simmered as well among many of Donovan’s agents overseas. The White House even received hate mail from one—written, oddly, in Latin, with a picture of an OSS gravestone drawn on it. Truman had returned American intelligence gathering “to the Eighteenth Century,” just when the country needed a modern one for future threats, Donovan wrote the New York Times Washington bureau chief, Arthur Krock, who had been a favorite for his leaks in the past. The Soviet Union would now be the principal threat, likely allied with China, Donovan’s analysts warned. The atomic bomb had radically changed the nature of future warfare, they also warned. Once Russia obtained the bomb, and Donovan was sure it would, large-scale wars between nuclear-armed countries would be inconceivable because they assured mutual destruction. Donovan’s analysts were already preparing a classified report on a hostile power one day able to sneak in atomic devices by diplomatic pouch, deliver a “declaration of war a few minutes before the first bomb explodes in some remote town,” then demand that the U.S. government surrender or face bombs detonating “in our largest cities”—a far-fetched notion in 1945 when the Hiroshima bomb weighed 8,900 pounds, but one the government would worry about in decades to come.