Wild Bill Donovan

by Douglas Waller

  Donovan seemed to crawl into his own shell and lose all interest in the pressing family matters. David had to make the funeral arrangements and with Mary he flew to Honolulu to meet his mother. Donovan did fly to Los Angeles to greet the three of them when they finally arrived on May 13. He and Ruth would never discuss divorce again. They would remain married forever. Donovan was now fifty-seven, and his hair seemed to turn white almost overnight without Patricia. After her death he drifted further away from his family. Only Mary grew closer to him, taking the place of the daughter he lost.

  Chapter 7

  Envoy

  THE SUMMER OF 1940 was a foreboding one. Germany, which would soon sign the Tripartite Pact with Italy and Japan, had successfully invaded Norway, Denmark, Belgium, Holland, Luxembourg, and France. The Battle of Britain had begun. U-boat submarine packs prowled the Atlantic waters to strangle her lifeline from the sea, the Luftwaffe ranged over her southern coast, and Hitler had ordered planning for a German invasion. The only thing that stood between the Nazi dictator and the United States, FDR knew, was the British and American navies.

  The garrulous and combative Winston Churchill, who became prime minister after Neville Chamberlain’s government fell in May, intended to defend the homeland to the last man, while bombing and blockading Germany and stirring revolts in the territories Hitler occupied. To do so he desperately needed American aid and wanted U.S. military intervention. But anti-British sentiment, whose roots traced back to the Revolutionary War, ran deep in the United States and a broad array of isolationists argued fiercely against America being sucked into another foreign war to save Europe from itself.

  By June, Roosevelt decided to bring Frank Knox into the administration as navy secretary. Instead of Donovan, he nominated for war secretary a less politically ambitious establishment Republican, seventy-two-year-old Henry Stimson. Donovan was not thrilled with being edged out by a man he considered a milquetoast, but he nevertheless worked to quell a Republican revolt over the two nominations and prepped Knox for what turned out to be a rancorous confirmation hearing.

  Roosevelt believed Great Britain would survive, but it was only a vague impression at this point. The military’s intelligence services, which were tiny underfunded operations, had filed conflicting reports. The new British prime minister who was sending FDR assurances was still an unknown quantity to him. The Democratic convention was about to nominate Roosevelt for a third term and he was walking practically blind into a controversial and complex American aid initiative for Europe, which could derail his reelection if he got it wrong. Roosevelt, who already had dispatched a number of emissaries to scope out the war, was eager to have Donovan’s seasoned eyes and ears there as well to assess whether England could withstand the Luftwaffe and a cross-Channel invasion. Knox also thought a London trip would help his friend get his mind off Patricia’s death.

  Reporters staked out a New York waterfront Sunday afternoon, July 14, 1940, where Donovan boarded a Pan Am Clipper flying to London. He insisted to the press he was on routine business. Just before leaving the dock he had phoned Ruth in Washington and told her, for the first time, that he was flying to London but could not explain why.

  He arrived in the British capital on July 16. Knox also ordered Edgar Mowrer, the Chicago Daily News’s top foreign correspondent then in Lisbon, to join Donovan in London and help investigate German fifth column espionage and sabotage operations in Great Britain and Europe. At first, the British Foreign Office was leery about opening doors for this latest emissary, an Irish American lawyer from the opposition party whose sidekick was a reporter. But Lord Lothian, Britain’s ambassador in Washington, had cabled London that Donovan was a close Knox adviser, who “may exercise considerable influence” over Washington’s decisions to ship arms. That was hardly the case at this point, but Lothian convinced the Foreign Office that Donovan could be a political ally. Whitehall scrambled to arrange ministry appointments for him and wedged fifteen minutes into Churchill’s busy schedule for a get-acquainted chat.

  Donovan ended up receiving unprecedented access befitting a high-level visitor. Britain’s top sea lords of the Admiralty, senior air commanders, and government economists gave him secret briefings on ships and planes in her arsenal, on output by her industry, and on food supplies from her farms. He inspected a fighter squadron at Essex and a naval officers training camp in Portsmouth. Churchill had to assign seven men working overtime to prepare for Donovan answers to all the questions he left behind from each visit. Even more important, he received highly classified briefings, normally not given to foreigners, on British intelligence and propaganda operations overseas. The counterintelligence arm, MI5, slipped him reports on the 16,300 aliens in the country who had been detained as suspected subversives. Over dinner at the Royal Thames Yacht Club, Admiral John Godfrey, the ruthless and normally reticent director of Naval Intelligence, told Donovan that London was eager to collaborate closely with Washington on spying. Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service chief, Stewart Menzies (known in MI6 simply as “C”), took Donovan under his wing and loaded him down with bulky reports—hoping like Godfrey to shape a future American spy organization after His Majesty’s services. The gentle, charming—and very secretive—Menzies, who liked to brag to American visitors that he gave Churchill his intelligence briefing each morning while the prime minister was still in bed, came from a wealthy family close to the royals. He did not reveal Ultra, which could intercept and break Germany’s coded radio messages. But he made clear to Donovan he was confident the Luftwaffe’s moves over British skies could be anticipated.

  Donovan told delighted British officials he would lobby hard for U.S. aid back in Washington. He thought the best place for Britain to go on the offensive was up through the southern periphery of German-controlled territory in the Mediterranean region (Churchill believed as well that it was Hitler’s soft underbelly). London diplomats hinted to the State Department that Donovan would be an ideal replacement for the current U.S. ambassador, Joseph Kennedy, whom they despised because he was convinced Britain was doomed. On August 3, the Air Ministry booked priority passage for Donovan on the flying boat Clare, which was camouflaged in green and blue and leaving the town of Poole on the southern coast for New York. Officers put a bottle of champagne and a volume of Edmund Burke by his seat for the thirty-four-hour flight. The Foreign Office, which Donovan had already briefed on his conclusions, wanted him back in Washington with his message as quickly as possible. Though he put the odds lower than the British briefers pitching him, Donovan believed England could beat back a German attack (even so, he underestimated how weak the British army was). But to do so, Britain required American military equipment and desperately needed U.S. destroyers to protect supply convoys in U-boat–infested sea lanes.

  Back in Washington Donovan briefed Knox and other cabinet officials, who were impressed with his upbeat assessment as well as the British reports he had collected to answer hundreds of questions they had submitted to him before his trip. Columnist Walter Lippmann gushed that his findings “almost singlehandedly overcame the unmitigated defeatism which was paralyzing Washington.” Even the normally reserved Stimson noted in his diary that the colonel “told a very interesting story.”

  Friday night, August 9, Donovan and Knox boarded the armor-plated presidential train at Hyde Park, which carried Roosevelt and the large White House entourage of aides, Secret Service agents, and reporters always following him. The train chugged east overnight to the Portsmouth, New Hampshire, Navy Yard. Roosevelt inspected it for an hour, then boarded his presidential yacht, Potomac, for the sail south (followed by a destroyer for protection) to the Navy Yard at Boston and another tour.

  Donovan briefed Roosevelt on the overnight train ride and the sail from Portsmouth to Boston, which became a challenge in itself. The president was easily distracted by the hundreds of memos and foreign cables his secretary, Grace Tully, fed him along the way, and by the striped bass he trolled for off the Potomac. Roosev
elt also had a penchant for launching into monologues instead of listening, which Donovan found irritating. But over the day and a half, Donovan thought he had convinced the president that Britain could hold out. He pressed FDR for the military hardware, for which Churchill was desperate: seaplanes, bombers, the Sperry bombsight for British warplanes, and above all the destroyers. Roosevelt worried the massive arms package, particularly the destroyers, could sink his reelection, but he still felt it should be sent.

  Roosevelt had Donovan spread his upbeat prognosis with the media. But with the dozen reporters following him on the trip FDR was evasive, having Knox say only that Donovan had visited Europe “to see what he could find.”

  Walter Trohan always found that caginess irritating. In fact there was not much the conservative Trohan and the isolationist newspaper he worked for, Colonel Robert McCormick’s Chicago Tribune, liked about FDR. Roosevelt, who found McCormick contemptible, tried his best to remain friendly with the Tribune’s White House correspondent. Press Secretary Stephen Early, who got along well personally with Trohan, occasionally even fed him derogatory information on administration black sheep like Joe Kennedy. Donovan now was on Trohan’s radar screen. The New York lawyer had been a reliable Republican—but he now warranted closer watching, Trohan decided. Although Donovan did not realize it at the time, Trohan was a reporter he would come to know well in several years.

  IN SEPTEMBER, Donovan and Knox flew to Hawaii for three weeks to observe naval fleet maneuvers. The two had a grand time aboard the aircraft carrier Enterprise, where Donovan’s coat with his watch and wallet inside it were blown off the flight deck. Donovan appreciated the crew replacing his watch, but he was not impressed with the Navy’s Pacific performance. “The maneuvers here have disclosed our weaknesses in all their nakedness,” he wrote a friend.

  After briefing Roosevelt in August, Donovan had delivered a nationwide radio address over the Mutual Broadcasting System warning that the United States had better prepare militarily or face the scary prospect of joining “the nations of Europe that have fallen.” With Mowrer he penned a wildly exaggerated series of articles warning that a $200-million-a-year German propaganda and sabotage program worldwide, which had undermined the will of conquered countries like France to resist, now had hundreds of thousands of hostile agents or Nazi sympathizers inside the United States. There was no evidence that was the case, but FDR believed it and had ordered J. Edgar Hoover to ruthlessly investigate Nazi, fascist, and communist subversion in the country.

  Donovan hoped that by winter he would be back in uniform, training an infantry division in Alabama and leading it in the war he thought the United States would eventually join. But Britain’s top spy in the United States considered a division command a waste of Donovan’s talent. He had bigger plans for the New York lawyer.

  Bill Stephenson and Donovan were remarkably similar. Stephenson, a low-key Canadian, was another man others found impossible not to like. As athletic and fearless as Donovan, Stephenson had been an amateur boxer who had performed heroically in World War I as a British fighter pilot. He became a millionaire entrepreneur afterward, and, like Donovan, occasionally fed his government intelligence by dealing with German businesses. In the summer of 1940, Menzies and Churchill had sent Stephenson to the United States to take over British intelligence operations there. He set up his organization on the thirty-sixth floor of Rockefeller Center in New York, eventually giving it an innocuous-sounding cover name, the British Security Coordination Office, and casting out lines to Washington’s powerful through old American pals like Vincent Astor, who was close to Roosevelt, and professional boxer Gene Tunney, who hooked him up with J. Edgar Hoover.

  One of Stephenson’s principal jobs was to mount covert operations against American isolationists trying to thwart war aid to Britain and to make sure that the aid Washington approved was not sabotaged by German agents before being shipped. His embassy had kept him posted on Donovan’s London trip. Stephenson began having long martini lunches and dinners with the New York lawyer at the St. Regis Hotel and “21” Club, talking up the need for the United States to have a worldwide intelligence service like Great Britain’s—an idea that intrigued Donovan. Stephenson also soon realized Donovan could be useful for another mission Churchill gave him—to help bring the United States into the war.

  KEYED UP BY the publicity after his first visit, the press staked out No. 10 Downing Street and clicked photos when Donovan arrived at noon on December 18, 1940. He said nothing to the reporters, walking quickly past the helmeted guard at the entrance. German intelligence also had Donovan on its radar screen. It’s best “to discreetly observe him and see what he is up to,” a German Foreign Office memo advised.

  Churchill booked more than an hour with the New York lawyer. Stephenson, who accompanied Donovan on the flight over, had urged him to make the second visit to collect material in London to justify U.S. Navy convoys protecting merchant shipping and then to take a tour of the Mediterranean region, which was critical to British war interests. The peripatetic Donovan hardly needed persuading and convinced Knox and Roosevelt to sign off on the trip. Like Lord Lothian, Stephenson dialed up Donovan’s importance, telling Menzies that he had a “vast degree of influence in the administration.” Churchill should “be completely frank” with this unofficial envoy, Stephenson advised. He could “contribute very largely to our obtaining all that we want of the United States.” That whet Churchill’s appetite as the two men tucked into a table in his study for their private lunch.

  The Mediterranean region—the southern front in this war—was far more strategically important than Americans realized, Donovan stressed as they began their lunch. Churchill agreed, but said nothing yet.

  “It’s time for both us—your people and our own people—” to study “the economic, political and military implications of the Mediterranean,” Donovan continued, and for both countries to come up with a “common” game plan for denying Hitler the region.

  That was exactly what the prime minister wanted to hear. Normally Churchill would never reveal to a foreign civilian his secret war plans—particularly not an Irish American who might be a closet Anglophobe. But he now opened up, as aides had urged him to do, rising from the table and sweeping his finger over a nearby map. Hitler already had Hungary and Romania in his orbit. The prime minister told Donovan what he now feared most: Germany would slice through the rest of the Balkans, taking Yugoslavia and Bulgaria through alliance or conquest, then aim for strategically placed Turkey with its important access for his army to the south and east. Churchill’s war plan was to set the territories Hitler now controlled “ablaze” with resistance movements to tie down his divisions and form a British and American alliance with Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Turkey, and Greece against Germany in the south. Churchill’s critics would accuse him of being naive in thinking he could mount an effective Balkans movement against Hitler, but with the British army far too weak to confront Hitler head-on in France, he was convinced his “peripheral strategy,” as it came to be called, was the only way to go on the offensive. Donovan agreed.

  Cables went out to British embassies and military commands in the Mediterranean: Donovan “has been taken fully into our confidence,” show him everything. For more than two exhausting months, Donovan toured the southern front. Menzies’s service paid his expenses, the Royal Air Force flew him from country to country, and trusted British military officers (on one leg it was a Naval Intelligence aide named Ian Fleming, the future author of the James Bond novels) served as escorts, cabling London detailed reports on his movements. Donovan intensely interviewed everyone he met at each stop, filling leather pouches with secret war planning documents to take back to Washington.

  This time, however, Donovan was far more than a fact finder. In effect, he became a diplomatic envoy for both the United States and Great Britain—unprecedented considering he had no official standing in either government. In closed-door meetings with fence-sitting leaders in Bulgaria, Yugos
lavia, Turkey, Spain, and the Middle East, he delivered the same blunt message: Franklin Roosevelt did not intend to let Great Britain lose this war.

  Hoping to block or at least delay Hitler’s move into the region, British diplomats and generals there were delighted with the pressure he applied. “I must thank you for the magnificent work done by Donovan in his prolonged tour of the Balkans and the Middle East,” a grateful Churchill cabled FDR. “He has carried with him throughout an animating heart-warming flame.” Aides to Cordell Hull, the turf-jealous secretary of state, investigated whether Donovan’s strong-arming Balkan leaders violated the Logan Act, which made it a crime for private citizens to negotiate with foreign countries.

  Berlin grew increasingly alarmed over Donovan’s meddling in the region. The Abwehr, Germany’s foreign intelligence service, began to follow his every move. Nazi propaganda denounced his tour as an “impudent” act. Paranoid that Donovan might even be preparing the ground for a U.S. invasion, German diplomats buttonholed friendly foreign leaders he had met to find out what he said. One was Bulgaria’s Tsar Boris III, whom Donovan thought was “a very frightened man” (understandable considering German forces from Romania had already infiltrated into his northern hills). Boris was dismissive of this American trying to convince him not to join the Axis. Donovan was “naive,” the swarthy Bulgarian told a German envoy, with “not the faintest notion of the political conditions and the history of the Balkans.”

  Berlin decided to play rough. As Donovan relaxed in a Sofia nightclub with a British intelligence officer and George Earle, Roosevelt’s colorful ambassador to Bulgaria, Abwehr agents sneaked into his room at the Bulgarie Hotel and stole his traveling bag (his British handlers kept his pouches of secret documents in a separate room). German propaganda claimed that Donovan lost the bag in a night of drunken barhopping with Earle. That was an outlandish tale for the abstemious Donovan, but not so far-fetched for Earle, who enjoyed carousing in Sofia’s nightspots with chorus girls.