Wild Bill Donovan

by Douglas Waller

  THE COORDINATOR OF Information office became a reflection of Donovan’s creative and eclectic mind—constantly exploring, expanding, experimenting. He launched new projects, rearranged priorities, and shuffled personnel—so fast his harried staff was forever catching up with his directives. Donovan’s idea of management, according to Buxton: “Put a lot of strong men in a pen and let them fight it out, on the theory that the strongest ones would emerge at the top.” He hated bureaucracy and its rules, refused to follow a chain of command. Anyone could walk into his office; sometimes, all they had to do was walk by and he would shout at them to come in and assign them a job that had just popped into his head. When Early, FDR’s press secretary, asked Sherwood one day at the White House for an organizational diagram of the Coordinator of Information, the playwright grabbed a sheet of paper and sketched a notional one as best he could remember. It was as accurate as any of the printed charts they had.

  Donovan and his secretive organization became the talk of Washington. The “celebrated man of mystery” was running “one of the wisest emergency moves the administration has made,” enthused the Washington Star, whose comic page ran a strip on “The Exciting Adventures of ‘Wild Bill’ Donovan.” At the end of October 1941 the British embassy cabled a cheery note to London: “Donovan is proceeding slowly in the exercise of his power” so as not to alienate other departments and “he appears to be building up amicable relationships.”

  That was not the case, however. Knowing this was one of Roosevelt’s pet projects and Donovan had direct access to him, other departments at first promised to cooperate. Even Hoover was helpful, trading tips with Donovan on Nazi subversives. But tensions quickly mounted. War Secretary Stimson became increasingly irritated with Donovan’s end runs to Roosevelt with off-the-wall ideas that infringed on the War Department’s turf. Miles, the Army’s intelligence chief, who was called its G-2, was leery about sharing the service’s intelligence with Donovan’s untrained civilians and furious that Donovan had gotten FDR’s okay behind his back to have agents overseas pretend to be military attachés. Secretary of State Cordell Hull complained to FDR that Donovan was secretly making foreign policy.

  Soon, everywhere Donovan turned he was irritating someone. Nelson Rockefeller, the young and dapperly dressed White House coordinator responsible for commercial and cultural relations with Latin America, controlled propaganda for that region. Donovan and Sherwood thought it ridiculous that Central and South America, which were infested with Nazi agents, were carved out of the world propaganda operation the Coordinator of Information was supposed to oversee. But when Donovan made a play for that turf, an angry Rockefeller, who was a member of one of the country’s richest families and had far more clout with the White House, easily beat him back. Roosevelt ordered Donovan to stay out of Latin America.

  Harold Smith, Roosevelt’s tight-fisted Budget Bureau chief, thought Donovan was an empire builder. A Kansas engineer with wire-rimmed glasses perched always on his beaklike nose, Smith envisioned Donovan having a small $1 million a year operation; he was shocked when in two months Donovan was demanding ten times that much. Donovan’s personal expense vouchers became a bean counter’s nightmare: a thousand dollars for unspecified secret meetings in unnamed Washington hotels and restaurants with the sources never identified. Even more annoying to Smith, Donovan wasn’t shy about griping to Roosevelt when the Budget Bureau tried to trim his requests. By November, Roosevelt had approved almost $13 million for his operation the next year. Donovan grumbled that it was $1 million less than what he wanted. Smith grumbled that it was far more than he deserved.

  Hoover quickly became convinced that Donovan’s organization was the biggest collection of amateurs he had ever encountered, which at the outset it was, and riddled with enemy agents, which it wasn’t. Hoover suspected that much of the classified material he sent Donovan ended up in British hands. Columnist Walter Winchell, a Hoover pal, published an article, which looked suspiciously like a Hoover leak, claiming FBI agents had found a Hungarian American with fascist ties in Donovan’s organization. The story was false.

  Hoover distanced himself from one press report. Collier’s magazine quoted an unidentified FBI agent in November 1941 who bragged: “Donovan knows everything we know except what we know about Donovan.” The day the magazine hit newsstands an embarrassed Hoover sent Donovan a letter, insisting “the Bureau does not possess any information concerning you.”

  That was a lie. Not only was the FBI file on Donovan growing, Hoover had begun an intensive spying operation on his organization. He had a mole in Donovan’s message center feeding him information and FBI agents began to compile dossiers on members of Donovan’s senior staff. At one point Hoover wrote Donovan innocently suggesting that whenever he was traveling in the country he should drop by the local FBI office and get acquainted with their agents. Donovan knew he just wanted to track his movements and ignored the suggestion. In another letter Hoover tested Donovan’s gullibility further, asking him to send the names and addresses of all his secret agents—just in case a person walked into an FBI office and claimed he worked for Donovan, the bureau could check the list to see if he was an impostor. Donovan refused.

  By the end of the year, however, the only person who mattered to Donovan—Franklin Roosevelt—thought “Bill was doing a pretty good job,” as he put it. Donovan never cared to be a Roosevelt intimate or to socialize with his old political rival. Roosevelt still kept a short leash on his intelligence chief, although Donovan did not always realize it. The White House was not unmindful of the fact that the high-powered bankers, lawyers, corporation executives, and society friends Donovan brought in gave his intelligence agency a decidedly Republican color. But Roosevelt admired Donovan’s boldness (he had already begun talking up FDR and Stimson on the idea of forming a guerrilla warfare force to fight alongside the regular Army).

  FDR also enjoyed reading tidbits of inside information from around the world. In the first six months, Donovan flooded him with phone calls, visits, and more than two hundred memos with intelligence on the war. Some reports misjudged German armament production, but others, such as studies of German casualties and supply problems on the Eastern Front, were on target. Much of the intelligence came from the British, which Donovan sent to FDR without attribution. Roosevelt suspected he was getting London’s reports under a different wrapper, but never complained. Donovan’s, he began to tell friends, are “my secret legs.”

  SATURDAY AFTERNOON, NOVEMBER 29, 1941, a military attaché in the Reich’s embassy, a dreary nineteenth-century brick mansion on Massachusetts Avenue, finished typing his report to Berlin on the war as seen in Washington. It contained the usual vitriol the Nazi leadership wanted to hear about Roosevelt “dilettantes” like Hopkins and Donovan. At the end of his report the Oberleutnant shifted to the Far East. Washington, he advised, was building up its forces in Asia “to woo and intimidate Japan” but “America needs time. All the dangers that threaten Japan will only materialize if Japan gives the Americans time.”

  Saturday evening, December 6, Roosevelt with Hopkins at his side in the lamp-lit study on the second floor of the White House read a lengthy Japanese diplomatic message just delivered by a Navy lieutenant. The U.S. military’s Magic code breakers had decrypted it. The thirteen-part message to the Japanese embassy in Washington rejected a final American diplomatic offer to relax economic sanctions if Japan withdrew its troops from China and Indochina. The fourteenth part of the message, which Tokyo delayed sending until overnight, formally broke off negotiations, but Roosevelt could tell where the two countries were headed after quickly reading the sheaf of papers before him. “This means war,” he said quietly to Hopkins.

  Roosevelt, however, was blind to when and where. The Japanese military command had already deployed its army and a combined fleet of six aircraft carriers and 360 warplanes to their attack stations, ordering strict radio silence to mask the movements. The president had seven intelligence agencies (including Donovan�
�s) reporting to him but none knew the timing of the most important strategic event about to happen to the United States in the Second World War. The take from Magic, the military’s Japanese code-breaking capability in place since 1940, was distributed in a cockeyed manner with no single person in charge of making sense of its raw intelligence. Because of interservice rivalry, the Army sent FDR reports from Magic on odd-numbered months, the Navy sent them on the even-numbered ones.

  Donovan’s researchers were focused mostly on the European war. He worried about Japanese aggression in Asia and tried to cultivate Saburō Kurusu, Japan’s special envoy sent to negotiate with Hull. But much of Donovan’s interest in the country was Eurocentric, requesting studies, for example, on German activity there. Most of his agents overseas were still unreliable and few of them were in the Far East. As a stopgap measure in early December, Bruce asked the Asian representatives for the International Harvester and International Telephone and Telegraph companies to send him any intelligence they ran across. Donovan also paid Mowrer $1,880 in the fall to spy on the Japanese in the region, but the reports the journalist filed were little better than newspaper features.

  At 1 P.M. Friday, December 5, Donovan boarded the train at Union Station for New York. He continued to practice a little law on the side and allowed other senior aides, who had left lucrative jobs in the private sector, to tend to business work. The weekend trips to New York soon became a headache for Eloise Page, Donovan’s secretary. He constantly changed his travel plans, which sent Page rushing to the phone to plead with the Pennsylvania Railroad to find him a last-minute seat on a train. One Friday after Donovan had changed his mind about traveling to New York four times and finally announced “I’m not going,” Page looked at him steely-eyed and said, “Oh, yes you are.”

  “What did you say?” Donovan asked, glaring.

  “You are going to New York,” Page said. “I got a special car put on for you and if you don’t take this train you’ll never get on that train again.” She grabbed his coat from the rack and draped it over him. “Now, you go!” she ordered.

  “Yes ma’am,” Donovan said meekly, and went.

  Page was the only secretary who could talk back to him and get away with it. Donovan developed a complicated relationship with his female employees. About 4,500 eventually joined his agency, with 900 serving overseas. Donovan welcomed them as spies; they became known as “Donovan’s girls.” He pressed to have the women paid salaries higher than they would earn in other government jobs and routinely showed unusual acts of kindness toward them. But there was still a glass ceiling. Few women broke through the clerical ranks to be research analysts. Practically all of the secretaries, who gave Donovan the code name “Sea Biscuit” because he always raced about, found him to be an intimidating taskmaster, which he was. He once threw a cup full of pencils across the desk at Page in a fit of anger.

  For this weekend, Donovan had tickets for the Sunday pro football game in the Big Apple. He settled into a seat in the train’s drawing room car that he always took because it offered privacy and pulled out a stack of office papers from his briefcase. An aide back in Washington had put a memo in Donovan’s in-box proposing a quickie pamphlet titled “Japan’s Road to War” to distribute among Asians and Americans. “This pamphlet done factually can definitely establish that the Japanese military has brought on this war—not the United States, not FDR,” the memo advised. Like Roosevelt, Donovan was convinced the Japanese would attack. When and where remained a mystery. A memo in his bag from MacLeish outlined a propaganda campaign if Claire Chennault’s Flying Tigers, who were part of the Chinese air force, soon began fighting the Japanese. Donovan had already had Cheney Brothers, a textile manufacturer, plant rumors that Japan’s silk trade with the United States would end permanently if she went to war—hardly a concern of Tokyo’s at the moment. Donovan also flipped through a draft speech Sherwood had edited for FDR to deliver after the war began, assuring Japanese Americans that the U.S. government had faith in their loyalty and that the United States “feels no enmity toward the Japanese people, but only toward the dangerous clique of military leaders who have betrayed” Japan. Roosevelt never delivered that speech.

  PART II

  WAR

  Chapter 9

  Pearl Harbor

  DONOVAN SAT BUNDLED up in a heavy coat as a cold wind swept through the Polo Grounds in New York Sunday afternoon, December 7, 1941. The stadium was packed with more than 55,000 fans watching the National Football League’s final regular season game between the New York Giants and the Brooklyn Dodgers. The Giants had already clinched the Eastern Division title but their crosstown rival now was clobbering them 21 to 7. In the press box above, sports reporters began fielding phone calls from their editors in Washington and not paying attention to the game. Suddenly a voice on the stadium loudspeaker announced: “Attention please! Here is an urgent message. Will Colonel William J. Donovan call operator nineteen in Washington immediately.”

  Donovan, startled, climbed down from the stands and finally found a phone booth under the bleachers. Jimmy Roosevelt came on the line. The Japanese have attacked Pearl Harbor, he told the boss. The president wanted Donovan back in Washington as quickly as possible. At 5:15 p.m., he boarded an Eastern Airlines plane at La Guardia, refusing to comment to reporters at the terminal. Vice President Henry Wallace, Labor Secretary Frances Perkins, and Postmaster General Frank Walker boarded the next flight out twenty-five minutes later hoping to make the cabinet meeting Roosevelt had set for 8:40 p.m. Hoover, also in New York for the weekend, hopped on a charter flight at La Guardia. An FBI agent from Honolulu had called him, holding the telephone out his office window so the director could hear for himself the sound of exploding bombs. An excited Churchill, joyful that Britain would survive with America now in the war, phoned Roosevelt in the afternoon. “We are all in the same boat now,” the president told the prime minister.

  A car was waiting at the Gravelly Point airfield on the Virginia bank of the Potomac when Donovan’s plane landed and sped him quickly to headquarters, which already was scrambling. The news flash of the Japanese attack had come in at 2:35 p.m., and the entire propaganda staff had been summoned along with Donovan’s Asia analysts. Donovan had no agents or saboteurs for striking back. All he could throw at the enemy at this point were words. His agency’s Foreign Information Service, which Sherwood ran on New York’s Madison Avenue, had shortwave propaganda broadcasts reaching Europe and the Far East, with a staff of twenty-one researchers, ex-reporters, and editors in Washington churning out radio copy and leaflets. While Donovan bought transmitters for his own stations, NBC and CBS executives had made their shortwave broadcasting facilities available, along with newsmen and technicians plus private overseas surveys for targeting audiences. A man had already been put on a plane that Sunday to San Francisco to join technicians at a shortwave station now under police guard. A Schenectady, New York, transmitter had been shifted from Latin America to the Far East broadcasts so the agency had two shortwave beams hitting Asia with propaganda. An hour after the news flash, four thousand words of copy had been put on the air for overseas audiences. By 6:30 p.m. it totaled sixteen thousand words. The American line: “Again, the Axis has misjudged world opinion. Shooting doesn’t frighten but unifies [the] United States.”

  Donovan walked into Roosevelt’s dimly lit oval study at midnight. Cable messages from the Navy and Pearl Harbor were stacked on one corner of his cluttered desk, which was surrounded by more than a dozen empty chairs from the 8:40 cabinet meeting. Miserable with a stuffy nose and headache from a cold, Roosevelt was exhausted from nonstop meetings since midday.

  The president now munched on a sandwich and sipped a beer. Donovan found Edward R. Murrow already in a chair chatting with him. Murrow and his wife had been guests for the scrambled eggs dinner Eleanor always fixed Sunday nights when the White House cooks took the evening off and Roosevelt had asked the CBS correspondent to stay behind on a bench in the outside hallway unti
l he finished his meetings. Donovan did not mind Murrow intruding on his time. The two were old friends. Just the month before, Murrow had confided that he wanted to join the Army “to do more in this war” than just talk about it. Donovan thought that would be a terrible waste of a newsman whose European broadcasts had been so important in shaping American public opinion. Within a month he would be broadcasting Murrow’s military commentaries from an agency radio station.

  Pearl Harbor’s planes had been caught “on the ground, by God, on the ground!” Roosevelt said in anguish, pounding his fist on the desktop as Donovan walked in. Had the Germans been in on this operation, the president asked? Donovan said he didn’t know but guessed that Hitler had been as surprised by the strike as Roosevelt. The three men wondered how the attack would affect American public opinion. Donovan assumed it would be galvanized behind war, the message his propagandists had been broadcasting the past nine hours. “It’s a good thing you got me started on this,” Roosevelt finally told Donovan, referring to the intelligence agency.