Wild Bill Donovan

by Douglas Waller

  AT NOON ON Monday, Roosevelt delivered one of the most powerful speeches of his presidency, asking Congress to declare war on Japan. December 7 will be “a date which will live in infamy,” he began to thunderous applause. Donovan spent the busy day pressing the military for more radio transmitters, deciding propaganda themes for Japan, arranging with United Press for the loan of one of its reporters to set up a broadcast station in China, and tightening security at his headquarters. “The use of telephones for discussing secret matters should be avoided,” a memo ordered. That evening, he attended a dinner party at the home of Atherton Richards, a wealthy landowner in Hawaii who had been in Army intelligence and now was one of his senior aides. One of the guests, Donovan’s friend Arthur Krock of the New York Times, broke away from the table at one point to take a phone call. “My God!” Krock said, ashen-faced, when he returned. “Ninety percent of our fleet was knocked out at Pearl Harbor.” Heads turned to Donovan. “Arthur has very good sources,” the spymaster said almost in a purr.

  As details of the devastation leaked to Congress and the press, the Navy quickly came under fire for being caught napping. Fingers began pointing at the military, and even at Hoover, accusing them of a massive intelligence failure. Donovan “had a little explaining to do also,” Berle at the State Department wrote in his diary. Donovan, however, escaped blame because he still had no intelligence assets to speak of that could have failed. He spent the week scouring West Coast businesses and foreign embassies in Washington for information on Japanese military and industrial targets that might be bombed.

  Tuesday morning, Donovan flipped through the newspapers for reaction to Roosevelt’s declaration of war speech, then scanned the foreign radio news summaries his office prepared daily. One rumor, Donovan noticed, had not worked so far. A dispatch from Tokyo reported that trading at the “silk exchange in Yokohama was firm.”

  Donovan sent Ruth to Chapel Hill, worried as many senior government officials were that Washington and other large cities would be bombed. Paranoia that blinded better judgment gripped Donovan’s agency as it did John Franklin Carter’s and J. Edgar Hoover’s. Donovan and Carter warned Roosevelt that Japanese planes were attacking or would soon bomb Los Angeles. Hoover sent the White House a secondhand tip (the source turned out to be a hardly reliable young secretary in one of Washington’s foreign embassies) that the Axis planned a full-scale invasion of the East Coast. Donovan even passed to FDR an unconfirmed report that five thousand Japanese saboteurs had landed on Mexico’s Baja California peninsula, poised to raid San Diego. A Donovan agent sent to San Diego to check it out later cabled that the report was bogus. But Roosevelt, Donovan, and other top national security officials realized that Pearl Harbor laid open America’s strategic vulnerability. Two days after the attack, William Langer, a distinguished Harvard historian who had taken over for Baxter as research director, outlined for Donovan a scary scenario from the best minds in the agency: The Japanese catch up with the Pacific Fleet that has escaped Pearl Harbor and destroy it, the Panama Canal is attacked and disabled “by Axis air or naval forces or by sabotage,” “the Hawaii disaster . . . discourage[s] the Russians from joining forces with us,” freed from the Eastern Front, Germany invades North Africa to gain “control of the Western Mediterranean,” the Battle of the Atlantic intensifies, choking off Great Britain.

  Midday Tuesday, Nelson Poynter, a former Florida newspaper editor now on Donovan’s staff, sent suggestions for Roosevelt’s fireside chat that evening, which Sherwood was helping draft. “The President must brutally warn the American people that we may fight alone,” Poynter wrote. “This is FDR’s blood, sweat and tears speech.” Roosevelt should also promise to fire admirals and generals who “stand in the way of victory,” the memo advised. The final script did tell Americans it would be a long and hard war. FDR decided to leave out the part about firing senior officers.

  Donovan that same afternoon asked the State Department to cable its attaché in Berlin to see if his propaganda broadcasts were reaching the German capital. But he was too late. Attaché operations quickly shut down. Germany and Italy declared war on the United States on Wednesday. Hitler included Donovan in his Reichstag speech, dismissing him as “an utterly unworthy character.” Tipped off by Stephenson, Donovan had alerted FDR on Tuesday that Germany would declare war first rather than wait for the United States to do so.

  DONOVAN SOON HAD a delivery system set up for the White House. Couriers lugging locked pouches made deliveries three times a day, seven days a week. The 8:30 a.m. delivery, when most of the senior staff were not yet at their desks, went to the White House usher, who made sure it got to Roosevelt’s bedroom, where he was usually reading the morning papers. For the noon and 6 p.m. deliveries the courier went directly to Grace Tully and exchanged the bag’s contents for the papers FDR had read or notes he wanted sent back to Donovan. Donovan succeeded in charming Tully, who made sure every document went to her boss’s in-box. If a report was particularly sensitive, a senior aide took the bag and waited in the Oval Office as FDR read it.

  By the end of December the courier bag for each drop bulged. Donovan’s research analysts began producing more accurate studies of German military strength. Other reports, however, had forecasts that did not pan out or contained half-baked intelligence, such as a memo predicting that Germany would invade Sweden (she didn’t) and a warning that Spain’s Washington embassy was burning its papers possibly as a prelude to joining the Axis (the smoke seen at the compound came from a boiler room explosion). Still other reports were entertaining but inconsequential: a memo to FDR on four South American diplomats attending a cocktail party the German ambassador in Chile hosted, another note that Axis radio was now calling him a Klinkenputzer—roughly translated, a door-to-door salesman.

  Roosevelt rarely sent back comments on the reports, to indicate that he had read them all carefully, or called Donovan to task over faulty intelligence. He also welcomed all ideas from Donovan and his other intelligence mavens—even the offbeat ones. Many from Donovan made sense, such as organizing the collecting of European newspapers and journals to sift for useful intelligence. But Donovan also proposed an “out of the blue” commando strike by the remaining U.S. Pacific Fleet against the Japanese home island of Hokkaido to rattle Tokyo. He suggested fitting every home radio with an “Alert Receiver” so Roosevelt could “press a button” from his desk and reach Americans with war instructions. The Army had no commandos to raid Hokkaido. Roosevelt never had an alert button. But FDR approved Colonel James Doolittle’s symbolic air raid over Japan four months later to demonstrate her vulnerability.

  Roosevelt had the good sense to have many of Donovan’s schemes run by other agencies before approving them. One proposal forwarded to the Navy: $100,000 for an intelligence team infiltrating Japanese conquests in the South Pacific and headed by Guy Richards, a Yale man and military feature writer for the New York Daily News. Richards had sailed in the region thirteen years earlier and, according to Donovan, was “highly intelligent . . . with a pronounced audacity.” The Navy, which oversaw the area, rejected what it believed would be nothing more than a “newspaperman’s junket,” according to its memo.

  Donovan, who soon won military approval for a two-thousand-man commando force in his agency, begged Roosevelt to let him fly to the Philippines and personally lead guerrilla operations against the Japanese. “This is an appeal from a soldier to his Commander-in-Chief,” Donovan pleaded in a memo to FDR.

  “I would want to do the same thing if I were in your place,” an amused Roosevelt wrote back. “Talk to General Marshall about it.” Marshall wrote Donovan that his eagerness to see combat “is typical of you,” but MacArthur wanted no interlopers. All Mac would accept were broadcasts and leaflets from Donovan’s men to counter Japanese propaganda urging Filipino soldiers to defect.

  Donovan became convinced that a powerful German subversive operation lurked in the United States and the fact that no one could find it did not dissuade him.
He warned FDR that Nazi saboteurs now planned a massive “frontal attack on New York, synchronized with general Nazi organized revolution in all South American countries.” He suggested that Polish, Czech, and Yugoslav Americans, whom he thought reliable because the Germans brutally occupied their countries, be organized in factories to watch for Nazi sympathizers among ethnic groups he considered unreliable, such as Ukrainian Americans, because elements of their old country had allied with the German invaders.

  Donovan was far less worried about Japanese Americans. He believed a mass relocation of them was a bad idea and tried to dissuade Roosevelt, sending him reports from his West Coast representatives who concluded there was no sabotage threat and internment camps would just make enemies of loyal Americans. “We are about to create dangers where little exist,” Buxton wrote Donovan, who agreed. He met with author Pearl Buck, who sent him a long memo, which Donovan condensed and forwarded to Roosevelt, warning that the Japanese would exploit in their propaganda American racism toward Asians. Roosevelt ignored Donovan and ordered the internment.

  SPORTING A NAVY pea jacket and yachting cap that made him look like an admiral, Winston Churchill landed at the Gravelly Point airfield the night of December 22. The prime minister arrived in Washington determined to settle with the Americans the strategic debate over where the new alliance should attack first. Donovan kept Churchill and his staff supplied with daily news bulletins from London newspapers, which he appreciated. But the British leader appreciated even more Donovan’s lobbying for Churchill’s peripheral strategy. Before the prime minister arrived, Donovan flooded FDR with memos advocating a beachhead on North Africa before Hitler seized it and proposing American intelligence and guerrilla operations to soften up the battlefield prior to an Allied invasion. Roosevelt was interested. With Marshall’s approval Donovan launched a $500,000 covert operation to have an anti-Nazi Portuguese shipper infiltrate an intelligence and special operations team into the Azores nine hundred miles off Lisbon’s Atlantic coast. If the Germans captured Portugal’s archipelago they could threaten American convoys to North Africa. Marshall approved another half-million-dollar plan to recruit commandos to take over the Cape Verde Islands, another Portuguese possession off the northwest Africa coast.

  Over the twenty-four-day Christmas conference in Washington, which was code-named “Arcadia,” the second floor of the White House became Downing Street West with Churchill ensconced in the Rose Suite and his staff occupying the Lincoln Study and other adjoining bedrooms. The Monroe Room had been converted into a map room like the one Churchill had at home. Roosevelt became so enamored of Churchill’s setup that he had a replica built in a ladies’ coat room on the ground floor of the White House with battle maps covering its walls. Roosevelt later would visit the room daily to read secret military reports in its safes and overseas cables off its clattering Teletypes.

  Late Sunday afternoon, January 11, Donovan cut short a New York trip and flew back to Washington for a private dinner Roosevelt hosted at the White House for Churchill and a few members of the British traveling party. Averell Harriman, a special envoy to Great Britain, who had accompanied Churchill, and Hopkins also attended the convivial meal. Churchill and Donovan traded stories about the days they rode as gallant cavalry officers in wars past. The talk soon turned to the present war and Churchill, fueled by Scotch and sodas, proclaimed with a flourish: “This is the stage of history that will be important—the time to make sure the deed is recorded.” Donovan had begun to find Churchill’s “curtain raising of history” monologues, as he called them, annoying. “All we were thinking at the moment was how to get more guns and ammunition in where we needed them,” he told a friend later, and Churchill kept making everything out to be a grand epic with him at center stage. “Very few get their names into history who don’t see to it that their names are included,” Donovan noted.

  The day after the White House gathering, Donovan attended another dinner Churchill hosted at the British embassy for the senior members of FDR’s administration. Over coffee and dessert, the talk drifted to the direction of the war. Churchill argued vigorously for an Allied landing at North Africa as the first step. Stimson quickly became irritated with Knox’s and Donovan’s loose tongues; both men chimed in on Churchill’s side, even though they knew Marshall and other senior U.S. commanders strongly backed a cross-Channel invasion of France first. Donovan, however, had become just as convinced as Churchill that attacking northern France now would result in the German defenders delivering “a terrific lacing” to the far weaker Allied force. The only realistic move, he believed, was to invade North Africa first and use it “as our aircraft carrier” for launching operations into Europe. Roosevelt and Churchill eventually agreed to set up a Combined Chiefs of Staff with the defeat of Germany first as the priority. Under political pressure after Pearl Harbor to quickly begin fighting somewhere, FDR by late July also agreed to postpone a cross-Channel invasion and attack North Africa first. A bitter Stimson, and practically every senior American officer except for Donovan, saw it as a wasteful diversion of forces to a strategic sideshow, just to keep Americans “entertained,” as Marshall later put it.

  Donovan’s backing had not tipped the decision Churchill’s way. If anyone had it was FDR’s closest confidant, the physically frail but always irreverent Harry Hopkins, who became his de facto national security adviser shaping his defense and foreign policy priorities in long memos immediately after the Pearl Harbor attack. Hopkins’s clout grated on Marshall and his senior aides. They resented having to give secret military briefings to someone they considered a political hack pretending to be “a great strategist,” as one general grumbled. Even so, Roosevelt depended on Marshall, air Lieutenant General Henry “Hap” Arnold, and fleet admirals like Ernest King and William Leahy to run the war. Donovan was not part of the war council. He was Roosevelt’s idea man, his secret daredevil, his spark plug for thinking outside the box. Knowing the military would refuse to send his map room secret reports if political cronies were allowed inside it, Roosevelt gave only Hopkins access. He never invited his intelligence chief to that inner sanctum.

  Chapter 10

  The Beehive

  THE LEADER OF America’s first strategic intelligence organization—the man the Washington press called “Hush-Hush Donovan” and Berlin reviled as a “monstrous” conspirator—was stuck in his driveway. A cab waiting on the street for a fare blocked the main exit from headquarters on February 18 and the driver refused to move to let Donovan’s limousine pass. Donovan’s driver, James Freeman, tried to shoo the taxi away, but the cabbie started hurling racial insults at the black chauffeur. Incensed as much over Freeman’s treatment as being delayed for his 1 p.m. appointment, Donovan climbed out of the limo and ordered the driver to move. He also scribbled down the cabbie’s name and sent it to the District of Columbia police, who hauled the terrified man into the station for a tongue-lashing.

  Donovan was now totally in his element building a spy organization. During weekend trips to New York he would drop by for only a few hours at his law firm, which shrank as many of its lawyers joined the military. Occasionally he visited Chapel Hill but found he hated the country and rarely stayed overnight. Ruth visited the Georgetown home only occasionally when Donovan needed her as a hostess for official functions. Otherwise she lived in “Little House,” the renovated slave quarters now attached to Chapel Hill’s main structure where David and Mary stayed. She rode sidesaddle in fox hunts, tended a large garden in scruffy overalls and straw hat, sipped Coca-Cola with girlfriends on the back porch, and threw occasional teas and dinner parties for Berryville’s social set. For the war effort she rolled bandages for the Red Cross and helped man a hilltop tower at nearby Woodley Farm to look out for German planes that might approach the capital.

  Donovan had people around him for practically every waking moment of the day, which usually stretched from 6 a.m. to midnight. In his office, maps marked “Secret” hung from its walls. Two telephones to patch
him into the White House and military sat on his desk, piled each morning with overnight cables from the spies whose numbers abroad began to grow. For meetings close by or lunches at the F Street Club, he often walked briskly for exercise, with Freeman following in the car. His loyal chauffeur, who drove him to clandestine meetings around Washington at all hours, often was the only one who knew where the chief had disappeared to. Where Donovan is, “that’s where [he wants] to be,” Freeman would tell frustrated aides trying to track down the boss for a missed appointment. “Where [Donovan] ought to be, that’s just a little bit of never-mind.”

  By the end of 1941, Donovan had nearly six hundred people on his payroll. Most knew little about spying but they included some of the country’s best and brightest: Wall Street banker Junius Morgan, Academy Award–winning movie director John Ford, labor lawyer Arthur Goldberg, Rhode Island governor William H. Vanderbilt III, author Stephen Vincent Benet, historian Arthur Schlesinger. Hire on the spot anyone “of great ability,” was Donovan’s rule, “later on we’ll find out what they can do.” Smart people can handle any job, he believed.

  Donovan’s “league of gentlemen,” as he liked to call them, also included a healthy share of social misfits, spoiled rich kids, and military castoffs. Everyone from Ickes to retired General Pershing to Eleanor Roosevelt to even his brother Vincent tried to foist friends or relatives on him, many the Army had rejected as physically unfit. (Donovan usually found a place for referrals from Eleanor, whom he did not want to alienate.) His headquarters soon earned the nickname “bad eyes brigade” because so many wore glasses. Society WASPs who were fit for combat but hoped to stay out of it also gravitated to Donovan. Reporters began to call the agency a “draft dodger haven.” Generals called them the “East Coast faggots.” Though he professed to want honest upstanding souls he could teach the shady black arts, Donovan took many who already knew the latter. He accepted safecrackers, men with prison records who could be useful as burglars, and occasionally Mafia thugs for paramilitary operations. Steve Early visited a training camp Donovan set up for German and Italian Americans he wanted to infiltrate as saboteurs and was struck that they were a bunch of “tough-looking hombres . . . not the kind of guys you would like to meet in a dark alley.”