Wild Bill Donovan

by Douglas Waller

  Donovan soon recovered enough to make a short flight south to Naples and drop a surprise on Peter Tompkins. The son of artists (his father was a New York sculptor), Tompkins had lived much of his life in Italy and spoke the language fluently. Until 1940, he had been a Rome reporter for the Herald Tribune, but after being recruited by the OSS Tompkins found himself speeding in a PT boat to the Salerno beach for the landing. He ended up sending Italian recruits short distances across enemy lines around Naples to collect combat intelligence for what became largely suicidal missions. Nazi troopers always infested the territory just ahead.

  After Clark took Naples, Tompkins commandeered for his OSS headquarters a four-story palazzo with a shabby garden off one of the city’s back streets, which a Neapolitan duke had once owned. He filled up its warren of rooms, cellars, and attics with radios, high explosives, and Italians of different political stripes preparing for infiltrations. On Saturday evening, January 15, Donovan showed up at his doorstep. He hardly knew this twenty-four-year-old officer, but, typical of his operating style, he had read his dossier on the plane trip and been impressed with his family background and experience in Italy. Donovan now treated the agent like an old friend. The instant intimacy had the same effect on Tompkins as it did on every other OSS officer who got the treatment; it melted all his frustrations with the Naples assignment and made him intensely devoted to his boss. Tompkins ushered the spymaster into his candlelit dining room for bowlfuls of fettuccine his Posilipan cook had whipped up with flour and GI powdered eggs. “You are the host,” Donovan said, acting like a humble guest. “I shall sit at your right.” Sipping coffee and Strega liqueur in the sitting room later, Donovan dropped the news he came to deliver. He wanted Tompkins to go to Rome immediately.

  After occupying Naples, Clark demanded more intelligence on the Eternal City, the next prize he lusted. On October 12, Donovan’s OSS detachment with the 5th Army had infiltrated into Rome a six-man Italian team, headed by “Coniglio,” the code name for Clemente Menicanti, a Neapolitan resistance leader. Coniglio hooked up with the senior Italian intelligence officer remaining in Rome, along with assorted communist, socialist, and Social Democratic factions in the city. By late November he had begun sending back intelligence reports over a clandestine radio station code-named Vittoria. Now, with Clark’s surprise landing of 56,000 men at Anzio just a week away, Donovan wanted an American OSS officer in Rome to run the Vittoria operation the Italian team had set up.

  Early Sunday morning Tompkins drove Donovan in his battered jeep to the Naples airfield where his plane’s engines warmed up. Again typical for Donovan, who regularly swooped into overseas stations and turned things upside down, Tompkins had no signed military orders, no protocols written out with the 5th Army, no coordinating cables sent to the Rome team. Just go, Donovan told him over the prop noise, contact the Vittoria station, act as an intelligence officer for the 5th Army in Rome, and launch sabotage attacks when the Allies land at Anzio. “Then he shook me by the hand,” Tompkins recalled, “climbed into the hatch and took off into the chill north wind, leaving me alone on the airstrip with that feeling of dedication which comes when one has been entrusted with a mission by a superior being.”

  Late Thursday night, January 20, a captured Italian torpedo boat deposited Tompkins and a bodyguard near the coastal town of Civitavecchia north of Rome. The two men reached the capital early the next morning, the day before the Anzio landing. Rome teemed with secret Italian resistance cells and some six thousand German counterespionage agents who ruthlessly hunted, tortured, and killed the dissidents. Tompkins, who expected Clark’s invasion force to speed to the capital, found Menicanti in a flat near the Littorio airfield along with other members of the Vittoria team: Maurizio Giglio (code name Cervo, whose day job was a mounted police officer in Rome), Franco Malfatti (a military intelligence officer for the Italian Socialist Party), Elio Gambareri (a Unione Democratica party member and Menicanti’s paymaster). Tompkins explained his mission.

  CLARK HAD BEEN ambivalent about the Anzio landing Churchill had pushed to leapfrog Kesselring’s defenses to the south, but he was delighted Saturday morning, January 22, when Operation Shingle met little resistance at what had once been a resort beach. The Germans were blindsided. As usual, Donovan was on hand, speeding in Clark’s landing craft to the beach mid-morning after the early waves had landed. OSS officers began to worry that the Germans would be tipped off that a landing was coming anyplace Donovan showed up. Washington columnist Drew Pearson, in fact, suspected that as well and later tucked a note in one of his pieces that Donovan “always goes ashore with every invasion.” Clark now thought it somewhat humorous that Donovan always popped up at these operations, but not so amusing when Donovan walked up to him on the beach, poked a finger at his chest, and said: “Hey, old boy, what are your plans?” Donovan didn’t care if it irritated Clark. He thought the Army commander had botched the previous Salerno landing, which proved bloody.

  Donovan had his own PT boat, which zipped him back and forth from Anzio to the OSS station in Bastia, where he wolfed down flapjacks and bacon in the dining hall with his men in the morning and sang Irish songs with them in the evening by a fireplace. At Corsica and back at Clark’s beachhead, Donovan also began firing off cables to the Vittoria station demanding constant updates on any German troop movements toward Anzio.

  Tompkins had quickly set up an elaborate system to transmit cables out of the Vittoria station. His Italian agents delivered their reports to radio operators written on thin tissue paper balled up so it could be easily swallowed if the Germans intercepted them. He had road watchers posted along the routes south toward Anzio. They counted vehicles in German convoys and recorded the directions they traveled. The traffic reports confirmed what Ultra intercepts already told Clark, that Kesselring was rushing reinforcements to the beach. Tompkins organized minor acts of sabotage, cutting phone lines and defusing mines the Germans laid at choke points into the city. Eventually, he had a spy planted inside Kesselring’s headquarters, feeding him intelligence on German military plans for Anzio.

  But all was not well for the Vittoria station. As German resistance stiffened, Clark’s invaders stalled at Anzio. Tompkins dejectedly realized they would not reach Rome anytime soon. A bitter feud erupted between him and Menicanti over who controlled clandestine operations in the capital. The OSS command with Clark did little to referee the dispute, but Donovan was to blame as well, for jumping in and rushing Tompkins to Rome without sorting out the jurisdictional questions ahead of time. Meanwhile, German agents penetrated the Vittoria network. Giglio was arrested, horribly tortured for six days, then executed when he refused to talk. By March, Tompkins was on the run as the Germans recruited informants in his network and rounded up others.

  WHEN DONOVAN FINALLY returned home, trouble was waiting for him. Shortly after 5 p.m., Monday, April 3, he and Edwin Putzell boarded the train at Union Station for Chicago. Putzell was far more than the scheduler and paper flow manager for Donovan, a man he had known since joining his law firm in 1938. They had developed practically a father-son relationship. Putzell became Donovan’s traveling companion, attending to the minutest details of his trips. Donovan’s two most trusted assistants became Putzell on the road and Doering in Washington. They watched his back, handled the dirty administrative chores of enforcing his orders and easing out poor performers.

  Before they boarded the train, a messenger from headquarters ran up to Donovan and handed him an envelope from his deputy, John Magruder. Donovan tucked it into his coat pocket to read later. After the train had pulled out and he had settled comfortably into the Pullman car with Putzell, Donovan pulled the envelope out of his coat pocket, ripped it open, and began reading.

  His hands trembled. Putzell thought he was about to have an apoplectic fit. Magruder and the gang of six were back at it, this time with a memo even more explicit than the one they sent six months earlier. The note bluntly criticized his “ineffectual administration of day-by-da
y affairs of OSS.” The agency needed better leadership at the top. Donovan should step aside and give Magruder and the other senior managers more power. “It really hurt him to the quick,” Putzell recalled. “Here were men he thought were supporters and here they were in a cabal.”

  Donovan wanted to stop the train immediately, climb off, and march back to Washington to have it out with them. Putzell talked him out of it. “You can’t do anything in the heat of the moment,” he said. Wait until we arrive in Chicago and you’ve calmed down.

  The next morning in Chicago, Donovan got off the train and found a phone in the station. With Doering listening in, he had the headquarters operator round up Magruder, Cheston, and several of the other coup plotters who could be found. He gave them an old fashioned Army ass chewing. “Donovan really crawled all over them,” Putzell said. The power they had was all he would allow them to have. “The chain of command is what I want it to be!” Donovan angrily declared. Donovan did not fire the gang of six, although Putzell thought he should have. He made Charles Cheston a deputy director along with Magruder and the nominal chief in his absence. But he never again trusted them and kept the entire junta at arm’s length.

  Donovan climbed aboard another train, which now traveled west. Just two months before the Allied invasion of France, Magruder and the other members of the junta thought he was headed in the wrong direction—and on a hopeless mission.

  THE TRAIN ARRIVED in San Francisco on Friday, April 7, and the next day Donovan and Putzell boarded a plane that would eventually land them in Brisbane, Australia. He brought along two books for the long flight: one an impenetrable tome in German to brush up on his language skills, the other an advanced physics textbook. An FBI agent in Honolulu spotted Donovan, whose plane landed in Hawaii for a refueling stop, and messaged Hoover. But the agent could not figure out why the OSS director was in the Pacific. Donovan, in fact, was flying to Brisbane for what his aides dubbed “Project Penetrate MacArthur”—a mission Donovan privately gave low odds for success.

  After the decisive Battle of Midway in June 1942, Nimitz and MacArthur went on the offensive with an expanded carrier force, ground army, and superior pilots. Their strategy: island-hop in the Pacific to capture strategic stepping-stones to Japan and leave starving enemy garrisons behind. By the time Donovan arrived in Brisbane, a number of the islands had fallen to overwhelming American firepower. The geography of the Pacific alone was daunting enough, but the hostility of the theater’s two commanders had made OSS operations impossible. Donovan sent Nimitz one of Stanley Lovell’s pistols with a silencer, which the admiral enjoyed shooting at targets. But during Donovan’s visit to Nimitz’s Hawaii headquarters while his plane refueled, the Pacific Ocean Areas commander made it clear he didn’t want much else from the OSS.

  Donovan had a complicated relationship with MacArthur. Though the two made a point of being cordial to each other after World War I, Donovan confided to Putzell that he always resented MacArthur being so slow to protect his right flank from the murderous enfilade at Landres-et-Saint-Georges. With large armies MacArthur was a brilliant strategist and a grand showman, Donovan told another friend, but on the ground with a small unit he was a timid tactician. Many OSS officers were convinced MacArthur kept their organization out of his theater because he was jealous that Donovan had won the Medal of Honor in the Great War and he had not. They had no proof for their theory, though MacArthur was infamously vain. What was undeniable was that MacArthur was constitutionally incapable of working jointly with almost everybody—Nimitz, the British, outsiders like Donovan—and he demanded total control of every outfit in his theater.

  MacArthur also thought that he was more than ably served by his own intensely loyal intelligence officer, General Charles Willoughby, a German American who had his uniforms custom-tailored and often wore a monocle that earned him the nickname “Sir Charles” behind his back. Willoughby, who also was as close-minded to outsiders as MacArthur, vied “for the title of stupidest intelligence chief of World War II,” one military historian has written. He habitually produced faulty reports on the condition of beaches MacArthur’s forces stormed and underestimated the strength of Japanese defenders they faced on the islands.

  Donovan had dispatched emissaries to MacArthur’s Brisbane headquarters and peppered him with written requests the past two years to send spies, commandos, and research analysts to his theater. MacArthur turned them all down and the Joint Chiefs refused to overrule MacArthur’s rejections. William Langer thought his research analysts could provide valuable intelligence on the beaches that would save lives. Willoughby considered them a bunch of academic pinheads ransacking libraries for worthless information. But Donovan had a standing invitation from MacArthur to visit his theater. He decided to take him up on the offer and try to crack the wall himself. He arrived in Brisbane the second week in April for the invasion of Hollandia.

  The landing at Hollandia on the northern coast of New Guinea was a MacArthur masterstroke. His army and the Australians’ had captured bits of southeastern New Guinea and advanced as far as Saidor on the northern coast. But forty thousand well-armed and dug-in Japanese soldiers in between prepared to make the 550 miles between Saidor and Hollandia a killing ground as the Americans slogged northwest. Hollandia, however, was lightly defended with eleven thousand mostly rear-echelon enemy troops. MacArthur decided to leapfrog the Japanese defenses just ahead and land two divisions with 55,000 GIs at Hollandia, then move inland behind the enemy.

  On April 19, Donovan boarded MacArthur’s command ship, the USS Nashville cruiser, docked at Finschhafen on the Huon Peninsula, which the Americans held, in southeast New Guinea. His briefcase bulged with memos from advisers on how best to approach MacArthur along with lists of gadgets from Lovell that might impress him. As the Nashville and the invasion convoy sailed circuitously to fool the Japanese, MacArthur, like an emperor on a galley, spent much of the next two days lounging on a deck chair outside his cabin chatting with aides, snoozing, and signing autographs for crewmen brave enough to approach him. Between the stream of interruptions, Donovan made his pitch. He said he had “no wish to compete with or disturb” Willoughby’s intelligence network and proposed a small team be sent to MacArthur as a sort of pilot project to show what the OSS could do: a research officer who could draw on the “voluminous data” the agency had collected on the Pacific region, a couple of propagandists expert in “the demoralization of enemy troops,” a training officer to instruct Asia operatives in clandestine techniques, an intelligence and special operations officer who could scout opportunities for spying and sabotage plus acquaint MacArthur with Lovell’s exotic gadgets. MacArthur would have complete control of the OSS officers sent to his command. Donovan sat back and waited for a response. He could see no reason why the man would not at least give it a try.

  Willoughby, however, had alerted his boss ahead of time to the bill of goods he thought Donovan would be selling. The cagey MacArthur came back with a counteroffer. He would take Donovan’s team, but only if they checked out of the OSS and became members of his staff. That killed the deal as far as Donovan was concerned, although he did not tell MacArthur aboard the Nashville that he had no intention of letting his men be absorbed by the Southwest Pacific Command. The other theater commands had accepted OSS detachments. Caving in to MacArthur’s demand “would destroy all that we have built,” Donovan told his senior advisers later, particularly if the other commands then demanded the same treatment. “It would mean that we would be only a recruiting agency for each theater.”

  The Hollandia landing was a resounding success, catching the Japanese completely by surprise as MacArthur had predicted. The American assault troops began hitting the beaches north and south of the town on Saturday morning, April 22, and lost only 150 lives in scattered fighting. At 11 a.m., MacArthur went ashore at the Humboldt Bay beach just south of Hollandia with his staff officers and Donovan in tow. Army photographers scurried ahead to snap photos of him with his trademark cornco
b pipe, aviator glasses, and gold-embroidered crush cap. The sun beat down, the humid tropical air was stifling, and the beach’s soft squishy sand had Donovan and the others panting and their uniforms soaked with perspiration. The sixty-four-year-old MacArthur walked at a fast clip and, to the astonishment of Donovan and everyone else, did not sweat a drop. His khakis remained dry and crisp. Putzell thought the only thing he and his boss had accomplished with this jaunt halfway around the world was being props for MacArthur’s photo op. Ultimately his command accepted only a smattering of operatives from the OSS.

  Chapter 23

  Normandy

  CLARIDGE’S WAS HALF EMPTY when Donovan arrived on May 14, 1944. The London bombing had made it easy to book rooms at high-end hotels and grab reservations at the priciest restaurants. Donovan had spent less than a fortnight in Washington after his Hollandia landing. As he had with most overseas trips, he told Ruth nothing about where he was headed on this one. Secrecy was now even more paramount for the Allied invasion of France’s northern coast, code-named Overlord.

  Donovan arrived in London near the top of his game. His organization was still the “junior partner” in its alliance with the British, as one memo he read on the plane trip over cautioned, mainly because London had such a head start in Europe’s shadow war. But Donovan’s contribution was substantial, and growing every day. He now had nearly three years’ experience under his belt and a worldwide network of some eleven thousand American officers and foreign agents scattered in every important capital. The OSS even had begun to accumulate its own ditties and songs. The last stanza to the irreverent “OSS Hymn” went: