Wild Bill Donovan

by Douglas Waller

  Stauffenberg, in fact, had become the engine behind the assassination plot. A Catholic aristocrat who had lost his left eye and right hand in the Tunisia campaign, he had become deeply disillusioned with the war and had joined the conspirators. Now as chief of staff for the Replacement Army, which trained soldiers for the front, he had been under orders to report to Hitler personally at Wolf’s Lair. Stauffenberg had entered the wooden hut where the noon meeting was held and placed a briefcase containing a small bomb under the heavy oak conference table as near as he could to the führer. He then had excused himself and watched from a nearby knoll when the explosion nearly demolished the hut. Stauffenberg had immediately flown to Berlin to help organize the coup against the remaining Nazi leadership, certain that Hitler had been killed. Four officers did die in the room and most of the others had been severely injured, but Stauffenberg’s briefcase had been pushed from one side of the heavy oak table to the other, shielding Hitler from the brunt of the blast. He had escaped with only bruises, wooden splinters all over his body, and a concussion.

  Although Stauffenberg’s heavy involvement surprised Donovan, the Valkyrie plot itself did not. Dulles, who had given the conspirators the code name “Breakers,” had kept Donovan fully informed of almost every move they had made the past six months. In January 1944, Hans Gisevius and Eduard Waetjen, Canaris’s emissaries from his Abwehr station in Zurich and two of Dulles’s best informants, had quietly approached him about the coup plotters. The Breakers conspirators, they told Dulles, were heavyweights in military and government circles. They included: General Ludwig Beck, the former chief of the German General Staff, who resigned in 1938; Carl Friedrich Goerdeler, the former mayor of Leipzig, who was prepared to be chancellor of a new government; Brigadier General Hans Oster, Canaris’s former deputy, who had been arrested by the Gestapo in 1943 for helping rescue Jews and later released; and Colonel General Franz Halder, head of the army General Staff until 1942, when Hitler dismissed him in a dispute over strategy for the Eastern Front.

  The peace plan the Breakers group offered was almost a carbon copy of the one Helmuth von Moltke had brought to Istanbul a month earlier. All negotiations would be with the Western powers, not the Soviets. The Breakers group would topple Hitler, allow the Americans and British to sweep through the west and three Allied parachute divisions to drop into Berlin, while the Wehrmacht shifted its force east to defend against the Russians. Donovan immediately suspected that some of the Breakers members had been in Moltke’s Kreisau Circle. They were offering an anti-Russian peace proposal as diplomatically unworkable as the count’s Hermann Plan had been.

  But by April, Gisevius and Waetjen returned with news that the Breakers conspirators were ready to “to take steps to oust the Nazis and eliminate Hitler.” Breakers was the only group “with personal access to Hitler,” the emissaries said, “and with enough power in the army to make a coup feasible.” A month later, Gisevius and Waetjen came back with the names of senior active duty officers who had joined the conspiracy. They included General Alexander von Falkenhausen, head of the military government of Belgium, and General Friedrich Olbricht, deputy commander of the Replacement Army. Dulles, however, told Gisevius and Waetjen that the United States and Great Britain would never negotiate with the plotters unless the Soviets were in on the talks. Dulles was skeptical Breakers could pull off the coup. Even if they succeeded, Donovan told him he did not want Breakers replacing a Nazi regime with a military junta just as odious. The Gestapo also had to be aware of what these conspirators were up to, Dulles thought.

  With the Americans unwilling to exclude the Soviets, the Breakers group decided to move on its own. In early July, Dulles alerted Donovan that a courier from the conspirators had arrived in Bern with news that the strength of Breakers continued to grow. Colonel General Fritz Fromm, the commander of the Replacement Army and Stauffenberg’s superior, had joined the cabal as had Wolf-Heinrich Graf von Helldorf, the Berlin police chief and a longtime Nazi. Donovan sent the update to Roosevelt. If the courier is to be believed, Dulles cabled Donovan on July 12, “there is a possibility that a dramatic event may take place” in Germany within the next few weeks.

  The courier’s message was the last report Dulles received from Breakers. Gisevius returned to Berlin to be with the coup plotters. Waetjen remained in Switzerland to serve as the Breakers’ link with the outside world.

  The day after the failed assassination, Dulles hunted for any bits of intelligence he could find for what happened. He noticed that photos in a German newspaper of Hitler with Mussolini after the attack showed the führer offering his left hand to Il Duce to shake. It “may indicate that Hitler’s right hand has been wounded,” Dulles cabled Donovan. Likewise, the carefully staged photo shows “only the left side of Hitler’s face,” Dulles noted. “Possibly the right side of the face is wounded.” Donovan forwarded everything his Bern agent turned up to Hull, Marshall, and Roosevelt. Dulles meanwhile looked for a way to evacuate his mole in the Breakers group. When he learned that the coup had failed and Stauffenberg and other plotters had been arrested and executed at Bendlerblock military headquarters that same night, Gisevius had fled to a Berlin suburb. He hid out for six months until the OSS could sneak to him phony travel documents to make his way back to Switzerland, his nerves shattered from the experience.

  With news coming out of Germany slowly, Dulles admitted he did not yet have a “very clear picture,” but it seemed to him that the conspirators may have launched their plot prematurely because Hitler was about to award Himmler new powers over the government, he told Donovan. Dulles also suspected the Gestapo knew of the impending coup by the first week of July. “Naturally, the blood purge will be unmerciful,” he now predicted, but the rebellion may not have been “put down at once.” The crucial question was whether the Home Army would “follow Himmler as their chief or whether they will stick to their old commanders, some of whom appear to be involved in the plot.” If the outcome of the conspiracy was still up in the air, there were many things the United States could do to nudge it in the right direction, Dulles advised. Roosevelt could issue words of encouragement, the OSS could air-drop leaflets, the Air Force could bomb Nazi strongholds around Hitler’s Berchtesgaden retreat or “announce that any German town which sides with the opposition would not be attacked.”

  Donovan relayed Dulles’s suggestion to Roosevelt and Air Force planes dropped leaflets over Germany. But Hitler quickly regained control. Four days after the assassination attempt, Dulles cabled Donovan that “it seems clear now that any prospects of an armed military revolt growing out of the Putsch against Hitler have been crushed.” Over the next two months, the Bern chief sent Donovan periodic cables on the net “being pulled tighter around Breakers.” Hitler eventually executed nearly five thousand.

  Donovan took a particular interest in one Breakers casualty—Wilhelm Canaris, the man with whom he had played a cat-and-mouse game the past three years. The Abwehr chief, whom Hitler fired in February 1944 for intelligence failures, had not been personally involved in the plot, but he knew of its preparations and the Gestapo soon discovered Canaris aides who were conspirators. Canaris was arrested on July 23 and eventually taken to the Flossenbürg concentration camp, where he was brutally tortured then hanged on April 9, 1945. Treating Canaris as if he had been an American collaborator, Donovan tracked down his wife, Erika, after the war and dispatched an OSS officer to help her settle her personal affairs. He also asked her to write him a long letter about her husband so he could gain a better sense of the man who had been his opposite. Erika complied. “My husband’s chief aim,” she wrote Donovan, “was to get good intelligence from abroad in order to try to convince the powers that be” that Hitler had embarked on a “mad adventure.”

  Walter Langer, William Langer’s brother and the top psychologist on Donovan’s staff, sent him a memo speculating that Hitler may have “staged” the assassination attempt to demonstrate he was invincible and lift German morale. That was not the
case. Johanna Wolf, the führer’s personal secretary, told U.S. Army interrogators after the war that “July 20 left Hitler a broken man.” Dulles predicted to Donovan that Breakers would “undermine the will of the German Army to keep up the struggle.” More coup conspiracies would emerge. William Langer’s research analysts, however, produced a twenty-six-page study seven days after the assassination attempt, which forecast accurately that the Nazis would use the plot to clean up the few dissidents remaining while the party’s grip on the army would tighten even more. Tragically, William Langer’s experts warned, “the collapse of Germany may be retarded” because of Breakers.

  Though Donovan at the outset had been excited about Breakers’ potential, he came to the conclusion that it was a clumsy, rushed job—bound to fail. Eight days after the assassination attempt he put OSS coup plotting into lockdown. He ordered his men not to share any of the Breakers material with the Soviets, knowing it would just stoke their suspicions that the Americans were plotting behind their backs. For the moment he decided it was best for his agency not to become entangled in any more of these conspiracies. “If the Germans battle it out inside Germany without help from us,” he cabled David Bruce in London, “it will be of more benefit to humanity.”

  THE AMERICAN 7th Army under the command of General Alexander Patch had landed at France’s Mediterranean coast between Nice and Marseille on August 15, 1944, and facing little enemy resistance quickly moved north. Marshall had insisted on Operation Anvil to link up with Overlord in northern France. Churchill bitterly fought what he considered a militarily worthless invasion; when Eisenhower and Roosevelt overruled him the story went that Churchill had the operation renamed Dragoon because he had been “dragooned” into accepting it. But Anvil-Dragoon was an intelligence triumph for the OSS.

  As usual, Donovan showed up for the landing, wading ashore at the beach near Saint-Tropez. He found his OSS officers in a dither because their vehicles and equipment had been deposited at another beach. Donovan listened to their complaints for a few minutes, then cut them off. “Any man who can’t get transportation somehow, doesn’t belong in this outfit!” he declared. But in the next breath, he said with a smile: “And I’ll fire the first man caught stealing a car.”

  The landing glitch, however, was insignificant compared to what the OSS had accomplished in the preparations for the invasion of southern France. Colonel William Quinn, Patch’s senior intelligence officer, was stunned when Donovan and Henry Hyde walked into his office at the 7th Army’s Algiers headquarters one day in the spring of 1944 and revealed that in southern France the OSS had twenty-eight agent networks operating, such as the one Rocquefort and Marret ran for the Penny Farthing mission. Quinn knew nothing about the espionage chains or the hundreds of reports they had been radioing back on German troop dispositions and fortifications in territory Patch’s army would soon be attacking. The OSS reports were all sent to Patch’s higher command at the Allied Forces Headquarters, where they disappeared into a black hole never to be seen by Quinn. Donovan offered to deliver the raw agent reports directly to the Army colonel, who was eager to get his hands on them. When the Allied Forces Headquarters discovered the end run it dispatched a British brigadier and two staff officers to Quinn. They huffily ordered him to halt this serious breach of protocol or he would be fired. Quinn threw them out of his office with a string of expletives.

  Patch made sure Quinn wasn’t fired and his intelligence chief reaped a windfall from Donovan. During the next five months, Hyde’s networks delivered him more than eight thousand reports on enemy troop concentrations, airfields, convoy routes, roadblocks, rail yards, coastal defenses, minefields, beach obstacles, submarine pens, antiaircraft gun emplacements, searchlights, and even dummy defenses the Germans built to try to fool Air Force bombers. (Prostitutes servicing German soldiers in Lyon’s bordellos gave Rocquefort details on their units from military identification documents in their customers’ pockets.) It all represented half the intelligence Patch’s army used for Anvil-Dragoon. “We knew everything about that beach and where every German was,” Quinn recalled. “And we clobbered them.” The 94,000 soldiers Patch landed the first days suffered fewer than five hundred casualties and captured 57,000 Axis prisoners in the next two weeks.

  AFTER THE Anvil-Dragoon landing, Donovan flew back to Rome for a secret meeting with a German diplomat. Hitler had made Baron Ernst von Weizsäcker his ambassador to the Vatican the year before because he wanted a seasoned and loyal diplomat for that important post. Born into German nobility and a naval lieutenant commander in the First World War, Weizsäcker had joined the Nazi Party in 1938 to further his career in the Foreign Office and became friends with Himmler, who awarded him an honorary rank in the SS. At one point helping with diplomatic arrangements to deport Slovakian Jews to Auschwitz, Weizsäcker rose to secretary of state under Ribbentrop. At the Vatican he tried to cultivate cardinals with the line that Germany was “a bulwark against communism.”

  Hugh Wilson, one of Donovan’s senior aides, had known Weizsäcker before the war and had arranged a secret meeting with him during a visit to the Vatican earlier in August. For three quarters of an hour behind closed doors, Weizsäcker and Wilson discussed the war. The German public realizes it is lost, Weizsäcker told Wilson, and now regards the fighting as a race to see which enemy army arrives in Germany first, the Americans and British or the dreaded Russians. “I found him in despair,” Wilson later wrote Donovan, “but still unwilling to give full vent to his personal feelings.” Wilson could not tell if Weizsäcker was a true dissident or still a loyal Nazi but he suggested to the German envoy that he meet with his “good friend,” Bill Donovan, who would be in Rome in ten days. Weizsäcker liked that idea. “He said it would be excellent if there were some American source with whom he could remain in touch,” Wilson wrote Donovan. The OSS gave Weizsäcker the code name “Jackpot II.”

  As de Gaulle triumphantly rode into Paris on August 26, Donovan sat down with the German ambassador at a secret location in the Vatican compound. Weizsäcker had snow-white hair brushed neatly across his high forehead with warm expressive eyes set into a gentle face. Only a small Nazi Party Eagle pin on the lapel of his tailored pinstriped suit indicated he was the enemy. Colonel Joseph Rodrigo, an OSS officer in Rome, had arranged the meeting through Weizsäcker’s consul, Albrecht von Kessel, who Rodrigo believed harbored anti-Nazi sentiments. Weizsäcker had told Wilson he knew little about Donovan, which very likely was a lie.

  The American spy chief mostly listened as the Nazi envoy launched into a long and somewhat mournful monologue. It had been ages since he had heard from his family, Jackpot II said; he was rarely in radio contact with his own Foreign Office, so he kept up with war news mostly from Stars and Stripes and other Allied newspapers that cutouts smuggled to him. Weizsäcker adamantly opposed the partition of Germany into American, British, and Soviet zones after the war, he told Donovan. It was “incomprehensible” to him why Roosevelt “did not want to dicker” with the generals who had previously approached him with peace offers.

  Donovan offered Jackpot II nothing more than FDR’s terms: unconditional surrender. But he told the German he wanted to set up a back channel to him. Rodrigo, Donovan said, would deal with any intermediary Weizsäcker designated for exchanging messages. He did not know what to make of this ambassador. Weizsäcker certainly did not sound like a Hitler loyalist, Donovan later wrote Roosevelt, but “his own nationalist aspirations for Germany and his long experience as a diplomat make him very useful to the Nazis.” Donovan, nevertheless, thought Weizsäcker could be of value to him as an informant or perhaps in helping him infiltrate agents into Germany and Austria.

  Peace offers continued to dribble in until the war’s end. Nothing ever came of them, and by August, Donovan’s interest had shifted from talking peace with the Germans to infiltrating agents into their country.

  AFTER HIS MEETING with Weizsäcker, Donovan hopped into his plane and flew back to southern France, where he picked u
p an energetic thirty-one-year-old OSS officer named William Casey at an airstrip near Lyon. Patch’s 7th Army had captured the city in early September and soon would link up with Patton’s 3rd Army to form a broad Allied front stretching from Switzerland to Belgium and marching east toward Germany. Before he went to Rome to meet with Weizsäcker, Donovan had flown to Grenoble southwest of Lyon, where the OSS had commandeered a tree-shaded château with a glorious view of the Alps. Over a fine French meal prepared by the house cook and several bottles of excellent Burgundy he had brainstormed with Casey future operations into Germany.

  Bill Casey was a lot like his boss, whom he worshipped. Born to a poor Irish Catholic family, fiercely Republican, and a successful lawyer before the war like Donovan, Casey had joined the OSS in the summer of 1943 as a Navy lieutenant eager to see action overseas. He reached London in November of that year. Colleagues found Casey to be genial if a bit rumpled, often hard to understand because he mumbled when he spoke, and a rabid anticommunist. He also had a healthy disdain for bureaucracy and a can-do spirit that impressed Donovan, who soon made him a troubleshooter for European operations.

  Casey now boarded Donovan’s DC-3 at the Lyon airstrip for the flight back to London. In his briefcase he had a plan for infiltrating OSS agents into Germany. But also climbing aboard the plane with him was an OSS officer with a reputation now as large as Donovan’s: Allen Dulles. When Patch’s army moved north and broke through the Swiss border near Geneva, Dulles was finally able to liberate himself after more than a year and a half of seclusion in Bern and reunite with Donovan in Lyon.