Wild Bill Donovan

by Douglas Waller

  The slow-flying DC-3 lumbered north along the Loire Valley, which soon made everyone in the cabin nervous except Donovan because Luftwaffe warplanes with the retreating German army still roamed the skies and the transport aircraft had no fighter escort to protect it. Dulles ignored the young OSS officer from London whom he had never before met and began updating Donovan on the latest details he had picked up on the July 20 assassination attempt. Despite Hitler’s brutal response, Dulles told Donovan he was still convinced that German opposition to the regime was growing, which the OSS could accelerate. Donovan agreed but then dropped a question Dulles knew would be coming, which he dreaded. “I wonder if the time isn’t ripe for penetration en masse?” he asked. “Agent drops from England—the way we infiltrated France.” Dulles considered the idea a fool’s errand. It was too late to send OSS agents into Germany, he thought, networks have to be organized in an enemy country before a war breaks out. After the fighting starts, a hostile nation locks down. The agents Donovan parachuted into France succeeded because they had the Maquis on the ground to protect them and help them transmit out their reports. Friendly French civilians brought them food and hid them in safe houses. None of that existed in Germany, Dulles knew. Far better, he argued as they flew to London, to recruit Germans already in the country to spy for the OSS, as he had done with agents such as Hans Gisevius and Fritz Kolbe.

  Other OSS officers agreed with Dulles. “Germany is a fortress—a besieged fortress,” an earlier secret memo from Donovan’s intelligence branch warned. OSS operatives sneaking into it will face “a generally hostile population—almost if not entirely mobilized for war and literally linked house by house, if not person by person, to the secret police in one form or another. A pretty formidable picture!” It was one reason Donovan’s operation to put his agents into Germany had moved so slowly. Arthur Goldberg, whose Labor Section in London had been largely ignored by Donovan’s senior intelligence staff, had begun a makeshift infiltration project, code-named “Faust,” in October 1943. Goldberg had been funneling money and equipment to underground labor organizations in Germany and German-occupied territories the past year and a half. By February 1944, he had ten agents in training to penetrate the Fatherland. But his operation moved at a snail’s pace. The British showed no interest in infiltrating agents into Germany, a country they also considered too difficult to crack, and soon their secret forces, as well as Donovan’s, were preoccupied with the Normandy landings.

  But in his briefcase for the plane ride to London, Casey had the Faust Plan, which he, Goldberg, and David Bruce had been polishing and which Eisenhower’s staff had approved two weeks before. Faust now had an ambitious goal: infiltrating at least thirty OSS agents into Germany to collect political and military intelligence and spy on Hitler’s espionage organizations. As the DC-3 sped toward London, Dulles tried to smother Faust with evidence he had that a viable underground remained in Germany with agents already in place, which the OSS could exploit.

  But Donovan’s mind was already made up. The agency must rethink the way it operates, he told Dulles in a loud voice so he could be heard over the engine noise in the cabin. He knew full well that his spies and commandos operating in occupied countries such as France had enjoyed the benefit of resistance groups sustaining them and fighting alongside, and that Germany would be different. “We can no longer count on the presence of friendly forces in the rear of enemy lines to give us a welcome,” Donovan said. There will be no civilian population “wishing us well.” The agency’s covert warriors will have to treat everyone around them as the enemy and “bring all our skill and ingenuity to bear on the problem,” he told Dulles.

  Donovan envisioned nothing less than a “rebirth” of OSS operations “in their truest sense—that of bold raids and nicely carried out attacks from hideouts, of patrolling by small groups, of destroying industrial installations.” He now wanted Dulles to use his Bern station as “a salient” for launching intelligence and subversive teams into Germany and Austria.

  Donovan’s plane landed in London on Friday evening, September 8, shortly before the Germans’ first V-2 ballistic missile slammed into the city, gouging a giant crater in Chiswick that killed three people. Donovan bounded up the stairs to the rooftop of the OSS station hoping to catch a glimpse of any more of Hitler’s “vengeance weapons” that might streak by. On previous London visits he had stood on the roof like a curious boy watching the stars as V-1 buzz bombs that were crude cruise missiles rained down on the city.

  Dulles returned to Washington to begin drafting plans for infiltrating agents from Switzerland into Germany although he remained pessimistic about Donovan’s venture. Before they left Lyon, Donovan had given Dulles another piece of distasteful news. He would not get the job he now craved. Dulles had heard the rumors that Bruce wanted to leave London and he wanted to replace him as chief of the most important station in the OSS empire. But before they boarded the plane, Donovan had pulled Dulles aside and told him no moves would be made. With the war reaching a crucial turning point, this was not the time to change chiefs at two critical stations. “I’m ordering David to stay on, just as I’m asking you to do the same,” Donovan told him. “God knows what would happen if we had a change in Bern at this juncture. We just can’t afford to lose you.”

  Although he did not reveal it to Dulles, Donovan always considered Bruce the better station chief of the two, particularly for the wide-ranging operations in Europe. Despite Dulles’s intelligence triumphs at Bern, Donovan thought he was a poor administrator, who, unlike Bruce, did not command the loyalty of the people who served under him. Donovan also suspected that Dulles coveted his job, which was true. Dulles thought he was the better leader for the OSS and that Donovan was jealous of what he had accomplished in Bern. Donovan’s misgivings about Dulles soon proved justified, however. When the Swiss border opened that fall and OSS staffers poured into Bern for the final push against Germany, Dulles, who thrived as a lone wolf, had trouble managing the ballooning bureaucracy. Donovan became frustrated over the growing disorder he saw in Bern and began scribbling hostile notes on some of Dulles’s cables. After the European war ended, he again refused to promote Dulles to the job he wanted. He made him head of the OSS mission in Germany instead of all operations in Europe.

  FOR THE ALLIED advance through France, Donovan had OSS detachments with the American armies to feed them intelligence the resistance fighters collected just ahead and to recover the agency’s spies who were overrun by the U.S. divisions—although the promise he thought he had from Bradley at the Normandy beach to welcome his men with open arms never panned out. Bradley still balked at having OSS officers assigned to his staff and his senior intelligence aide treated the ones who were grudgingly accepted as if they were Abwehr agents. Even the more congenial Patton, who appreciated Donovan’s men organizing guerrillas to guard his southern and western flanks as he swept through France, became irritated at times when Bruce and other OSS officers showed up for what his staff thought were nothing more than sightseeing tours. While the Allied armies marched east, OSS counterintelligence teams also prowled the rear to round up German sabotage agents left behind, some dressed in American uniforms. Many agreed to work for the American side. An Abwehr radioman the OSS nabbed in Verdun began transmitting back to his base phony information Donovan’s agents concocted on Allied troop movements. The reports pleased his unwitting German superiors so much they awarded him the Iron Cross.

  Donovan was convinced, however, that he needed to step up the infiltration of agents into Germany. Otherwise, he feared, the Allied armies would be blind to what lay ahead as they advanced east. A few days before Christmas, Donovan promoted Casey to be his chief of secret intelligence for the European theater with orders to launch a full-scale invasion of Germany with covert warriors. Casey did just that, over the next six months infiltrating 150 agents into Germany. Anti-Nazi Germans who were physically fit to parachute in but not so young that they would be drafted by the Wehrmacht as soon as
they landed were in short supply, so Casey recruited his agents from German-speaking foreign laborers who could blend in, from German and Austrian POWs willing to spy on the Reich, and from German communist refugees (Donovan ordered him to overcome his ideological repugnance and hire them). Casey, however, soon abandoned Donovan’s visions of having teams launch commando attacks; what little was left to be destroyed in Germany could be more safely and efficiently flattened by American bombers. Instead, Casey sent in spy teams—the ones collecting intelligence about German military movements were given alcoholic code names, such as “Martini” and “Daiquiri.”

  Donovan’s penetration of Germany had mixed results. The Faust teams managed some successes. Agents who were overrun by the quickly advancing Allied armies alerted commanders to enemy threats ahead. Some operatives rescued war prisoners or convinced local German commanders to quit fighting. Three teams penetrated Gestapo organizations in Munich and Berlin while other agents identified local Nazi chiefs for American soldiers. But the Faust spies ended up delivering only bits and pieces of intelligence. Only about half of Casey’s infiltration missions were successful. Because of nagging equipment problems, just seven of the thirty-four intelligence teams that he did safely infiltrate radioed back reports. “I don’t think they did very much good,” said Richard Helms, a young naval officer who worked on the OSS infiltrations into Germany and who one day would be director of the Central Intelligence Agency. Even Casey, who also would later become a CIA director, conceded the penetrations did nothing to shorten the war. At best, “we probably saved some lives,” he said.

  After the Wehrmacht surrendered, all but seven of the spies infiltrated into Germany were recovered. Casey expected to lose far more. For many of those who did survive, life behind German lines had been harrowing. Leon Adrian, one of Casey’s Polish-born agents in the Martini operation, parachuted into Germany on March 19, 1945, pretending to be a foreign railroad worker. Though he had a limited education, Adrian possessed street smarts and he was a skilled observer of military hardware traveling on trains. But at a rail station at Altenburg in eastern Germany, an official in the military recruiting office noticed a slight discrepancy in Adrian’s war service papers and called the police, who arrested him. Adrian managed to tear a drawing he had made of a nearby military airport into small pieces and swallow them before two Gestapo agents arrived. At their station in nearby Halle, the two Gestapo men stripped him and searched every inch of his clothes, then plunged a hypodermic needle into his arm and injected him with a solution to make him throw up. When Adrian refused to drink a second concoction to induce vomiting, they knocked out five of his front teeth with a rifle butt and forced the noxious liquid down his throat. He began to heave violently, but suspecting his stomach still wasn’t empty, the agents started rolling two rubber cylindrical pins up and down his body from his knees to his ribs as if he were a lump of dough. Adrian finally threw up everything and with a magnifying glass the agents picked out the bits of paper.

  Convinced he was a spy they beat him mercilessly with rubber clubs nearly eight hours a day for the next five days, but Adrian, barely able to remain conscious, never talked. On the morning of the sixth day, when he was sure he would be dragged out of his cell and executed, American B-17s dropped bombs over Halle, one of which blew open the door to his prison cell. His face bruised and bloated and his legs nearly crippled from the beatings, Adrian hobbled out and managed to escape to a nearby forest, where American GIs eventually picked him up on April 15. For the next three weeks, he helped an Army counterintelligence team round up Gestapo men in the region.

  As Army officers processed a group of Gestapo prisoners in a room, Adrian spotted the two thugs who had tortured him. He silently sidled up to one of the American guards and pulled the pistol out of the soldier’s holster without him realizing it. Adrian walked up to the two Gestapo men, whose faces he would never forget, and calmly fired two bullets into each of them. The Army planned to ship the two brutes along with the other Gestapo officers to a prison camp and they would likely get away with their cruelty, Adrian later told his OSS superiors. Now “they won’t beat anyone else.”

  Chapter 26

  The Sideshow

  BY THE SUMMER of 1944, Donovan had built a formidable covert operation in the Balkans. The Allied command estimated that by spring the resistance forces Donovan and the British backed in the region were killing 4,700 Axis soldiers a month. That was likely an overestimate. Churchill and Donovan were never able to set the area ablaze to make life unbearable for Hitler though the resistance movements at least made the Germans bleed and Donovan was proud of what he had accomplished so far. In his Georgetown house he kept a collection of guerrilla weapons to show off to visitors—like the Smatchet, a combination machete and Roman short sword for knife fighting. At dinner parties he read in a loud and dramatic voice for his enthralled tablemates after-action reports filed by OSS commandos. But the war Donovan’s men fought in what both the Allies and the Axis considered a strategic sideshow could be brutal and coldhearted, and he agonized over the human loss. For Donovan, fighting in the Balkans also continued to be a political jousting match with his allies.

  By November 1944 he had almost sixty OSS agents with Tito, led by one of his most senior aides, Colonel Ellery Huntington, and was pouring arms and propaganda kits into the partisan camps. The leaflets OSS officers prepared for the kits urging Axis troops to desert ended up backfiring; when enemy soldiers arrived with their hands up, the vengeful partisans executed them, which soon convinced the Germans never to surrender. But Ultra intercepted complaints Wehrmacht commanders in Yugoslavia radioed back to Berlin that Tito’s fighters appeared to be better clothed and armed because of the OSS supplies. Donovan’s buildup made Churchill nervous as well. To add prestige to the British delegation with Tito, Churchill dispatched his son, Randolph, to the partisan headquarters, giving the communist warlord a direct pipeline to the prime minister. The Russians also beefed up their Yugoslav mission, which was now led by two seasoned generals, one whom, N. V. Korneyev, was a confidant of Stalin’s. It also soon became clear to Donovan’s men that Tito treated the Soviet delegation as the first among equals.

  Donovan chuckled when the Chetnik press reported that he had sent his son, David, to Mihailović’s headquarters in late February 1944. The story was false. Donovan, to his great annoyance, had no one with Mihailović after he had bowed to Churchill’s demands and pulled out his lone OSS officer with the Chetniks that month. Ever since, he had been lobbying the Joint Chiefs and State Department to put his intelligence agents back with Mihailović and use his base for infiltrating into Germany and Austria. Roosevelt finally agreed at the end of March to allow OSS officers to return to the Chetniks as long as they made it clear to Mihailović they were there only to collect intelligence and not to lend him any military or political support. Churchill was furious when he learned Donovan planned to slip his men back into the Chetnik camp. While Donovan trekked to the Pacific to be with MacArthur at the Hollandia landing in early April, Churchill fired off a cable to FDR pleading with him to reverse his decision. “If, at this very time, an American Mission arrives at Mihailović’s headquarters, it will show throughout the Balkans a complete and contrariety of action between Britain and the United States.” Roosevelt complied and ordered the team not to be sent.

  With Mihailović and his Chetniks out of the way, Churchill was intent on dancing alone with the communists in Yugoslavia. His goal: to preserve the country’s monarchy by forming a postwar unity government between Tito and the young King Peter exiled in London—with Ivan Šubašić serving as prime minister. Donovan knew exactly what Churchill was up to because Šubašić was his mole among the four men. The project was code-named “Shepherd” and it was a sensitive intelligence operation because it violated the agreement the United States and Great Britain had that they would not spy on each other. Both did, of course, but the Shepherd Project was one of the more blatant breaches of the accord. Šubaš
ić had been the prewar Ban of Croatia. Though exiled in the United States, Donovan’s men believed he remained a revered figure among the some five million Croats he once governed, many of whom sympathized with the Allies instead of the pro-Axis Croatian regime that now ruled over them. With the help of Bernard Yarrow, a Russian-born New York lawyer on his staff, Donovan had recruited Šubašić in August 1943 to infiltrate into Yugoslavia to spy on the Germans for the OSS and stir up an anti-Nazi rebellion among the Croats. He had given Šubašić the code name Shepherd and approved $53,000 for his covert operation. Šubašić instead ended up in London, where Churchill browbeat Peter into dumping Mihailović as an ally and accepting the Croation governor as prime minister of his exiled government. But with Yarrow as his handler, Šubašić continued to spy for Donovan, sending him detailed reports, which he relayed to Roosevelt, on the private talks Churchill had with Peter, Tito, and Stalin to form a unity government in Yugoslavia.

  Donovan, however, still believed he needed agents with Mihailović and true to his MO he did not intend taking Roosevelt’s no as the final answer. While he was untangling his messy Italian operation in June, he paid a visit to Jumbo Wilson, the supreme commander for the Mediterranean theater, and cajoled the amiable British general into agreeing that, despite the objections of Churchill and his Foreign Office, there was really no harm in the OSS sending an intelligence team to Mihailović, particularly if it helped hunt for Allied pilots shot down over Chetnik territory. Donovan passed along Wilson’s green light, such as it was, to Roosevelt, who reversed himself once more and approved the OSS team joining Mihailović.

  It was a nifty piece of diplomatic maneuvering on the spy chief’s part. Even before FDR reauthorized the mission in early August, Donovan had already begun preparations in July for a six-man team to slip into Mihailović’s headquarters, headed by Lieutenant Colonel Robert McDowell, who had taught Balkan history before the war as a college professor. Donovan ordered that “Ranger,” the code name for the operation, be kept secret at that point from both Tito and Churchill. After FDR changed his mind in early August, Donovan had his aides inform Wilson’s Mediterranean command and Fiztroy Maclean, who led the British mission to Tito, that he planned to send his team to the Chetniks.