Wild Bill Donovan

by Douglas Waller

  Donovan decided to tell Tito himself. Five days before the Anvil-Dragoon invasion of southern France, he flew to Caserta, where Tito was visiting Jumbo Wilson. The Yugoslav marshal was settled comfortably in a hunting lodge near Wilson’s quarters with his son, a secretary named Olga, an aide, two guards, and an Alsatian dog. Thursday afternoon, August 10, Donovan was ushered into the lodge’s sitting room. He had brought with him Maclean, in a display of British-American unity, and Huntington, to introduce him to the marshal as the new chief of the American mission at his headquarters. Tito received the delegation alone, except for the large hound sleeping at his feet.

  The OSS was interested only in fighting the Germans, Donovan told the partisan commander, reminding him that “a large percentage of the supplies” he now received from the Allies came from the Americans and more was on the way. Tito nodded. He was aware of that fact, he said. The OSS mission also “is purely military in character,” Donovan told him. “It is to serve no political ends. We are neither making nor requesting political or territorial commitments of any kind.” Tito nodded again, although he knew the OSS arms certainly served his political aims. Donovan nevertheless insisted that his agency would work with any faction “which can aid us in our struggle against the enemy.” That included the Chetniks, although Donovan decided to wait and break that news to Tito over a sumptuous lunch the next day at Mona Williams’s luxury home on Capri.

  The Friday lunch at Villa Fortino lasted more than three hours. After the war, Williams sent Donovan a bill for all the furniture that had been damaged by OSS officers on R&R there and the silver that was missing from the estate. The long list also included the bottles of vintage wine in her cellar that had been drained. Donovan and Tito decided to take their coffee on the terrace. Maclean, Olga, and the Alsatian joined them. As they sipped and enjoyed the view, Donovan finally broached the Mihailović mission. McDowell’s team would be going in only to collect intelligence. Donovan already had a small team, code-named “Halyard,” near Belgrade, where Mihailović had delivered more than 250 Allied airmen shot down over Chetnik territory and he planned to keep his officers there to receive more pilots, he told Tito. “In no sense of the word” would the Ranger or Halyard missions provide the Chetnik leader arms or political support, he assured the marshal.

  To Donovan’s surprise, Tito did not appear angry. He nodded once more and simply warned Donovan that McDowell’s stay with Mihailović “might not be too pleasant.” Donovan should give him the names of the Halyard and Ranger team members so his partisans don’t accidentally shoot the OSS officers if they run into them with the Chetniks, the marshal said.

  But although he did not let his true feelings show on the terrace, Tito was annoyed with the news. Fighting between the communist partisans and the Chetniks had intensified lately and for Tito the civil war had become personal. Not only was Mihailović collaborating with the enemy, Donovan also knew that Tito was convinced the Chetnik chief had fed the Nazis information to try to have him assassinated three months earlier. There was also no doubt in Tito’s mind as they finished their coffee on the terrace that Mihailović would consider the McDowell mission proof the Americans backed him instead of the communists and that he would try to manipulate the team for his own political advantage. As Donovan and the marshal got up to put on their bathing suits for a swim in Villa Fortino’s pool, the long tail of the happy Alsatian swept over the small tea table in front of them, sending the expensive china cups and saucers crashing to the ground. Mona Williams would add them to the bill.

  McDowell’s Ranger team parachuted into Mihailović’s camp on August 26. Tito’s wariness quickly proved warranted. Though McDowell had dutifully told Mihailović that Ranger was there only to collect intelligence, Draža released a propaganda leaflet written in Serbo-Croatian proclaiming that the lieutenant colonel had come as Roosevelt’s personal representative with an endorsement letter from the president clearly demonstrating U.S. support for the “freedom loving” Chetniks. Tito was furious when he read the flyer. He stopped cooperating with the American and British missions at his headquarters and slapped travel restrictions on OSS officers in his domain. He also demanded that the McDowell mission be removed.

  Churchill, who had been fuming ever since the Ranger team parachuted in, was also outraged. On September 1, he sent a testy cable to Roosevelt. He had worked hard cultivating Tito to form a pro-British alliance with King Peter and Šubašić. After their April exchange of messages he thought Roosevelt had agreed not to send the OSS mission to Mihailović, he wrote FDR. But lo and behold, he now discovered that Donovan has a team with the Chetnik warlord, which meant “complete chaos will ensue,” Churchill complained. “I was rather hoping things were going to get a bit smoother in these parts, but if we each back different sides we lay the scene for a fine civil war. General Donovan is running a strong Mihailović lobby, just when we have persuaded King Peter to break decisively with him.”

  Like a boy taken to the woodshed, Roosevelt cabled back: “The mission of OSS is my mistake. I did not check with my previous action of last April 8th. I am directing Donovan to withdraw his mission.”

  Donovan was livid when he learned that Roosevelt had yanked his chain once more. He protested as diplomatically as he could. “I am happy to accept, at your hands, repudiation of any act of mine when you think it may be necessary,” he wrote the president. “It is not my function to make policy decisions.” But nearly sixty more airmen had come out of Yugoslavia by the first week of September, bringing the total number retrieved by the Halyard operation to over three hundred. Ranger had collected valuable intelligence on German divisions in Chetnik territory and fielded peace offers from Nazi representatives in Yugoslavia. Donovan hated abandoning either operation when they had so much more to accomplish. But Roosevelt would not change his mind again. The Ranger and Halyard missions were pulled out in early November.

  Donovan ordered his men with Tito to make no apologies over the two missions to Mihailović. “It is important for us not to be stampeded or bluffed or intimidated,” he told Huntington. The marshal had acted boorishly, Donovan thought, likely because the communist chief knew he had the civil war under control. By the end of September 1944, Mihailović’s army had begun disintegrating, with thousands of Serbs once loyal to him joining the partisans. (Tito’s men later rounded up the Chetnik leader and his loyalists, executing Mihailović and throwing the others into prison after hasty trials.) Tito would not need British and American help much longer. Churchill’s vision of Yugoslavia becoming both a British and a Soviet sphere of influence proved to be an illusion. Negotiations to restore Peter to the throne with Šubašić as his prime minister and Tito his military commander collapsed. Yugoslavia would belong to Tito as a communist and somewhat nonaligned state. The OSS passed along to Roosevelt Tito’s wishes for a happy New Year in 1945, but the marshal did not remain long in the holiday spirit. By early October 1944 he had invited the Red Army in to “liberate” Yugoslavia. Huntington cabled Donovan on November 3 that a convoy of Soviet troops, most riding in American-made vehicles, was approaching Belgrade, the nearby villages welcoming them with “triumphal arches.” The OSS brought in ten tons of medical supplies for the partisans and retrieved another hundred airmen by the beginning of 1945, but their relations with the new Yugoslav regime became more strained as Tito imposed further travel restrictions to keep the American agents from roaming the country and spying.

  On May 11, 1945, Arso Jovanović, Tito’s chief of staff, finally summoned an OSS officer and a British special operations representative to his Belgrade office and curtly told them their teams must leave the country. The OSS man reminded Jovanović of all the help the Americans and British had given the partisans. “We would have won the war with or without your support,” Jovanović told them haughtily. “The materials you provided were our right to receive.”

  Donovan believed Churchill deserved no apology either over the OSS missions to Mihailović. Yugoslavia had caused a
serious rift between the two men. But it was not the only country in the region where they clashed.

  WHILE CHURCHILL TRIED to work with the communists in Yugoslavia he was fighting them in Greece. The prime minister, who wanted to restore the Greek monarchy, had become increasingly irritated with Donovan’s OSS aiding the royalists’ enemy, the leftist National Liberation Front and its People’s Liberation Army, known as the ELAS. Reflecting Roosevelt’s view, not to mention American pubic opinion, Donovan cared little about propping up Greece’s King George II and had sent his men to aid ELAS because their communist-led guerrillas, not the royalists, were doing most of the fighting against the Germans. The tension between Donovan and Churchill, however, reached a boiling point when the August 19, 1944, edition of the Washington Post hit the stands.

  Drew Pearson was the richest journalist in the United States, with more pipelines in Washington, so the joke went, than Standard Oil. The U.S. military looked for ways to block Pearson’s sources in the Pentagon but failed. Roosevelt detested Pearson and had once called him a liar. So did Churchill, who considered the newsman a bitter enemy of the United Kingdom after he published an article critical of British rule in India. Citing “uncensored diplomatic reports” as sources for his August 19 “Washington Merry-Go-Round” column in the Post, Pearson delivered a blistering attack against Churchill, who “insists on keeping King George of Greece on the throne, despite the opposition of a great majority of the Greek people.” While brave Americans were fighting the Nazis, Pearson charged, Churchill was conniving to save the British Empire and keep a royal crony in power. When aides showed the prime minister the column he flew into a rage. Churchill immediately suspected that Donovan, who shared Pearson’s contempt for British policy toward Greece, had planted the hostile story.

  Churchill had no proof, but reason to be suspicious. Pearson had written snide columns about the OSS, calling it the “Oh, so social” organization, and Donovan suspected he had a plant in his agency slipping him sensitive material, but Donovan also had his own pipeline to the columnist. Ernest Cuneo, Donovan’s liaison officer with the Roosevelt administration and the British, was a Pearson pal who regularly fed him scoops. When Donald Downes returned to Washington the year before, he told Cuneo the story circulating in Italy that Patton had slapped two soldiers in evacuation hospitals who were suffering from shell shock. Cuneo sent Downes to Pearson with the story, which he published later in November 1943, sparking a political firestorm for Patton as well as for Marshall and Eisenhower.

  Five days after Pearson’s column attacking him, Churchill sent a private telegram to Donovan. He asked General Walter Bedell “Beetle” Smith, Ike’s chief of staff, to deliver the note; he was sure that Smith would share its contents with Eisenhower and Marshall, which Beetle did. Churchill couched his incoming round for Donovan in sugary language. “I must tell you that there is very formidable trouble brewing in the Middle East against OSS, which is doing everything in its power to throw our policy towards Greece, for which we have been accorded the main responsibility, into confusion,” he wrote. “I grieve greatly to see that your name is brought into all this because of our agreeable acquaintance in the past. Drew Pearson’s article is a specimen of the kind of stuff that fits in with the campaign of the OSS against the British.” Churchill said he was about to cable FDR “when I realized that you were involved and in view of our association I should not like to put this matter on the highest level without asking you whether there is anything you can do to help.” If Donovan could not be of assistance in Britain’s Hellenic affairs then “the whole issue must be raised as between governments.” Translated: I know you leaked that story to Pearson. Don’t mess with me in Greece or I’ll have you crushed.

  Churchill’s threat was crystal clear to Beetle Smith, who moved quickly to put some distance between Eisenhower’s command and the spymaster. “I have forwarded your message on to Donovan,” he wrote the prime minister two days later, adding: “I have always been worried by his predilection for political intrigue, and have kept a firm hand on him when I could, so he keeps away from me as much as possible.”

  Churchill could not stem the chaos that followed after German troops evacuated Greece in October and British forces moved in. Civil war broke out between the royalists and communists by early December 1944. It took the British occupation force about two months to beat back the communists. From his OSS officers in Greece, who spied on the British as well as the Soviet agents in the country, Donovan filed regular reports to FDR on Churchill’s struggle to put the royalists on top. Churchill could be a bully when he wanted to, notorious for sacking military commanders so often it surprised even Hitler, who had fired a few in his day. The prime minister had even tried to browbeat senior American officers like Marshall and Admiral King. But in the Balkans, Donovan would not be intimidated.

  Chapter 27

  Stockholm

  DONOVAN SENT ROOSEVELT a warm note after he was reelected to an unprecedented fourth term on November 7. It “clearly shows the determination of the great majority of the American people to support you in the conduct of the war,” he wrote. And he meant it. Working for Roosevelt had its frustrations, but he could think of no Republican qualified to be commander-in-chief at this point—certainly not New York governor Thomas Dewey, whom he was privately glad FDR had defeated. Frenchy Grombach, who ran the G-2’s secret spy unit nicknamed the Pond, told his Army superiors Donovan was having a law partner slip Dewey classified information to “butter up” the governor in case he won. Grombach had no evidence to back up his charge. What was true was that three weeks before the election, Donovan had quietly passed to Roosevelt an analysis Elmo Roper had prepared for him of survey results. It showed Republicans had gained ground from public concerns over the president’s health, his choice of Harry Truman as his running mate, and his willingness to work with Stalin. Donovan also passed the survey reports to Bill Stephenson, who cabled them to London.

  By the fall, Mary Donovan’s name had begun to crop up more in the society columns, which gushed that the spy chief’s daughter-in-law was one of Washington’s “out-of-the-ordinary beauties.” Mary had moved into the Georgetown house with her daughter, Patricia, who was now three years old. With David at sea, farm life in Berryville had become insufferably dull compared to the limelight surrounding her father-in-law. Mary also now had a job in the capital. In early October, Donovan had hired her to be a clerk in the OSS secretariat and one of his personal assistants at a starting salary of $1,440 a year. She answered phones, took messages, booked appointments for him, and sometimes helped female agents overseas with personal problems. Occasionally, Mary also began traveling abroad with Donovan to handle secretarial chores.

  Gossip soon spread from Berryville to OSS and society circles in Washington that Donovan was having an affair with her. The same rumor circulated in Nonquitt, where neighbors noticed on several occasions that Donovan arrived there with Mary and they did not see Ruth in the summer home. Questions were whispered in Rumsey family circles: Had Donovan—who they knew enjoyed the pleasures of other women—taken his daughter-in-law as a lover? But no one had any proof, because there was none. Mary was twenty-seven years old and her father-in-law was now sixty-one. Their relationship was odd, and it would become more so over the years, but it was not sexual. Moreover, Ruth was practically as close to Mary as Donovan was. Never once did she even hint to family or friends suspicion that anything unusual was going on between her daughter-in-law and husband—whose philandering with other women Ruth knew full well.

  Donovan had enough rank in the military he could ignore the rumors, as well as complaints from some in the Pentagon of nepotism in his organization. After his reelection, Roosevelt promoted his spymaster to major general. Congratulations poured in from other flag officers who had treated him warily in the past, such as Omar Bradley and Beetle Smith. He was now moving up the ladder in their exclusive club. His pay increased to $10,200, which he needed. Soon he had a new Cadillac to d
rive around Washington, with license plates displaying the two stars for his new rank. Donovan also requisitioned an M1 .30-caliber rifle with ten clips of ammunition. He planned to keep it at his side during overseas trips.

  AFTER GERMAN DEFEATS on the Russian front in the spring of 1944, Hungary, Bulgaria, and Romania looked for the exit doors. But as all three countries tried to pull out of the Axis alliance, the Red Army moved in. Donovan wanted to maintain good relations with Fitin, hoping it would grease the way for OSS teams to remain in the Balkan and Eastern European nations coming under Russian control so his spies could continue snooping on the Germans—and the Soviets replacing them. The NKGB general was still eager for OSS technology and intelligence reports so he continued to exchange information with Donovan and help him find downed pilots and missing agents in the territory the Soviets occupied.

  Romania became what OSS officers called a “dry run” for how they planned to spy under Stalin’s nose in the region. Just before Soviet divisions arrived in late August, Donovan rushed in Frank Wisner, who had cleaned up his Turkey station, with an OSS team that eventually retrieved 1,350 Allied airmen and nearly a ton of German documents. Wisner’s men passed out cigarettes to Russian soldiers, presented a matched pen and pencil set to one of their generals, and traded intelligence reports with NKGB agents, whose numbers in Bucharest swelled to 1,200 by November. A month after his arrival, Wisner reported to Donovan that he thought the team’s rescue work and cooperation with the Russians had provided good cover to spy on the Red Army.