Wild Bill Donovan

by Douglas Waller

  There was another even more sensitive secret in her case that eventually Donovan wanted to keep hidden—not from the Nazis, but from the press corps. The reason Legendre and her comrades had been captured was because they had been out on a joy ride. In the bar at Paris’s Ritz Hotel several days before October 26, Legendre and Jennings had decided as a lark to drive to the 3rd Army headquarters just outside Wallendorf. George Patton was a friend of Legendre’s and she wanted to catch up. Legendre and Jennings made it as far as Luxembourg, where their Peugeot broke down, and then hitched a ride with Papurt to Wallendorf, where he said he had business to attend to at Patton’s command post. All three cavalierly ignored the fact that the area around Wallendorf was still infested with Germans.

  Major Papurt died on November 29 when a bomb from an Allied air raid struck his prison camp. Private Dickson, of no value to German intelligence, was sent to a POW camp. Wehrmacht officers rigorously interrogated Lieutenant Commander Jennings but he managed to convince them he was simply a naval observer, so he was packed off to a dreary Stalag as well. For Gertrude Legendre, however, being a POW turned out to be a delightful excursion. The Germans moved her from prison to prison. One was a baroque seventeenth-century castle, another a comfortable room in a hotel. She befriended her guards, who sometimes brought her beer, cognac, and apple strudel. When a Gestapo interrogator asked her what OSS stood for, she chirped: “God, I haven’t the slightest idea. Probably Office of Social Club or something.” Legendre’s questioners soon lost interest in her. Convinced a German surrender could not be far off, one interrogator toward the end of March 1945 had a guard dump her near the Swiss border. Dulles eventually retrieved Legendre and ordered her not to talk to the press because Dickson and Jennings had not been recovered. Dulles also found a note sewn in the lining of her raincoat from the guards at her last prison wishing her well.

  When counterintelligence officers in London learned of the friendly German note they sent a for-your-eyes-only cable to Donovan questioning whether Legendre had been turned into a double agent or at best a propaganda pawn for German intelligence. Donovan knew she was neither, but he ordered her hustled back to the States and kept under wraps. “She is to give no interviews, make no statements and remain completely silent in getting from Switzerland to Washington,” Donovan cabled Dulles on March 27. By then he knew the real story behind the Legendre party’s capture and he was furious.

  When Legendre finally reached Washington the first week of April 1945, Donovan personally moved to bury the fiasco in a deep hole. He sat her down in his office and dictated to her the cover story she would continue to keep if anyone asked. She was a Red Cross volunteer for the Allied Club. Otherwise, she shuts up. Donovan ordered Legendre to go underground. Because she was a civilian, Donovan could not bring military charges against her for the escapade and even if he could it would have leaked to the press because Legendre was now a celebrity. New York gossip columns already were reporting she had returned. Donovan had to treat Legendre with kid gloves. But he had to keep her quiet. When his security officers discovered she had brought back a long diary written during her imprisonment, they impounded it and ordered it not returned to her until after the war.

  Lieutenant Commander Jennings was subject to military law and after he was freed on March 28, 1945, by Allied troops liberating his POW camp, Donovan lowered the boom on him. When Jennings arrived back in Washington, Donovan treated him like a sailor who had deserted his station. He placed him under house arrest and ordered that no one talk to him and that he not be allowed to set foot inside OSS headquarters. Not only did he kick Jennings out of his agency, he ordered him drummed out of the Navy. “He was absent without leave and had no orders whatever permitting him to make [that] trip,” Donovan angrily wrote. “His action exposed [the] OSS to great criticism and discredit.”

  AFTER PARIS, Donovan flew to Cairo and Caserta before heading east to Asia. He caught another nasty flu bug in Italy, which this time put him in the Army infirmary in Caserta for several days. But his doctor still could not keep OSS officers from surrounding his bed for business. Vincent Scamporino, the former Connecticut lawyer who was now his chief of secret intelligence for Italy, arrived from Rome. “Scamp,” as everyone called him, was in his late thirties with a dark complexion and a heavy beard that he had to shave twice a day. His winning smile, however, masked a fierce determination to keep Washington meddlers out of his hair while he built up his Italian network. As the Germans evacuated north the OSS had harvested thousands of Italian documents on the Axis. By the time Donovan arrived, Scamporino had nearly thirty informants in the top echelons of the new Italian government. Propped up in his hospital bed, Donovan told Scamp he wanted him to manage the alliance the OSS had set up with the SIM, Italy’s military intelligence service, to spy on both the Axis and the Russians for the agency. Scamporino questioned whether it was proper, or even legal, for the OSS to be using military agents who had been on Mussolini’s payroll. Donovan had no qualms. “The British have been using SIM for six months,” he said.

  Donovan recovered enough from the flu to make a side trip to Rome and meet with a young counterintelligence officer who had become a rising star in his organization. Only twenty-eight years old, James Jesus Angleton already had enough quirks for a man twice his age. He chain-smoked, spoke with a slight British accent, was a chronic insomniac, quoted T. S. Eliot to relax, refused to sit beside a colleague in a restaurant booth, struck his OSS friends as overly secretive even for their profession, could be irrationally paranoid about communists, and liked to prowl Rome’s streets in a black cape. After graduating with poor grades from Yale, Angleton joined the OSS and was sent to London as a counterintelligence corporal. From his first day in the London station, Angleton was a human tornado, quickly learning street skills for spy catching. Within six months he was commissioned a second lieutenant and by October 1944 he had been transferred to Rome to clean up counterintelligence operations in Italy, using the code name “Artifice.”

  By the time Donovan met with him that January, Angleton had set himself up in Rome’s five-star hotel district off Via Veneto with an impressive network of moles in Italy’s spy services. Though he had exchanged only a few words with Donovan during the director’s previous swings through London and Rome, Angleton, like most field agents, worshipped the ground he walked on. Donovan, too, was impressed with the moles Artifice had cultivated and the fact that he also seemed to have a well-grounded skepticism of foreigners who walked in bearing gifts of secrets.

  BUT WITH THE new year, Donovan could see that the European war was reaching its end, which was the reason his plane flew from the Mediterranean to the Far East the first week in January. His future battles would be there, he believed. Since he waded ashore at Hollandia the previous April, the Marines had taken Saipan, Tinian, and Guam. MacArthur had returned to the Philippines and U.S. strategy had shifted to launching large Navy and ground amphibious operations against the outlying Japanese islands, the assault on Iwo Jima and Okinawa the most important ones to come. From mid-January until the first week of February 1945, Donovan toured his outposts scattered in the Burma-China theater, still the only place in Asia his covert forces were allowed to fight. But China remained a troubled land for the OSS. Even after Donovan fired Mary Miles and won what he thought were concessions from Tai Li to allow the OSS more independence, progress on the mainland remained slow. Tai Li still restricted his agency’s operations. When he arrived in Chiang’s military headquarters in mid-January, the OSS was only beginning to assemble a viable intelligence and commando operation. Two precious years had been wasted squabbling with the Chinese.

  Consumed with clearing the thicket in Chungking, Donovan had paid only scant attention to a cable that arrived the second week in January from the Washington headquarters. Charles Cheston was letting him know that he planned to send Roosevelt a report from an important informant the OSS now had deep in the Vatican. The source had been given the code name “Vessel” and Chest
on was sure his latest report would interest the president. It was a snippet of a private conversation Pope Pius had a month earlier with Father Norbert de Boyne, his vicar general of the Jesuits. The two men were mulling the possibility of the Vatican mediating a peace agreement between Japan and the Allies. Pius, according to the Vessel report, asked his Tokyo envoy to find out how receptive the Japanese government would be to laying down its arms “before determining whether our intervention is opportune.” A pope interested in peace talks was not headline news, but what was startling was the fact that Roosevelt was reading parts of a verbatim transcript from a meeting in the Vatican, one of the most impenetrable institutions in the world where private papal conversations rarely seep out.

  In November 1944, a Russian émigré named Dubinin had approached Scamporino in Rome with an offer to sell transcripts of papal meetings that were being supplied to him by a well-placed official inside the Vatican. Since Donovan cleaned house, OSS operatives in Italy were under pressure to produce. Scamporino wanted to show results. Through the Vatican passed international gossip and power brokering at the highest level. Vessel’s pipeline to what went on behind its walls could be priceless. Shortly after the Russian approached Scamporino, an Italian named Fillippo Setaccioli offered the identical material from what appeared to be the same Vatican source to Angleton, who was just as eager to please Donovan. Because of distrust and bureaucratic rivalry between them, Scamporino refused to cede control of Vessel to Angleton and have his reports come through just Setaccioli. The Rome station ended up paying two intermediaries for the same intelligence.

  In any other case the double billing would have been considered a waste of money except that the reports the OSS was receiving from Vessel were spectacular. This mysterious source in the Vatican—neither Scamporino nor Angleton at first knew his name—was revealing intelligence the pope had on Roosevelt’s upcoming Yalta summit with Churchill and Stalin, a peace offer Japanese industrialists were pressuring their military to make, the damage a B-29 air raid had inflicted on an Osaka armored car plant. Donovan had been only mildly impressed when Scamporino and Angleton briefed him on Vessel during his stopover in Italy; it looked promising yet there were many promising sources coming out of Rome. But while he toured Asia, Vessel began attracting high-level attention in his Washington headquarters. The Vatican source “offers great promise,” John Magruder, Donovan’s senior deputy for intelligence, cabled Scamporino—almost too good to be true. How credible is Vessel? Magruder asked. Scamporino admitted that he was obtaining the reports through a cutout but he rated them “very reliable.” So did Angleton. Donovan’s Reporting Board, a panel of experts that evaluated intelligence from overseas stations, also pronounced the Vatican reports sound enough to pass around. The Vessel cables were assigned a special “Control-Secret” classification so they were at first delivered only to FDR and a select group of his senior officials.

  By the second week of January, a half dozen Vatican reports landed on Magruder’s desk each day. Vessel provided a pessimistic telegram from the pope’s Madrid envoy on the political health of the Franco regime in Spain, details on Japanese shipbuilding, and the location of her key war vessels. As Roosevelt prepared for his conference at the Crimean resort city of Yalta with Churchill and Stalin to decide the partition of postwar Europe and the final offensive against Japan, Buxton and Cheston rushed two Vessel reports to his desk with what they thought were explosive diplomatic revelations. The Vatican’s Tokyo envoy, according to the OSS source, had received the “minimum demands” from the Japanese government “for a negotiated peace” with the Allies, which included her army’s withdrawal from China and most other occupied territories in exchange for U.S. recognition of “Japan’s privileged position in the Far East.” Just as significant, Vessel reported, the emperor had been informed on January 10 that unofficial Japanese intermediaries had been trying to arrange a papal mediation of the war and “the Emperor did not express any disapproval of these efforts.” On January 20, Magruder cabled a list of Vessel’s revealing intelligence on Japan’s recent war losses to Donovan, who was visiting Detachment 101’s Nazira base camp in East India. Donovan was impressed with what he read and ordered the Asia material delivered to Nimitz in Hawaii.

  Roosevelt sailed on the USS Quincy for the Crimea on January 25, intent on having Stalin join the war in the Pacific against Japan. Vessel revealed that Ken Harada, Japan’s Vatican ambassador, had told Pius’s private secretary the Kremlin had secretly assured Tokyo that at the Yalta conference “Russia will continue to define Japan as [the] aggressor but will not go beyond this” and declare war. Instead, Vessel disclosed that Moscow and Tokyo were negotiating a private agreement to continue their nonaggression pact in exchange for Japan breaking with Germany and removing “all anti-communist controls” in her country. Roosevelt was beginning to find the Vessel reports “most interesting,” Grace Tully, his White House secretary, told the OSS.

  But how much credence FDR gave the Vatican reports, Magruder did not know. For that matter, he and other officers in headquarters were still unsure about how much faith they should have in Vessel. Scamporino was now dealing directly with his prized source. Vessel was Virgilio Scattolini, a short, fat, timid man with a sallow face and a slight twitch in one arm, who stuttered somewhat when he spoke. A former journalist, Scattolini claimed he worked for a Vatican agency that gave him access to the sensitive documents. Scamporino was still convinced the material was authentic, but he told Washington there was an easy way to establish Scattolini’s bona fides. Vessel had also reported on diplomatic positions the White House had told the Vatican that Roosevelt would take at Yalta and on conversations Myron Taylor, the U.S. envoy at the Vatican, had with Pius on papal mediation in the Pacific war. They would certainly know whether Vessel’s reports on their diplomatic moves were accurate. But verification was easier said than done. Roosevelt, who was too busy with Yalta to be vetting an OSS source, raised no red flags about the reports mentioning him. Donovan’s officers in Rome and Washington, meanwhile, could not get a straight answer from Taylor or other White House and State Department officials on whether Vessel’s intelligence on them was correct.

  But by the time Donovan returned to Washington the first week of February, other government agencies had begun to raise questions about Vessel’s veracity. Two days before the Yalta conference began on February 4, Scattolini claimed Tokyo had told the Vatican that Stalin definitely would not abrogate Russia’s nonaggression treaty with Japan and would pressure Churchill and Roosevelt to negotiate a peace treaty in the Pacific. The Army’s military intelligence section dismissed the Vessel report as nothing more than “straight propaganda” the Japanese must be planting with the OSS to sow dissent among the Allies.

  The warning shot from the G-2 should have made Donovan more wary of Vessel, but it did not. He remained an eager customer for Scattolini’s wares. On February 9, another Vessel report arrived claiming Taylor had met with Harada, who declared that if the Americans and British offered “acceptable” peace terms Japan might agree to them. Taylor, according to Vessel’s report, reminded Harada that Americans had not forgotten Pearl Harbor, but he said he would ask Washington if it was interested in negotiations. A peace feeler from a senior Japanese envoy was big news. At the very least, Vessel’s report indicated that a secret meeting between Taylor and Harada had been leaked to the Vatican. Donovan should have checked Scattolini’s story first with Taylor, a former U.S. Steel executive who was close to FDR and a favorite of Pius’s. Instead, he rashly cabled the unverified report on February 16 to Roosevelt, who was sailing to Algiers after the Yalta conference.

  It was a foolish move for Donovan, who should have been paying more attention to the misgivings his aides had begun having. The day before he sent FDR the Vessel report on Taylor, Scamporino had warned him that the enterprising Scattolini appeared to be selling his documents to several other governments, some of which were likely leaking them to the enemy. Magruder realized that th
e Italian’s intelligence on secret Soviet-Japanese peace negotiations did not square with the facts. Stalin at Yalta had agreed to join the Pacific war two to three months after Germany was defeated. The Vessel material, Magruder wrote Scamporino on February 17, seems to be “a mixture of the obvious, the unimportant if true, and plants” by the enemy. Magruder, for the moment, stopped distributing Vessel reports, which was a good idea. When the State Department received Donovan’s surprising news that its Vatican envoy had conferred with the Japanese ambassador on peace negotiations, James Dunn, the assistant secretary for European affairs, immediately fired off a telegram to Taylor asking what in the world he was doing. Dunn sent Donovan Taylor’s reply: Not only had he not talked to Harada, he had never met the man. The evidence was now clear, Magruder cabled Scamporino. Vessel has “manufactured” intelligence “out of whole cloth.”

  Donovan sent a disingenuous “Dear Jimmie” letter to Dunn pretending to be one of the skeptics all along. Dunn’s news that Vessel had fabricated the Taylor-Harada meeting merely “confirmed . . . our suspicions of the source of this material,” he claimed. That was hardly the case. Donovan, Scamporino, Angleton, and everyone else in his agency had been conned by Vessel. If the OSS had done its homework it would have discovered that transcripts were never made of the audiences Pius had with visitors. Suspecting the Italian might be fabricating reports because he was an Axis agent trying to confuse the Americans, Donovan kept Scattolini on the payroll and Angleton plotted ways he might feed Vessel disinformation to pass on to the enemy. Holding out hope that Scattolini’s Asia information might still be reliable, Donovan also continued to send occasional Vessel reports to Roosevelt on peace feelers from Tokyo.