The White House became deathly silent on Donovan’s plan and its leak. Delighted, Hoover cabled the Tribune stories to his agents in the field. Donovan, meanwhile, worried about international fallout from the leak. German propaganda had a field day, accusing him of conspiring to set up “a net of Jewish informers” to spy on “good neighbors throughout the world” with a plan that leaves “even the most hard-boiled gangsters of New York and Chicago wondering.” Cables went out to OSS stations abroad to be on the lookout for foreign reaction. The French remained silent while some British intelligence officers refused to send their OSS cousins classified documents for fear they could not keep them secret. London privately worried Donovan would not recover. Trohan’s “characteristic piece of misreporting,” a confidential Foreign Office note warned, “shows what opposition there is going to be to any extension of war agencies into peacetime.”
Donovan began a massive investigation to uncover how the classified documents ended up in Trohan’s hands. It was evident from the rapid-fire series of hostile articles that “the disclosure was no mere leak but a deliberate plan to sabotage any attempt at reorganization of this government’s intelligence services,” Donovan angrily wrote Roosevelt. And it was also crystal clear that this was “an inside job,” he added. Ole Doering had not come up with a culprit three hours after Donovan’s 6 a.m. call but he believed it had to be Hoover. He couldn’t prove it but he thought the signs certainly pointed to the FBI director. The month before, a Navy source had tipped him off that Edward Tamm, Hoover’s deputy, had used such vile language denouncing Donovan and his intelligence plan at a Pentagon meeting that the note taker decided not to record what he said.
To try to narrow the universe of leakers, the Pentagon and OSS security officers began the painstaking exercise of tracking down everyone who had been given copies of Donovan’s November 18 memo to Roosevelt with its draft executive order or the intelligence plan the Joint Chiefs had drafted. Donovan scribbled on pads at his desk the names of staffers in his own organization and officials in other agencies who had seen the documents. It turned out to be a large universe. Nearly eighty copies had been made of Donovan’s memo, which had been seen by more than two hundred people, while some 175 had seen nearly fifty copies of the Joint Chiefs’ plan. Donovan could account for the memos in his own agency so he was pretty sure the leak did not come from there. But when the security officers did a word-by-word review of the Times-Herald stories they came up with an important clue. Trohan had printed copies the Joint Chiefs’ aides had made of Donovan’s memo, which contained a few minor word changes from the original version sent out by his agency. That meant the leak had come from the Pentagon or from another agency that had received a Pentagon copy of Donovan’s memo.
Donovan had plenty of enemies in the military like Bissell who wanted to sink his plan. But Hoover hated him, his plan, and the military’s alternative the most. The FBI was not on the original military distribution list, but Doering, whom Donovan had sent to the Pentagon in early March to scour its records, discovered that Hoover’s agents had gotten copies of the two documents there. Hoover hotly denied he was the leaker and claimed that the FBI had returned its copies of the two documents to the Pentagon on February 17. But there was some question whether the bureau actually did. Tamm confessed to Hoover in a later internal memo on March 13 that the FBI’s records section had never been able to find the two documents.
Donovan was now convinced that Hoover was guilty. He demanded that the Pentagon launch a full-scale criminal probe. The leak “strikes at the heart of military security,” he told the Joint Chiefs. But the only agency with the authority to conduct a criminal investigation was the Justice Department and its FBI—Donovan’s enemies. So many people had access to the documents it was impossible to determine how they got out. The Pentagon managed to retrieve all but one set of memos, which had been checked out by the Joint Intelligence Staff, but a copy of a copy could have been made and slipped to Trohan so accounting for the originals was no help. The Pentagon eventually abandoned its inquiry. It left Donovan bitter. He confronted Trohan at a later Gridiron dinner and accused him of aiding and abetting the enemy.
But who leaked the material? Many years later, Trohan told a CIA historian that it was not Hoover. None other than Franklin Roosevelt had leaked the memos. Trohan claimed that Steve Early, the White House press secretary, had given him the Donovan and Pentagon documents and told him FDR “wanted the story out.” Roosevelt had grown distant from Donovan, Trohan said, and along with Hopkins did not want the Republican taking on a prominent position in the postwar administration. So in one of the most Machiavellian maneuvers a White House could make, FDR and Hopkins decided to leak Donovan’s proposal to the McCormick-Patterson papers to kill it. Early had always been friendly with Trohan and the crafty Roosevelt knew that no one would ever suspect him of leaking the documents if they appeared in a newspaper chain that was his political enemy.
Trohan wasn’t the first reporter to lie about the identity of a source and in this case he likely did to the CIA. It would take a monumental effort on Roosevelt’s part to overcome his visceral hatred for Robert McCormick and Cissy Patterson and leak secret documents to their newspaper chain, which would end up painting him as a power-hungry politician intent on establishing an American Gestapo. It also defied credulity that Roosevelt would engineer to have a story damaging to him as well as to Donovan come out as he was immersed in sensitive talks at Yalta. Moreover, there was no record of Roosevelt, Hopkins, or Early receiving the Joint Chiefs’ copy of the documents, which Trohan printed. Donovan had sent the White House his original version, which the reporter did not have. The biggest hole in Trohan’s cover story, however, was that at the time he claimed he received the documents in Washington from Early, the press secretary was five thousand miles away with Hopkins and Roosevelt in Yalta. Though he tried to keep the relationship secret, Trohan had long been close to Hoover. The two had done favors for each other over the years. FBI agents had fed Trohan stories and considered him a bureau loyalist. The odds that Hoover was the leaker were high.
But neither Donovan nor anyone else who investigated the case could ever be sure. By the end of March, however, the question became moot even for Donovan. Marshall and the other service chiefs decided that with all the negative publicity it was best to shelve consideration of a future central intelligence agency for now. Roosevelt, who had remained silent throughout the controversy, agreed. Exhausted from his Yalta trip and preoccupied with the speech he had to give before Congress justifying the conference’s result, FDR had ignored Donovan’s memos complaining about Trohan. He made a point of acknowledging a gold cigarette case one of Donovan’s officers had delivered as a gift from the regent of Thailand, but he said nothing to his spy chief about the leak. Harold Smith, meanwhile, moved quickly to take control. He sent Roosevelt a memo letting him know that the Budget Bureau was working on a “comprehensive study” of a future intelligence system. Smith advised his boss not to commit to Donovan’s scheme or anyone else’s until his number crunchers had sorted out the “tug-of-war going on between some of the agencies.” Roosevelt agreed.
DONOVAN LUNCHED WITH Roosevelt at the White House on March 15. He was horrified at how feeble and exhausted the president appeared. Roosevelt had lost weight and showed no appetite for their meal. “He looks like he is on his last leg,” Donovan later told Putzell. The two men did not discuss the Trohan leak or Donovan’s CIA plan. Most of the lunch was spent with small talk. Donovan told Roosevelt of his plans to fly to Europe to organize OSS operations in the areas of Germany the Allies occupied or soon would occupy. The agency intended to have a large mission in Berlin once the Russians captured the city. Roosevelt planned to take the train down to Warm Springs, Georgia, for a much needed rest. After that, he said, he was looking forward to the first organizing conference of the new United Nations, which would be held in San Francisco. He planned to attend. After he retired, he told friends, he even wanted to b
e secretary-general of the world body one day. Donovan planned to go to the U.N. conference as well, along with a large delegation of more than eighty OSS officers. His Presentation Branch and foreign experts in William Langer’s research department had been assigned to help the State Department with displays and position papers. Donovan’s graphics shop had even designed the United Nations emblem. The mission of others in Donovan’s party, however, was quietly to spy on the foreign delegations attending the conference and look for informants to recruit among them—which made the State Department nervous. This was supposed to be a diplomatic meeting to chart an enduring peace and Stettinius did not want its atmosphere fouled with a large OSS contingent the other delegations were sure to suspect was snooping on them. The Russians, assuming Donovan was up to no good, did object to the large contingent he wanted to bring to San Francisco, so he had to scale back his group.
Before he boarded his plane for Europe on April 6, Donovan deftly engineered a last gasp for his central intelligence agency plan. He got Isadore Lubin, one of his staunchest allies in the White House, to breach the wall Harold Smith thought he had firmly erected around Roosevelt to prevent anyone from foisting an intelligence proposal on the president. On April 4, Lubin rushed a memo to Warm Springs, where Roosevelt was now resting, which Donovan had helped him draft. Donovan’s central intelligence idea “has stalled” in the Pentagon, Lubin wrote FDR. “Personally, I think that this is the time to have a definite plan formulated. The difficulty seems to lie in the fear of certain agencies of the government that they will not be permitted to play their part in the proposed setup.” Why not have all the agencies come together for “a frank, across-the-table discussion” of Donovan’s plan, Lubin suggested. He was sure their differences could be resolved. Lubin attached to his note the draft for a memo to Donovan—which Donovan also helped Lubin write—ordering the OSS director to call together the one dozen intelligence agencies in the U.S. government, ask for their suggestions on how a centralized service might be set up, and reach “a consensus of opinion” from them on a new agency. Roosevelt signed the order.
Even in a town where skilled bureaucratic fighters never let an issue die, this was a brassy move. The twelve agencies had already reached consensus the previous winter and that consensus was anything but Donovan’s plan. But Roosevelt was giving him a second chance. Donovan phoned Grace Tully in Warm Springs to make sure the president’s order was rushed back in the April 5 pouch to the White House. The next day, he dashed off letters to the twelve cabinet departments and executive agencies with a copy of FDR’s order attached, notifying them that after he received their opinions on his intelligence plan he would gather them together to hammer out an agreement, as the president wanted. Donovan boarded his flight for London that night confident he still had a fighting chance for his intelligence agency when he returned to Washington on April 25—particularly with Franklin Roosevelt in the White House to back him up.
Chapter 30
Harry Truman
AS DONOVAN SETTLED into his suite at Claridge’s Saturday evening, April 7, eight American, British, and Canadian armies raced toward the River Elbe west of Berlin. The Red Army prepared to jump across the Oder east of the German capital. Wehrmacht forces were now in such a confused state, Allied intelligence knew their positions on the battlefield better than German generals did. Dulles cabled to Washington regular reports from his informants on Hitler’s eleventh-hour moves to shore up his crumbling lines. An OSS source in Berlin reported that “supplies of bread and potatoes are virtually exhausted” sparking food riots, while “conditions in the hospitals are hopeless” with no medicines to treat the sick or injured. “People’s nerves are at an end,” the agent noted. “Hysterical outbursts over trifling incidents are common.”
Donovan transformed one floor of the London hotel into a command post. Rooms were set aside for secretaries, staff officers, and clattering typewriters, closets were stuffed with classified documents, and aides scurried into the suites twenty-four hours a day with reports and cables. The spy chief held round after round of meetings with his OSS team and with Menzies and his top MI6 officers to plot operations in Europe after the war. Donovan had twenty-one more intelligence missions being launched into the central slice of Germany that Hitler still controlled. To uncover Gestapo officers trying to blend in with civilians in the parts of Germany the Allies controlled, Donovan told aides he wanted to send out teams of French, Danish, Norwegian, and Polish nationals who had been tortured by the goons and survived. They would remember their faces.
Donovan was eager for practically any new mission launched into Germany. But he began to have second thoughts about one of the projects his aides briefed to him at Claridge’s. Its code name was “Cross.” Among the many resistance factions fighting the German occupation of France had been the communist-leaning German nationals of CALPO (for the Comité de l’Allemagne Libre pour l’Ouest or Free Germany Committee for the West). They were political refugees or Wehrmacht deserters. The OSS found them to be capable and courageous operatives. In February Donovan’s special operations officers began training one hundred of the CALPO guerrillas to take their subversive war back to the Fatherland for the Cross Project. Once in the field, the Cross agents were promised what at the time was the princely sum of $200 a month. They were to carry out sabotage missions against Nazi strongholds in southern Germany including Hitler’s retreat at Berchtesgaden. But the other mission Donovan had assigned the Cross team was assassinations. Their targets: Hitler, Himmler, Göring, and the other top Nazis, along with every Gestapo official or SS and SD officer with a rank of major or higher. One memo to Eisenhower termed them “organized killings.” High-paid death squads would roam Germany looking for Hitler and his henchmen. The Cross teams received detailed briefings on who to pick as their prey; anyone wearing the “Golden Party Badge, the Order of Blood medal, the Guerrilla Warfare medal, or SS number lower than 125,000 should be disposed of without formality,” one secret memo advised—in other words, executed on the spot.
Twenty-two assassins had been trained by the time Donovan received his final briefing at Claridge’s. A top secret memo had been delivered to Ike asking for his approval. But as he sat in his suite and mulled the full scope of Cross, Donovan got cold feet. He had the good sense to realize that at this late stage of the war, launching a “wholesale assassination” program “would invite only trouble for the OSS,” as he told his staff. Top Nazis such as Hitler and Göring were more valuable alive and brought to trial. Donovan canceled the execution plan. The Cross teams could be sent out for sabotage missions and if they ran across German leaders they should kidnap them, he instead ordered. Bad weather, however, delayed airdrops for Cross before the war ended so Donovan eventually scrubbed the sabotage and kidnap missions.
WEDNESDAY, APRIL 11, was busy at the Little White House in Warm Springs. Roosevelt endured another sitting with Madame Elizabeth Shoumatoff for his watercolor portrait that left his neck stiff. He settled on his schedule for the next week, dictated his Jefferson Day speech, took a long drive through the rural hill country, and met with Henry Morgenthau, who dropped by to lobby once more for Germany being broken up into small agricultural states after the war. The secretaries who traveled south with the president thought he did not look as deathly feeble as when he first arrived at the west Georgia retreat on March 30. He had even gained a few pounds. But his blood pressure remained dangerously high and his enlarged heart strained to keep pumping.
Buxton had three OSS memos pouched to Warm Springs by Wednesday so Grace Tully could place them in Roosevelt’s overflowing in-box. Over the four years, Donovan or his senior aides had sent Roosevelt 7,500 pages of memos, cables, reports, and studies. One document now in the in-box updated Roosevelt on a surrender offer Dulles was negotiating. Karl Wolff, the Waffen SS chief for Italy, and Heinrich von Vietinghoff, who had replaced Kesselring as overall military commander, were proposing to surrender the hundreds of thousands of German soldiers who st
ill occupied northern Italy. “Wolff recognizes the futility of further fighting,” Dulles reported in the memo sent to Roosevelt. All that remained was haggling over the details. The two German generals had agreed to the Allied demand for unconditional surrender, Dulles cabled, but they wanted the language in the final document they signed “dressed up” so it looked like they had capitulated with “military honor.”
The OSS had given the secret talks the code name “Sunrise.” The first peace feeler had arrived in November 1944 and Wolff finally met Dulles secretly in his Bern apartment on March 8 to begin serious talks. Dulles believed the SS general was “probably the most dynamic personality in North Italy,” as he wrote in one top secret memo to Donovan. Wolff was also a war criminal, complicit in the extermination of 300,000 Jews, who calculated that successful surrender negotiations would save Germany’s Army Group C—and his skin. But there were delays on the German side while indecision gripped Washington and London. The Soviets were informed of the Wolff contacts but not brought into the early negotiations. Stalin complained that the Germans were exploiting the lengthy talks to move three divisions from northern Italy to the Eastern Front and demanded that they be broken off. Fearing Sunrise seriously undermined relations with Moscow, Churchill at one point succeeded in having the operation suspended. Not until April 29 was a surrender finally signed in Caserta. It went into effect May 2, five days before all German forces gave up.
Wild Bill Donovan Page 38