Wild Bill Donovan

by Douglas Waller

  Those five days saved hundreds, perhaps thousands, of lives. But they came at the price of further straining U.S. relations with the Russians, who remained indignant at being cut out of the operation. Donovan considered it one of the most successful diplomatic missions his agency carried out.

  DONOVAN FLEW TO Paris on Thursday evening, April 12. He had stored among the classified documents packed in the plane’s cargo hold a piece of war booty he planned to take back to Washington. Among the hundreds of subjects he dealt with during his London meetings was the disposal of the Abyssinian Treasure Trove, found after the Allies liberated Ethiopia in 1941. Donovan ordered all of the artifacts returned to Emperor Haile Selassie, who had been restored to power. But he decided to take home one item he knew Selassie did not want—a silver casket containing the baton of the hated Marshal Rodolfo Graziani, who had brutally ruled Ethiopia at one point during the Italian occupation.

  Donovan settled his traveling headquarters into a suite Hermann Göring once occupied at the Ritz Hotel. He planned to breakfast with Casey the next morning for an update on his penetrations into Germany. He went to bed not knowing the momentous news Steve Early had released to the press in Washington at 5:48 p.m., which was almost midnight Paris time.

  Early the next morning, Donovan was shaving in the bathroom when Russell Forgan, his London counterintelligence chief, rushed into the suite with the news bulletin that the sixty-three-year-old president had died of a massive cerebral hemorrhage Thursday afternoon at Warm Springs. Donovan raced out of the bathroom, wiping the shaving cream off his face with a towel, and told Forgan to get him an open line to Washington. He then dashed off a condolence cable to Eleanor—so sorry, he wrote, for the “crushing loss” she and the nation have suffered. It came from the heart. Back in Washington, many staffers at OSS headquarters were in tears, grief-stricken like the rest of country. “We felt the end of the world had come,” recalled Margaret Tibbetts, a research analyst covering Great Britain.

  For three hours, Donovan sat on the edge of the bed in his Paris suite, his elbows propped on his knees, his head slumped down. Some of the time he just talked to himself, or when Forgan, Casey, and other officers walked into the bedroom he looked up and pondered the loss with them. “This is the most terrible news I’ve ever had,” he said at one point. Roosevelt was the last person protecting his agency. Donovan hardly knew Truman. It probably means, he told his aides, that their dream of a postwar central intelligence service has died as well.

  BY MAY 1, the Red Army occupied practically all of Berlin. British forces neared Lubeck and Hamburg while the U.S. armies stood at the Elbe and Mulde Rivers and, to the south, moved into Austria. That Tuesday evening, Ruth had brought a rib roast from Chapel Hill to their Georgetown home for a dinner party Donovan was throwing in honor of Victor Cavendish-Bentinck, who chaired Britain’s Joint Intelligence Committee. After dessert, cars took the group of more than a dozen American and British intelligence officers to OSS headquarters where they watched a movie in the basement theater. Ruth found the musical boring. But midway through the show, Donovan ordered the projectionist to halt the film. An aide had just passed him a news bulletin from Hamburg radio. Hitler was dead. With the fighting drawing near to his Berlin Führerbunker, Hitler married his mistress, Eva Braun, on April 29 and the two committed suicide the next day. Their bodies were burned but the remains later found by the Soviets. Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz, whom Hitler had appointed to succeed him as head of state, announced that “the struggle against the Bolsheviks” would continue and exhorted every German soldier to “do your duty!”

  The final days of the Axis leaders had been on Donovan’s mind lately. He read with interest grisly details in the autopsy report for Mussolini, whom Italian partisans had captured and executed on April 28. Il Duce’s head had been beaten and shot so many times his face was “almost unrecognizable,” the report noted. Donovan had earlier ordered Dulles to have an agent search Munich’s police headquarters, where he knew Hitler’s fingerprints were on file when he had to register there as a nonresident in 1921—just in case the dictator sent an impostor out to be captured while he fled. He later gave Pavel Fitin, the Russian intelligence chief, Hitler’s dental records to help the Soviets identify the corpse. OSS counterintelligence officers had gotten their hands on the chart when they captured the führer’s personal SS dentist in April.

  The projectionist did not restart the film after Donovan read the news report. Everyone stood up. A few shook hands. Then silently they filed out of the theater and climbed into their cars for home and bed—a feeling of both relief and exhaustion overpowering them all.

  Donovan was in a more festive mood after Dönitz signed the unconditional surrender of all German forces at Eisenhower’s Rheims headquarters on May 7. At a raucous private dinner at New York’s St. Regis Hotel with Bill Stephenson, the two men shouted toasts and danced about like bears in triumph. Donovan had had his squabbles with the British, but he realized full well the contribution they had made to his organization.

  DONOVAN HAD RETURNED to Washington from his Europe trip two weeks after Roosevelt died. His most important task now was developing some type of relationship with Harry Truman. Like many FDR aides and Washington political pundits, Donovan thought the Missourian was a provincial politician unqualified to be president. Truman, in fact, had assumed the nation’s highest office unprepared for it, but he was not cowed by the tremendous responsibility dumped into his lap. An internationalist, he had read a lot about foreign affairs before joining the administration. Once he solved his immediate transition problems, “there’ll be no more to this job,” he wrote his wife, Bess, “than there was to running Jackson County,” Missouri, when he was its commissioner. Truman quickly developed a firm sense of the FDR men he could trust—such as Early and Harold Smith at the Budget Bureau—and those he could not. He could spot a phony a mile away, and prima donnas in the military—MacArthur was already on his list—did not impress him.

  Truman intended to bring organization to an executive branch he found shockingly disorganized. Unlike Roosevelt, he did not encourage rivalries among his top people and he did not intend to run cabinet agencies as if he were their secretary. Truman liked order and delegating authority, and he quickly halted the haphazard access to the Oval Office his predecessor had encouraged. Unlike Roosevelt, he had no use for secret operations run out of the White House and shut down John Franklin Carter’s spy unit.

  Truman also began his new job with a healthy distrust of J. Edgar Hoover. Hoover tried to cultivate Truman early on. He arranged for an FBI agent who hailed from Independence, Missouri, to drop by the Oval Office to swap family stories and plug his plan for heading a worldwide intelligence service. The new president was willing to open his door for a hometown neighbor, but not for Hoover. Roosevelt had encouraged the FBI’s domestic spying, but Truman feared the bureau had become a Gestapo-like secret police force and he wanted no part of it. From his days in Congress, he also knew that Hoover kept files on the sex lives of lawmakers to blackmail them. From now on, Truman ordered that anything Hoover wanted to say or report to him first had to go through his new military assistant, Harry Vaughan, a garrulous, blustery, and often comical Army colonel he had known since World War I. Hoover detested the arrangement and tried to bypass Vaughan, but Truman still refused to give him direct access.

  Donovan and Truman had more in common. Both had fought in World War I. Donovan saw more intense combat, but Truman had been a conscientious artillery captain, receiving commendations from his superiors and reacting coolly when German field guns and planes rained counterfire on the battery he commanded. Truman also revered soldiers who received the Medal of Honor for valor, as Donovan had. But there was a lot with Wild Bill that Truman did not like. Donovan was a smooth-talking and successful Wall Street lawyer from New York, not the kind of person a failed Missouri haberdasher identified with. Truman fought to make government more open when he chaired a special Senate committee probing w
aste. Donovan worked to increase secrecy. The spy chief also was a Republican and Truman did not believe he had been completely loyal to the Democratic administration.

  Donovan brainstormed with his staff about how to cozy up to the new president. Putzell phoned Rose Conway, Truman’s personal secretary, to arrange for Donovan’s secret intelligence memos to be placed on his desk without being seen by intermediaries, as Grace Tully had done with FDR. A small, shy woman who could outwork any man, Conway agreed to the same procedure. Donovan tried the tricks he had used to schmooze Roosevelt. He sent Truman a framed map of Belgian territory the 2nd Armored Division had recaptured, a warm letter addressed to the president that he had received from twenty thousand workmen in the Netherlands, and accounts of the daring exploits of agents like Virginia Hall behind enemy lines in France. He worked hometown connections as well, sending Truman reports from two Missourians recovering Americans from Japanese POW camps in China. Truman thanked Donovan for the map and, unlike for Hoover, allowed the OSS reports to come directly to him. But he did not respond to the war stories.

  Donovan also sent Truman his proposal for a postwar intelligence service, along with the April 4 Roosevelt memo directing him to shop it with the twelve other agencies. The responses Donovan got from the twelve were disheartening but not unexpected. The five most important organizations—War, Navy, State, Justice, and FBI—shot down the plan once more. Almost all the others rejected it or had no comment. The only one backing Donovan was the Foreign Economic Administration, an insignificant outfit for his purposes. Over long lunches or private meetings in their offices, Donovan promoted his plan with Truman’s Senate pals, such as Illinois’s Scott Lucas (a rising liberal star and Truman favorite), West Virginian Harley Kilgore (a key Military Affairs Committee member who had befriended Truman), and South Carolina’s James F. Byrnes (whom Truman would soon make his secretary of state). But the person to convince was Harry Truman.

  After almost a month of begging for time on Truman’s crowded schedule, Donovan finally walked into the Oval Office on Monday morning, May 14, for his first meeting. Truman already knew his other national security agencies opposed Donovan’s postwar intelligence plan. Harold Smith, who developed almost an instant rapport with the new president, also had convinced him to keep both Donovan and Hoover at arm’s length until the Budget Bureau came up with a postwar intelligence plan.

  Truman gave Donovan just fifteen minutes for their first meeting—what a president usually affords visiting firemen. It was the chilliest session the spymaster had ever had in the White House. Donovan tried his best in the cramped time slot to make his pitch for a postwar intelligence agency, but Truman did little to hide his lack of interest in the proposal. Afterward the president noted mockingly in his diary that Donovan “came in to tell how important the Secret Service [sic] is and how much he could do to run the government on an even basis.”

  Donovan continued to pepper Truman with memos: on future U.S. relations with Russia, on Axis espionage agents remaining undercover after the war, on peace feelers the Japanese sent through intermediaries to OSS officers overseas. Truman was too busy to respond to most of the reports but he did scan them and was quick to react when he saw something he did not like. On August 18, Donovan sent him an offer of cooperation from Kim Ku, who he identified as chairman of the Korean Provisional Government, a loosely organized group of exiles holed up in Chungking with visions of governing Korea after the war. The OSS’s Asia experts did not think the uneducated Kim or his cronies could run the country, but Donovan told Truman he had been working with the man to install agents in Korea. The only problem: The State Department knew nothing about Kim Ku or his group and White House aides thought it highly improper for a spy chief to be dealing with them. Truman agreed. He dressed down Donovan in a snippy note, telling him he had no business “acting as a channel for the transmission to me of messages from representatives of self-styled governments which are not recognized by the Government of the United States.”

  THREE DAYS AFTER his frosty meeting with Truman, Donovan took what amounted to a short break from his own agency. Bureaucratically it was not a particularly smart move with the OSS on life support in Washington. But Donovan boarded his plane for Europe on May 17 to become what he had been twenty-three years earlier—a prosecutor. This time the criminals were the Nazis of Germany.

  Though he had been largely indifferent to collecting wartime intelligence on the Holocaust, Donovan had been ahead of the rest of the U.S. government in making preparations to bring Axis leaders to justice for their crimes. As early as August 1942 he had ordered his staff to begin looking into Japanese atrocities against civilians and POWs. By October 1943, he was urging Roosevelt and others in the administration to set up the legal machinery for extraditing and prosecuting Axis war criminals. The military, State Department, and the British paid little attention to the subject, but Roosevelt was interested and told Donovan to begin investigating how the accused could be brought to trial. John Ciechanowski, the Polish ambassador to Washington, sent him the names of the top Nazis ruling Poland and Donovan cabled his OSS teams in the Balkans for the Germans there who should be on the war crimes list. He gathered up affidavits from Norwegian doctors who had treated victims of Gestapo torture in German prisons and news stories on the liberation of death camps such as Treblinka, where nearly a million Jews had been gassed. Finally on December 15, 1944, the War Department’s judge advocate general formally assigned to the OSS the job of collecting evidence against suspects and researching international law to bring them to justice. Donovan plunged into the mission as if he were launching a covert operation. He ordered his aides to put together “a top-flight staff on war crimes.” Donovan envisioned the Germans bringing the men to trial so the country could “purge itself of its blood guilt and punish its own criminals,” he said. Other officers, like Dulles, thought that was a bad idea; the Allies should control the prosecution.

  There were practical reasons for Donovan’s interest in going after war criminals—he wanted payback for the torture and murder of his agents. He had personally interviewed a female OSS operative raped and beaten by her German guards and was shocked by what he heard. He had not forgotten the commandos from a team code-named “Ginny” who were captured by the Germans in Italy and gunned down by a firing squad or the fifteen OSS and British operatives captured in Czechoslovakia who had been taken to the Mauthausen concentration camp, where they were brutally tortured for eight days, then executed naked with bullets to the back of their heads. Both teams’ members had been wearing their U.S. Army uniforms and should have enjoyed the Geneva Convention protections for war prisoners. Donovan, Dulles, and British intelligence also wanted to protect German spies who had worked for the Allies from being swept up in war crimes prosecutions, although Roosevelt resisted offering blanket immunity. FDR suspected a number of guilty Germans would try to save themselves by coming over to the winning side at the last moment.

  After the European war ended, Truman picked Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson to be America’s chief counsel for the prosecution of Nazi war criminals. Jackson was a handsome and courtly man who had taught himself law to pass the bar exam instead of graduating from law school. Both he and Donovan came from western New York and had become able lawyers, but that was about all they had in common. The two had been political rivals in the state. Jackson, a Roosevelt Democrat, did not think much of Donovan’s conservative Republican positions and both men had been mentioned as presidential prospects for their parties. But Jackson, who took a leave of absence from the Supreme Court, quickly discovered the OSS was the only agency in the U.S. government seriously working on war crimes. He asked Donovan to join his trial staff, clearing it first with Truman, who thought having a prominent Republican on the legal team was a good idea.

  On May 15, Donovan huddled with Jackson in the justice’s chambers. He offered the full resources of his spy agency. Jackson was grateful; he had only a handful of loyalists to call on, includ
ing his son who was a lawyer, and none was experienced in war crimes prosecutions. Donovan also said he knew Jackson would be “the captain of the team” and he “would play wherever” the Justice could use him. Donovan didn’t really mean that. He intended to play a star role in the trials. He wanted to put Hermann Göring, who had just surrendered to the Allies, on the stand for a dramatic cross-examination. Jackson was intrigued and told Donovan he should send agents to interview the Reichsmarschall.

  Donovan flew to Europe on May 17 eager to move quickly to trial. It was important to show progress at the outset, he warned Jackson before boarding his plane, not only to generate public support for the historic proceedings but also to keep on board the Russians, who would have a say in the prosecution. Jackson agreed. Over the next six months, 172 OSS staffers would join the justice’s team. Navy Lieutenant James Donovan, the OSS’s general counsel, became one of Jackson’s key trial tacticians. (OSS critics used James Donovan as an example of nepotism in the spy agency, which was not true in his case; the general counsel and his boss were not related.) Donovan and his investigators began piecing together the many parts of the Nazi Holocaust machine, unearthing SS documents on “death vans” used to asphyxiate Jews, collecting testimony from Auschwitz survivors on its gas chambers. Dulles’s key Abwehr informant, Hans Gisevius, sketched out the organization of the Nazi Party. William Langer’s researchers in Washington and London provided mountains of reports on such topics as the inner workings of the German General Staff and analyzed captured documents plotting the religious and ethnic cleansing of Europe. Donovan assembled a panel of psychiatrists to rule on Nazis who might plead insanity as a defense and briefed Jackson on the agency’s highly secret research into truth drugs, which the justice agreed might be useful in getting defendants to talk. No detail was ignored. The OSS Presentation Branch designed the courtroom for the tribunals (one innovation put the judges on the right facing the defendants in a box on the left), while John Ford’s film unit produced movies of the concentration camp horrors.