Wild Bill Donovan

by Douglas Waller

  But Truman and Harold Smith, who faced the daunting task of demobilizing millions of soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines, had other plans for Donovan’s spy agency by late August. Smith’s budget staff began quietly working on a proposal for a new intelligence organization in the future; the OSS would be disbanded and its operations parceled out to the military and the State Department. By the second week of September, however, Donovan had picked up the rumors that his agency would be dismembered and he was furious that Smith had hatched this plot without consulting him—or anyone else in the Pentagon for that matter. He could not believe Smith had foisted such a naively dumb idea on the president, he angrily told the budget chief.

  Donovan fired off an angry memo to Truman on September 13. “I hope that in the national interest, and in your own interest as the Chief Executive, that you will not permit this to be done,” he wrote, practically accusing Truman’s budget director of treason. That same day he had managed to schedule an appointment with Truman to bring in Henri Laussucq, a Pittsburgh artist who had fought bravely for the French underground. But Donovan sat dour-faced as Truman listened to a few war stories from Laussucq, pinned a Silver Star medal on his chest, posed for photos, then hustled the two men out before Donovan could get in a word about his agency. Later in the afternoon, Smith slipped into Truman’s office to let him know that Donovan was “storming about our proposal to divide his intelligence service.”

  I know, Truman told Smith. Donovan had brought one of his agents in earlier that morning but Truman said he didn’t give him a chance to bring up the subject. Continue with your plan to dissolve the OSS, he told his budget director, “even if Donovan did not like it,” Smith recorded in his diary.

  Ironically, Truman actually wanted some kind of “broad intelligence service” set up in the future, as he told Smith, and he wanted it reporting directly to him, not to the Pentagon, as Donovan advocated. But he was firm in the belief that neither Donovan’s OSS nor Hoover’s FBI should head it. Hoover launched his own publicity campaign to show how the bureau had won the war. His agents regularly took Harry Vaughan, Truman’s military aide, out to dinner and Hoover became a lunch buddy with the jolly but well-connected officer, who swapped dirty jokes and played poker with Truman. But the director had no luck cultivating the president. Truman told Smith to cut the 8,223 employees in the FBI to its prewar level of about six thousand and he ordered a scale-back of the bureau’s spy operation in Latin America. He worried that gringo agents roaming the region threatened Roosevelt’s old Good Neighbor Policy.

  Hoover, whose sources in the administration kept him informed of every move Donovan made with Truman to save his agency, took one more important step to make sure his nemesis failed. The unfounded rumor floating around Washington and Berryville that Donovan was having an affair with his daughter-in-law had no difficulty making its way to FBI agents. Hoover ordered an aide to pass the rumor on to Vaughan, who in turn passed it on to the president. Truman, who was prudish about sex and totally devoted to Bess, was offended. But the rumor was far from being the final death blow for Donovan’s organization. Truman had another equally derogatory report on his desk.

  Richard Park Jr. had been an Army brat from Washington, D.C., who followed his father’s footsteps and graduated from West Point. Though trained as an artillery officer, Park eventually gravitated to military intelligence and became devoted to George Strong, who reciprocated and sent him to Moscow in 1941 as a military attaché. It was a prestige post and Park sent back a vivid report to Washington on his month-long tour of the Russian front, which even reached Donovan. In March 1944, Park was assigned to the White House as an assistant to Pa Watson, Roosevelt’s military adviser and appointments secretary. Park had little to do with military advice for Roosevelt. Watson handled that himself. Park’s real job was being the Army’s representative in FDR’s map room, where he sometimes funneled OSS reports to the Oval Office or handled chores Watson didn’t have time for. But Park made important friends during his White House tour, such as Hopkins. The Army officer lunched with him occasionally and traveled with Hopkins to Yalta. After the ailing Watson died on the return voyage from Yalta, Park was named to succeed him. But he was just a placeholder at this point, and did not have the access to the physically weak president that Watson had. After FDR died, Vaughan kept Park on as his assistant for a few months.

  Shortly after Roosevelt’s death, Truman had on his desk a scathing fifty-nine-page indictment of the OSS written by Richard Park. How he came to write this detailed study of OSS misdeeds remains a mystery. Park claimed in a cover memo to Truman that Roosevelt ordered him to produce the report before he died and that he collected much of his information on the OSS from a tour he made of the Italian and Western fronts. But the evidence that Roosevelt gave him the assignment is flimsy. George Elsey, a Navy officer who worked with Park in the map room, did not believe his Army colleague knew enough about the OSS to put together a top secret report with more than one hundred charges in it. Based on the gossip Elsey heard from Park and from Vaughan, he suspected General Bissell’s G-2 minions had written the document and put the lieutenant colonel’s name on it to give it the appearance of being a White House paper so it got into the hands of Vaughan and then Truman.

  Elsey’s suspicions proved valid. Bissell tried to distance himself from the enterprise, but it turned out that the hidden hand behind the Park report was the man who ran the general’s secret espionage unit, John Grombach. Most of Park’s information on Donovan’s organization came not from any tour he had taken of war fronts, but rather from a fifty-two-page memo Grombach had slipped to him with every damaging rumor the Pond had collected on the OSS. Park spliced page after page from Grombach’s memo into his report. Hoover’s men helped as well. Park lifted one paragraph practically verbatim from a letter the FBI director had written ridiculing Donovan.

  Frenchy later bragged that they all had been part of a “a top secret exparte investigation of the OSS.” The Park report they put on Truman’s desk ended up being a cut-and-paste collection of accusations of petty graft, rule infractions, scandalous behavior, and communist infiltration in the OSS, with practically every complaint the FBI, Pentagon, and State Department had ever lodged against the agency included. It claimed one of Donovan’s officers got drunk and spilled secrets, money was wasted on worthless agents in Portugal, the Turkey station hosted lavish parties, and OSS agents in Bombay staged an orgy in their offices (all with no names or evidence to substantiate the charges). It rehashed Hoover’s irritation with Donovan’s students trying to infiltrate U.S. factories on training exercises, the Pentagon’s grousing about overpaid OSS officers, and Ambassador Carlton Hayes’s gripes about cowboy operatives in Spain. Some of the mishaps the report raised were true. But other allegations distorted the facts. The report claimed Tony Di Luca’s infiltration of the Japanese embassy in Portugal caused Tokyo to change its codes, costing “many American lives in the Pacific,” which was not the case. It cited British help for the OSS and the cooperation of the two intelligence agencies before the Normandy landing as if that were something evil.

  Some of Donovan’s activities “have not been harmful,” such as William Langer’s research branch, the Park report grudgingly acknowledged. But overall the OSS “is the most expensive and wasteful agency of the government.” That was a gross exaggeration. In unconventional warfare, petty graft came with the territory and thievery among a spy agency’s foreign sources had to be expected because they were often disreputable characters. The OSS had elaborate accounting procedures for its secret funds, detailed rules for entertainment expenses, and Donovan wasn’t shy about disciplining officers he caught dipping into the till. The agency’s infractions turned out to be no more or less than for other American units. The Army’s top supply officer estimated that pilferage and waste in the Mediterranean theater alone had been so rampant, it amounted to “one ship out of every five” lost.

  Oddly enough, the Park report did not alert Tr
uman to the OSS’s larger debacles, such as the Dogwood case in Istanbul, likely because its writers knew little about them, and it ignored an even more important question: How much did Axis intelligence know about what the OSS was doing? Donovan’s organization performed detailed postmortems on blown operations and agents nabbed by the enemy who were forced to talk. Yet for all the operatives captured and successfully interrogated in Europe, all the OSS documents seized and codes broken, counterintelligence officers in London concluded in one top secret report that the Wehrmacht “failed to make worthwhile use” of what they got. “German knowledge of [the] OSS was fragmentary, uncollated, incorrect and diffuse.” Abwehr charts on the agency were riddled with errors. Some of Donovan’s officers who had been captured were shocked that their Gestapo interrogators did not even know what the letters OSS stood for.

  DONOVAN SPENT THE weekend of September 15 with Ruth in Nonquitt. This time, he made no phone calls back to Washington. He seemed to be marking the last days of his agency in serene calm—something he had not done in four years.

  By the time he returned to Washington Sunday evening, September 16, the machinery to close down his operation was moving quickly behind his back. Smith had all the pieces in place—beginning in October, Langer would move his Research and Analysis branch, which Smith considered the crown jewel of the OSS, to the State Department. The intelligence and special operations units would go to the War Department and be headed by Magruder, Donovan’s deputy. Truman ordered his new secretary of state, Jimmy Byrnes, to form an interdepartmental group to thrash out a new plan to coordinate the intelligence arms of the State Department, military, and FBI. If Byrnes wasn’t up to that job—his State Department bureaucracy certainly wasn’t suited for it considering its cultural aversion to espionage—Truman left open the option of having the White House do it. Smith quickly got the parties to agree to this setup. The Pentagon brass never had an opportunity to present their alternative. Truman did not intend to give them that chance—this was a president taking over the decision-making process that had snarled the agencies since last November and imposing his will. On Tuesday, Smith told Donovan the White House’s plans. Donovan protested once more but Smith didn’t much care at this point what he thought. Donovan was history.

  Thursday afternoon, September 20, Smith walked into the Oval Office with all the paperwork for Truman to sign. The president was not in a particularly good mood. It had been a trying week and Truman was feeling sorry for himself. War agencies balked over downsizing. “It is almost impossible to get any action around here even from the most loyal of the close-in helpers,” he wrote in his diary that day. “Well, this terrible job was virtually crammed down my throat.” He intended to do it as he saw fit. “No pressure group need apply,” he wrote. And that included Wild Bill Donovan.

  Smith handed him the executive order abolishing the Office of Strategic Services. The plan to have its functions divided between the War and State Departments while Byrnes worked out the coordination was the best the Budget Bureau could come up with at the moment, he said. “Donovan will not like it,” he warned. Truman could care less what Donovan liked or didn’t like. He scanned the order and signed it.

  Smith put another page in front of him to sign. A perfunctory thank-you note to Donovan for heading up the agency the past four years. It was insulting—the kind of form letter written for a low-level civil servant leaving his job. Truman acknowledged only that Donovan had provided “capable leadership” of the OSS.

  Donovan took the train to New York that morning, not bothering to be at his desk when the letter arrived.

  PART III

  AFTERMATH

  Chapter 31

  Nuremberg

  DONOVAN SAT ACROSS the table from Hermann Göring in one of the Palace of Justice’s bare and cramped interrogation rooms. Dressed in a plain gray uniform shorn of military insignia, the Reichsmarschall spent most of each day reading and writing intently in his prison cell next to the palace, a dingy and chilly cinder block room with a metal cot, crude commode, washstand, small desk, single wood chair, and heavy steel door. The only breaks from monotony were lonely walks in the prison’s exercise yard (Donovan could see him from his nearby office window), Sunday services in the Protestant chapel (which Göring attended for the music, not to confess his sins), and the interrogation sessions, like the one he was having this Tuesday evening, November 6, with the American spy chief.

  Since his surrender six months earlier at his Bavarian villa near Berchtesgaden, Göring had lost his swagger and joviality, as well as some of his 340-pound girth. Donovan and the other prosecutors found the Reichsmarschall more serious now, alternating between fits of cockiness and deep depression. But his mind remained quick and his heart, as one of the American attorneys put it, was still “cold, brutal and murderous.” The Army soldiers who detained him relieved him of 485 tons of documents the prosecution team found useful, a vial of potassium cyanide concealed in a coffee can, and several thousand paracodeine tablets. OSS researchers had compiled a lengthy dossier on Göring’s many war crimes. An art looting unit Donovan had formed with ten investigators and analysts to track stolen treasures in Europe also soon discovered Göring was the Reich’s biggest thief.

  A large military detail mingled outside the interrogation room. Rumors had circulated in Nuremberg that Nazi diehards still at large were hatching a plot to spring Göring from jail, so he was under heavy guard. Inside the room only an Army private sat with Donovan to translate—although both men could have dispensed with the interpreter. Göring understood English well and Donovan had been practicing his German for the cross-examinations he planned at trial. The Reichsmarschall insisted that no official reporter record their meetings. Donovan obliged. (After he left the room, however, he always promptly wrote down the conversation for the prosecution team.) Donovan had worked hard to cultivate the Reichsmarschall. He wore his uniform each time pinned with every medal he had received to impress Göring, who liked to drape himself with military decorations. Göring believed the spymaster was approachable and had sent word he was open to cooperating. The two had a total of ten private meetings. Donovan, who had always been intensely curious about what made evil men like Göring and Hitler tick, found the sessions fascinating. The Reichsmarschall seemed to Donovan only too willing to regale him with inside stories, such as Hitler’s early diplomatic bluffs to win European territory before the war’s outbreak. Like a skilled intelligence operative, Donovan eventually convinced Göring they were both like-minded conspirators who could share secrets. This Tuesday evening, Göring had salacious details he wanted Donovan to keep hush-hush about generals in the early years of the regime. Hitler, for example, had attended the 1937 wedding of his field marshal, Werner von Blomberg, to a young woman the führer thought was “of simple background but of fine character,” Göring told Donovan. The bride turned out to be a porn model, so Göring engineered Blomberg’s dismissal.

  Donovan filed a report on Göring’s sex stories, but he had a bolder legal gambit in mind. There was no way Göring could escape death, Donovan told him in one of their meetings. But he could “die like a man” after a full confession, Donovan said. The egotistical Göring, who knew the only question remaining was how he met his end, was intrigued with the idea of copping a plea and ratting on his comrades—if the price were right. Donovan was after what could be the world’s most sensational plea bargain. Göring would accept full responsibility for the war crimes, which would dramatically shorten the trial, and would take the stand to sell out Dönitz and the other top Nazis under indictment with testimony on their complicity. In return, the Reichsmarschall would be executed as a soldier before a firing squad instead of suffering the humiliation of hanging as a common criminal. The scene in the courtroom with Donovan as the star prosecutor and Göring on the witness stand could be dramatic, the spy chief knew—if he could pull it off, which on November 6 was far from certain.

  DONOVAN HAD FLOWN to Nuremberg two days after the O
SS closed down on October 1. Mary, who had given birth two months earlier to her second daughter, joined him for the trial as a confidential secretary. She left Patricia and the baby, whom they named Deirdre, with Ruth at Chapel Hill. (David had been home on leave for the conception nine months earlier but was now in the Pacific with the Avoyel.) Putzell, who also traveled with Donovan, did not see any useful purpose for Mary being there, but she “elbowed her way in,” he griped. The beautiful daughter-in-law quickly caught the eye of other prosecutors.

  Donovan could still drive in any direction for ten minutes and see few buildings standing in Nuremberg. Where the residents who survived now lived was a mystery to the prosecutors but they always managed to appear magically for bread lines with dazed and haggard looks on their faces. Donovan commandeered for his quarters a bürgermeister’s home, one of the grander structures left standing, which came with servants and GI sentries to guard against saboteurs. The Palace of Justice had been renovated using hundreds of SS prisoners as laborers. Donovan’s drafty dank office was located near Jackson’s in what used to be chambers for appeals court judges.

  Donovan expected to take up the star prosecution role he envisioned for himself before he left Jackson’s team to fly to Asia and then fight for his agency’s survival back in Washington. Jackson’s son, Bill, suspected from the first day Donovan returned that he wanted to take over his father’s job as part of a scheme to revive the OSS. But Donovan had been away from Nuremberg for nearly four months. He was out of the loop and did not command the influence he once had over the tribunal. Jackson no longer needed the spymaster or his organization as much. Research material had already been assembled for the trial, the indictment had been drafted, and the prosecution staff had grown to some 650, only a quarter of whom were former OSS members.