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Wild Bill Donovan

Page 43

by Douglas Waller


  It was sort of a car pool arrangement. Donovan, who had been following the travails of his old units and keeping tabs on the formation of this new Central Intelligence Group, ridiculed it as little better than “a good debating society.” Which it turned out to be. Souers, who admitted he never really wanted the job, proved to be a disinterested leader whom Hoover found easy to bully. He lasted only six months. The director who succeeded him—a handsome and well-connected air general named Hoyt Vandenberg—stood up to Hoover but still became bogged down in bureaucratic battles with the military. With the Cold War heating up, Truman in February 1947 asked Congress to approve a new Central Intelligence Agency as part of a larger reorganization of the armed forces into a Department of Defense. With Allen Dulles’s help, Lawrence Houston, a young lawyer who had spied in the Middle East for the OSS and now worked for Vandenberg, wrote the provision setting up the CIA. They slipped Donovan copies of their drafts and he privately lobbied Congress on behalf of the spy unit. Donovan was not completely happy with the organization the lawmakers finally approved in July; the new agency reported to a National Security Council instead of directly to the president, as Donovan wanted. But in most other respects, the CIA resembled closely the proposal he first brought to Roosevelt. It would be an independent outfit controlled by the White House, conducting espionage and covert operations overseas with the analysis of intelligence centralized in one organization. The new CIA was a vindication of Donovan’s vision.

  He wanted to lead it. Friends lobbied Truman to appoint him the agency’s chief. Even Vaughan, who had passed on the damaging gossip about his sex life, eventually told Truman he ought to consider him for the job. But it was unrealistic for Donovan to expect that a president he had called a “tragic figure” on the campaign trail would name him to such a sensitive post. Truman appointed Admiral Roscoe Hillenkoetter, who had been Vandenberg’s lackluster deputy, to be the CIA’s first director. The best Truman offered Donovan was chairman of an inconsequential committee studying the nation’s firefighting departments. Donovan bit his lip and accepted the humiliating appointment.

  But he was determined to keep dabbling in spy work. Donovan sent Hillenkoetter and Beetle Smith (who succeeded the admiral three years later as CIA director) notes on former OSS officers to hire, such as Dulles and Casey, and scouted overseas operatives who might be useful. He showered them with ideas for covert operations, such as secret programs to recruit Russian defectors and arm French mercenaries to attack communist agitators. Donovan mined old contacts for covers CIA agents could use infiltrating into the Soviet Union and passed along plans Eastern European exiles gave him to spy on Russian troops occupying their countries. Hillenkoetter and Smith dutifully listened to the suggestions along with leads he brought back from foreign trips about black marketeers shipping strategic goods to communist countries. But Truman was furious when he learned about Donovan’s meddling in CIA affairs, calling him a “prying S.O.B.”

  Donovan eventually set up what amounted to a private intelligence operation of his own. He regularly debriefed lawyers and businessmen traveling overseas for their observations. Friendly American ambassadors slipped him classified cables on communist activity in Europe. Gisevius kept him posted on politics in Germany. An Italian journalist touring the Persian Gulf briefed him on the quality of Soviet troops he saw at the Russian-Iranian border. Soon New York gossip columnists were alive with speculation about the secret comings and goings at Donovan’s law firm, one writer calling him “one of the most influential behind-the-scenes men in the country today.” That was hardly the case, but the FBI grew suspicious. The bureau’s snitches warned that the CIA was slipping Donovan secret documents by the pound.

  MARY GARDNER JONES had worked as an OSS research analyst and after the war became one of a few women to graduate from Yale Law School in 1948. But no New York law firm would take her until she applied to Donovan’s. Others in the firm thought a female attorney should not be hired when men returned from the war needed jobs, but Donovan never gave it a second thought and made her his assistant. Jones answered his mail and wrote him memos on legal and foreign policy questions. She also became his partner for dinner parties when Ruth was not there, which was often. Jones had heard stories from the secretaries about Donovan’s affairs. Women noticed that even in his mid-sixties, the general still had a sparkle in his eye for the ladies. But Donovan treated Jones practically as another surrogate daughter. Soon she was having lively debates with him on issues of the day. Jones found her boss open-minded and willing to listen to her arguments. They co-authored a Yale Law Review article on civil rights and national security; Jones managed to edge Donovan more toward the civil rights side by the time they finished writing the piece.

  But she could push him to the left only so far. With the onset of the Cold War, Donovan became a conservative hawk. He did not believe the Soviet Union would risk attacking the United States with nuclear weapons—America’s retaliatory capability made that unthinkable—but he was convinced the Cold War was becoming “hot as hell,” as he liked to tell reporters, and that the communists were moving to dominate the world by every other means. The State Department, however, was meeting the Red menace with “basic timidity,” he complained to a friend, and Dean Acheson, who became its secretary in 1949, was a “pantywaist,” he told Jones.

  Donovan’s strident anticommunism also helped inoculate him from attacks by his political enemies. Hoover had no luck uncovering a nest of communists among the OSS officers who transferred to the Pentagon after the war, but he remained convinced that Donovan was a closet commie—or, at the very least, a sympathizer. Security guards one day found electronic bugs hidden in Donovan’s law firm; a rival firm may have planted them, but Ole Doering, who returned to the practice after the war, suspected it was Hoover’s men. Donovan and Dick Heppner, another OSS officer who rejoined the firm, were outraged when two FBI agents knocked on the door of Heppner’s New Jersey home one day and told his wife, Betty, they were there to search the library. Betty let them in and the agents took away two books from the room: Hitler’s Mein Kampf and Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung. For his part, Donovan continued to gig Hoover, accusing him in magazine articles and letters to the Truman administration of running an amateur intelligence agency during the war and being just as inept at battling communists afterward. The attacks infuriated Hoover. “My, my,” he scrawled on one memo about Donovan’s bad-mouthing, “Col. Bill knows all the answers but few of the facts.”

  Hoover had better luck dredging up the past. Elizabeth Bentley, a Vassar College graduate and disillusioned NKGB courier, had gone to the FBI in 1945 and identified over twenty-eight Soviet informants in the U.S. government—five of whom worked for Donovan. Hoover thought they were the tip of the iceberg. But the bureau did not have enough corroborative evidence to prosecute the OSS officers Bentley fingered so she was paraded before the House Committee on Un-American Activities in 1948, where the “Spy Queen,” as she became known in the press, named Donovan’s executive secretary, Duncan Lee, and the four other OSS analysts. Other OSS officers were swept up by Joseph McCarthy, a junior senator from Wisconsin beginning to make a name for himself ferreting out Reds.

  Under fire from conservatives for lax hiring, Donovan stood up for his old agency and denied it had been infiltrated by Russian intelligence—although he knew it had been. In the summer of 1944, his security office had sent him a memo with the names of forty-seven OSS employees suspected of being communists or party sympathizers. Moscow had begun its effort to penetrate the OSS in 1942 and soon had a dozen snitches planted in OSS stations in England, Spain, and Yugoslavia. Lee denied the charges, although the evidence is now clear that he was one of a half dozen NKGB informants in the Washington headquarters. Privately, Donovan did not believe that Lee and the other Soviet moles posed any danger to U.S. national security—they were, after all, passing secrets to an ally at the time—and, in fact, there was no evidence that the information they delivered to the NKG
B did any damage to Donovan’s wartime operations. But in public, Donovan stood by the adviser who had been in his inner circle. Duncan Lee is “a Rhodes scholar and a very high principled boy,” he told reporters. “I believe he would be very loyal and not disclose any classified material.” Nevertheless, Donovan now let his fear of communism cloud the better judgment he should have had as a lawyer in one high-profile court case.

  On June 10, 1948, Donovan arrived in Athens to browbeat Themistocles Sophoulis, the frail eighty-eight-year-old prime minister of Greece. A month earlier, on May 8, the body of CBS correspondent George Polk had washed ashore at Salonika Bay, his hands and feet bound by hemp rope with a bullet hole in the back of the head. A former World War II Navy pilot with a daring streak as a reporter, the thirty-four-year-old Polk had visited Salonika in northern Greece to interview communist leader Markos Vafiadis, whose guerrillas controlled the surrounding countryside. The city dwellers and Salonika’s police, however, had grown hostile to American journalists like Polk, who had filed stories critical of the Greek government in the past. Truman was committed to helping the Greek military fight the communist insurgency raging in the north. Athens now wanted a solution to the crime that did not incriminate the Hellenic government and endanger U.S. aid. So it was little wonder that Greek officials and the U.S. embassy were convinced at the outset that the communists, not Greek rightists, were responsible for the murder. Salonika’s police began their investigation assuming that Polk had been in a boat motoring across the bay to meet Vafiadis when communists on board shot him and threw his body into the water. The murder would be blamed on the Greek government to embarrass it.

  That theory seemed a stretch. Vafiadis had every reason to want to keep Polk alive to broadcast the guerrillas’ story to the world, while Greece’s right-wing extremists had good reason to want him killed as a warning to any other network reporter thinking about putting communists on the air. Suspecting the Greek government would whitewash the case, American journalists formed the Overseas Writers Special Committee of Inquiry, led by Walter Lippmann, to monitor the investigation. The respected columnist recruited Donovan, an old friend, to be the panel’s chief counsel. During two trips to Athens and Salonika, Donovan bluntly warned Sophoulis, the local prosecutor, and police that the American press expected an honest probe and a speedy arrest.

  On August 18, the Salonika authorities produced their culprit: Gregory Staktopoulos, a thirty-eight-year-old stringer for the Reuters news service who had joined Greece’s communist-leaning National Liberation Front (EAM) during the war. At first, Staktopoulos told the police he had talked to Polk for only five minutes before the American went missing. But after forty-five days in custody, the Greek newsman finally signed a lengthy confession, admitting that he had been Polk’s translator and intermediary, taking him to the boat with two of Vafiadis’s communist saboteurs aboard as escorts. About a mile from shore, Staktopoulos’s statement claimed, one of the communists shot Polk, who had agreed to be blindfolded for the trip. Donovan and the State Department accepted the police version of events and backed Staktopoulos’s arrest. But there was a problem with the confession. After being starved and beaten with brass knuckles for weeks, Staktopoulos signed a statement that had been fabricated by the Salonika police. Donovan was kept in the dark about the torture, although as an experienced lawyer and seasoned OSS man who had seen his share of captured agents confessing to anything to stop the pain, he should have suspected it.

  Donovan attended Staktopoulos’s nine-day trial, which began on April 12, 1949, in a drab courtroom in Salonika. He told reporters he was there to make sure the proceedings were fair. He should have realized they were rigged. Staktopoulos kept his mouth shut about the torture. The police, who had arrested his mother as an accomplice, told him the only way he could keep her out of jail was to stick to the confession they had written for him. The law officers also handpicked Staktopoulos’s lawyers, whose weak defense of their client boiled down to arguing that he was probably mentally ill and just a small part of a larger communist conspiracy to kill Polk. On April 21, the jury freed Staktopoulos’s mother, but gave him life in prison and sentenced the two communists he had identified on the boat to death in absentia. Donovan told the newsmen gathered around him in the courtroom afterward that the trial “was honestly and efficiently conducted.” The final report he drafted for the Lippmann committee concluded that the Greeks had convicted the right men. They had not. Who killed George Polk remains a mystery, but the evidence clearly pointed to someone besides Staktopoulos and the communists. Donovan, however, saw Greece as a critical battleground between the United States and Russia. Prosecuting rightists for the crime would be a setback for that war. In his mind now, the communists had to be guilty.

  He had plenty of company. The U.S. embassy praised Athens’s handling of the case. Greek and American reporters covering the trial never seriously questioned its fairness. Lippmann and the other members of the Overseas Committee accepted Donovan’s conclusion that Staktopoulos and the communists were guilty. Even Ed Murrow, Polk’s colleague at CBS, went along with the verdict. The trial of Gregory Staktopoulos was not a proud moment for Greek justice, U.S. diplomacy, American journalism, or for Donovan.

  IN 1949, Ruth and Mary brought Patricia to spend her third-grade year with Donovan at the Sutton Place apartment. It was a special time for her. They rode horses in Central Park and listened to the big dance bands play at the St. Regis. In the afternoons when Donovan came home from work he flipped on the television in the living room to the Arthur Murray show and practiced dancing with his granddaughter, who stood on the toes of his shoes. It surprised Mary Gardner Jones, who was in and out of the apartment all the time with memos for the boss to read and letters for him to sign. Donovan did not strike her as a kid person.

  Jones never saw Mary’s husband, who had no interest in joining them. David finally processed out of the Navy as a lieutenant commander on April 28, 1946. He became a gentleman farmer in love with Berryville’s peaceful life that Mary found boring. Chapel Hill became a major agricultural operation, marketing 450 head of cattle, hogs, and lambs each year, and David soon branched out, trying his hand at running a trucking line for ten states. Though he kept his feelings mostly to himself, David was increasingly unhappy with Mary spending so much time away from Chapel Hill and leaving him to care for the children with the nanny. By 1949, their brood had grown to six: Patricia the oldest, Deirdre now four, Bill who was three, two-year-old Sheilah, and the twin babies David and Mary. But his wife’s absences had begun to put strains on the marriage. Donovan did not help; he may have been a doting father-in-law but he was a poor father to his son, encouraging Mary to be away for long stretches to keep him company and be his hostess.

  When they were together Bill could still be a tender husband to Ruth. Sometimes they dined with Donovan’s old war comrades such as Allen Dulles and his wife, Clover. On a walk down a New York City sidewalk to a party being thrown for Louis Mountbatten, Heppner’s wife, Betty, was struck by how Donovan fussed over Ruth when she slipped and fell. But they were rarely together. If not by law then by practice, Bill and Ruth were separated. She had succeeded in walling him out of her life and building one for herself. She rarely talked about her husband to friends or relatives and kept her unhappiness with the failed marriage to herself. In Berryville, she took on civic projects and hosted at Chapel Hill the U.S. equestrian trials for the Olympics. To friends, Ruth Donovan seemed reserved and distinguished as she began her sixties, yet strong-willed and determined.

  For the grandchildren, Chapel Hill became a magical place, filled with horses, dairy cows, sheep, pigs, and all manner of dogs, with pastures for roaming and forests for hunting and two donkeys named Fearless Flannigan and Sneaky Pete for riding. The floors in the house creaked, a grizzly bear rug stared up at them in the living room, and a mounted ram’s head looked down from a basement wall. Donovan visited Chapel Hill more often after the war but it was still infrequent, so holidays li
ke Christmas were always a treat because they were the few days the grandchildren could count on Faddy being there, always in his coat and tie with presents for them.

  New Year’s Eve 1951 began as one of those special days. Grandchildren played outside as the sun set in late afternoon while parents and grandparents scurried about inside the house dressing and primping for the Blue Ridge Hunt Club Ball that night. Mary and David were being honored at the event. Four-year-old Sheilah raced into the kitchen at one point thirsty for a drink of water. But in the confusion the little girl reached for a cup of silver polish that had been set out for Ruth and drank it. Sheilah collapsed unconscious almost immediately. The silver polish contained potassium cyanide. David and Mary rushed her to the Winchester hospital twelve miles away but she was pronounced dead on arrival.

  David and Mary were devastated. The pain of losing her daughter lingered long for Mary and her marriage with David also deteriorated after the death. From 1952 on, the two became unofficially separated, as Bill and Ruth were. While David worked the farm, Mary pursued her own social life in Berryville performing regularly in the local theater or entertaining her father-in-law’s guests in New York and traveling with him overseas.

  Ruth took the death hard as well, but typical of her personality she soldiered on and never complained. Donovan was crushed. A daughter and now a granddaughter lost. He was not prone to introspection but he realized how distant he had been from his family while the personal tragedies seemed to him to be piling up. After Sheilah’s death, Mary Gardner Jones found him sometimes in his Sutton Place apartment muttering to himself: “What have I done with my life?”

 

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