In one report to the Foreign Office, Boetticher wrote he had sat next to Professor Robert Goddard, the guest speaker at a dinner, who had explained his rocket experiments and outlined “the first practical reality of a usable rocket” he was close to creating. Boetticher persuaded Goddard to let him have a copy of his speech, in which Goddard had said his rocket would reach an altitude of 2,400 meters and a speed of 1,000 kilometers. Boetticher sent the details to Berlin, adding that the Guggenheim Foundation and the Carnegie Institute financed Goddard’s research.
Boetticher described the funding as “Jew money that controls American military policy.” In Berlin his report was sent to Luftwaffe Chief Hermann Göring, who would later call them “precious pages” in helping to create the V-1 and V-2 rockets that would rain down on London.
After a Thanksgiving luncheon at the State Department in 1941 he cabled Berlin, “No land and air armaments adequate for an aggressive war policy by the United States are to be expected in the near future. The army and air force still do not have the necessary forces to undertake any important aggressive manoeuvres outside the western hemisphere. By that time England would be occupied or turned into a waste of rubble.”
In between his reports Boetticher updated his profiles of important members of the Roosevelt Administration. Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau Jr. was described as “A Jew and close adviser to Roosevelt.” J. Edgar Hoover, the head of the FBI, was called “Anti-German in his speeches.”
Donovan’s profile dealt with his life before his visit to London and his appointment as Coordinator of Information. There were also extracts from society gossip columns about his relationship with women—married or unmarried—some of whom he had represented in their divorces. One was the millionaire Helen Astor; another was Marion Davies, the film actress and mistress of William Randolph Hearst. “The newspaper magnate had told columnist Walter Winchel that the FBI is investigating Donovan for his connection with suspect fascists. Roosevelt has ordered Hoover to send Donovan a letter insisting that the Bureau does not possess any information concerning him.” The latest item in the profile was from a Washington gossip column that Donovan was about to take a tour of the Mediterranean that included the Balkans.
Boetticher took the details to the embassy communications room in a nineteenth-century mansion on Massachusetts Avenue. He instructed the duty officer to mark it IMMEDIATE IMPORTANCE and transmit it to Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, the head of the formidable Abwehr, the German secret service, in its headquarters at 72-76 Tirpitz Ufer in Berlin.
Roosevelt had agreed with Churchill’s suggestion that Donovan should see the importance of Britain’s front line, which extended across North Africa from Gibraltar to Cairo. The friendship between the leaders had deepened since Roosevelt had been returned to office for a third term in the previous November election despite the sustained attacks by the isolationists, who worried that Roosevelt was ready to abandon American neutrality and lead the country to war.
Prime Minister Churchill had ordered William Stephenson—the newly appointed head of British security in the United States—to institute adequate security measures against the threat of sabotage to British property in the country and to organize American public opinion in favor of aid to Britain.
The British ambassador in Washington, Lord Lothian, was further instructed to publicize that Britain would fight the war with additional vigor now that the Lend-Lease Act of March 1941 formally committed the United States to support the war effort. Britain was facing a situation in which a great proportion of its war production, supplies, and shipping depended on the United States.
Between them, Stephenson’s and Lothian’s lobbying in Washington had played a significant part in the agreement in which the United States provided Britain and Canada with fifty badly needed US destroyers. They would fly the Union Jack on Atlantic convoy escort duty in exchange for rights for their bases to be used by the US Navy.
Earlier, with the war only weeks old, MI6 chief Menzies had asked Stephenson to meet J. Edgar Hoover, the head of the FBI, to discuss cooperation between the SIS and the Federal Bureau of Investigation in the event of the United States becoming involved in the war. On April 16, 1940, Stephenson cabled Menzies, “Meeting completely successful. Hoover will cooperate fully. Code names established. You will be ‘S.M. Scott’; he will be ‘H.E. Jones.’ Jones sends Scott assurances of goodwill and a desire to assist far beyond confines of officialdom.”
Hoover had told Stephenson he should “procure an official position and should become Britain’s Passport Control Officer in New York.” The post would give him cover to liaise with the FBI to track Nazi sympathizers and enemy companies. He also should develop contact with journalists, newspapers, and wire services and provide them with pro-British stories. Stephenson’s office in Rockefeller Center would eventually combine the functions of MI6, MI5, and the SOE, as well as liaising with the FBI.
In their work together, the low-key Canadian Stephenson and the hard-driven Donovan would find they were remarkably similar. Both agreed that the Mediterranean was not only strategically important for Britain but would also become important if America entered the war, which Donovan said “would only be a matter of time.” Stephenson cabled Menzies that it was a matter of urgency for Donovan to visit the region.
On January 30, 1941, Stephenson’s official position as British director of British Security Coordination, BSC, in the United States, was registered in the State Department. The formality was required for a foreign intelligence officer of a friendly nation to operate in the country.
Before the war, MI6’s presence in the Americas had been in three stations: Washington was staffed by an intelligence officer and a secretary, Panama City was responsible for Mexico and Central America, and Montevideo covered South America. They would all come under Stephenson in New York, which would become MI6’s most important overseas station in the war. Churchill had instructed him to “create the clenched fist that would provide the knockout blow to the Axis Powers,” and gave Stephenson the code name Intrepid.
However, Stephenson’s position aroused suspicion about his activities in some quarters. Adolf Berle, the assistant secretary of state, told Congress, “Although Stephenson is ostensibly involved with the protection of British supplies under Lend-Lease, he is developing a full-size secret police and intelligence service with a string of secret agents and a much larger number of informers.”
Within days British ambassadors and military commanders in the Mediterranean region had all received cables from the Foreign Office to regard Donovan “as fully in our confidence and will be accompanied by a senior British officer, Naval Commander Ian Lancaster Fleming, of Naval Intelligence.”
Fleming came from a wealthy London banking family. He was educated at Eton College and the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst. He spent less than a year there, leaving in 1927 without gaining a commission, after contracting gonorrhea. Behind his correct manner was a rather perverse sexuality, which led to numerous affairs. To prepare Fleming for possible entry into the Foreign Office, his mother sent him to the Tennerhof in Kitzbühel, Austria, a small private school. After improving his language skills there, he studied briefly at Munich University and the University of Geneva.
Failing the Foreign Office entrance examination he joined Reuters news agency and was sent to Moscow as a correspondent. He wrote to the Soviet premier Joseph Stalin asking for an interview and personally received a handwritten apology for “not having the time.” It made a story for Reuters.
In October 1933, bowing to family pressure, he went into banking with a position at the financiers Cull & Co. In 1935, he moved to Rowe & Pitman as a stockbroker. Fleming was unsuccessful in both roles.
In 1939 he began an affair with Ann O’Neill, the wife of the third Baron O’Neill; she was also having an affair with Esmond Harmsworth, the heir to Lord Rothermere, owner of the Daily Mail. Fleming’s affair with O’Neill was a passport to London society where his charm made him a
regular guest at dinner parties.
At one he sat next to a man with clipped speech and probing questions. He was Rear Admiral John Godfrey, director of naval intelligence. By the end of the dinner he had invited Fleming to come and see him at the Admiralty. He offered Fleming the post as his personal assistant. With it came a commission into the Royal Navy as a lieutenant. Fleming accepted. In August 1939, in his new uniform, he started work in room 39, which adjoined Godfrey’s suite on the Admiralty’s third floor.
Navy Intelligence, NI, had direct lines to the prime minister’s office, the Foreign Office, Air Ministry, Scotland Yard, MI5 and MI6, and the SOE. Fleming’s first brief was to study the files, which contained intelligence from Britain’s forty-three seaports, about foreign vessels and their crews. Godfrey called the files “our Scarlet Pimpernels” and told Fleming he was to look for anything that posed a threat to the country. After reading, Fleming would knock on the green baize door of Godfrey’s office and report with his favorite remark: “Well, there it is, nothing untoward.” Godfrey would smile and more than once invited Fleming to join him for lunch in his club, telling Fleming of those days when he had sailed the seven seas; how he had taken Lawrence of Arabia into Arabia and had worked with the navies of Japan, Greece, France, and Italy during the First World War and later had been given command of the battle cruiser HMS Repulse and had taken his ship to evacuate British subjects caught up in the Spanish Civil War. Fleming’s diary began to fill with the admiral’s recollections.
Within months Fleming had shown his skill at running Godfrey’s office and, discovering Godfrey had enemies within government circles, he learned to keep them at bay from the admiral, fielding their calls and responding to their demands with a promise: “I’ll see to it. Your matter will be top of the Admiral’s agenda.” By the outbreak of war Godfrey had promoted him to a commander in the Royal Navy. Fleming became a familiar figure at Whitehall meetings, seated beside Godfrey and anticipating his request for a document from the files he carried in a leather briefcase.
The war was weeks old when Fleming was told to join the morning senior staff conference to discuss ideas that could be offered to MI6, the Joint Intelligence Committee, and the SOE. Godfrey described them as “our three prime customers.” Fleming’s own older brother, Peter, who had served under Gubbins in Norway, had become an analyst at the SOE’s Baker Street headquarters. Ian Fleming’s own suggestions had gained praise from Admiral Godfrey, not only for their possibility but for the style and research. Godfrey had appointed him to accompany Donovan on his visit to the Mediterranean, describing him as “the ideal choice as a traveling companion, witty, a gourmet, and [with] an understanding of secret intelligence.” He would report directly to Menzies during the tour.
In Berlin Boettcher’s encoded message to Wilhelm Canaris about Donovan’s visit to the Mediterranean and the Balkans had resulted in Abwehr agents in the region being ordered to track his every step. An agent in Cádiz, a fishing port on the Spanish coast of the Strait of Gibraltar, reported Donovan and Fleming had arrived on the Rock and had met with a man who was the MI6 agent in the British overseas territory. From there they traveled to British bases in North Africa and Cairo. Abwehr agents cabled Berlin that their informers had told them Donovan had delivered the same message: the United States was not prepared to let the United Kingdom lose the war.
Increasingly the tour involved meetings with British military authorities, diplomats, and MI6 operatives. The more he learned from them the more determined Donovan became to create an intelligence service like Britain’s. Every evening he wrote detailed reports of his meetings and placed them in the leather pouches with the documents he had been given to take back to Washington. The files included reports on the right-wing government of Spain’s General Franco and his pro-German activities, which allowed the German navy to use Spanish ports and detect British ships passing through the Suez Canal and the Strait of Gibraltar.
Throughout the summer, reports continued to reach Canaris, the Abwehr chief. The agent in Madrid reported that “Spanish cabinet circles” feared Donovan’s visit was the precursor of an invasion should the United States enter the war. Franco had assured his ministers that Spain would continue to receive help from Germany as it had from Germany’s elite Condor Legion during the Spanish Civil War. The air fleet had bombed Guernica, the cultural and religious capital of Basque Spain, and reduced it to rubble on April 26, 1937. It was the first blitzkrieg.
The Abwehr spy in Lisbon had a family connection with Portugal’s ruling dictator, António Salazar. Salazar’s discussion with Donovan had centered on the three Atlantic archipelagos. Portugal’s Azores lay a thousand miles west of Lisbon, Cape Verde stood off the bulge of Africa, and Spain’s Canary Islands were off the northwestern coast of Africa. Salazar had told Donovan that Franco was allowing U-boats to refuel in the Canaries before continuing to attack Allied merchant ships on their way to England. Salazar had promised Donovan that Portugal would refuse to provide refueling facilities and was sending troops to the Azores to protect its neutrality.
The Abwehr agent’s reports were a reminder to Canaris of when he had met Donovan on his visit to Berlin in 1937 as Roosevelt’s special representative. He had decided then that Donovan was like the trio of brass monkeys on his desk who symbolized the way he ran the Abwehr: “See all, hear all, say nothing.” The trio had been a gift from his wife, Erika, after he had been appointed by Hitler as head of counterintelligence. However, the strain of his duties as Hitler’s intelligence chief had whitened his hair and given him a frail look accompanied by an occasional lisp and a speech pattern of answering a question with another. He was now also convinced that Donovan was not only still Roosevelt’s spy but was on a mission to prepare for America to enter the war.
What Fleming called “Wild Bill’s tour” reached Sofia, the capital of Bulgaria, where Donovan met its king, Boris III. Donovan had been briefed by one of America’s few Balkan experts, George H. Earle, a former governor of Pennsylvania and a friend of Roosevelt. Donovan planned to use the information to persuade the king to remain neutral.
But for once, Donovan failed to persuade and closed their meeting with the warning that “any nation which submits to Nazism will receive no sympathy from Washington.”
Fleming cabled Menzies that the words marked the end of Donovan’s tour.
Donovan broke his journey back to the States with a stopover in London to meet David Bruce. He had appointed the tall, articulate Maryland lawyer to run the London end of the COI. Its office was in Grosvenor Square and was listed by the Foreign Office as an annex of the American embassy.
After graduating from Princeton, Bruce had traveled extensively through western and eastern Europe before returning home to Baltimore to pass the Maryland bar and win a seat on the state legislature at the age of just twenty-six. Throughout the 1930s he had sat on the boards of some of America’s largest corporations. He was a man at home with the wealthy of Washington and New York, but with a deep fondness for England and Europe. In the summer of 1940, with Britain standing alone among the free states of Europe, he had visited London as a member of the war relief committee of the American Red Cross. He was in London during the Battle of Britain and the Blitz.
On his return to America he had been active in the Fight for Freedom, a group of rich businessmen who lobbied against the isolationists across the Atlantic, and he had spoken on the radio about the resolution of Londoners.
While America’s defense built up and Lend-Lease moved the nation closer to the conflict, Bruce also knew it was still hard to persuade the isolationists to stop accusing the internationalists back home of dragging the United States into the war. Their activities had percolated through Donovan’s mind as he arrived in England. Bruce sent a car to collect him from the RAF airfield at Hendon and had reserved a suite for Donovan at the Savoy.
Driving into the city, Donovan saw that although the bombing destruction was bad enough, his driver told him there had been no
air raids for a week, giving time for some of the debris to be removed since his last visit. Bruce was waiting in a soft armchair in the front hall of the Savoy. He was his usual ebullient self. Donovan smiled when Bruce said he had booked a private dining room overlooking the Thames for lunch. An Anglophile like Donovan, Bruce also had a connoisseur’s taste for wine and food.
Donovan explained that as the result of his Middle East visit the intelligence sharing with the British had grown, though there were moments in Cairo when there had been tensions about Britain’s reaction to the attitude of American isolationists. More than once Fleming had played his part in calming matters. The result was that Donovan was returning to Washington with an insight into both British political thinking and intelligence in the region. He was convinced that, when the time came for the United States to enter the war, there would be a role for the COI, but not in its current form. He told Bruce he intended to create America’s first strategic intelligence service, adding that he even had a name for it: the Office of Strategic Services, or OSS. Bruce had arranged for Donovan to meet Gubbins for dinner that evening.
Gubbins suggested that before Donovan fly back to Washington he should first accompany him to visit the SOE paramilitary training schools in Scotland. They spent a day sitting in on lectures and watching agents taking part in unarmed combat and field craft exercises as instructors fired live rounds over their heads.
Some trainees were women, and Gubbins said he would arrange for Donovan to meet Selwyn Jepson and Vera Atkins to learn about the role women would have in the SOE.
When Donovan told them of his plans for women, Jepson said there was still opposition in Whitehall to their doing the same jobs as male secret agents. Atkins asked if there would be similar discrimination in the United States. Donovan said he would overcome it “by recruiting women who came from the same stock which had founded my country.”
Shadow Warriors of World War II Page 9