Pack made her third attempt on the safe on June 23. The plan remained the same, but it was decided that it would be impossible to persuade the guard to take a spiked drink again. This time he and his dog would be awake during the break-in, but Pack’s gall, cunning, and beauty saved the mission.
Shortly after midnight the two lovers entered the embassy and went to their usual spot on a settee in a salon near the code room. There was no sign of the guard or the dog, and as they sat together they felt uneasy. Suddenly Pack stood up and stripped, throwing her clothes around the room. She urged Brousse do the same, telling him they had to look like lovers if the guard came to investigate. A short while later there was a noise in the corridor and the door opened. The night watchman’s flashlight settled on Pack, naked except for high heels and a pearl necklace. There was a gasp and an apology, and the guard disappeared.
With a relieved giggle, Pack pulled on her slip and picked the lock on the naval attaché’s door. Then she rushed to the window and signaled with a flashlight. With the guard awake, the plan this time was to bring the safecracker in through the window. He climbed the wooden ladder and picked the lock of the code room. Now familiar with the combination, he quickly unlocked the safe, and Brousse and Pack handed the books—each the size of a large family Bible—to an OSS agent on the ladder outside.
It took more than two hours for the codes to be copied. Unable to dress for fear of the guard returning, Pack and Brousse smoked incessantly, their fear of getting caught building with each passing minute. It was obvious to them that if they were discovered in the act of copying the books the scandal would cause an international incident. An OSS officer, Donald Downes, had earlier cautioned Donovan that “entering a foreign embassy clandestinely and borrowing code books is full of great risk for everyone concerned.”
At about 4:40 AM the safecracker returned and the books were put back in the safe. The pair tidied up after themselves, wiped the furniture and safe for fingerprints, and left by the front door.
When they got to the Wardman Park Hotel, they were taken to another room requisitioned by the OSS that had obviously only recently been filled with frantic activity. Cameras, lights, and tripods were positioned in different places, and photographic copies of the codes lay drying on every piece of furniture.
Standing among them with a large smile on his face was Colonel Huntingdon. Following the operation he would become head of the OSS’s special operations department and become a key figure in the plans to invade North Africa. Betty Pack’s success in obtaining the Vichy naval ciphers helped unlock Vichy communications around the world for the OSS.
On November 8, 1942, the military forces of the United States and the United Kingdom launched an amphibious operation against French North Africa, in particular the French territories of Algeria and Morocco. Torch’s impact on the course of Anglo-American strategy during the remainder of the war would be enormous. It would be seen as the most important strategic decision that Allied leaders, including Stalin, made. It would enable the Allies to hold back D-day until the United States could complete the mobilization of its immense industrial and manpower resources for the titanic ground battles of 1944.
Betty Pack remained on the books of the Secret Intelligence Service, to become known as “the spy who slept her way to obtain information.” The BSC report for 1943/4 lists her salary as $250 per month.
7
Donovan’s Decision
IN WASHINGTON, DONOVAN’S SKILLS in persuasion and manipulation drove the OSS with the same acuity that he used in his days as lawyer, when he had insisted that every statement had to be proven. Now, in partnership with British intelligence, he went about building America’s first strategic intelligence service with a worldwide reach. His blue eyes gave every idea a close look, and his calm aura instilled confidence in anyone he wanted to persuade to do his bidding. William Stephenson would recall how Donovan would shake a person’s hand and say, “I am counting on you.”
By the end of 1941, the OSS had recruited almost six hundred people who had been told he was depending on them: women clerks, secretaries, administrative assistants, planning staff, and liaison officers. All had signed an oath of secrecy, a document shorter but just as important as Britain’s Official Secrets Act.
They included those Donovan called “our best and brightest” or “our league of gentlemen.” Some were members of a group committed to Anglo-American solidarity and met once a month at the New York mansion of Vincent Astor, the scion of a well-known and wealthy British family. Among them were Junius Morgan, a Wall Street banker; the author Stephen Vincent Benét; Rhode Island governor William H. Vanderbilt; and historian Arthur Schlesinger. With connections around the world, they shared their knowledge and insights with each other.
As the Second World War began with the fall of Poland, and the soprano voice of Kate Smith sang on every radio network her hit “God Bless America,” members of the group continued to meet in Vincent Astor’s mansion. With international business interests and seemingly infinite social connections, these men ran their lives by the bang of the stock exchange gavel that announced the morning’s start of trading on Wall Street. At the end of the day they would talk about Dow Jones stocks and their standing in other markets in the world. Among them was John Lord O’Brian, who had been Donovan’s law partner, who suggested that his colleagues would benefit from hearing about the OSS.
On a summer evening Donovan’s driver, James Freeman, drove him to Vincent Astor’s mansion in New York. A footman opened the door and took Donovan to the ballroom where he would speak.
After the audience settled into their rows of chairs on the dance floor, he stood before a lectern and opened his notes. His eyes swept the room as if to remember the faces. When he spoke his voice was deep, soft, patrician, with more than a touch of the Boston-Irish accent. His eyes flashed as he said Pearl Harbor had denied the isolationists their need to continue to attack him as a committed internationalist and accused him of dragging America into the war. He told them he had won the support of Churchill and King George. “For them the point of no return has been reached. Hitler and Nazism must be conquered, and they will remain at battle stations until Britain defeats them. They will not allow isolationism to separate us from helping them. That is why the OSS has been created.”
He explained how it was structured and talked about the British intelligence departments that had inspired it.
Britain’s SOE has not only men but women who are married and have children, yet are being trained to operate behind enemy lines. Their training is the same as that for its men. OSS also has no restriction on gender. But we want more volunteers. Some will be trained to obtain information as spies. They would be parachuted behind enemy lines or slipped ashore by a small boat to work with local Resistance fighters. I have one rule. I hire on the spot anyone who shows true ability. I’ll soon find out otherwise. Working in secret intelligence demands the upmost commitment.
Donovan stepped back from the lectern and said he would be ready to receive applications from those who were ready to join the OSS. As he walked toward the door, hands reached out to shake his. Applause followed him out of the ballroom.
When news of Donovan’s speech reached the US intelligence community—the State Department, army, navy, and FBI—General George Marshall, the chief of staff, wrote to Secretary of State Henry Stimson, “It is not clear what Colonel Donovan will do next.”
After the next cabinet meeting, President Roosevelt told his spokesman, Stephen Early, to brief his newspaper contacts that the OSS would conduct a range of operations: espionage, counterespionage, guerrilla warfare, psychological warfare, and marine operations bearing on national security.
Donovan arranged his day to begin at 6:00 AM, when he arrived in his office to read the overnight cables on his desk in the high-ceiling corner office on the first floor of OSS headquarters. Its tall windows provided a view of the Potomac River. His room number, 109, was his code number and was stamped
on all his documents. Maps hung on the wall were marked SECRET and were updated daily to show the position of the war in Europe. There were two telephones on his desk: one linked him to the White House and the other was for incoming calls.
Before he arrived, the night duty officer, one of several Dartmouth College graduates working in the top-secret communications branch, had neatly stacked the overnight call-back messages on his desk.
Most of the messages were to do with the urgent need to recruit. Donovan had cast his net widely, asking close friends, clients of his law firm, and professors at elite colleges and military academies to recommend interviewees. Some were rejected after they admitted that while they were physically and mentally fit, they did not want to be posted to Europe to take part in a war many said they did not understand. Donovan called them “East Coast Faggots.” It cost him friends when he said he was also looking for safecrackers and men whose prison records showed they had a background of burgling.
Donovan had discussed with Stephenson how MI6 selected its agents. He explained the service had a team of psychologists to interview candidates who had either applied or had been recommended. The interviewer looked for signs a candidate was motivated by the essence of what MI6 wanted. Those who passed were sent to the training school on the south coast of England. Stephenson said, “The last thing MI6 needs are self-deluded heroes.”
Donovan contacted Dr. Henry Murray, a psychologist he had used in prewar law cases involving clients like Mary Pickford and many other Hollywood names who needed his services in contract disputes with studios. Murray, whose gray hair was carefully brushed back from a high forehead, chain-smoked, had a dark sense of humor, and collected antique porcelain objects from Europe.
Donovan chose a restaurant for their lunch where the food was served on century-old plates. He told Murray what Stephenson had said. Almost as if he were giving evidence in court, Murray responded with a statement. Smiling, showing all his teeth, he told Donovan: “From the medical standpoint Stephenson is right about deluded candidates. They are often driven by the thought of being part of a secret world. Careful questioning can reveal their personalities and whether they could work with their own intelligence. The ideal recruit will be honest, devious, audacious, quick, and always cool-headed.”
Donovan asked Murray if he was prepared to become the chief psychologist for the OSS.
“I thought you’d never ask,” came the response. A retainer fee was agreed, and Murray would have a consultant room in headquarters and have the status of a medical officer with a rank equal to an army major.
There were now over forty-six million foreign-born citizens in the country and a growing number of refugees from Europe, of whom, Murray said, he would expect a number would be suitable for clandestine work and could be trusted to keep secrets.
Allen Dulles, among the first key men Donovan recruited, used his office, room 3661, on the fifth floor of the OSS’s Fifth Avenue location, to interview émigrés and refugees who came from all parts of Nazi-occupied Europe. He continued to build up a staff of experts on German and European affairs. They included Baron Wolfgang zu Putlitz, a former Nazi diplomat who had worked in the Foreign Ministry in Berlin and had fled to New York on the eve of the war, and Gottfried Treviranus, a Prussian who had once served in the Reichstag.
Among others Dulles recruited were men and women from a wide range of occupations who gave an insight into who made up Hitler’s Germany, from the top rank of Nazi Party leaders to SS and Gestapo personalities and experts in the fields of economics, anthropology, and racial ideology. His interviewees told him of the extent of the German Resistance, which included Protestant Christians, Catholic priests, politicians, academics, and artists. Many had been imprisoned and executed; others had gone underground.
Dulles’s files contained documents, materials, press cuttings, and transcripts of interviewees’ life histories that had revealed the connection between the aesthetic and the barbaric, the homicide and the criminality of the Third Reich.
The files also included information from left-wingers who had escaped capture and moved to New York and had ended up in Dulles’s office with information. Inevitably they had also come to the unfavorable attention of the FBI, and J. Edgar Hoover had complained to the president that Dulles “is hiring a bunch of Bolsheviks.” President Roosevelt had discussed with Donovan Hoover’s claim, which Donovan dismissed as another instance of the FBI director’s obsession about suspects with Communist leanings.
The international career of Allen Dulles—a future director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)—began on that summer day in 1942, when he told Donovan that Bern, the Swiss capital where he had once served as a State Department diplomat, had become a spy haven through which important information passed, to and from Nazi-occupied countries and Berlin. The news confirmed Donovan’s own belief that the most effective center from which the OSS would operate would be a neutral country like Switzerland on the enemy’s doorstep. Switzerland had continued to protect its neutrality since the outbreak of World War II. Knowing how close the country had come to becoming occupied since the quick collapse of France, which would have made it a stepping stone to supply the German armies in North Africa and Italy, the Swiss government had passed a law against any act of favoring the interests of belligerents.
A special force, the Fremdenpolizei, the foreign police, had been formed to monitor all foreign embassy staff, and the Swiss counterintelligence service was equipped with the latest surveillance equipment to spy on suspects.
Donovan decided Bern was where Dulles, graying and bespectacled with the disarming charm of a country lawyer, would use his instincts to operate at the back door to the Reich. There was one hurdle to overcome: his official post. The State Department had finally agreed he would have the title of legal assistant to the American minister, Leland Harrison. The Swiss newspapers published Dulles’s photograph under the caption, “Personal representation of President Roosevelt posted to Bern.”
Dulles’s final days in New York before going to Bern as the OSS station chief in Switzerland had been filled with the minutiae of spycraft. He had been given his own code number, 116; Donovan would be 108, and David Bruce, the London station chief would be 105. All cables from Bern station were to carry the prefix “Victor,” and all incoming messages would bear the word “Burns.”
He had hosted a farewell party for his staff and introduced them to his replacement. The next day, he flew to Lisbon to take a train across Spain and Vichy France to Geneva, and he reached Bern five days after leaving New York. He arrived in time to hear of the successful Allied landings, Operation Torch, in North Africa.
Dulles’s first cable to Donovan included his contact with the World Council of Churches organization in Geneva from which he had received the first reports of Hitler’s extermination of the Jews, including details of the volume of murders and locations of the death camps. Dulles also made contact with the Italian-Socialist Resistance fighting the SS in the North Alps of Italy and his connections with the Italian political and military hierarchy in Rome, which, in July 1943, had deposed Mussolini.
Every morning Dulles culled reports from Swiss newspaper correspondents in Berlin. Himmler, commander of the Home Army, was raising fifty new divisions—the Volksgrenadiere—to defend the Reich, which was being firebombed by the RAF and USAAF.
Another report contained news that a Wehrmacht force, called Brandenburger, was being posted to the Swiss Alps. Was it in readiness to cross the border into Switzerland? Dulles sent the story to David Bruce in London, knowing it could be of interest to the intelligence planners preparing a prelude for Operation Overlord, the invasion of occupied Europe. Updating pulsating gossip was a part of Dulles’s work.
Shortly after Dulles arrived in Bern his secretary showed a very tall woman in her midtwenties into his office. Her clothes were shabby but, despite the exhausted look on her face, she had the air of someone with a privileged background.
Without spea
king he looked her over, studying the notes he had been handed by his team. “You claim to be an American?” he said.
“I am,” came the reply.
“I’m Allen Dulles,” he said. “In charge of everyone claiming to be an American.”
“My name is Elizabeth Devereaux Rochester,” she said proudly, allowing her Manhattan accent and a little of the haughtiness she had inherited from her English mother to come through. She could be herself now, after more than a year of passing herself as a Frenchwoman.
Rochester was twenty-six years old, tall, with a slim, long-legged athlete’s figure. She had been educated at an English public school and had been traveling in France when the Germans invaded. She spoke French with a confident tone. Her mother would be proud of the way she spoke and fit in to French life.
Like her mother, Rochester had grey eyes that she knew men found attractive; in Paris they called her très joli and sympathique with dark hair cascading to her shoulders and a jaw suggesting she did not suffer fools or pointless argument.
Her eyes had become forbidding at the sight of Paris buildings bedecked with swastikas and German soldiers marching in the streets to the sound of martial music. Their uniforms were everywhere, while in the background guttural, rasping voices shouted over loudspeakers. The sounds of occupation.
Her own father had been a soldier in the First World War and served in France. Her parents’ marriage broke up on his return from Europe. Elizabeth had been four when her parents divorced, and then her mother met and married Myron Reynolds, a rich American businessman; he had tacked his own surname on to Elizabeth’s. When she started school she had insisted her mother register her by her own father’s middle and surname, Devereaux Rochester.
The Reynolds family lived in a spacious apartment on Fifth Avenue, staffed by a cook, a maid, and a governess who taught French to Elizabeth. When she reached her teens her mother sent her as a boarder to Roedean, a private school in Sussex, England, overlooking the English Channel. She was one of several American pupils. After graduating with honors in French and history, her stepfather paid for her to travel around Europe while she decided her future. Vienna, Budapest, and Munich had all been on her itinerary by the time she arrived in Athens on September 4, 1939. Rochester had gone to the American embassy to register her name as an American passport holder and found the building to be bedlam, with American citizens waving their passports and seeking consular help to return home.
Shadow Warriors of World War II Page 15