Shadow Warrior

by Randall B. Woods

  The new intelligence agency would need a leader of Donovan’s energy and audacity. From Berlin, Joseph Goebbels’s minions denounced the COI/OSS as a “staff of Jewish scribblers,” while in Washington a senior official at the War Department decried it as a “fly-by-night civilian outfit headed up by a wild man who was trying to horn in on the war.” In private, some officers called the operatives the “east coast fagotts.” But a Congressional Medal of Honor recipient who had the president’s ear was hard to dismiss. Like the man in the White House, Donovan was an unconventional administrator. He welcomed, nay, demanded, new ideas. No scheme was too harebrained, no project too expensive. The OSS chief not only tolerated insubordination, but seemed to encourage it. “I’d rather have a young lieutenant with guts enough to disobey an order than a colonel too regimented to think and act for himself,” he said. Although increasingly anti-communist, or at least anti-Stalinist, Donovan insisted on political diversity in the OSS. New Dealers and even communists worked alongside Willkie (moderate) Republicans. Despite the Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact, Donovan and his lieutenants had recognized that once Germany invaded Russia, as it did in 1941, communists everywhere could be counted on to fight the Axis to the death. When FBI director J. Edgar Hoover presented proof that three OSS officers were affiliated with the Communist Party of the United States and demanded their firing, Donovan replied, “I know they are communist; that’s why I hired them.” At the same time, Paul Mellon, the son of banker and archconservative Andrew Mellon, served as an officer of the Special Operations Branch in London; J. P. Morgan’s sons were both in the OSS.4

  In addition to Research and Analysis, the OSS was composed of two other principal branches, the Secret Intelligence Branch (SI) and the Special Operations Branch (SO). This organization mirrored Britain’s MI-6, which had been conducting espionage since the early twentieth century. The SO men and women who would be dropped behind enemy lines would be charged with raising an insurrection. “The oppressed peoples must be encouraged to resist and to assist in the Axis defeat, and this can be done by inciting them[,] . . . by training and organizing them,” Donovan wrote in 1941. Most important, the inhabitants of the occupied territories had to be turned into revolutionaries. Those officers who parachuted behind enemy lines were college-educated men under thirty who had grown up during the Depression. The words of the Atlantic Charter had real meaning to them. In their collective mind, they were tasked with bringing not only liberty to oppressed peoples—but democracy and social justice as well. There were, of course, exceptions.5

  By the time Bill Colby spied the OSS recruitment poster on the bulletin board at Fort Mackall in 1943, the principal Allied leaders—Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin—had set in motion plans for a massive cross-channel invasion of occupied Europe. General Dwight D. Eisenhower was named commander of Supreme Headquarters, Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF), and D-Day was set for May 1, 1944. As the Allies began massing the men and materiel required for the assault on Nazi-occupied Europe, both the American OSS and British SOE eagerly joined in the planning. Each submitted proposals for parachuting operatives into France just before and after D-Day to help mobilize and equip the French resistance—the maquis—which in turn could harass the Germans from the rear as the Allied armies drove inland from the Normandy beachheads. After some difficulty, SO and SOE agreed to merge, and Operation Jedburgh was born.6

  According to legend, Operation Jedburgh took its name from one of the training centers for its operatives situated along the Jed River in the Scots borderland of Roxburghshire. The area was known for its abbey and for “Jeddart Justice,” in which the accused were hanged first and tried later. A variation on this story was that the village of Jedburgh had been the scene of guerrilla warfare during the twelfth-century conflicts between England and Scotland, and thus its name was appropriate as a moniker for an unconventional warfare operation. A French version had it that the name came from the French “J-Jour,” or D-Day.7

  Many Americans were uneasy about collaborating with the French; the resistance and, some believed, the Free French Forces headquartered in Britain were riddled with Nazi collaborators. But the need for coordination between the resistance and the invading Allied armies trumped that concern. In conjunction with the cross-channel invasion, three-man teams, each consisting of one British or American officer, one French officer, and a radioman of any nationality, would be inserted into France, where they would help organize and mobilize the maquisards. Using compact, self-powered radios, Jedburgh teams were to coordinate air drops of arms and ammunition, including heavy machine guns, bazookas, and small artillery pieces, to the resistance.8

  In the summer of 1943, George Sharp, head of the Western European section of the OSS, set about identifying and recruiting American officers for Operation Jedburgh. Before the war, Sharp had been a partner in the prestigious Wall Street law firm of Sullivan and Cromwell, the entity that had played a major role in America’s acquisition of the Panama Canal Zone and that, after World War II, would lobby intensely for a central intelligence agency. Naturally, Sharp’s network concentrated on rounding up officers who already had parachute training and were fluent in French. Bill Colby matched the profile perfectly. When he and his fellow volunteers assembled at Fort Mackall, the OSS recruiter told them only that they would receive additional parachute training and that perilous missions would follow. Anyone could withdraw. Those who chose to remain were interviewed individually. Nothing specific was said to them about the Jedburgh program, but Colby and his comrades assumed they would be dropping behind enemy lines. Colby later speculated that his boredom with the officer replacement pool to which he had been assigned, and his desire not to be left out of the action, both played roles in his decision to join the OSS. “And then too, all those other influences of my youth came into play: an inclination to unorthodoxy in military service, an interest in the political aspects of war, a habit of going my own way and seeking my own band of kindred souls where money or social status, or the prep school you went to, didn’t matter.”9

  In October 1943, the one hundred officers who had survived the initial selection process began arriving in Washington, DC. From Union Station they were bused across the Maryland countryside to what once had been the Congressional Country Club. Between the wars, the Congressional—with its four-story, Italianate clubhouse, 406-acre golf course, indoor swimming pool, and bowling alleys—had been the playground of the capital’s elite. With the coming of the Depression, the enterprise had fallen on hard times, however, and in early 1943, with the promise of restoring the facility after the war, the OSS had acquired it as a training ground. When Colby and his mates arrived, the former country club was known simply as Training Area F. Quonset huts and tents dotted the lawn and covered the tennis courts. The fairways and greens had been turned into an obstacle course. To the north across River Road lay pistol, rifle, and machine-gun ranges.10

  The first orders of the day were strenuous physical tests and probing psychological examinations. Those who did not pass were sent back to regular duty. Bernard Knox, who had fought in the Spanish Civil War, and who, like Colby, had volunteered for the OSS (he would go on to become a famed classicist following the war), described the kind of individuals the OSS was looking for, noting first the kind it was not looking for: “The problem in choosing men for such an operation, of course, is that once they are landed in enemy territory, you can no longer control them. They may do the obviously sensible thing: go to ground in a safe hiding place, do nothing to attract attention to themselves, and wait for the arrival of friendly troops.” What Donovan and Menzies had in mind was quite a different type of person: “The psychological and psychiatric tests the Jeds were subjected to had one basic objective,” Knox recalled—“to select men psychologically incapable of remaining quiet—troublemakers in fact.”11

  The tests were manifestly successful: “I have never known such a bunch of troublemakers in my life,” Knox wrote. Colby described his compatriots as a “
mixed, spectacular, and exuberant lot.” Among his special friends were Knox; Stewart Alsop, who went on to a distinguished career in journalism; Lou Conein, a Franco-American who had fought with the French Army in 1941 before he was dismissed for impregnating the daughter of a high-ranking French official; Douglas Bazata, a soldier of fortune who called all of the colonels “sugar”; Hod Fuller, who had circumnavigated the globe in a small sailboat, and had fought with both the French in Europe and the First Marine Division at Guadalcanal; and Rene Dussaq, an Argentinian stuntman who had worked in a number of Hollywood movies.12

  Training at Area F was modeled after that of British commandos. The day frequently started at dawn with a 5-mile run; continued with classes in map reading and orienteering, then instruction in hand-to-hand combat techniques, more physical training, and demolitions instruction; and ended with nighttime field exercises. The men hardened quickly, and by December, the regimen eased a bit. There was some time for cards, touch football, and weekend passes. But this was just the lull before the storm. Shortly before Christmas, the American Jeds boarded a ferry that transported them up the Hudson River to Manhattan’s West Side passenger-ship terminal. There, they boarded the RMS Queen Elizabeth, one of the world’s two largest passenger vessels, for the trip across the Atlantic.

  Stripped of its luxurious fittings, the Queen Elizabeth, originally built in Scotland for the Cunard line in the 1930s, had been converted for military use in 1940. The ship boasted endless rows of metal or wooden bunks and could accommodate fifteen thousand men—a full division—although the vessel’s lifeboats could handle only half that number. All the ship’s portholes had been blacked out, the hull and superstructure had been painted a dull gray, and its decks mounted with guns and rocket launchers. Officers at the rank of captain and above—Colby had been promoted to captain—were assigned a stateroom, but instead of the two passengers usual in peacetime, the cabins were inhabited by six to eight soldiers. The passage was uneventful. The ship’s speed no doubt helped—it raced along at 28 knots, more than four times faster than the rate attainable for submarines below the surface—but in any case the Queen Elizabeth did not encounter any Nazi subs. Once in sight of the British Isles, the massive vessel picked up a destroyer escort.13

  Colby and his mates disembarked at Glasgow and from there were transported to an SOE training facility in western Scotland. Then it was on to Milton Hall, where the Jedburgh teams would assemble and train until D-Day. Situated 90 miles north of London near the town of Peterborough, Milton Hall, once the ancestral home of the Earl Fitzwilliam, was a rambling seventeenth-century estate; the SOE had acquired the property for temporary use. In addition to the huge Elizabethan mansion, there was a golf course, acres of woods, stables, and assorted other outbuildings. Upon their arrival, the Americans made their way up the half-mile-long driveway and were assigned quarters in the main house. The great hall had been converted into a classroom, but the trappings of British aristocracy remained, including full suits of armor standing in the corners and massive portraits adorning the walls. Then began what must have seemed like endless weeks of training. There was some duplication of the activities at Area F, but the hikes were longer—20 to 25 miles—and the night navigation courses more difficult.

  None of the trainees would forget the martial arts instructor at Milton Hall, Major William Ewart Fairbain. There was nothing particularly imposing about the fifty-seven-year-old Fairbain. He stood five feet eight inches tall and weighed in at 170. The men soon learned, however, that he was the physical match of any of them. Fairbain had spent thirty years as a Shanghai policeman, subduing a population of Tong gang members, pirates, and run-of-the-mill cutthroats. He was steeped in the oriental arts of self-defense and silent killing, skills that he meticulously transferred to his students. There was also knife-fighting with a foot-long, double-edged stiletto, as well as instruction in the Fairbain instinctive shooting method: from the hip with one hand, or from a crouch with two. Everything could be turned into a weapon, the men learned, from an entrenching tool to a fountain pen (there were so many soft-tissue, vulnerable points on the human body). Field craft—the art of survival—even featured lessons in poaching. Late one afternoon while Colby and his mates were bivouacking, a truck drove up. One of the instructors rolled up the back flap and threw out a sack of flour and a live sheep. “Here’s your supper,” he exclaimed.14

  For the Americans and Brits, intensive instruction in French was a priority. Pronunciation and usage would have to be perfect to escape detection by Nazi collaborators. The Yanks were taught to keep their table knives in their right hand and their forks in their left, rather than switching them, as was the custom in the New World. There were classes in tradecraft—how to tail and detect a tail, forge documents, pick locks, set up safe houses, and send encrypted messages. In weapons classes, the men were taught the workings of British, American, French, and German small arms. The weapon of the French resistance was the British Sten gun. It was simple, efficient, and could function for months without being oiled. Looking more like a bicycle pump than a firearm, the Sten consisted of a stock, a tube, and a short barrel with a 32-round magazine protruding from its left side. The weapon took 9x1.9 mm parabellum ammunition, the same as used in German Lugers and MP 40s. If the maquis expended the ammunition that had been dropped to them, they could find a plentiful supply in German stocks. Arguably the second most important weapons, as far as the Jedburghs and their colleagues in the resistance were concerned, were plastic explosives. The material was malleable, relatively stable, and hot-burning. The Jeds learned about Primacord (a flexible explosive detonating cord), time pencils (devices used for initiating explosions after predetermined time delays), and a variety of other fuses.15

  Early on, those in command at Milton Hall had decided that the three-man teams to be dropped behind enemy lines would be self-selecting. To operate effectively, a Jed trio would have to be matched psychologically, physically, and temperamentally. During the endless rounds of poker and discussions of the fine points of explosives, as well as during the scant time allowed for leisure activities—which trainees largely spent sampling the charms of English girls—Colby was drawn to a French officer named Jacques Favel (his real name was Camille LeLong; all French Jedburghs used pseudonyms to protect their families). Favel hailed from the Catalan town of Perpignan, a coastal settlement at the foot of the Pyrenees near the Spanish border. He had fought against the German invasion in 1940 and then, following the armistice, migrated to North Africa. Shortly after the Allied landings in 1942, Favel joined the Free French Forces, where the OSS recruited him. Colby and Favel immediately hit it off, though Colby observed that he was no match for the Frenchman’s charisma. “He was lively and outgoing, a dazzler with the English girls, an extremely deadly poker player, tough, quick with a native intelligence and an ability to handle himself in tight places,” Colby later wrote. The two agreed to an “engagement” (a trial partnership) and subsequently to a “marriage” (formalized by the command officially posting their names as a team). Louis Giry (a.k.a. Roger Villebois) joined them as radioman, and Team Bruce was born. Colby noted that though he was promoted to the rank of major five days before the Normandy invasion, it was Lieutenant Favel who was really the team leader. Immediately, the trio began participating in “schemes,” two- to three-day exercises in which teams were parachuted into Wales or Scotland and told to find their way back without being detected. Authorities along the way were alerted to be on the lookout. One squad reportedly beat another back to Milton Hall by hijacking a train.16

  As the spring of 1944 waned, those in charge of Milton Hall came to fear that their charges were overtraining; consequently, there was more time for rest and recreation. In the evenings, Colby and his mates might catch a ride into nearby Peterborough for a pint at the Bull Hotel or one of the pubs. Weekend passes to London became more frequent. Despite the ravages of the Battle of Britain, London remained one of the most vibrant cities in the world. The American
Jeds took in the sights: the Tower of London, Trafalgar Square, Buckingham Palace. The streets were ablaze with the uniforms of numerous countries allied against the Nazis. For the adventurous, there were the chorus lines at the Windmill and Prince of Wales, where the showgirls wore little more than some type of military headgear. In Piccadilly Circus, prostitutes, who came to be known among the soldiers as “Piccadilly Commandos” or “Hyde Park Rangers,” plied their trade. During one London outing, Colby took a breather from sightseeing and sex to visit the famous Foyle’s bookstore. There he purchased a copy of T. E. Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom. Colby recalled in his memoirs that he read the book “voraciously for its account of how an outsider operates within the political framework of a foreign people.”17

  While a student at Oxford in the summer of 1909, Lawrence had embarked alone on a three-month walking tour of crusader castles in Ottoman Syria, during which he covered nearly 1,000 miles. After graduation, he became a field archaeologist specializing in the Middle East, working under D. G. Hogarth and R. Campbell-Thompson of the British Museum. A natural linguist, Lawrence was accomplished in French, German, Latin, Greek, Arabic, Turkish, and Syriac. Following the outbreak of World War I, he was commissioned a second lieutenant in the British Army. He was, of course, assigned to the Middle East, where the British Foreign Office was hatching plans to foment a revolt among the Arab tribes of the Arabian Peninsula and the Levant against the Ottoman Turks, Imperial Germany’s ally. From 1916 through 1918, Lawrence would fight with Arab irregular troops under the command of Emir Faisal, a son of Sherif Hussein of Mecca. The insurgents tied down thousands of Turkish troops by harassing Mecca and the Hejaz Railway. In 1918, Lawrence participated in the capture of Damascus. In the newly liberated city, which the Englishman envisioned as the capital of a new Arab nation, he was instrumental in establishing a provisional Arab government under Faisal.