That sure beat what for most of his adult life had been his great ambition, to be the ranking chief on a Yangtze River gunboat.
Naturally, there had to be a price to pay for this beyond making life a little easier for the Colonel when he could arrange it—beyond even putting himself between the Colonel and whoever meant the Colonel harm—but he was prepared to pay that.
What exactly that price was going to be, Ellis didn’t know. When he got the bill, he’d pay it. And in the meantime, if the Colonel wanted eggs sunny-side up before they got on the plane to go around the world, that’s what the Colonel would get.
II
[ONE]
East Grinstead Air Corps Station Sussex, England 3 December 1942
While he was in Cairo, Colonel William J. Donovan sent a courier ahead to London bearing material he did not wish to entrust to ordinary channels. Among this material was a personal message to David Bruce, Chief of the OSS London station, explaining that he would be leaving Cairo in the next few days. After that he planned to spend a day in Algiers and another day in Casablanca—“to see things for myself.”From there he would fly on to London.
In addition to the Casablanca station chief, two familiar faces were waiting for Donovan and Ellis at the Casablanca airfield.
They were Richard Canidy and James M. B. Whittaker. Both men were in their mid-twenties and close to the same height—about six feet—and good-looking enough to turn most girls’ heads in their direction. End of resemblance. Canidy was heavy of shoulder and large of bone, Irish dark-eyed and dark-haired, while Whittaker was pale blond and slender, with leopard-like moves.
Canidy and Whittaker had been close since they were schoolboys. Canidy was one of Donovan’s more recent acquisitions, but Donovan had known Jimmy Whittaker since he had worn diapers. Whittaker’s uncle, Chesley Haywood Whittaker, a Harvard- and MIT-trained engineer who had built railroads, dams, and power-generating systems around the world, had been a great friend of Donovan’s all of his life. Before the war began, it had been Donovan’s intention to make Chesty Whittaker his deputy. But on Pearl Harbor Day, while he was waiting at his Washington mansion for a summons to the White House, Chesty Whittaker had suffered a coronary embolism.
Canidy and Whittaker were readily recognizable as officer-pilots of the United States Army Air Corps. Both were wearing pilots’ sunglasses and leather-brimmed caps whose crown stiffeners had been removed. That way, the caps and an aircraft headset could be worn simultaneously. Canidy wore a tropical worsted shirt, no tie, and olive-drab trousers. He had on as well a garment officially described as Jacket, Horsehide, Flying, A-2. The golden oak leaves of a major were pinned to his epaulets, and a leather patch embossed with his name and the wings of the Chinese Air Corps was sewn to the breast.
The entire back of the jacket had painted on it a representation of the flag of the Republic of China. Below that was written a lengthy message in Chinese informing the people of that country that the wearer was engaged in fighting the Japanese invaders and that a reward, payable in gold, would be given for his safe transfer into the hands of any Official of Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang government.
Before Pearl Harbor, Canidy had been a Flying Tiger, flying P-40s in Burma and China for the American Volunteer Group. He considered his jacket a lucky piece.
Whittaker was also wearing an A-2 jacket, but his was so new it still smelled of the tanning chemicals. On it were embossed leather representations of a captain’s bars sewn to his epaulets, and to the breast was sewn a patch with a representation of Army Air Corps wings and his last name. He was wearing pink trousers and a pink shirt. And looked, Donovan thought, like a fighter pilot in a recruiting-service poster.
Canidy carried an issue .45 Colt automatic pistol in an issue holster on a web belt around his waist. Whittaker had a Model 1917 Colt .45-caliber ACP revolver jammed casually into his waistband under the A-2 jacket. The crude hilt of an odd-looking knife was visible at the top of Whittaker’s Half Wellington boots. Donovan knew the knife. The blade, which was ten inches long and nearly black with oxidation, had a double edge cut in inch-long scallops. Jimmy Whittaker had brought the Colt and the Kris home with him from the Philippine Islands.
The two of them looked like pilots from a fighter squadron somewhere in North Africa who just happened to be at the Casablanca airport. They were in fact in the OSS, and they were supposed to be in England. Donovan wondered what the hell they were doing in Casablanca. He asked them.
Canidy gestured to a B-25 “Mitchell” twin-engined bomber parked on the grass not far from the terminal.
“Your personal chariot awaits your pleasure, Colonel,” Canidy said. “We thought you and Chief Ellis might want to avoid the common herd on the commuter flight.”
“That’s not what I asked, Dick,” Donovan said.
“Stevens sent us down here with three very heavy crates,” Whittaker said. “And when we checked in, they told us you were coming.”
Lieutenant Colonel Edmund T. Stevens was Deputy Chief of Station, London.
“It’s also the plane we used to drop Fulmar down on the other side of Ourzazate,” Canidy said. “Extra fuel tanks, even a couple of airline seats. The way we cleaned it up, it cruises right around 310 knots.”
Donovan took a closer look at the airplane. The turret on top had been removed, and the opening faired over. The machine-gun positions in the sides of the fuselage were also gone, and faired over. It was no longer a bomber, but a high-speed, long-range transport. Canidy, Donovan reflected, sounded like he was trying to sell it to him. He wondered what that was about but didn’t ask. Not only was he fond of both of them, but he trusted their unorthodox—sometimes even outrageous—style.
“I’ll be here two days,” Donovan said. “Won’t they expect you back?”
"Absence,” Jimmy Whittaker said solemnly,“makes the heart grow fonder.”
Donovan grinned.
“Why not?” he said.
The B-25 arrived in England sixty hours later, having flown a circular route far enough out over the Atlantic to avoid interception by German Messerschmidt ME-109E fighter planes based in France.
Lieutenant Colonel Stevens, another old friend of Donovan’s recruited for the OSS, was on hand to meet it. Stevens, forty-four, graying, erect, with intelligent hazel eyes, was a West Pointer who had resigned his commission and gone to work in his wife’s wholesale food business. He had lived in England for several years before the war, and his ability to handle upper-crust Englishmen had proved even more valuable than his military expertise.
Stevens wasn’t sure what he thought about their waiting around in Morocco so they could fly Donovan up on the B-25. Canidy, as usual, was treating orders and accepted procedures the way playboys treat women: Canidy knew damned well that he was expected to unload the crates, grab a few hours’ sleep, and fly back to England. Both he and Whittaker had more important things to do than drive airplanes.
Canidy had been put in charge of the OSS base in Kent. Whitbey House, the requisitioned “stately home” of the Dukes of Stanfield, was both the “safe house” for the OSS and the training base for agents. And there Jimmy Whittaker ran what the OSS called “The Operational Techniques School,” or what Canidy more accurately called the “Throat Cutting and Bomb Throwing Academy.”
But separately and—more important—together the two were a very persuasive pair. When the problem of transporting the crates of radios and special explosives (earmarked for Casablanca but sent in error to England) came up at a staff meeting in London, Canidy and Whittaker had quickly made convincing arguments that the obvious solution was for them to fly the crates down to Casablanca in the B-25: There was no reason they couldn’t be absent from Whitbey House for seventy-two hours; the crates would not be misdirected again; and there wouldn’t be all the bureaucratic crap involved in arranging for the priority shipment through normal channels.
Stevens had let them go, though it was even money they wouldn’t be back
in seventy-two hours—Canidy and Whittaker being Canidy and Whittaker. But he had not expected they would return with Colonel Donovan aboard. Still, Canidy and Whittaker being Canidy and Whittaker . . .
And the truth was that what they’d done was a good thing. It had provided a more secret mode of travel than one of the courier flights from Casablanca: There was no question in Colonel Stevens’s mind that the Abwehr had a 90 percent accurate passenger manifest of VIP courier flights. And besides, Donovan was human, and there had to be some jolt of pleasure derived from traveling aboard “his own” aircraft, flown by two of “his own” pilots.
On receipt of the Air Corps message that “Colonel Williams” would be aboard a B-25 aircraft, Stevens had been so confident that “Williams” was Donovan that he had gone to East Grinstead with two cars. Donovan would be carried to Whitbey House in the long, black Austin Princess limousine assigned to the Chief of Station, while Canidy, Whittaker, and Ellis would go in a 1941 Ford staff car driven by Captain Stanley S. Fine.
Stevens had with him a thick sheaf of Top Secret messages that Donovan would want to deal with right away. Canidy and the others had no “need to know.” Thus, separate cars.
When the B-25 landed, a checkerboard-painted “Follow Me” truck led it away from Base Operations to a remote corner of the field where the Princess and the Ford sedan were waiting.
Donovan was first off the airplane. He was wearing a simple olive-drab woolen uniform, with the silver eagles of a colonel and the crossed flint-locks of infantry. On his head was a soft “overseas” hat.
Technically, Donovan was assigned to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and probably should be wearing the insignia of a General Staff Corps Officer and not the flintlocks. It was interesting to wonder why he wore infantryman’s rifles: Perhaps he simply wanted to—and was confident no one would call him on improper insignia. In Europe, he was answerable only to Eisenhower, and Ike had much too much on his mind to notice the insignia Donovan wore.
But Stevens knew that as open-faced and disingenuous as Donovan appeared, there was more than a little subtlety in him: Donovan was a longtime mandarin in the political establishment and an old buddy of Franklin Roosevelt. Without these credentials he would never have been pegged by Roosevelt to create out of practically nothing America’s first true spy network. But he was doing this in a country at war, and he was doing it officially as a soldier. Which meant working as much with the military establishment as the political one.
Which meant that all other things being equal, Donovan would have been treated like an amateur by the military establishment (an amateur being defined as anyone who had not been on active duty prior to 1938). Which meant that America’s young spy organization would have had about as much chance of getting off the ground as a balloon in a needle factory. Thus the infantry rifles: Anyone who has commanded an infantry regiment in combat is, Q.E.D., not a military amateur. And Donovan had not only commanded a regiment (in War I with the "Fighting 69th" Infantry) but he’d won the Medal of Honor doing it.
The crossed flintlocks would subtly remind the senior officers with whom he dealt (including Eisenhower, who had spent War I at Camp Colt, New York) that he had seen more than his share of combat, which meant that he was not just a civilian politician in uniform who could be ignored because he “just doesn’t understand what the Army is all about.”
And the Army establishment was not half of the stone wall Donovan had had to break through before he could even begin to worry about the enemy. Long, long ago (that is to say, a few weeks earlier) during the hectic seventy-two hours between Colonel Stevens’s orders to report to active duty and his departure by plane to London, Donovan half jokingly, half bitterly had looked at Stevens and sighed. “You know, Ed,” he told Stevens, “I consider it a good day if I can devote fifty-one percent of my time to the armed enemy.”
There was no doubt whom he meant by the “unarmed” enemy: a number of people, ranging downward from J. Edgar Hoover, who loathed William J. Donovan. The authority granted to Donovan by the President (which came with virtually unlimited access to nonaccountable funds) had turned him into a very real threat to long-established government fiefdoms. He was particularly a thorn in the side of the FBI, the ONI (the Office of Naval Intelligence), G2 (Military Intelligence), and the State Department Intelligence Division. These bodies had quickly proved to be a thorn in the side of William J. Donovan.
Lt. Colonel Stevens and Captain Fine saluted when Donovan walked over to them. Donovan returned the salute, smiled, and then shook their hands. Then he walked to the tail of the aircraft and met the call of nature. By that time, Canidy and Whittaker had climbed out of the aircraft and begun to unload the luggage. Fulmar, Stevens saw, was not with them.
As Canidy and Whittaker approached the Austin Princess, Donovan said, “Canidy would like to keep the airplane.”
“I’ll bet he would,” Stevens said, smiling.
“He thinks he can get it in and out of the strip at Whitbey,” Donovan said, seriously. “Would keeping it pose problems?”
“No, sir,” Stevens said.
Donovan nodded. It was an order. Stevens would now have to somehow arrange for the transfer—or at least the indefinite “loan”—of the B-25 to the London Station. Another victory for the persuasive Canidy-Whittaker combination.
“I see you brought your lawyer with you, Colonel,” Canidy said to Stevens as he offered his hand. “Been behaving yourself, Stanley?”
Prior to his entry into military service, Captain Stanley S. Fine, a tall, skinny, somewhat scholarly-looking man of thirty-three, had been Vice President, Legal, of Continental Studios, Inc. Before he had been recruited for the OSS, he had been a B-17 Squadron Commander.
“I see you brought this one back in one piece,” Fine said, nodding at the B-25.
“We try to learn from our little mistakes,” Whittaker said, wrapping an affectionate arm around Fine and then kissing him wetly on the forehead. Fine was torn between laughter and annoyance.
The trouble with Dick Canidy, Fine thought as Canidy hugged him, is that l both like and admire the sonofabitch.
If I didn’t like him, both of them, the goddamned Bobbsey Twins, it would be very easy to stay pissed off, because they get to fly around in airplanes, while I sit on my ass and clean up the paperwork mess they leave behind them.
Fine was not just kidding when he needled Whittaker and Canidy about bringing the B-25 back in one piece. Not too long ago the pair had wrecked a Navy R-5D Curtiss Commando transport aircraft on takeoff from the airfield in Kolwezi in the Belgian Congo. And Fine had wound up dealing with the problem of how to explain the lost airplane.
Fine had flown one of the R-5Ds involved in the Kolwezi Operation. After that Operation was successfully (miraculously was a better word) completed, Fine had started to “make himself useful” in London,“until something else comes up.” Before long he’d turned into something like Stevens’s deputy. He wasn’t sure how he felt about this: It was important work, but he was a pilot, and pilots should be flying.
Just before Canidy and Whittaker talked Stevens into letting them take the B-25 to North Africa, Captain Peter Douglass, Sr., USN, Donovan’s deputy, made a two-day trip to London. Ten minutes after he arrived at Berkeley Square, he tossed a thick folder, red-stamped SECRET, on Fine’s desk.
“Come up with how you think we should handle this, Stan,” he said. Then, chuckling, he added,“It’s right down your alley.”
It was a thick file from the Navy’s BUAIR (Naval Bureau of Aeronautics), with addenda and comments from the U.S. Army Air Corps and the War Production Board, expressing the Navy’s bureaucratic outrage: An R-5D transport which they had loaned to the Army Air Corps had not only not been returned, but the Air Corps professed to have no knowledge of its whereabouts. Further, the Navy complained, in the absence of a Certificate of Loss Due to Enemy Action, the War Production Board refused to grant them anything higher than a “B” Priority for its replacement from the Curtis
s Production Stream.
This wasn’t as funny as it first appeared. Bureaucratically, it was necessary to find the Navy a replacement aircraft as soon as possible, which meant arranging an “AAA” priority for them. Otherwise, the next time the Navy was asked to loan the Air Corps an aircraft, it would find sufficient reason to delay indefinitely doing so, priority or no priority.
The “loan” process had to be kept moving smoothly not only for operational reasons but—at least as important—for security reasons. The OSS would in the end get what it wanted, but questions would be asked if it took a personal telephone call from the Joint Chiefs of Staff to the Director of BUAIR ordering him to immediately produce an airplane.
The mess was not helped by the fact that the R-5D Commando that Canidy and Whittaker had dumped in Kolwezi had been intended as a VIP transport and had been borrowed by the Air Corps for no longer than thirty days for use “in transporting senior U.S. and Allied military and civilian officials to, and within, the British Isles.”
The Commando had been destroyed on a mission so secret that the full details were known to only the President, General Marshall, Brigadier General Leslie R. Groves, USA, Colonel Donovan, and Captain Peter Douglass, Sr., USN.
Fine still had no idea what the sacks he had transferred from Canidy’s Commando to his had contained. And the operation was still classified Top Secret. Obviously, the Navy could not be told that the plane, accidentally overloaded, had crashed on takeoff in the Belgian Congo, and had then been burned to inhibit identification.
Meanwhile, the Navy wanted either the VIP airplane back, or one just like it. And they wanted it immediately.
Happily, a solution born of his experience in Hollywood came to Stanley Fine. For a moment, as a result of his training at Harvard Law, he had to reject the solution. But before long, expediency won out over ethics. At Harvard Law he had been taught that at the head of the list of Thou Shalt Nots for a member of the bar was “uttering, issuing, or causing to be uttered or issued a statement, written or oral, he knows to be false.”
Soldier Spies Page 4