Burn After Reading (31 page)

Roosevelt was a great war leader, but unlike Churchill, he was not sold on intelligence. It was remarkable that in the face of such a crippling handicap, American intelligence nevertheless developed into the brilliant and efficient system that it became when it was freed of the spell of the oldtimers.

The great change for the better began on May 5, 1942, when Major General George V. Strong was appointed head of G-2. It continued in June with two major developments: Captain Ellis M. Zacharias was ordered to Washington to become Assistant Director of Naval Intelligence; and Colonel William J. Donovan was named chief of a brand new organization under the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Office of Strategic Services.

Strong was picked by General George C. Marshall, not because he was an outstanding expert in intelligence matters, but because he was known to be possessed of a driving energy and ruthless determination. G-2 needed a housecleaning badly and only a man who had initiative, daring, independence, and integrity could do the job. Marshall thought Strong was such a man.

Strong more than confirmed Marshall's expectations. As his first act, he went to London to see how the British were handling intelligence activity and he established the closest possible co-operation with them.

Upon his return he set up virtually an entirely new
organization. He did not do the job by stepping on sensitive toes or chopping off heads indiscriminately. He not only left the oldtimers at their posts, to utilize their experience and unquestionable knowledge, but ended their dominant influence by bringing in new men and giving them wide latitude.

In O.N.I. “Captain Zack” did not have the power of a Marshall behind him, so considerable department politics ensued, but, in the end, that agency also attained its majority. For one thing, within a couple of years, O.N.I. had had four directors. The new one was Harold Train, an officer, as Zacharias himself later put it, “who had been passed over in the regular selection process for rear admiral and who had never had one day's experience in intelligence work.” For his new job, however, Train was advanced to the rank of rear admiral.

“A few weeks in O.N.I.,” Zacharias wrote, “convinced me that we had to start from scratch and do a complete job of overhauling if we were to make O.N.I. an efficient wartime intelligence organization; and I was often reminded of Thomason's prophetic words that the museum idea still prevailed. My assignment as assistant director was, therefore, the greater disappointment, since I knew that the traditional system of the chain-of-command would slow down the realization of my prepared plans, but I hoped I would receive complete support from Admiral Train, who was a newcomer to intelligence and not familiar with any of its peculiar problems and their solutions. But the months ahead of me proved extremely difficult. I was compelled to wage an uphill fight.… Here, then, in 1942, I was confronted with the second war that we were waging: the never-ending battle of Washington, in which memoranda clashed with memoranda, and draft proposals were the usual casualties.”

Zacharias first turned his attention to the training of a brand new crop of intelligence officers, virtually all of them recent civilians, many of them “ninety day wonders.” He established the Basic Intelligence School in Frederick, Maryland, and the Advanced Intelligence School in a row of rented rooms in the Henry Hudson Hotel in New York.

“What we needed was operational intelligence,” Zacharias
recalled, “an activity between strategy and tactics providing in intelligence everything a commander might need to take his ships into combat or to conduct amphibious warfare.” He planned to train hundreds of operational intelligence officers. He actually trained a thousand.

Zacharias also played midwife at the birth of new branches of O.N.I. to deal specifically with such tasks as prisoner interrogation, the study and exploitation of captured enemy documents, psychological warfare, and with the collateral problems of intelligence about chemical and bacterial warfare. He introduced secret intelligence (an activity between intelligence proper and espionage improper) and developed projects for action behind enemy lines, especially in China, but also in Italy. He established intimate liaison with his opposite numbers in the British Admiralty and he organized the Japanese language schools where young Americans by the hundreds learned the difficult tongue virtually overnight.

When he left Washington on September 5, 1943, to take command of the battleship
New Mexico,
he could look back on the job with justified satisfaction and say, as he did : “This baby of mine has certainly come of age!” Zacharias' departure, at a time when he was Deputy Director of Naval Intelligence, was abrupt. “Even now,” he wrote after the war, “I do not know what caused that action or whether it was justified. It will have to be credited to the fact that I was moving too rapidly, and was becoming too strong for the good of more ambitious individuals and agencies.”

His departure was not only regrettable, it was damaging to the war effort. It did to intelligence what the unfortunate departure of Sumner Welles did to diplomacy: it slowed it down and petrified it along conventional lines. Had Zacharias been permitted to remain and carry his plans and dreams to their logical conclusion, the United States would have produced in him a towering figure. He could have become the American Reginald Hall. No greater tribute than that could be made.

The third man responsible for the great change was a sport
in the history of espionage, “Wild Bill” Donovan. Donovan appeared from nowhere to conjure a motley army of spies and saboteurs out of the ground; he trained them and equipped them; sent them on missions of deceit, arson and murder. Then, when they were no longer needed, he sent them back to their humdrum lives, and he himself retired with them to the quiet and dignified practice of corporation law. His was the incredible triumph of the blessed amateur at the head of a band of gifted dilettantes.

It is still a mystery, and a delightful one to contemplate, why Donovan, of all people, was chosen to do such a job. He was ebullient and dynamic, as so many Irishmen are. He had nothing sinister or sordid about him. If anything, he was rather gentle and equable, even somewhat naive.

William Joseph Donovan was born on New Year's Day in 1883, in Buffalo, New York, the son of a railroad yardmaster who dabbled in county politics. At Columbia he earned the sobriquet “Wild Bill” for quarterbacking a fondly-remembered football team. After that, he practiced law and carved out a military career as a pastime. In 1912, he organized a cavalry unit for the New York National Guard and served with it at the Mexican Border. In 1917, he went to war in earnest and was a full colonel by October 14, 1918, when he won the Congressional Medal of Honor for his fantastic courage in the Meuse-Argonne operation.

Afterwards, he took up intelligence as a hobby. Just as a big game hunter goes all the way to India or the Sudan, Donovan started chasing wars all over the world. It was an expensive hobby, because he went as a semi-official observer, at best, often as a private citizen, and he always had to foot the cost. In his capacity as a martial sidewalk superintendent, he attended Admiral Kolchak's rear-guard action against the Soviets in Siberia; the so-called Manchurian incident of 1931; Mussolini's Ethiopian adventure in 1935; and the Spanish Civil War the year after it. When Colonel Frank Knox became Roosevelt's Secretary of the Navy, he gave Donovan a quasi-official status
and sent him to England to study British military strength and intelligence. He brought back a detailed account of British secret intelligence and special operations, which highly impressed Roosevelt. Hence, in January, 1942, Roosevelt sent for Donovan and told him to draft a plan for a new intelligence service cut to fit a global war. “You will have to begin with nothing,” the President told him. We have seen that this was too sweeping a statement, but it was true in an urgent and grave sense.

“If you wanted a Michelin road map of the Vosges or Haute Savoie,” John Chamberlain wrote, “in the Washington of early 1941, it was a hundred to one that you could not find one. Nor could you successfully apply to any governmental agency for the gauge of an Algerian railroad track, the kilowatt hour supply of the Japanese power grid, the number of wharf-side cranes in Casablanca, the quality of drinking water in Tunis, the tilt of the beaches off Kyushu or the texture of the Iwo Jima soil.”

This was the kind of minute information Donovan was to procure, whether from the Congressional Library or straight from the secret files of the enemy. A few months later he returned to Roosevelt with a plan. The President liked it and on June 13, 1942, the Office of Strategic Services was set up with Donovan as Director.

The O.S.S. was organized in three parallel echelons. One was “R.&A.” for
Research and Analysis,
by far the biggest. It was to continue and vastly expand the work of the one hundred professors, culling all sorts of vital intelligence from normally accessible sources.

Second was “M.O.,” for
Morale Operations,
to conduct black propaganda and related maneuvers, to undermine the resistance of the enemy and to soften him up by any means, fair or foul.

The third was “S.I.” for
Secret Intelligence,
the clandestine core of the organization, the band of spies and saboteurs, guerrilla fighters, weapon instructors, guides,
femmes fatales
and operators of clandestine radios. The activities of this division gave O.S.S.
its nicknames, “Oh, Shush, Shush” and “Oh, So Secret.” Its exploits frequently came to little or nothing, but they were always highly romantic, whether it meant the surreptitious entry of a neutral embassy in Washington (to obtain some compromising information about Germany), or the climbing of the Himalaya to persuade the Dalai Lama to join the Allies.

The O.S.S. was called by still another nickname: “Oh, So Social.” In the beginning, when O.S.S. was still small, Donovan populated it almost exclusively with his own friends, associates and acquaintances. Ned Buxton, his first tutor in espionage, became his chief assistant; from his New York law firm came “Oley” Doering and Ned Putzell. Others in the top echelon included financiers Charles Cheston and Russel Forgan; David Bruce, a Mellon son-in-law; Atherton Richards, heir to the Hawaiian pineapple millions; Bill Vanderbilt, of the Rhode Island Vanderbilts; controversial international lawyer Allen W. Dulles; Louis Ream of U.S. Steel; polo-playing Winston Guest; a former Czarist colonel named Serge Obolensky, who was also a Russian prince; scions of the Armour packing dynasty; and others from such unusual breeding grounds of espionage and sabotage as the Social Register, the Stork Club and El Morocco.

In the course of the war, O.S.S. employed a total of twenty-two thousand people on a staff that leveled off at about twelve thousand, or something like the numerical strength of a combat division. The personnel ranged from emeritus professors who had won the Nobel Prize to playboys and screwballs; from world-famous movie personalities (like George Skouras, John Ford and Garson Kanin) to card-carrying Communists and ex-members of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade; from pious missionaries to drunks and drug addicts; from Americans to virtually every nationality on the globe.

The personnel policy of Colonel Donovan was another demonstration of that man's remarkable mind. In December, 1942, I met him on a train going to Washington and we talked about the big mistake France had made when it interned without discrimination the bulk of German refugees, instead of utilizing
the cream of the crop for the war against the Nazis. He mentioned a book he had read recently on the subject and that stirred him to considerable thinking. It was Arthur Koestler's
Scum of the Earth.
“I will never make that mistake,” he said. “Every man or woman who can hurt the Hun is okay with me.” He was backed up in this to the hilt by President Roosevelt. His faith in and loyalty to these pariahs was amply repaid. Not a single enemy alien employed by O.S.S. betrayed the trust. The handful of traitors within the O.S.S., like Carlo Marzini, were native Americans and their treachery favored the Russians.

In the course of its activities, O.S.S. scored brilliant victories and suffered grave disappointments. The mortality rate of its agents sent to Tunisia was astonishingly high, due to misplaced faith in local contacts. A big contingent of O.S.S. men smuggled into Slovakia to exploit an incipient rebellion was caught and eventually died in a concentration camp because intelligence about events in Slovakia was faulty: by the time the O.S.S. delegation arrived, the Germans had already quelled the rebellion. Even when no human lives were sacrificed because of inadequate preparations, some of the one hundred and thirty-five million dollars O.S.S. spent must have gone down the drain. But Donovan liked to say that as a team his organization batted at least .260 and that, he adds, is a good team figure in any league.

Donovan was an inveterate gadgeteer, forever devising gimmicks for a business that has enough of them anyway. He had a number of guns that came in the shape of pipes. You could shoot well with these pipes, but you could not smoke them. So, whenever a fellow turned up behind the Nazi lines with a pipe in his mouth that would not smoke, he was promptly assumed to be a Donovan man.

Donovan inspired a small mechanism that made briefcases explode when unauthorized persons tried to open them. Several such explosions enlivened cocktail parties in Washington to which O.S.S. staffers went straight from their offices. Then there was the secret compass, which was concealed inside a false tooth.
But one of the requirements to be employed by O.S.S. was that an agent must possess all his teeth. Where to put the compass? The problem was solved by pulling a tooth of any agent who was given the compass.