Joseph E. Persico (48 page)

Gisevius informed Dulles that another date, not far off, had been set for Hitler's assassination. On July 12, Gisevius left Switzerland for Germany, and on the same day Dulles sent a cryptic telegram, relayed to FDR, reading, “There is a possibility that a dramatic event may take place up north, if Breakers courier is to be trusted.”

Astonishingly, knowing and sharing the President's taste for strategic rumors, Donovan never sent FDR any of the specific Gisevius intelligence that conspirators were plotting to assassinate Hitler and that the Nazi regime might be overthrown and replaced by a government ready to make peace. What was set before the President from Donovan seemed to point in the opposite direction. On the day that Gisevius departed for Berlin, Donovan relayed another report from Dulles, obtained from a “neutral observer,” that read: “A revolution is not to be expected; the people are too apathetic and too closely supervised by the police. A collapse can only come as the Allied troops arrive. . . . The opposition are not in any position to take such a step.”

Three days later, FDR had another appraisal from Bern, this one gingerly questioning FDR's policy of unconditional surrender. Inside Germany, Dulles reported, “Goebbels has taken and twisted the slogan of unconditional surrender and made the people feel that the slogan means unconditional annihilation.” He went on to predict that “any opposition to the Nazi regime involves the gravest risk of immediate execution.”

The closest Donovan ever came to advising the President that he had knowledge of a plot brewing was to share the following: “Those opposed to the Nazis realize . . . that the next few weeks may be their last chance to show that they are willing to take some risks in making the first move to clean up their own house.” Donovan advised, “We must judge whether the encouragement of any effort towards a revolution in Germany will, at this juncture, help to save thousands of lives of Allied soldiers. . . .” He believed it would. Churchill had already pointed out to FDR “the desirability that the German people themselves should take steps to overthrow the Nazi government. I believe that it would be helpful if a similar and somewhat expanded statement could be authoritatively made on our side at this time.” But FDR remained obdurate in his opposition: no negotiated peace, only unconditional surrender. He wanted the Germany of Adolf Hitler driven to its knees. Only then could a better nation be reborn.

That summer, Eleanor Roosevelt came across a memorandum that Churchill had written in 1919 during the Russian civil war, describing how the Allies had tried to strangle the Red revolution in its cradle. “Large sums of money and considerable forces have been employed by the Allies against the Bolsheviks during the year,” Churchill wrote. He noted that over eight thousand American troops in Siberia were fighting the Red Army. Further, Japan and Finland stood ready to commit substantial forces to the anti-revolutionary side, and Britain and France were prepared to commit millions in aid lest “the Bolshevik armies are supreme over the whole vast territories of the Russian Empire.” In a cramped scrawl across the top of the memorandum, the First Lady had written, “It is not surprising if Mr. Stalin is slow to forget!” She then passed Churchill's long ago sentiments on to the President. Here was the seed of East-West distrust that Roosevelt was determined to overcome.

On the very eve that the anti-Nazis planned their coup, the President received from Donovan another report from Bern stating flatly that “Hitler is still functioning as the Supreme Commander of the Army.” The only hint of restive generals in this communication dealt with the V-1 rockets the Germans had begun dropping on England. The generals opposed the weapon, “not on any grounds of principle. . . . They felt that the employment of this bomb had little strategic value.”

Yet Donovan also had the dozens of Breaker messages anticipating a plot against Hitler, and given the boost in his standing if these reports proved accurate, his failure to inform the President is mystifying. In the ten days prior to July 20, Donovan's memoranda to the President dealt with the possibility of Bulgaria entering the war, profiles of several Chinese generals, a draft Chinese Constitution, and information on the Timor islands, but nothing about an attempt on Hitler's life. On July 20 the conspirators did strike. Colonel Klaus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg, missing an eye, one hand, and three fingers on the other hand, planted a briefcase bomb in the Wolfsschanze, Hitler's East Prussian headquarters. Four of the men in the room with Hitler were killed outright or suffered fatal wounds. Hitler was only slightly injured. The coup had failed.

A memorandum delivered to the White House two days after the plot suggested that Donovan did not want it to appear that his organization had been caught flat-footed. He sent FDR a transcript of a radio telephone conversation he had had with Allen Dulles which read: “The developments did not come as a great surprise except to the extent that there were reasons to doubt whether any high officers of the German Army, who had remained in positions of power after the successive purges, would have the courage to act. . . . We had ample advance warning that a plot was in the wind,” the transcript concluded, “if this attempt has failed, the Germans will probably have to wait for the complete military collapse of Germany to rid themselves of the Nazis. . . .”

Details of the failed coup came dribbling in, but little more than could be gleaned from monitored German broadcasts and newspapers reaching neutral Switzerland. “Photographs appearing in the German press of Hitler bidding farewell to Mussolini, after his visit to headquarters,” Donovan reported to FDR, “may indicate that Hitler's right hand is wounded, since he is giving Mussolini the left hand.” Donovan included one more detail passed along by Dulles to tantalize the President: “I have just heard tonight from a good source that Berger, Hitler's co-worker, who was the only one who was immediately killed at the time of the attack on Hitler, was Hitler's double. Possibly Stauffenberg, who probably did not know Hitler well, made a mistake.” Donovan also reported that the assassination attempt had occurred not in East Prussia, but in Hitler's Alpine retreat at Berchtesgaden in Bavaria. The report was inaccurate as to the site, the number killed, and the supposition that Stauffenberg had been misled by a double. The one accurate disclosure Wild Bill reported was that the blast at Rastenburg marked the fourth failed attempt by these conspirators on Hitler's life. One OSS prediction proved dead on. “The blood purge will be ruthless,” Dulles cabled Washington. The Gestapo had immediately embarked on a remorseless manhunt, arresting thousands, however remotely traceable to the plot.

Actually, FDR had little need for the tardy and speculative intelligence on the plot from Donovan's spies. He had a much swifter, more accurate source, the unwittingly obliging Ambassador Oshima. Days after the failed coup, the ambassador had a long conversation with Joachim von Ribbentrop in which the Reich's foreign minister revealed the leaders of the plot, their intentions, the collapse of their enterprise, and their fate. Ribbentrop told Oshima, according to the ambassador's report to Tokyo, “Colonel Stauffenberg entered a meeting which was in progress in order to make a report to Chancellor Hitler. After he had placed a bag in which the bomb had been put upon the floor about two meters from where Chancellor Hitler was, he said that he had some other business and left the room.” Ribbentrop next told Oshima, “. . . [T]he bomb exploded with tremendous force after the lapse of about five minutes. . . . What was really mysterious was the fact that the Chancellor, who was nearest to the bomb when it exploded, was unhurt with the exception that his clothes were torn to pieces by the blast and he sustained a few burns.” Oshima gave Ribbentrop's view of the genesis of the coup. “I think that this was a plan for attempting a compromise with England and America after the people involved had secured in this way the real power for themselves. However, while there is some suspicion that the bomb which Colonel Stauffenberg used was of British make, we have not yet secured any proof that Beck [General Ludwig Beck, a plot leader] was communicating with England and America.” Through Magic, this account from the lips of the German foreign minister was available to the President just five days after the coup. Oshima sought credit for warning the Führer. “I as well as others had advised Chancellor Hitler that resolute steps should be taken against this attitude, but the Chancellor is a man who prefers to deal with problems of this kind with forbearing and gentle measures, and therefore, so long as there was no clear proof, he did not consent to the taking of measures such as we suggested.”

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FDR's resolve not to provoke Soviet suspicions about a separate peace was matched only by Stalin's hypocrisy. An OSS agent in Sweden, Abram Hewitt, had managed to penetrate the Nazi SS, through the personal physician of Heinrich Himmler, head of the terror apparatus. Dr. Felix Kersten, a Finn, had developed a promising nerve therapy with which he treated leading Europeans, including Benito Mussolini, Il Duce's son-in-law, Count Galeazzo Ciano, Prince Henry of the Netherlands, and Himmler, who by now monopolized the doctor's time. Hewitt had met Kersten on one of the doctor's frequent visits to Stockholm and found him willing to cooperate with the Allies. Between them, they concocted an imaginary back ailment for the American which Kersten would pretend to treat while briefing Hewitt. Most alarming was what the Finn revealed about peace maneuvering between the Soviet Union and Germany. “The doctor reported,” Hewitt cabled Washington, “that Prince Wied, the German Minister to Stockholm, had come with a peace proposal from the Russians to SS Headquarters about the time of Stalingrad, and that Papen had come with another one from Ankara in May 1943. The outlines of the proposals were that Germany should take about one-half the Baltic countries to the north of East Prussia; and that Poland should be divided along the 1939 lines; that Russia should demand the whole coast to the Black Sea, including the mouth of the Danube, and should go as far as Constantinople and Salonika, and should also have a port on the Adriatic.” Kersten told Hewitt during a subsequent back treatment of the fate of the Russian scheme: “Ribbentrop and Goebbels had been in favor of accepting these proposals, while Himmler and Hitler were against them. Even with the defeat at Stalingrad, Hitler had convinced himself that Russian reserves would be exhausted and the Eastern front would stalemate.” He needed to concede nothing to Stalin.

Donovan forwarded Hewitt's entire seventeen-page report to the President on March 20, at the same time that the numerous Breakers communications were revealing the German conspirators' hopes for a separate peace with the West. If FDR regarded separate peace talks with the Germans as betrayal of the Soviet Union, Hewitt's report provided indisputable evidence that Stalin was only too willing to betray his Western Allies. Ever since Tehran, however, FDR had persuaded himself that he could not only work with Stalin, but could trust him. Furthermore, the remorseless retreat of Germany from east to west convinced him that the Russians, at this point, must prefer to destroy rather than deal with their enemy.

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The performance of the OSS continued to seesaw. Donovan's great strength remained his ability to attract talent. By the third year of the war, his forces in the field had penetrated all the occupied countries, providing arms, communications, and heart to resistance movements. An esprit de corps sprang up, tinged with self-mocking irony. One favorite ditty, sung to the tune of the “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” described the fate of an OSS agent parachuted into occupied territory:

He hit the ground, the sound was splot,His blood went spurting high.His comrades then were heard to say,  “a helluva way to die.”He lay there rollin' around in the welter of his gore,And he ain't gonna jump no more.

The products of Donovan's Research and Analysis branch, under William Langer, noted Harvard professor of European history, won grudging respect even from the military. Langer's staff engaged Dr. Henry A. Murray of the Harvard Psychological Clinic to prepare an “Analysis of the Personality of Adolf Hitler: With Predictions of His Future Behavior and Suggestions for Dealing with Him Now and After Germany's Surrender.” Copy number one of thirty copies of the two-hundred-page profile went to the White House and confirmed Putzi Hanfstaengl's earlier reading of his erstwhile Führer. “Hitler has often vowed that he would commit suicide if his plans miscarried,” Murray reported, “but if he chooses this course, he will do it at the last moment and in the most dramatic possible manner. He will retreat, let us say, to the impregnable little fortress he has built for himself on the top of the mountain beyond the Berghof [at Berchtesgaden]. There alone he will wait until troops come to take him prisoner. As a climax he will blow up the mountain and himself with dynamite.”

Along with the gems, the OSS continued to submit clinkers. While American and Allied armies were hopping across the islands of Guadalcanal, New Guinea, Tarawa, Bougainville, Kwajalein, and Saipan, Donovan's Morale Operations branch offered its contribution to victory in the Pacific. The Japanese were reportedly circulating pornographic pictures of American women throughout India and other Asian countries to demonstrate the enemy's depravity. Morale Operations mounted a counterattack. The FBI reported, “Mr. Towell of OSS has requested that permission be granted to a representative of OSS to come to the Bureau and select copies of obscene materials [of oriental women]. . . . The laboratory has a collection of 25 or 30 photographs of this nature. It is suggested that OSS be permitted to obtain copies of a representative group of these photographs for their project,” to demonstrate the low morals of the Japanese. “O.K.,” Hoover scrawled across the bottom of the OSS request. Finally, an endeavor had been found in which the rivalrous Donovan and Hoover could cooperate.