Kill Chain: The Rise of the High-Tech Assassins (12 page)

An old idea had found its time.

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IT’S NOT ASSASSINATION IF WE DO IT

He was the ultimate high-value target, the man who by virtue of his personal magnetism and force of will had brought about the most destructive war in history. Even when defeat appeared certain, his absolute control of the nation he ruled meant the fighting dragged on, with millions more dying. “As long as Hitler continues to live among them,” wrote Air Vice-Marshal Alan Ritchie of the Royal Air Force in 1944, “the people will have faith and, having faith, they will remain impervious to logical argument or demonstrated fact.… Remove Hitler and there is nothing left.” Ritchie, a former bomber commander, was a senior official in Special Operations Executive (SOE), the clandestine British warfare agency set up by Winston Churchill in 1940 with a mandate to “set all Europe ablaze.” Not only did he believe that the assassination of Hitler would collapse the enemy war machine, but he also became deeply involved in an operation to carry it out.

Along with sabotage, subversion, aid to resistance movements, and other harassing operations against the Germans, SOE was always in search of ways to eliminate leading members of the Nazi hierarchy. By 1944 the agency’s most notable success in this regard had been the elimination of SS General Reinhard Heydrich, the ruler of occupied Czechoslovakia, in 1942. Although Heydrich, one of the cruelest of the Nazi bosses, did die from wounds following an attack by Czech partisans dispatched by SOE, the resulting German reprisals were savage in the extreme. Thousands of Czechs, including the entire male population of the village of Lidice, as well as the last surviving Jews of Berlin, were immediately murdered in revenge. The overall ongoing holocaust accelerated.

Nevertheless, the leadership of SOE remained eager to find a way to kill Hitler himself, exploring various possibilities, such as blowing up his train or introducing poison into his tea. By June 1944 serious consideration was being given to Operation Foxley, in which a sniper would infiltrate Hitler’s mountain retreat of Berchtesgaden in the Bavarian Alps and shoot him as he took his daily walk, unguarded, to a teahouse a few hundred yards from the main building.

In view of Hitler’s status in the pantheon of evil, his elimination would seem to be an obvious and unquestioned priority for the Allies, just as killing Osama bin Laden would be, decades later, for Barack Obama. Such was not the case. Even in the midst of total war against a remorseless and vicious enemy, not everyone agreed that Hitler himself should be on any kind of target list. Major-General Gerald Templer, who, as commander of SOE’s German Directorate, would be in immediate charge of the operation, wrote in November 1944 that there was “still a grave divergence of views” on the “desirability and feasibility” of the assassination scheme. The arguments on either side resonate strongly in an age when such targeting has become a fundamental component of U.S. strategy.

“All experts on Germany,” noted Templer, agreed that Foxley was “unsound and would not be in the interests of the allied cause.” Nevertheless, “among certain members of the SOE Council” and “among the highest in the land in England” were “strong advocates of the operation.” The “highest in the land” had to be a discreet reference to Winston Churchill, himself, who not only had already endorsed the notion of assassinating Hitler but also was enamored of schemes for daring and unorthodox military adventures. The SOE council members referred to by Templer included Ritchie, a former bomber commander with a conviction common to his profession that there was a targeting solution to any challenge. Just as his successors fighting the Vietnam War believed that the destruction of the Thanh Hoa Bridge would solve their problems, and their successors pursuing the war on terror single-mindedly hunted the leadership of al-Qaeda, Ritchie took it as a given that Hitler’s “mystical hold” was all that was keeping his country together. Given Hitler’s absolute domination of Germany and its war machine, who could doubt that getting rid of him would be an unqualified benefit?

However, there were plenty of people with doubts, and they were in a position to express them. Lieutenant Colonel Ronald Thornley, Templer’s deputy, was a genuine expert on Germany, since he had traveled there extensively in peacetime as a businessman and spoke the language fluently. Joining the army at the beginning of the war, he had risen rapidly through the ranks of SOE, supervising subversion and sabotage inside Germany itself. In clear, simple prose, he laid out his reasons for why killing Hitler would be entirely counterproductive. Merely disposing of the Nazi leader, he wrote, “would almost certainly canonize him and give birth to the myth that Germany would have been saved if he had lived.” Since the overall war aim was to defeat and extinguish Nazism, this would have been a most undesirable development. Furthermore, rather than standing in the way of an Allied victory, Thornley pointed out, the Führer was being extremely helpful. “As a strategist, Hitler has been of the greatest possible assistance to the British war effort.… He is still in a position to override completely the soundest of military appreciation and thereby help the Allied Cause enormously.” Furthermore, he argued, such an act would cause lasting damage to those who carried it out: “It would be disastrous if the world came to think that the Allies had to resort to these low methods as they were otherwise unable to defeat the German military machine. From every point of view, the ideal end to Hitler would be one of steadily declining power and increasing ridicule.” In an age where high-value targeting lies at the core of U.S. strategy against its enemies, Thornley’s reasoned assessment still stands as a model of rational rebuttal against the idea.

As it happened, nothing ever came of Foxley, as Hitler stopped visiting Berchtesgaden after July 1944. In any event, SOE was in reality a surprisingly ineffective operation overall, sometimes shockingly so. From 1941 on, its operations in aid of the French resistance had been largely penetrated by German counterintelligence. Agents parachuting into France were met all too often by an enemy reception committee. Shockingly, even when captured agents managed to use prearranged codes to warn they were in enemy hands, headquarters paid no attention and continued to dispatch brave men and women to inevitable torture and death. Dissolved after the war (though not before a mysterious fire had destroyed much of its financial records), SOE left an enduring legacy not only in espionage fiction but also in the culture of another wartime creation: the Office of Strategic Services, precursor of the CIA. The biographer of OSS Director William Donovan summarized the relationship between the two organizations this way: “Each had much to offer the other—the British experience, training, contacts and special equipment; the Americans, manpower, gold and political reputation.”

The OSS itself attained legendary status, central to the creation myth of the CIA, although in fact it contributed little in the way of intelligence. For example, though its chief agent in Switzerland, future CIA director Allen Dulles, subsequently made much of his success in inducing the surrender of German forces in northern Italy following months of secret negotiations, this coup preceded the total German unconditional surrender by a mere eight days. The OSS Rome station chief James Jesus Angleton had meanwhile won accolades for recruiting an agent who could supply copies of the Vatican’s secret diplomatic correspondence, including reports from the Papal Nuncio in Japan. These were deemed so valuable and urgent that they were rushed straight to the Oval Office. Sadly, the intelligence turned out to be entirely bogus, concocted by the “agent,” a forger and pornographer, author of such works as the best-selling
Amazons of the Bidet
.

The great triumph of Allied intelligence of World War II was the comprehensive cracking of German and Japanese codes (not to mention those of most neutral nations as well). This gave U.S. and British leaders an unambiguous insight into enemy plans and dispositions. But the OSS had no access to this vital tool, having been excluded since inception by the military services that had broken the codes in the first place. Indeed, the prevailing attitude of military intelligence toward OSS was contempt. As General Carter Clarke, who headed the vital military intelligence department known as Special Branch, later scornfully informed me, “The OSS did superb work rescuing downed pilots and other unfortunates in Burma, but if they ever produced any intelligence worthy of the name, I was not aware of it.” Clarke, a salty-tongued Kentucky native who had risen through the ranks of the prewar army, made no secret of his opinion of William Donovan, the flamboyant lawyer who founded and led the OSS through the war. Clarke’s colorful style and views are apparent in his account of an incident when “there were three guys in Dakar that needed to be knocked off, and old Donovan—who was about as useful as a row of tits on a nun—he said, well, the OSS’ll do it. So he went over there and they killed three guys all right, but they were the wrong three. Well Roosevelt damn near had a stroke over that.”

Special Branch was itself the brainchild of a Wall Street lawyer, Alfred McCormack, a partner in the powerful firm of Cravath, Swaine & Moore, and John J. McCloy, the quintessential insider who became assistant secretary of war in 1940. Following the disaster of Pearl Harbor, intelligence agencies, including OSS, proliferated like weeds in Washington: no less than forty appeared over the following twelve months. Few people even inside the government knew that the Japanese diplomatic code had been broken by a secret army unit and that all Japan’s diplomatic traffic had been read for months before the Pearl Harbor attack, priceless intelligence that had been almost entirely wasted. However, McCloy, together with his immediate superior and fellow Wall Street lawyer Henry Stimson, felt that the best way to analyze discreetly what had gone wrong with prewar intelligence and how to proceed in the future was to consult a fellow Wall Street lawyer. So McCormack was asked to come down from New York and take a look.

Given immediate access to the so-called magic intercepts—there was no nonsense about waiting for security clearance in those days, at least not for a Cravath partner—McCormack soon reported back. Uncowed by his high-level audience, he began by noting that the intercepted material had made it perfectly clear that the Japanese were likely to attack Pearl Harbor, and therefore he asked, “Why were the principal units of our Navy herded together in a harbor from which they could not escape?” The mistakes, he stated baldly, had not been made by the local commanders (who were already being scapegoated for the disaster) but in Washington. Despite this frankness (unthinkable in today’s intelligence bureaucracy), McCormack’s suggestion that a special and very carefully selected unit be set up to handle the priceless intelligence was heeded. “To do the work well,” he wrote afterward, “a man must have not only a broad education and background of information but must have more than his fair share of astuteness, skepticism and desire to solve puzzling problems; and he must have a capacity for laborious detail work that very few people have.” The people he had in mind were smart lawyers like himself, many of whom were from the same Cravath firm and almost all of whom were graduates of Yale and Harvard law schools.

The new unit, Special Branch, was soon up and running, commanded by the above-mentioned Carter Clarke, with McCormack as his deputy. As Clarke put it to me many years later, “He furnished the brains, and I did the hatchet work.” Hatchet work apparently included not only fighting necessary bureaucratic battles but also executing sensitive missions for Army Chief of Staff General George Marshall, especially when they concerned threats to the great secret of the broken enemy codes. Thus in 1944 Clarke was dispatched by Marshall to dissuade presidential candidate Thomas Dewey from revealing that the United States had been reading Japanese messages before Pearl Harbor. Dewey had learned of this, Clarke explained to me, from General Hugh Drumm, a disappointed candidate for Marshall’s post as army chief of staff.

Despite the vital necessity of preserving the supreme secret of the broken codes, it gave way to an overwhelming desire to kill a particular enemy leader. Admiral Isoruku Yamamoto had devised and commanded the surprise Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, America’s greatest-ever naval defeat, thereby earning demonization in domestic U.S. propaganda as “our chief individual enemy, next to Adolf Hitler, leather faced, bullet headed, bitter-hearted Isoroku Yamamoto.” By the spring of 1943, however, the Japanese advance had been stemmed. Yamamoto had been decisively beaten in the Midway battle, and more recently at Guadalcanal. Early that April, U.S. naval cryptographers in Hawaii (one of whom was the future Supreme Court justice John Paul Stevens) decrypted a message detailing the Japanese commander’s itinerary for a forthcoming inspection tour. American commanders saw an opportunity for revenge. Orders came from on high—by some accounts, from President Roosevelt himself—to “get Yamamoto.” His plane was accordingly intercepted and shot down over the Solomon Islands on April 18, 1943, by U.S. long-range P-38 fighters, a feat that rapidly prompted dangerous leaks imperilling the precious secret of the codes.