The Irregulars (11 page)

Then there was the special operations section, a particularly learned group, among them Bill Deakin, a professor; Freddie Ayes, a philosopher; and Gilbert Highet, a classical scholar. There was Alec Halpern, an omniscient White Russian, nicknamed Monsieur le President, whose main function was to put feelers out to the different ethnic communities in the United States to assess their sympathy with Britain, as well as to find and recruit agents of Greek, Yugoslav, Bulgarian, Rumanian, or Hungarian extraction who might be of help in special work in Europe and Asia. Because of the diversity of languages involved in interrogations and examinations of documents, he also hired a small staff of linguists. The BSC cleverly tailored its messages to appeal to particular ethnic groups, targeting Catholics by spreading stories of Nazi desecration of churches, dispatching Irish agents to organize a network called the Irish American Defense Association, and persuading the journalist Max Ascoli to make inroads into the Italian-American community through the Mazzini Society.

These agents were supported in their efforts by a galaxy of creative talent such as the filmmakers Alexander and Zoltán Korda, who made pro-British propaganda films about their soldiers’ romantically dangerous exploits; and the magician Oskar Maskelyne, who was brought in specifically to create an illusory army to mislead and confuse the Germans. The composer Eric Maschwitz was made head of the BSC’s documentary warfare division, known as Station M, tasked with forging and fabricating wartime documents. There were also a number of Mata Hari types, such as Betty Thorpe, attractive young women in well-placed embassy jobs or exalted social circles who were in a position to hear important information, carry messages, and on occasion pilfer documents. For the same reason, Stephenson also sometimes recruited celebrities as couriers. Noël Coward and Leslie Howard were among those assigned tasks of a glamorously dangerous nature.
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Coward, famous for his plays
Fallen Angels
,
Hay Fever
, and
Private Lives
, was offered a job by Stephenson in the summer of 1940, after a clandestine meeting in an absurdly feminine chintz-covered room at the Hampshire House. “He was small, quietly affable, and talked very little,” recalled Coward. “He gave me two strong Cuba Libres one after another, and waited politely for me to talk a great deal. I obliged, up to a point, and was asked to return a few evenings later.” Coward had met Stephenson once before, very briefly, in London when he was first recruited. He had gone St. Ermin’s Hotel on Caxton Street, the original headquarters of the SOE before they moved to 64 Baker Street, to meet “a contact” in the foyer. “I waited in this squalid place and eventually a man said, ‘Follow me,’” he recalled. “He wheeled me round and into an elevator. It was only labeled to go up three floors. To my absolute astonishment it went to the fourth floor. An immense fellow guarded the place, all scrunched up inside a porter’s uniform. Well, this was the Special Operations Executive. What we later called the Baker Street Irregulars. Some chap was saying that President Roosevelt wanted us to do his fighting.” Stephenson was present but kept to the background and was “very calm, with those sort of hooded eyes watching everything.”

This was not Coward’s first foray into intelligence work. When war broke out, he had undertaken a mission for the SIS to set up a propaganda bureau in Paris, and his celebrity, busy theatrical schedule, and international travel had also made him useful to the Ministry of Information, which tapped him to do propaganda work in America. Coward expressed his desire to do something more for his country’s cause—a planned mission to do anti-Nazi work in South America had been called off at the last minute—and Stephenson assured the would-be spy that he could be of considerable service to the BSC and would be asked to undertake espionage assignments that required a delicate touch. In the meantime, his work for British War Relief in America would provide him with a reason to tour the country and “talk up” support for the Allies. “I was to go as an entertainer with an accompanist and sing my songs and on the side doing something rather hush-hush,” Coward wrote in his diary. “He saw where my celebrity value would be useful and he seemed to think I ought to be as flamboyant as possible, which was very smart of him. My disguise would be my own reputation as a bit of an idiot…merry playboy. It was very disarming. Very clever of him.”

By all accounts, Stephenson was the magnetic core around which these myriad stars rotated. A workaholic, he had almost no life outside the section, remaining largely anonymous and invisible in the city. No one seeing this short, square, sagacious-looking man in the elevator would have mistaken him for anything but a businessman, albeit one who kept very long hours. It was not unusual for him to work until midnight and to be back at his desk by dawn. As one BSC subordinate recalled, “It took eleven secretaries to keep up with him.” He rarely left the building unless it was to liaise with British and American intelligence in Washington, and more often than not people were expected to make the trip up to New York to be briefed. To facilitate communications between New York and the Washington office, Stephenson had installed a state-of-the-art teleprinter, known as the Telekrypton ciphering machine, or TK, which instantaneously coded or decoded the messages passed between the two bureaus.

When Ian Fleming met the BSC director the following spring, while on an assignment for British Naval Intelligence, he knew at once that he was in the presence of an extraordinary individual—a very tough, very rich, single-minded patriot, and “a man of few words.” Fleming was completely captivated by Stephenson’s elaborate setup and the vast array of sophisticated equipment he had accumulated, particularly the mechanical ciphering machines. Drawing on his background in radio and electronics, Stephenson had made improving the communications division one of his priorities, and he boasted it was “by far the largest of its type in operation.” Fleming, who was fascinated by gadgets of all kinds, carried a small commando knife with him on most foreign assignments, along with a trick fountain pen that ejected a cloud of tear gas when the clip was pressed. In Stephenson, he had finally found someone whose passion for sophisticated weaponry surpassed even his own, and his frank admiration led to a quick rapport and a rapidly developing friendship. Within a short time of their meeting, Fleming came to regard the Canadian as “one of the great secret agents” and a man who had “the quality of making anyone ready to follow him to the ends of the earth.” A mere commander and a comparative newcomer to the intelligence world, Fleming was self-conscious about his late start. He had failed the Foreign Office exam and was anxious to prove himself. He had also lost his father early in life—he was nine when Robert Fleming was killed in the First World War—and looked up to the BSC chief as a role model and mentor.

Until the spring of 1939, Fleming had been happily employed as a stockbroker in the old London firm of Rowe and Pitman, when he had been invited to a luncheon with Rear Admiral John Godfrey, the newly appointed director of Naval Intelligence, and informed that he had been appointed a lieutenant in the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve, and that his duty from then on lay in serving as the admiral’s personal assistant. He most likely owed his sudden career change to his older brother, Peter Fleming, a well-known explorer and author who had already been recruited by the SOE because of his extensive travels in and knowledge of the Middle East. Aged thirty-two and thirty-one respectively, the Fleming brothers were considered too old and inexperienced for frontline commands, but their Eton education and facility with languages singled them out as agent material. In the small, interlocking establishment circles at Whitehall and the City, the Fleming name was known. It did not hurt that Ian had done a stint at the Reuters news service, where he had volunteered to take on a little espionage assignment in the Soviet Union, and in the process earned a reputation as a fellow who could think on his feet.

Ian was tall and strikingly handsome, with blue eyes, thick brown hair, and a long nose that was somehow more attractive for having been broken. He was so impossibly clean-cut and square-jawed that when he reported to the Ministry of Defense in his blue serge uniform, he was promptly dubbed “the chocolate sailor” by an envious colleague. While his operational experience was limited to one brief mission in France, he was an extremely energetic and efficient administrator, becoming the chief contact between the Admiralty and the SOE. He also turned out to be highly imaginative when it came to devising espionage schemes, and while most of his proposals were too far-fetched to be practical, some were just crazy enough to be worth trying. One bright idea that got provisional approval before being scrapped was a detailed plan to capture German codebooks—of great value to the cryptographers—which involved staging a dummy crash of a Luftwaffe plane, which in theory would lure in one of the high-speed German launches patrolling the Channel and allow a team of saboteurs to overpower the crew before they realized it was a trap.

Fleming knew from his access to eyes-only documents that Stephenson, by carefully nurturing his unofficial relationship with the FBI, had already rendered “innumerable services to the Royal Navy that could not have been asked for, let alone executed, through normal channels.” On that first trip to the United States in May 1941, Fleming had accompanied Admiral Godfrey on a covert mission to Washington aimed at strengthening the ties between the British Admiralty and U.S. Naval Intelligence. It was, in essence, an attempt to initiate the same backstairs dialogue Stephenson had so successfully established with the Americans. They never had a chance. After listening to their exposé of security problems “with the air of doing [him] a favor,” Hoover made it clear he had no interest in accommodating the British any further and politely but firmly showed them the door. “Hoover had his channels with Bill Stephenson,” recalled Fleming, “and his common-sense, legalistic mind told him it would be unwise to open separate channels with us.”

Godfrey’s snubbed overture to Hoover had served only to highlight British intelligence’s frustration with the clumsy, one-sided arrangement, in which all of their useful information and requests for action had to be transmitted through the FBI. Increasingly touchy about incursions on his turf, Hoover had become close-fisted and combative, and in the absence of an American counterpart to the SOE, there was no other authority the British could turn to for assistance. The FBI had been created under the New Deal to fight crime, and while Hoover had added counterespionage to his roster of responsibilities, the FBI made no organized effort to collect secret intelligence from friendly and neutral countries, to say nothing of the enemy. The U.S. Army’s Signal Intelligence Service was an outdated and understaffed organization, a relic of the First World War and the prevailing isolationism that followed in its wake. As a result, the Roosevelt administration was poorly informed, and almost entirely dependant on tip-offs from its embassies and service attaches abroad, and the kindness of its allies. Vincent Astor, in his waning days as the president’s intelligence adviser, reported the British complaints to the president and lamented the bureaucratic delays and lost opportunities: “It is certainly a bit difficult to conduct an effective blitzkrieg of our own against malefactors when information becomes stymied in department files for six weeks.”

Prescient as ever, Stephenson had been arguing for the creation of an American secret service organization, to be headed by someone sympathetic to the British government—or, more to the point, someone with whom he could work—and had been assiduously pushing his own candidate to run the new agency. Colonel William Donovan was a prominent attorney and Columbia Law School classmate of Roosevelt’s, an irresistible Irishman with a forceful personality and immense charm, who had already run for office several times as a Republican. He had won a jacket full of medals in World War I, ended up as commander of the legendary “Fighting 69th,” and was affectionately known to the press as “Wild Bill.” Donovan, at the request of the president, had traveled to London in July 1940 on a fact-finding mission to survey fifth column activity in England. His “real object,” however, was to assess the state of the British defenses, as well as the underlying morale, with an eye to collecting as much information as possible in the event America entered the war: Would England fight on at all costs or, as the defeatist ambassador Joseph Kennedy kept warning Washington, would the country surrender in a matter of months? Stephenson, aware of the importance of his visit, had arranged for the American lawyer to meet with everyone who could help his inquiries, including an interview with Churchill.
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Donovan found the British still full of grit and determination and in turn assured them that he was an experienced and influential adviser on whom they could rely. Acting as a middleman, Donovan reported back to Washington that England could hold out, and in December he returned to London with Stephenson for another round of talks about Britain’s urgent need for supplies and military support, with destroyers topping the list.

Throughout that autumn, the two men were in regular contact as they evaluated the British prospects, the imminence of the Nazi assault, and a German fifth column that they believed threatened not only Europe but the whole Western Hemisphere, which Donovan proceeded to describe in a series of articles that ran in newspapers across the country. Both men pressed hard at the highest levels, for the badly needed supplies and lobbied tirelessly for the destroyers-for-bases agreement that ultimately provided England with fifty-four aging destroyers at a time when they were desperate for combat escorts to protect their convoys from U-boats. In the months that followed, Stephenson continued to cultivate Donovan, who had already proven his value and promised to be of great importance to him in the future, not only as a personable and vigorous figure close to the administration but as someone who had earned the trust and gratitude of the British government. If Stephenson had not yet fully conceived of the kind of sister organization the BSC required to function more efficiently in America, he was astute enough to identify the man he wanted to lead it early on. To make sure Donovan remained the front-runner, Stephenson exerted his influence on both sides of the pond and later admitted that some in the old-school circles of the SIS would have been horrified to learn the extent to which he was “supplying our friend with secret information to build up his candidacy for the position I wanted to see him achieve here.”