The Irregulars (12 page)

On June 18, 1941, Stephenson got his way, and Roosevelt appointed Donovan to the newly created office of coordinator of information (COI), acting as an adviser to the president on all matters concerned with intelligence, propaganda, and special operations. It was a huge assignment, and it was almost impossible to expect Donovan to be able to come up with a complete outline for the wartime organization at once. Stephenson offered Donovan his help in getting the new agency off the ground and “pressed his view” that it should be patterned after his own organization. Donovan, for his part, acknowledged Stephenson’s role as “the earliest collaborator with and chief supporter of the early movement” to expand the country’s secret activities, “whose early discussions with the Coordinator were largely instrumental in bringing about a clearer conception of the need for a properly coordinated American intelligence service.”

During this same period, Admiral Godfrey, who had befriended Donovan during his recent trip to London, was staying at his house in Washington and finding all his efforts to coordinate the two countries’ intelligence services frustrated at every turn, until Stephenson advised him that his host might be the answer to all their problems and that he was on the point of having him installed in power. To cut through red tape and speed up the process, Stephenson then maneuvered to have Sir William Wiseman, the SIS’s man in New York during World War I and one-time liaison to President Woodrow Wilson, explain the British Admiralty’s predicament to Roosevelt. This was done during a dinner party at the home of Roosevelt friends on Long Island. The result, Godfrey recalled, was that three weeks later Donovan received “$3,000,000 to play with as head of a new department.”

Having done what he could, Godfrey returned to England alone, leaving Fleming behind with instructions to do everything within his power to help establish the joint intelligence machinery. Godfrey approved of Fleming’s friendship with “Little Bill” (Stephenson) and “Big Bill” (Donovan) and thought that the more his assistant could learn about their ally’s point of view, the more he could do to improve their relations. “Ian got on well with the Americans,” recalled Godfrey, and “operating on a slightly different plane to mine, he was able to discover how that land lay and warn me of the pitfalls.” His energy and flair also appealed to Donovan, who found the young commander far more amenable and productive than the more deliberate, slow-moving admiral. “Fleming suffered not at all from Very Senior Officer Veneration,” observed Donald MacLachlan, a colleague in naval intelligence. “He was ready—indeed, more ready than Godfrey himself—to stand up for a case against a Vice-Chief of Naval Staff or Director of Plans. This easy confidence made him very effective in defense of the DNI’s sideshows, some of which were to expand famously and create all kinds of unfamiliar problems for the Admiralty’s civil servants.”

Fleming thought Donovan a “splendid American” and was eager to help him in any way he could. Over a period of several days, he worked with him while staying at Donovan’s Georgetown residence, drafting what he later described as the “original charter of the OSS,” as well as a second document he called “my memorandum to Bill on how to create an American Secret Service.” While neither of these memos fully qualified as “the cornerstone of the future OSS,” as Fleming later claimed, they comprised a thoughtful, practical outline of the kind of wartime organization the Americans needed, informed by the British service’s century of experience.

Ivar Bryce, Fleming’s Eton classmate and closest friend, recalled Fleming telling him that he wrote the charter out in longhand, “as a sort of imaginary exercise describing in detail all the arrangements necessary for financing, paying, organizing, controlling and training a secret service in a country that had never had one before. And it included a mass of practical detail on how much use could be made of diplomatic sources of intelligence, how agents could be run in the field, how records could be kept, and how liaison could be established with other governments.” Fleming even sketched his notion of the ideal American intelligence officer: “[He] must have trained powers of observation, analysis and evaluation; absolute discretion, sobriety, devotion to duty; language and wide experience; and be aged about 40 to 50.” Donovan greatly appreciated Fleming’s advice and before he left Washington presented him with him a small souvenir—a .38 Colt Police Positive revolver with the inscription “For Special Services.” Fleming would later imply he received the gun as a reward for far more dangerous work than being a pen pusher.

It took only a word from Fleming, and Bryce, a wealthy playboy from a good family, found himself working for Stephenson in New York, after what he later recalled as a remarkably short interview at the Westbury Hotel. The man who vetted him, and subsequently became his immediate superior, was Dick Coit—known affectionately to his staff as Coitus Interruptus—“a cherubic sixty-year-old” with a pink face and fiery disposition who helped oversee the BSC’s Special Operations Section. As Bryce would later write in a book of reminiscences of his adventures with Fleming, Coit told him the BSC could use someone like him, “if you are willing to follow any orders, and accept whatever happens to you, and on no account ever to reveal the smallest detail concerning your work.” Bryce then signed the Official Secrets Act, “a terrifying document,” and swore “total and blind and everlasting obedience.”

As he had joined around the time when the BSC was taking over the SOE’s responsibilities for Latin America, Bryce spent the first few months working in what he said felt like “an export office,” sitting behind an accountant’s desk and dealing with dreary commercial and cultural matters in Venezuela, Brazil, Cuba, Colombia, and Peru. His first real assignment was to help find and train “bodies,” the term for agents, that the SOE needed to carry out risky missions to disrupt Nazi and anti-Allied activities in the area. The Latin countries were honeycombed with German organizations such as Auslands Deutsch, and the Reich had even gone so far as to establish some secret military training camps in the continent’s interior. At the time, it had seemed probable that the Germans would invade South America using the Vichy French territory of Senegal as a staging area. Given the scant opposition in the area, military strategists estimated that the German conquest of the continent would take less than a month. With that threat in mind, Stephenson thought it was worth trying to mount at least a skeleton resistance force. Of the twenty young men whom Bryce managed to recruit in Latin America for the BSC’s operation, more than half were rejected for one reason or another. Of the small pool who eventually passed muster, only a handful successfully completed their hair-raising missions and returned home safely. Most of those who were caught were tortured, then shot. One, a young Dutch friend from Brazil named Jan van Schelle, was reported killed. He had parachuted into Holland after his underground operation was exposed and had the misfortune to put down among a reception party of Gestapo agents. Bryce felt “the dreadful responsibility” of selecting these candidates given the catastrophes that might befall them. His friend had enjoyed a happy and useful life in Brazil, and it was he “who suggested to him what he might exchange it for.”
*

The BSC’s anti-Nazi underground was from the start “a shoe-string operation,” and relatively little had been accomplished by the spring of 1942 when Hoover moved to rein in Stephenson’s activities and ordered him to curtail their defensive efforts in the southern republics. Hoover, Bryce noted, was a man for whom “jealousies and petty rivalries meant more than great causes.” Although the FBI director was “on good terms” with Stephenson, “he was immensely touchy at the thought of any British interference in what he regarded as ‘his territory.’” In March, Bryce alerted Lippmann to the gravity of the situation: “If you felt at all inclined to write anything about the danger to S. America, I could give you any number of facts which have never been published, but which my friends here would like to see judiciously made public, at this point.”

Still preoccupied with Nazi designs on Latin America, Bryce, holed up in his BSC office, took to sketching worst-case scenarios on his blotter showing what the area would look like if forced to submit to Nazi rule. There would be the inevitable rearrangement of national borders, with Nazi-oriented governments probably gaining territories, while some homelands might be totally eradicated. In his trial maps, he imagined what would happen if Hitler got his way, and drew a logical extension of the idea: “The obvious aggrandizement of Paraguay, the land-locked and poverty-stricken but immensely militaristic kingdom of the great German dictator Stroessner, would of course be enlarged: a great corridor to the Pacific, at the expense of Chile, Paraguay’s old enemy. The abolition of Uruguay, the Switzerland of South America.”

According to Bryce, after looking over his sketches, it occurred to Stephenson to try to pull a fast one and plant a fake map in a known German safe house on the southern coast of Cuba, where Nazi agents stored radio equipment used for signaling U-boats in the area. Stephenson then planned to tip the FBI, which would promptly raid the Nazi outpost and fall upon “a monster prize.” Bryce could only speculate on the immense value of such a find, especially when it came to sounding the alarm in America, which still felt safely removed from the Nazi threat: “Were a German map of this kind to be discovered or captured from enemy hands and publicized among the good neighbors themselves, and above all among the ‘America Firsters’ with their belief that America could get along with Hitler, what a commotion would be caused.”

One of Bryce’s trial maps was immediately given over to Station M, the BSC’s technical facilities in Canada, where Eric Maschwitz ran a chemical laboratory and photograph studio, and had the ability to fabricate images, such as atrocity pictures, and to “reprint faultlessly the imprint of any typewriter on earth.” Forty-eight hours later Maschwitz and his team of experts had created an authentic-looking German map, slightly worn and discolored from frequent use, which, Bryce marveled, even “the Reich’s chief mapmakers for the German High Command would be prepared to swear was made by them.”

On this occasion, Stephenson may have outdone himself, passing the forgery on to Donovan, who gave it to Roosevelt. On March 11, 1941, the president made a dramatic announcement during his Navy Day radio address, revealing that he had proof that Hitler’s plans for conquest extended across the Atlantic Ocean. “I have in my possession a secret map,” he solemnly intoned, “made in Germany by Hitler’s government—by the planners of the new world. It is a map of South America and a part of Central America as Hitler proposes to reorganize it.” Roosevelt went on to describe the principal features of the map, including the Panama Canal, “our great life line,” and Germany’s plan to carve the region up into five vassal states. “That map, my friends, makes clear the Nazi design not only against South America but against the United States as well.” Bryce’s map, which had been produced rather than procured by the BSC, was held up to the nation as one of the “grim truths” of Hitler’s future plans and demanded a response. Americans, Roosevelt declared, were “pledged to pull our oar in the destruction of Hitlerism.”

From the BSC’s point of view, the map was a daring gambit that resulted in a propaganda coup. As expected, the German government responded to Roosevelt’s radio broadcast by angrily denouncing the document as a fraud. The Italian government immediately demanded that unless the president published the map within twenty-four hours, Roosevelt would acquire “a sky-high reputation as a forger.” Their furious protests only served to make the phony document appear more real. At a press conference the following day, FDR declined to make his “secret map” available, assuring reporters that it came from “a source that is undoubtedly reliable.” Bryce, who was sure the president’s speech was inspired by his invention, was amazed by the impact of the broadcast. “The item was made full use of by the media,” he recalled, “and gave distasteful but unanswerable food for thought to the many who believed that European wars could have no influence on the inhabitants of the Western Hemisphere.”

While the map’s true origin was not discovered at the time, Adolf Berle strongly suspected that Stephenson and his boys were behind it. Another document cited by Roosevelt in the same speech, supposedly detailing a Nazi plan to abolish all the world’s religions, seemed equally spurious. Berle knew that the BSC specialized in manufacturing fake documents, and the written proof outlining German plans for world domination struck Berle as a bit too convenient. In a memorandum forwarded to Cordell Hull, Berle warned that Americans should be “on our guard” against these “false scares” concocted by the British. Only a month earlier, Berle had written a detailed memorandum enumerating the potential dangers of the British operation being run by the “security co-ordinator” Mr. William S. Stephenson, arguing that it was developing into “a full size secret police and intelligence service” and was supported by shadow force of “regularly employed secret agents and a much larger number of informers, etc.”

Looking ahead, Berle worried that in any number of conceivable wartime scenarios—if Britain fell to the Germans, and they were faced with a new hostile occupation government; or some mission went wrong and their activities were exposed—this unofficial band of spies could prove a real liability. “I have good reason to believe that a good many things done are probably in violation of the espionage acts,” he warned, adding with lawyerly caution, “We should be on very dubious grounds if we have not taken appropriate steps.” When he learned that Stephenson had succeeded in having his position in the United States formalized as director of security coordination, Berle was not pleased: “It’s a bad title—& worse to talk about. I would shut up and watch it.” In the months that followed, Berle grew increasingly hostile toward the BSC’s interference on American soil and began leading the effort, with Hoover’s quiet encouragement, to discontinue the British spy unit.