Joseph E. Persico (17 page)

After the war Donovan returned to Buffalo and the law. He was first drawn into public service as U.S. attorney for the Western District of New York in 1922. In that era of Prohibition, he authorized a raid on his own Saturn Club, outraging his fellow members who denounced him as “a common mick” and who expected him to resign from the club. “The law is the law,” he told reporters, “and I have sworn to uphold it.” And, seeing no reason to deprive himself of the pleasures of membership, he remained in the Saturn Club.

In 1924, Donovan was promoted to assistant attorney general and went to Washington, where he became nominal boss of the rising J. Edgar Hoover, a relationship that fit poorly from day one. It was during this period that Donovan experienced the rebuff that FDR later recalled, the refusal of President Herbert Hoover, after making him acting attorney general, to appoint Wild Bill to the full post.

In 1932 politics beguiled him, and Donovan won the Republican nomination as candidate for governor of New York. But that year, with the Depression deepening, was a lean season for Republicans. Donovan was pulled under by the same voter tide that swept FDR into the White House.

His political ambitions frustrated, Donovan returned to New York and established a Wall Street law firm, heavy with international clients. While becoming rich at the law, he still retained his avidity for public issues. In 1936 he left the practice to his partners and went off to observe firsthand the fighting between Italy and Ethiopia. His wife by now accepted, if she did not embrace, his absences. Thus far, in their marriage, eighteen months was the longest period during which he had stayed at home.

This was the man who had come into FDR's orbit in 1940, a multimillionaire Wall Street lawyer, globe-trotting student of world affairs, a mover at the summit of society with connections to practically everyone who mattered. Now in his late fifties, the man still retained a restless, curious, devouring mind that leaped from enthusiasm to enthusiasm, giving ideas, the brilliant and harebrained, an equal hearing. A colleague remembered of Donovan, “He was soft-spoken, but determined. He would persuade you with logic, charm, and presence, but always persuade you.” Indeed, he had persuaded FDR that America needed an intelligence service and that the obvious choice to head it was himself.

*

A president turning to espionage to strengthen his country's defenses followed in a long tradition. Phillip Knightley writes in
The Second Oldest Profession:
“The spy is as old as history. . . . The Old Testament names the twelve spies Moses sent on a mission to the land of Canaan. . . . Alfred the Great was always interested in the Danish threat . . . he went into the enemy encampment himself disguised as a bard.” The fourth-century
B.C.
Chinese general and military thinker Sun-tzu writes: “One good spy is worth a regiment of troops.” Roosevelt was also pursuing the path of his earliest predecessor. George Washington, “first in war, first in peace,” was also early to engage in espionage. In 1753, just turned twenty-one, Washington entered the Ohio wilderness to ascertain for the British if any French had penetrated British colonial soil. He managed to dine with French officers at a fort called Venanges. Washington merely sipped while the Frenchmen “dos'd themselves pretty plentifully,” he later wrote. He went on, “The Wine . . . soon banished the restraint which at first appeared in their Conversation, and gave license to their Tongues to reveal their Sentiments more freely. They told me it was their absolute Design to take Possession of the Ohio. . . .”

When in 1775 Washington became commander of American Revolutionary forces, he declared that gaining intelligence about the British was one of his “immediate and pressing Duties.” He paid over three hundred dollars to an undercover agent who entered British-occupied Boston “to establish a secret correspondence for the purpose of conveying intelligence on the Enemy's movements and designs.” The amount was substantial at the time, but as King Frederick II of Prussia once noted, “A man who risks being hanged in your service merits being well paid,” which was precisely the risk run by Nathan Hale, America's first national hero, hanged regretting only that he had but one life to spy for his country. Hale's statue today stands in front of the headquarters of the Central Intelligence Agency.

President Abraham Lincoln had no formal espionage service during the Civil War, but he did engage Allan Pinkerton's detective agency to spy for the Union. The Confederates employed women, including Belle Boyd, who outwitted Pinkerton, and Rose O'Neill Greenhow, a rich Washington hostess who gathered intelligence at parties she gave and passed it along to Confederate agents, including Lincoln's assassin, John Wilkes Booth.

The first country to create a permanent, publicly funded spy service had been Great Britain in 1909, although British espionage dates back to Queen Elizabeth's secretary of state, Sir Francis Walsingham. Sir Francis developed an organization that ran agents into France, the Low Countries, Italy, Germany, even Turkey, and penetrated the Spanish Armada, costly operations paid for out of his own pocket. England's lead in entering the permanent spy business was soon followed by Germany in 1913, Russia in 1917, and France in 1935.

America's Office of Naval Intelligence was founded in 1882. It was followed soon after by the Army's Military Intelligence Division, which was largely a housekeeping service, running loyalty checks on War Department personnel, protecting government buildings, bridges, and other facilities, and conducting meager intelligence.

During World War I the United States entered the codebreaking field when a short, balding, brilliant, fanatic poker player named Herbert O. Yardley launched a cryptographic service that came to be known as the Black Chamber. But in the era of peace that followed, Yardley found his chamber choked for funds. In 1929, when Henry Stimson became President Hoover's secretary of state, Stimson was appalled to have deciphered Japanese messages delivered to his desk. He shut down the Black Chamber for engaging in what he regarded as unethical conduct. As he famously notes in his memoirs, “Gentlemen do not read each other's mail.”

By the 1930s, the Army's foreign intelligence branch had fewer than seventy agents to cover the world. When war broke out in Europe, America's Office of Naval Intelligence reported “a real undercover foreign intelligence service, equipped and able to carry on espionage, counterespionage, etc. does not exist.” Now, with creation of Donovan's COI, America was in the game. How this official entry would mesh with Roosevelt's informal rings of agents, led by Vincent Astor and John Franklin Carter, remained to be tested.

One point was clear. Few leaders were better adapted temperamentally to espionage than Franklin Roosevelt. No one, not even his closest associates, ever fully penetrated the President's core being. His speechwriter, the insightful Robert Sherwood, admitted, “I could never really understand what was going on in Roosevelt's heavily forested interior.” Information was compartmentalized according to unfathomable boundaries existing only inside FDR's mind. Henry Stimson did not always know what Pa Watson knew. Watson did not know what Harry Hopkins knew. And Hopkins, closer to FDR than anyone else, did not necessarily know what FDR told Henry Morgenthau Jr. Secretary of State Hull might not have so hated his undersecretary, Sumner Welles, if FDR had not given secret assignments to Welles behind Hull's back. Blunt-speaking Harold Ickes, secretary of the interior, once told FDR, “You are one of the most difficult men to work with that I have ever known.” “Because I get too hard at times?” Roosevelt asked. “No,” Ickes answered, because “. . . you won't talk frankly even with people who are loyal to you.”

What had produced a character that suggested Machiavelli in Byzantium? In his
Roosevelt in Retrospect,
John Gunther attempts to decipher FDR, calling him a “cryptic giant.” “The central point of his character as a youth was that he was a ‘good boy,'” Gunther observes. “Later, as the psychologists would say, he overcompensated for this by being unconventional and daring, by upsetting applecarts.” Gunther concluded that FDR “went north by going south and loved it. He was tricky for fun.” The novelist John Steinbeck, whom the President once asked to do some spying in Mexico, concurred, noting, “[H]e simply liked mystery, subterfuge, and indirect tactics . . . for their own sake.” Steinbeck also offered an ironic but shrewd perception. He believed that deviousness usually derives from cowardice, but, Gunther knew, “Roosevelt had the courage of a lion. Why, then, should he have been so fond of techniques and maneuvers that, to put it bluntly, verged on deceit?” Gunther concluded that Roosevelt was so clever and confident that he thought people would never catch on to him. Unwelcome petitioners to his office were not even given the chance to present their case, but were overcome by a flood of FDR meanderings, then ushered out, before they realized what had happened. Others, encouraged by a nodding and smiling FDR, believed that they had won his agreement, when all he meant was, I hear what you are saying. Yet, this master of dissembling and deception was no warped personality. Sherwood concluded, “[A]lthough crippled physically and prey to various infections, he was spiritually the healthiest man I have ever known. He was gloriously and happily free of the various forms of psychic maladjustment. . . .” His personal physician, Admiral Ross McIntire, said of his patient in 1940, that his health was “the best in many years.” The President ate heartily, drank temperately, slept soundly, exercised regularly by swimming, and kept his weight at a steady 1871⁄2 pounds.

Franklin Roosevelt was the architect who sat above, looking down onto a cross section of the compartments he had created, the only one who knew what was going on in all of them, while his subordinates could barely see beyond the walls surrounding them.

Chapter VII

Spies Versus Ciphers

FDR WAS the first world figure to learn one of the great strategic secrets of the war. He came to know it, not through Donovan, Carter, Astor, the FBI, or the military intelligence branches, but from an unlikely source.

Sam E. Woods was something of a good-time Charley assigned to the U.S. embassy in Berlin in 1940 as the commercial attaché. His job was to help American firms conduct business efficiently and profitably in Germany. William L. Shirer, in Berlin as a correspondent at the time, noted that Woods “seems to those of us who knew him and liked him the last man in the American Embassy in Berlin likely to have come by such crucial intelligence.” Genial Sam Woods, however, had a German friend with connections in government ministries, the Reichsbank, and the Nazi Party. His friend was a covert anti-Nazi, eager to pass along to the attaché intelligence about the regime he reluctantly served. They had worked out a system. Woods would reserve two seats at a movie theater and send one ticket to his friend, who would meet him there and pass along his latest secrets as they sat in the dark. In early August 1940, as the Germans were preparing to smash Britain from the air, as Operation Sea Lion was being organized for the invasion of England, when it was rumored that Hitler might invade Spain, with the Führer and Stalin joined in a peace pact that left Britain to fight Germany alone, Woods's source passed along a scribbled note pointing in the opposite direction: Hitler and his generals were plotting the invasion of their presumed ally, the Soviet Union.

Woods was no political seer. As Shirer put it, his “grasp of world politics and history was not striking.” Yet, he was sufficiently respectful of what he was learning to keep a file of the movie theater gleanings over the next five months. Then his informant gave him a Christmas present—precise details from a directive, dated December 18, describing Operation Barbarossa, Hitler's plan for invading Russia. Woods concluded it was time to act.

In early January 1941 the State Department informed the President that it had received a startling report from its Berlin embassy. The disbelieving secretary of state, Cordell Hull, had already asked J. Edgar Hoover to evaluate the information provided by Sam Woods. FBI agents checked the names Woods had mentioned in various German ministries and on the General Staff. They were, the bureau reported back, men in a position to know what was going on, and some were believed to be anti-Nazi. Woods's intelligence appeared authentic.

Roosevelt's quandary now was how best to handle this information vis-à-vis the Soviet Union. FDR chose to be direct. He would simply have the American ambassador in Moscow, Laurence Steinhardt, inform Stalin. However, Steinhardt advised against this course. He was well aware that Stalin distrusted Churchill and Roosevelt. Britain and the United States had both sent troops to Russia in 1918–19, after the revolution, to try to strangle the Bolshevik regime in its cradle. The Soviet dictator was convinced that the capitalists would spread any canard to drive a wedge between him and his new ally, Germany. This partnership, he believed, would keep his country safe from attack while Hitler went about swallowing up the rest of Europe.

Finally, on March 1, nearly two months after FDR had first seen Woods's report, Sumner Welles was dispatched to sound the alarm to the Soviet ambassador in Washington, Konstantin Oumansky. An encounter with Oumansky was not something looked forward to with pleasure. The Russian's background was in Soviet police work and capitalist-baiting journalism. His manner was universally characterized as boorish. Still, Welles did his duty and reported the impending danger to the Soviet Union. In describing the meeting he recalled, “Mr. Oumansky turned very white. He was silent for a moment and then merely said: ‘My government will be grateful for your confidence and I will inform it immediately of our conversation.'” What Oumansky actually did was to follow the Stalin line. He called Hans Thomsen, the chargé d'affaires at the Germany embassy, and told him that the Americans were spreading vicious rumors to undermine the friendship between their two countries.

Reports of a German invasion, however, began to reach Moscow in a crescendo. Even before Welles's warning, on February 18, Sir Stafford Cripps, Britain's ambassador to Moscow, had held a press conference and declared that Germany would attack Russia before the end of June. On April 3, Churchill asked Cripps to deliver his personal note to Stalin warning of a German troop buildup in the East, information based on intercepted codes, the source, however, not revealed to Stalin. From Tokyo, the Soviets' legendary spy, the German Richard Sorge, pinpointed the invasion date. The hard-drinking, womanizing Sorge, working undercover as a journalist, had the run of the German embassy, where he was treated like a fellow staff member and made privy to the choicest secrets. On May 15, Sorge cabled his Moscow controllers that the invasion would begin on June 22. The Soviets' best source in Switzerland, a well-connected publisher, Rudolf Roessler, code-named Lucy, confirmed that date and, in addition, provided the Wehrmacht's order of battle.

On May 16, FDR had in hand a memorandum on the letterhead of “John Franklin Carter, 1210 National Press Building,” relaying a report from a Swedish member of parliament “who has a record of being 60% right . . . on all developments since Munich.” The Swede reported that millions of German troops were massing on the Soviet border, and “maps of Russia [were] being printed in huge quantities.” Carter's source also predicted the invasion toward the end of June. “The Germans are reported confident that they can beat Russia in one or two months,” the source added. Secretary of War Stimson's outlook was even bleaker. He predicted that Russia would surrender even before being attacked.

The Soviet Union was the beating heart of world communism, as feared by most Americans as it was loathed by Churchill. Yet, the Prime Minister knew where Britain's advantage lay. As the rumored invasion date approached, he told his dinner guests at Chequers—Anthony Eden, John Colville, his private secretary, and John Winant, the American ambassador who had replaced Joe Kennedy—what he intended. “Hitler was counting on enlisting capitalist and Right Wing sympathizers in this country and the U.S.A.,” Churchill said. But Hitler was wrong. If the anticipated attack did occur, “We should go all out to help Russia.” Winant now felt free to reveal earlier guidance he had received from FDR: Roosevelt would support “any statement Churchill might make welcoming Soviet Russia as an ally.” After dinner, with the other guests gone, Colville tweaked Churchill about the arch anti-Communist making favorable noises about the Soviet Union. It was on this occasion that Churchill made his memorable response: “Not at all. I have only one purpose, the destruction of Hitler, and my life is much simplified thereby. If Hitler invaded Hell I would make at least a favorable reference to the Devil in the House of Commons.”

Over a hundred warnings of the pending invasion are estimated to have reached the Kremlin. Operation Barbarossa had become the worst-kept secret of the war. Why, when it appeared that every Moscow factory worker had heard of the threat, was it disregarded by Stalin? Whatever else he may have been, the Soviet leader was no naïf. As late as May 1941, Stalin addressed graduates of the Soviet military academies in the Kremlin. Almost certainly, he told them, there would be war with Germany by 1942, even possibly with the Soviet Union taking the initiative, since “Nazi Germany as the dominant power in Europe is not normal,” he warned. But the Red Army currently was not strong enough either to repel or launch an attack. Therefore, Russia had to try by diplomacy to stall German aggression. Besides, Stalin did not believe that Hitler was mad enough to start fighting Russia before he had defeated England and thus saddle himself with a two-front war. He did not deny that German armies were massing on his border. But that was only Hitler's way of pressuring him to give in to Germany's economic demands. All these reports that Hitler planned to invade, loot his country, enslave his people, and crush communism were capitalist provocations designed to goad him into a conflict against Germany while Russia was still unprepared. Then the British would make peace with Germany, and he would be left to fight the Nazis alone.

On the night of June 21, a German soldier deserted to the Russian army and told his interrogators that an attack would take place at 3
A.M
. the next morning. Within three hours Stalin had the report, but rejected it and supposedly ordered the bearer of the news shot. The invasion that FDR had known about for over five months began when the deserter said it would. Like the husband who is the last to know that his wife is faithless, Stalin was stunned by the invasion. As the depth of Hitler's deceit and his country's debacle sank in, Stalin went into a depression approaching a nervous breakdown. For several days, at the moment of its greatest peril, Russia was leaderless.

*

FDR had been the first major world leader to learn of the pending Nazi attack on Russia from the serendipitous source of Sam Woods in Berlin. At the same time, a much more systematic enterprise was extracting secrets for him from the other side of the globe. Until the spring of 1938, FDR had been able to read Japan's diplomatic traffic between Tokyo and its embassies worldwide after American cryptanalysts broke the Japanese Red code. Then Japan switched to a new, thus far impenetrable code, labeled Purple. Deliveries to the White House stopped.

On the afternoon of September 20, 1940, customary quiet prevailed at Arlington Hall, a former girls' school in the northern Virginia suburbs where the Army had quartered its codebreaking Signal Intelligence Service. Frank B. Rowlett, a usually reserved, scholarly former schoolteacher, now working for SIS, suddenly let out a war whoop. “That's it!” Rowlett shouted, jumping up and down. His two assistants, Robert O. Ferner and Albert W. Small, joined in the shouting and began dancing around the office. The elation among men who ordinarily spent their days in gnomelike absorption in their work was occasioned by the fact that, after eighteen months, they had broken Purple. The team celebrated this landmark in American espionage by sending out for bottles of Coca-Cola, which they downed, and then went back to their offices. Their superior, Major General Joseph Mauborgne, the Army's chief signals officer, started referring to Rowlett and his team as “magicians” and the Japanese traffic they decrypted as “Magic.” Magic meant, once again, that the Tokyo foreign office might as well have placed FDR on its distribution list, since he could read what Japanese diplomats were telling each other almost as soon as they could.

Rivalry between American Army and Navy cryptanalysts, however, was to produce a bizarre system for delivering Japan's diplomatic secrets to the President. The flood of messages intercepted daily was too great to be handled by the Army alone. Thus, the naval codebreaking unit, OP-20-G, shared the workload. Each service had its own officer who decided which intercepts were sufficiently significant to be seen by the nation's leaders. This judgment was made for the Army by Colonel Rufus S. Bratton of G-2 and for ONI by Lieutenant Commander Alwin D. Kramer. Distribution was limited to the President, the secretaries of state, war, and navy, the Army Chief of Staff, the director of military intelligence, the director of naval intelligence, and the chiefs of naval operations and war plans. Messages selected were delivered in locked pouches to these officials, each of whom had his own key. But who should deliver the pouch containing the cream of decrypts to the President, a task that would reflect prestige and credit on the service chosen? After protracted wrangling, the Army and Navy came up with a solution. In odd-numbered months, such as January, March, and May, his military aide would deliver Magic to the President, and in even-numbered months his naval aide would do so. No provision was made in this jerry rig for delivering Magic to the President in the evening or on Sundays. Intelligence that could determine war or peace was handled as a nine-to-five job.

The inanity increased in July 1941 when Colonel Bratton noticed a copy of a Magic decrypt that the President's aide Pa Watson had thrown into his wastebasket. Watson was a big, florid-faced, good-natured Virginian who had come to the White House as the President's military aide. He now held one of the most difficult jobs in the administration, presidential secretary in charge of appointments. He determined who got to see FDR. Pa Watson was liked by all and underrated by some as a simple soul. He was, in fact, unusually astute and not above allowing others to underestimate him, since they would then lower their guard to his advantage. When Colonel Bratton informed the Army intelligence chief, General Sherman Miles, of Watson's carelessness with the decrypt, Miles decided that Magic could no longer be entrusted to the White House. Throughout June, Roosevelt continued to receive Magic decrypts from his current naval aide, Captain John R. Beardall. But in July, an Army month, no decrypts appeared. FDR asked Beardall what had happened. Fearing to contradict General Miles's order, the Navy thereafter worked out an arrangement under which Beardall could read the decrypts during an Army month and then summarize them for FDR; but he could not show the actual messages to the President of the United States.

In spite of this triumph of red tape over sanity, the Magic channel began proving its worth. Decryption was analogous to seeing one's opponent's hand in a card game, rather than guessing at it. It was the equivalent of listening in on a telephone conversation, as contrasted to a hearsay report of it. Signal intelligence delivered exactly what an adversary was saying, unfiltered by any third party. A spy's reporting could be twisted by prejudice or hidden agendas, or deliberately distorted by a double agent. Yet, signal intelligence had its limitations as well. The thousands of intercepted and decrypted messages yielded raw information, often unanalyzed and lacking context. But a spy's report, at its best, could present intelligence filtered through analysis and placed in context. The recipients of the broken code or the spy's report, however, could never be sure that they were receiving the virtues of one or the failings of the other.