Joseph E. Persico (29 page)

Donovan uttered the cries of protest expected of an empire builder shorn of 50 percent of his empire. But FDR's decision presented him with a strategic retreat. The Joint Chiefs did not want Donovan's propaganda machinery in the military. But with it jettisoned, they might agree to take over the proposed OSS. Snooping, sneaking about, and sabotage did not rank high among the martial arts, and the generals and admirals were only too eager to avoid the dirty work. The JCS thus agreed to absorb the OSS without its propaganda branch and to give it two functions, to collect and analyze intelligence and to carry out special operations. Wild Bill saw in this new job description the opportunity to carry out both espionage and sabotage, functions in Britain requiring both MI6 and SOE. On June 13, 1942, the President made it official. He issued an executive order creating the Office of Strategic Services. On the same day he issued another order creating the Office of War Information, sliced off from Donovan's propaganda operation. Though now part of the military, Wild Bill did not immediately press for rank. He wrote to a British friend, General Sir Archibald Wavell, “[T]hese admirals and generals might be willing to sit down with citizen Donovan, but not with General Donovan.”

If he believed his new status would keep his enemies at bay, Donovan was almost immediately disabused of that hope. That summer, FDR received an urgent request for a meeting with his upgraded spymaster. Mrs. Ruth Shipley ran the State Department's Passport Office like an absolutist monarch. Donovan came complaining to FDR that Mrs. Shipley insisted on stamping “OSS” on the passports of agents he was sending abroad. The grim joke around his headquarters was that they might as well wear a sign on their backs reading
I'M A SPY.
Roosevelt managed to reverse the redoubtable Mrs. Shipley, and Donovan's operatives went abroad under protective cover.

*

By the summer of 1942, most of the absurdities of delivering Magic to the President had been eliminated. The system by which the Army decrypted Japanese diplomatic traffic on one day and the Navy on the next was finally discarded by the secretary of war. Henceforth, the Army was to do all the Magic decrypting. But Navy pride had to be assuaged. The codes the Army broke continued to be delivered to the President by his naval aide. The Navy also managed to maintain control over another cryptanalytic triumph. Its codebreakers had begun to crack the latest version of JN25, the Japanese navy cipher. Purple had bared the secrets of the enemy's diplomatic communication. JN25 now began to bare the movements of Japan's fleet.

On May 24 an untidy Navy commander, Joseph J. Rochefort Jr., left his equally messy, windowless basement office in the Naval Administration Building in Pearl Harbor and trotted up to the headquarters of Admiral Nimitz, the Pacific Fleet commander. Only Rochefort's genius as a codebreaker, exemplified by what he was about to deliver, excused his unmilitary appearance. Penetration of JN25 had parted the curtain on the most ambitious Japanese naval offensive since Pearl Harbor. Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, chief of the Japanese fleet, the enemy's ablest strategist, had conjured a plan to cap Japan's string of victories in the Pacific and finally drive America out of the war. At the far end of the Hawaiian island chain stood the lonely American outpost of Midway. Yamamoto planned to capture Midway, thus achieving two objectives. The island would serve as his central Pacific base, blocking the American way to Japan. Further, an attack on Midway could be expected to lure what was left of the U.S. Pacific fleet to a place where Yamamoto's far larger force, the very carriers and their aircraft that had struck Pearl Harbor, would polish off the American Navy. The defeat would drive the United States to the negotiating table and out of the Pacific war. American codebreakers knew that a major Japanese strategy was brewing, but not where, only that the location was designated by the enemy as “AF.” Commander W. J. Holmes, a Navy cryptologist, suspecting the site might be Midway, had an inspiration. Have Midway report to Pearl Harbor, in an easily decrypted U.S. code, that the islands' water-distilling plant had broken down. Soon afterward, Navy codebreakers intercepted a Japanese message that “AF” was short of water. This intelligence formed part of the mosaic that enabled Commander Rochefort to report to Admiral Nimitz that Midway was Yamamoto's objective. Subsequent intercepts showed Japanese army units confidently giving the islands as their next mailing address.

In Washington, the precision of the intelligence seemed too good to be true. Could the intercepts be trusted? Could Yamamoto's plan be merely a feint to draw the weakened American fleet away from a more important Japanese target, the Hawaiian Islands? Chester Nimitz decided to gamble on Rochefort's intercepts and to deploy his remaining three carriers 350 miles northeast of Midway. There they would wait. On the morning of June 4, an unsuspecting enemy came within range of Nimitz's carrier-borne dive bombers. The planes inflicted horrific destruction on the Japanese. All four of Yamamoto's irreplaceable aircraft carriers were sunk, along with one cruiser. Over 330 Japanese planes were lost. American casualties amounted to one carrier and 150 planes.

For the Japanese, far more than ships and planes lay at the bottom of the Pacific after the Battle of Midway. The whole Japanese strategy lay in ruins. After an unbroken round of victories—the conquest of the Philippines, Singapore, Hong Kong, Malaya, and the Dutch East Indies—the chain was snapped. Invasions planned for New Zealand, New Caledonia, and Fiji had to be scrapped. The threat to the Hawaiian Islands had been lifted. Midway marked the turning point in the Pacific war. From now on, the Japanese would be on the defensive. American sailors, crowded into cramped office corners amid the clatter of Teletypes, key punchers, collaters, and tabulators, laboring over seemingly meaningless jumbles of random letters, had enabled a surprise strike by the American Navy amounting practically to a Japanese Pearl Harbor, and, in the long run, more decisive. Admiral Nimitz had no doubt about the key to his epic triumph. Midway was, he said, “essentially a victory of intelligence.”

The Japanese were handed an unusual opportunity to end this disastrous leakage of their secrets. The opportunity was presented by the
Chicago Tribune,
published by the arch Roosevelt-hater Colonel Robert McCormick. Stanley Johnston, a
Tribune
war correspondent, had been sailing the cruiser
New Orleans,
en route to Pearl Harbor. While in the captain's cabin, Johnston stole a look at a JN25 decrypt left on the desk, one revealing what the Navy knew about Yamamoto's Midway strategy and fleet deployment. The story Johnston wrote three days after the battle carried the headline
NAVY HAD WORD OF JAP PLAN TO STRIKE AT SEA.
The same account appeared in McCormick's New York
Daily News
and Washington
Times-Herald.

Any reasonably alert reader would conclude that the United States had broken Japan's naval code. So flagrant was the
Tribune
's breach of security that a Chicago grand jury was convened to consider possible violations of the Espionage Act. But rather than reveal anything about its cryptographic coup, the Navy chose not to participate, and the probe had to be dropped. Had the Navy cooperated in the grand jury proceeding, the President might have tasted delicious revenge against his most virulent critic. Stanley Johnston, as the correspondent, and Colonel McCormick, as the publisher, might well have been convicted of treason. But FDR was far too shrewd a player to trade fleeting vengeance for loss of a priceless secret weapon. Still, anger at the newspaper persisted. A congressman denounced the
Tribune
on the floor of the House, charging, rightly, that the
Tribune
story could lead the Japanese to change their code.

With all this public uproar in the United States—the news stories, the grand jury, the speech in the Congress—the Japanese, still believing JN25 impenetrable, did not change the code and continued to use it to the war's end. The Japanese may have spied brilliantly before Pearl Harbor, but afterward they had virtually no apparatus for espionage in the United States. Prior to hostilities, they had depended entirely on their American embassy and consulates. Once the war shut these down, the Japanese, in gauging their enemy's moves, had lost their eyes and ears. As to the secret of the Midway victory, Japan could not believe what millions of American newspaper readers knew.

*

While at the level of grand strategy the President was learning to appreciate the value of intercepted enemy ciphers, he retained his weakness for the gossipy products of agents like John Franklin Carter reporting to him personally. One can only wonder at some of the notions Carter relayed to the President from his nebulous sources. His “Secret Memorandum on U.S.S.R.” advised Roosevelt that three Americans served on Stalin's secret strategy board, and one of them was helping the Russians to plan an air strike of eighty-three hundred planes hidden underground at Vladivostok that would burn “Japan and the islands from one end to the other.” On another occasion Carter informed the President that the Free French leader, General Charles de Gaulle, and the U.S. mine workers leader, John Lewis, were plotting to seize control of the U.S. government. Late in May 1942, Carter had lunch at New York's Century Club with Harvey Davis, director of the Stevens Institute. Immediately afterward, Carter informed the President, “There has been a suggestion that our airmen spare a few bombs to drop down the craters of some of Japan's nine hundred semi-active volcanoes. Davis said that seismologists and volcanologists were of the opinion that a hearty explosion of a semi-active volcano will start the lava flowing and might burst out of the sides.” To this bright idea, Carter added his own psychological warfare twist: “. . . [W]e could convince the mass of Japanese that their gods were angry with them, by dropping bombs down the craters and starting some nice local eruptions.” FDR did not dismiss the idea. He sent it to the Army Air Forces chief, Lieutenant General H. H. “Hap” Arnold. Arnold responded to FDR with admirable tact. “I do not feel that his [Carter's] suggestion can be dismissed without serious consideration,” Arnold said. But, he cautioned, planes could not be spared until “our bombardment effort against Japan warrants directing our efforts toward anything but the most critical military objectives.” FDR never asked again about bombing volcanoes.

And then Carter would come up with something useful. Early in June 1942 he alerted FDR to a glaring failure in U.S. security. “Gerald Haxton, Somerset Maugham's secretary [and lover], who has been a source of some value to this unit,” he told the President, “reports that it is possible to pick up a telephone in New York and put a call through to Switzerland (and, it turned out, to Sweden, Spain, Portugal and Vichy France as well).” The significance was immediately evident to FDR. Allied shipping losses in the Atlantic were soaring, 108 ships sunk in March alone. The transatlantic telephone offered a deceptively simple way for an enemy agent in the United States to phone an Abwehr colleague in Bern with intelligence on convoy sailings and sightings. This information could then be relayed to the German navy to guide its U-boat wolf packs to these targets. FDR told Carter, “I see no reason why all trans-Atlantic conversations should not be completely severed with Sweden, Switzerland, Vichy, Spain and Portugal. I see no reason why foreign diplomats of these nations should not also be forbidden telephone communication. This should be a proper exercise of war power.” Sumner Welles, much trusted by the President, suggested he go slow. Yes, shut off personal phone calls to these countries, but allow foreign ambassadors in Washington to call their governments, but have the United States monitor the calls. FDR wanted simply to cut off all foreign calls to neutrals, but went along with Welles. John Franklin Carter had earned his keep for another day.

The transatlantic phone severance was a small triumph for Carter, who believed that he was now about to pull off a more stunning triumph. That summer, he informed the President that he could produce a man who had been as close to Hitler as Hermann Göring, Heinrich Himmler, or Josef Goebbels, an ex-Nazi who had held a sensitive post in the Third Reich, a figure who could be exploited for Allied propaganda and provide a deep well of insider intelligence on the Nazi regime. The President was instantly interested in this singular person who, along with all his other credentials, had been a Harvard man, graduating six years after FDR.

Carter's potential catch was Ernst Franz Sedgwick Hanfstaengl, born in Munich to a wealthy father in the art reproduction business and an American mother, Catherine Sedgwick, of an old New England family. Though he grew to a portly six feet four, Hanfstaengl had been tagged by a governess with the nickname Putzi, from which he never escaped. By upbringing, Hanfstaengl was almost as American as German. He had been sent off to Harvard in 1905, where he mingled socially with T. S. Eliot, Walter Lippmann, Theodore Roosevelt Jr., and the budding Communist John Reed. Putzi was a gifted pianist, and young Teddy invited him to the White House, where he performed for President Theodore Roosevelt's family. After Harvard, Hanfstaengl remained in the United States, marrying an American woman and managing his father's branch art shop on Fifth Avenue in New York. There, he sat out World War I while one of his brothers was killed fighting for the kaiser.

By 1921, Putzi had returned to Munich. One day, a U.S. military attaché told him that he had met an impressive political newcomer who was going to be speaking at a beer hall that night. The two men went together to hear the speaker, who looked to Putzi like “a waiter in a railroad restaurant.” Then the man began to talk, and Hanfstaengl was smitten on the spot by Adolf Hitler. He introduced himself to the fledging leader of the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, the National Socialist German Workers Party, and they soon became fast friends, especially since the wealthy Hanfstaengl helped bankroll Hitler's party newspaper, the
Völkischer Beobachter.
When Hitler fled Munich after his beer hall putsch failed in 1923, he took refuge in Putzi's country estate at Uffing, thirty-five miles from the city. While there, Hitler fell into a suicidal depression. Only the comforting of Hanfstaengl's wife, to whom the sexually ambivalent Hitler was attracted, stopped him from taking his life, surely a turning point in world history. Hitler was subsequently caught and arrested at the Hanfstaengl estate. But after his release from Landsberg prison, Putzi was there with his touring car waiting to pick him up.