Joseph E. Persico (37 page)

The cooperation of the Spanish regime with the Axis powers emerged in a decrypted message from Japanese ambassador Suma, in Madrid to the foreign ministry in Tokyo. A Spaniard, spying for Japan in the United States, an official of Generalissimo Francisco Franco's Falangist Party, had been arrested on a charge unrelated to espionage. Ambassador Suma's greatest concern was “that there may be raids on other Spaniards as well,” further reducing Japan's few intelligence sources in the United States. Among those on the distribution list for this dispatch, besides the President, was the country's chief spy catcher, J. Edgar Hoover.

A late 1943 decrypt offered an eerie premonition of the future of U.S.-Soviet relations once the war ended. The message from the Japanese foreign office to its envoy in Kuibyshev, to which elements of the Russian government had retreated began: “. . . [L]ooking at it from the American point of view, the Soviet denies the right of private ownership of property and for more than ten years the American people have been suspecting that Russia's policy is to Bolshevize the whole world. Nevertheless, America does intend to continue to use the Soviet against Japan and Germany, going, I suppose, on the theory that you have to fight fire with fire. After the war, however, we may well surmise that the United States will be faced with the fear that Russia will endeavor to communize the United States. What then . . .?”

In 1943 over four hundred messages from Ambassador Oshima alone were intercepted. Reading these and the rest of the Magic decrypts was, for the President, better than a peek at the other fellow's hand. It was closer to holding his cards. General Marshall paid Oshima a tribute that would have doubtless devastated Germany's fervent champion. Oshima, Marshall was later to state, “was our main basis of information regarding Hitler's intentions in Europe.”

This incomparable source was almost lost in the summer of 1943 if General Strong, the Army's intelligence chief and Bill Donovan's nemesis, is to be believed. That July 7, Strong sent General Marshall a report charging that Donovan's bunglers had probably compromised Magic. Through a roundabout Magic intercept out of Rome, Strong claimed that the Italian General Staff had tipped off the Japanese that “[a]n American espionage agency in Lisbon not only knows to the minutest detail all the activities of the Japanese ministry in Lisbon, but is also getting Japanese code books, too.” The agency making this penetration was the OSS. Obviously, if the Japanese believed their codes had been stolen, they were going to change to a new system, an outcome that Strong told Marshall “would be nothing less than a catastrophe.” All this had been risked, Strong claimed, by “the folly of letting loose a group of amateur spies in neutral countries . . . with unlimited money to squander operating under no proper definition and subject to no proper control.” Strong recommended to Marshall “. . . that steps be taken immediately to recall from Spain and Portugal all OSS personnel who are engaged in espionage in those countries in open violation of the directive of the Joint Chiefs of Staff which excludes them from such activities in neutral countries.”

OSS agents had, in fact, penetrated the office of the military attaché in Japan's Lisbon embassy. In Strong's telling, Donovan's men had stolen the most secret cipher and left the office in such a shambles that “the ill advised and amateurish efforts of [Donovan's] representatives in Lisbon have so alarmed the Japanese that it is an even money bet that the codes employed by the Japanese are in imminent danger of being changed.” The President was advised of Strong's accusation, and the Joint Chiefs ordered the burglary investigated.

Finally, it seemed that Donovan had been pinioned. Still, Strong had not reckoned with his opponent's counterpunching. Yes, he had recruited two Portuguese agents inside the Japanese embassy in Lisbon, one who worked there as a messenger and the other as an interpreter-stenographer, Donovan admitted. But he was able to prove to JCS investigators that General Strong had been informed in advance of this penetration. The general had been shown the very papers lifted from the wastebaskets of the Japanese military attaché which U.S. Army cryptanalysts found were encoded in a cipher “used by the Japanese for material of low intelligence value,” certainly not the Purple diplomatic code. Most telling, Donovan was able to prove that the Japanese were still using the high-level cipher that Strong claimed had probably been compromised. Indeed, continuing intercepts encoded in Purple made that point for him. In another decrypt, the Japanese ambassador in Lisbon, Morishima, defended his embassy's security practices. He described all the safeguards taken in the code room, including sealing all doors and windows with wax to tell if they had been broken into. He concluded, “Nothing has happened to the code books in safekeeping here.” The Japanese foreign minister replied, “I am inclined to believe that this is a planted report to throw us off balance.” Donovan had not yet run out of lives. The Joint Chiefs investigation cleared him, and the Japanese continued using Purple.

*

High-level eavesdropping did not occur only in one direction. Roosevelt and Churchill had mistakenly come to believe that their transatlantic telephone conversations were inviolable. Bell Telephone System scientists had developed A-3, a technology for scrambling radio-telephone conversations so that an outsider listening in would hear nothing but gibberish. The transmitting frequencies were changed often, further frustrating enemy monitors. Scrambled calls offered other advantages. They did not have to be encoded or decoded and thus saved time. They were, in effect, person-to-person communication, bypassing layers of diplomatic and military bureaucrats and affording the President and Prime Minister near-total privacy.

Democracies, however, are porous institutions. In the fall of 1939,
The New York Times
had carried a story headlined
ROOSEVELT PROTECTED IN TALKS TO ENVOYS BY RADIO SCRAMBLING TO FOIL SPIES ABROAD.
The article went on to describe how the scrambling device had been installed in a soundproof room in the White House basement and that it had been used for the first time when FDR received the September 1939 call from his ambassador to France, William C. Bullitt, informing him that the Germans had invaded Poland. A German spy in New York, Simon Emil Koedel, clipped the story from the
Times
and sent it to an Abwehr officer in Bremen. Thereafter, the information made a slow journey through the German bureaucracy. The Abwehr forwarded the story to Wilhelm Ohnesorge, chief of the Deutsche Reichspost, Germany's state telephone and telegraph system. Ohnesorge, an elderly, grandfatherly Nazi Party member, wondered if these transatlantic conversations might not be unscrambled. Not until the summer of 1941 did he assign his chief engineer, Kurt E. Vetterlein, to investigate the possibility. Vetterlein, with essentially nothing to go on as a model, managed to replicate Bell's A-3 system. By March 1, 1942, German signalmen, operating from a secluded former youth hostel near Eindhoven in occupied Holland, began rotating a giant antenna across the Atlantic. Within a week, a proud Ohnesorge sent a message to Hitler reporting that his staff had “completed . . . an installation for the interception of the telephone traffic between the USA and England.” His agency, he added, had “succeeded in rendering conversations, that had been made unintelligible, intelligible again at the instant of reception.” Soon the signalmen at Eindhoven were intercepting up to sixty phone calls a day between Allied leaders using the A-3. What they said across the ocean became available to Hitler within hours.

At 11
A.M.
on the morning of July 29, 1943, General Alfred Jodl, the military operations chief who briefed Hitler daily, showed the Führer the transcript of a telephone conversation that had been picked up earlier that day between Churchill and Roosevelt. They had talked just days after Mussolini had been deposed, and Hitler was eager to know which way Italy, his faltering ally, would jump now. The two leaders had discussed a proclamation that Eisenhower might issue should Italy surrender. Churchill said, “We do not want to propose armistice conditions before we are definitely asked about them.” Roosevelt answered, “That's right.” Churchill then added, “We could even wait one or two days.” That was all Hitler needed to hear. The entry in the official German War Diary for that day concerning the intercepted phone call reads: “This is incontrovertible evidence that secret negotiations between the Anglo-Americans and the Italians are already in progress.” Hitler had decided three days before to pour his own troops into Italy before the peninsula fell to the Allies. He now knew that his decision had been correct. He accelerated the occupation to a total of twenty divisions.

After the Allies did invade Italy, Roosevelt and Churchill made another damaging admission over the scrambled transatlantic line. According to a postwar interview of Vetterlein by David Kahn, the writer on cryptanalysis, the German scientist claimed that the two Allied chiefs discussed an amphibious attack on central Italy, presumably the Anzio invasion. As a result, the German High Command in Italy was alerted in time to regroup its forces and bottle up the invaders, thwarting their role of spearheading a breakthrough to Rome.

At times, the intercepted discussions of the two leaders took on comic overtones. In one conversation, Churchill was puzzled to hear FDR giggling at the other end of the line. The Prime Minister subsequently learned that the A-3 equipment made his voice, when unscrambled, sound like Donald Duck. Churchill threatened that he would never use the infernal machine again. The Bell system engineers went back to work and managed to make Churchill sound more Churchillian. Roosevelt and Churchill were not the only voices that the Germans intercepted on the scrambler phone. The list reads like an Allied Who's Who: Harry Hopkins, Anthony Eden, W. Averell Harriman, Lord Keynes, the economist, and a dozen more officials possessed of the most coveted Allied secrets. By late 1943, however, the Bell engineers had redesigned A-3 to make it almost impenetrable.

*

Bill Donovan's fortunes continued to gyrate. In December 1943 he had reason to feel confident. The OSS was elevated to co-equal status with the Military Intelligence Division and the Office of Naval Intelligence. Further, Wild Bill received a star. The JCS had even been amenable to two stars, but for the time being FDR found brigadier general sufficient. His bureaucratic rivals, however, ignored Donovan's new standing, refused to accept him into the club of intelligence, and waged unceasing guerrilla warfare against the OSS. His situation became so untenable that on February 20 he drafted a letter to the President reading, “. . . in view of the position which you have taken, I feel that there is no longer any useful purpose for me to serve, and I hope you will accept my resignation.” The intolerable position the President had taken was to seek an end to the squabbling by transferring control of the OSS to General Strong. The situation was analogous to asking the cannibals to look after the missionaries and would certainly have spelled the end of Donovan's organization. Then, in another Rooseveltian turnabout, the President decided not to deliver Donovan to the mercies of George Strong. Instead, he signaled that Wild Bill had been given a reprieve by inviting him and his wife, Ruth, to join the Roosevelts for a special church service at St. John's across from the White House on Lafayette Square, an occasion, FDR said, that he shared only “with certain friends.”

It was the bureaucratic infighting and not Donovan's often madcap schemes that explained the swings in his standing. One OSS proposal called for pouring mustard gas into a water-filled flower vase at an estate where Hitler and Mussolini were to meet at the Brenner Pass. The fumes thus released would blind the Axis dictators. In another ploy, female hormones would somehow be introduced into Hitler's diet, raising his voice, swelling his breasts, and causing his mustache to fall out. These cockeyed capers did not offend, but seemed to excite the President's own imagination. A banker from Buffalo, New York, wrote FDR suggesting that American bombers drop counterfeit currency and ration books over enemy cities to confound their economies. The banker pleaded that his idea be spared the presidential wastebasket. Rather than the wastebasket, FDR sent the letter to Donovan for action. Donovan pointed out that the OSS already had similar plans in the pipeline, awaiting only the President's blessing. Britain's Lord Louis Mountbatten pleaded with Robert Sherwood for FDR's support of a British proposal, an unsinkable ship to be made from blocks of ice. In Roosevelt's mind, Donovan's or Mountbatten's or any stranger's idea not patently crackpot merited a hearing. Nor was the President apparently put off by the avalanche of Donovan messages hand-delivered to Grace Tully at the White House almost daily, typically accompanied by a note reading, “Dear Grace, I think the attached memorandum will be of interest to the President. Will you please see that it gets to his desk.” Most went unanswered and possibly unread. If Donovan had merely whetted FDR's appetite with a few judicious items, the President might have given him more attention. Instead, Wild Bill stuffed the man to a point where much of what he served was left on the plate.

The half-baked quality of many of Donovan's ideas and the distracting turf battles tended to obscure the OSS's areas of solid performances. Switzerland, a neutral island in the heart of Europe, was a nest of intrigue that every foreign intelligence service sought to exploit. Donovan informed the President that he had an ideal chief posted to Switzerland. Oddly, while describing the man's eminent suitability, he never mentioned his name, possibly for reasons of security but more likely because he chose not to emphasize that his agent was a Brahmin who had run unsuccessfully as a Republican candidate for Congress in 1938 and who had worked against Roosevelt's reelection in 1940. The OSS had already taken on the patina of an exclusive Republican preserve that Donovan was not eager to reinforce. OSS staffers with lesser social credentials referred to their wellborn colleagues as “white shoe boys.” The chief agent whom Donovan had sent to Bern, of white shoe pedigree but strong fiber, was Allen Welsh Dulles. His older brother, John Foster Dulles, of equally firm will, would one day emerge as President Eisenhower's secretary of state. Allen Dulles at the time was forty-nine years old, gray-haired, scholarly-looking, pipe-puffing, wearing rimless glasses and bow ties and looking as if he might have been raised in the home of a Presbyterian parson, which he had. His genial, avuncular air provided good cover. Beneath the tweedy charm was a tough, cunning, and ruthless man. “Espionage is not a game for archbishops,” the parson's son liked to say.