Joseph E. Persico (38 page)

That he had arrived in Switzerland at all had been sheer luck. The day after Allied forces invaded North Africa, the Germans immediately seized unoccupied France, thus shutting off Switzerland from the outside world and completing its encirclement by Nazi-controlled territory. Dulles arrived only hours before the Nazis sealed the French border. He came to Bern officially as “special legal assistant” to the American minister, Leland Harrison. The Swiss newspapers described him as the “personal representative of President Roosevelt.” Though the description was exaggerated, Dulles did nothing to rebut it. The conjecture could only increase his influence. He brought with him letters of introduction to prominent Swiss at every level and soon came to know anti-Nazi German politicians, labor leaders, religious figures, scientists, professors, diplomats, and businessmen exiled in Switzerland. Dulles was also a ladies' man who found innumerable amorous opportunities in the intrigue-ridden Swiss capital, particularly with his wife, Clover, still back in America.

In Bern, Dulles had taken up residence at Herrengasse 23, a solid bourgeois home on a hilly side street in an old residential neighborhood. He had the lightbulbs removed from the lamp outside the door so that visitors could arrive and depart in darkness. Some nine months after Dulles's arrival, a man knocked at the Herrengasse address, begging to speak to an American. The caller was a gnomelike, fidgety figure who hardly inspired confidence. During a diplomatic assignment to Bern during the First World War, Dulles had turned down an opportunity to meet an obscure Russian revolutionary, possibly a crackpot, named Vladimir Ilich Lenin. This time around, he intended to keep his pores open. He agreed to see his uninvited visitor. The man's name was Fritz Kolbe, and he explained that he worked in the German foreign office in Berlin for Karl Ritter, Joachim von Ribbentrop's liaison to the military high command. The forty-three-year-old Kolbe, speaking in nervous bursts, told Dulles that his job was to arrive early at the office and read the overnight dispatches from German embassies and military commands all over the world, selecting those worthy of Ritter's attention. Unsuspected by his superiors, this inconspicuous drone was a devout Catholic with a deep hatred for the regime he served and eager to work against it. Kolbe had engineered a courier run to get himself to Bern. His first attempt to help the Allies had been rebuffed at the British embassy in Switzerland. A tall British attaché looked down on the little German's pate of sparse blond hairs and announced, “I don't believe you. And if you are telling the truth, you are a cad.”

A devastated Kolbe had next tried Allen Dulles. Aware of the skepticism he aroused, he reached into his overcoat and extracted a thick bundle, 186 messages stamped
Geheime Reichssache,
secret state document, which he proceeded to strew over the living room floor. Dulles was still not about to accept this apparent windfall as genuine. Kolbe might be an agent provocateur. Upon the German's departure, Dulles forwarded the pilfered reports to Washington to be checked by the OSS and military intelligence against German documents from other sources. The experts dragged their heels for seven months before pronouncing Kolbe's papers authentic.

Dulles took another precaution. He sent copies of Kolbe's messages to Claude Dansey, assistant chief of MI6, no fan of the OSS or Dulles. Dansey was described by his own people as a “curmudgeon” and a “cantankerous son of a bitch.” He pronounced Kolbe “obviously a plant” whom “Dulles had fallen for . . . like a ton of bricks.” However, when Kolbe's purloined messages were compared with German traffic intercepted by Ultra, his take was again pronounced authentic. Dulles now assigned Kolbe a code name, George Wood, and dubbed material from him Boston.

Among the documents that Kolbe had spread on Allen Dulles's floor, one message revealed that Madrid had promised Germany, “[S]hipments of oranges will continue to arrive on schedule.” This, Kolbe explained, meant that Generalissimo Franco, violating his pledge to the Allies, was continuing to ship to Germany in orange crates the tungsten critical for tempering steel. From a cable sent by the German embassy in Buenos Aires, Dulles learned how the departures of Allied convoys from the United States were signaled to Admiral Doenitz's U-boats. Another foreign office communiqué to Dublin revealed that the Germans were being allowed to operate a shortwave radio station in Ireland, well situated to report on Allied ship movements.

After reading agent Wood's documents for months, Bill Donovan felt confident enough to inform FDR, “We have secured through secret intelligence channels a series of what purport to be authentic reports, transmitted by various German diplomatic, consular, military and intelligence sources to their headquarters.” The first fourteen messages from Kolbe/Wood's Boston series were delivered to FDR in January 1944. The President now had a source in Berlin reporting on what passed between Ribbentrop's foreign office, Nazi embassies worldwide, and the German military. And this prize had simply walked in off the street.

*

Bill Donovan might move on the margins of FDR's galaxy. But Sumner Welles was a glowing star near its center, one whose luster was about to be dimmed. In 1937 the President had appointed Welles undersecretary of state, the number two man in the department. A special closeness knit the Roosevelt and Welles families. The first Delano, the ancestor of FDR's mother, had arrived a year after the
Mayflower,
the first Roosevelt in the 1650s, and the first Welles even earlier, in 1635. Thirteen-year-old Sumner had served as a page at Eleanor and Franklin's 1905 wedding, where the boy carried the bride's wedding train as she walked alongside her uncle President Theodore Roosevelt, who gave her away. Sumner Welles later roomed with Eleanor's brother Hall at prep school.

Welles married an heiress and then embarked upon a seemingly unstoppable State Department career, becoming the expert on Latin America. It was capped by FDR's appointment of him as deputy to Secretary of State Cordell Hull. Hull's appointment in January 1933 had been strictly a political payoff for a supportive senator, since the man had not a shred of foreign policy qualification. His chief attributes were an unbending honesty and his appearance. Tall, lean, white-haired, and dignified, Cordell Hull looked like a secretary of state. But for all practical purposes, Welles performed that job for FDR, since the President found Hull narrow-minded, unimaginative, and a hopeless administrator. Welles, consequently, became privy to most state secrets in the Roosevelt administration. Furthermore, Cordell Hull was suffering from diabetes and tuberculosis; and as he became increasingly debilitated, the President turned ever more to Welles, which bred a seething hatred in the secretary for his undersecretary.

In September 1940, Welles had gone to Alabama with Vice President Henry Wallace to represent Roosevelt at the funeral of William Bankhead, late Speaker of the House of Representatives. Four months after the funeral, the President summoned Harry Hopkins from his quarters in the Lincoln study. FDR's habitual geniality was missing as Hopkins entered the President's bedroom. Sumner Welles, reserved, soft-spoken, immaculately attired, and the very soul of the patrician, Roosevelt explained, was suspected of gross indecency. FDR had heard rumors that during the return train ride from Alabama a drunken Welles had rung his bell, summoning a porter to his compartment. Upon the porter's arrival, Welles exposed himself and made a lewd proposition. When the porter declined his advances, Welles kept ringing the bell for other porters, with the same lack of acceptance. After the trip, the first porter he propositioned filed a complaint with his employer, the Southern Railway Company.

The President handed off to Hopkins the unpleasant task of bringing in J. Edgar Hoover to find out just what had happened on the train. What Hoover's deputy Ed Tamm subsequently discovered, after questioning the porters, was not reassuring. Welles's behavior turned out to be much as suspected, and this occasion had not been his first delinquency. He had made homosexual passes on an earlier presidential train en route to Chicago and had cruised Washington restrooms and parks seeking homosexual partners, preferably blacks. Hoover, aware that he himself was rumored to be homosexual, was not about to be thought soft on perversion, and had his agents relentlessly track down every accusation against Welles. Though the acts Welles had allegedly committed were felonies, Hoover's investigation was not conducted as a prelude to a criminal indictment. The results were kept in the FBI's “OC” (Official/Confidential) file, reserved for reports of homosexuality, alcoholism, and infidelities among Washington's high and mighty. On January 29, a little over three weeks after completing his investigation, Hoover went to see the President personally and delivered his unwelcome findings. Roosevelt reacted noncommittally in the face of news that had to be upsetting. He had already heard Welles's explanation, a claim that Bill Bullitt had bribed the porter to incriminate him. According to FDR's son Jimmy, despite the overwhelming evidence against Welles, the President was half inclined to believe the worst of the ambitious Bullitt. Bullitt's friendship with the President contrasted diametrically with the former ambassador's relationship to Welles, which was a compound of hatred and envy. To Bullitt, waiting since the fall of France for a new assignment, Welles held the job he ought to have. Bullitt had somehow managed to get his hands on the porter's written complaint against Welles, and FDR had been told that he was retailing the Welles story all over Washington and that he had even leaked it to the President's arch foe, Senator Burton K. Wheeler. Bullitt was further suspected of peddling the story to Cissy Patterson, Joseph Medill Patterson, and Colonel Robert R. McCormick, publishers of the Roosevelt-hating Washington
Times-Herald,
New York
Daily News,
and
Chicago Tribune,
respectively.

In April 1941 the egocentric Bullitt had gone to see FDR to derail a civil defense assignment Roosevelt had in mind for him. Then he steered the subject around to Sumner Welles. He handed the President a document summarizing the homosexual charges against Welles. FDR glanced at the first page, flipped through the rest, and answered dryly, “I know all about this already. I have had a full report on it already. There is truth in the allegations.” Roosevelt went on to say that he believed the story too scandalous for any newspaper to print. Besides, he pointed out, Welles had promised never to misbehave again. FDR had arranged for a guardian, under the guise of a bodyguard, he explained, to watch the man day and night. Bullitt continued to press the case against Welles, playing his last card. Having a man of Welles's character in charge of their careers was ruining morale among State Department officials, he claimed. The President, unnoticed, pressed a button under his desk that summoned Pa Watson. As the general stepped in, FDR said, “Pa, I don't feel well. Please cancel my appointments for the rest of the day.” Bullitt left, but went on to take the smarmy tale to Welles's superior, Secretary Hull, who somehow had been excluded from the knowing circle.

On July 16, 1943, nearly three years after the train incident, Hull believed the scandal could no longer be contained. He met with the President, telling FDR that he feared foreign governments would learn of Welles's perversion and try to blackmail him. After all, the man knew everything. Hull pleaded with the President to fire his undersecretary and end the threat to security. Eleanor Roosevelt, who overheard the conversation, expressed horror. Sumner was like family. He might commit suicide if the President dismissed and disgraced him. FDR struggled to make light of the matter. “Well, he's not doing it on government time,” he said with a wan smile.

Long ago FDR had had his own brush with blackmailers, an experience he confided to Daisy Suckley. As a twenty-one-year-old he had been touring Switzerland with a friend named Bradley. The two young sports, each carrying a then substantial thousand dollars, cultivated the acquaintance of two beautiful women at the next table in their Geneva hotel. The women turned out to be “the baroness so and so and the countess so and so, aunt and niece.” The foursome hit if off famously, subsequently traveling together the tourist circuit around Lake Geneva, Bradley paired with the niece and Franklin with the older woman. After two days of this delightful companionship, the maître d'hôtel asked to see Franklin in his office. There he explained, “Monsieur, I am an old man. I have known your uncle and aunt for a great many years [Mr. and Mrs. Franklin Delano], and I have known you since you were a child. You will forgive me if I speak frankly.” The maître d' proceeded to explain that the lovely ladies were neither baroness nor countess, and “were not ladies at all, but the best known pair of international blackmailers in Europe.” Their modus operandi was to maneuver well-to-do young gentlemen into compromising situations and then have them send home for ten thousand dollars to hush up the affair. FDR admitted to Daisy that he had been genuinely frightened, offered the two women a lame excuse about bad news from home, and then fled with Bradley on the next train to Paris, leaving no forwarding address.

FDR's forbearance in the matter of Sumner Welles was both personal and partisan. He could take a quite different stance against a foe. When New York police and ONI officials raided a homosexual brothel looking for Nazi agents, they thought they had found an isolationist senator, David I. Walsh, of Massachusetts, among the clientele. Though Walsh was later cleared as a victim of mistaken identity, FDR had no doubts as to how such matters were handled by men of honor. He told Senator Alben Barkley that in the Army fellow officers would leave a loaded gun with the miscreant, and it was expected that he would have the decency to use it on himself.

As for Welles, Roosevelt could no longer resist the pressures enveloping him from Hull, Congress, and looming newspaper exposure. The undersecretary recognized the hopelessness of his situation, and FDR accepted his resignation to take effect September 30, 1943. He, however, managed to bring his arch antagonist down with him. Shortly after Welles's resignation, Bill Bullitt, still seeking a major diplomatic post, secured another meeting with the President. As Bullitt stepped through the door, FDR intoned biblically, “William Bullitt, stand where you are. Saint Peter is at the gate. Along comes Sumner Welles, who admits to human error. Saint Peter grants him entrance. Then comes William Bullitt. Saint Peter says: ‘William Bullitt, you have betrayed a fellow human being.
You-can-go-down-there!
'” he said, pointing hellward. He never wanted to see Bullitt again, he said. Bullitt had fulfilled the description of him painted by Washington columnist Marquis Childs, “an Iago of Iagos.”