Joseph E. Persico (40 page)

The truth was that Lavrenti Beria, the NKVD chief, had laid out for Stalin the case for eliminating the Polish prisoners while they had been in Russian hands: “The military and police officers in the camps,” Beria wrote on March 5, 1940, “are attempting to continue their counterrevolutionary activities and are carrying out anti-Soviet agitation. Each of them is waiting only for his release in order to enter actively into the struggle against Soviet authority.” The obvious solution was to hold “[s]pecial tribunals . . . without summoning those detained and without bringing charges.” The equally obvious denouement was to apply “the supreme penalty, shooting.” Documents released following the collapse of the Soviet Union reveal that between nine thousand and fifteen thousand Polish military officers, government officials, intellectuals, and landowners were murdered in the Katyn forest on Stalin's orders in April 1940 as “hardened and uncompromising enemies of Soviet authority.”

The hypocrisy of the Soviet government during the Katyn affair was egregious even by Stalin's standards. But Churchill and Roosevelt were prepared to swallow it. That they knew all along the cynical game Stalin was playing is obvious in a long dispatch the Prime Minister sent to FDR on August 13, 1943. More than two months before, Owen O'Malley, British representative to the Polish government-in-exile, had provided to Churchill's foreign secretary, Anthony Eden, twenty-four detailed points describing where and when the murdered Poles had been found, the climate and clothing worn at the time of their execution, the past use of the Katyn forest by the Reds to execute its czarist enemies, and the contradicting explanations the Soviets had given for the disappearance of the Poles. Most damning, letters the prisoners had been sending to their families ceased after April 1940, while the Katyn forest was still in Russian hands. O'Malley made clear his own conclusion that “in light of all the evidence” the Soviets had murdered the Poles. The Briton, torn between the case for pragmatism and his humane impulses, accepted the necessity of the former. He told Eden, “[I]n view of the immense importance of an appearance of Allied unity and of the heroic resistance of Russia to Germany, few will think that any other course would have been wise or right.” But O'Malley could not resist adding the price of turning a blind eye to evil. “If,” his message ended, “we, for however valid reasons, have been obliged to behave as if the deed was not theirs, may it not be that we now stand in danger . . . of falling under St. Paul's curse on those who can see cruelty ‘and not burn.'” Churchill was prepared to risk Saint Paul's curse. In his note forwarding O'Malley's report to FDR, he concluded that it was too convincing to suit their policy of not antagonizing Stalin. What O'Malley had revealed “is a grim, well written story, but perhaps a little too well written,” the Prime Minister wrote. “Nevertheless, should you have time to read it, it would repay the trouble. I should like to have it back when you have finished with it as we are not circulating it officially in any way.”

FDR, too, was willing to respect the Faustian bargain: Keep the Soviets at our side killing Germans, and say nothing of Stalin's crimes and hypocrisies. The President never made a public statement accusing the Russians of Katyn. Nor did Hitler, after his initial propaganda barrage attempting to bring the Soviets to his moral level. With the stunning defeat at Stalingrad, with the Russian steppes littered with German corpses and the burnt-out hulks of Wehrmacht tanks, and with no major offensive feasible for 1943, Hitler began considering a way out of the Soviet morass. A Magic decrypt picked up between a Japanese diplomat and Tokyo noted, on June 7: “All the fierce anti-Soviet propaganda that Germany started about Soviet soldiers mass murdering a group of Polish officers at Katyn has calmed down and is now scarcely a whisper. This is regarded as being done on Hitler's own secret orders and that the Chancellor in his own heart is trying to figure out a way to negotiate for peace with the Kremlin.” This decrypt was routed to President Roosevelt, who, determined not to embarrass the Soviets, found himself engaged in this conspiracy of silence.

One of the people whom Whittaker Chambers had fingered as a “fellow traveler” in his meeting with Adolf Berle was the State Department official Laurence Duggan, a studious, quiet man married to a wife described in a Soviet cable to Moscow as an “extraordinarily beautiful woman: a typical American, tall, blonde, reserved, well-read, goes in for sports, independent,” and also of leftist sympathies. Duggan, according to Soviet wartime documents unearthed in the mid-1990s by Allen Weinstein and Alexander Vassiliev and described in
The Haunted Wood,
had been passing documents to Soviet agents since 1936. By 1939, Duggan had begun to pull away from direct involvement with the NKVD, although he was still intermittently passing along State Department information as late as 1943. In March of that year, Vice President Henry Wallace received a letter from a Mrs. Ann M. Dziadulskato containing a list of Polish officers, including her husband, held by the Russians and asking the Vice President's help in obtaining information on the men who had disappeared. Wallace bucked the letter to the State Department, asking, “Is it possible and advisable to do some discreet work on the problem which this woman presents?” The answer that came back on June 9 read: “Mr. Duggan feels that no reply should be made to it.” Laurence Duggan was now a personal advisor to Secretary of State Cordell Hull. The advice to ignore the distraught woman's cry for help may have revealed Duggan's lingering protective sympathies for the Soviet Union. If so, he was in good company with the President and the Prime Minister of Great Britain. The dead Poles were buried not only physically but metaphorically, their memory subservient to a colder calculus in the mathematics of war.

*

Soviet practice was not to engage American Communists as spies since they were usually known to the FBI. Earl Browder, general secretary of the Communist Party of America, told an interviewer postwar, “There's been an awful lot of silly talk about the Communists in those days infiltrating the Roosevelt Administration. As a matter of fact, the Communists weren't interested in anything of the kind. . . . And we influenced everyone that came under our ideas to get active in mass work and not get into some governmental department.”
The New Yorker
magazine profiled Browder as “a haggard little man with grizzling hair and a stubby moustache who looks as though he had eaten something that didn't agree with him . . . [and] moved about briskly, somewhat in the low-slung manner affected by Groucho Marx.” Browder preferred to portray himself as a corn-fed son of Kansas, a midwestern American who just happened to have chosen communism as his politics over that of the Democrats or Republicans. In actuality, Browder was a conduit who led American Communists beyond street-corner pamphleteering into spying for the Soviet Union.

In 1940 the old Bolshevik had been railroaded into a four-year prison sentence for a minor passport irregularity: he failed to mention that he had obtained passports previously, a violation at its worst incurring a sentence of months, not years. The sentence had been handed down after the 1939 Russo-German peace pact, placing Browder, at that point, on the wrong side of American popular sentiment. His conviction, however, did not deter Browder from running for president in 1940 before entering the federal penitentiary in Atlanta. By 1942, with the international lineup reversed, and Russia now America's ally, President Roosevelt came under left-wing pressure to release Browder from prison as a gesture of Soviet-American amity. FDR looked for a graceful exit. According to Browder's account, Roosevelt found it in New York's mayor, Fiorello La Guardia. The feisty La Guardia came to the White House to urge the President to free Browder. FDR asked the mayor, “Tell me one good reason why I should act in this at this time.” La Guardia answered, “Because Browder's sons are being kept off the baseball teams in school because their father's in prison.” “That's the best reason I've been given so far,” the President responded with relief. “Let's release him!” Whether for this explanation or less colorful reasons, Browder was, in fact, sprung from the penitentiary by presidential order.

Early in the next year, a dumpy, washed-out figure, Elizabeth Bentley, an underground courier between American spies and their Soviet controllers, recalled meeting with Browder. He directed Bentley to extend her courier runs to a new ring serving the Soviets. As she later put it, “They had been engaged in some sort of espionage for Earl Browder” for a considerable time. By freeing Browder to placate the Russians, the President had unwittingly restored a key link in Russia's spy chain in America.

*

That fall of 1943, FDR's desire was not merely to back the Soviets but to woo Stalin personally, to subject the Soviet dictator to the fatal Roosevelt charm that so rarely failed to conquer. He had finally persuaded Stalin to meet with him and Churchill outside the Soviet Union. Stalin had previously refused to do so, arguing that his country could not risk his absence, as if FDR and Churchill were less essential to their countries' survival. More likely, Stalin feared turning his back on rivals, real or imagined, should he leave Russia. Indeed, the strongest proponent for Stalin's staying home was his secret police chief, Beria. Finally, Stalin agreed to travel as far as neighboring Iran to meet his allies in the capital, Tehran, in November 1943. Roosevelt was so eager for an opportunity to deal with Stalin face-to-face that he would probably have agreed to a meeting in the Gobi Desert. At Tehran, Stalin could be expected to accelerate his steady drumbeat for a second front. But what FDR wanted went beyond the war in Europe; it was to realize a dream that he might go down in history as the man who brought democracy and communism together in peace. Nothing could shatter that dream more swiftly than the slightest suspicion on the part of the paranoid Stalin that Roosevelt and Churchill might cut a separate deal with Germany. It was precisely this worst fear, at the worst possible time, that a Bill Donovan alumnus nearly triggered.

Of all the individuals engaged in espionage on the American side in World War II, few could match Theodore Morde for sheer gall. Morde, at age thirty-two, had gone to Cairo in March 1942 with Donovan's COI. When the Office of War Information split off from COI, Morde stayed with the former organization. At some point in 1943, for reasons best known to himself, Morde resigned and went to work in the Cairo office of the
Reader's Digest
international organization. To Robert Sherwood, now with the OWI, it was good riddance since Morde “had been making a certain amount of trouble.” Morde next showed up in Istanbul posing as a war correspondent with no more credentials than an American passport. The smooth talker dropped names and spoke of his high-level experiences with a confidence that lent weight to otherwise invisible qualifications. The correspondent guise enabled Morde to win the trust of an anti-Nazi German professor in Turkey, who in turn led him to the German ambassador, Franz von Papen. During a meeting on October 5, 1943, Morde told the ambassador that he “had come on a highly secret and important mission from the United States for the sole purpose of seeing Von Papen.” His mission was so delicate, he explained, that he “carried no other credential than my passport.” The passport carried a notation that the bearer was “the assistant to the American minister” in Cairo, an out-of-date position left over from Morde's OWI days. This identification, however, satisfied Papen. During a long conversation Morde proposed that the ambassador lead a plot to overthrow Hitler. If carried off, he could promise nothing for sure, Morde added modestly, but doubtless, the removal of Hitler would lead to peace and save Germany. Papen, a canny diplomatic survivor, and a former chancellor of Germany, took the opportunity to protest the indiscriminate Allied bombing of German cities, noting that only one bomb in ten struck a military target. He also warned Morde that Roosevelt's policy of unconditional surrender was driving the German people in a direction the Western Allies could not possibly have intended. Because the bombing was destroying their material comforts, the German people, Papen claimed, were turning to communism. That concern vented, the ambassador then listened to the young American read from a formula for peace terms between Germany and the Western Allies, a twenty-six-page document born of the pen of Theodore Morde.

A week later, Morde was back in Cairo, where he managed to see Lieutenant Colonel Paul West, OSS operations chief for the Middle East. He confidently explained that he was engaged in a highly secret mission and was under orders to get back to Washington at once to report directly to President Roosevelt. So urgent a mission, Morde said, rated nothing less than a number one passenger priority on the next flight to the United States at a time when civilian airspace was next to unobtainable. OSS obligingly arranged the flight and Colonel West alerted General Donovan of the imminent arrival of this important figure. On his arrival in the United States in mid-October, Morde almost made it into the Oval Office. He did manage to see Pa Watson, who turned him over to Morde's old OWI superior, Robert Sherwood. Morde told Sherwood that his mission to Papen had been sponsored by Brigadier General Patrick Hurley, FDR's personal representative in Cairo. After Morde's departure, Sherwood sent the President a report of his encounter with Morde. “The story he brought back was an amazing one,” Sherwood told FDR. “He said that under the sponsorship of General Pat Hurley he had been to Istanbul and had two interviews with Papen, in which he discussed a possible deal for the overthrow of Hitler and the Nazi Party.” But no more enamored of Morde than he had been earlier, Sherwood went on to say that he had checked out the self-anointed negotiator and his peace plan with the general. Hurley, he told FDR, “disclaims all responsibility for it and denounces Morde.” What infuriated Sherwood, apart from Morde's brazen manipulation, was the anti-Roosevelt posture of the man's present employer,
Reader's Digest.
At this time, the magazine was printing huge editions for distribution to American troops abroad. Sherwood told Roosevelt that while supporting the war in general, “the
Reader's Digest
has become more and more bitter and partisan in its attacks on this Administration. In its world-wide circulation it is, in effect, undoing the work that my outfit [OWI] is constantly trying to do overseas.” FDR, too, was incensed by the editorial direction of the
Digest.
But he was enraged most by the rashness of Morde's talk of a separate peace with Germany on the eve of the Tehran conference with Stalin.