Joseph E. Persico (56 page)

Even after the war the FBI continued to poke into lingering suspicions against Currie, but nothing ever came of it. As Harvey Klehr, a scholar of the period, writes, “No one who talked to the Bureau believed that Currie was a Party member, secret or otherwise. . . . Over all the FBI file suggests that Currie was hardly a controlled agent but an eccentric, rather self aggrandizing individual who enjoyed the sensation of manipulating events from behind the scenes.” He may have described his level of complicity best himself. In a letter to a friend, Richard H. Wels, written six years after the war, Currie said, “I was probably too accessible and not sufficiently circumspect. However, I certainly had no idea what the world would be like today. As you remember, in the early days the New Deal was in the nature of a crusade and New Dealers felt a strong sense of camaraderie. . . . We were all united in pushing along with the War. The atmosphere of suspicion and caution only arose after I left the government [in 1945].”

Lauchlin Currie's behavior runs like a thread through the lives of numerous well-placed Americans who proved useful to the Soviet Union. Their rationale can be roughly synthesized as follows: We and Russia are Allies in the war against fascism. Therefore, our ally is entitled to know what we know. In its extreme form, this mentality motivated the men who were stealing the secrets of Los Alamos for the Soviet Union. Currie's involvement was of a lesser order. In him, the Soviet Union did not have a spy in the White House; it had a friend.

Chapter XXVI

A Leaky Vessel

LAUCHLIN CURRIE'S reportedly breathless alert to the Silvermaster ring that U.S. cryptanalysts were on to Russian codes was, it turned out, a false alarm, at least in part. The United States was indeed in possession of certain Soviet codebooks, but not those used by the NKVD for traffic passing between Washington, New York, and Moscow which Arlington Hall was attempting to break, thus far with scant success. What Currie had learned, probably through Map Room scuttlebutt, was about an unrelated spy escapade born halfway around the world.

In November 1944, Wilho Tikander, the OSS chief in another espionage haven, neutral Sweden, dangled a beguiling proposition before his boss, Bill Donovan. Finland had dropped out of the war as Germany's ally the month before, and Finnish officers approached Tikander in Stockholm offering to sell codebooks seized from the Soviet consulate in Petsamo. Ordinarily, Donovan would have leaped at the opportunity, but he was in a rare prudent mood, trying to win allies, not adversaries, in his campaign to propel the OSS into the postwar world. He was supposed to inform the State Department of any OSS contacts with foreign governments, and for once he chose the path of discretion, relaying the Finns' offer to the new secretary of state, Edward Stettinius. Stettinius well understood FDR's supersensitivity to any act that might arouse Soviet suspicions. Consequently, he recommended to Donovan that buying Russian codes from the Finns “would be inadvisable and improper.” Donovan chafed at the secretary's caution. His impetuous side surged to the fore. He instructed Tikander to proceed with the purchase, for an undisclosed sum, through which over fifteen hundred pages of Russian cryptographic material, including a charred codebook, passed into OSS hands. On December 11, Donovan proudly sent the President a letter trumpeting his acquisition. “I wanted you to know,” he told FDR, “that our chief representative in Stockholm was able to obtain three diplomatic codes and one military through special sources . . . We have made the necessary payments. . . . You are the only one to whom I have disclosed these facts.”

Edward Stettinius had a reputation as a suave, handsome courtier, possibly in over his head. But Donovan's rejection of his recommendation gave him an opportunity to show some spine and at the same time play to FDR's prejudices. Though Donovan had tried to limit knowledge of what he had done, Stettinius learned of it, doubtless from Roosevelt. Two days before Christmas, the secretary of state went to the White House and made an easy convert. He persuaded the President that the codes should be returned to the Soviets. He and FDR then concocted an explanation as to how this material had come into America's hands. Donovan was to inform his counterpart in Moscow, General Fitin, that an unspecified U.S. agency, in the course of its work, had happened to run across certain documents that apparently related to Russian-encoded communications. Specifically, he was to tell the Russians, “. . . [W]e had taken advantage of the opportunity to prevent this material from falling into the hands of the enemy and that we would immediately make it available to the Soviet government if they so desired.”

Of course, Fitin replied, the Russians would like to have their ciphers back. All that remained was to arrange a method of delivery. On February 15, 1945, a wary Andrei Gromyko, the Soviet ambassador, greeted Donovan at the Sixteenth Street embassy. Donovan's aide Ned Putzell followed behind carrying the thick sheaf of codes and keys, some burned around the edges. Gromyko in Washington and Fitin in Moscow felt more bafflement than gratitude at the return of the documents. Such behavior by the NKVD would have been unthinkable. What were the Americans up to? In the minds of the Soviets, only one explanation made sense. By making it appear that the codes were still secure, the Russians would continue using them while the Americans could continue breaking them.

For their part, American cryptanalysts heard in disbelief that the White House had ordered the ciphers returned. Colonel Carter W. Clarke, head of G-2's Special Branch, remembered going to Arlington Hall to report this decision to the staff. Clarke told them that the First Lady had learned of their attacks on Soviet codes and said that it had to stop. The colonel was indulging in hyperbole. Eleanor Roosevelt had no authority to issue orders in this realm. But she did share her husband's impatience with schemes that could menace the fragile East-West alliance and was not reticent about expressing her feelings. The Russian codes sold by the Finns had had to be returned, but Clarke, with a wink and a nod, told the codebreakers to keep working on the ciphers that were still being intercepted between NKVD agents in the United States and the USSR.

Did Donovan copy the Soviet codes obtained from the Finns before returning them? It would seem instinctive behavior for a spy chief. However, Putzell, who carried the documents to the Soviet embassy for his chief, insists that Donovan played it straight and that no copy was made. Neither the archives of the OSS, currently maintained by the CIA, nor the codebreaking National Security Agency, nor President Roosevelt's papers yield any trace of the codes or any reference to their being duplicated.

Contemporary observers, with opinions colored by forty years of Cold War distrust, may be forgiven for finding Franklin Roosevelt the naïf in this drama, with his oversolicitous concern not to upset Stalin. But the President's actions must be judged against the political backdrop of 1945. Finland had just left the war as a Nazi ally. How would it appear to the Soviets if FDR acquiesced in buying the codes of a presumed partner from a recent enemy? The President was then trying to engineer another three-power summit meeting among Churchill, Stalin, and himself, at which his chief objective was to draw the Soviet Union into the war against Japan. For Stalin to suspect, on the eve of such a meeting, that his capitalist partner was dealing behind his back could well have poisoned the atmosphere. All the performers in this ring behaved according to their natures: Donovan as a spymaster, Stalin as a distrustful ally, and Roosevelt as a leader trying to see beyond short-term advantage.

*

The President had sent the rambunctious George Earle, former Pennsylvania governor, former ambassador, and permanent playboy, to Istanbul in 1943 as his eyes and ears. Earle's reports from that den of intrigue had proved a mixed but respectable bag. He had provided FDR with solid, if unwelcome intelligence on what the Russians had done to the Poles in the Katyn forest. He had correctly predicted German rockets falling on England. But he had overestimated the destruction and underestimated the time for the Germans to rebuild the bombed Ploe¸sti oil fields.

Earle was not above exploiting his closeness to the President for personal advantage. In the summer of 1944, he wrote FDR, “[W]ith all the tremendous burdens now upon you, I am terribly sorry to bother you with a comparatively unimportant personal matter.” Earle had become eligible for promotion, and since he reported directly to the White House, though he operated undercover in Turkey as assistant naval attaché, he sent FDR a blank Navy fitness report to complete. Roosevelt handed the task over to his current naval aide, Rear Admiral Wilson Brown, telling the admiral, “From all I hear, he [Earle] has been doing useful work and doing it well.” Brown completed the form and the President happily signed it. In due course, Earle rose from lieutenant commander to full commander. That fall, the restless agent wrote again: “My dear Mr. President, Turkey has for the most part lost her value as a listening post and my position here as a personal observer for you is rapidly becoming valueless.” He wanted FDR to send him to Germany as soon as that enemy was defeated, again as the President's personal observer. Of course, he made clear, he had always hated Nazism, but a Red menace would replace the Nazis as soon as Germany surrendered. “Eighty million Germans after their capitulation must not be left entirely without hope,” Earle warned. Again, FDR bucked the request to Admiral Brown. The admiral wrote back to Earle, “There is no vacancy on the very small naval mission earmarked for Germany and your age makes it difficult to find a good sea billet for you that you would find satisfactory.” Instead, Brown arranged for Earle to be brought back to Washington while the Navy decided what to do with the President's overage friend.

Late in 1944, just before he was due to come home, Earle came upon intelligence that seemed to dispel his opinion of Turkey as a valueless listening post. He fired off a warning to the President on December 5 that the Germans, already using V-1 buzz bombs and V-2 rockets against England, were about to launch another secret weapon, the V-3, against the American East Coast. The pilotless, sputtering V-1s, the “buzz bombs,” had been raining hell on London since the week after D-Day. FDR's ambassador in London, John G. Winant, the Lincolnesque former Republican governor of New Hampshire, had described to him the psychological impact of the weapon: “The fact that this raiding is continuous, with warning sirens still operating, has disturbed people more than the heavy bombing of earlier periods. Fatigue seems to be the worse general result.” Casualties from the V-1s were building toward an eventual six thousand British civilians killed. Three months after the Normandy landings, on September 8, 1944, the first V-2 rocket had struck London. Its supersonic double crack soon played a fearful tympany over London since the V-2, unlike the buzz bombs, arrived without warning and thus could not be shot down.

Earle had made an unfulfilled prediction of a “stratospheric attack” on America well over a year before. This time, the President told Admiral Leahy that Earle was again probably retailing a rumor, “but every precaution should be taken.” On December 7, Leahy carried out the President's order and placed the entire East Coast on alert. The leader who had been caught flat-footed at Pearl Harbor three years before was not about to be caught again. Leahy, still skeptical, nevertheless notified coastal land, sea, and air commanders to be prepared for the possibility of an attack within the next thirty days. The following night at dinner with his cousin Daisy, FDR poured out his concerns over the V-3. He told her he had received a secret report from a source who had proved reliable in the past that the Germans had a weapon capable of killing by concussion everyone within a mile. They were planning to use it on New York. The President said that he was particularly worried over the growing laxity in U.S. defenses. As Daisy recorded in her diary, “The entire Atlantic Seaboard has relaxed all its dim-outs and air raid precausions [
sic
] etc. . . . He feared that in the next war, the side which first uses these new explosives will undoubtedly win.”

The threat of secret weapons targeted against the United States was not all that farfetched. Even before Earle's warning, the President had learned from J. Edgar Hoover that a German agent in the United States, under FBI control, had received instructions from Berlin to determine “the extent of offshore coastal protection of the United States and particularly as to any areas where this protection may have been curtailed.” The Germans, obviously, were probing for a soft spot.

To the creators of the V-1 and V-2 the possibility of striking the American mainland was not simply theoretical. The director of the Peenemünde Rocket Research Institute, Major General Walter Dornberger, admitted: “This development of the [V-2] did not satisfy our ambitions. . . . We wanted to cover thousands of miles.” Thus German rocket scientists had been conducting exploratory research since 1937 on a missile referred to variously as the “New York bomber,” or the “American Rocket.” Dornberger and Wernher von Braun, his brilliant thirty-two-year-old partner, building on their success with the V-2, had a new design on the drawing board. They would place a winged V-2 atop an even more powerful missile, the A-10, an eighty-seven-ton behemoth. The A-10, within a minute of blastoff, would propel the V-2 to a speed of 2,700 miles per hour. The A-10 would then fall away, sprout a parachute, and be retrievable for reuse. The winged V-2 would continue on, achieving a speed on its own of 6,300 miles per hour at an altitude of 35 miles. “Very fast stratos-high supersonic speed had reached design stage,” Dornberger claimed. “They would be able to cross from Europe to America in forty minutes.” Indeed, a rocket launch site angled along the great circle route to New York was found when Allied troops liberated Wizernes, France.

If the A-10 booster could not be readied in time, German engineers were also exploring the possibility of a rocket launched from a submarine. Allied photo reconnaissance over the coast of Nazi-occupied Norway had, in fact, spotted a U-boat of the 740-ton class fitted with rails running from the conning tower to the ship's bow. “The purpose of this,” the report concluded warily, “is unknown.” Besides experimenting on launching missiles from a heaving deck the Germans were working on more stable launching rafts to be towed by U-boats. The German navy's chief, Admiral Karl Doenitz, pleaded with Hitler to allow him to construct these platforms, assuring him that his wolf packs could surface off New York City in the dark of night, launch rockets, and turn the city into flame and rubble. In one test, a rocket launched from a submarine platform had traveled 250 miles, a range that would put dozens of major U.S. coastal cities within the arc of destruction.

The photo of the U-boat with rails had been taken on September 19, 1944, a date disturbingly close to the October warning that J. Edgar Hoover made to the President that German spies had been instructed to probe weak points along the Atlantic coast. That same month, a Nazi agent arrested by the FBI reported that while in Europe he had watched U-boat crews practicing rocket launches from their decks. Confirming Admiral Doenitz's strategy, crew members told the agent that they were practicing to proceed to within two hundred miles of the United States, where they would fire their rockets. Leahy, in his alert to the East Coast defense commands, had warned, “The capability exists . . . for small scale attacks by flying bombs or by rockets, smaller than the V-2, launched from specially fitted submarines.”