Joseph E. Persico (66 page)

FDR, in his opaque style, has left little trace of what he thought of Donovan or the intelligence fed to him. The general undeniably served up a good deal of twaddle, the Vessel messages being the most egregious example. But so did Vincent Astor, John Franklin Carter, and George Earle. Nevertheless, FDR's habit was to keep all his pores open.

One point is fairly certain: Roosevelt would not have summarily lopped off the nation's intelligence arm as Harry Truman did. FDR had given a great deal of thought to postwar espionage, and discussed the matter with top aides on numerous occasions. Just a week before his death, he had issued the instruction for Donovan to pull together all the government's intelligence elements and start mapping a permanent service. These actions hardly suggest that either Donovan or espionage after the war was finished.

Only four months after Truman killed off the OSS, a whimsical ceremony took place in the White House. On January 24, 1946, the President presented Admiral Leahy and Rear Admiral Sidney Souers with black cloaks, black hats, and wooden daggers. He then read a mock directive to the “Cloak and Dagger Group of Snoopers.” The horseplay masked the moment's serious purpose, the appointment of Souers as the nation's first director of central intelligence and creation of the Central Intelligence Group, which within twenty months would metamorphose into the Central Intelligence Agency. Truman had felt chill winds blowing from the East and accepted that in the emerging Cold War the United States had to rearm and reenter the clandestine battleground.

In 1952, Donovan, then sixty-nine, thought he saw an opportunity to become the next director of the CIA. But his old nemesis, J. Edgar Hoover, remained unappeased. Hoover told Clyde Tolson, “I stopped him from becoming AG [Attorney General] in 1929, and I'll stop him now.” Whether through Hoover's machinations or composite reasons, Donovan was never again to become the nation's spy chief. He died on February 8, 1959, his Dominican priest brother administering the last rites. On learning of Wild Bill's death, President Eisenhower remarked, “What a man! We have lost the last hero.”

*

Deep in the makeup of FDR something reveled in the whispered secret, the clandestine mission, the mysterious agent. He delighted in his midnight rides through back streets to the obscure railroad siding under the Bureau of Engraving and Printing for dead of night departures from Washington. Merriman Smith, the veteran White House reporter, observed, “Mr. Roosevelt made a fetish of his privacy during the war.” It was FDR who chose the exotic Shangri-la as the name for his hideaway in Maryland's Catoctin Mountains. After Tehran, he gleefully embroidered on the alleged plot to assassinate him there. Psychohistorians may explain this penchant for the covert as providing the vicarious adventure that FDR's useless legs denied him. But the predilection was present long before his paralysis, in the enthusiasm with which he directed the Office of Naval Intelligence as assistant secretary of the Navy, in the wide-eyed wonder with which he swallowed Admiral Blinker Hall's fabrications in England. It was evident even earlier in his invention of a code for concealing intimate entries in his college diary.

By the time FDR entered the White House, his attraction to the circuitous and byzantine had evolved into a reflexive behavior. The bureaucratic fog that he laid down was deliberate. As the onetime Brain Truster Rexford Tugwell described FDR, “He had long ago learned to conceal from friend and enemy alike his thinking and deciding processes and even many of his convictions. . . .” He did not want anyone to know how he did it. A frustrated Raymond Moley, another early New Dealer, concluded, “[F]ewer friends would have been lost by bluntness than by the misunderstandings that arose from engaging ambiguity.”

FDR's preference for talking and his reluctance to commit anything to paper have created a maddening situation for scholars. Roosevelt forbade any note-taking in his presence. When George Marshall instructed General John Deane to bring a notebook to a White House briefing, “The President,” according to Marshall, “blew up.” Roosevelt himself rarely recorded his discussions, no matter how significant the issue or elevated the participants, even during private sessions with the heads of nations, to the frustration of State Department historians. Of his confidential talks with Churchill at the White House or Hyde Park, the department's history notes dryly, “[T]here took place a number of informal and unscheduled conferences between [Churchill] and Roosevelt, and the President, as was his custom, prepared no minutes or memoranda of conversations on them.” Tugwell has summed up the scholar's frustration. “There is hardly a dependable record of a conversation in Franklin Roosevelt's whole life.” The choicest secrets remained locked inside his head.

The President's personal predilections also explain his greatest weakness as a participant in secret warfare, his preference for working with human sources over signals intelligence, for “humint” over “sigint” in the shorthand of the trade. Magic, through Ambassador Oshima, provided access to the most intimate councils of war, inside Germany. Arlington Hall also broke the codes of Brazil, Chile, Egypt, Finland, Greece, Iran, Ireland, Italy, Mexico, Portugal, and Turkey. FDR's attitude toward human intelligence versus signals intelligence mirrored his character. The broken enemy codes set before him were the product of a laborious alphanumeric science. But FDR's character was drawn to intuition over analysis, boldness over methodology, romance over technology. He could grasp the terrifying potential of atomic weaponry when it was described to him and set the Manhattan Project in motion; but, day to day, he preferred the liveliness of personal contact to the detachment of science.

What cannot be gainsaid, for better or worse, is that FDR built espionage into the structure of American government when he created the OSS. He was present at the creation, was indeed the creator. The OSS, only temporarily scuttled, was essentially refloated by Harry Truman. In a generation, the United States went from no intelligence service to a permanent service; from dilettante amateurs to careerist professionals; from no spending and no personnel to a CIA which at the peak of the Cold War had a budget approaching $3 billion and employed approximately seventeen thousand persons; from attaché chatter picked up at embassy parties to billion-dollar satellites spying from space to Earth; from the almost homey codebreaking club at Arlington Hall to the ultra-secret National Security Agency, referred to as “No Such Agency,” whose intelligence collection and codebreaking enterprises far outstripped the budget even of the CIA. In short, America went from a nation innocent of espionage to one embracing its inevitability.

Wars are not won by spies pilfering documents or math professors cracking codes. They are won by forces engaged in bloodletting, by combatants bombing targets, sinking ships, and seizing ground. How long these forces are engaged and how much blood is spilled, however, can be shortened by the spy and the codebreaker. The advantage of Magic alone is proof. It revealed the Japanese fleet's movements that led to the pivotal Pacific victory at Midway. Magic tracked and doomed Admiral Yamamoto, whose loss to the Japanese has been equated with the Allies losing Eisenhower. In the final tally, both America's and Britain's intelligence operations far outstripped the performance of the enemy for political and psychological as much as technological reasons. Hitler's megalomania and the fear the Führer planted in his subordinates discouraged their delivering bad news. Hitler once pronounced accurate intelligence on Soviet troop concentrations “completely idiotic.” Across a report on Russian agricultural output he scrawled, “This cannot be!” In time, his lieutenants spared themselves grief and merely omitted the bitter dishes of German espionage from the Führer's menu. Joseph Stalin was much the same throughout World War II and into the Cold War. NKVD officials watered down the unpalatable since by telling Stalin the truth one risked transfer to the Gulag. This denial of reality by despots rendered even the best intelligence valueless, a point worth remembering when democracies tend to ascribe the advantage in covert activity to authoritarian regimes. The truth, the welcome and the unwelcome, is more difficult to suppress in open societies. The ironic conclusion is that, like individual freedom, espionage ultimately fares best in free nations.

In Franklin Roosevelt's character, the elements of secret warfare blended felicitously. His pragmatic outlook was reflected by an OSS agent who had parachuted behind the lines. “I was,” this spy observed, “a burglar with morals.” FDR's approach was not all that different: the devious route to a desirable goal; inconstant behavior directed toward constant ends; the warship hiding behind a smoke screen but steered by a moral compass. His biographer James MacGregor Burns describes the kind of public man FDR admired: “opportunistic in meeting problems but principled in outlook; flexible in negotiations but right-minded in the final test. . . .” It is a description of Roosevelt himself. Whether shaped by a privileged childhood, the cruel education of polio, or a dizzyingly complex persona to begin with, Franklin Roosevelt confidently led America in a cataclysmic war in which secret warfare figured significantly and for which he possessed a talent that sprang spontaneously from his nature.

Source Notes

SOURCE notes are keyed to the page number and a quotation or phrase occurring on that page. Citations from books, periodicals, and other attributed sources begin with the author's name followed by the title and page numbers. The sources are fully identified in the bibliography. Where more than one work by the same author is cited, a distinguishing word from the appropriate title appears after the author's name. Frequently cited sources are abbreviated as follows:

foreword

“You know I am a juggler. . . .”: Morgenthau Diary, May 15, 1942, p. 1093, FDRL.

“I had a conversation with father. . . .”: James Roosevelt,
My Parents,
pp. 160–61.

“He deliberately concealed. . . .”: John Gunther,
Roosevelt in Retrospect,
p. 53.

“Nothing would have pleased him. . . .”: Brian Loring Villa, “The Atomic Bomb and the Normandy Invasion,”
Perspectives in American History
2 (1977–78), p. 465.

Prologue

He sat in bed: John Gunther,
Roosevelt in Retrospect,
p. 119.

He dressed casually: James Roosevelt,
Affectionately, F.D.R.,
p. 327.

To one guest: Richard M. Ketchum,
The Borrowed Years, 1938–1941,
p. 765.

The President had excused himself: Day-by-Day, Dec. 6, 1941, FDRL.

“looked very worn. . . .”: Gordon Prange,
December 7, 1941,
p. 28; Ketchum, p. 765.

Prettyman lifted a drained FDR: Day-by-Day, Dec. 6, 1941, FDRL; Christopher Andrew,
For the President's Eyes Only,
pp. 116–17.

The weather, for December:
NYT,
Dec. 7, 1941.

The President had invited Murrow: Joseph E. Persico,
Edward R. Murrow,
p. 193.

“Wild Bill” Donovan, just six months: Thomas F. Troy,
Donovan and the CIA,
pp. 115–16.

As Prettyman removed the debris: William Doyle,
Inside the Oval Office,
p. 22.

His chronic sinusitis: Eleanor Roosevelt,
The Autobiography of Eleanor Roosevelt,
p. 226.

Washington was a: David Brinkley,
Washington Goes to War,
p. xi.

The silence was broken: Ketchum, p. 765.

The President and his doctor: Prange, p. 247.

Portraits of the President's mother: Gunther, pp. 361–62; Doyle, p. 26; Robert E. Sherwood,
Roosevelt and Hopkins,
pp. 204–205.

Hu Shih left: Prange, p. 248.

He asked his valet: Grace Tully,
F.D.R., My Boss,
p. 7.

“I was disappointed. . . .”: Eleanor Roosevelt, p. 226.

FDR picked it up: John Toland,
The Rising Sun,
p. 223; John Costello,
The Pacific War,
p. 4.

“Mr. President,” he said: Gunther, p. 319.

Knox said that he had no further details: Prange, p. 248.

There must be some mistake: James MacGregor Burns,
Roosevelt: The Soldier of Freedom,
p. 162.

“His reaction to any great event. . . .”: Geoffrey C. Ward,
A First-Class Temperament,
p. 591.

the President responded: Sherwood, p. 431; Burns,
Roosevelt: The Soldier of Freedom,
p. 162.

chapter i: gentleman amateurs

As she came in: John Gunther,
Roosevelt in Retrospect,
p. 26; Jim Bishop,
Roosevelt's Last Year,
pp. 1–2.

By now, eighteen years: Robert E. Sherwood,
Roosevelt and Hopkins,
pp. 205–206.

The President took from a can: Bishop, p. 15; William Doyle,
Inside the Oval Office,
p. 22.

The letterhead read simply: PSF Box 92.

The president-elect then joined: Michael F. Reilly,
Reilly of the White House,
p. 92.

And always the appended note: PSF Box 92.

“the richest boy in the world”:
The Poughkeepsie New Yorker,
Feb. 3, 1959;
The Poughkeepsie Journal,
Oct. 16, 1977; Vincent Astor to Missy LeHand, June 23, 1937, FDRL.

“we grew to be. . . .”: Ernest B. Furgurson, “Back Channels,”
Washingtonian,
vol. 31 (June 1996); Vincent Astor to Missy LeHand, June 23, 1937, FDRL;
Poughkeepsie Journal,
Oct. 16, 1977.

“In a day and age. . . .”: Christopher Andrew,
For the President's Eyes Only,
pp. 75–76.

“learned to anticipate . . .”; “We took secret pride. . . .”: Doris Kearns Goodwin,
No Ordinary Time,
p. 77.

“You keep your cards. . . .”: Doyle, p. 30.

Roosevelt was a man: Eric Larrabee,
Commander in Chief,
pp. 28–29.

Four months later: Miriam Greenblatt,
Franklin D. Roosevelt,
pp. 26–27.

“Whenever a Roosevelt rides. . . .”: Larrabee, pp. 29–30.

In its thirty-first year: Jeffrey M. Dorwart,
The Office of Naval Intelligence,
pp. ix, x, 96, 104, 105, 108; Norman Polmar and Thomas B. Allen,
Spy Book,
pp. x, 408.

FDR's amateurs: Dorwart,
Office of Naval Intelligence,
pp. 96, 104–105.

ONI's roster: Dorwart,
Conflict of Duty,
p. 163; Dorwart,
Office of Naval Intelligence,
pp. 108–109; Andrew, p. 77.

German saboteurs were suspected: W. A. Swanberg, “The Spies Who Came in from the Sea,”
American Heritage,
April 1970, p. 67.

One ONI informant: Dorwart,
Office of Naval Intelligence,
p. 117.

FDR ordered another investigation: Assistant Secretary of the Navy, Box 2, FDRL.

“The employees. . . .”: Andrew, p. 77.

With FDR's fervent support: Dorwart,
Office of Naval Intelligence,
p. 117.

He wore the gun: Andrew, pp. 77–78.

On July 9, 1918: Elliott Roosevelt, ed.,
FDR: His Personal Letters,
p. 375.

Hall had leaked the telegram: Dorwart,
Office of Naval Intelligence,
p. 105.

“Neither in fiction or fact. . . .”: Polmar and Allen,
Spy Book,
p. 251.

“I am going to ask. . . .”: Andrew, p. 78.

“Their Intelligence Department. . . .”: Franklin D. Roosevelt, “Account of 1918 Trip to England, France and the Front,” p. 387, FDRL; Andrew, pp. 2, 78.

Indeed, by the end: Andrew, p. 117.

As Roosevelt began: Vincent Astor to Missy LeHand, June 23, 1937, FDRL.

While the political views: Furgurson.

It would be Astor's gift: Dorwart, “The Roosevelt-Astor Espionage Ring,”
New York History,
vol. 62, no. 3 (July 1981), p. 311.

Otherwise, it was: Vincent Astor to Missy LeHand, June 23, 1937, FDRL.

Astor backed reform: Dorwart, “Roosevelt-Astor Espionage Ring,” p. 308.

Astor's fellow members:
U.S. News & World Report,
Jan. 12, 1987; Dorwart, “Roosevelt-Astor Espionage Ring,” pp. 309–10.

Distinguished figures were invited: Dorwart, “Roosevelt-Astor Espionage Ring,” p. 310.

“. . . estimable, socially acceptable. . . .”: Dwight D. Eisenhower,
Crusade in Europe,
p. 32.

“could not be more clear”: PPF Box 40.

“keep a security watch on me”: ibid.

He ended confidently: ibid.

“I don't want to make you jealous. . . .”: Andrew, p. 84.

The President spoke quickly: Suckley, Binder 16, p. 258.

“I will not say more. . . .”: PSF Box 92.

“a 100% probability. . . .”: ibid.

“only beer and sherry. . . .”: ibid.

A small but zealous Friedman: Andrew, p. 105; Polmar and Allen,
Spy Book,
p. 222.

This breakthrough meant: Roberta Wohlstetter,
Pearl Harbor,
p. 170.

At about the time: Andrew, p. 105.

“The German future. . . .”: Joseph E. Persico,
Nuremberg,
p. 43.

U.S. industry was willingly: Phillip Knightley,
The Second Oldest Profession,
p. 102.

“I want to do something. . . .”: Charles Wighton and Gunter Peis,
Hitler's Spies and Saboteurs,
p. 27.

Piece by piece: David Kahn,
Hitler's Spies,
pp. 328–31; Ladislas Farago,
The Game of the Foxes,
p. 40; Daniel Patrick Moynihan,
Secrecy: The American Experience,
p. 125.

The British were not: Thomas H. Etzold, “The (F)utility Factor,”
Military Affairs,
vol. 39, no. 2 (1975).

“Then it's happened. . . .”: Dorwart,
Conflict of Duty,
pp. 119–20; Gunther, p. 303.

“Tomorrow I am starting. . . .”: Dorwart,
Conflict of Duty,
p. 165.

He informed Roosevelt: Andrew, p. 93.

“in accordance with your wishes. . . .”: ibid., p. 92; Dorwart, “Roosevelt-Astor Espionage Ring,” p. 15.

“constantly crossing each other's tracks.”: Thomas F. Troy,
The Coordinator of Information and British Intelligence,
p. 149.

“His mind does not easily follow. . . .”: Stimson Diaries, Dec. 18, 1940, FDRL; Andrew, p. 86.

But over the long term: Roger J. Sandilands,
The Life and Political Economy of Lauchlin Currie,
p. 98.

He handed responsibility: Troy,
The Coordinator,
pp. 147, 148; Andrew, p. 86.

He attended: Andrew, p. 91; Troy,
The Coordinator,
pp. 149–50.

chapter ii: spies, saboteurs, and traitors

“No, you can't come in”: Richard J. Whalen,
The Founding Father,
p. 310.

What they revealed: Norman Polmar and Thomas B. Allen,
Spy Book,
p. 309.

“I have always disliked. . . .”: Michael F. Reilly,
Reilly of the White House,
p. 200.

“widely and deeply disliked”: James Leutze, “The Secret of the Churchill-Roosevelt Correspondence, September 1939–May 1940,”
Journal of Contemporary History,
July 10, 1975, p. 478.

“Mr. Churchill was sitting. . . .”: ibid., p. 480.

“was one of the most. . . .”: ibid., p. 470.

“. . . [T]here is a strong possibility. . . .”: Robert Thompson,
A Time for War,
p. 200.

“The decisive hour has come. . . .”: Doris Kearns Goodwin,
No Ordinary Time,
p. 15.

“I should like to speak. . . .”: William C. Bullitt to Roosevelt, May 16, 1940, PSF Box 2.

“the British fleet would base itself. . . .”: ibid.

He had received: Whalen, pp. 311, 312.

He had come to London: Polmar and Allen,
Spy Book,
p. 309.

Kent's fellow clerks: Whalen, p. 310.

“The more American ships. . . .”: Leutze, pp. 483–84.

He began signing: Ladislas Farago,
The Game of the Foxes,
p. 339.

“. . . [T]heir [U.S.] patrols. . . .”: Leutze, p. 484.

“I gave orders last night. . . .”: ibid., p. 475.

“Take no sides. . . .”: Robert E. Sherwood,
Roosevelt and Hopkins,
p. 128.

“Our objective. . . .”: Thomas F. Troy,
Wild Bill and Intrepid,
p. 63.

“We should be quite ready. . . .”: Leutze, p. 472; Farago, p. 39.

Tyler Kent, as he brooded: Whalen, p. 310.

“secretly and unconstitutionally. . . .”: Farago, pp. 338, 350.

“All wars are inspired. . . .”: ibid., p. 338.

He had, he later admitted: Whalen, p. 316.

And so Kent began: Farago, p. 342; Whalen, p. 316.

Anna's mother: Polmar and Allen,
Spy Book,
p. 309.

Captain A.H.M. Ramsay was: Farago, p. 341.

Further, he was: Whalen, p. 316.

Ramsay had fought: Polmar and Allen,
Spy Book,
p. 309.

“Jew's War”: Farago, p. 341; Whalen, pp. 316–17.

Wolkoff, of the aristocratic past: Farago, pp. 340–41.

“. . . a maudlin and monstrous pile. . . .”: Robin W. Winks,
Cloak and Gown,
pp. 271–72.

There a clutch: Polmar and Allen,
Spy Book,
pp. 73–74.

One report demonstrated: Farago, p. 340.

Hitler's foreign office: ibid.

“It would be possible to hand over. . . .”: ibid.

The measure was narrowly defeated: Whalen, p. 208.

Next he began threatening: Jeffrey M. Dorwart,
Conflict of Duty,
p. 114.

“He . . . says that. . . .”: John Morton Blum,
Years of Urgency, 1938–1941: From the Morgenthau Diaries,
pp. 90–91.

“about which he is. . . .”: Leutze, p. 482.

Henceforth, FDR said: Irwin F. Gellman,
Secret Affairs,
p. 67.

“People come in here. . . .”: Goodwin, p. 107.

“When you are in the center. . . .”: ibid., pp. 108–109.

THIS IS A JEW'S WAR
: Farago, pp. 340–42.

“. . . I asked him. . . .”: Whalen, pp. 310–11.

As Jimmy described a conversation: James Roosevelt,
My Parents,
pp. 208–209.

“I have made arrangements. . . .”: David E. Koskoff,
Joseph P. Kennedy,
pp. 116–17.