The Irregulars (26 page)

As Halifax routinely failed to report the little of importance that he heard from the American officials who called on him, Ogilvy had the bright idea of installing a microphone in his office so that his staff could later transcribe the recordings and the summaries could be sent to London. “Needless to say,” he later recalled, “this was considered ungentlemanly.” Ogilvy, who had no such scruples, filed this quaint sentiment alongside the “prissy view” held by Roosevelt’s secretary of war, Henry Stimson, that “gentlemen don’t read each other’s mail.” To his mind, the Americans were determinedly naïve and preferred not to know when they were “the beneficiaries of such skullduggery.” It was why so many BSC agents thought the Americans were hopeless when it came to espionage and why they dismissed the FBI as “flatfoots.”

Ogilvy, who was promoted to second secretary in the spring of 1944, was bored silly by his official duties. He kept himself entertained by seeing how many telegrams he could get approved by the “hyper-critical levels” above him. His record was forty-two in one month. This was all the more impressive given the complexity of the material—everything from the correct official line regarding Russian requests for food, textiles, and other relief requirements to an analysis of Britain’s postwar policy toward China—and that each telegram had to be encoded by hand before being sent, and then decoded in London. He took great pride in the fact that some of his finer compositions droned on for thousands of words, which his superiors found laudable. As a matter of policy, Ogilvy observed, “brevity was discouraged; it might cause misunderstanding.” Bad as the British bureaucracy was, it did not compare to that of the State Department, which was largely staffed by Wall Street lawyers known for sending out instructions that were so unintelligible that the ambassadors were frequently at a loss to understand them and had to wire back for clarification. Ogilvy, however, could remember having no difficulty comprehending one “momentous communication” from Cordell Hull to Lord Halifax:

The Secretary of state presents his compliments to His Excellency the British Ambassador and takes pleasure in informing him that the appropriate Customs Officer has been authorized to admit free of duty three cases of whisky for the personal use of Mr. David Ogilvy.

 

Because of their contacts in American journalism circles, Stephenson sometimes called on Dahl and Ogilvy to investigate leaks, which were a constant problem. “Our security was dreadful then,” recalled Dahl. “We used to pass these telegrams all over the place.” At the embassy, protocol dictated that incoming telegrams were earmarked for the most junior member of the diplomatic staff with oversight for that area. After he had read each telegram and written up his summary, or “minute,” he passed them up to his superior, and they traveled in this fashion from desk to desk until the cables worked their way up to the ambassador, who added his two cents and then frequently passed them on to an even higher authority—Lady Halifax—for perusal. As a result, when a leak occurred, it was hard to know where to look first for the chink in the armor.

When Drew Pearson somehow got hold of a top-secret telegram from Churchill to the British commanding general in Greece and reprinted much of its contents in his “Merry-Go-Round” column, the Foreign Office became extremely exercised about the security of its confidential communications. London asked Stephenson to make immediate inquiries, and he promised to put one of his “ruffians” on the case. How was it that the text of Churchill’s secret telegrams were finding their way into an American gossip column? Unlike Winchell, who had Cuneo serving as his lieutenant and sometime ghostwriter and hence could be counted on to march to the British tune, Pearson was cantankerous and hard to control. Isaiah Berlin considered him to be “one of the most malicious and irresponsible political muckrakers in the United States.”

If Pearson thought he had a “hot” scoop, he ran with it, and the British could take their lumps along with everyone else—as he had demonstrated when he printed an item quoting Assistant Secretary of War John J. McCloy to the effect that he believed Britain was deliberately delaying the launching of the second front. He was not anti-British, however, and not intractable. In the past, Pearson had on occasion been persuaded to scratch stories that would have been damaging to the British cause and once even allowed the BSC to write a column publicizing the gallant role that British women were playing in the war. A staunch FDR supporter, he cared about the administration’s war effort, and if he could be made to understand that something was potentially harmful to Anglo-American relations, such as the fact that their secure communications had been penetrated, he could be reasoned with. Ogilvy, who believed in low cunning and expediency, quickly pried loose the name of Pearson’s “leaker,” who turned out to be none other than Sumner Welles, the undersecretary of state.

With the war against Germany tapering off in the foreseeable future, the British were increasingly more engaged in clandestine politics than espionage against the enemy, so it was a matter of the utmost importance that Churchill’s intelligence and policy—particularly where Russia was concerned—remained a closely guarded state secret, and kept out of American hands. Although America was Britain’s firm ally, between them there was still “tremendous friction,” as Dahl recalled, and the British could ill afford any further leaks. So when a subsequent problem with Pearson’s column cropped up that summer, London asked Stephenson to give all possible assistance to the embassy. “The embassy waffled around with this for two or three days to try to find out what was going on,” Dahl recalled. “They didn’t, and then they went, of course, to Bill, who flashed one down to me, and said, ‘find out at once.’”

The trouble had started with Pearson’s publication in July 1944 of an extremely inflammatory confidential letter concerning the resignation of William Phillips, a highly regarded American diplomat and most recently the president’s special envoy in India. The letter in question, which dated back more than a year to April 1943, was addressed to Roosevelt and had been sent from New Delhi, where Phillips was reporting on the situation in India, and was particularly unforgiving when it came to British colonial rule. The gist of his letter was that India was in shambles, and that resentment of the British, who had helped foster the divisiveness and helplessness that crippled the country, was deepening. The British had succeeded in their policy of “keeping a lid on” and had suppressed the independence movement among the Indians. Phillips went on to note that the British Army was there in force and to keep the peace had arrested political agitators; an estimated “twenty thousand Congress Party leaders remained in jail without trial.” More to the point, he had been hard put to find any anti-Japanese sentiment in India, adding ominously that when it came time to fight, “We Americans should have to bear the burden of the coming campaign in that part of the world and not count on more than token assistance from the British in British India.” Pearson alleged that Phillips had been declared persona non grata in London and was demanding an investigation by the Foreign Relations Committee.

As Isaiah Berlin reported in one of his weekly dispatches, Pearson had caused “a genuine flurry with his stories.” The public airing of Britain’s problems in India was the last thing the Foreign Office needed. Sir Ronald Campbell, the British minister, lodged a strongly worded protest, requesting that the U.S. government disavow any connection to the views expressed in Pearson’s column. Campbell also met with Eugene Meyer, the publisher of the
Washington Post
, to express his outrage over the column, which turned out to be a waste of time because the
Post
was just one of the 616 papers that carried his column and had no particular influence over Pearson. Making matters worse, Campbell’s report of his conversation with Meyer, sent to the Foreign Office in a secret telegram, was reprinted in full in Pearson’s column just days later. The mischief-making Pearson privately claimed “to have collected a considerable dossier of facts on…India, publication of which would be unwelcome to His Majesty’s Government,” Berlin reported. “[He] has assured friends that he intends to print more and more Indian material likely to do us damage.” The leak had turned into a flood. Dahl found the whole situation nothing short of farcical, and could not help enjoying the ambassador’s humiliation: “Suddenly, in Drew Pearson’s column in the
Washington Post
everyday, there appeared absolutely…Halifax’s most secret telegrams to London.”

Cordell Hull was beside himself. Phillips’ letter had been copied to him, and he was determined to clear his office. Over the next three weeks he aggressively pushed the British to root out the source of the embarrassing leaks. According to the BSC history, their contact with Pearson in Washington “set to work, and, on 3 August, was able to report that he had received a copy of the Phillips letter from an Indian.” Stephenson cabled London: “Man who gave Pearson Phillips memorandum was Chaman Lal, Indian nationalist.”

This still did not explain how Pearson was regularly managing to get hold of bootleg embassy communications, including Campbell’s recent telegram, which he was faithfully reprinting word for word. Stephenson sent Dahl back to work on the hard-nosed columnist, who put freedom of the press above any other interests, national or international. “Well, this wasn’t too difficult for me because I knew Drew,” recalled Dahl, who went directly to Pearson and brokered a deal for the culprit’s identity. “I traded with him for this, and it turned out to be…an Indian in the Indian High Commissioner’s Office.” Major Altaf Quadir, a third secretary in the Washington office and another Indian agitator, had been copying telegrams and peddling them to Pearson as anti-British propaganda. The BSC saw to it that Quadir left the country, and Stephenson sent his completed report on the Washington leaks to London. “That stopped that,” said Dahl, “but you see it meant that if that telegram was leaking, then any others they were sending could leak as well.”

To the best of Dahl’s knowledge, the only “absolutely secure” telegrams between the United States and England during the war were the ones sent by Stephenson from New York using his “fantastic coding machines.” It was thanks to the BSC’s communications division that Britain eventually adopted Stephenson’s sophisticated code-making invention for ensuring the security of their top-secret communications traffic—including messages between Churchill and Roosevelt—and he liked to boast that they were handling up to a million characters a day. Dahl, who had only a nodding acquaintance with how the contraption worked, recalled Stephenson explaining how they intercepted wireless transmissions from German U-boats and deciphered them mechanically, before reciphering them and putting them on the wire to London, where they were again deciphered. “It took a whole roll of lavatory paper at one end,” he recalled, waggishly describing the randomly perforated code tape, “and another at the other end with the same size and number of holes in them.”

Dahl enjoyed having friends in the BSC, a sort of old boys’ club for intelligence types comprised of an incongruous mixture of brass and brains, backgrounds and skills, who were always ready for a visit to a bar and a shared laugh at Halifax’s expense, though that was about as much as they ever delved into their work. He liked the tribal mannerisms of his fellow sleuths, their friendly, low-key insults, studied indifference, and their nothing-sacred disposition toward all governments, institutions, and organizations, even their own. If he met up with them in New York, they invariably wound up at the 21 Club. In Washington they congregated at Billy Martin’s, their local Georgetown pub, which was popular with the British and at night was thick with gold braid and mink.

During his off hours, Dahl spent a good deal of time with Ogilvy, who introduced him to his friend Ivar (John F. C.) Bryce. “Burglar” Bryce, one of the many names by which he was known, was an old school chum of Fleming’s and quite a colorful character in his own right. Tall, dark, and handsome to the point of absurdity, he looked like an Aztec prince and was often mistaken for a film star. He was born to European nobility, counted the Marquess of Milford-Haven and the Earl of Medina as nephews, and radiated the languid ennui of someone who never had to work for a living. His great-grandfather was the founder of W. R. Grace & Co., which he sold for a huge sum. As Lord Mountbatten reportedly said of his distant nephew, “It’s terrible, the advantages he’s had to overcome.” Dahl found his good-mannered affability “charming” and thought him “kind” if rather “lazy.” Bryce had the splendid build and carriage of a natural athlete but had been barred from combat by a childhood sledding accident that left him with a bad knee, and a leg that was three inches shorter than it should have been. With his keen sense of adventure and wide-ranging curiosity, Stephenson, on Fleming’s recommendation, had put him to work on all sorts of unusual schemes and operations.

When they were together, Fleming and Bryce acted like long-lost brothers, immediately squaring off for competitions, interrupting and insulting each other; they were obviously devoted. Ian had a way of entering a room and tossing out something faintly challenging that would wind Ivar up and get everyone going. He would never just say “hullo” but would start in right away with some taunt, but nothing so rude that anyone could really take offense. Lighting one of his gold-banded cigarettes, he would look down his nose and exclaim with a slight patronizing inflection: “My dear boy, that
ghastly
tie. Why can’t you get yourself decently dressed.” A “giant among name-droppers,” as his colleague Donald Mclachlan once called him, he would breeze into town on some government propaganda business, and with a few well-placed phone calls would provoke instant action. Thereafter, his friends would find themselves in the company of very senior officers who were forever inquiring after the health of Ian Fleming. As Dahl would note fondly many years later, “There was a great red glow when Ian came into the room.”