The Irregulars (35 page)

By the time Dahl got back to Washington, the war was over. It was a strangely blank sensation. The tension, which had been a constant in his life for so long, was suddenly gone. Cuneo put it best when he said it felt like the power had been “switched off.” For more than four years, the rotund White House liaison had called on Stephenson on practically a daily basis, so the following afternoon he stopped by the BSC chief’s Rockefeller Plaza office as usual. Without a word, Stephenson shoved a copy of the London
Times
across his desk and pointed with a finger to a single line: “The Home Secretary told the Commons last night that the emergency having ended, habeas corpus was restored.” Stephenson remarked, “I guess that’s what it was all about.” “I guess it was,” Cuneo agreed, and because there was nothing else to be said, they headed to the 21 Club for a drink.

Dahl found that the euphoria of V-E Day and V-J Day had quickly passed and given way to a mood of nervous distrust. Victory in Europe, so long anticipated, had come in May. Then in August, victory over Japan was achieved with shocking finality by the atom bomb. America was already looking to the future and was tired of feeling Britain’s hand at their back. The mounting differences between Russia and the West, exacerbated by America’s possession of the A-bomb, did not bode well for postwar cooperation. The Georgetown drawing rooms that Dahl frequented echoed with anti-Russian talk. The Truman administration had adopted a view of Russia as aggressive and expansionist and blamed it for the breakdown of the wartime alliance. The administration was following an increasingly hard line, abruptly terminating Lend-Lease the minute the European war was over, paring down the loans to Britain for reconstruction, and repudiating Russia’s request for funds to help jump-start its shattered economy. Ships bearing Lend-Lease cargoes to Britain remained docked, and those already under way had to be recalled.

America was letting it be known that there would be no unconditional postwar handouts—not to Britain, not to anyone. Uncle Sam was not going to play “Uncle Sucker” a second time. As the British Embassy cabled London: “The dollar sign is back in the Anglo-American equation.” The sudden loss of Lend-Lease funds shocked Britain, and relations between the two countries became increasingly strained and contentious. Churchill, who had been assured of ongoing American support by Roosevelt, was deeply disappointed, and, believing Truman reneged on their deal, called the move “rough and harsh.” Clement Attlee, who had just been made prime minister in the recent British elections, echoed regret at Truman’s precipitate action with no prior consultation and voiced concerns about the degree to which the Americans planned to work with their allies in the future. Stalin made it clear that Russia regarded Truman’s cut-off of rehabilitation funds as a deliberately hostile act.

In this atmosphere of mutual suspicion, Donovan and his people had wasted no time in turning the OSS, which still had the temporary status of a wartime agency, into a far more hawkish outfit, letting go many of Roosevelt’s more liberal appointments and weeding out the British officers brought in during the formative days of the organization. In doing so, Donovan was not only trying to assert his independence but also seeking to silence the critics who were uncomfortable with the OSS’s dependence on British intelligence. There was a sizable anti-British element within the FBI and State Department, as well as military intelligence, who felt it was time for sweeping change. Those who had long nursed a grudge against the BSC were quick to revive old complaints about the competition between the American and British intelligence agencies and fears that the British wanted to limit the OSS’s operations and reduce them to a lesser role, or “Cinderella status.” Part of their new adversarial attitude toward their British allies stemmed from the growing conviction that only America was somehow strong and true enough to command the powerful new arsenal of atomic weapons. While the British had initially shared their scientific knowledge with the Americans, it had become an essentially American effort—an American breakthrough, an American bomb. Fears that any breach in security could lead to the Soviets acquiring nuclear secrets drove the president and military planners to adopt an increasingly fortresslike mentality.

Donovan, however, still had a high regard for Stephenson and the British and was pushing for a permanent, coordinated overseas intelligence service under his direction. Dahl and Marsh, who had debated the postwar future of the BSC and the OSS dozens of times over, producing the usual trail of reports and memos, fancied themselves experts on the subject. Now that the administration was at last “catching up” with this idea, Marsh sent Wallace a memorandum on what he termed “the matter of the President’s eyes and ears,” advocating Donovan’s “set up” and including a second unsigned report, presumably furnished by Dahl, representing the British point of view. Dahl, who was by then completely in Stephenson’s thrall, was convinced that the United States should approve a peacetime extension of Donovan’s organization and urged “the establishment of a world wide secret economic and political intelligence organization.” Writing from his “experience of the British government in the intelligence field,” Dahl argued that the new organization should not be under the authority of either the Foreign Office or the Board of Trade but should instead function as an independent agency reporting directly to the prime minister, so that he could have some “check” on his diplomatic and consular representatives abroad. (No doubt Halifax was foremost in his mind.) Dahl also contended that the FBI was not qualified to take over for the OSS and that while their policing was above reproach, the training for their “cops and robbers” role was inadequate for the investigation of “intricate economic and political situations” in the foreign field. The OSS, in its present form, was admittedly less than perfect, he concluded, but was a temporary solution and could be expected to evolve in the months after the war, especially since so many top personnel would be returning to private life.

The much-decorated Donovan, who had up until then always enjoyed good publicity, was not prepared for the storm of controversy that greeted his efforts to preserve his wartime agency. Most of it was stirred up by the die-hard isolationist press. Blazing the way, as usual, were the McCormick-Patterson papers—the
Times-Herald
, the
Daily News
, and the
Tribune
—in a series of sensational front-page stories by Walter Trohan. The OSS-bashing campaign had begun back in January when copies of Donovan’s proposals were mysteriously leaked to Trohan, who painted a frightening picture of “an all-powerful intelligence service to spy on the postwar world and pry into the lives of ordinary citizens at home.” Inflammatory headlines accused Donovan of trying to create a “Super Spy System” and “Super Gestapo Agency.” There were more damning details: it was rumored the OSS would have “secret funds for spy work along the lines of bribing, and luxury living described in novels.” British Embassy sources suggested the information was leaked deliberately, if not “maliciously,” by military intelligence, which had long been jealous of the OSS. Hoover, who also had no use for the OSS, was causing trouble and wanted a “piece of the action” for his agency.

Donovan’s plan for a postwar intelligence organization had continued to be the subject of rumors and speculation in the press until May, when Trohan launched another major attack, this time “exposing” serious flaws within the OSS, tagging it “the glamour set,” composed of members who took “oaths of secrecy ‘as awesome as [those in] a fraternity institution.’” Two stories took direct aim at the so-called tie-up between the OSS and the British: the
Washington Times-Herald
charged that the “OSS Is Branded British Agency to Legislators,” and the next day the
Chicago Tribune
proclaimed that “British Control of OSS Bared In Congress Probe.” Trohan, quoting unidentified members of Congress, provided ample evidence of the “tie-up”: the facts that OSS agents were trained in England, that the British had access to OSS information otherwise denied to them by the United States, and that the OSS and the British Passport Control Office in New York, known to be “the headquarters of British intelligence in the U.S.,” had a close relationship.

The final nail in the coffin was Trohan’s claim that the OSS had spent “more than $125,000,000 in propagandizing and intelligence work around the world” but was “scarcely more than an arm of the British Intelligence Service.” Trohan’s timing was impeccable. The House Appropriations Committee was in the midst of hashing out the OSS budget for 1946, and every day the papers put another black mark next to the agency’s name, printing allegations of Communist infiltration and the ultraliberal bias that repeatedly brought Donovan to Capitol Hill to defend his staff.

By September, Donovan, tired of being on the defensive, came out swinging. An Irish charmer with many friends in the press, he met personally with dozens of reporters and columnists and gave rousing public statements in support of his plan for a new unified agency. He argued that the OSS concept was new only in America and that both Britain and Russia had possessed good intelligence agencies before the war and continued to retain their services as a matter of course. As one of the largest, most responsible, and influential nations in the world, America, he maintained, could no longer afford the mistakes of the past—that is, Pearl Harbor—or the kind of mistakes that might arise from bad information or bad judgment. Donovan pledged that the intelligence-gathering part of the OSS would be as valuable in peacetime as it had been during the war, not as a means to investigate the folks at home, or to spy on and destroy the enemy, but as a vital measure of defense. His counteroffensive worked, up to a point. The
New York Times
ran stories on the OSS’s “cloak and dagger” heroics, and the
Washington Post
reported on a mission to rescue “4000 stranded fliers” and other bold exploits. On September 12 Donovan released the names of twenty-seven OSS men whom he decorated for outstanding service to their country.

Although Donovan had succeeded in subduing his most vocal critics, Cuneo doubted the cease-fire would last for long. Even before this last skirmish, he knew there was entrenched opposition to Donovan’s unit in the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Cuneo liked and admired Donovan and had worked hand in glove with the OSS and the BSC throughout the war, but even he was not convinced that the coordinated service was a marriage made in heaven. “To put it mildly, I was chary,” he recalled. Since the British taught in their intelligence-training schools that all neutrals could be enemies, he “naturally drew the corollary that all allies could be potential enemies.” He told Donovan that as far as he could ascertain, “England was not a country but a religion, and that where England was concerned, every Englishman was a Jesuit who believed the end justifies the means.”

One fall morning, as Dahl walked downtown with Wallace, who now worked in the massive gray Department of Commerce Building, he took advantage of their time together to lobby for the postwar alliance with the OSS. Dahl was “very complimentary about the high quality of the work done by the OSS under Donovan” and spoke warmly of “the very close friendship” that had continued since the beginning of the war between Donovan and Stephenson. Dahl told Wallace that America had benefited greatly from their close cooperation, pointing out that of the twenty German saboteurs discovered by the FBI, seventeen of them were apprehended because of advance information given to the FBI by the British secret service. He felt certain that such a reciprocal relationship would only help their countries in the future.

Wallace listened courteously and did not voice any real objections, though he was privately of the opinion that integrating the intelligence services had “dangerous implications.” When Donovan had pushed for this move the previous October, Roosevelt had demurred, saying that he would first have to get clearance from the other agencies. Wallace did not believe that the departments of State, Army, Treasury, and Navy, to say nothing of his own Commerce Department, would all sign off on it, and he recorded his misgivings in his diary:

[Dahl] thinks a combined American-English Secret Service is necessary to prevent the destructive possibilities of the bomb. In other words, Dahl envisions the United States and England working together to prevent Russia from blowing up Anglo-Saxon civilization and wants an American Secret Service which in fact will be under the thumb of the British Secret Service organization.

 

At one point in their conversation, Dahl admitted to Wallace that he had become susceptible to the argument that the Soviets were intent on military expansion and was now “something of a Russophobe.” Wallace, who thought the hardliners were inviting conflict, told him: “Well, if you fear the Russians, it won’t be long until your fears are well founded.” He later reflected again in his diary on “how fond” he was of Dahl, and what “a nice boy” he was, but that he was necessarily biased: “He is working out problems from the standpoint of British policy, and British policy clearly is to provoke the maximum distrust between the United States and Russia and thus prepare the groundwork for World War III.”

On a more conciliatory note, Dahl told Wallace a humorous tale about Churchill that he had recently heard from the navigator on one of the PM’s flights. Apparently Churchill was under doctor’s orders not to fly too high. So when the plane climbed to nine thousand feet, he naturally became concerned and asked someone onboard to check his pulse. One of the pilots, who had only a dim recollection of how this was done, went to the forward cabin in search of a stopwatch when a colleague took him aside and whispered in his ear, “Seventy-two.” So the pilot went back and took Churchill’s wrist, and when the stopwatch showed sixty seconds were up, he announced, “Seventy-two.” As Dahl told it, “Churchill grinned happily and said, ‘Pretty good for an old man, isn’t it?’” Wallace laughed and said that he “didn’t know of any story which better typified the spirit of England.”