Part 1: Wedge; From P.Harbor to 9/11 How the Secret War Between the FBI & CIA has Endangered National Security

WEDGE 

FROM PEARL HARBOR TO 9/11 HOW THE SECRET WAR BETWEEN THE FBI AND CIA HAS ENDANGERED 

NATIONAL SECURITY 

MARK RIEBLING

PROLOGUE

ON MAY 25, 1941, Commander Ian Fleming entered the United States on a secret mission. He took a taxi from LaGuardia Field to Rockefeller Center, in midtown Manhattan, where he got out with his boss, Rear Admiral John H. Godfrey, the director of British naval intelligence. Flags of a hundred nations fringed the plaza’s International Building, as if to advertise the many spy services within: America’s Federal Bureau of Investigation on the 44th floor; the Japanese consulate on 35; and on 36, behind a door marked “Rough Diamonds, Ltd., ” the British Secret Service. When Fleming later began writing novels, he would have his fictional James Bond shoot a Japanese cipher clerk here—hinting that this was based on the author’s own killing of a Japanese agent, by “accidentally” crashing a construction sandbag through a window. As far as history can establish, however, Fleming’s real purpose in America was at once more prosaic and more profound. In the words of a Most Secret British document, he was to help Godfrey “report on United States intelligence organizations, ” and “to coordinate them with those at the disposal of the United Kingdom.” In practice, that would mean pushing for an American central-intelligence agency, and helping choose its chief. 

The task fell mostly to Fleming, for the admiral had to handle such matters as the hunt for the German battleship Bismarck, and in any case it was Fleming’s job, as an assistant, to read files and command facts. He began working closely on the project with station chief William Stephenson, a Canadian millionaire-inventor and former amateur lightweight boxing champion, cable address Intrepid. Stephenson’s secret duties, performed under a cover as passport-control officer, included recruiting agents like actor-playwright Noël Coward to report on fascist sympathizers, and hiring Italian crime families to sweep the New York docks for Nazi spies. Another of Stephenson’s tasks was to liaise with the Americans, and he had been urging them to create their own spy service while there still was time. 

The problem assumed a new urgency on the day after Fleming arrived. Worried by Japanese aggressiveness in the Far East, President Franklin Roosevelt declared a full “state of emergency. ” On the eve of her inevitable entry into the worst war in world history, it was pathetic and dangerous that the United States had no brain trust to analyze foreign affairs, no espionage service to practice the darker arts of clandestine collection, no counterspy component to keep her secrets safe. America was not exactly a secret-intelligence virgin—General Washington had been helped by Nathan Hale and hurt by Benedict Arnold, and Pinkerton’s detectives had caught Confederate spies for Abraham Lincoln—but the country still had no central intelligence. 

Instead, Fleming learned, feuding U.S. intelligence chiefs had a jurisdictional “twilight-zone” problem. Two years earlier, Roosevelt had decreed that the FBI would handle spy work in the Western Hemisphere, while military and naval intelligence would cover the rest of the world. Although these “Big Three” were ordered to pool their efforts, that was easier demanded than done. If, for instance, the Navy was running a double agent in Hawaii, and he came to the continental U.S., must he then be handed over to the FBI? Naturally the Bureau thought so, and naturally the Navy thought not. When Roosevelt convened a Cabinet meeting on these matters in April 1941, all parties admitted that “a certain amount of twilight zone was inevitable, ” but the president did not see why it couldn’t be overcome. In Britain, he observed, such matters were handled by “a gentleman known as Mr. X, whose identity was kept a complete secret.” Why shouldn’t America have its own Mr. X? The Big Three agreed that it would help to have a single coordinator; who that man should be, they would leave to the president. 

The president had then turned to Winston Churchill. FDR did not especially like the prime minister or his alcoholically bombastic “curtain raising of history, ” but America needed British experience and advice. Admiral Godfrey and his young attaché had thus been invited to visit. 

After sitting for a few days with Stephenson at Rockefeller Center—drinking gin and smoking Turkish cigarettes, digesting case histories and reviewing P-files (personality dossiers)—Fleming began to grasp that there was really one main obstacle to the centralization of American intelligence. So in early June, the British team boarded a train to Washington, to confront him. 

 ♛♛♛

AS FLEMING ROAD SOUTH on the Palmetto Express, anticipating a meeting with one of the world’s most famous and admired men, he turned over in his mind what he had gleaned from Stephenson’s big, baize-bound P-file on John Edgar Hoover. Stephenson had built a psychological profile, and the FBI director’s personal life and background were emphasized, according to Stephenson’s papers, because they were “regarded as fundamental to any understanding in London of a relationship that does not always run smoothly.” 

By conventional standards, Hoover was not an especially attractive person. He was short, and had been rejected on sight by his high school football coach. His squarish face was accentuated by a jutting jaw and a pug nose; the overall effect was of a bulldog. A childhood stutter had earned him the derisive nickname “Speed, ” until he conquered it, like the Greek orator Demosthenes, by secluding himself and practicing speeches. As with many who could not rely on natural gifts, he developed other ways of making himself liked. He was a collector of good jokes and anecdotes, a social drinker of Jack Daniel’s, and when his friends had children, he ordered the FBI’s Crime Lab to imprint their tiny toes on gold coins. But Hoover had also developed a general inwardness, a social self-reliance, a pride in his own privacy. He never married, did not date, and rarely accepted invitations to parties; when he did, he always brought along Clyde Tolson, his best friend and chief deputy. He didn’t talk politics or philosophy, never voted, never put up a Christmas tree. He was undeniably intelligent, but not intellectual, and seemed to have assimilated a typically bourgeois view on matters of the mind, valuing education yet scorning ideas. There was a definite provincialism to his outlook; he had never left the United States, and “never trusted any foreigners, ” as his own men knew—not exactly a selling point for a prospective coordinator of foreign intelligence. His personal life centered on a fine city home crammed full of antiques, a perfectly tended garden, and two cairn terriers. Otherwise he cared for little but his work. “Hoover is a man of singleness of purpose, ” Stephenson’s file had said, “and his purpose is the welfare of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.” 

His family had worked in Washington’s bureaucracy since the Civil War, and Hoover, born on New Year’s Day 1895, seemed to have inherited a special gene, or genius, for government work. He began at twenty-one, as an indexer at the Library of Congress, while going to night law school at George Washington University. Three years later, in 1919, he became a clerk in the Justice Department’s General Intelligence Division; after five years of working Sundays, he was heading the department’s Bureau of Investigation. The Bureau had existed since 1908, but had become a corrupt political police under the Harding administration; Hoover’s defining innovation was to make it “clean.” A strict code of conduct was imposed, and enforced less by punishment than by the sheer force of Hoover’s personality. He also did his best to make the Bureau competent, substituting lawyers and accountants for patronage hacks, and promoting solely on merit. At the time, he was not yet thirty years old, but he knew what he wanted to do, and did it well. As Stephenson’s file noted, Hoover’s job was “both his pride and his vanity.”

The truth of that assessment hit Fleming full force as he entered FBI headquarters at 9th Street and Pennsylvania Avenue, in downtown Washington. White tiles shone everywhere; workmen were repainting, cleaning, polishing. The British visitors trooped down a maze of corridors, past long rooms filled with chittering typewriters, against a stream of special agents in gray flannel suits and snap-brim hats. The whole place had the busy humming feeling of a bureaucracy actually at work. A receptionist took their names and showed them to a waiting room adorned with trophies of the FBI’s famous cases, from Bolshevik bombings to the hunt for bank robbers like John Dillinger. Though it was an obvious attempt at image management, Fleming could not help being impressed. He knew the Bureau’s successes were due partly to technological factors, such as tommy guns and fingerprinting, but even more to lessons Hoover had learned at the Library of Congress. Through so simple an innovation as comprehensive cross-referencing, both bureaucracy and criminal science had entered the information age. 

So, too, had popular folklore and public relations. Hoover was not going to hide his bureaucracy under a bushel basket, and he had early learned the value of mass media, using radio and motion pictures to project the shining ideal of the government agent. In 1935 James Cagney, who had glamorized gangsters in Scarface and Public Enemy, reversed the aesthetic by playing a special agent in G-Men; from that moment, in the public imagination, Hoover’s government agents were demigods. American myth had previously provided only individual heroes: solitary trappers (Daniel Boone), lone gunslinger sheriffs (Wyatt Earp), crazy-ass all-purpose misfits (Buffalo Bill). There had been no collective order of virtue, no legion of honor, until Hoover’s American Knights. Like King Arthur’s men, Hoover’s heroes were thought to be chaste, incorruptible, invincible, and they went around the country doing good deeds. As real knights had done in medieval times, Hoover’s men literally kept roads safe for travelers and protected the country’s treasure in its vaults. The FBI had almost a holy aura about it, and Hoover was showered on holidays with flowers, food, and candy. “If we didn’t have Mr. Hoover and the FBI, ” one citizen wrote the editor of Life magazine, “I would like to know how you and I would exist.” 

In 1936, at the height of his popularity, Hoover had been given authority to track down foreign spies in the United States. After three years of good work in that field, President Roosevelt had cut him a full third of the U.S. intelligence pie—the whole Western Hemisphere. Now, in 1941, Hoover’s undiminished popularity and power made him an attractive candidate for director of central intelligence. And his Bureau was definitely well fitted, in some key respects, to be the spy service Fleming foresaw. 

The FBI was a virtual trap for facts. From almost two hundred field offices, more than two thousand special agents teletype all new data daily to headquarters in Washington, where an army of clerks indexed it for easy retrieval. In the terminology of a later era, the FBI might be viewed as a giant computer made of human beings. That suited strategic intelligence, the construction of a big picture from an updatable universe of bits, as well as counterintelligence (CI), the thwarting of enemy spies. Both depended on accurate records, for one never knew in advance which bits of data might burn the enemy’s agents or plans. 

To get those bits, the Bureau had planted secret agents of its own. For the past few months, Hoover had been sending operatives of his Special Intelligence Service (SIS) into Latin America under cover as soap salesmen, stockbrokers, and journalists. The game could get dangerous, but SIS agents had been tutored in jujitsu, and were drilled in hip shooting and night firing with the pistol, shotgun, machine gun, and .30’06, .351, and Remington 81 rifles. More important, for purposes of secret intelligence, they were as “secure” a unit as any in the world, being well disciplined, highly motivated, and “clean” to a fault; none was likely to have the kind of character weaknesses that could lead to entrapment or black-mail by foreign powers. They were learning on the job and making some mistakes, but could be expected to improve, Fleming noted—provided they got proper tutoring from British experts. 

That was perhaps the most important requirement, a willingness to work with London. For the past year, Stephenson had been trying to effect what his files termed “the closest possible marriage between the FBI and British Intelligence. ” Serious courtship had occurred in Bermuda, where mail sacks from the Pan Am Clipper were secretly taken to the basement of a pink hotel, there to be “chamfered” for secret writing by Nazi agents. Some take from that operation had been provided to SIS, which was now tangling covertly with at least four spy rings in the New York area. A member of one ring, William Sebold, had even been turned into a double agent; the FBI had installed Sebold in an office with a hidden camera and microphone, yielding legal evidence against the entire Nazi network, and had also set up for him a radio transmitter on Long Island, for the relay of misleading material to Berlin. 

But Fleming knew that the very cases celebrated in the trophy displays, and other factors that made Hoover both popular and feared, did not necessarily make him a good spy chief. Indeed, Stephenson had recently been getting cold feet about the bride he had been wooing. The problems were built into the strengths. 

FBI agents compiled a mound of data, for instance, but Hoover’s policy discouraged them from analyzing it. A law enforcement officer’s main duty was accurate collection of information—“just the facts”—and every memo disseminated outside the Bureau carried the caveat:“this document contains neither recommendations nor conclusions of the FBI.” Putting the Bureau in charge of American spying might lead to a lot of prosecutor’s briefs but very little strategic intelligence, since there would be no way to filter signals from noise. 

Even if analysis were to become FBI policy, moreover, Fleming believed that the Bureau’s criminal investigators should be flanked with teams of experts from different backgrounds. FBI agents were good sniffer-dogs, but they were not especially promising material for a brain-trust. Most struck Fleming as Irish-Catholic Texans from second-rate law schools, which not only invited British snobbery, but made it difficult to find plausible covers in places like Peru, where some SIS agents went around pronouncing gracias as “grassyass.” 

Hoover’s dominant personality, so often a plus, also made him enemies. Secretary of War Henry Stimson thought him “a good deal of a prima donna, ” military intelligence chief Sherman Miles found him “very childish, petulant, ” and Stephenson believed the U.S. spy service “needed as its chief a man less rigid and sensitive to potential rivals.” 

Finally, intelligence work required a system of discipline less strict than Hoover’s, one that did not crush creativity or imagination. Realizing that “impressions made by Special Agents on the public have a great deal to do with developing cooperation on the part of the public, ” the FBI had imposed a strict administrative code that extended even to a man’s appearance and personal life. Agents had to wear dark suits, white shirts, and snap-brim hats; cut their hair two inches above the collar in back, and comb it just so on top so that there would be “no pointy heads”; they must keep a handkerchief in the right front pocket so no heroically firm handshake would be marred by “wet palms.” Coffee was not allowed at desks, unmarried agents were not allowed to spend the night at girlfriends’ apartments, and no FBI man must ever be drunk. The resulting white-knight mystique did ensure public cooperation, to the point where the flashing of an agent’s gold badge was often enough to make an arrest, and a gun was almost superfluous. Most agents therefore tolerated such petty tyrannies, just as similar rules were endured by college football players or Marines, which many FBI men had once been, or by Catholics, which most FBI men still were. 

There was some logic to Hoover’s tyranny; adherence to a common code solidified the FBI“team spirit, ” the sense of membership in a “family.” Fear of The Boss did not sap this spirit, but rather made it possible. There was no “democracy” or “individuality” under Hoover, any more than there was a under a football coach like Knute Rockne, or a general like Pershing, or the Pope; if you were going to go up against Notre Dame, or the Nazis, or the Devil, without discipline enforced by fear of your coach, or your commanding officer, or the wrath of God, you weren’t going to win. Still, strict enforcement of such regulations did create a certain climate of fear, and some of the brighter agents had quit because, as one put it, “I always had the feeling that someone was looking over my shoulder, checking up on what I was doing and how I was doing it. In fact, some of the FBI discipline verged on thought control. ”

Some reeducation had been attempted with Hoover’s spy chief, Percy “Bud” Foxworth, who had gone to London in February for a crash-tutorial in spying. But his ten-week report card showed little progress. Fleming believed, as he would soon write in a secret memo to London, that the FBI spies were a “small and uncoordinated force, ” mostly “amateurs without special training, ” who “have no special means of communication, ” and seldom any clearer brief than “to go and have a look.” FBI agents had been taught to look, but not to see; they thought only about arresting spies, and Stephenson struggled to keep them watching the Sebold ring instead of busting it up. Nor, alas, was much energy devoted to divining enemy plans. “‘ Intelligence’ in the United States generally means ‘Security and Counterespionage, ’” Fleming would report. “The concept of’Offensive Intelligence’ is not well understood.” 

What Fleming meant by “offensive” had to include Stephenson’s mischief on the docks. Britain was fighting for its very existence, and His Majesty’s Secret Service was not going to let a few Yankee laws sink vital convoys in the North Atlantic. But neither was the FBI going to stand by idly while American laws were disobeyed, and Stephenson had warned Fleming that a “flap” was brewing over the recent murder of a suspected Nazi spy. 

Still, Hoover seemed to be very much an antifascist. He had shown considerable courage in working secretly with British intelligence, given that the liaison might create an international crisis if exposed. Maybe, then, there still was hope. 

Godfrey and Fleming were led through a large conference room, past a ceremonial desk, and into a small, plain, almost Spartan private office beyond. The furniture was old, and a small desk was piled high with papers and files. There sat forty-six-year-old J. Edgar Hoover. He struck Fleming as “a chunky enigmatic man with slow eyes and a trap of a mouth. ” But he received them graciously, and listened with close attention as the admiral urged him to help create a new intelligence system. Godfrey gently ticked down a list of British “wishes”: an improved program to prevent naval sabotage, a special branch for the debriefing of war prisoners, a means to ensure the security of ciphers, a capacity to provide topographical target maps, a more thoroughly trained network of spies, a brain center to analyze intelligence, and, most important, a single coordinator to eliminate the twilight zones. 

When Godfrey was finished, Hoover “expressed himself firmly but politely as being uninterested in our mission.” Instead he complained, as Fleming had feared, about the British murder of a Nazi spy in New York. The Bureau had learned that a certain British sailor was telling U-boats where to intercept convoys, and Foxworth had shared that lead with Stephenson. Soon afterward, another FBI man had said to Stephenson, “Someone ought to give the treacherous son of a bitch the chop.” Stephenson had chopped his own hand against his desk and said, “I already have.” The special agent thought he was joking, but the sailor was found dead in a basement. Fleming had already heard Stephenson’s side of the story, and felt the act was justified: “There was overwhelming evidence against the seaman. Killing him quickly perhaps saved hundreds of sailors’ lives and precious supplies. ” But Hoover was having none of that. His willingness to work with the British, though inspired by genuine patriotism, would be conditioned above all by the interests of his Bureau. He would accept pilfered mail from Bermuda, but not dead men in Manhattan. 

The admiral promised to relay Hoover’s protests to Churchill, who was known to have great influence over Stephenson, but Hoover was not placated. As Fleming later noted, the FBI director’s toes were “covered with corns, ” and the meeting ended sooner than the British expected. With the air of doing a favor, Hoover had his guests guided through the world-famous Crime Laboratory and down to the basement shooting range. Fleming was awed by “the shattering roar of the Thompsons in the big dark cellar, ” but he and the admiral left Hoover’s headquarters re-convinced that intelligence and police work could not be made to mix. 

Still, there was another option. 

 ♛♛♛

FLEMING FELT A TWINGE of excitement as the admiral lifted the brass knocker at William Donovan’s Georgetown home, an old brick beauty. Fifty-one years later, it would host a victory party for a president-elect whom some called a draft evader, but for now it housed one of the most decorated men in American military history. Donovan answered the door himself, hugged the admiral, and shook Fleming’s hand. He was husky, blue-eyed and silver-haired, fifty seven years old, a millionaire lawyer, in an expensive suit sloppily worn. There was something in him of the overgrown leprechaun, and as he led his guests into a room of books and comfort, Fleming was already under the spell of Wild Bill. 

No one knew where the nickname came from; they only knew that it fit. Some said it came from the Irish side of the tracks in Buffalo, where Donovan had grown up; some from Columbia University, where he had been a mediocre law student and star quarterback; others from the dark forests of the Argonne, where he led charges against German machine-gun nests in 1917. Still others said it derived from his stint as an assistant attorney general, during which Donovan had raided his own social club for violating Prohibition. The adjective also fit Donovan’s crazy travel schedule, which was a principal reason the British were interested in him. 

Roosevelt called him “My secret legs.” An international law practice gave Donovan “businessman’s cover,” an excuse to travel the world on unofficial fact finding missions for the wheelchair-bound president; he had gone into fascist-occupied Ethiopia in the 1930s, when no one else could get in, bringing back a complete report on Mussolini’s troops, and had performed similar missions in a dozen other countries. By July 1940, he had been quietly moving around London, to determine whether His Majesty’s subjects would survive the Battle of Britain. After he returned to Washington and urged FDR to loan Churchill some warships, British support for Wild Bill became practically a point of honor. Churchill had put Donovan in touch with Admiral Godfrey, who found him a worthy student in late-night tutorials on secret intelligence. Since then, Stephenson had befriended Donovan and convinced him of the need for a secret service. In fact, just before the Fleming-Godfrey mission, Stephenson had cabled London: “I have been attempting to maneuver Donovan into the job of coordinating all United States intelligence.” 

Donovan was sympathetic to British problems with the FBI. Although he himself had a decent working relationship with Hoover—when Donovan referred to him potential informants in Germany’s U.S. underground in 1940, Hoover reciprocated by offering valuable contacts in the Far East—the two men also had a history of tangles tracing back to Donovan’s days as assistant attorney general. In 1924, Donovan had reviewed Hoover’s statutory authority for tracking communists and found it lacking. When Hoover uncharacteristically buried a Donovan request for justification, Donovan had to hound him into a “paper confession” about the illegality of his subversives index. 

There followed conflicts over Donovan’s “borrowing” of agents for what Hoover considered improper purposes, mutual resentment over each other’s perceived ambition, differences between Donovan’s loose administrative style and Hoover’s detail mindedness. They made a stark study in contrasts, the dashing millionaire jock and the homely, hermetic bureaucrat, and Fleming could see why they clashed. The essential difference of temperament was perhaps shown best by their respective activities during the defining event of the age, the Great War. While Donovan had been in Europe bayoneting Germans, Hoover had stayed behind a desk at Justice, organizing index files. Donovan had become a hero, but Hoover remained a clerk. No matter how famous and powerful Hoover became, no one ever thought of calling him “Wild Edgar. ” 

But while it was easy to romanticize Donovan, he did have his flaws, as the admiral had warned Fleming. Wild Bill tended to be an enthusiast, to think too broadly, to start projects and not follow through. He was not a “fact man, ” and for that reason was not considered an outstanding trial attorney. He could also be careless in matters of security. Five months earlier, Fleming himself had sent the potential intelligence chief, on the admiral’s behalf, transcripts of German propaganda broadcasts ridiculing “Colonel Donovan” for losing secret papers at a nightclub in Sofia, Bulgaria.

The main problem with Donovan, though, was that he kept saying that he didn’t really want the job of U.S. spy chief. He would do what he could to help form a new American secret service, and promised the British duo every facility in Washington; he was even putting them up at his house. But what he really wanted was to be a general with troops. The immediate task, Fleming informed London, was to “persuade” Donovan “to increase his personal interest in intelligence. ” 

As appeals to his patriotism only pushed him toward the battlefield, the British team tried to engage him intellectually. Donovan was a soldier jock with a curious mind; he not only seemed to have stepped from Plutarch’s tales of ancient heroes, but had actually read, dog-eared, and underlined them. He confessed he would like someday to write a world history of spying, and as the admiral and Fleming supplied him with memoranda on subjects like the “security of intelligence sources [and] Cyphers, ” they could see him becoming excited, as a boy might be about building an airplane model. He asked them for their ideas, and they obliged with “details as to how U.S. intelligence could be improved in the common cause.” Fleming closeted himself in a back room for two days, and produced longhand a sample charter and supporting notes. Above all, Fleming urged, America must centralize intelligence to gauge enemy intent. To that end, Donovan should infiltrate into the Axis nations, on neutral passports, officers with “trained powers of observation, analysis, and evaluation. ” These agents “should be under the protection of a strong government department, ” yet “should not be controlled by the FBI, which has no conception of offensive intelligence and is incapable of a strategic mentality. ” 

Donovan was intrigued, and thereby hooked. He wrote a secret proposal for the president, sometimes following Fleming’s words closely, but also adding ideas of his own. “Information is useless unless it is intelligently directed to the strategic purpose, ” Donovan wrote. “We have scattered through the various departments of our government, documents and memoranda concerning … the Axis, which, if gathered together and studied in detail by carefully trained minds … would yield valuable and often decisive results.” But even though facing the “imminent peril” of “total war, ” the United States was “lacking in effective services for analyzing, comprehending, and appraising” information “relative to the intention of potential enemies.” 

Donovan sent his letter to the president on June 10; the move was part of a carefully timed gambit, and coincided with a British intelligence mission, that very evening, to the White House. Fleming himself did not get to see the president, but the admiral obtained an invitation to dinner with the Roosevelts, and told Donovan and Fleming about it when he got back, late that night. FDR had not actually been present for the meal, and the admiral had instead been lobbying Mrs. Roosevelt and two aides when the president suddenly wheeled himself in. He was in a puckish mood, and would brook no matters of state; everyone was ushered into the drawing room, where they watched a movie on snake worship in Laos. Afterward, Godfrey gained a private hour in the Oval Office, during which, as Fleming duly reported to London, the Donovan plan was “discussed with the President direct, and Colonel Donovan’s qualifications as Coordinator of Intelligence were advocated to Mr. Roosevelt.” 

The president was an easy sell. He was getting so much information from so many departments, he admitted, that it would be good to have some kind of filtering, gatekeeping, sense-making mechanism. The next day, on June 11, he asked his appointments secretary to set up a long lunch with Donovan. Given the president’s schedule, however, this meeting could not be arranged until a week later, on June 18—and during that interim there developed an intense bureaucratic counterattack. 

Donovan had done his best to avoid this fight. The proposed agency, he had assured Roosevelt in his letter of June 10, would “neither displace nor encroach upon the FBI, Army, and Navy Intelligence, or any other department of the government.” On June 11, after hearing from the admiral that he was probably “in, ” Donovan had even telephoned Bureau Assistant Director Edward Tamm, professing that his unit would “not in any way interfere with what the FBI was doing.” But Tamm told him coldly that as far as Hoover was concerned, “a Controller was neither necessary nor desirable at this time, ” and soon the Big Three closed ranks against Donovan. “If there’s a loose football on the field, ” G-2 (military intelligence) chief Sherman Miles warned his colleagues, “Wild Bill will pick it up and run with it.” Only a month before, the Big Three had agreed that a coordinator was necessary, but now they reversed themselves: such an office would be “calamitous,” “too cumbersome,” “a positive detriment to … swift and secret action.” The only area in which a coordinator might help was counterespionage, since foreign spies were constantly crossing turf lines, and even here the Big Three claimed to have “reduced the twilight zone as far as it is possible to do so.” 

But Roosevelt’s mind was made up. Wild Bill went to the White House at 12:30 p.m. on June 18 and, as Fleming recorded, “was offered by the President and accepted the post of ‘ Coordinator of Intelligence [COI]. ’ ” Fleming cabled the news to Rockefeller Center, and Stephenson wired Churchill: “You can imagine how relieved I am after months of battle and jockeying in Washington that our man is in position.” 

There was, however, a hitch. Counterespionage—the one area, Hoover and the other chiefs had already agreed, where conflict was inevitable, and a coordinator needed— remained, under Roosevelt’s rules, the single area in which jurisdiction was split. A wedge was to be driven between foreign and domestic spy-catching. Donovan’s central-intelligence agency would work against enemy spies overseas; Hoover’s FBI would continue to handle them at home. It would later become an article of faith, even among intelligence professionals, that this schism was effected because Roosevelt wanted to protect Americans’ civil rights, which the president feared might be threatened by a superagency. In fact, the division was made for bureaucratic, not constitutional reasons. It was made to placate J. Edgar Hoover. It was necessary to divide counterespionage geographically, the White House announced, so that COI would not “supersede or duplicate … the Federal Bureau of Investigation.” 

This was, of course, a highly arbitrary way to carve out national-security duties. Why shouldn’t American spy hunters be allowed to follow spies’ tracks continuously, wherever they led? “The jurisdiction was divided at the water’s edge,” complained Richard Helms, who later became one of Donovan’s successors as U.S. spy chief. “When you are dealing with something that has both foreign and domestic aspects to it, the line has to be wavy. There is no other way to do it that I know of. It is like cutting a man down the middle.” 

To keep the two halves of the man from walking in opposite directions, Fleming knew, would be virtually impossible. A less severe division between internal security (MI5) and foreign intelligence (MI6) had been causing its own share of friction in London, and Fleming himself would soon help handle, in Lisbon, one special project that was widening the MI5-MI6 wedge. If such disputes were to be minimized in the U.S., there would have to be close liaison between Donovan and Hoover, who did not like each other. Indeed, Hoover’s previous pro-forma helpfulness had begun to change once Donovan seemed likely to become FDR’s official legs; already he had rallied the Big Three against COI, which he reportedly called “Roosevelt’s Folly.” 

Sensing that Hoover’s resistance would only stiffen, Fleming went out of his way to suggest a palliative strategy. Lest COI be “still born, ” he counseled Donovan on June 27, it was crucial to “enlist the full help of the FBI … by cajolery or other means.” This would require good “liaison officers, ” but things could be taken beyond that. Why not, Fleming wondered, seek billeting in Hoover’s headquarters at Justice? His building was “secure, and [had] central communications, ” and putting COI so close at hand might mollify J. Edgar. Likewise, counterespionage, where Bureau collaboration would be crucial, could be conducted by “a nominee of Mr. Hoover. ” The important thing was to make an overture of peace. 

Wild Bill gave it a try. That very day, he solicited an appointment with the FBI director, but Hoover was not available to see him. Rebuffed but resolute, Donovan spoke instead with Assistant Director Tamm, saying he wanted “to allay any fears.” His new unit, Donovan said, was merely to be “a laundry” through which the material of other agencies would be “ironed out and distributed.” He said he had not sought the COI job and did not want it, but, now that he had it, he wanted his people to visit the Bureau and emulate its administrative expertise. He even proposed an “advisory group, ” which he hoped the Bureau would join. 

Tamm said he would consult “the boss,” and Fleming took that as evidence the Americans were “taking steps to put their own house in order.” If Donovan assumed his coordinating duties “with vigour and speed, ” Fleming recorded as his mission finished in July, there was no reason why U.S. intelligence should not become “an extremely valuable offensive weapon.” As if in promise of that, Donovan had given him, as a parting gift, a .38 Police Positive revolver, inscribed:“For Special Services.” 

Fleming carried the gun with him as he caught the Clipper to Lisbon, proud of his role in helping the Americans create a central intelligence agency. He had no idea, at the time, just how utterly his visit had failed to eliminate the American twilight-zone problem. Nor had Fleming any inkling, as he left New York, that he was about to meet the man who would become his real-life model for James Bond, and whose case was about to be passed into the Hoover-Donovan twilight zone, where it would be bungled in a way that brought America into the war.

BOOK ONE 

THE WAR AGAINST WILD BILL

CHAPTER ONE 

THE TRICYCLE TRUST 

AT 2:30 P.M. ON TUESDAY, August 12, 1941, a secret agent entered the United States with information that Japan was planning to bomb Pearl Harbor. Tan, hatless, twenty-nine years old, he disembarked from a Boeing 314 Flying Boat, the Pan-American Clipper from Lisbon, and lolled across LaGuardia Field. Deep Slavic lines ran from the wings of his nostrils to the corners of his lips. His straw brown hair was brushed straight back, parted on the right, and receding at the temples, giving the face a heart shaped look. His passport declared him to be Dusan M. Popov, a native of Yugoslavia. Only a few days earlier, in the Lisbon suburb of Estoril, he had been shadowed by Ian Fleming; many years later, he would recognize some of his own adventures in Fleming’s first novel, Casino Royale. 

After an hour in Immigration, Popov obtained a sixmonth visa and caught a cab to Manhattan. He checked in at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel, showered, ate a roomservice sandwich, and inventoried his gear. It all seemed in order. There was $58,000 in small bills, provided by the Germans, plus $12,000 he’d made by staking the German money in Lisbon; four telegrams, individually folded in five-by-seven-inch sheets of thick white paper; a codebook for secret radio transmissions to Berlin, disguised as a hardbound popular novel; the torn half of a business card, to present to a contact who would give him a radio; and one vial of white crystals, soluble in two ounces of distilled water, to make invisible ink. Satisfied, and anxious to see the city, Popov locked his suitcases and pushed them into the closet, marking their exact positions, by his own account, “with faint pencil lines and a single hair secured by saliva.” 

He walked out of the Waldorf and down Park Avenue, then crosstown at 42nd Street, to Broadway. Nowhere in the world, he thought, was there a feeling of so much sex and money and light. Passing an automobile showroom, he admired a maroon Buick Phaeton with red leather upholstery and a black sliding sunroof. Ten minutes later, he had bought the car and been guaranteed delivery, registration included, the following day. When he returned to his room at the Waldorf, he was high on the promise of American efficiency, and conscious that he mustn’t let it affect performance of his mission. 

Routinely he unlocked the closet and stooped to check his suitcases. Someone had disturbed them; they were no longer aligned with the tiny hash marks, and the hair was missing. Had a hotel valet tried some petty theft? Nothing was missing. Hitler’s Abwehr? He doubted they would have assigned anyone to check on him. The FBI? That was probably it. Calling it part of the game, he went to bed early, to be ready for what he assumed would be an early-morning meeting with his new handlers. 

Five days passed, but no one called. Popov opened a checking account, took delivery of his car, and sat on his bed by the telephone. So much for American efficiency. 

Not until August 18 did he get the call. Not until the day after that, in a hotel room near Pennsylvania Station, was he finally meeting with Assistant Director Foxworth of the FBI. 

They talked for three hours. Popov, who went by the nickname “Dusko, ” explained that he had originally been recruited by German intelligence, the Abwehr, to operate in London, but hated the Nazis for overrunning his homeland, and for the past year had really been working for the British under the code-name “Tricycle” to deceive Berlin. The British had learned the basics of such deception from the Soviets, who in the 1920s had created an “anticommunist” spy network, the Trust. Since the Trust attracted genuine anticommunists but was infiltrated by informants, it posed no threat to the regime, yet it did serve as a convenient conduit for false information. British intelligence had been badly burned by the Trust— its “Ace of Spies, ” Sidney Reilly, had been sucked into its operations, compromised on a mission to Moscow, and was never seen again—but the lesson had been learned and was being employed against a new enemy. The British had created their own “Trust” of German agents, and so controlled virtually all Abwehr spies in Britain. To preserve German confidence in Popov, MI6 not only arranged for him to pass carefully screened secrets but concocted life histories of spies he had allegedly recruited. By summer 1941 the Germans believed Popov to head a whole network of agents, and had given him $60,000 to pay those nonexistent sources. 

He had received that sum in Lisbon, but there had been a hitch. He was supposed to hand the cash to MI6, but was stuck with it until his next scheduled contact. That would not happen, however, until MI6 settled a dispute with MI5, who felt they should have been told earlier about the case. Ian Fleming’s Naval Intelligence status had made him a good neutral party to watch Popov until the matter was resolved, and Fleming had followed the double agent through a smoky Estoril casino. As Popov later told it, Fleming watched from the fringes while Popov cleaned out the local braggart, a Lithuanian count. At one juncture Popov counted $50,000 onto the green felt, but the Lithuanian didn’t have enough cash to match that bet and went home humiliated. Afterward Fleming went over to Popov, bought drinks, and introduced himself. He was impressed not simply because Popov had shown nerve but because he had in the process increased the operating funds available to British intelligence. 

Since Popov had seemingly been so successful in England, the Germans had now sent him to the United States to rebuild the Sebold spy ring, which had been decimated by mass FBI arrests two months before. Popov told Foxworth he would contact five or six persons on an Abwehr list, but instead of trying to recruit them for the Nazis, he would secretly try to “turn” them to work for the United States. He was also supposed to supply answers to an espionage questionnaire concerning Pearl Harbor’s defenses, provided by his superiors in Berlin at the behest of their Japanese allies. With FBI help, however, Popov would furnish false responses, to misdirect any pending Japanese attack. 

Foxworth asked to see the questionnaire. Popov reached into his briefcase and unwrapped four telegrams. “They contain a new and very ingenious method of communication,” he explained, angling one of them under a lamp. Each telegram hid a dot containing microtext queries about U.S. Pacific defenses. 

Foxworth seemed amazed. Whole pages on the dot of an “i”? If that was true, it was something new and sensational. He would send it for analysis to the Bureau’s lab, on the next train to Washington. 

Popov hoped that the microdots would indeed be developed and disseminated quickly. It would also take time to select false “feed” intelligence and relay it to Berlin, to mislead the Axis in case of any pending attack. 

Foxworth nodded sympathetically—but told Popov they’d have to wait “to get specific instructions from Mr. Hoover.” 

Popov wondered at the delay. Already a whole week had been lost. Weren’t there other U.S. agencies involved? In England, authorities had formed a special double-agent committee, composed of representatives of all the various intelligence services—naval, military, internal security—to deduce Axis war plans from the kinds of questions posed. There was some inevitable rivalry between internal security and foreign intelligence, between MI5 and MI6, but that was all the more reason to be sure that everything was coordinated, because running double agents, like assembling strategic intelligence, was a tremendous undertaking that required interagency cooperation. 

“I know, ” Popov would later quote Foxworth as saying. “That’s the trouble. Theoretically, the FBI is concerned only with counterespionage in the United States. Believe me, Mr. Hoover is doing a marvelous job of that, but he is limiting his intelligence activities to that alone. I’m not sure he is eager to allow other services to mix in our work.” 

AS IT HAPPENED, one other agency needed desperately to mix in the FBI’s work, or at least to share in its product. At nine-thirty every workday morning, a secret team of scholars met at the Library of Congress, in Washington, D.C., in a room dominated by a strategic map of the world. Their top priority, according to meeting minutes, was to obtain “a general picture of the situation in regard to Japan.” Formally called the Board of Analysts, though also known as the “College of Cardinals” or the “Bad Eyes Brigade, ” they worked for William Donovan’s COI. 

Overseeing COI’s Far East efforts was Kenneth Landon, a philosophy professor on leave from Earlham College. When he reported for his first day of work and swung open the door of his office, it hit somebody. 

“Good morning, sir, ” said a tall young man in a seersucker suit. “My father sent me over to see whether I can help out.” 

It was Captain James Roosevelt, the president’s son; everyone called him Jimmy. His job, he told Landon, was politely to pressure other intelligence agencies into turning over “all information bearing on national security, ” as his father’s edict required. By charter, COI could not investigate enemy espionage in the United States, and Donovan had yet to establish his own collection channels overseas; he had dispatched a lone secret agent to the East, but the man had not reported back. Detection of Axis war plans would thus depend on getting information from other agencies. Just how badly Landon would need such outside input was clear when he was given access to a locked four-drawer cabinet labeled “Southeast Asia Intelligence.” Three drawers held nothing; the last, a sealed docket stamped “Top Secret, ” contained two magazine articles recently clipped by COI, both of them written by Landon. 

So, on August 19, as Foxworth was interviewing Popov in New York, Landon dispatched liaison officer Roosevelt to FBI headquarters to ask for information on the Far East. Although Hoover now promised to do “anything and everything possible to assist and cooperate with” Donovan, as COI files recorded, Jimmy Roosevelt was skeptical. Despite Donovan’s June 27 overtures to Tamm, Hoover had refused to appoint an adviser to COI, declined to help set up a good paper flow, and failed to recommend a candidate for counterintelligence chief. 

But Roosevelt let those issues lie, and pressed one other matter. On the day before, he said, COI had set up an Oral Intelligence Unit in New York City, for the debriefing of foreigners who arrived by Pan Am Clipper. Since the FBI was already doing that, and since it would take place domestically, COI would naturally reserve its debriefings to persons referred by the Bureau—but it was vital to have those referrals. Hoover did not disagree, but asked that Donovan send over a memo detailing the nature of COI’s “foreign-intelligence” interest in such domestic de-briefings. 

The next morning, Jimmy Roosevelt went to his In box and read the memo Donovan had prepared for Hoover. Noting that “much useful information might be obtained from covering the arrival of Pan American Airways passengers, ” especially regarding “questions bearing on military information, ” Donovan asked to be made part of the process. “In doing this, however, I don’t want in any way to interfere with what you may be doing. Therefore, before attempting anything along this line, I wanted to take it up with you.” 

On the surface, it was a reasonable enough request. But Roosevelt knew enough about interagency politics, and the geographical division between COI and FBI, to realize that coverage at American ports was an area of potential dispute. Pan Am’s New York gangways brought foreign travelers, but were they a foreign or a domestic concern? The answer, of course, was both. He just hoped J. Edgar would see it that way. 

ON SEPTEMBER 17, five weeks after Popov’s arrival by Pan Am Clipper, FBI headquarters sent Rockefeller Center a translation of the microdot questionnaire. As Foxworth read it, he could discern what seemed a clear Axis military interest in Pearl Harbor. Popov was supposed to determine: 

1. Exact details and sketch of the situation of the State Wharf and the power installations, workshops, petrol installations, situation of Dry Dock No. 1 and the new dry dock which is being built. 

2. Details about the submarine station (plan of situation). What land installations are in existence? 

3. Where is the station for mine search formations? How far has the dredge work progressed at the entrance and in the east and southeast lock? Depths of water? 

4. Number of anchorages? 

5. Is there a floating dock in Pearl Harbor or is the transfer of such a dock to this place intended? 

Special task—Reports about torpedo protection nets newly introduced in the British and U.S.A. navy. How far are they already in existence in the merchant and naval fleet? 

This was not the first time Foxworth had seen evidence of German curiosity about Pearl Harbor. Five months earlier, after a known German agent, Ulrich von der Osten, had been run over by an automobile in Times Square, FBI agents had searched his room at the Taft Hotel and discovered a detailed report on defenses at Pearl and nearby Hickam Field. Written in cursive on ocean-liner stationery, the report referred to maps and photographs “of interest … to our yellow allies, ” which had apparently been sent to Berlin. But now Popov was asking for some of the same information. Was the Abwehr merely testing him, by asking questions to which it already knew the answers? If so, couldn’t this mean that the Germans had lost confidence in him? 

Foxworth himself had reasons to sour on Popov. On September 1, without consulting his handlers, the double agent had moved into a penthouse apartment on the twenty-second floor of a brand-new building at 530 Park Avenue, at the corner of 61st Street. Foxworth sent some agents to inspect the place, and it was pretty damned nice —high above the noise of the city, lots of sunlight, and Popov had even hired a Chinese servant. At that rate, Foxworth had to wonder how long the Abwehr’s cash was going to last. 

Then there was the “playboy problem.” The Bureau kept a close surveillance on Popov’s penthouse, and it did not go unnoticed that he conquered the French starlet Simone Simone one morning, and in the afternoon seduced her mother. The man was simply a swordsman. Because he made a habit of bedding two women at once the story went around that this was how he earned the cryptonym “Tricycle.” He was also driving around with a married woman, an English fashion model who was supposed to be flying to Reno for a divorce. That last put the brass in a sticky position, because the Bureau was charged with enforcing the Mann Act, which made it a crime for men to transport women across state lines for immoral purposes. When confronted about his life-style, Popov countered that he should be judged by his work, by the “results.” 

As it happened, “the results” presented the biggest problem of all. After nearly three months in America, Popov had failed to contact a single Nazi spy. His secretink letters to Abwehr mail drops went unanswered. He claimed he didn’t really expect to hear from the Germans until he’d secured an operator for his radio station, but Foxworth wondered whether Popov wasn’t simply an opportunist who’d been used up. The British had just given him over—and when the British services gave you anything, you had to look at it closely. The whole Donovan business had finally proved that the British, helpful as they sometimes were, could not be fully trusted. 

But the case must go on anyway. The existence of von der Osten data and Popov’s questionnaire would conduce to a double-agent game. Knowing some of what Berlin already knew, the Bureau could tailor its lies to that prior base of truth. In November, Foxworth therefore sent Popov to Brazil, to give his torn half of a business card to an Abwehr contact who would arrange for Popov to pick up a radio transmitter, which Foxworth would then use to pass lies about Pearl Harbor’s defenses. To make those lies credible, Foxworth turned to Naval Intelligence, giving them Popov’s questions on September 25 and asking for false answers, “the reliability of which the Germans would not be able to check on.” If all went well, Popov might be sending false data to Berlin by January 1942. 

Foxworth meanwhile wondered whether he should pass the Pearl Harbor queries to Donovan. That would be a simple matter, for Foxworth’s assistant, Arthur Thurston, was in contact several times weekly with Donovan’s New York office. But Foxworth sensed that the Popov queries were not merely routine Pan Am passenger intelligence, such as COI kept asking about. He also knew that Hoover had no great affection for the coordinator of information. Foxworth would do no special favors for COI, then, without an okay from the boss. 

BY MID-SEPTEMBER 1941, Donovan was becoming frustrated. The bureaucratic reality of his work was considerably less enticing than he had been led to expect by Ian Fleming and British intelligence. He could barely get enough furniture for his offices, let alone information for his officers. He had recruited foreign-area analysts from universities like Michigan and Yale, but when they showed up he could only house them in buildings vacated by the Public Health Service, down by the breezeless Potomac River. Medical researchers left behind some animals in cages, and, naturally, office jokes arose over “whether to put the monkeys on the payroll—if there was ever going to be a payroll.” News of the working conditions somehow reached Berlin, which ridiculed Donovan’s new unit as “50 professors, 20 monkeys, 10 goats, 12 guinea pigs, and a staff of Jewish scribblers.” But no one laughed when an infected monkey bit a secretary, and neither she nor the other women would go near the building until a solution was arranged. So Donovan’s employees arrived at work one morning in early fall to see smoke coming from an incinerator chimney, while their director chatted on the steps outside with Jimmy Roosevelt. Under such conditions, with the stink of frying rhesus fur and no intelligence, it seemed absurd to even attempt a “strategic picture” of Japanese intent. 

But assembling just such a picture was the first and primary task assigned by the president, and Donovan did not want to disappoint. So on September 15, when he finally got an answer to his August 20 letter about Pan Am passengers, Donovan was cheered by Hoover’s pledge “to instruct my Special Agents to obtain any information that you desire from the incoming passengers, and see that this information is promptly relayed to you.” But as September turned to October, the FBI seemed to be sending only trivia, such as the report of a rice riot in Yokkaichi, “during which many were hurt.” Donovan’s carefully phrased thanks—“We will want to make use of this in a study we are now making of the Pacific situation”—served as a tactful reminder that he was interested in seeing anything the Bureau might possess about Japanese war plans. He nudged Hoover again on December 2, when they attended a luncheon with representatives of G-2 and ONI about possible Pacific threats. The next day, Hoover sent over intelligence from a missionary who had just returned from Japan, which revealed nothing about Tokyo’s intentions. 

Far more helpful was news that same morning from Donovan’s lone secret agent in the East. In three months undercover as a correspondent for the Chicago Daily News, Edgar Ansel Mowrer had tried to find patterns of travel by Japanese “businessmen”—spies—who might be casing Pacific targets. From Saigon, Hanoi, Djakarta, Singapore, Bangkok, Rangoon, and Hong Kong, Mowrer had found his way to the Philippines, where sources reported a Japanese war fleet sailing west. Mowrer suggested that the Japanese were going to “do something soon.” Information obtained from the War and Navy Departments by Jimmy Roosevelt confirmed that a Japanese flotilla was massing for action, and Donovan’s Far East analyst, Landon, also foresaw a Pacific offensive. 

A recent U.S. oil embargo had raised tensions with Tokyo, and the replacement in October of moderate Prime Minister Prince Fumimaro Konoe by militant General Hideki Tojo, who declared that “the essence of freedom is to live and die for the state, ” seemed to confirm a new Japanese aggressiveness. Donovan began telling his deputies that the U.S. would somehow be drawn into the war “before the end of the year.” By December 4, FDR had explicitly ordered him to examine U.S. Pacific defenses against possible Japanese raids. 

In a final attempt to figure out what was happening, COI officer Ferdinand E. Mayer approached Saburo Kurusu, a special Japanese envoy who had been dispatched to Washington. Squeezing through a hostile crowd outside the Japanese Embassy on Massachusetts Avenue, Mayer visited Kurusu at 11:00 a.m. on the morning of Saturday, December 6. The two had met during diplomatic service in Peru in the 1930s, but Kurusu was not his typical self; even in the embassy’s drawing room, he kept turning his head to see if anyone was approaching. There was extreme danger, Kurusu said, of war with the United States; “hotheads could upset the applecart at any time.” 

Mayer’s mission seemed to confirm Donovan’s darkest suspicions. The key question now was not whether or even so much when the Japanese flotilla would attack, but where. 

POPOV’S PEARL HARBOR questionnaire might have been of some value to COI analysts trying to puzzle out Japanese plans. The Germans had no forces whatsoever in the Pacific, so it was likely they were doing a favor for their Japanese allies. Perhaps, then, Popov’s questions might hold clues to Tokyo’s intent. It might have occurred to an intelligence analyst that the Japanese were interested in Pearl Harbor’s torpedo defenses because they were considering bombing Pearl Harbor with torpedoes. 

But the FBI did not employ intelligence analysts. If other agencies wanted to analyze Bureau-supplied information, that was fine with the Bureau, and in October a paraphrase of the entire questionnaire had been passed to Naval Intelligence. Yet that was only for purposes of deception, without sourcing or context, with no particular urgency attached to the request. Consequently, no deceptive data had yet been transmitted by Popov, who on December 7 was still in South America, arranging for delivery of his transmitter. Nor was ONI, in any case, the agency charged with putting together “a general picture of the situation in regard to Japan.” That was the job of the Far East Division at Donovan’s COI. 

In hindsight, it would seem obvious that the Bureau should have shared pov’s questions with the fledgling central-intelligence agency. But Hoover had reasons for not wanting to give Donovan sensitive information, and some of them were good ones. 

As early as June 27, when Donovan consulted Tamm, Hoover had sensed that Wild Bill’s overture was at least partly an attempt to soften the Bureau’s position. It didn’t take much knowledge of Donovan’s character to disbelieve his protestations that COI would be doing only memo-laundering, but that laundry function alone was a threat, since it meant that Hoover would be reporting to the president through Donovan, which amounted really to reporting to Donovan, at least on intelligence matters. Donovan’s true intentions, moreover, blew back to Hoover through the FBI director’s many gossip channels in government. At the end of July,a source reported that “Donovan is taking it very easy in the new position; that he plans to continue to do so for about a month, after which he will let it be known that he is the man behind the scenes.” To snuff out any bureaucratic opposition in the delicate early days, it seemed, Wild Bill was putting on a mild front. 

If that was his plan, it didn’t work. An informant relayed rumors that soon a special someone-else “would be appointed to take the place of Donovan … as coordinator of intelligence activities.” The source, according to a Bureau summary, had heard that “many Senators and others on the Hill … are particularly opposed to Donovan, they believing he is a publicityseeker and will use this position merely to build himself up. [Source] stated that strangely enough this opposition comes mostly from the isolationists he is acquainted with, and, also strangely enough, this group favors Mr. Hoover for such a position.” From the White House, too, there were rumors that “the President would be very receptive to a suggestion that Mr. Hoover take over COI…. as he felt that the operation of COI had been a miserable failure … and a waste of money.” Given that Hoover still had a shot at being director of central intelligence, he certainly wouldn’t go out of his way to consolidate Donovan’s position. 

Nor was Hoover going to jump through hoops for Jimmy Roosevelt just because he was the president’s son. The boy was insufferably spoiled and arrogant, and would drop by without notice, then not return calls. It apparently did not occur to him that he had no right to inconvenience others, or exploit his father’s position; he seemed to feel the normal rules didn’t apply to presidential families. By December, Hoover had discreetly taken the “Jimmy problem” to one of the president’s assistants. According to an FBI memo, “Certain faux pas committed by James Roosevelt in the Donovan office and the problem of having him removed to another agency were discussed.” 

While Jimmy Roosevelt was busy mucking things up, another irritant emerged: the contents of a Bureau file on Donovan. In the November 21 issue of Collier’s magazine, a columnist asked an FBI source whether the Bureau was sending Donovan all intelligence having a bearing on national security. The answer: “Donovan knows everything we know, except what we know about Donovan.” Although Hoover wrote Wild Bill to assure him that “the Bureau does not possess any information concerning you, ” the Bureau had, in fact, been keeping a file on Donovan since 1924, when he reported the theft of a motorcar, and it was being updated even as Hoover denied its existence. 

In this file was a 1936 report that Donovan was collecting “anti-G-men material” and conspiring “to have the Director fired” if Republicans ever returned to power. Scraps collected throughout the fall of 1941 included the fact that “from time to time news stories have made reference to Colonel Donovan being a logical successor to the present Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.” 

Such allegations could be written off as typical products of the capital’s rumor mill, but other reports indicated that Donovan was a poor administrator who did not really have his unit under control. One informant, who went to COI’s offices to discuss secret matters, reported to Hoover that “The undisciplined atmosphere … sort of playing and not working and of ‘boondoggling’ struck me when I observed the secretaries in the anterooms…. In spite of the fact that the talk was to have been confidential, people kept coming in and going out of the room and [one of Donovan’s men] dropped in and put his feet on the desk.” Donovan had hired Hawaiian Pineapple Company President Atherton Richards, regarded as a brilliant executive, to be his right-hand man for administration, but Donovan himself was “totally unfit temperamentally to administer any such agency, ” as one source told Hoover.

Perhaps most damningly, Donovan’s personal behavior suggested that COI was an unsafe repository for secrets. Wild Bill’s loss of secret papers in a Sofia nightclub was only one of the serious security breaches. Donovan’s own chief of research and analysis, Stanley Lovell, recalled that the COI chief “drove his security officers, Weston Howland and Archibald Van Buren, to the brink of despair…. [He] would talk about the most secret affairs at a cocktail party or a dinner, according to our chief of security, and be furious if he were criticized for it.” Some tidbits in FBI files even suggested that Donovan might be vulnerable to blackmail by hostile powers. When a suspected Mussolini agent was arrested in July 1941 for impersonating a U.S. government employee, the man’s attorney “claimed he had something on Col. Donovan, ” and that if Donovan refused to get his client off, they “would make a public matter of him.” 

Hoover had immediately notified Donovan of that threat, and it is unclear what resolution was ever effected, but the Bureau began to link Donovan with other presumedly fascist elements. For instance, Donovan had become “a very good friend of” Count John Perdicari, the U.S. representative of an Italian tobacco firm, who was “believed to be a German spy.” Perdicari seemed to know a good deal about Donovan’s various trips to Europe, and “Donovan was believed to have been asked to use his influence in obtaining a visa for Count de Perdicari to return to Italy.” FBI documents also noted that “Donovan’s name has been associated with German activities, ” including the Friends of New Germany, an organization run by an “active Nazi propagandist, ” located “on the same floor as the German Consul at 17 Battery Place.” Donovan had even reportedly made some attempts to contact the anti-Semitic publisher of the American Gentile, and was listed as a reference by a suspected Nazi sympathizer who held “key positions in both industry and government in California.”

No substantive proof was ever uncovered of wrongdoing by Donovan in his relations with suspected fascist agents. In fact, the Bureau was probably only uncovering Donovan’s efforts to recruit agents with good fascist “credentials” for secret work in Europe. But hearing that Donovan was “a very good friend of … a German spy” could hardly have encouraged Hoover to share the “take” from anti-German agents such as Dusko Popov, Even if the Bureau had analyzed Tricycle’s Pearl Harbor questionnaire as strategic intelligence, Hoover’s rational concern for operational security—or, from another perspective, the efficiency of his witch-hunts— would probably have kept Popov’s queries from Donovan. “With the distrust of Donovan’s outfit that existed because of his lax security, Hoover wouldn’t have passed him anything that was truly sensitive, ” ventured FBI agent Lawrence F. McWilliams, who reviewed Bureau documents of the period. “I don’t think anybody in their right mind would have passed him a damn thing.” 

So Hoover didn’t. As Donovan’s files recorded, COI was “consistently … denied the privilege of taking part in these [Pan Am passenger] interrogations, even though incoming passengers and crews have information which is of primary interest to this agency.” Nor was the Pearl Harbor questionnaire ever furnished to COI. The full, original text remained in Hoover’s files on Sunday, December 7, 1941. 

Hoover, it must be noted, was not the only one to hold back on Donovan. Security concerns had caused Army Chief of Staff George C. Marshall to deny COI access to intercepted Japanese cable traffic, known as “Magic, ” which might have provided clues to Tokyo’s intentions. Perhaps it was such security worries—coupled with jurisdictional delicacies, and an active desire to see America enter the war—that had also kept the British, despite their backing of Donovan, from sharing Popov, or his Pearl Harbor intelligence, with COI. 

But whereas Donovan was soon able to engineer cooperative arrangements with the U.S. military, as well as with the British, a truce with Hoover would always elude him. Instead of shocking the rivals out of petty bureaucratic bickering, America’s formal entrance into the war only exacerbated the conflicts that came from cutting a man down the middle. Though created to placate the FBI director, this geographical division of counterintelligence duties would only excite Hoover’s ire over the next years and decades, when Donovan, and a half-dozen CIA directors, repeatedly and necessarily breached it.

CHAPTER TWO 

NO-MAN’S-LAND 

IT WAS JUST BEFORE midnight on December 7 when Donovan was ushered in to see the president. The Oval Office was dark, and Roosevelt sat alone in a pool of light cast by his desk lamp. He was tired and pale. “They caught our ships like lame ducks, ” he told Donovan. “Lame ducks, Bill! They caught our planes on the ground! It’s a good thing you got me started on this intelligence agency.” Donovan did not know about Tricycle’s questionnaire, and therefore could not have mentioned it, but he did complain that the military, the FBI, and everyone else had been holding back. To obviate such interagency problems, he asked for a presidential order authorizing him to collate “strategic information” in the Americas. 

Armed with that order, issued two days later, Donovan began building a network of agents in the Western Hemisphere, which previously had been Hoover’s private preserve. He also started assembling, in earnest, a colorful and talented yet deeply flawed roster of personnel— making Donovan’s unit both the most celebrated and romanticized outfit in the war, from the public point of view, and one of the most overrated and incompetent, to Hoover and the FBI. In the months after Pearl Harbor, these personnel differences were admixed with questions of turf. The resulting patterns of conflict would run deeper, and last longer, than any personal hostility between Hoover and Donovan, and would be carried over, with the foreign-domestic dichotomy, at the official creation of CIA. * 
* Since Central Intelligence officers have commonly referred to their Agency simply as “CIA” rather than “the CIA,” while the Bureau is usually known by its agents as “the FBI,” that idiosyncrasy is reflected herein. HOOVER’S HEROES WOULD never have found themselves working, like so many of Wild Bill’s, down behind Washington, D.C.’s old Heurich Brewery. As described by one who knew: “That corner of Washington is drab and down-at-heel. A rambling brick brewery, its copper roof green with age, a row of dilapidated warehouses, a skating rink. Nearby some colliers are tied up in the Potomac, and a coal-yard clatters dustily. A line of colored tenements climbs the weed-grown grubby hill away from the river, and at its top, presiding over the scene, are the ugly twin cylinders of the city gas works…. No one gave a second glance at the brashly familiar brewery, sprawled like an amiable bum.” Donovan’s position confined him to the squat dullness of the Administration Building or “Kremlin, ” but as his organization expanded, most of his men worked in places like the brewery, or in unmarked wallboard-and-wood “temporary” structures on the Mall. The isolation, anonymity, and low-budget grubbiness, of course, were all part of the secret-boys-only-after-school treehouse charm. Hiding out from your wife down at the brewery or over in the “tempos, ” you could roll up your sleeves, drink bad coffee, and think of crazy ways to save the world. 

That was the Donovan spirit. Where Hoover was a prudent bureaucrat who discouraged creativity, Donovan was an idea man. He was also a man of action—ideas into action, that was the soul of COI. “Some of his ideas were a little crazy, ” recalled one of his men, “but he had awfully interesting ideas, and usually he’d send ’em off to someone on the staff, and just expect them to go ahead and do it.” Do it! Act! Wild Bill was like the football coach who went up to you on the sidelines, spanked you on the ass, and yelled in the earhole of your helmet: “Just get out there and hit someone!” The shabby chaos of COI’s offices seemed to encourage brainstorming. One famous undertaking was spawned by an unsolicited letter to the president from a Mr. Adams of Irwin, Pennsylvania, asserting that the Japanese were deathly frightened of bats and suggesting that America consider the opportunities for “frightening, demoralizing, and exciting the prejudices of the people of the Japanese empire” by a “surprise attack” in which Japan would be bombed with live specimens. The president passed Adams’ letter to Wild Bill with a note asserting that “this man is not a nut.” Donovan promptly commissioned the curator of mammals at the American Museum of Natural History to work with the Army Air Corps; bats were strapped into catapults and flung, and their trajectories noted on clipboards, but the project was terminated when it was discovered that bats would freeze to death at forty thousand feet. Also, though no one had bothered to check Adams’ assertion at the time, it turned out that the Japanese did not fear bats. 

Minor facts like that were always falling through the cracks. Unlike Hoover, the master administrator, Donovan was forgetful, disorganized, disdainful of detail; he ran COI, it was said, like a country editor. He may have wanted to manage his outfit as efficiently as Hoover did the FBI, but it simply was not in him to be a bureaucrat. He hated red tape and loved to break through it. Organizational outlines were fuzzy, standard operating procedures were unknown, and discipline was lax; Colonel Donovan’s own wrinkled Army uniform was not regulation-issue. Even if chains of command had been properly structured, many operatives were so far removed from headquarters, and so infrequently in touch, that it wouldn’t have made much difference. One exasperated officer told the Bureau that “on numerous occasions … he had wired Col. Donovan for instructions, but had not received any.” Hearing about that, FBI agents like Lawrence F. McWilliams would be aghast: “In the Bureau, if you were in the field and didn’t get back to headquarters in the morning, you were fired by the afternoon.” 

Of course, Donovan men would point out, that was just the problem: “The Bureau people were scared to death of Hoover. They could hardly breathe without knowing if it was in line with policy.” How far that was from the liberal, cerebral climate under Donovan. His analysts were encouraged to question, to criticize; “yes-men” were reprimanded. He was heard to say, “I’d rather have a young lieutenant with guts enough to disobey an order than a colonel too regimented to think and act for himself.” That such an ideal as “free thought” would be consciously cultivated was partly a function of the fact that many of Donovan’s men came from the highest levels of American literary life (author and playwright Robert Sherwood, poet Archibald MacLeish, critic Malcolm Cowley); it was also a precondition for the harmonious coexistence of members in a motley group. If FBI men were “Identikit, ” or “all cracked from the same mold, ” Donovan’s “crazy outfit, ” as Navy Secretary Frank Knox called it, resisted easy characterization. The cast included people like the French chef Julia Child, Hollywood director John Ford, baseball catcher Moe Berg, fashion designer Count Oleg Cassini, and former G- man Melvin Purvis, famous as the man who shot Dillinger; and there was the well-connected homosexual leftist Carmel Offie, who used his edgy charm to collect the wives of influential men. “We attracted the most extraordinary group of people, ” the typical Donovan retiree would proudly say. “It was really fantastic, around the world, what turned up. Our people were not at all as parochial as Hoover’s.” 

That was how it looked through one end of the telescope. For his part, Hoover was heard to deride Donovan’s disciples as “a group of arrogant amateurs” encroaching on his own terrain, or, more usually, as “Ivy League dilettantes.” A great many COI men did indeed come out of the Ivy League, especially Yale, and there was a certain tension in the general difference of social class between personnel. After June 1942, when Donovan’s COI became the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), his enemies, like Hoover, would sometimes call it “Oh So Stupid, ” but “Oh So Social” was the name that stuck. That moniker, like the stereotype of the Bureau being “Foreign Born Irish, ” was both apt and misleading; Donovan was a social climber, not a socialite, and he did not deliberately surround himself with Ivy Leaguers, or “old boys, ” so that he could pal around with “men of his own class.” He wanted experts to analyze foreign affairs, talented writers to craft subtle propaganda, operatives who knew a few languages and could find their way around Europe. It just so happened that the best qualified people came from the country’s better schools.

Besides, if Donovan’s organization was home to blue bloods, it also had its share of black sheep. One idealistic young COI man posted overseas found the quality of his colleagues “appallingly low” as the organization expanded with the war and absorbed military personnel, it became a “convenient dumping ground for useless career officers, ” not to mention a means of draft evasion for “playboy bankers and stupid sons of wealthy and politically important families.” Also, a secret intelligence service in time of war needed “special services” from safecrackers, footpads, and confidence men, and so Donovan provided a sort of “foreign legion” for many with silty reputations. This did little to detract from the COI-OSS mystique, which itself turned on the idea that even men of fine reputation, far from home, could find themselves doing bad things for a good cause. 

But the incorporation of known criminals into sensitive government work, where they could hope for both immunity from future prosecution and clemency for transgressions past, did not please the country’s top law enforcement official. The arrogant naivete of Donovan’s staffers only worsened the situation. When Hoover blocked a special visa which Wild Bill had requested for a new employee, Donovan’s assistant Ernest Cuneo tried to go over Hoover’s head, protesting to Attorney General Francis Biddle that the individual in question had merely made “a few youthful mistakes.” Biddle checked with Hoover, then summoned Cuneo and humiliated him in the presence of the FBI Director. “A few youthful mistakes?” Biddle queried. “Tell him, Edgar!” Hoover informed Cuneo that Donovan’s recruit had two convictions for manslaughter and two for first-degree murder. [And this guy was still on the streets? Something wrong with that picture DC]

More commonly, however, the Bureau disapproved of Donovan personnel who had past histories of “German activities, ” as Hoover had noted before Pearl Harbor, or a pattern of association with “Communist elements, ” as became more usual in the months after. But Donovan’s men found that communists and former fascists could make highly motivated recruits against a fascist enemy, and regarded Hoover’s resistance as just one more manifestation of FBI pettiness. COI’s Malcolm Cowley, attacked by Hoover as a “subversive, ” went to see an official at Justice. “I made the obvious remark that most of the FBI investigators seemed pretty stupid. ‘Of course, ’ he said. ‘You don’t expect us to get bright law-school graduates, do you, for $65 a week?’ I learned something about the sociology of the FBI. Its investigators, who have to have law-school training, are for the most part either Southerners or Catholics”—as if it somehow mattered very much that the FBI was not made up of members of the Eastern liberal establishment, as if that difference in social class somehow explained everything. 

Cowley’s characterization was a smear job. It was certainly true, as Fleming had noted in 1941, that the Bureau did not employ many Ivy Leaguers; FBI agent Robert Lamphere would recall that “On the first day of New Agents class, an instructor asked if anyone in the class was from Harvard, and the one who admitted it was singled out as if he were a different breed. It was sort of in fun but not entirely.” But Cowley’s implication that “the bastards are too bourgeois to understand us” only obscured the fact that known communists were allowed to work for OSS, as long as they were effective against the Axis—and that this offered great chances for penetration by Soviet spies. Indeed, the Soviets would manage to place at least seven agents in Donovan’s organization. In most cases, Hoover warned Donovan about these people, and Donovan kept them anyway. “I have no authority over Donovan, ” Hoover lamented to Tamm, “and of course he doesn’t check with me before he acts.” 

Neither did British Security Coordinator Stephenson, and Hoover’s ire only increased as a number of Stephenson’s agents were absorbed into COI. Stephenson’s relations with the Bureau had been increasingly rocky in the eight months since Donovan had been made Coordinator. It was generally felt that Hoover had never forgiven the British role as “midwife, ” and now as nursemaid, to Donovan’s brainchild. Nor was Hoover pleased by Stephenson’s habit of doing things in New York without asking permission, and in March 1942 Senator Kenneth McKellar, a Hoover ally, introduced a bill that would force Stephenson to list all his agents and detail their doings, or else be kicked out of the country. To get around that requirement, Stephenson simply gave over many assets to Donovan. That did not solve the problem, but only transferred it to COI, especially since some of Stephenson’s assets were “tainted, ” in the sense that Hoover already was on to them. 

So it was with the case of one Yale graduate and communist sympathizer, who joined COI that very month. He would become, according to Hoover’s agents, “the source of a lot of headaches” for the FBI and, according to COI veterans, the pretext for an attempt by Hoover to “strangle this unwanted newcomer [COI] at birth.” 

A FEW DAYS AFTER Pearl Harbor, a fat man with a red beard hurried past the ice rink at New York City’s Rockefeller Plaza and entered the International Building, guarded by its two-story bronze sculpture of Atlas holding up the world. He almost took the elevator to the 35th floor, as he had done so often in past months when calling at the office of Rough Diamonds, Ltd. This time, however, he went one floor higher and found his way down the corridor to Room 3663, the newly opened local branch of COI. 

Allen Dulles shook his hand. Dulles had thinning brown hair, thick gold-rimmed glasses, and a striking white mustache that made him look as if he had recently sipped a glass of milk. He already knew something of the man seated before him, this left-leaning homosexual who was considered, even by his backers, “a delicate case, ” and by his attackers, “a fraud, a liar, and an insecure man.” He knew that this American citizen had been working as a British agent for fourteen months, that he now wanted to serve his own country, and that his name was Donald Downes. 

Downes was an “old boy” questing for a new life. He’d come out of Phillips Exeter and Yale (’26), where he had roomed with James Gould Cozzens, the novelist-to-be, who kept pet snakes under the bed and made Downes a lifelong ophidiophobia. There followed fourteen years during which Downes found little meaning in the working world. He coached boys’ athletics at Cheshire Academy, a few miles from Yale, until April 1940, when, roused by anti-Nazi pamphlets, he sought work in which he could use his “ideals as weapons.” Family contacts put him in touch with British intelligence, and William Stephenson had hired him to see if Nazi money was behind isolationist activism in the United States. Through infiltrators, and a subcontracted burglary of Nazi Bund offices, he had found some financing of neutralist organizations in Cleveland and Boston, but no systematic control of major groups like America First. Downes had been at his typewriter reporting these conclusions on December 7 when he heard about Pearl Harbor. 

Now, he told Dulles, he was willing to turn over his files to Donovan’s group, whether the British wanted him to or not. He was willing to be trained, to relocate, to pay his own expenses. He just wanted to be part of the game. 

Dulles mulled. He was wary about even having this man in his office, since Downes readily admitted that his work for the British had “put the FBI on my tail.” Still, Downes was an operator with some field experience, a commodity that COI now desperately needed but found in short supply. Downes seemed perhaps too enthusiastic, maybe a bit unbalanced, but these were heady days; the country was at war. Dulles promised that he would consult Donovan and be in touch. 

Downes’ gung-ho attitude and good British references apparently won over Donovan, for Downes was soon shipped off to a secret base where COI’s secret warriors were being trained, the legendary “Camp X.” The compound was hidden on an old Canadian farm at Oshawa, near Toronto. Under the guidance of a major from the Shanghai police, Downes took a two-week crash course in the basics of surveillance and countersurveillance, lock-picking, mail-opening, parachuting, demolitions, night movement, stealth, forgery, firearms. There were also the techniques of “silent killing”: improvisations like the rolling of newspaper into a sharp point, for the puncturing of a victim’s throat; a rock in a sock, which could smash a skull; quick pulls at the corners of a man’s mouth, which would supposedly tear his cheeks “like blotting paper.” 

On returning from Camp X Downes reported to Q Building, one of COI’s wooden “tempos, ” where Donovan’s chief assistant, James R. Murphy, gave him his first mission. The U.S. was planning an assault on Nazi-held North Africa, to be known as Operation Torch, and for this campaign it was important to know whether key neutral nations—Turkey, Portugal, Vichy France, and Spain—would side with Hitler, or with the Allies, or stay neutral. “We want to be able to read their cables, ” Murphy said. “You will be given a completely free hand, technical advice and aid from the British, and whatever sums of money are needed subject to our approval, that is Allen Dulles’ and mine. You can count on us for all help and aid possible, unless you are caught. Then, we agree, we have never heard of you.” 

DOWNES UNDERSTOOD THE NEED for such precautions, for he would be poaching on Hoover’s turf. After Donovan’s conference with FDR at midnight on December 7, COI had been officially charged with coordinating intelligence in the Western Hemisphere, but Hoover protested that he should not yield control over SIS just because the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor. A harried Roosevelt ordered his feuding bureaucrats “to straighten out this whole program among yourselves.” The matter had finally been settled at an interagency conference on January 6, 1942, when State and G-2, themselves worried about losing autonomy to a coordinator, sided with the FBI. Donovan’s only consolation was that he could “on special occasions” send agents into Latin America—though only “with a specific mission (not under cover), ” and only upon the personal approval of the Bureau. Those same proscriptions were to apply to COI operations anywhere in the Western Hemisphere.

But Downes regarded such “arbitrary geographical limitations” as unworkable, and decided to ignore them as he operated against the embasssies. Early in 1942, he infiltrated the Vichy embassy in Washington by arranging the sexual compromise of a female worker, and obtained proof that Vichy was violating economic agreements. Next he penetrated the Portuguese mission, by promising a college education to the janitor’s son, but no proof of Axis sympathy was procured. He then targeted the Turkish consulate, without success, but by March he was concentrating on fascist but neutral Spain, the true key to lighting Torch. If Generalissimo Franco kept Spain neutral—if the Germans could not mass troops at the Pillars of Hercules—the Mediterranean would remain open, and the Allies could land at Morocco. But Franco and Hitler were friendly, and there seemed every possibility that Spain might instead side with the Nazis. It was therefore crucial that Spanish ciphers be obtained, and cable traffic scrutinized for clues to Franco’s intentions. 

TO ASSEMBLE A BURGLARY team, Downes slipped into Mexico City and began stalking the coffeehouses, basements, and back alleys where the antiFranco underground moved and met. He selected two agents for the embassy job and recruited others to be commandos in North Africa. While in Mexico, however, Downes also checked up on one of Donovan’s secret networks— consisting, according to COI files, of “about 20 civilian agents operating throughout Mexico,” especially at “strategic points along the Gulf of California,” where they were “prepared to give any information relative to suspicious ship movements.” Those sources had originally been handled by Naval Intelligence, according to Donovan’s records, “because of the apparent inability of FBI to effectively handle” coverage of Japanese subversion. Hoover had reluctantly accepted ONI’s role, and the agents’ reports had been forwarded to the Bureau until mid-December 1941, when ONI’s unique Latin American chief, a hairless hunchback named Wallace Beta Phillips, officially transferred to COI. Phillips’ agents began reporting to Donovan on such matters as mysterious planes taxiing down secret landing fields along Mexico’s Pacific Coast, where a clutch of Japanese businessmen had moved from California just before Pearl Harbor. 

Donovan regarded the network as valuable, but his staffers were nervous about it, and even before Downes’ mission had sensed that it was in danger of compromise by the FBI. “Inasmuch as the Presidential Directive has forbidden COI to operate in the Western Hemisphere, we are at the present time carrying on an activity in Mexico in violation of that directive, ” Donovan was cautioned by a deputy on February 19. “A recent letter received by Mr. Phillips definitely suggests that FBI is at least aware of our arrangements in Mexico, and it may bring the matter up at any moment.” 

By April, the Bureau had indeed brought the matter up. Apparently Downes had made contact with some of Phillips’ seaport watchers, and was watched, in turn, by the FBI. “I have been advised through Mexican sources that there is presently operating in Mexico one Donald Downes, who is representing himself as a representative of your organization in Mexico,” Hoover wrote Donovan on April 2. “I assume, of course, that Downs has no connection with your organization since the Bureau has received no notification of his employment by you or of the fact that he is operating officially in Mexico. Appropriate steps are, therefore, being taken to bring about a termination of this man’s representation.” 

Donovan replied, untruthfully, that he did not employ Downes. Hoover wasn’t fooled, and, along with Undersecretary of State Sumner Welles, complained to FDR that Donovan had “some ninety agents operating in Mexico … in violation of the President’s instructions.” As punishment, it was urged that Roosevelt have “the Donovan organization dissolved.” 

That bureaucratic offensive hit Donovan at a hard time, for he was convalescing in a New York hospital after an auto accident had aggravated an old war wound, causing a blood clot to break loose and lodge in his lung. Roosevelt did not mention Downes or the alleged ninety agents when he conveyed get-well wishes to Donovan later that month, but Donovan heard of the Hoover-Welles conspiracy from Navy Secretary Knox, and through a haze of sedation defended himself to the president, dictating to a bedside stenographer that he would soon “go into the field again, ” but was “angry and indignant” because “by now the well worn lie has been retailed to you that I had or have some ninety representatives … in Latin America…. I assure you that your real concern must be with those who bring such stories to you about men who are trying to serve you loyally, because this tale is a dirty and contemptible lie.” 

Fortunately for Donovan, his protestations were believed by Roosevelt, who pressed the accusers for evidence. Welles claimed that the original figure of ninety agents had come from “an official high in Colonel Donovan’s office, ” but could produce only an account of Downes’ mission to Mexico City, and the names of four Donovan employees. “The FBI has other records, ” Welles lamely added, “which will take more time to dig up.” 

There the danger died, but Donovan, back at his desk by early May, ordered an internal review of the entire situation. A State Department contact informed him that the affair of “the famous ninety humpty-dumpties” had developed out of Wallace Phillips’ network. Phillips, who had since transferred to London, insisted by cable that Hoover had initially approved the transfer of Naval Intelligence spotters to COI but had then created the ninety-agents myth “for reasons of his own.” Phillips appended the opinion of his British colleagues that “Hoover, who apparently spread a rumor about the British having 3,000 agents in the U.S., would certainly not hesitate to spread a similar rumor about any other service.” 

THE DOWNES “rumor” had been true, however, and Donovan’s denial only upped the stakes, as did the June 13 transformation of COI into the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). To integrate its work into the Allied effort, Donovan’s organization was resettled under the Joint Chiefs of Staff. That meant a pro-forma loss of autonomy, but also entailed some bureaucratic protection. Hoover thus predictably opposed creation of OSS; he warned Assistant Secretary of State Adolf Berle “that Donovan would attempt to take over the legitimate functions of the FBI, particularly those relating to SIS.” Berle insisted that Hoover needn’t worry, especially since Berle himself, a Hoover ally, was on the Joint Committee supervising OSS. But Hoover was not so sure, and Wild Bill sensed correctly that the FBI director would be waiting for the slightest pretext to accuse OSS of breaking faith. Donovan warned Downes that the whole embassy operation was “very much against the law, and if you get caught we’re in terrible trouble.” 

Downes insisted he would deny everything if caught and wait for Donovan to “spin him out, ” but privately he had some cause for concern. He had taken precautions against all imaginable contingencies but one—“betrayal by someone high enough in the American Government to know what we were doing.” His two antifascist agents, back from Camp X, thought their apartments in Washington had been searched, and felt that on a few occasions they had been followed. Downes assured them it was “only the FBI checking on strangely behaving individuals in Washington, ” but a friend at the Justice Department had warned that Hoover suspected OSS of “penetrating” embassies and was “annoyed.” Foreign embassies on American soil might be, at best, a jurisdictional “no man’s land, ” but Downes knew that “the no-man’s-land between the FBI and OSS was dangerous territory.” 

The operation proceeded, however. Downes infiltrated an agent into the Spanish Embassy as a secretary, recruited a New York City safecracker, and set up an elaborate infrared-photo lab. All was ready by the last week in June, when Downes’ agent deliberately damaged the dial on a vault where the codes were stored. The embassy called the safe company, which agreed to help “the war effort” by sending over Downes’ safecracker, who thus obtained the combination and a key to the vault’s inner door. At ten o’clock on the evening of June 29, with the embassy staff occupied till late at a Maryland roadhouse, the burglars entered the building. At exactly 11:15, the team returned to their safehouse, where machinery was put to work on the coding tape. By 1:10, they had taken over thirty-four hundred photographs. The developing and printing was finished just as a hot dawn broke over Washington. The burglars re-entered the embassy and replaced the tape. Downes stuffed the “product” into an old suitcase and caught the pre-breakfast plane to New York, where a delighted Allen Dulles examined it over breakfast. For at least a month, until the roll was changed on the Spanish machine, OSS could decipher their telegrams. 

But the operation would have to be repeated every time the Spanish put in a new roll. All went easily again in July, August, and September. Then, on October 21, the team was followed by an FBI car. They tried to lose it, and thought they had. At eleven o’clock they were inside the embassy, in front of the safe, beginning to open it, when they heard sirens. As FBI agents converged on the front entrance, the burglars scrambled out a side exit into a service alley, hopped a high fence, and by that narrow margin avoided arrest by the FBI. 

When Donovan and Murphy heard about the episode, around dawn, they were deeply disturbed. The team had made off with the cipher data, but the Bureau obviously knew a lot about what OSS had been doing. They had awakened the whole street, and would owe the Spaniards some explanation. What if the FBI now said something to the Spanish that led them to suspect that the burglary had targeted their code systems? That would certainly lead to a cipher change, with possibly dire implications for the invasion of North Africa. The special agent who led the attack on Donovan’s team insisted he had talked with no Spanish official, but OSS could only wait to see whether their source had been compromised.

Meanwhile, on the day after the burglary, Hoover sent Donovan a thinly veiled reminder that Downes’ embassy doings were fully known. He demanded to know “the location of any representatives, ” allegedly so that the Bureau might “verify any impersonation complaints.” No such complaints had been made, but that was hardly the point. Hoover had Wild Bill against the rail, and was attempting a blatant power play that would allow him to monitor OSS personnel. 

Looking for ammunition in case the battle escalated, Donovan’s staff began reviewing the history of their relations with the FBI. Though no new liaison man had been formally appointed since Jimmy Roosevelt’s January commission into the Navy, a number of promising domestic counterespionage leads had been turned over to the Bureau. In New York City, Donovan’s men had tipped Bud Foxworth to a Manhattan machinist “whose brother is a member of the Gestapo” identified the daughter of a Mrs. Walter Hidden as Goering’s mistress; discovered that Nazi propaganda was distributed at “Hanna’s Service Station” and implicated as Nazi spies a German-American mechanic in Mount Vernon, New York, a ski instructor at Williams College, and a Dr. Ancieto Montero, “supposedly expert on tropical diseases.” But what had the Bureau done in turn for OSS? The FBI did provide some incidental intelligence, but much of it was believed of doubtful value. When Hoover sent over maps depicting “penetration of the totalitarian Axis countries in Latin America, ” Donovan wrote back to thank him—“These are very interesting”—but an OSS analyst haughtily scrawled: “These charts are too general to give any important impression of the actual distribution of Axis activities. They are typical of the work of non-geographers, and represent an unfortunate waste of time and money. We can do much better.” 

On the eve of landings in North Africa, moreover, Hoover’s men had come dangerously close to exposing key Allied cipher operations. A depressed Donovan was heard to say that “the Abwehr gets better treatment from the FBI than we do.” 

THE DOWNES AFFAIR was “resolved” in November 1942, when Donovan agreed to turn the embassy operation over to Hoover, and promised that any future “infiltration of installations” would be cleared with the Bureau in advance. “It [penetrating embassies] very properly was the Bureau’s business, not OSS business, ” OSS’s legal counsel Lawrence Houston would later admit. But Downes, ordered to entrust his crew to “a Mr. Brown” at the FBI, was less sanguine about the deal. “The personnel, almost to a man (and woman), came back later to protest. Instead of being treated as patriotic people making war for their country, Mr. Hoover’s Mr. Brown treated them as so many stool-pigeons, as inferior people who had sunk to the depths of being police spies and informers—the classical cop attitude toward the underworld weakling whom they use to trap gangsters.” 

By the time he heard those complaints, however, Downes was already preoccupied with other projects. The Spanish cipher system had not been blown by the Bureau, after all; Spanish neutrality had been ascertained, and on November 8 the Allies landed easily at Casablanca and the coast near Algiers. Downes then volunteered to vault into the North African fray with his Spanish-communist commandos, to help protect Allied supply lines from pro-fascist guerrillas, and on November 17 he left the United States by plane for a dusty, romantic reach of world that must surely be beyond the compass of Hoover’s FBI. 

It was not. Downes himself, when arguing that OSS operations could not be held back by “arbitrary geographical limitations, ” had conceded that, likewise, “the FBI … must be allowed to follow its investigations, no matter to what part of the globe they may lead.” He had never expected Hoover to hold him to those words, but special agents were already being posted outside the Western Hemisphere as “legal attachs” at selected embassies. Unlike Hoover’s SIS agents, the “legats” were to have no “operational” duties, and were to clear any investigations with Donovan. Unofficially, the legats sometimes had little patience for such delimitations, as Downes was to discover in the case of a Nazi sympathizer named Charles Bedeaux. 

An expatriate American industrialist in Algiers, Bedeaux dreamed of building a pipeline to pump palm oil across the Sahara, from Oman to Dakar, and thence to a fat-starved Germany. Trapped by the Allied landings, Bedeaux was arrested for treason on tips from Guy and Jacques Calvert, two OSS spies in the Vichy Securité Militaire. Downes, in Morocco, knew that Bedeaux had friends in Washington, and guessed there would be some political pressure for his release, so he ordered Guy Calvert to photograph financial records proving Bedeaux’s collaboration. Sure enough, a few weeks later, the originals disappeared. Two FBI agents then arrived to take Bedeaux—and “any relevant documents”—back to the United States. 

Downes flew to Algiers. After coaching Guy on how to handle the G-men, he hid in the fitting room of a dress shop owned by the brothers Calvert, where he could overhear the FBI’s interrogation of Guy. The agents knew Guy had made photostats of the papers, and warned him: “Technically we could arrest you … The papers are rightly ours. It is entirely our jurisdiction.” Calvert protested his ignorance. There was mumbling between the FBI men. “Probably OSS. We’ll never get them back … Let’s go.” 

Their voices faded. Downes later heard that Bedeaux, under the protection of Hoover’s men, had committed suicide by taking poison while changing planes in Florida. 

A year later, as an OSS detachment moved north with the Allied offensive, Downes met up with Donovan in Italy, and heard that his boss was also still having problems with Hoover. Downes took him out in a PT-boat to watch Naples burning, rimmed with orange, belching columns of black, and Mount Vesuvius smoking gently in the distance. Donovan stood in the prow, steel helmet shading a face stern and set with anger. 

“It’s hell on the front back in Washington, too, ” he told Downes. “I have to compromise every day. The FBI’s gunning for us every time we have a new idea.” 

Donovan’s newest idea—actually, it had come to him from the British—was the creation of a special OSS division to handle double agents and deception. But Hoover’s Bureau was also running doubles, or trying to. The result was a “deception gap, ” and it was already imperiling Allied plans for the invasion of Normandy. 


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