Wild Bill Donovan Page 15

  Donovan could be a stickler with others about security. But he was notoriously lax himself. Aides always became nervous when he chatted about operations in front of the barber who shaved him in the morning or Freeman during car rides. One time he left a briefcase filled with secret papers in a cab. Dulles was shocked when he once found the door to the St. Regis suite wide open, secret papers spread over the bed, and Donovan on the john. He scooped up the documents, went downstairs to the lobby, and phoned Donovan, casually saying: “Bill, I’d like to talk to you about that memorandum I sent up to you yesterday.” There was a long pause from the other end of the line. Dulles began to laugh. But Donovan didn’t think the joke was funny. He always became testy when aides suggested he might be more careful with sensitive material.

  One of his most serious breaches—although Donovan never realized it—came shortly after he returned to Washington from his convalescence at the St. Regis. The Polish embassy was a favorite haunt for Donovan. He visited it often to milk the ambassador for information from Eastern Europe. Chatting one day with Count Mohl, the Polish secret service chief, Donovan casually told him not to expect an invasion of Europe that year; the Allies did not have the ships for it. He also revealed that Russia had over 360 divisions for the coming summer offensive. A German informant in the embassy overheard those two morsels and passed them on to the Abwehr. Fortunately for Donovan, the leak did not reveal much new news to the German army. The Wehrmacht did not expect an invasion of Europe in 1942 because it also knew the Allies lacked the shipping and its count of Russian divisions on the Eastern Front nearly matched Donovan’s.

  Roosevelt refused to overrule Marshall’s decision to deny Donovan direct access to Magic. He thought he now had Donovan in the right spot conjuring up his spy intrigues. Donovan would not be happy, Roosevelt joked with Adolf Berle, unless he was on an “isolated island, where he could have a scrap with some Japs every morning before breakfast.” But the president also told Ernest Cuneo he did not want his spy chief “horsing around” making problems for the military or the White House.

  Donovan continued to cultivate Roosevelt to keep his ear. He had his agents pick up stamps from around the world that he forwarded to FDR for his collection. He sent him movies a Dutch photographer had taken of the Roosevelt ancestral home in the Netherlands just before the Nazi invasion and a large world globe the OSS commissioned, which FDR kept next to his desk. But his appointments with the president tapered off as he became enmeshed in military work—although Donovan still encouraged gossip that he had direct access to Roosevelt because it bolstered his political clout. But though he still believed FDR was the shrewdest politician he had ever met, Donovan was coming to the conclusion that he was not a great wartime leader.

  Donovan’s judgment was likely clouded because he also realized that his drive to centralize intelligence under his control would not succeed. Roosevelt would not let it be successful.

  Chapter 13

  The Embassies

  CYNTHIA ROSE FROM the couch in the hall outside the naval code room of the French embassy. She lifted her dress over her shoulders and threw it on the floor. Then she wiggled out of her slip and girdle, unhooked her bra, and removed her panties and silk stockings. Cynthia stood naked in her high-heeled shoes with just a string of pearls draped from her neck. It was a warm night in Washington on June 23, 1942, so the air wafting in from the nearby open window did not chill her. Charles Brousse, the embassy’s press attaché, looked up at her gaping.

  “Suppose someone should come in!” he whispered with a gasp. “What are you thinking?”

  “I am thinking of just that,” Cynthia answered coolly. They had already convinced the embassy’s night watchman they were lovers using the hall for late night trysts. The guard would be suspicious if he walked in on their burglary and they did not look like they were having sex. She ordered Brousse to strip.

  Sure enough, as the attaché pulled off his coat the door to the hall suddenly opened and the guard beamed a flashlight on Cynthia’s naked body.

  “I beg your pardon a thousand times, madame,” the flustered guard apologized. “I thought . . .” He flipped off his flashlight and beat a hasty exit so the couple could continue their lovemaking in private.

  Cynthia put just her slip back on. The curious guard might return. She rushed to the window and signaled the “Georgia Cracker” to climb up the ladder. That was the nickname she had given the locksmith Donovan’s men had paid $1,000 for the job. He had cracked safes before for the British. Cynthia also had been a British agent, but since January her burglary and the other black bag jobs had been taken over by Donald Downes, Donovan’s New York operative who had been hatching anti-Hitler plots.

  The Georgia Cracker quickly picked the lock to the code room. It did not take him much more time to break into the room’s antique safe; he had already spent a night earlier there carefully spinning the dial to figure out the combination. Cynthia and Charles scooped out the large cipher books, which told the French radio operators how to code and decode classified messages, and carried them to an OSS agent at the bottom of the ladder outside. Then they waited for two agonizing hours as Donovan’s men photographed the hundreds of pages in the cipher books in a nearby hotel room. Donovan’s officers finally returned at 4 a.m. with the books. Cynthia and Charles stuck them back in the safe. They checked the room to make sure nothing looked out of order, locked it, then scurried quietly down the embassy’s front steps before the first employees arrived for work.

  The Asia war Americans read about in their newspapers had been largely grim. There had been American victories, such as the Battle of Midway in early June, where the U.S. Navy destroyed four Japanese carriers. But Tokyo’s forces had overrun the East Indies, FDR had ordered MacArthur to evacuate from the Philippines on March 11, Corregidor had surrendered on May 6, and the rest of the islands had been conquered by June 9. Behind the headlines, however, a private war consumed Donovan’s secret force. It was being waged against the Vichy French and Spain, both of which were cozy with the Germans. In Washington, the battleground for the OSS became the embassies of the two. But this secret war would produce the deepest rift yet between Donovan and J. Edgar Hoover.

  While German forces occupied Paris and northern France, Marshal Philippe Pétain, the World War I hero of Verdun, had negotiated an armistice with Hitler that left remnants of the defeated French army, headquartered in Vichy, controlling southern France plus her colonies in Indochina and West and North Africa. Donovan had ample evidence the Vichy French were collaborating with the Nazis. He had already begun planning with Hull a broad propaganda campaign to destabilize Pétain’s government if it continued to cooperate with Berlin and to convince his navy and his army in North Africa to join the United States and Britain in fighting the Germans. George Marshall’s intelligence officers were now eager to get their hands on the copies of the French embassy’s code books so they could decipher from Vichy radio messages intelligence critical for the Allied invasion of North Africa.

  Roosevelt, who could be ruthless when it came to fighting foreign enemies on American soil, had given Hoover wide latitude to wiretap, open diplomatic pouches, and burglarize the embassies of hostile, neutral, and even friendly countries. Donovan saw Washington’s diplomatic community as a rich target for his agents as well, even though FDR had explicitly made domestic spying the FBI’s responsibility. Donovan knew his breaking into embassies was probably illegal, so he kept it secret from Hoover. He thought he could get away with the trespassing on a technicality. Under international law an embassy was considered foreign territory so penetrating it would be no different than Donovan’s agency spying overseas.

  Roosevelt was not particularly bothered by Donovan’s trying to exploit the obviously questionable loophole. He had alerted Roosevelt, Hull, and the Joint Chiefs in April that he was launching a highly secret operation to steal the ciphers in the French embassy. Donovan knew the penetration “must be handled with great care and discreti
on,” he wrote Roosevelt. If the French discovered the burglaries, it could “jeopardize” the U.S. military’s winning Vichy cooperation with the North Africa landing.

  Donovan had inherited the French embassy job from Bill Stephenson. Earlier in the year, Tennessee senator Kenneth McKellar had introduced a bill requiring that foreign governments, including Great Britain’s, disclose to the Justice Department all their agents and activities in the United States. An angry Stephenson knew it would close him down. Donovan, whose organization depended heavily on British help, realized the McKellar bill would be a body blow for him as well and lobbied Roosevelt to veto it. Roosevelt did, though he was furious when he learned of covert British operations being waged in the United States. A different version later became law, which exempted the British, but Stephenson knew his freewheeling days in America were over. He transferred to Donovan Cynthia and his other burglary jobs.

  Cynthia was the code name for Amy Elizabeth Thorpe Pack. The daughter of a U.S. Marine Corps major, she had grown into an enchanting and sexually promiscuous beauty. In 1930, Betty Thorpe had married a British diplomat named Arthur Pack, who turned out to be a cruel husband. Betty took on lovers and by the end of that decade had begun working for British intelligence plying sex for secrets among foreign officials when Pack was away. Divorced by 1940, Betty had moved to Washington with orders from Stephenson’s men to penetrate the Vichy French embassy, posing as a freelance journalist looking for stories. Pack soon began a heated romance with Brousse, a married man who had had a number of affairs and was eager to start another. Soon Cynthia had Brousse, who she discovered harbored a private hatred for the puppet regime in Vichy, passing her telegrams his deceitful ambassador, Gaston Henry-Haye, received and delivered.

  The press attaché finally agreed to an even more daring operation to steal the embassy’s cipher books. Brousse had convinced the compound’s night watchman he needed the hall outside the code room for lovemaking that he wanted to keep secret from his nosy wife. On a previous visit the couple had shared a bottle of champagne with the guard. Cynthia slipped Nembutal into his glass, and while he snored away the Georgia Cracker sneaked in to case the safe.

  Cynthia eventually fell in love with Brousse and the two later married after the attaché obtained a divorce. But for now she was a coldly calculating agent handler. “Australia,” Cynthia’s code name for Brousse in her agent reports, “has no secrets from me,” she told her new American boss, Donald Downes. Cynthia even urged her lover to continue having sex with his wife so the woman wouldn’t become suspicious of his extracurricular activities. Downes was just as coldly calculating with Cynthia. He had other moles in the French embassy slipping him floor plans for the safe’s location along with schedules for the arrival times of workers to check against the information Brousse provided his mistress.

  Donald Downes was one of Donovan’s true oddballs. He wore a corset for a bad back and had an assortment of phobias—snakes, stray dogs, and yellow paint to name a few. His biographers have written that he was a homosexual, although he never openly acknowledged being gay. A Yale graduate, Downes had traveled through Europe as a professor in the late 1930s mastering several foreign languages and picking up a yen for foreign intrigues. In 1940 he applied to Army and Navy intelligence to be a spy, but he seemed to them nothing more than a quirky amateur and both turned him down. So Downes approached the British, who thought he might be useful. After a stint overseas performing odd jobs for MI6, whose officers found him a bit insecure, Downes returned to New York in 1941. By September, he was snooping on isolationists and casing foreign embassies for Stephenson. Doing so broke a number of U.S. laws forbidding citizens from spying for other countries, as well as Stephenson’s promise to Hoover that he would not hire Americans. After the Pearl Harbor attack, however, Downes asked Donovan if he could join his team. Dulles and other senior aides were leery; the agency already was filling up with misfits and Downes’s résumé had the extra baggage of his having been an illegal spy for the British.

  But Donovan had a soft spot for this thirty-nine-year-old overweight professor, whom the British had already taught how to crack a man’s skull by silent killing. Downes believed as fervently as Donovan that “extracurricular warfare,” as Downes euphemistically put it, would be key to winning major military campaigns. Donovan first kept Downes in New York dreaming up covert operations with Allen Dulles and Arthur Goldberg, but by March he had moved him to Washington to take over Stephenson’s embassy jobs.

  By the time he went on Donovan’s payroll, Downes had come to Hoover’s attention. The FBI director reserved a special loathing for Downes, whom he considered a traitor for spying for the British (it had not taken Hoover long to discover that Stephenson had reneged on his promise) and for being a “sex deviate,” as the bureau’s many surveillance reports on Downes described him. Downes, who believed FBI agents constantly tailed him, detested Hoover as much as Donovan did.

  Not knowing what Cynthia was up to irritated Hoover as much as Downes now working for Donovan. His agents on routine stakeouts had soon spotted a fashionable young lady they identified as Mrs. Arthur Pack making an unusual number of visits to embassies in Washington, particularly the Vichy compound. A snitch told a bureau agent that Mrs. Pack was having an affair with a Charles Brousse in the French embassy. The bureau’s wiretap of Brousse’s line certainly turned up conversations that sounded like the two were talking in codes: “The little boy has spoken to the boss,” Brousse told Mrs. Pack during a June 23 call. Hoover on August 14 ordered his men to put Room 215-A of the Wardman Park Hotel under watch. Mrs. Pack and the French press attaché seemed to spend a lot of time there. The FBI agents also tapped the room’s phone line.

  SPAIN INTENDED TO remain neutral for the moment, but its dictator Francisco Franco favored Germany and if Hitler won he wanted to join the Nazis in reaping the spoils of war. It did not take long for Donovan’s men to uncover evidence of how Franco was deviously positioning himself and secretly helping the Third Reich. With the North Africa invasion just eight months away, the U.S. military, which feared a German flanking maneuver through the Iberian Peninsula and Spanish Morocco, wanted every scrap of information it could find on Spanish intentions. Stephenson’s men had regularly burglarized the Spanish embassy in Washington to steal the books with the ciphers the Spaniards changed often to frustrate decoders. With General Strong and the Joint Chiefs eager to acquire the codes, Donovan had Downes add Spain’s to the list of embassies he was breaking into.

  Since he had no inside employee like Brousse, Downes had to devise a more complex plan to penetrate the Spanish embassy. He had agents follow and compile full dossiers on the private lives of practically every employee in the embassy from the senior counselors to the cooks and chauffeurs, looking for sympathetic moles to approach. Agents wrote down the license plates of cars around embassy parties to check if their owners could be used as informers. Downes also arranged for Sidney and Eleanor Clark, a wealthy Philadelphia couple, to approach the embassy posing as producers who were planning expeditions to the Iberian Peninsula to record color films of folk dances for American museums. They began throwing parties for embassy employees in a luxury suite at the Wardman Park Hotel and filed detailed reports on each one who attended.

  To infiltrate one of his own agents into the embassy, Downes went to a Northeast women’s college and recruited “Ella,” his code name for a young student who spoke perfect Spanish and could type and take dictation. He rented Ella a room in a boardinghouse off Connecticut Avenue where the embassy’s secretaries lived so she could become friends with them. To create a job opening in the embassy for Ella, Downes arranged for International Telephone and Telegraph Company to post an ad in the New York Times looking for a Spanish-speaking secretary and offering $400 a month. He knew that was more than an embassy secretary made. Ella, who had already identified one of her new girlfriends, María, as the most eager to leave the embassy for big-city life, innocently showed her the ad and told her
she ought to apply. María did, and as Downes had arranged, IT&T promptly hired her. A grateful María then helped Ella get her old job in the embassy in April.

  After just a week in the compound, Ella had drawn detailed sketches for Downes of the floor plan and the location of the code book safe in the senior counselor’s office, where she worked as his secretary. By early May, she had made pencil drawings of the safe, built by the Shaw Walker Company, and memorized the dial numbers and turns she thought the counselor made when she watched him behind his back opening it. Inside the vault, she saw a circular leather box, ten inches in diameter, which spooled out tape with numbers printed on it, plus four leather-bound encoder books for converting the tape’s numbers into words. But when no one was around and Ella tried to open the safe with the combinations she thought she had seen, the door wouldn’t budge.

  Downes finally had her whack the dial one night with a leather-headed mallet. When the counselor couldn’t open the damaged safe the next morning he phoned Shaw Walker to send a locksmith to repair it. Downes had already arranged for Shaw Walker to dispatch G. B. “Sadie” Cohen, a safecracker who had been in and out of Sing Sing. Downes had hired him with the help of a New York policeman. Cohen fixed the safe and recorded the combination that would open it.

  On July 29, Cohen and two antifascist Spaniards Downes had recruited sneaked into the embassy at 10:30 p.m. The Clarks threw a party that night for the embassy employees at a Maryland roadhouse to keep them occupied. It took Cohen just minutes to open the safe. They grabbed the spool box and the four leather books, which were spirited to an apartment near the embassy where a team of OSS technicians hurriedly took 3,400 photographs of the spool and pages the next two and a half hours. The code material was back in the safe by 1:45 a.m.