Wild Bill Donovan Read online

  For Ike one important detail became Donovan’s softening up the battlefield for his landing force. Eddy and Donovan had come up with more ambitious ideas, which Donovan outlined for Eisenhower. Murphy’s apostles would be paired with landing force commanders to hook them up with dissident French elements when they hit the shore. The Joint Chiefs first balked at Donovan’s unconventional proposal to pay the salaries and pensions of French navy and army officers who join the Allies. They decided the $36 million cost was too high. Eisenhower thought the bribe a small price to avoid fighting the French. When he returned to Washington, Donovan lobbied Marshall to reverse the decision and approve the payoffs.

  The heart of the OSS plan that Donovan briefed to Ike remained Lemaigre-Dubreuil’s Group of Five organizing a coup d’état in North Africa backed by U.S. arms with Giraud leading that force to welcome in the Allies. But after another skull session at the St. Regis with his inner circle four days before he flew to London, Donovan still was unsure that the complex political scenario would play out as Eddy and Murphy envisioned. There were deep misgivings among Donovan’s aides. Leaders like Giraud and the generals in North Africa who would follow him “think with their heads” not their hearts, one OSS memo warned.

  Two days after Donovan left London, Murphy slipped into Telegraph Cottage, Eisenhower’s hideaway outside the city, to brief the supreme commander on the byzantine political factions in North Africa that the ambassador and Eddy hoped to muster behind the coup. It made Ike’s eyes water. Murphy, however, was confident and suggested Eisenhower send a senior officer to Algeria to scope out for himself the potential of the French military there. Ike decided the scout would be his deputy, Major General Mark Clark.

  Before his mission to Algiers, Clark lunched with Donovan and Murphy in Washington on September 28. He plopped down on the lunch table a long list of artillery and antiaircraft emplacements Eisenhower wanted Eddy’s saboteurs to take out in North Africa before the Torch invasion. Clark was a lanky general other men found to be short-tempered, aloof, and a publicity hound. But Donovan found him to be open to unconventional ideas. When the Allies landed, Clark had approved an Eddy plan to assassinate all Axis agents and members of the German and Italian Armistice Commission, which monitored the Vichy government in North Africa. Eisenhower later ruled the plan “out of bounds” and quashed it.

  Clark would grow to despise the Vichy generals he dealt with in North Africa, giving them a private code in memos to Ike: YBSAS for “yellow bellied so and so.” But he came away impressed after a clandestine meeting October 22 that Murphy arranged for him at a seaside farmhouse west of Algiers with General Charles Emmanuel Mast, Giraud’s North Africa representative. A short stocky man in his mufti, Mast in fluent English promised that Giraud would unite all of North Africa in revolt. Clark, who had been sneaked into Algeria with the help of a British submarine that deposited him at the coast, sent a coded message to Ike from Gibraltar afterward: “Anticipate that the bulk of the French army and air forces will offer little resistance.”

  AS D-DAY NEARED, Eisenhower became increasingly edgy about security leaks tipping off the Germans to Torch. By the end of August, he barred Donovan from bringing more OSS officers into North Africa, fearing it would arouse suspicion among German intelligence there. A month later, Ike and Marshall were livid when they learned that Eddy had smuggled to London René Malvergne, an anti-Nazi and the retired chief pilot at Port Lyautey, to guide the U.S. Navy when it reached the French Moroccan coast. It had been a daring escapade. Given the cover name Victor Prechak, Malvergne had been hidden under a blanket in a truck trailer that carted him from Casablanca to Tangier, where he was spirited off to Gibraltar. But if the Nazis discovered the pilot missing it shined a spotlight on Morocco as a landing site, Ike worried. Donovan was irked as well. Patton approved the operation but Eddy had not alerted Donovan, who came under fire and did not appreciate being blindsided.

  On November 6, Eddy moved to Gibraltar, where Eisenhower had relocated his Torch headquarters to the British underground fortress tunneled into the two-and-a-half-square-mile limestone rock. Murphy remained in Algiers to tend to senior French officers, but Ike wanted Eddy in his command post to advise him on the covert operations that were to unfold. Eisenhower’s staff also feared the Gestapo might try to capture Eddy at the first sighting of the Allied armada.

  From a cramped underground office, Eisenhower began the agonizing wait for Torch to begin. Sending messages around the clock to operatives on the ground, Eddy had intelligence networks in place at all the major cities along the North Africa coast. Clandestine radio stations funneled their reports to his main listening post in Tangier. He was counting on resistance groups in French Morocco, Algiers, and Tunisia taking over the local governments for long enough to let the invaders in with minimal fighting. Agents sat at the beaches with flares to guide in landing parties. Carleton Coon, who had joined him in Gibraltar, expected some eighty thousand Muslims in Spanish Morocco to join the revolt. Gordon Browne drove to a bleak plain south of Oran to assemble “Rebecca,” the code name for a radio beacon device and its bulky nine-foot antenna that would guide in planes dropping 556 paratroopers, who were to capture the Tafaraoui and La Sénia airfields.

  His nerves fraying, Ike still worried that the French would fight, his fear heightened when Murphy sent a frantic cable to Washington on November 1 pleading for a two-week delay in the landing. General Mast and Lemaigre-Dubreuil, who had expected the invasion much later, complained they did not have enough time to organize the cooperation of French forces. They might battle the Americans at the beaches if Eisenhower came too early, the intermediaries warned. Delay at this point was impossible, Ike told Murphy.

  Donovan the week before had asked the Budget Bureau to rush more money from the White House secret account to Eddy’s covert force. Suspicious that Donovan was inflating his role in Torch to justify these emergency funding requests, a Budget Bureau aide earlier had asked Milton Eisenhower, who had gone to work for Elmer Davis’s Office of War Information, to snoop around his brother’s London headquarters for any complaints about the OSS. Milton reported back that he could not find anyone who knew much about the agency’s secret operations. Torch, Donovan told his aide Otto Doering, “may be a test of whether we survive or not.”

  DONOVAN’S WASHINGTON headquarters was bustling Sunday evening, November 8. No one had left through “crash weekend,” as it came to be called. Consumed with monitoring the Allied invasion of North Africa, branch chiefs, research analysts, office clerks, and secretaries had caught just brief minutes of sleep on cots by their desks. The excitement over the invasion kept them awake and charged.

  The early reports from the region seemed to Donovan to indicate that Torch was rolling out smoothly. “Thank God, all well,” Eddy cabled him.

  But it soon proved not to be the case.

  Eddy and Coon munched on ham sandwiches and sipped beers at their office on Gibraltar Saturday night, November 7, when the French-language BBC broadcast: “Allo, Robert. Franklin arrivé.” It was the signal, which Eddy’s clandestine stations in North Africa heard as well, that the Torch invasion was on time for the next day.

  Eddy’s first all’s well cable to Donovan bore some truth. Parts of the OSS operation proceeded splendidly. Eddy’s clandestine radio stations in Casablanca, Oran, Algiers, and Tunis stayed on the air throughout the invasion transmitting agent reports to him in Gibraltar on last-minute beach defenses and the movements of French forces that they spotted while driving their cars through the cities. By 2 a.m. Sunday, some four hundred young guerrillas Lemaigre-Dubreuil had trained captured the French 19th Corps headquarters (which controlled Algerian troops), Radio Algiers (where Giraud was to broadcast a message to North Africa), and the main post office and military telephone exchange (where they cut telegraph and phone service for the city). Murphy’s officers aboard command ships directed the task forces to their beaches, where in most instances the GIs were met by Eddy’s French guides—al
though at Oran neither side knew the other’s password. Even Malvergne, the pilot Eddy had caught so much heat for smuggling out, succeeded in steering the USS Dallas destroyer through a narrow channel from Port Lyautey off the Moroccan coast, dodging sandbars, sunken ships, and Vichy shore fire so seventy-five U.S. Army rangers could debark and seize the nearby airport.

  But only a small fraction of the French partisans Eddy expected to battle Vichy forces ever showed up for the fight. Rifles and machine guns promised for rebels in Casablanca and Algiers never arrived. Meanwhile, gutless French officers who were to lead revolts, such as General Mast, went missing, refused to fight, or were arrested. Rebels failed to capture the critical French naval headquarters in Algiers, while the facilities Lemaigre-Dubreuil’s guerrillas had seized early Sunday morning were soon surrendered back to Vichy loyalists.

  Early Sunday morning Lemaigre-Dubreuil dressed in his crisply starched French major’s uniform and left for the Blida airfield at Algiers to greet Giraud, who was supposed to land at dawn. Giraud never showed up. A British submarine had sneaked the French general to Gibraltar on Saturday. He arrived in a wrinkled herringbone suit, unshaven with a handlebar mustache drooping over his lip. Murphy fully expected that Giraud would fly to Algiers the next day, order the Vichy forces to allow the Allies in, then take over France’s North Africa army after Eisenhower had established his beachhead. But in a tense first meeting with Eisenhower, Giraud balked at leading the French insurrection unless he also was supreme commander of the invasion force. Ike, who had put off the touchy command issue when Giraud had raised it before with Murphy, now adamantly refused to give up his job. If that is the case, “Giraud will be a spectator in this affair,” the general stubbornly announced. Eisenhower, who had his fill of self-centered French officers, later grumbled to an aide: “What I need here is a damned good assassin.” Hours ticked by, as the two men waited for the other to blink. Giraud finally “decided to play ball,” Clark recalled, but precious time had been wasted.

  In a Tuesday press conference, Roosevelt warned Americans that in any war “there are peaks and valleys.” Eisenhower began his Sunday invasion in a canyon of pandemonium. Murphy’s vision of the Allies being welcomed by the locals had quickly blown up in smoke. Americans were fighting Frenchmen. The landings at Algerian beaches near Oran and Algiers were chaotic with transports off course or lost in the dark night, tank-carrying vessels stuck on sandbars, green American soldiers staggering to shore with hundred-pound packs on their backs, and French soldiers waiting for them who chose to fight though they were far outnumbered. Browne waited with his Rebecca beacon kit set up south of Oran. But no paratroopers had arrived by their 5 a.m. deadline so he blew up the set and left; navigation errors had scattered the aircraft and their commandos all over the region. Patton’s landing was just as sloppy at Morocco, where Vichy French resistance near Casablanca and Mehdia further north stiffened. Had the Germans been defending instead of the French, “we would never have gotten ashore,” Patton later admitted.

  Back in Washington, Donovan began his morning staff meetings reading aloud from a chapter of a War of 1812 history. “They haven’t burned the White House yet,” he said each time after closing the book. True, but the recitals lifted spirits only briefly until another discouraging cable came in from North Africa.

  Giraud finally arrived in Algiers on Monday, November 9, to proclaim himself the leader of French forces resisting the Axis. But French officers, still loath to break their oath to Pétain, ignored him and continued fighting. Events, it turned out, had already overtaken Giraud. Shortly after noon the day before, Murphy had discovered, much to his surprise, that the hated Darlan was in Algiers visiting his polio-stricken son, who was near death in the hospital. Murphy quickly began talks with Darlan, who unlike Giraud was in command of French North Africa forces, and tried to persuade him to order a cease-fire. Clark joined the negotiations Tuesday, pounding the table and telling Darlan point-blank that his North Africa army would be destroyed and he would be arrested unless he halted the fighting.

  By November 12, a tenuous cease-fire finally was in place across North Africa. In response to Torch, German forces quickly swept through southern France and Vichy, making Pétain, who had disowned Darlan’s armistice, irrelevant. Eisenhower arrived at the St. George Hotel in Algiers on November 13 to close the rest of the agreement with Popeye. In exchange for the cease-fire, Darlan would be the Allies’ “Head of State” for North Africa.

  Murphy believed the accord was far better than the alternative: Eisenhower, who had suffered 2,225 casualties in four days of fighting, bogged down longer in a bloody battle with the French. But an international firestorm erupted. Elmer Davis’s propagandists complained that the pact with a notorious collaborator like Darlan was a public relations nightmare. “Are we fighting the Nazis or sleeping with them?” Edward R. Murrow asked sarcastically. Roosevelt, who had held his nose in agreeing to the deal with Darlan, assured Americans it was “only a temporary expedient.” The arrangement troubled Donovan, whose aides feared it would be used by overseas rivals to discredit American influence in Europe. But for the moment, the American Army command was thankful just to have survived its first test of fire in the war. Torch had blooded the GIs and provided some relief for the Soviets fighting the Germans on the Eastern Front.

  Torch, however, exposed serious shortcomings in the American war effort. FDR privately questioned Ike’s judgment. Patton had been derelict with logistics. Murphy proved naively blind to the political deviousness of French reactionaries, such as Lemaigre-Dubreuil. Donovan suspected that Peanuts had revealed Torch to Nazi collaborators with the Banque Worms et Cie so they could transfer 25 billion francs to North Africa before the invasion and reap a windfall from a better exchange rate for dollars and pounds there. Within OSS, a secret internal assessment sent to Donovan concluded that while the agency had provided valuable intelligence for the Army on French forces in North Africa, its covert operation to win them over had failed miserably. Donovan bristled at the second-guessing. In truth, the OSS had done no worse—nor better—than the rest of the Army.

  AS AMERICAN AND BRITISH ground forces rolled east toward Tunisia, OSS officers watched their back for any German counterattack from Spanish Morocco. Donovan’s men also tracked German espionage agents who sneaked into Tangier or remained in Casablanca and Algiers to monitor Allied ships off-loading military cargo. Meanwhile, Charles Hambro moved a large contingent of British subversive warfare operatives into Algiers, under the code name “Massingham.” It sparked angry complaints from Eddy that Hambro was taking over North Africa, which he had agreed in June would be Donovan’s territory, and making the OSS there “window dressing.” American and British generals from the beginning had been critical of the quality of each other’s army and leaders. That same tension quickly crept into the American and British secret services. Confidential memos from his field officers began landing on Donovan’s desk complaining that British intelligence agents pouring into North Africa were snobs who held themselves “aloof” from the OSS. London’s station chief for Tangier was so unscrupulous he “should have been killed a long time ago,” one OSS report complained. A Cairo OSS agent considered his British counterpart “the scum of the earth.”

  Donovan also thought he was being muscled out of North Africa. “The trouble with you British,” he vented to one of Hambro’s officers in New York, “you always try to seduce your partners for your own advantage.” The officer relayed the remark to Hambro, who did not appreciate being called a whore. He thought Donovan was an ingrate. Nevertheless, Hambro realized Donovan was upset and had to be treated with kid gloves. He ordered Massingham to be more deferential to their temperamental American cousins.

  Like the conventional generals, Donovan was looking ahead to the next fight. For almost a year he had been mulling ambitious plans to make North Africa his aircraft carrier for launching future covert operations into southeastern Europe. Roosevelt could go down in history as the �
�great liberator” of Axis-occupied Greece and the Balkan states, he wrote the president. Donovan now planned to expand his OSS bases in Algiers and Cairo to three hundred operatives. To infiltrate fascist Italy, he asked the Army to send him 230 Italian-speaking soldiers to begin sabotage training. He also proposed organizing Italian, Greek, and Yugoslav guerrilla brigades recruited from their ethnic communities in the United States. Donovan began getting the Italian American officers, but Marshall nixed the special ethnic armies. They would divert soldiers from the regular force, the chief of staff feared.

  To plunge into the next war zone with his covert operatives Donovan also found that he needed two things in short supply: transportation and British cooperation. He begged Marshall to order American commanders in the field to provide him planes and ships to infiltrate his agents and supplies into Southern Europe, but Marshall refused to micromanage his generals in the field. Donovan would have to join a long line of units pleading for cargo space. Under the agreement he had signed with Hambro, the British oversaw covert operations in southeastern Europe. They were eager to have Donovan pony up arms for the region and join the covert force Hambro ran there. But the British, who kept as close a watch on Donovan’s moves in the Mediterranean as the Germans did, wanted no OSS rookies barging in by themselves and blowing operations Hambro’s guerrilla warriors or Menzies’s MI6 spies had spent years setting up.

  London’s operations may have been more seasoned but they did not dazzle Donovan. So far, “the quality of the British intelligence in Greece left much to be desired,” one secret report sent to him complained. What’s more, his OSS officers thought they had a better chance of succeeding in the Balkans because as a rule Americans were more popular there than the British. Donovan knew what Hambro and Menzies were up to with all their talk of joint Anglo-American operations. As his OSS grew they wanted it swallowed into their secret service so it never achieved independence in the field. Donovan was “determined,” he angrily told Hambro’s New York agent, “not to be nobbled”—British slang for fixing a horse to lose.