Wild Bill Donovan Read online

  On October 23, however, Huot clearly did wander off the reservation. He sneaked into Tito’s mountain headquarters at Jajce in Bosnia-Herzegovina, without the prior approval of higher headquarters or the chief of the British mission to Tito, Brigadier Fitzroy Maclean. A lanky thirty-two-year-old Churchill confidant, Maclean had once been a Conservative Party member of Parliament. The brigadier was away from the camp when Huot showed up for a long chat about guerrilla operations and American supplies with Tito in his office, a bare-wood shed under a stand of cedar trees. The handsome and manicured Tito, dressed in a gray tunic and breeches with black riding boots that clinked with spurs, chain-smoked cigarettes perched in what Huot thought was a ridiculous-looking miniature pipe adorned with silver filigree. But over a simple dinner washed down with schnapps and a light rosé, the charismatic Croatian wowed Huot, who called him “a man of action rather than polemics.” The major left with a long shopping list from the communist warlord. Maclean, who was supposed to clear all British and American visits to Tito’s headquarters, was livid when he learned of the protocol breach. The British soon took over the convoying and Huot was eventually sent home.

  Huot left behind bruised feelings. Fitz Maclean became a bitter Donovan enemy. Over the next three months the British brigadier tried to block more OSS commandos and intelligence agents from entering Yugoslavia. Maclean ordered that not only did the Americans have to encode their radio messages using British ciphers but that he also must read their intelligence reports before they were transmitted. Any OSS officer who violated these draconian rules would be arrested and evicted.

  But Huot’s china-breaking behavior merely mirrored Donovan’s basic instinct. By the fall of 1943, the OSS director was intent on busting up the British monopoly in the Balkans. On his return to Washington from his Salerno adventure, Donovan made a stop in London to visit Major General Colin McVean Gubbins at Baker Street. A war-seasoned officer and resourceful guerrilla organizer, Gubbins had just replaced Hambro as the head of the Special Operations Executive. He knew he had to keep a close eye on Donovan’s requests to infiltrate OSS men into British territory. That was why Gubbins’s ears perked up when Donovan mentioned casually at the end of their meeting that he hoped the two sides did not become too “legalistic” about the wording of previous OSS-SOE agreements dividing up the world’s turf. The new CD took the passing remark from the New York lawyer as a signal that Donovan intended to abrogate their contract—which was exactly what Donovan planned to do.

  Overall, the United States, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union—each with competing postwar goals—were finding it more difficult to manage their alliance. Donovan’s mood and moves reflected a broader tension between British colonial aims and American anticolonial sentiments. When he later learned that Maclean wanted to make his OSS officers in Yugoslavia subjects of the crown, Donovan angrily informed Gubbins that the deal was off. The OSS would not use British ciphers in the Balkans, his officers at Jajce would not clear their reports with Maclean, and, if he had to, he would treat the British there like the Nazis and sneak his secret agents into Yugoslavia behind Maclean’s back. Donovan’s “violent attack” on Fiztroy and his rules, as one secret SOE memo termed it, stunned the British.

  Churchill was even more flabbergasted with an October 22 cable from Roosevelt, which Donovan had convinced FDR to send. “The chaotic conditions developing in the Balkans causes me concern,” Roosevelt’s “Personal and Most Secret” message to Churchill began. “And I am sure you are also worried. In both Yugoslavia and Greece the guerrilla forces appear to be engaged largely in fighting each other and not the Germans.” FDR had ceded Nazi-occupied Greece to Churchill as a British theater of operations. The prime minister was committed to restoring exiled King George II to the Hellenic throne and his Special Operations Executive favored the more conservative National Republican Greek League (EDES) and its some 6,500 guerrillas. Donovan’s OSS, which considered the senior ministers who fled Greece with the fascist-prone king mostly a bunch of crooks, leaned more toward the leftist National Liberation Front (EAM) and its military corps, the Greek People’s Liberation Army (ELAS), whose 17,500 guerrillas were communist-led and, as was the case in Yugoslavia, appeared to be doing most of the fighting against the Germans. “In the present confused condition,” Roosevelt’s cable continued, “the only hope I see for immediate favorable action is the presence of an aggressive and qualified officer.” Why not send Donovan to take charge of covert operations and unify the feuding parties in the countries? “I do not believe he can do any harm,” FDR wrote his friend, “and being a fearless and aggressive character he might do much good.”

  Churchill contained his fury over Donovan’s blatant power grab. The next day, the “Former Naval Person,” as Churchill always called himself in his private messages to Roosevelt, wrote FDR in the most diplomatic words he could summon that the Yugoslav and Greek civil wars indeed were “vexatious,” but Jumbo Wilson, the region’s British commander, had matters well in hand. “Some of our officers there of Brigadier’s rank are very capable and have in numerous cases been there for two years,” Churchill gently lectured the President. “I have great admiration for Donovan, but I do not see any centre in the Balkans from which he could grip the situation.” In other words, butt out. Roosevelt dropped the idea.

  By late fall of 1943, however, Churchill’s intelligence and special operations chiefs had accepted the fact that they could no longer hold back the OSS in the Balkans or the rest of Europe for that matter. By the time Donovan flew back to Washington in early October he had finally secured for his exclusive use nine American bombers and cargo planes for his infiltrations. The OSS would not be where it is today if London had not freely lent its considerable expertise in espionage and covert warfare, the British correctly believed. But like a teenager eager to escape his parents, the OSS now wanted “to break away from the existing tutelage,” in Gubbins’s words. It left his Baker Street Irregulars both nervous and bitter. The British effort “to work as one” with Donovan’s organization “has proved a failure,” an SOE representative in North Africa wrote CD at the end of September. “The American temperament demands quick and spectacular results, while the British policy is generally speaking long-term and plodding.” The dangers to His Majesty’s Government in assuaging their “inferiority complex” and granting the Americans independence, the memo indignantly warned, are obvious:

  1. The irresponsibility of the OSS.

  2. Their permanent hankering after playing cowboys and red Indians.

  3. Their unlimited dollars.

  4. The political necessity of paying spectacular dividends.

  5. Their capacity for blundering into delicate European situations about which they understand little.

  Gubbins agreed.

  Chapter 20

  Peace Feelers

  DONOVAN BOOKED a late lunch October 13 with Roosevelt, who was eager to hear his war stories from Salerno and an update on the rest of the Mediterranean theater. After two years of near immobility, his OSS was finally being assigned aircraft for its missions, Donovan proudly told the president. He had men in Yugoslavia and more on the way. Covert operatives would be infiltrated into Greece by planes and caique fishing boats. As soon as Coon finished work in Corsica, he was headed to Albania. As for a large relief map of Italy that Roosevelt had told him at the Quebec conference he wanted in order to follow Clark’s campaign, Donovan said his cartographers were putting the finishing touches to a sheet they had been coloring by hand—scaled one inch to eight miles. Donovan did not mention it to Roosevelt but peace feelers were also percolating. They would confound his agency for many months.

  Although Hitler would hold together his army through intimidation and rewards, a growing number of senior Wehrmacht officers believed by the fall of 1943 that Germany had no hope of winning the war. Europe became alive with reports of an impending German officer coup or peace emissaries looking to gain concessions for Germany in the future. Many of Do
novan’s advisers were skeptical. “There is no cause for undue optimism,” Putzi Hanfstaengl wrote on September 10, “for although fortress Europe may be cracking, Hitler himself is not.” Expect “much hard fighting” ahead, he warned. Though their declared position was to accept nothing less than unconditional German surrender, the Allied leaders remained wary that the Nazis or other factions within Germany might attempt a separate peace with one country to break up the alliance. No one more so than Stalin, paranoid that Churchill and Roosevelt would strike a deal behind his back leaving him fighting the Germans alone on the Eastern Front.

  Enter Count Helmuth Graf von Moltke, descended from one of the most revered military families in Germany. His great-uncle, General Field Marshall Helmuth Karl Bernhard Graf von Moltke, had been the innovative strategist who had defeated France in the 1870 Franco-Prussian War, and Helmut Johann Ludwig von Moltke, known as “Moltke the Younger,” had been chief of the German General Staff at the outbreak of World War I. Thirty-seven-year-old Helmuth von Moltke had inherited the family estate in Silesia but instead of the military had pursued international law. At least six-feet-five-inches tall, Moltke was well read, well educated, and well traveled, having made a number of friends in American circles, such as Alexander Kirk (the U.S. ambassador to Cairo), journalist Dorothy Thompson, and Donovan. The young count also was a liberal, who became part of what would be called the Kreisau Circle after the Silesian city near Moltke’s estate. It was a loose pro-West and anticommunist association of left-wing civil servants, doctors, lawyers, labor leaders, and anti-Nazi military staff officers, all determined to defeat the regime as the only way to save Germany from annihilation.

  In the summer of 1943, Moltke had traveled to Istanbul both as a Kreisau Circle emissary and as an Abwehr agent for Canaris, hoping to use his American connections to make contact with U.S. representatives. He met with two members of Alfred Schwarz’s chain of Dogwood agents: Hans Wilbrandt, an economist code-named “Hyacinth,” and Alexander Rustov, a sociologist code-named “Magnolia,” both of whom were members of the German Freedom Movement in Istanbul, which collaborated with the OSS. Moltke, who assumed the code name “Hermann,” read Hyacinth and Magnolia his written peace plan. The Kreisau Circle accepted the “unequivocal military defeat and occupation of Germany.” But the Hermann Plan, as it came to be called, was Russophobic. The Kreisau Circle proposed to overthrow Hitler and establish a “provisional anti-Nazi government,” which would help the Western Allies invade quickly by having the German army shift east to hold the Red Army at the Tilsit-to-Lemberg line in Poland. Moltke offered an unnamed “high officer” of the Wehrmacht to meet with Eisenhower’s representative and work out this complicated military dance.

  Packy Macfarland, the OSS Istanbul station chief, urged Donovan to take Moltke seriously. The count wanted to present the Hermann Plan to Alexander Kirk, whom he had known intimately from the envoy’s prewar posting in Berlin, but Kirk begged off, insisting that the war could not end by “dickering” with German factions. Dejected he could not meet Kirk, Moltke returned to Berlin. He wanted to fly back to Istanbul in January 1944, when Macfarland hoped to have convinced the Cairo ambassador to change his mind and meet the count, joined by an Eisenhower representative authorized to negotiate the deal.

  Donovan was cautious. In October 1943, Theodore Morde, a fast-talking correspondent for Reader’s Digest who fashioned himself a spy and diplomatic dabbler, arranged a meeting on his own in Turkey with Franz von Papen, Hitler’s crafty ambassador there. Papen, who told Morde “the time had come when the war must stop,” floated a proposal to overthrow Hitler and head a new government that would make peace with the West but maintain the German army on the Eastern Front to “keep guard” against the Russians. Morde brought Papen’s peace offer back to Washington, where Donovan urged Roosevelt to “carefully” consider it. But FDR was horrified when he learned of the freelance diplomacy. In late November he planned to travel to Tehran for the first Big Three conference with Churchill and Stalin to coordinate the Allied offensive against Hitler. If word leaked—and it surely would—that an American emissary was negotiating a secret deal behind the Russian dictator’s back, which was far less than unconditional surrender and left intact the German army facing Stalin’s force, it could blow the Tehran talks sky high. Roosevelt shut down the line to Papen, ordering the State Department to revoke Morde’s passport so he could not return to Turkey or travel anywhere else overseas.

  Smarting from FDR’s rebuke in the Morde gambit, Donovan ordered Macfarland to keep a tight leash on Dogwood and any of his agents talking to Moltke. No “loose talk” that even hinted at how Washington might react to the Hermann Plan, he demanded. Meanwhile, a top secret debate raged within his headquarters over how the OSS should treat the offer. Whitney Shepardson, Donovan’s intelligence chief, believed Moltke was “one of the most influential individuals” of a powerful and broad-based anti-Nazi group that Hitler had not yet liquidated. The Hermann Plan was a way to short-circuit the war as well as liberate Western Europe—and to occupy Germany ahead of the Russian army. Others weren’t so sure. Except for Moltke, the OSS did not know the names of anyone else in the Kreisau Circle. The Hermann Plan could be a Nazi plant deviously designed to split the alliance. Even if genuine, the plan was disturbingly short on specifics, such as exactly how this little group would move Hitler’s massive army in France and Western Europe’s other occupied countries, along with the German home forces, to the Eastern Front. William Langer, Donovan’s research director, continued to “find it extremely difficult to believe” that any well-organized opposition existed in Germany, as Moltke claimed. “Certainly it would be a vast mistake for any military commander to count upon such inside aid” from the Kreisau Circle and change his battle plans.

  Donovan tended to agree with the pessimists. He drafted a lengthy memo to the Joint Chiefs detailing objectively the pros and cons of the Hermann Plan and recommended that Washington should consult Churchill and Stalin over what was obviously “an anti-Russian proposal.” But after rereading the draft and chewing it over with his staff once more, Donovan shelved the document. He ordered Macfarland just to keep in touch with Moltke to see what intelligence he could provide for the Allied invasion of France. Perhaps the Kreisau Circle could offer spies for the OSS in Berlin.

  Macfarland, however, never again heard from Moltke after he left Istanbul in December. Donovan would learn later that the Gestapo had grabbed the count shortly after he returned to Berlin and had executed him soon after. It was disturbing news. Why the sudden arrest? Had the Gestapo been tipped off to agent Hermann? Was there a leak in Macfarland’s chain?

  DONOVAN RECEIVED encouraging news from one operation to pry a satellite from the Axis. He had attended his law firm’s annual dinner at the River Club of New York on Friday night, March 17, 1944, then hopped on the last train to Washington so he could put in a full day’s work on Saturday. As Donovan sipped his breakfast coffee at his Georgetown home Arthur Goldberg phoned with the report headquarters had just received from an overseas station. “The Sparrow team has been dropped successfully,” was all Goldberg would tell him over the open line. Later from his office, Donovan delivered the top secret news to the Joint Chiefs: Hungary had been penetrated.

  Four hours before dawn on Thursday, March 16, Colonel Florimund DuSossoit Duke and his two subordinates—Major Alfred Suarez and Lieutenant Guy Nunn—feverishly shoveled holes in a forest field near the junction of the Mura and Drava Rivers. Short and muscular, Duke had been a football star at Dartmouth College and had fought in World War I. He had been Time magazine’s advertising manager before he joined Donovan’s organization as a Balkans operative. Duke was not a particularly subtle thinker, but he was a bullheaded leader who kept his cool under pressure. Arthur Goldberg’s Labor Section, set up to organize European unions against the Nazis, had recruited Nunn, a freelance writer educated at Stanford University, and Suarez, who had served in the Spanish Civil War with the anti-Franco Republicans
as a radio operator. The OSS team, code-named Sparrow, had parachuted from a British Halifax to a plowed field and the exact spot they wanted to be—just over the border from northern Croatia in Hungary. But they had a lot of digging to do before sunup. The bomber had also dumped out three parachuted containers crammed with clothing, food, and radios that needed to be buried along with the chutes and their jumpsuits. Exhausted, they finally finished about 6 a.m. and began walking to a village Duke spied a mile and a half away, where he hoped the Sparrow team would be captured by the Hungarian military.

  It took a while to find someone awake but Duke finally convinced the friendly villagers to have a teenage boy bicycle to the military barracks six miles away and alert it that the Americans had landed.

  Duke calmly told the squad of Hungarian soldiers who arrived that their plane had been hit by antiaircraft fire and they had to bail out to lighten the load so the aircraft could return to base. The enlisted soldiers, not sure they should buy this story, radioed for officers to come to the village. By 11 a.m., Duke and his Sparrows had more than a dozen Hungarian authorities milling about them when one, dressed in civilian clothes, finally pulled the colonel aside and whispered in English: “I’ve been waiting for you for three days.” He identified himself only as Major Kirali from the Hungarian air force and told Duke to let the soldiers process them through the army’s regular security channels so they could eventually meet the man they had come to see. That person was General Stephen Ujszaszi, the army’s chief of intelligence.

  The Sparrow team had an unusual infiltration plan. They would become prisoners of war of the Hungarian army, which would take them to Ujszaszi, who had secretly agreed to be their go-between in peace talks with the Hungarian cabinet. Part One of the operation went off without a hitch. By the next evening, Duke, Suarez, and Nunn sat comfortably in a jail cell in the basement of Budapest’s Internal Security Police headquarters building, enjoying a delicious dinner from the restaurant around the corner and waiting for General Ujszaszi.