Burn After Reading (40 page)

Coggins solved my draft status in a similarly melodramatic fashion. I was then classified 1-A, but Coggins called on my
draft board in New York, identified himself as a physician and told them I had suffered a nervous breakdown and had to be committed to a “psychiatric institution.” I was promptly reclassified 4-F and remained in that category until my thirty-eighth birthday, in September, 1944, when I ceased to be eligible for the draft and Coggins could take me out of the institution.

My office was in a restricted part of a makeshift frame building called “Temporary-L” near the Lincoln Memorial, an architectural survivor of the First World War. Op-16-W occupied three rooms flanked by Op-16-Z, headed by Riheldaffer, and a secret branch of the Bureau of Naval Communications.

Our neighbors at “Z” had one of the most fascinating jobs in war-time Washington: interrogating prisoners of war, exploiting captured documents, scanning censorship intercepts and doing odd jobs in cerebral espionage. They were, for the next four years, to supply the ammunition for our own operations.

My first job in 16-W was to devise a plan for a frontal psychological assault on the personnel of Doenitz's awesome U-boat arm. Up to one hundred and eighty enemy submarines were prowling all along the Atlantic Seaboard. We had hardly any defenses against them, and almost no offensive weapons.

Never before had a propagandist established within an American intelligence organization been given classified information and permitted to talk directly to the enemy. Now I suggested that we begin operations with a series of broadcasts to the U-boat men, based on this intelligence. The idea was promptly approved by Admiral Ernest J. King, Chief of Naval Operations.

I concocted a character who would act as the U.S. Navy's official spokesman to the officers and men of the
Kriegsmarine,
the German Navy. I created this personality at my typewriter out of thin air in a thirty-page legend like the cover story prepared for a spy. I gave the mythical person a name,
Robert Lee Norden,
because it sounded indigenously American with a slight touch of Confederate chauvinism, yet was easily understandable and pronounceable by the Germans. I gave him a rank—Commander, USN—sufficiently high to command respect, but not
too high to alienate junior officers and enlisted men. I gave him a birthplace, parents, an education, a career, wife and children, hobbies and pets, until the character lived, at least in our own minds.

We breathed life into this figment of my imagination by placing the myth inside the body of a remarkable officer whom we found right next door at “Z.” He was Ralph Gerhart Albrecht, a distinguished international lawyer in civilian life, a lieutenant commander in the Naval Reserve, doing delicate “special” jobs at “Z.” Albrecht was tall, erect to the point of being ramrod stiff, his gray hair closely cropped, with a clipped mustache in the British style and a commanding presence and voice. He spoke German with absolute fluency and with only that slight touch of accent necessary to leave the listener in no doubt that the speaker was an American and not a renegade German.

To make him real, even in an administrative sense, we entered “Norden” in the Mail Room and applied for inclusion in the Naval Register. This was a wise precaution, for he was to receive bundles of fan mail from his audience, separated from him by an ocean and a war, yet finding means of writing to him. In the course of the war, Commander Norden delivered six hundred broadcasts to the German U-boat Arm. He became famous and respected by the U-boat men, except by Doenitz, who detested him.

In his broadcasts, Norden forever sided with the ordinary U-boat man, telling him that he was being sent deliberately into certain death by Hitler and Doenitz. Once, when my researches revealed that not a single non-com or enlisted man had ever received the coveted Knight's Cross of the Iron Cross, we wrote a script for Norden bemoaning this fact. The risks of operational cruises are identical for all ranks, he said. Then he asked, “Why this discrimination?”

A few days later we found an item on the ticker announcing the award of the Knight's Insignia to a couple of chief mates in the U-boat Arm, with the words: “The Fuehrer, upon
recommendation of Grand Admiral Doenitz, was pleased to award the
Ritterkreuz
to,” and so forth. Norden was on the air within hours, extending his congratulations to the decorated men from the lower deck, but adding, “There was only one error in the citation. The Fuehrer awarded the
Ritterkreuz,
not at the recommendation of Grand Admiral Doenitz, but at the recommendation of the United States Navy.”

When we seized a disabled U-boat, we salvaged a copy of the German Naval Register and were appalled by the extraordinarily large number of flag officers in the German Navy. We added them up, and found that in a single month more captains were made admirals in Germany than U-boats were launched. We proceeded to point this out to the men, who habitually dislike admirals.

We realized that the fighting spirit of the U-boat men was high, and that any direct appeal to surrender would fall on deaf ears. Yet we wanted to plant the idea of this eventuality in their minds, so we decided to talk to them, not about surrendering, but about the best means of surrendering. We described an actual action during which a U-boat had been disabled. The men had nothing white on board with which to signal to the attacking U.S. destroyer to cease fire, since all the curtains and towels on the boat were green. We suggested that the men bring along something white for such an emergency. Sure enough, when the next boat signaled to an American warship that her crew was abandoning ship, it was done with a white cloth. Upon closer scrutiny it turned out to be the dress shirt of the executive officer, the only white object they dared to smuggle aboard in accordance with Norden's suggestion.

Captured documents had references to Norden and his “devastating influence on the morale of the men.” If positive proof were needed, it was supplied by a U-boat skipper named Heinz-Eberhard Mueller, whose boat was sunk off the Virginia coast. Badly wounded, Captain Mueller was taken to the hospital at Fort Meade, Maryland, where his first request was to be introduced to Commander Norden. This request, flattering
though it was, created a minor crisis, if only because “Norden” was a full commander while his voice was only a lieutenant commander. For the trip to Mueller's bedside Albrecht was given another stripe. Mueller received him with tears in his eyes and thanked him for his compassionate broadcasts, which, he claimed, made many a U-boat man more dependent on information from Norden than from the German radio.

The most dramatic Norden broadcast concerned a U-boat skipper named Werner Hanke, a fanatical Nazi and a strict taskmaster, respected but disliked by his men. When a British ship, the
Ceramic,
carrying dependents of soldiers to South Africa, was sunk in the South Atlantic, we established from secret intelligence reports that the U-boat that sank the ship was commanded by Hanke. We further knew that Hanke refused to give aid to survivors struggling in the water or to call for aid before he himself had escaped from the scene of the disaster.

Norden went on the air with a stern warning that Hanke would be made to account for his act, as a war criminal, after Allied victory. By a strange quirk of fate, a week after this broadcast, Hanke's U-boat was sunk by American planes and Hanke was found among the survivors. By a further coincidence, the admiral commanding the rescuing carrier happened to have read the English translation of the Norden script in which Hanke had been singled out. He ordered the prisoner of war to report to him at his quarters.

“You know,” the admiral told him, “that the British are looking for you. I am now making for the Azores, where I am going to hand you over to them.”

The U-boat commander crumbled under this threat. He admitted that he had heard the Norden broadcast and did his utmost to assure the admiral that Norden was wrong in his statements. The admiral was adamant. “You'll be handed over to the British,” he said, “unless you co-operate with us.”

“But how?” Hanke asked.

“You'll sign a paper signifying your agreement that you will co-operate with us wholeheartedly.”

Hanke signed. He was then dismissed and was excluded from interrogation, but his men were shown the paper he had signed as an inducement for their co-operation. Hanke could never live down the shame. In the prison camp he committed suicide.

This was grim business, and it was working perfectly. According to Wallace Carroll, the distinguished
New York Times
correspondent who was an executive of the Office of War Information, the Norden broadcasts were “the single most effective propaganda weapon we had in the war.”

In 16-W we also prepared leaflets, concocted rumors for distribution by agents among the U-boat men, and put together, among other things, a song book for German sailors in which every song prescribed another simple form of malingering.

Our most effective leaflet, for which Commander Coggins gave the branch a golden star, was initially as amusing as it was later effective. Officers from 16-Z found a peculiar little brochure on sailors captured from a German blockade runner. It was a guide to the brothels of Bordeaux, home base of the ship, with a map of the city indicating the houses of ill fame and identifying them by the names of their star inmates, such as Maison Fifi, Maison Mimi and so forth. The brochure also listed first aid stations in the city where the sailors could turn for prophylactic measures or treatment. There was a ration card attached to the brochure, indicating that each sailor was entitled to one daily visit to the ladies' establishments.

We reproduced five million copies of the brochure just as it was, even duplicating the bad paper on which it was printed, and dropped them over Germany. We added (in red) to only the last page. The addition read: “German women! Be grateful to the Fuehrer for taking such good care of your men !”

The Norden operation was of enormous
tactical
significance. In due course, Op-16-W was also given major strategic assignments, two in particular: to draft a critique of the meaning and morale implications of President Roosevelt's unconditional surrender formula; and to prepare a co-ordinated campaign
directed to the Japanese High Command, providing arguments to be used inside Japan by advocates of surrender.

The unconditional surrender formula, proclaimed at the Casablanca Conference in January, 1943, became a thorn in our side. It became evident that it was stiffening enemy morale, preventing our adversaries from even considering the idea of surrender and prolonging the war. Eisenhower asked the Joint Chiefs of Staff to do something about the formula, and in February, 1944, the Joint Chiefs commissioned Op-16-W to prepare a brief on the subject with recommendations. “The questions,” Zacharias wrote in
Secret Missions,
“which the experts of 16-W were supposed to answer were, first, whether the unconditional surrender formula was conducive to increasing or stiffening resistance of the enemy; and, second, how we could alter the formula without losing face or doing damage to our political prestige.”

When the formula was originally proclaimed, we in 16-W regarded it as an outstanding psychological scoop because, as Zacharias put it, “It revealed both our determination and confidence to carry the war to a victorious conclusion at a time when the military situation did not seem to warrant such optimism and confidence.” However, by 1944, we had our doubts about the wisdom and efficacy of the formula. Even before the assignment reached us from the Joint Chiefs, I undertook research about the historical origin and legal validity of the formula.

I established that it was based on a historical misapprehension, a distortion of the term Grant had used in the Civil War. Moreover, I found that it was legally invalid and, as a matter of fact, illegal under the Articles of War. In view of the provisions of the Hague Convention, which clearly distinguishes between the responsibilities of combatants and noncombatants in warfare, the term could refer only to the manner in which hostilities are terminated, and not to the future fate of a whole nation.

We nevertheless recommended to the Joint Chiefs that the form of the formula be sustained for the sake of prestige with the proviso that it “does not refer to conditions to prevail after
the war, which have to be made on the basis of explicit peace terms, and not under the blanket dictation implied in unconditional surrender.” This preoccupation of 16-W with the unconditional surrender formula became of great importance later in connection with our assignment concerning Japan.

The Special Warfare Branch consisted of only a handful of people and its budget was less than the price of two torpedoes. We had an Italian desk, consisting of a single pretty WAVE lieutenant, Dorothy Sandler. We had a German desk manned by Professor Stefan T. Possony, now of Georgetown University, and Yeoman Ernst Erich Noth, now a professor at the University of Oklahoma. We had a Japanese desk, on which worked Professor John Paul Reed of the University of Miami; Dennis McEvoy, writer and linguist who could speak Japanese with amazing fluency; Professor Joseph Yoshioka, a noted Japanese psychologist; Francis Royal Eastlake and Clara Eastlake, children of the great American lexicographer who was author of a famed Japanese-American dictionary. Eastlake was an outstanding linguist, his sister a sociologist. Our naval adviser was Professor Bernard Brodie of Dartmouth College, author of
Seapower in the Machine Age,
a Mahanesque scholar and, to my mind, the outstanding and most lucid American expert on strategy in political scientific terms. I, in my lonely splendor, attended to research and special investigations, co-operating with each desk on the themes and composition of all their output, suggesting topics and themes for the Norden scripts, concocting rumors, writing leaflets and supplying arguments to our Officer-in-Charge to defend our own Branch in the face of snipings by diehard Naval fogies.