Joseph E. Persico (26 page)

A young Navy watch officer, Robert Myers, received his initiation into the Roosevelt style when he had to deliver an urgent message from the Map Room to FDR after the President had gone to bed. Uneasy at disturbing him, Myers asked Roosevelt for future guidance when messages arrived at irregular hours. “Well, if they aren't important and you come up and wake me,” the President answered, “you're in trouble. And if they are important and you don't come up and wake me, you're in trouble. So you take it from there.”

The President set up communication procedures to serve another end. He sent all his outgoing messages through the Army Signal Corps. He received messages to him only through Navy personnel. Consequently, the Army knew some of what he knew. The Navy knew some. But only FDR knew it all.

*

One name not appearing on the list of those granted admittance to the most secure depository of secrets in America was that of the President's chief of secret warfare, William J. Donovan, director of the COI. Still, other than that exclusion, Donovan appeared to enjoy the President's favor. In his first six months in the post, Donovan had flooded the President with over 260 phone calls and written memoranda. Nine hand-delivered reports arrived at Grace Tully's desk on December 15, 1941, alone and eleven more the next day. They rained down on the Oval Office so profusely that Donovan's messages were identified by time as well as date—11
A.M.
, 1
P.M.
, 5
P.M.
, etc. The chief courier was twenty-nine-year-old Navy Lieutenant (Junior Grade) Edwin J. “Ned” Putzell, another lawyer out of Donovan's New York law firm. As Putzell described his duties: “I'd be standing by while General Donovan dictated his messages to the President. Usually he classified them ‘Secret' or ‘Top Secret.' I put the memoranda, as many as five or six a day, into a zipped leather briefcase with a strap that I wound around my wrist. Freeman, the General's black driver, then took me to the White House in an Army sedan where I was so familiar that the guards waved me through. I took the dispatches directly to Grace Tully. If the President was tied up, I left them with her. If he was free, she sent me right in. The President always greeted me like a long lost friend. On one occasion, I pulled out a pocket watch with my Phi Beta Kappa key attached. He said, ‘Lieutenant, that's something I always aspired to.' I'd wait while he read the memoranda. He'd ‘Mmmm' over certain passages, or nod his head. Occasionally he might scribble something in the margin.” Of his countless deliveries, however, Putzell recalled, “I don't remember him ever giving me specific instructions to take back to Donovan.”

Just days after Pearl Harbor, the President had received from Donovan a transcript of a radio talk made by E. D. Ward, described as “one of the two Americans broadcasting in the Nazi pay from Berlin.” Ward's message expressed sorrow that his nation had been suckered into war against Germany. He repeated what an American professor in Berlin had told him: “Whatever happens, America will lose. Meaningless slogans about salvaging democracy and civilization are shibboleths which will lead to shambles. It is a war for control of European politics. The blessings of democracy will vanish in the war. The fusing of oligarchic England and Bolshevistic Russia cannot produce an American way of life.” Ward's broadcast concluded: “The United States should, for its own good, remain aloof and mind its own business. However, more powerful influences and interested groups have decreed otherwise.” It seemed routine claptrap from a Nazi sympathizer and paid lackey. But in the post–Pearl Harbor climate, FDR took Ward's behavior seriously. He directed Donovan, on the very day that he received the transcript, to have the State and Justice Departments investigate Americans working for the enemy. “I think they still come under some old law and can have their property in the United States confiscated,” he said, and “whether they automatically lose their citizenship should be looked into.”

Donovan forwarded to the President a five-page handwritten letter penned by Hollywood's quintessential swashbuckler, Errol Flynn, suggesting an appropriately dashing adventure to be produced by the COI and starring Flynn himself. Noting that his father, T. Thomson-Flynn, dean of the faculty of science at Queen's University, was esteemed in all of Ireland, Flynn wrote, “. . . [P]erhaps you know that the Irish, both North and South, are great movie goers. When last there, it was a constant source of astonishment to me that while Bridget O'Toole had only the foggiest notion whether the Panama Canal divides America or Africa, she did know without a shadow of a doubt that Clark Gable cherishes a marked antipathy for striped underwear and that Hedy Lamarr wears a false bust. . . . Now in view both of this well disposed attitude toward me personally as a Hollywood figure plus my father's position there . . . it seems to me that if Uncle Sam were to put me in American Army uniform and send me over there I could be of value to your department. One presumes America needs the Irish bases in the South . . . I could work well perhaps better than most to this end. . . .” Flynn saw himself ideally cast as a spy because of “. . . the excellent opportunities which seem to come, almost without effort on my part, to a man in my peculiar position in life, to acquire a certain sort of intimate information that would be of use to your department. . . . If I were to go there openly as a Hollywood figure in an American Army uniform, I would be far less suspected of gathering information than the usual sort of agent.”

FDR knew that Flynn was a friend of his son Franklin Jr. and that the actor knew Eleanor Roosevelt because of his work helping polio victims through the March of Dimes. But Franklin Jr.'s opinion did not advance Flynn's cause. “Errol used to join me and the Whitneys in fox hunting in Virginia,” young Roosevelt said. “Knowing how he hated Jews, we used to call him ‘Flynnberg' to annoy him.” More damaging, the year before Flynn had exploited his acquaintance with the President's wife to try to stop a citizenship revocation proceeding against Dr. Hermann Erben, a physician suspected by the FBI of being a Nazi spy. Much of the Irish hatred for England translated into sympathy for Germany. Exactly who Flynn might be working for in the Emerald Isle was thus questionable. FDR did not accept Flynn's offer to take on a new role as a spy.

Bill Donovan did not limit himself merely to reporting intelligence and passing along agent candidates to the President. He showered Roosevelt with strategies bred in his hothouse mind. Less than a month after Pearl Harbor, he urged that the President use what was left of the Pacific Fleet to transport fifteen thousand American commandos—which the United States did not have—for an “out of the blue strike” against the Japanese home island of Hokkaido. That same January, Donovan had another brainstorm. He suggested to the President that the United States should announce that Japan intended to attack Singapore or the Panama Canal. Then, when the Japanese failed to do so, which Donovan assured FDR was the case, the United States could trumpet this “failure” as the turning point of the war. Alas, Japan did attack Singapore and capture it on February 15. Two days later, Wild Bill rushed the President a warning from an agent who “has previously given correct information regarding moves of the Axis in Europe and the Orient.” This informant reported, “Next move of the Nazis will be frontal attack on New York, synchronized with general Nazi organized revolution in all South American countries, timed to follow closely the fall of Singapore.” Donovan also passed along information that leading Nazis—Göring, Rudolf Hess, von Ribbentrop, and Goebbels—had made large secret bank deposits in Latin America, Holland, Switzerland, and even the United States. He proposed that this information be broadcast over his own COI shortwave radio service to demonstrate the top Nazis' lack of faith in their own regime.

The man who pressed these ideas is perhaps best understood in the way he went about recruiting a New England chemist and businessman, Stanley Lovell, to run COI's Research and Development branch. Lovell, then age fifty-two, was heading his own Lovell Chemical Company when he was persuaded to go to Washington early in 1942 to talk to Colonel Donovan. Upon their meeting, Donovan told Lovell, “Professor Moriarty is the man I want. . . . I think you're it.” What Donovan had in mind, he said, was a laboratory of dirty tricks. Lovell left to think over whether or not he wanted to pattern his life after the evil genius of the Sherlock Holmes stories. A few days later, he returned to Donovan's home and pointed out: “Dirty tricks are simply not tolerated in the American code of ethics.” “Don't be so goddamn naive, Lovell,” Donovan responded. “If you think America won't rise in applause to what is so easily called ‘un-American' you're not my man.” Lovell signed on and caught on. He was soon exploring schemes, including one to inject Hitler's vegetarian diet with female hormones that would cause his mustache to fall out and his voice to turn soprano.

That FDR tolerated what in retrospect seems such patent nonsense requires an understanding of the President's own occasionally overheated imagination. In January, FDR received a letter from Lytle S. Adams of Irwin, Pennsylvania. Mr. Adams, of unspecified credentials, claimed that the Japanese had a phobic fear of bats. He urged the President to launch a surprise attack, dropping large numbers of bats over Japan, thus “frightening, demoralizing and exciting the prejudices of the people of the Japanese Empire.” The President sent Adams's letter to Donovan with a note reading, “This man is not a
nut.
It sounds like a perfectly wild idea but is worth looking into.” Donovan seized upon the scheme, enlisting the participation of the curator of mammals at the American Museum of Natural History as well as the Army Air Corps. The bat mission was seriously pursued and given up only after the bats, in test flights, froze to death in the high altitudes required.

John Ford, the movie director Donovan had recruited, described his new chief as “the sort of guy who thought nothing of parachuting into France, blowing up a bridge, pissing in
Luftwaffe
gas tanks, then dancing on the roof of the St. Regis hotel with a German spy.” The description would have tickled FDR. Chairbound himself, he loved vicarious flights of derring-do, stories of missions potent with danger and mystery. There was in Bill Donovan something of himself. If you are knocked down, if your schemes fall flat, if you are dead wrong, you get up, dust yourself off, and storm the next barricade.

FDR's initial admiration for Donovan and the adulation of the colonel by his subordinates did not extend to intelligence competitors, MID and ONI. Ever on guard against the man's naked ambition, they managed to freeze Donovan out of the best intelligence. Wild Bill was not permitted to see Magic or Ultra.

In the post–Pearl Harbor fear of fifth column subversion, Donovan reported to FDR that German saboteurs were about to descend on America's shores, supported by U.S. bands of Nazi-style storm troopers. The President received a further warning from Donovan that Japanese soldiers disguised as civilians were mobilizing to move against San Diego. Both reports were taken seriously at a time when an underground shelter with a thick bombproof roof was being dug under the White House's East Wing with room enough to accommodate a hundred officials, a time when the White House roof bristled with guns. Donovan next warned of an imminent Japanese air strike against Los Angeles. To strengthen the report's credibility, he pointed out that the intelligence had come through the President's son Jimmy, Donovan's liaison with the Marine Corps. Jimmy had informed Donovan of a warning received from a COI agent traveling aboard a ship from Havana to Germany. On Pearl Harbor day, the agent had radioed a message, to his wife, reading, “Get out of Los Angeles and go back home.” “I interpreted this to mean,” Donovan told FDR, “that there would be an air attack on Los Angeles.” He had shared this information with General John L. DeWitt, chief of the Army's West Coast command, and “General DeWitt placed the same interpretation on it.”

Donovan also contributed to the mixed messages FDR was receiving about what to do with Japanese living on the West Coast, both the Nisei, American-born citizens of Japanese parentage, and the Issei, immigrants from Japan. On December 15, Donovan advised the President, “[T]here was no reason so far to suspect the loyalty of Japanese-American citizens.” The President received the same advice from John Franklin Carter. Months before Pearl Harbor, Carter's man, Curtis B. Munson, had concluded that the Japanese in America “are more in danger from the whites than the other way around.” Munson, however, gave himself some cover. As for Hawaiians of Japanese descent, he reported, if the enemy fleet appeared off Hawaii, “doubtless great numbers of them would forget their American loyalties and shout ‘Banzai!'”

After Pearl Harbor, the perception of disloyalty among Japanese Americans, if not the reality, grew rapidly. While Donovan and Carter were essentially reporting the loyalty of this group, Navy secretary Knox made a statement on December 15, carried by the major news services, that offered his version of the disaster of December 7: “I think the most effective fifth column work of the entire war was done in Hawaii. . . .” Pressure on FDR to do something to eliminate the perceived danger of the Japanese living on the West Coast and in Hawaii began to mount. California's governor, Culbert Olson, the state's attorney general, Earl Warren, later to be a liberal chief justice of the United States, and the West Coast Army chief, General DeWitt, urged the President to intern the Japanese. Supposed proof of Japanese sabotage included reports “that ground glass had been found in shrimp canned by Japanese workers and that Japanese saboteurs had sprayed overdoses of arsenic poison on vegetables . . . a beautiful field of flowers on the property of a Jap farmer near Ventura, California, had been plowed up because it seems the Jap was a fifth columnist and had grown his flowers in a way that when viewed from a plane formed an arrow pointing in the direction of the airport.” Where no evidence of sabotage surfaced, a perverse logic provided it anyway. General DeWitt concluded, “The very fact that no sabotage has taken place to date is a disturbing and confirming indication that such action will be taken.”