Joseph E. Persico (30 page)

After coming to power in 1933, Hitler made Hanfstaengl, with his flair for languages and cosmopolitan suavity, the Reich's foreign press chief. In the evening, Putzi entertained the Führer and his coterie with renditions of Wagner, and Harvard football marches and pep songs. But Putzi apparently had too much flair for the political henchmen around Hitler. He sensed their jealousy and feared they were plotting to kill him. He fled Germany for Britain, taking with him his young son, Egon. Hanfstaengl was interned when the war broke out and subsequently sent to a Canadian POW camp in Kingston, Ontario.

John Franklin Carter had known Putzi in the latter's Nazi heyday. Carter had been in Germany working as a freelance journalist in the mid-thirties, trying to get a line on the Hitler regime. A friend told him that the man to see was Putzi Hanfstaengl. Carter looked up Hanfstaengl in Munich and the chemistry was instantaneous. They came from the same crowd. Putzi's mother was the daughter of Ellery Sedgwick, a close friend of Carter's father. Putzi tried to get Carter an interview with Hitler, who, at the time, was seeing no one. But he did arrange for Carter to see Hitler's anointed successor, Hermann Göring.

Just after Pearl Harbor, while Winston Churchill was staying at the White House, Carter received disturbing news from Henry Field, the member of his ring whom Bill Donovan had tried unsuccessfully to recruit. Carter's operatives were keeping an eye on a woman named Viola Ilma, suspected of being a German spy. “She's staying at the White House!” Field had informed a stunned Carter. Ilma had run into Mrs. Roosevelt and said she was having a hard time finding a hotel room in war-crowded Washington. Eleanor Roosevelt, always tenderhearted toward strays, had said, “Well why don't you come and stay at the White House? There's nobody there but Franklin and the Prime Minister.”

Distressed to discover that a possible Nazi spy had penetrated America's innermost sanctum, Carter began to track down Putzi Hanfstaengl, who had known Viola Ilma in Berlin. He learned, through the FBI, about Putzi's internment in Canada and managed to visit him there. He concluded from what Hanfstaengl told him that Ilma was not a Nazi, but more likely a British agent. More important, Carter discovered that Hanfstaengl was eager to work for the Allies against his old Nazi pals.

Carter went to see the President about bringing Hanfstaengl to America. Roosevelt airily claimed that he had known Hanfstaengl at college, though it is doubtful since he had left Harvard six years before the German. “What do you think on earth he could do?” FDR asked Carter. Carter pointed out that Hanfstaengl “actually knows all these people in the Nazi government; he might be able to tell you what makes them tick.” “Yes. Go ahead,” the President said, and then added something that impressed Carter with his sense of the enemy's culture. “You can tell [Hanfstaengl] that there's no reason on God's earth why the Germans shouldn't again become the kind of nation they were under Bismarck. Not militaristic. They were productive; they were peaceful, they were a great part of Europe. And that's the kind of Germany I would like to see. If he would like to work on that basis, fine.”

Carter left the White House, fired by FDR's support and determined to find a way to bring Putzi under his wing. The task did not prove easy. Churchill, the Foreign Office, and the British embassy in Washington all balked. As one English diplomat put it, they were not inclined toward “confusing anybody's mind . . . into the belief that there are good and bad ex-Nazis.” Carter realized that he would need Roosevelt's personal intervention to spring Hanfstaengl from captivity in Canada. On June 24, FDR, with Churchill's reluctant acquiescence, authorized an Army plane secretly to fly Hanfstaengl to Washington. His presence in the country was not to be known. He was to be quartered at Fort Belvoir near the capital under twenty-four-hour guard. Putzi was to be treated as a paroled captured officer and known as Ernst Sedgwick.

Though admitted to the country, Putzi had one more test to pass. As Carter put it, the British “warned me that Hanfstaengl was a homosexual,” a compromising condition particularly for someone engaged in intelligence work. After all, the huge German had sung falsetto soprano in a Hasty Pudding show at Harvard. Carter went to New York to seek the advice of Clare Boothe Luce, the playwright and wife of
Time
magazine's publisher, Henry Luce. The beautiful Mrs. Luce suggested using Gerald Haxton, Somerset Maugham's beau, as bait. Haxton, then in America, could speak good German to the lonely Putzi, since he had spent two years as a POW in Germany in World War I. Carter arranged for Haxton to visit Hanfstaengl at Fort Belvoir. As Maugham's wife once said of Haxton, “If he thought it would be of the faintest advantage, he'd jump into bed with a hyena.” The day after Haxton's visit, Carter went to see Putzi. The German's first remark was, “I wish you'd get rid of this man. One of the things I couldn't stand about Hitler was all the fairies he had around him. I don't like fairies.” Putzi's sexual orthodoxy was confirmed.

Putzi soon appeared to demonstrate his use to his new keepers. During a visit to an Army base, he and Carter were studying a wall map when Hanfstaengl suddenly put his finger on Casablanca. “Of course, there's where you ought to land,” he said. Army officials were stunned. He had pinpointed a major target of Operation Torch, the pending invasion of North Africa, which was to be America's first campaign on the Atlantic side of the war. Army officials feared there had to have been a leak. An investigation was ordered. The investigators concluded that the closely guarded German could not have learned of Torch. “It was just Hanfstaengl using his brain,” Carter assured the Army. All the effort and trust the President had invested in bringing Hanfstaengl to America, Carter was now convinced, had been justified. This man would earn his way.

Chapter XV

“We Are Striking Back”

WHAT JAPAN would do that summer of 1942 became a burning quandary. If the Japanese chose to attack Russia, as Hitler wanted, the move might relieve pressure against America and Britain in the Pacific. More directly, it would mean that the Russians would have to divert troops engaging the Nazis on their western front and send them east to battle the Japanese. To both FDR and Churchill, the primary objective of the war remained to destroy Hitler first. A Japanese attack on Russia would delay that end. In his private musings, the President revealed to Adolf Berle how far he was willing to go to appease the Russians and keep them fighting. In a May diary entry, after lunching with FDR, Berle wrote, “He said that he would not particularly mind about the Russians taking quite a chunk of territory; they might have the Baltic republics, and Eastern Poland and perhaps the Bukovina, as well as Bessarabia.” Such concessions, giving away half of Poland and rubber-stamping Russia's grab of Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia, if known outside FDR's circle, would have represented a contradiction of the President's publicly professed support of self-determination for nations. Berle tried to steer FDR away from overly accommodating Stalin, arguing, “The Atlantic Charter might have something to say about this.” He added, only half joking, that he hoped Roosevelt “would not be getting generous with Scandinavia” as well. FDR laughed off the gibe. But Berle was sure the President was overfeeding the Russian bear.

On July 27 disturbing word reached Roosevelt from the American minister in Bern, Leland Harrison. Since the German conquest of Russia had not gone according to schedule, Hitler had reportedly put out a peace feeler to Stalin through the Japanese. Worse still, the Russians had proved receptive. Such a peace would release the full might of the Wehrmacht against the West. Fortunately for the Western Allies, a suspicious Hitler came to distrust his Japanese intermediaries and decided instead to go ahead with his summer offensive against the Soviet Union.

As to whether the Japanese intended to attack Russia, FDR had intelligence coming directly out of Tokyo. On June 17, without identifying Magic as his source, he advised Stalin he had hard evidence that “the Japanese may be preparing to conduct operations against the maritime provinces of the Soviet Union.” However, Russia would not be left in the lurch, FDR assured Stalin. “In the event of such an attack, we are prepared to come to your assistance with our air power. . . .” In July, Roosevelt informed the Soviet leader that the threat had hardened. The Japanese would definitely attack the Soviet Union in the first ten days of August, he warned. The Russians must have been mystified when, less than a month later, the President sent another secret cable, addressed to “Mr. Stalin,” again based on an unrevealed Magic intercept, claiming, “I have information which I believe to be definitely authentic that the Japanese government has decided not to undertake military operations against the Soviet Union at this time.” A decrypt dated November 29, from the foreign minister in Tokyo to his ambassadors abroad, further confirmed the safety of the Soviet Union's eastern flank. Classified “strictly secret,” it read: “I believe that we must, at the earliest possible moment, devise some concrete means of contributing our influence to turning the tide in Europe. Nevertheless, we are now involved in trying to swing the situation in the Pacific and in sober truth, to suddenly divert our own reserve strength in sufficient quantity to be of material aid to Germany and Italy in their operations would be impossibly foolish.” Possessed of this intelligence, FDR could tell Stalin to relax. He had it from the horse's mouth: The Japanese had their hands full in the Pacific and would not be attacking him from the rear. Stalin could keep the bulk of his forces west of Moscow fighting the Germans.

*

That summer of 1942, the President half won his argument with Churchill about the time and place to commit American forces in the European war. He accepted Churchill's and his own service chiefs' judgment that invading the Continent itself was impractical that year. The Allies were not yet ready. But he did win Churchill's acceptance of an invasion of North Africa. In pursuing this strategy, Spain would hold a key card. Would the Spanish caudillo, Generalissimo Francisco Franco, allow Hitler to reinforce his armies in North Africa by allowing German troops to land in Spanish Morocco? Would Franco remain neutral and lock out all belligerents? Or, in the worst outcome, would he enter the war on the side of the Axis? One way to plumb the Spaniards' intentions was to read their codes. This objective had been achieved by Bill Stephenson's BSC agents, who repeatedly burglarized the Spanish embassy in Washington to obtain keys to the ciphers Spain used. Since the keys were changed monthly, the BSC break-ins became a recurring affair, until passage of the McKellar Act. Thereafter, Stephenson was afraid to continue anything so blatant as burglary, which might cause the BSC to be booted out of the United States. Consequently, Bletchley Park went temporarily blind in penetrating Spain's intentions. Stephenson sought help from Bill Donovan. Another break-in of the embassy was critical since the Spanish had again changed their code in July. Stephenson's plea to Donovan to take over the break-ins might have put off a more prudent man. FDR had specifically banned the OSS from carrying on espionage inside the United States. Internal intelligence and counterintelligence, the President had ruled, belonged to Hoover's FBI. But Donovan spotted a fine crack in the wall excluding him. Technically, he would not be engaged in domestic spying. He would be penetrating what traditionally was considered foreign territory, a nation's embassy abroad. Donovan thus agreed to Stephenson's appeal. The assignment to burglarize the Spanish embassy fell to an agent who fulfilled the profile that led critics to characterize the OSS as standing for “Oh, So, Social.” Donald Downes was a forty-year-old product of Exeter and Yale, an intellectual liberal who had previously taught in a private school on Cape Cod. He failed the ideal OSS image only by being unstylishly overweight. Shortly after 11
P.M
. on July 29, Downes led a team into the Spanish embassy. They left at dawn the next morning with enough photographs of the ciphers to enable Ultra to resume breaking Spanish documents. Since, however, the Spaniards continued to change the keys every month, Downes and his cohorts continued to break in.

In October, in the course of their fourth burglary, Downes's team was startled by sirens audible for blocks. Two squad cars disgorged FBI agents outside the embassy who sealed off any escape. The OSS burglars were arrested. Downes was allowed to make a jailhouse call to Bill Donovan, who woke up a chief aide, James R. Murphy, and told him to spring his men. While in custody, Downes tried to explain to the FBI that he worked for the OSS. Hoover's agents were only too aware that they were dealing with Donovan's poachers on their turf. The bureau already had three agents of its own inside the Spanish embassy.

Bill Donovan was furious over the FBI raid. Donald Downes recalled, “I don't believe any single event in his career ever enraged him more.” Wild Bill, for once matching his nickname, protested vigorously to the President, “The Abwehr gets better treatment from the FBI than we do.” But FDR stuck by the boundaries he had drawn. Donovan had stepped over the line. Internal spying belonged to Hoover. After his release, Downes wondered aloud to a colleague if Congress might not punish Hoover for what seemed to him treasonous behavior. His friend answered, “No President dare touch John Edgar Hoover. Let alone congressmen. They are all scared pink of him.” Indeed, Hoover had informants inside the OSS and was building a dossier on the foibles of Donovan's organization and the director himself. Wild Bill, however, was not intimidated. He started keeping his own file of FBI blunders and initiated a covert investigation into one of Washington's most persistent rumors, that Hoover and his chief aide, Clyde Tolson, were engaged in a homosexual liaison.

*

German espionage in the United States had largely become a shambles after Hoover's July 1941 dragnet in which thirty-three Nazi agents were arrested. Among the few shards of intelligence Germany now received from America were reports from an agent, Count Friedrich Saverma, who had refashioned himself, using his wife's maiden name, as a Scotsman named Douglas. The handsome couple were welcome adornments to New York and Washington society. Drawing on these connections, Saverma sent a “Top Priority” message to the Abwehr: “Reliable source confirms that Roosevelt is suffering from a uraemic condition causing serious disturbances of consciousness as a result of constant application of catheter in urinary tract. Recurrent announcements indicating mild soreness of throat and similar instances are made merely to camouflage his true condition.” If true that Roosevelt's consciousness was afflicted, this represented valuable intelligence for the Abwehr, which concerned itself with the President's health almost as much as did FDR's own physician. In this case, however, Saverma/Douglas had the wrong end of the Roosevelt anatomy. The President did go almost daily to Dr. McIntire's office next to the Map Room, but to have his sinuses packed while Captain McCrea, his naval aide, read him the latest Magic decrypts.

An unhappy Hitler leaned on the Abwehr's chief, Admiral Wilhelm Franz Canaris, to penetrate the United States. Canaris, sallow-skinned, sad-eyed, his face deeply furrowed, and called the Old Man by his subordinates, though still in his forties, was no Hitler toady. His unprepossessing appearance concealed a tough old sailor. While held in an Italian prison during World War I, Canaris lured a prison chaplain into his cell, killed him, and then passed out of the prison in the priest's cassock. Though originally a Hitler disciple, the onetime U-boat skipper had gradually become disenchanted. The crude Nazi vilification of General Freiherr Werner von Fritsch, the Army commander and a model Prussian, had disgusted Canaris. Fritsch despised the Nazis, particularly the SS. Hitler therefore forced Fritsch into retirement on trumped-up evidence, provided by a professional blackmailer, that the lifelong bachelor was homosexual. Canaris had been further sickened by the persecution of the Jews. Though he came to detest Hitler and all he represented, Canaris still loved Germany. He did what was expected of a German officer, which meant obeying orders.

What Hitler wanted from him now was an Abwehr operation to disrupt American armaments production. Thus, in April 1942, Canaris approved Operation Pastorius, named for Franz Pastorius, the first German immigrant to America, who had arrived in 1683. That spring, eight Germans, all of whom had lived in the United States and two of whom were American citizens, reported to the Abwehr espionage academy at Quentz Lake, forty miles west of Berlin. The eight were Georg Dasch, an itinerant waiter when he had resided in America; Ernest Burger, a naturalized American citizen who had worked as a machinist in Milwaukee and Detroit; Herbert Haupt, an optical worker raised in Chicago, also an American citizen; Edward Kerling, a onetime chauffeur for the American bridge expert Ely Culbertson; Richard Quirin, who had been a mechanic in New York City; Heinrich Heinck, who had worked in New York as a machinist; Hermann Neubauer, a former cook in Chicago; and Werner Thiel, a onetime toolmaker in Philadelphia, Detroit, and Los Angeles. All were in their thirties, and all had willingly returned to Germany, inspired by the glowing promise of the Third Reich.

The fledgling saboteurs began a crash course in blowing up vital installations. They were provided with drawings of key bridges and railroad centers, locks on the Ohio River, the layout of the Aluminum Company of America, the New York City water supply system, and the Niagara Falls hydroelectric plant. They were to carry high explosives, disguised as lumps of coal, and incendiary devices looking like pen and pencil sets. The Pastorius plan was to divide the eight men into two teams, one to be led by Dasch, the other by Kerling, and infiltrate them into America. They were provided with smuggled American newspapers and magazines to acquaint them with hit songs, the latest movies and slang—in short, to become familiar with daily life in the United States. The teams split the formidable sum of $174,588 in American bills and coins to cover expenses and bribes. By the end of May, Operation Pastorius was ready for launching. Admiral Canaris, however, had scant confidence in the mission. On signing their final orders he remarked, “This will cost these poor men their lives.”

On the night of June 13, in pitch darkness, Dasch's team clambered out of the conning tower of U-boat 202, the
Innsbruck,
and lowered themselves into a heaving rubber dinghy. Crewmen from the sub began paddling the boat toward the shore, where the four saboteurs were landed on a fog-shrouded beach near Amagansett, Long Island, 105 miles east of New York City. Dasch's group were still burying some of their gear when out of the mist appeared a twenty-one-year-old rookie Coast Guardsman, John C. Cullen, armed only with a flashlight. On spotting Dasch, Cullen shouted, “Who are you?” Standard procedure would have dictated killing the Coast Guardsman and hiding the body. Instead, Dasch, a garrulous loudmouth, but no tough guy, pulled a gun and shoved $260 into Cullen's hand, warning him, “Forget about this.” Cullen hightailed it back to the Coast Guard station and immediately reported the improbable encounter to his superiors, who, in turn, called the FBI.

In the meantime, the Dasch team made its way to New York, where the men split and checked into two hotels, Dasch and Burger into the Governor Clinton and Heinck and Quirin into the Martinique. They began their mission in America by whooping it up, spending their unimaginable wealth on expensive clothes and fancy restaurants where Dasch, the onetime waiter, now played the free-spending patron and big tipper. Though a blowhard and not a leader—a psychiatrist would later describe him as suffering from an “obsessive, compulsive, neurotic, hysterical personality disorder”—Dasch was no fool. The close call on the Amagansett beach had opened his eyes to the perils of Pastorius. After a night on the town, back in their hotel room, Dasch probed his partner's commitment to the mission in a cautious conversation. He managed to persuade a receptive Burger that Pastorius was doomed. If they turned themselves in now, he argued, instead of being treated as enemies, they would be welcomed as heroes, feted by America, and might even get to meet the President. A few years before, Burger had run afoul of the Gestapo and had spent seventeen months in a concentration camp. He had been tortured and his pregnant wife had been so harshly interrogated that she suffered a miscarriage. He was only too willing to be talked out of the mission. On a Sunday evening, less than two days after their landing, Dasch telephoned the FBI and demanded to see J. Edgar Hoover personally. By the following Friday, he was at FBI headquarters in Washington, speaking not to Hoover, but to incredulous FBI agents. Dasch divulged everything, including the information that another four-man team, under Kerling, was to land at Ponte Vedra Beach south of Jacksonville, Florida.