Joseph E. Persico (32 page)

The President was vague in his conversation with Hoover, saying that the tip he had heard concerning unusual activity in New Jersey had come to him from a friend in New York who had heard it from the original source. As FDR explained, this person had been driving along a road in New Jersey from Andover to Sparta and had turned down a dirt lane for a better view of Lake Perona. Partway down the road, the car was stopped by an “Italian-appearing individual,” who rudely told the driver to stop and go back to the main road. Before leaving, however, the informant made other observations. Standing by a parked car was a “very German looking” man who kept staring. Some odd construction was also under way and, coincidentally, a German-American Bund camp, called Nordlund, was located nearby. As Hoover left, the President handed him a rough pencil-drawn map of the area.

Hoover immediately dispatched a senior FBI agent to investigate the situation. The agent made some curious discoveries, the most curious being that FDR's unnamed party who had stumbled onto the suspicious scene turned out to be a Mrs. Winthrop Rutherfurd, who owned an estate at nearby Allamuchy. As the agent continued investigating, the story began to unfold. Lucy Rutherfurd, driven by her chauffeur and accompanied by her son, daughter, invalid husband, and his nurse, had indeed gone down a dirt road to catch a better glimpse of Lake Perona situated on farmland owned by John Perona, whose family was described by neighbors as “loyal Americans.” The construction Mrs. Rutherfurd reported seeing turned out to be an excavation for a culvert to pass under the road to drain adjoining fields. The Italian-appearing individual was indeed an Italian-born gardener who could barely speak English and who had tried to warn the Rutherfurd party to turn back because the culvert construction blocked the road ahead. It was his inarticulate speech and clumsy gestures that had struck Lucy as suspiciously un-American. As for the Nordlund Bund Camp, it had been abandoned long ago.

Hoover reported all this, not directly to FDR, but, tactfully, to the President's aide Pa Watson. His report made clear that his agent had gathered the evidence through third parties. “No contact,” he told Watson, “was made with Mrs. Rutherfurd because her name was not given to me by the President and I gathered that it was not desired that it become known who may have been the original informant in this matter.” Watson passed Hoover's report along to the President, who showed it to Lucy on her next visit. She complained of inaccuracies. Since no reason now existed to pretend to Hoover that the Perona informant was anyone but Lucy, FDR told the FBI director about the alleged discrepancies. The President insisted that Lucy be interviewed personally to get the facts straight. Hoover again dispatched his agent. But nothing Mrs. Rutherfurd said materially altered the facts of the case. Hoover, however, that unsurpassed collector of dossiers, now had proof that FDR had resumed contact with his long ago mistress.

*

One of the more ironic utterances of General Marshall, not noted for irony, was made after the war, concerning the American-led invasion of North Africa in the fall of 1942. Marshall had opposed the landing as had every U.S. military chief, including General Dwight D. Eisenhower, who was chosen to lead it. “We failed to see,” Marshall later confessed, in grasping why FDR had pushed for a military campaign that his generals did not favor, “that the leader in a democracy has to keep the people entertained. That may sound like the wrong word, but it conveys the thought.” The war in the Pacific was, at best, the stemming of reverses. Marshall came around to understand why Roosevelt was pressing for the North African offensive: The people had to be fixed on something positive, on American forces carrying the fight to the enemy, on action rather than reaction. The North African operation, code-named Torch, which Putzi Hanfstaengl had intuitively guessed at, demonstrated a marriage of FDR's political and strategic shrewdness. As historian James MacGregor Burns puts it: “
TORCH
was a project bound to activate and test Roosevelt's skill at deception and surprise and to gratify his flair for the complex and the indirect.” On one point, however, Roosevelt was anything but indirect. “I feel very strongly that the initial attacks must be made by an exclusively American ground force,” he told Churchill. He offered a political rationale: “. . . [T]he assumption [is] that the French will offer less resistance to us than they will to the British.”

The President wanted the spearpoint of Torch hurled first against Casablanca, a target that posed problems both of deception and politics. The French defeat of 1940 had not been total. Under the armistice with Germany, the French had managed to hold on to a south-central band of their country, with Vichy as its capital and the aged World War I hero Marshal Henri Pétain as chief of state. This rump nation was also allowed to keep France's colonial possessions and the French Mediterranean fleet. Thus, Vichy ruled in Casablanca and other colonies stretching across French North Africa. Dealing with the Vichy government left Roosevelt perched on a precarious high wire. Liberals, tugging from one side, wanted a total break with a regime that had knuckled under and now collaborated with Hitler. The President's own instincts pulled in the opposite direction. By dealing with the Vichy government, he hoped the French fleet or Pétain would not be driven totally into the arms of the Nazis.

Early in 1941, even before the United States had entered the war, the President had kept one eye cocked on North Africa. He sent Robert D. Murphy, a State Department career official, to Algiers bearing the formal title consul general but actually to work out a deal with General Maxime Weygand, Vichy's high commissioner for French North Africa. Under a secret arrangement, the United States would free up frozen French funds, enabling Vichy to purchase food, cotton, and oil, and would also arrange with the British to allow these shipments to pass through their blockade of North Africa. In turn, the United States would be allowed to set up twelve vice consuls in the French African colonies, ostensibly to make sure none of these items were transshipped to Germany or Italy. While “vice consul” had a diplomatic sound, the twelve men, to be selected by the War and Navy Departments and foisted on a reluctant State Department, were to form FDR's North African intelligence ring. They were a mixed bag, including a winemaker, an anthropologist, and a Harvard librarian. The pact was sealed on March 10, 1941, and FDR's “twelve disciples,” as they came to be called, were operating by June, before either the COI or OSS had been created.

Months after launching the ring under Murphy, FDR brought Bill Donovan into his plans for North Africa. On a brisk winter morning, six weeks after Pearl Harbor, the President called Donovan to the White House and handed his then COI director his most substantive assignment so far. The twelve disciples were to serve, with Rooseveltian imprecision, under both Donovan and Robert Murphy. Donovan was to find out which way French colonials would jump if invaded—to the Allied side, to the Nazis, or would they hang on the fence. Further, his agents were to determine if Generalissimo Franco intended to block Gibraltar and allow German troops to land from Spain into Spanish Morocco. If that happened, an invasion of North Africa would likely be doomed. It was in trying to plumb Franco's intentions by breaking his codes that the OSS had made the ill-fated break-in of the Spanish embassy. Donovan's agents had another North African assignment that further tested the nascent OSS's capacity for the clandestine. The organization was to invent diversions to mislead the Germans into thinking that, should an African invasion take place, it would occur at Dakar, on the continent's western bulge, fifteen hundred miles from the intended landing site.

Though American generals regarded Torch with skepticism, Donovan became a staunch supporter. He saw, at last, the opportunity to make his organization a serious player within the military. Many of Bill Donovan's ideas had misfired, even backfired. But in one arena, his charismatic character had worked. Donovan attracted superb people to the OSS. He chose as his chief North Africa agent, William Eddy, age fifty-three, who had been born to American missionary parents in Syria, spoke fluent Arabic, was a former president of Hobart College, a much-decorated World War I intelligence officer, and now a Marine Corps colonel under cover as the American naval attaché at Tangiers. When a friend offered to introduce General George S. Patton to Eddy at an earlier London party, Patton glanced at Eddy's five rows of campaign ribbons and observed, “I've never met him, but the son-of-a-bitch has sure been shot at enough!” With the arrival of Colonel Eddy in North Africa, the twelve disciples fell under his control. Their tasks ranged from mundane detail—measuring the height of the surf on Casablanca's beaches—to assessing which French leaders were pro-Allied and persuading the French military not to oppose an invasion.

Abwehr agents in North Africa had easily penetrated the guise of the twelve American “vice consuls” and dismissed them as feckless amateurs. “All their thoughts are centered on their social, sexual or culinary interests,” one report to Berlin read. “. . . [P]etty quarrels and jealousies are daily incidents with them. We can only congratulate ourselves on the selection of this group of enemy agents who will give us no trouble.”

Robert Murphy, FDR's chief North African representative, reported to the President that what the French colonials wanted most was to be “complacently neutral. Far from wanting to be liberated, they just wanted to be left alone.” But the wishes of the French were not Roosevelt's priority. On September 4 he secretly brought Murphy back to Hyde Park. The diplomat sensed the President's almost childlike delight in what he was about to divulge. Nearly 100,000 troops, the vast bulk of them American, he told Murphy, would land at twelve points stretching over a thousand miles from French Morocco to Algeria. The President admonished him not to breathe a word at the State Department. “That place is a sieve!” FDR warned. Murphy felt uneasy at learning of a major wartime decision that his superior, Secretary of State Cordell Hull, did not know about. “Don't worry about Cordell,” FDR said. “I will take care of him. I'll tell him our plans a day or so before the landings.” Murphy left Roosevelt and returned to North Africa to persuade the French against resisting an attack.

FDR handled secrecy as great sport. Just days after seeing Murphy, he embarked on a nine-thousand-mile tour of U.S. war plants and training facilities. His wartime movements were supposed to be handled with utmost security, and the traveling press was honor-bound not to reveal his itinerary. At a shipyard stop where his daughter, Anna Boettiger, launched a vessel, FDR spoke to a cheering crowd of twenty thousand and said, impishly, “You know I am not supposed to be here today.” As the audience joined in his laughter, he could not resist tweaking the press corps. He told his listeners, “You are the possessors of a secret which even the newspapers of the United States don't know. I hope you will keep the secret because I am under military and naval orders . . . and my motions and movements are supposed to be secret.” The crowd loved it. The reporters were not amused.

The President returned to Washington to find an OSS analysis that reinforced his intuition: North Africa made both political and military sense as America's debut into the European war. According to anti-Nazi colonial officers with whom Colonel Eddy met secretly, the French army would put up only token resistance against the invasion.

The President had taken out one more insurance policy. He had asked the respected Princeton pollster Hadley Cantril to do some discreet sampling. The challenge was formidable even for a pulse taker of Cantril's stature. His people were to evaluate how North Africans, particularly the French, would react to an American invasion—and do so without arousing suspicion that an invasion was in the offing. Cantril's staff managed to conduct only 142 usable interviews across North Africa. Statistically, the sampling was small to the point of near invalidity. But the responses were agreeable to the President's ear. Those polled were far less opposed to an American than a British invasion. FDR also had devised a cover story. The moment the troops landed, Marshal Pétain in Vichy was to be handed a personal message from Roosevelt explaining why Americans were attacking French territory. The President had it on good authority, his message would explain, that the Germans were planning to seize all of French North Africa, a potential disaster for both France and the Allies. No evidence, however, supported his rationale.

One last clandestine scheme had to be fitted into Torch. In mid-October, General Marshall brought to the President a bold plan to defuse French resistance to the operation. Robert Murphy, after returning to North Africa, had rendezvoused secretly in Algeria with Major General Charles Mast, Chief of Staff of the French XIX Corps, and five other French colonial leaders. On this occasion, Murphy practiced his own deceit. He revealed that the Allies, spearheaded by the Americans, were going to invade French North Africa. In order to discourage French resistance, he described the power being massed for the offensive: two thousand planes, seven aircraft carriers, eight battleships, a hundred destroyers, and, most astonishing to General Mast, a half million men. The ship count for Torch was close; the number of planes exaggerated; but the manpower figure had been inflated by 400 percent. Murphy then posed the question Roosevelt most wanted answered: Would the French cooperate to avoid spilling blood between two old allies? When the Americans landed, would the French hold their fire?

Mast raised the greatest French fear, that a landing in North Africa would provoke the Germans to occupy all of France. The general wanted a fuller picture of the invasion than the diplomat could provide. He wanted Allied military commanders to be spirited into Algeria to describe for him exactly what the colonials could expect. Murphy communicated Mast's wishes back to the White House. The reward for neutralizing French forces without bloodshed was so desirable that Mast's request was immediately forwarded to Torch's commander in chief, General Eisenhower, then in London. On October 17, a Saturday, Eisenhower dared interrupt Prime Minister Churchill's weekend at Chequers to ask for an emergency cabinet meeting, to which Churchill grumpily agreed.