Joseph E. Persico (49 page)

In the fall of 1944, Wild Bill met with Vice Admiral Lord Louis Mountbatten, Supreme Allied Commander of the Southeast Asia Command, to try to inveigle himself into the Pacific war from which General MacArthur had thus far excluded him. Donovan told Mountbatten that if he had a job requiring two or three thousand men whom the admiral could not spare, he would happily provide twenty or thirty OSS operatives who could do it. It was, of course, hyperbole, but tinged with the Donovan hubris. The man managed to retain FDR's confidence, not in spite of his excesses, but because of them. Roosevelt had dealt with enough people to recognize the dearth of original thinking. Maybe only five of a hundred of Donovan's ideas had any merit; but most people never had five good ideas in a lifetime. Further, Donovan knew how to play to the President's pleasures. In one note FDR wrote to him, “Dear Bill, Ever so many thanks for the Himmler and Hitler stamps. I had heard that there was such a stamp as the Himmler one and it will be an interesting addition to my stamp collection.”

Donovan was both the beneficiary and victim of his zeal. What Wild Bill did possess was a powerful amalgam of Irish charm, courage, and contagious optimism. In these qualities FDR could see himself reflected. Still, Wild Bill never cracked the Roosevelt inner circle. He was never an architect of strategy, never invited into FDR's war councils along with Marshall, Leahy, Admiral King, and other shapers of the battle. One colleague described Bill Donovan as “a Cortez who . . . never found his Mexico.”

Chapter XXIII

A Secret Unshared

LIKELY THE loneliest and least contented of the President's intelligence sources sat for hours every night before a powerful Hallicrafter shortwave radio in a shabby redbrick Virginia farmhouse some twenty miles south of Washington. Putzi Hanfstaengl, now dubbed the “Dr. S Project,” had been transferred to Bush Hill, one hundred ragged acres alongside a railroad track, after the Army wanted him out of Fort Belvoir. However unhappy Hanfstaengl might be, he still represented to John Franklin Carter the thoroughbred in his agent stable, a man who provided a rare window into the world of the Third Reich. The outsized, shaggy, jut-jawed German proved a prickly asset, however. His fixed pose was to gaze disdainfully down a long patrician nose at the plebeian American soldiers assigned to tend him. His daylight hours were spent demanding more from Carter—more money, more freedom, more care for his bad teeth. Then, while others slept, Hanfstaengl monitored German news broadcasts, summarizing their content and analyzing their meaning for the White House. He self-pityingly styled himself “America's first prisoner of State.”

In 1943 he wrote directly to the President complaining that as long as he was treated by the British as a prisoner of war and by the Americans as an enemy alien, his work carried no weight. He wanted to be freed. FDR broke the bad news to Carter. “I talked with the Prime Minister about this and the answer is ‘no.' I think that too many difficult questions are present.” For all the grief Putzi caused him, Carter still believed that the man provided dollar value. He eagerly delivered to FDR another sixty-nine-page portrait of Hitler's psyche prepared by Hanfstaengl. In it, the President read of Hitler's mother fixation, his spotty education, his professed spiritual kinship to Frederick the Great and Napoleon, his vegetarianism, his ecstasy over the music of Richard Wagner, his surprising physical courage and ambiguous sexuality. Putzi recalled how in 1923, when Hitler was still a political upstart, he advised him that his patch of a mustache was unattractive and that he should grow it wider; to which Hitler replied, “If it is not the fashion now, it will be later because I wear it.” None of Putzi's revelations influenced the conduct of the war, but they fed the President's appetite for high-level tittle-tattle. FDR called Hanfstaengl's reports his “Hitler bedtime stories.”

Carter sought to use Putzi's contributions to leverage his budget. He had started out with $10,000 from the President's emergency fund, buried in the State Department for “foreign reporting.” By fiscal 1943–1944, he was asking for $10,000 a month, including money to have Putzi's tonsils removed and to repair botched dental work on his prize catch. Carter defended the request with the explanation that while Hanfstaengl was in a British POW camp, his captors “allowed their embryo doctors and dentists to practice on prisoners of war.”

Early in 1944, Carter brought to FDR another scheme concocted by Hanfstaengl. Rudolf Hess, once number three in the Nazi Party hierarchy, had, in 1941, made his quixotic solo flight to Britain to try to persuade Churchill to make a separate peace with Germany. Hess had never gotten near the Prime Minister, and for his pains had been locked up as a war prisoner. Carter urged the President to ask the British to allow Hanfstaengl to fly to England and meet with Hess, whom Putzi knew from the old days, in order to extract more recent intelligence from inside Hitler's realm. FDR vetoed the scheme. The British, he explained, were not going to let anyone question the possibly insane Nazi, who had recently hurled himself headfirst down a flight of stairs.

Carter did manage to have Hanfstaengl's son, Egon, now a U.S. Army sergeant, reassigned from the South Pacific to serve as his father's secretary at Bush Hill. Egon presented Carter with his own scheme to place before the President, one worthy of his father's panache. On his next visit to the White House, Carter explained that Egon, as a result of boyhood hikes, was well acquainted with Hitler's mountain retreat at Berchtesgaden. Armed with forged papers, Egon believed that he could slip over the Swiss border into the area. By affecting disgust over his father's defection to the Allies, and having once been a paragon of the Hitler Youth, he believed he could bluff his way into the Führer's headquarters. “If I can get close enough to shake his hand, I can kill him,” Egon had assured Carter. The President dismissed young Hanfstaengl's scheme with “a curt and clear negative,” Carter later recorded in his diary. FDR's reaction was of a piece with his other positions—his unwillingness to bomb concentration camps ostensibly to save Jews, or to support the anti-Nazi generals, or to back off from unconditional surrender. To Roosevelt, there was no alternative to victory on the battlefield.

By mid-1944, Putzi's star, always in tenuous orbit, began to fall and Carter's momentarily wobbled. Undersecretary of State Edward Stettinius called Grace Tully to tell her, “very confidentially, that the State Department did not know what [Carter's people] were doing for their $10,000 a month and that the State Department does not feel this work is of enough value to warrant spending that amount of money.” She relayed Stettinius's qualms about the Carter operation to FDR, and soon Hanfstaengl was being dismissed around the White House as “Hitler's piano player.” Within a week, FDR made his decision. The rest of Carter's work could continue, but he “did not feel it was worthwhile to continue the Dr. S. [Hanfstaengl] project and therefore it will be terminated as of July 1.” On September 25, Carter returned from a trip to New York to find a curt note from Lieutenant Colonel B. W. Davenport, his Army liaison officer with Hanfstaengl. Without consulting Carter, the Army had flown Putzi to England, where he became again an ordinary POW. Davenport's note said only, “I thought you would want this information for the completion of your files.” Furious, Carter could only rage impotently in a message he sent to the President. “My own opinion on the subject,” he said, “is that it was officious in the extreme for the Army to take this matter into their own hands and above all to take this action without notifying me. . . .” The President responded as he usually did to the unpleasant and unchangeable, with silence.

The last had not yet been heard from Putzi. Late in the fall, he wrote from a POW camp in Liverpool asking Carter to sell the Steinway piano installed for him at Bush Hill “and send the money to me.” However, Colonel Davenport informed the White House that the piano had been bought “with government money allocated to Mr. Carter.” At this final rejection, Putzi wrote Carter that in light of the “two years and three months during which I worked loyally and unremittingly in aid of the cause my son is fighting for, my reinternment seems a rather mediocre finale to a noble beginning.”

Despite the fall of Hanfstaengl, Carter's standing with FDR rebounded. Espionage need not be limited to foreign countries, and Carter found other ways to earn his keep. He had infiltrated an informant into the arms industry who was providing him with inside reports of failures in Army ordnance. He brought these critiques to the President cautioning, “The source of this information is a responsible Army officer who would certainly be subject to Pentagon reprisals if his connection with these reports should be established.” The President then sent the reports to General Marshall, adding his own layer of deception. “Dear George,” he wrote, “An occasional correspondent who sometimes makes sense, sends me the enclosed. He is an engineer of some experience. I thought I ought to pass his remarks on to you. . . .”

*

Early in the war, Hitler had made a serious blunder. His intention all along, despite the 1939 peace pact with Stalin, had been to attack Russia in mid-1941. In launching the invasion, he faced a deadline that even the then invincible Wehrmacht could not move, the element that had defeated Charles XII and Napoleon before him, the Russian winter. Hitler had six months to subjugate the vast Soviet landmass before winter set in. However, he had allowed himself to be diverted by what amounted essentially to a fit of personal pique. In March 1941, Yugoslavia had signed a treaty that made the small Balkan state practically a German puppet. Then, to Hitler's outraged astonishment, this pliant Yugoslav government was overthrown by nationalists of stiffer spine. During delirious celebrations in Belgrade's streets, the crowds jeered at Nazis and spat on the car of the German minister. “The beginning of the Barbarossa operation [to attack Russia] will have to be postponed up to four weeks,” Hitler said. First his generals must complete “Operation Punishment.” On April 6, German bombers pulverized Belgrade, killing seventeen thousand people and creating the nightmarish spectacle of crazed animals from the zoo dashing through the smoke and fire of the shattered city. The punitive diversion set Barbarossa back six crucial weeks; and three years later, Yugoslav resistance fighters were still tying down twenty-five divisions of the Wehrmacht.

The first Yugoslav resistance fighter known to FDR was Colonel Draza Mihailovic, heading a force called the Chetniks. One might have expected the President's ally Prime Minister Churchill to support Mihailovic since the Serb was an avid monarchist bent on restoring King Peter to the throne. Initially Churchill did support him, but the Chetnik leader seemed more interested in destroying political opponents than Germans to the point of making deals through which Chetnik and Wehrmacht forces agreed to leave each other alone. Mihailovic's chief rival was Josip Broz, the tough, barrel-chested, Moscow-trained general secretary of the Yugoslav Communist Party, who headed the Partisans and styled himself “Tito.” While Tito was the antithesis of a monarchist, Churchill concluded that he was making a real fight against the Nazis, and thus the Prime Minister threw Britain's support to the Communist and away from the royalist. When one of his staff asked him about the wisdom of backing a Communist army, Churchill replied, “Do you intend to make Yugoslavia your home after the war?” “No,” the subordinate answered. “Neither do I,” Churchill replied.

This split over Chetniks and Partisans was to lead to the sharpest intelligence rivalry thus far between the President and the Prime Minister. Roosevelt's objective was to heal the fractures in Yugoslav politics. In the fall of 1943, he had cabled Churchill, “. . . [T]he guerrilla forces appear to be engaged largely in fighting each other and not the Germans. . . . In the present confused condition the only hope I see for immediate favorable action is the presence of an aggressive . . . officer.” He had just the man for the job, Wild Bill Donovan. “I do not believe he can do much harm and being a fearless and aggressive character he might do much good.” Churchill shuddered at the name of this nominee, whom he had come to regard as a loose cannon. “I have great admiration for Donovan,” Churchill replied to Roosevelt. “But I do not see any centre in the Balkans from which he could grip the situation.” Besides, the Prime Minister observed, over eighty British intelligence teams inside Yugoslavia had the situation well in hand. To an aide, Churchill complained that Donovan “is shoving his nose in everywhere. We are hardly allowed to breathe.”

After Churchill dumped Mihailovic in favor of Tito, Donovan suggested to the President that the United States at least ought to maintain a nonpolitical and not necessarily supportive contact with the Chetnik leader just to know what he was up to. FDR concurred, noting, “We have no sources of intelligence whatever in a part of the Balkans which may become an important area. . . .” It was not simply a matter of collecting information, Donovan told FDR, but of not caving in to the British, who blithely assumed the senior partnership in any joint espionage. To Donovan's proposal to have the OSS parachute a mission and thus maintain contact with Mihailovic, Roosevelt replied, “I completely approve of the plan. . . . We intend to exercise this freedom of action for obtaining independent American secret intelligence.” But even a modest American listening post inside the Chetnik camp was too much for Churchill. On April 6 he cabled FDR, “We are now in the process of withdrawing all our missions from Mihailovic and are pressing [exiled] King Peter to clear himself of this millstone. . . . If at this very time, an American mission arrives at Mihailovic's headquarters, it will show throughout the Balkans a complete contrariety of action between Britain and the United States.” Forced to choose between Wild Bill and Winston Churchill, the decision of the President was inevitable. To Donovan's bitter disappointment, Roosevelt answered Churchill two days later, “In view of your expressed opinion that there might be misunderstanding by our Allies and others, I have directed that the contemplated mission be not
repeat
not sent.”

An OSS agent already in Yugoslavia, Lieutenant Colonel Lynn M. Farish, managed to get out an eleven-page report that Donovan sent to the President in July 1944. Farish described a scene with an eerie contemporaneous ring. “The situation,” he wrote, “has from the beginning been terribly confusing, and almost beyond the comprehension of an impartial outside observer. The deep-rooted causes of the internecine strife are contained in racial, religious, and political disputation which are so long standing that the people themselves do not understand them.” Each side, he reported, believed that “their first enemy is the other, with the Germans second. . . . It is useless now to endeavor to decide which side first did wrong.” Farish closed, dismayed that “the combined strength and influence of the Soviet Union, Great Britain and the United States could not put an abrupt end to the civil wars in Yugoslavia. . . . That it has not been done is, in the eyes of many, not a good portent for the future.”

The President directed Admiral Leahy to “[p]lease ask General Marshall, Admiral King, and General Arnold to read this amazing report and to let me know what they think we should do about it.” Farish's observations confirmed what FDR had long since concluded. He told the British foreign secretary, Anthony Eden, that these Yugoslavs had little in common, particularly the Serbs and Croats, and that the only practical solution was to separate them.