Joseph E. Persico (57 page)

While Doenitz's submariners were experimenting with floating launch pads, the Luftwaffe was testing the Junker Ju 390. This six-engine bomber had supposedly test-flown a 6,000-mile round trip for thirty-two hours and skirted, without detection, within twelve miles of New York. And well over a year had passed since intercepted cables from Oshima's embassy in Berlin had reported work on the Me-264, a bomber also intended to reach New York.

But the Germans' bedevilment was time. Little doubt existed about their technological prowess, as the V-1s and V-2s shattering London made clear. In another engineering triumph, Me-262s, the first operational jet fighters, capable of flying 540 miles per hour, had come on-line in the summer of 1944 and were shooting Allied bombers out of the sky before conventional fighters could catch them. But were enough resources and will left in a country whose ultimate defeat seemed inevitable? The President chose to err on the side of caution. George Earle's rocket warning coincided with the December Ardennes offensive, a shock that made Germany appear a still formidable foe. The reality, however, was that secret weapons destined for American cities would never get beyond blueprints, drawing boards, and experiments. For Nazi Germany, time was running out.

The rocket scare passed, and on February 15, Commander Earle came home from Turkey, resuming his turbulent life without missing a beat. The very next day his wife, Huberta, mother of his four sons, filed for divorce, charging that Earle had absented himself from her “without cause” since January 1942. Earle's last battle took place soon afterward. He left his bachelor digs in the Philadelphia Racquet Club and, in spite of a fever of 103 degrees, boarded a train for Washington to see FDR. On his arrival, still trembling with illness, he was greeted by the President's correspondence secretary, William D. Hassett. Hassett, known around the White House as “the bishop” for his magisterial manner, informed Earle that the President was too busy to see him. Earle returned to his Philadelphia club and sulked. He then wrote a letter to FDR's daughter, Anna, pointing out that though he had started out as a Republican, he had been among the first to rally to Roosevelt's candidacy in 1932. “Imagine my shock,” he told her, “when I arrived to find myself about to be brushed off to the inactive list . . . for what Admiral Brown has been frank enough to say on several occasions was because of my anti-Russian attitude. In other words, because I told your father the truth about conditions in Russia and countries occupied by Russia, that near-Bolshevist group of advisers around the President had persuaded him to force me out of the picture.” Earle was not about to go quietly into the night. Unless the President objected, he told Anna, “I want to present the following to the members of Congress and to the American people. . . . I shall point out why Russia today is a far greater menace than Germany ever was, because of its manpower, natural resources, prospect of Bolshevizing Europe, including Germany, and because of its millions of fifth columnists. I shall show how Russia twenty-five years after its Revolution is exactly the same Red Terror it was then, of its 15 million people in concentration camps, of its treatment of the Jews and of Labor. I shall prove how Stalin deliberately started this war with his pact of friendship with Hitler so that the capitalistic nations would destroy each other. . . . If I do not hear from you in a week, I shall understand the President has no objection to me sending this letter to members of Congress and the press.”

Three days later, Earle had the President's response. For all his intimacy with FDR, he had gauged the man badly. “I have read your letter of March 21st to my daughter Anna,” Roosevelt wrote, “and I have noted with concern your plan to publicize your unfavorable opinion of one of our allies at the very time when such a publication from a former emissary of mine might do irreparable harm to our war effort. . . . You say you will publish unless you are told before March 28th that I do not wish you to do so. I not only do not wish it but I specifically forbid you to publish any information or opinion about an ally that you may have acquired while in office or in the service of the United States Navy.” FDR then called in Admiral Brown and instructed him to send a message to Navy secretary James Forrestal with a copy to the Bureau of Personnel. He wanted it understood “that Commander Earle no longer has any special instructions or responsibility to the President.” Earle backed down. He promised FDR, “I shall issue no public statement of any kind again so long as you are the President.” All he asked for now was “that I be transferred to inactive duty.” He was not to get off so lightly. “Your orders to the Pacific have already been issued,” FDR wrote back. “I think you had better go ahead and carry them out.” For all the President cared, George Earle could spend the rest of the war aboard a rust bucket off Guam.

*

In the first week of January 1945, J. Edgar Hoover sent a young agent to the White House to hand-deliver a report that the FBI chief believed the President must see. The message offered proof either of the obstinacy or the vitality of the enemy. Three years had passed since the President had pressed for the execution of six out of the eight German saboteurs who had landed on the East Coast. Now Hoover was telling him that he had caught two more spies delivered by submarine, one supposedly related to the President.

William Colepaugh had never fit in. He was a bony, six-foot-two twenty-six-year-old from a good Connecticut family, but a social outcast and a loner. Attorney General Francis Biddle remembered the teenage Willy Colepaugh. The Biddles had been vacationing at Black Point, Connecticut, where Willy's father frequently fixed their windmill-powered water pump. “Willy, I suppose about sixteen at the time,” Biddle later recalled, “must have been something of a problem even then, for I can remember our neighbors saying when the boy got into some small scrape, ‘I wonder what will happen to Willy Colepaugh.'” His parents managed to get the boy into Admiral Farragut Academy in New Jersey, and Willy then went on to study marine engineering at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. But he flunked out of MIT, studying too little and drinking too much. Only one thing appeared to engage Colepaugh's imagination. His mother's parents had emigrated from Germany, and Willy swelled with borrowed pride at the Reich's early victories. He went into the Navy, but his vocal Nazi sympathies led to his discharge in 1943, “for the good of the service.” By January 1944, though Germany's military fortunes had begun to wane, Colepaugh's faith remained unshaken and he took a fateful step. He earned a berth on the Swedish liner
Gripsholm,
jumped ship in Lisbon, and made his way to Germany. There he was recruited into the SD by the legendary Major Otto Skorzeny, rescuer of Benito Mussolini.

During spy training at The Hague, the SD teamed Colepaugh with Erich Gimpel, eight years his senior and an expert in high-frequency radio. The two men, with Colepaugh in command, formed
Unternehman Elster,
Operation Magpie. They were to be infiltrated into the United States by submarine to spy on shipyards, airplane factories, and rocket-testing sites. Colepaugh managed to persuade his SD superiors that a single man in America needed $15,000 per year to live on, at a time when the average U.S. annual family income was $2,378. Thus two men embarked on a mission estimated to last two years would need $60,000, according to Colepaugh. Not only did the SD unquestioningly provide this sum in cash, but also added ninety-nine diamond chips, in case the two agents were somehow parted from their dollars.

On November 29, 1944, U-1230, after passing an unnerving eight days avoiding American patrols by resting on the sea bottom off the coast of Maine, slipped into Frenchman Bay and put Colepaugh and Gimpel ashore. The two spies subsequently made their way to New York City, where Colepaugh showed little appetite for espionage, but keen interest in drinking and womanizing from his seemingly bottomless finances. The carousing was partly a mask to conceal Colepaugh's mounting anxiety. On Christmas Day he went to the home in Queens of an old Farragut school chum, Edward Mulcahy, where he bared his soul. The two spent most of the holiday holed up in Mulcahy's bedroom wrestling over what Willy should do. The next day, he turned himself in to the FBI and readily volunteered where the agents would find Gimpel.

What Hoover, in reporting the arrests to the President, conveniently omitted was that, as in the case of the eight earlier saboteurs, the Magpie mission had been undone not by brilliant FBI detective work but because Colepaugh gave himself up. In a subsequent report to the President, Hoover revealed that Havel Lina Colepaugh, Willy's mother, upon being questioned by the FBI, claimed that her son was FDR's third cousin. Willy bore the same relationship to the Theodore Roosevelt branch of the family, she claimed. Consequently, he was also related to the First Lady. During the 1927 funeral of her husband, Mrs. Colepaugh told her interrogators, “the Colepaugh family Bible disappeared” and later popped up in the Franklin Roosevelt family's possession. “She stated that at the President's Inauguration in Washington, it was discovered that the Bible purported to be the Roosevelt family Bible was in reality the Colepaugh family Bible.” FDR was unmoved. He told Hoover, “[H]e [Willy] is no relation of mine. Finally, the family Bible on which I take the oath of office happens to be a Roosevelt one with manuscript notations of births and deaths as far back as the 17th Century. Enuf said!” On Valentine's Day 1945, Colepaugh and Gimpel were convicted by a military tribunal of espionage and were sentenced to death. A week later, Bill Donovan, in the very sort of interference that infuriated Hoover, sent the President a wrap-up of espionage and sabotage cases in the United States since the war's outbreak. Twenty cases, including Colepaugh's and Gimpel's, had been brought to trial, with sixteen completed, one under way, and three pending. Donovan's unsubtle point was that the tip-off in sixteen of these cases had been provided by British intelligence, and it was he who was thickest with the British, not J. Edgar Hoover.

*

FDR believed that another meeting with Stalin and Churchill was imperative. The controversial postwar frontiers of Poland had to be settled. The occupation zones of conquered Germany, roughed out at Tehran, had to be fixed. Most critical, the President intended to marshal his powers of persuasion toward drawing Stalin into the war in the Pacific. The Russians had agreed in principle at Tehran to join the battle, but where and how soon? What Henry Stimson and the Joint Chiefs of Staff were telling Roosevelt in 1945 was chilling. No assurance yet existed that the hushed activities at Los Alamos would succeed. The atomic bomb could well prove to be a $2 billion dud. Planning for Operation Olympic, the invasion of Japan, was therefore proceeding on the assumption that conventional forces would have to defeat the enemy. The assault against the Japanese home islands, FDR was told, would engage five million American troops. D-Day was set for November 1, 1945, and the war could not be won, the Joint Chiefs projected, before the end of 1946. Churchill was even less sanguine. He feared that the Pacific war would drag on into 1948. Roosevelt's objective was to diminish the bloody American casualties predicted by enlisting the Red Army against Japan.

A physically failing FDR had hoped to achieve his ends without making another exhausting journey abroad. Months before, he had confided to Daisy Suckley that he thought this time he could persuade Stalin to come to him. “When I first got to Tehran,” he told her, “Stalin came to call on me. Of course I did not get up when he came into the room. We shook hands and he sat down, and I caught him looking curiously at my legs and ankles.” Later at dinner, “when Stalin was seated on my right, he turned to the interpreter and said, ‘Tell the President that I now understand what it has meant for him to make the effort to come on such a long journey. Tell him that the next time I will come to him.'” It was not to be. As plans for the three-power summit advanced, Roosevelt cabled Churchill, “I have received a reply from U.J. [Uncle Joe] which is not very helpful in the selection of a place for our next meeting. He stated that if our next meeting on the Black Sea is acceptable, he considers it an extremely desirable plan. His doctors to whose opinion he must give consideration do not wish him to make any big trips.” Thus the paraplegic with the failing heart agreed to travel over seven thousand miles to accommodate the Soviet leader who still had eight years to live.

On January 23, 1945, FDR boarded the cruiser USS
Quincy
for the first leg of his journey. He sailed the
Quincy
to Malta and from there flew the presidential plane, the
Sacred Cow,
for seven hours to an airfield at Saki in the Crimea. The field was crusted with snow and the Soviets had marked off its perimeter with soldiers placed shoulder to shoulder. FDR was lowered by a makeshift elevator from the plane to a waiting automobile. The worst was yet to come. The President, to whom the swaying of a train was agonizing, began a jolting eighty-mile odyssey mostly over dirt roads across the steppes and through the Yalta Mountains. As Admiral Leahy described the journey, “That mountain road had been built in the era of the horse when long base cars had never been dreamed of. The curves were short and sharp without retaining walls, and jutted out to the very edge of the continuous precipice.”

The route was littered with the waste of war, burnt-out houses, charred tanks, upended railroad cars, and rotting animal carcasses, resulting from fierce fighting to drive the Germans out of the Crimea. The visible suffering of the people, the ruination of their farms and villages, and the massive casualties reconfirmed FDR's long-held conviction that the Russians still bore the brunt of the war. On reaching Yalta, he was put up at the Livadia Palace, the three-storied marble summer retreat of the last czar, Nicholas II, one of a handful of buildings still standing in the city. Churchill, on his arrival, observed, “. . . [I]f we had spent ten years on research, we could not have found a worse place than Magneto [code name for Yalta].” He told his aides that he could survive only “by bringing an adequate supply of whiskey.”