Joseph E. Persico (60 page)

Jim Angleton had never been comfortable with Vessel. He found it hard to swallow that an institution as tightly shrouded in secrecy as the papacy, whose intelligence activities reached back for a millennium, could be so easily breached. Angleton, a Catholic of near-mystical vision, had his own pipeline into the Vatican, the same Bishop Giovanni Battista Montini who was Vessel's supposed entrée. Still, Angleton faced a classic intelligence dilemma. To inquire about a source in the Vatican would be to reveal that the OSS was spying on the Vatican. Angleton managed to walk the tightrope. He learned that one of Bishop Montini's duties was to maintain the Holy See's archives. Vessel had informed the OSS: “The procedure of the Papal audiences is the following: After each audience, Monsignor Pio Rossignani, private secretary to the Pope, heard personally from the Pope what was said. He often writes a rough copy that the Pope corrects so that it may be registered in the archives.” Access to these archives was presumably what had enabled Scattolini to provide his controllers with near-verbatim reports of what passed between the pope and his inner circle. Scattolini had, in fact, provided detailed accounts of twenty such private papal audiences. All told, his reports had generated over seventeen hundred OSS documents. But, as Angleton learned through Bishop Montini, no transcripts of papal audiences were ever made. None existed in the Vatican archives.

All that Virgilio Scattolini did have access to was a fertile imagination. His earlier work at
L'Osservatore Romano,
his ear as a playwright for convincing dialogue, and a spongelike memory had combined to produce plausible fabrications swallowed at the highest levels. The Rome station chief had been fooled. OSS Washington had been fooled. Donovan himself had been fooled. At times, State, the War Department, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the military services appear to have been taken in. But was the object of Donovan's keenest attentions, the President, duped as well?

Inexplicably, and inexcusably, not only did Donovan fail to notify the President that the communications he had rushed to the White House were suspect, but he also continued to send FDR Vessel reports even as his counterintelligence officers in Rome were exposing the pornographer/playwright/con artist. More than a month after Donovan wrote James Dunn of his suspicions of Vessel, number 84a went to the White House, in which the “Apostolic Delegate in Yokohama” tells the Vatican that a prince of the Japanese royal family is preparing “a set of conditions which they judge acceptable to the Anglo-Americans” to achieve peace.

Scattolini, never imagining how high his fictions would reach, could not know that some of what he fabricated could be checked for authenticity by the President himself. While FDR was en route to Yalta, a Vessel report relayed to him told of a “White House spokesman” forwarding a message for the Vatican regarding Poland's future. The President had to know that no such message ever existed. Most telling, the President received Magic, the direct interception of Japanese diplomatic traffic coming out of Rome, Berlin, and other capitals, intelligence that did not square with what Vessel was reporting. FDR had no need to depend on hearsay from an anonymous spy in Rome. If the OSS had not been shut out of Magic, Donovan would likely have been spared the humiliation of having his proudly trumpeted source exposed as a swindle.

It was FDR's habit, upon receiving any communication of consequence to the war, to forward it to Leahy, Stimson, Stettinius, or whomever he wanted to deal with the matter, usually with an appended note reading, “Please take care of this,” “What do you make of this?” or “What are we doing about this?” No record exists among the voluminous Roosevelt archives that FDR ever forwarded a single Vessel message to anyone, no matter how seemingly urgent, as in the case of supposed Japanese peace feelers. No evidence establishes that FDR took any action as a result of a Vessel report. The question then arises, if he must have known the spuriousness of this source, why did FDR never say so to Donovan or anyone else? Roosevelt may have chosen not to embarrass a man whose boldness and energy, if not his reliability, he genuinely admired. However, the likeliest explanation, given the President's crushing burdens coupled with his steady physical decline, is that FDR lacked the time or energy to focus on a misbegotten Donovan venture. Whatever the reasons, leaving the matter in limbo was not odd, but typical of FDR's impenetrable motives.

As for Virgilio Scattolini, he never knew that he had been unmasked. Indeed, at Angleton's insistence, the Italian kept receiving his monthly $500 stipend, not for his worthless product, but because Angleton, of a conspiratorial bent that would persist throughout his long subsequent CIA career, could not believe that one lone figure could have produced the torrent of Vessel intelligence. He wanted to uncover the chain that, he was convinced, would lead from Scattolini to a wider ring of deceit.

The Vessel fiasco came at a bad time for the OSS, exploding within weeks after the
Chicago Tribune
debacle. Donovan would now have to survive the twin batterings of Walter Trohan and Virgilio Scattolini.

Chapter XXVII

Who Knew—and When?

THE SOVIET Union was still at peace with Japan, outwardly respecting the nonaggression pact between the two countries. Stalin had told FDR at Tehran in 1943, “We Soviets welcome your successes in the Pacific,” but as for Russian participation, his forces in the East were, he claimed, sufficient only for defense. If the United States wanted the Soviet Union fighting Japan, Stalin estimated, “Our forces . . . must be increased about three-fold.” Out of this demand was born a secret collaboration between the United States and USSR beginning in October 1944 to bring the Soviet Union to offensive strength in the Pacific. The operation was code-named Hula. Under Hula, the United States would covertly turn over to the Soviet Union a flotilla of thirty U.S. frigates, sixty minesweepers, fifty-six submarine chasers, and thirty large landing vessels. Chosen to head the project was one of the least likely officers in the U.S. Navy, a newly minted forty-five-year-old captain named William S. Maxwell. Maxwell had been born in Warsaw and his surname at birth was Dzwoniecki. The boy went to sea at age thirteen and, penniless and not speaking a word of English, jumped ship in New York City. He was subsequently adopted by a U.S. Navy recruiter, George Maxwell, joined the Navy, and rose from seaman apprentice to his present rank, forging along the way a reputation as a hard-driving but fair commander. Besides his get-things-done record, Maxwell was chosen for Hula because he spoke a bastard Russian. This Polish American, his thick Slavic features set in permanent resolution, was to complete his mission at one of the most inhospitable spots on earth, Cold Bay, on the southwestern tip of the Alaskan peninsula, where the average annual rainfall was forty inches and the port was shrouded in fog half the time. Here, Maxwell began receiving fifteen thousand Soviet naval officers and enlisted men, housing them, feeding them, and training them to take over the American ships, all without Japan's knowledge.

*

Roosevelt had decided at Yalta not to tell Stalin about the Manhattan Project. It did not matter. Klaus Fuchs, Theodore Hall, and other covert servants of the Soviet Union had filled the void. Other major figures who did or did not know about the war's most precious secret formed a crazy quilt pattern. In mid-1943, FDR had written Robert Oppenheimer to warn the project's scientific leader of the absolute necessity of protecting the secrecy of the enterprise. Yet, to the President's dismay, Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter had learned of the bomb. General Douglas MacArthur, despite his towering role in the Pacific war, knew nothing of the weapon until the eve of its use. General Eisenhower had only a sketchy understanding. He knew more about what the Germans were up to in the realm of the atom than what was happening in Los Alamos. “From time to time,” he wrote in his wartime memoirs, “. . . staff officers from Washington arrived at my headquarters to give me the latest calculations concerning German progress in the development of new weapons, including as possibilities bacteriological and atomic weapons. . . . I was told that American scientists were making progress in these two important types. . . .” Still, FDR never directly revealed the secret to Ike, who later admitted, “I did not then know, of course, that an army of scientists had been engaged in the production of the weapon.” That army, by now, had grown to 150,000 persons, most of whom had no idea of the end point of their efforts.

Though Eisenhower was not directly informed, one of his subordinates heard the secret from the President's mouth. General Omar Bradley, fresh from victory in Sicily as commander of II Corps, had been recalled to Washington in September 1943 to brief General Marshall and the President. As Bradley told the story, “I reported as requested. I had seen Roosevelt at aforementioned White House receptions when I was a lowly lieutenant colonel, but I did not really know him.” Marshall, Bradley believed, set up the White House appointment to give FDR a chance to judge a promising American commander. If so, Bradley appeared to pass the test since, he recollected, “When I finished, Roosevelt astounded me with a fairly detailed briefing on our Manhattan Project, the effort to build an atomic bomb, then one of our most secret projects and one I had never heard of.” The President also confided to Bradley, “[T]he Germans might be leading us in the race to build this revolutionary weapon. . . .” Bradley felt burdened by the confidence. As he later wrote, “I decided that the President, however well intentioned, had spoken out of turn. Not once during the war did I question Marshall or Ike about the atomic bomb, nor did they mention it to me.”

Eisenhower did not learn definitely about the bomb until Henry Stimson informed him at the Potsdam conference in July 1945. By then, FDR was dead and use of the bomb less than three weeks off. Soon afterward, Ike shared the secret with his son and aide, John. Though troubled by the morality of using so annihilating a weapon, he wondered aloud, “What if the Germans had had this bomb on D-Day?” The military men in almost daily contact with FDR, General Marshall and Admiral Leahy, were privy to the secret, the latter convinced that an atomic weapon “is the biggest fool thing we have ever done. The bomb will never go off, and I speak as an expert in explosives.”

Edward Stettinius was summoned to the White House one day in January 1945. The secretary of state arrived just as the steward was clearing away the tray from which the President and Grace Tully had shared sandwiches. FDR waited until the door closed behind his secretary, directed Stettinius to sit down, and then swore him to secrecy. He proceeded to brief his goggle-eyed visitor about the bomb. “I am not sure how long it will take to perfect,” he told Stettinius, but its potential was awesome. If dropped on the intersection of Broadway and Forty-second Street, it “would lay New York low.” While trusting in Stettinius, Roosevelt had withheld the knowledge for years from the less compliant Cordell Hull, who had been his secretary of state when the Manhattan Project was launched. Hull's independent streak may have explained FDR's choice in whom to confide. But no discernible reason existed to share the secret with the prickly, aggressive Jimmy Byrnes, formally director of the War Mobilization Board, whom FDR had installed in a White House office as “my assistant President.” Byrnes had accompanied Roosevelt to Yalta, and after FDR told him of the atomic bomb, became a vigorous advocate for its use.

Congressional leaders had been brought in on the secret at the narrowest level. Until 1944 the administration had been able to hide the cost of building the bomb in obscure pockets of the War Department's budget. But the costs had soon outgrown these concealments. The President directed his three associates most respected for their integrity, Stimson, Marshall, and Vannevar Bush, to meet with Sam Rayburn, Speaker of the House, John W. McCormack, the majority leader, and Joseph W. Martin, the minority leader, to tell them only that the financing of a weapon of unimaginable power was at stake. The leaders accepted the word of the President's emissaries and shepherded through Congress, without debate, massive appropriations to continue the work at Los Alamos.

Henry Morgenthau Jr., as Treasury secretary, had played an early and unwitting role in juggling funds and providing silver to build the bomb. Still, that proud and garrulous confidant of the President was not admitted to the knowing circle. He wrote in his diary why he believed he had been instructed to shift the money and metal: “I got the impression it's some secret weapon.” Roosevelt knew of the secretary's vehement opposition to the use of poison gas, and Morgenthau later reasoned that this was why he had not been told about the atom bomb.

Two other members of the President's immediate circle learned about the bomb, not from FDR, but indirectly through his wife, who herself first heard the secret from the unlikely 1943 encounter with Irving Lowen, the young physicist who had managed to talk his way into the First Lady's apartment in New York. Nearly a year later, on June 25, as she returned from grocery shopping, Lowen again showed up at her place. As she later rashly wrote her friend Joe Lash, still in the Army, “We now have the discovery I'm told which he [Lowen] feared Germany would have first but I gather no one wants to use it for its destructive power is so great that no one knows where it might stop.” Sensing that this was one arena where she could not influence her husband, she asked two of his trusted associates, Steve Early, the White House press secretary, and Sam Rosenman, to see Lowen. The two men met thereafter in Early's office with the furtive, jumpy scientist, who ran his hands over the walls and demanded to know if the room was bugged. He opened the door and peered in both directions to see if anyone was eavesdropping. He insisted that no secretaries be allowed in. He then told his two astonished listeners in detail about the Manhattan Project, of which they had previously known nothing. He had gone to see Mrs. Roosevelt, Lowen said, because big corporations, particularly Du Pont, were taking over the project so that they could monopolize the production of atomic energy after the war. On Lowen's departure, Early promptly reported him to the War Department. He was subsequently removed from the atomic program.

Two more Manhattan Project physicists chose to spill out their fears about the bomb to the First Lady, Leo Szilard and Enrico Fermi. It was Szilard who had originally drafted the letter Albert Einstein signed alerting FDR, “A single bomb of this type, carried by a boat and exploded in a port, might well destroy the whole port together with surrounding territory.” Now, in the spring of 1945, as success neared, Szilard and Fermi were having second thoughts. They met with Mrs. Roosevelt and urged her to warn her husband of its unimaginable destructive force. Though she had already learned of the Manhattan Project from Lowen, there is no indication that the First Lady was ever told by her husband about the bomb or that she ever discussed its use with him.

One of her sons almost knew the secret. Jimmy Roosevelt had been granted leave to come home from the South Pacific to attend FDR's muted fourth inauguration. On finding his father in his study, the young Marine embraced him, tears welling in his eyes. He later recalled the moment. “When he asked about my emotion, I said simply that although we were winning, we still had a lot of fighting to face and I could not know I would be coming back; that the invasion of Japan, for example, was bound to be bloody.” The President answered, “James, there will be no invasion of Japan. We have something that will end our war with Japan before any invasion ever takes place.” Jimmy asked what it was. FDR replied, “I am sorry, even though you are my son, I cannot tell you. . . . But it is there, it is something we can use and will use if we have to, something we will certainly use before you or any of our sons die in an invasion of Japan.”

J. Edgar Hoover learned of the bomb through a roundabout route. Steve Nelson, the Communist Party's West Coast organizer, had managed to penetrate the Manhattan Project by cultivating Joseph W. Weinberg, a physicist employed at the Berkeley laboratories, who passed secrets to him. Nelson, though unaware of it, was being tailed and wiretapped by the FBI. Thus, in the spring of 1943, Hoover learned of the bomb through Nelson's recorded conversations. Hoover's rival, Wild Bill Donovan, heading an agency employing thousands of persons engaged in intelligence, knew nothing of the atom bomb.

A quandary lingers as to when Harry Truman learned of the bomb. His predecessor as vice president, Henry Wallace, had been a member of the atomic energy policy group and had been present with Roosevelt, Churchill, and Harry Hopkins when bomb developments were discussed. Considering Wallace's other loose-lipped disclosures to his Swiss diplomat brother-in-law, leakage of the secret of Los Alamos to Germany seemed more than a remote possibility. But on this subject, Wallace kept his mouth closed. Truman denied ever being informed of the bomb before becoming president. He writes in his memoirs that the day after FDR died, “Stimson told me that he wanted me to know about an immense project that was under way—a project looking to the development of a new explosive of almost unbelievable destructive power. . . . It was the first bit of information that had come to me about the atomic bomb. . . .”

Yet, a respected historian and leading Truman scholar, Robert Ferrell, offers an alternative version. On August 18, 1944, FDR invited his daughter, Anna, and his then vice presidential running mate, Senator Truman, to join him for lunch. The staff set up a table under the shade of a magnolia tree on the rear lawn of the White House. The President behaved that day very much as the senator had come to know him. As Truman once told a reporter, “He does all the talking, and he talks about what he wants to talk about, and he never talks about anything you want to talk about, so there isn't much you can do.” During the alfresco lunch, Truman mentioned that his wife, Bess, was out of town, which prompted a Roosevelt story about Eleanor. In a later letter to his wife the senator wrote, “[T]he president told me that Mrs. R. was a very timid woman and wouldn't go to political meetings or make any speeches when he first ran for governor of N.Y. Then he said, ‘Now she talks all the time.'”

FDR suggested to Truman that they defeat the heat of the day by taking off their jackets. Photographers and newsreel cameramen, pleased to film the Democratic ticket in shirtsleeves, circled the table orchestrating their shots. At the end of the lunch, Anna left, and the President dismissed the press and asked to be left alone with his running mate. Later, Truman told his friend Harry Vaughan that he had been shocked by FDR's appearance. The President seemed feeble, and when he tried to pour cream into his tea more went into his saucer than the cup. “. . . [H]e's just going to pieces,” Truman told Vaughan. “I'm very much concerned about him.”

Later accounts of that lunch cast new light on when Truman might have originally learned of the bomb. Professor Ferrell was among the first to gain access to the oral history of Tom L. Evans, an early member of the Boss Tom Pendergast Kansas City Democratic political machine. Evans, a successful businessman who owned a chain of drugstores and a radio and television station, remained an unswerving friend of Truman for life and a frequent recipient of his confidences. Evans has claimed that he asked Truman when he had first learned about the atomic bomb. “You remember when we were together,” Truman reportedly responded, referring to the lunch with Roosevelt on the White House lawn, “and the pictures appeared in our shirtsleeves?” “Yes,” Evans answered. “That's what we were talking about,” Truman replied. The Evans account is corroborated by what Admiral Leahy told Truman biographer Jonathan Daniels, son of the Navy secretary Josephus Daniels, under whom FDR had served as assistant secretary. “Truman told me that FDR had told him much about [the bomb] situation though not details,” Leahy stated. Why Truman's account in his autobiography of when he learned of the bomb differs from that of Evans, a trusted friend, and Admiral Leahy remains cloaked in mystery. Prior to becoming president, Truman was not supposed to know. Therefore, even though FDR might have shared the secret with him, he might have felt obliged to behave as if he did not know.