The Yanks Are Coming! (32 page)

In 1929, Donovan moved to New York City and started another law firm, which became hugely successful. In 1932, he was the Republican candidate for governor of New York but was trounced in what was a very Democratic year. Donovan had hoped to use the governorship as a springboard to become the first Catholic president of the United States. He made do with enjoying the perks that came with being a wealthy lawyer. He liked living in high style; he also took a keen interest in military and foreign affairs. As American diplomat Hugh Wilson said of him, “Colonel Donovan has played an active part in American political life and is one of the leading lawyers of the country, but he has a hobby and that hobby is war.” Donovan, he added, was “not happy if there is a war on the face of the earth, and he has not had a look at it.”
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There would soon be plenty of war, and plenty of opportunity for Donovan to pursue his hobby. At first, though, personal tragedy intervened. Donovan had always been distant from his wife and son, living a largely separate life, but he had a strong rapport with his daughter, who took his wife's place at many social functions. When she was killed in a traffic accident in 1940, aged twenty-two,
Donovan's grief was profound. He was a shattered man; his hair rapidly went white. War and intelligence gathering were now more than a hobby; they were a means of escape.

Donovan had been an outspoken opponent of President Franklin Roosevelt's domestic policies, but like Roosevelt he wanted the United States prepared for war, if war should come. President Roosevelt had appointed Republicans Frank Knox as secretary of the Navy and Henry Stimson as secretary of war to generate bipartisan support for his foreign policy. He tapped Donovan too, sending him on a fact-finding mission to Britain; Donovan returned an enthusiast for helping arm the British Empire to fight the war in Europe. Frank Knox asked Donovan to join him for an inspection of America's Pacific Fleet in Hawaii. Donovan became a private citizen emissary for the administration's military and foreign policies.

Donovan's own ambition was a return to the colors and eventual combat command; the British, however, made a concerted effort to enlist Donovan as their advocate in Washington, even arranging a meeting with Prime Minister Winston Churchill, who outlined his war plans. Donovan traveled through the Balkans and the Middle East, which both he and Churchill thought strategically vital, with the message that the United States intended to support Great Britain with aid and military supplies. He also hit the speaking circuit in the United States, arguing for military preparedness and American aid for Britain.

In 1941, Roosevelt appointed him coordinator of information—a vague title and unpaid position, but both Donovan and the president intended to make the COI the unofficial director of American intelligence. They did this against the opposition of J. Edgar Hoover, head of the Federal Bureau of Investigation; Army chief of staff George Marshall, who thought the military's intelligence role would
be usurped; and the half dozen other intelligence agencies reporting to the president. Donovan ran agents, broadcast propaganda abroad, and built up an unconventional team of often brilliant, socially well-connected men—some of whom maintained businesses while they dabbled in intelligence—who supplied him with information, which he assembled, edited, and delivered to the president, eventually at regular intervals three times a day, along with his own assessments and ideas, one of which was to create an independent commando army. Donovan had not given up on the idea of a battlefield command.

Donovan suspected the Japanese would attack the United States, but he was surprised when the blow came at Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941. Late that night, in a meeting at the White House, the president told Donovan, “It's a good thing you got me started on this,”
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referring to Donovan's development and organization of American intelligence. Accurate intelligence would be crucial in the war to come. A failure of intelligence had left the United States unprepared for the attack on Pearl Harbor—something for which Donovan could not blamed, because his men had been focused on Europe and his intelligence assets in Asia were too few.
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Others, including military and naval intelligence and Hoover's FBI, came under closer scrutiny.

Donovan built an intelligence agency out of whatever materials came to hand—not just Ivy League lawyers and wealthy businessmen but academics, criminals, expatriates with possibly valuable overseas links, and anyone of whatever background with skills that might come in useful. Donovan's COI was a bit like an intelligence version of Theodore Roosevelt's Rough Riders, though with fewer cowboys and more men wearing spectacles and carrying briefcases. He relied on no elaborate security clearances, but on his own whim, others'
recommendations, and the cooperation of companies—and the Vatican—that encouraged their employees to assist Donovan's undercover assignments. Some gathered information, others analyzed it (the “chairborne division”); some engaged in sabotage, others designed weapons for saboteurs and spies. Donovan stood above it all, an ideas man of expansive imagination, blithely independent of the bureaucracy, with an enormous appetite for cloak-and-dagger operations. Roosevelt liked Donovan—his ideas were entertaining, if nothing else—and protected him from his many critics who thought him an irresponsible amateur.

THE OSS

To meet that criticism, Donovan lobbied to have his organization brought under the Joint Chiefs of Staff. It meant less independence, but it also meant that the COI's reports might be taken more seriously and that the COI would survive the number crunchers who regarded it as reckless and free-spending and largely unaccountable. The transfer was approved, and the COI—stripped of the Foreign Information Service
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—became the OSS, the Office of Strategic Services, in June 1942.

Later that year, the OSS was assigned to undermine Vichy resistance to the Allied invasion of North Africa. OSS agents supplied worthwhile intelligence but failed to stiffen the backbone of potential Vichy defectors and Free French partisans. Donovan expected to do better in future guerrilla operations—starting perhaps by dropping agents in the Balkans.

In March 1943, Roosevelt made Donovan a brigadier general. The promotion did not come with a battlefield command, but Donovan planned to use his rank, when necessary, to better fight bureaucratic
battles at home and rivalries with British intelligence abroad. Donovan was an Anglophile; he had used his intelligence reports to back Churchill against virtually every military advisor to Roosevelt in supporting the attack on North Africa rather than a direct assault on Nazi-occupied France; and he had been a great, licit conduit of intelligence to the British. But he also resented the British Empire's sense of superiority in its military and intelligence branches. He thought his OSS was at least an equal to British intelligence in many theaters and superior in some where British imperial motives might be questioned. The British reluctantly acceded to OSS operations in Greece, Romania, and Bulgaria. They were hostile, however, to the OSS dropping agents into Yugoslavia, where British operations were well established and the political alignments were complex and fragile.
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Similarly, the British were opposed to the OSS meddling in Nazi-occupied Western Europe, particularly France, where they feared that Donovan's amateurs, as they regarded them, might put British intelligence assets at risk. If OSS agents were subordinated to the British (as they sometimes were), cooperation might be possible, but the British were adamant that Donovan should not run independent operations. Donovan was equally adamant that he should. In the end, Donovan won.

“HAPPY AS A CLAM”

Not only did he win the bureaucratic battle with the British, but he managed to insert himself as one of two members of the OSS to land with American troops during the invasion of Sicily (the other was there to interrogate prisoners). On shore, he convinced General Theodore Roosevelt Jr. to lend him a jeep and a driver. Donovan promptly saw combat against an Italian patrol, which he subdued
himself with a light machine gun. His driver, Captain Paul Gale, a combat veteran, remembered that Donovan “was happy as a clam”
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after the firefight. Donovan landed with the invasion force on Salerno as well, and, perhaps hoping to re-create his adventures in Sicily, he asked General Mark Clark for a jeep and a weapon. Clark obliged.

Donovan even convinced Generals Marshall and Eisenhower to let the OSS have a crack at organizing partisan guerrilla operations in German-occupied Corsica, supporting an invasion of fifteen thousand Free French. The OSS officer in charge, Major Carleton Coon (a prewar professor of anthropology), remembered that “Far from being the great victory which . . . has been portrayed in the papers,” the Allied operation was “largely an act of occupying territory which the Germans did not want.” The Germans “left as early as, if not actually when, they wanted to leave, and the French moved in afterward.” All the OSS and its allies did was “annoy them on their way out.”
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Still, the OSS was annoying quite a lot of people—and not just the Nazis and the British and Donovan's bureaucratic enemies. Donovan's operations had gone global, from Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East to war-torn China and British India. He traveled incessantly, even into the depths of the Burmese jungle to check on OSS training of Kachin guerrillas. J. Edgar Hoover and President Roosevelt blocked Donovan from establishing a formal intelligence exchange with the Soviets,
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and Douglas MacArthur kept all but a few OSS men out of the southwest Pacific (Donovan was one of the few, landing with MacArthur at Hollandia, Dutch New Guinea), but these were the exceptions to Donovan's ever-expanding intelligence empire that by the middle of 1944 numbered eleven thousand operatives.

Of course, the giant mission in 1944 was Overlord, the invasion of Normandy. By D-Day, 6 June 1944, the OSS and the British
Special Operations Executive (SOE) had parachuted teams—the famous Jedburghs—into France to help organize and supply the French resistance, the Maquis. The OSS performed other, more standard, intelligence operations as well, such as advising on German targets for Allied bombing. General Marshall had issued an order that Donovan should not land with the invasion force, but the irrepressible Irishman finagled a berth on a ship pounding the German coastline defenses with its big guns on 6 June, and then hitchhiked aboard smaller vessels to land ashore on 7 June, coming under Messerschmitt and German machine gun fire that pinned him to the ground—and reminded him that he had forgotten his poison suicide pills. He gallantly told the OSS London station chief, Virginia aristocrat Colonel David K. E. Bruce, who was pinned down with him, that as senior officer he would shoot Bruce first and then himself if they were in danger of being captured. Luckily for them both, Allied air cover drove the Germans back. Donovan was promoted to major general in November 1944.

The OSS helped Communist partisans fight the Germans, but as the war entered its final phase, Donovan recognized the Soviets as a potential future enemy, given their scarcely disguised hostility to the United States and the West. At home, he fought a bureaucratic turf war to establish a postwar intelligence organization. His rivals were J. Edgar Hoover at the FBI and the offices of military intelligence. President Roosevelt had loved gossip and hence intelligence. His successor, President Harry Truman, did not, having a healthy skepticism of and distaste for domestic spying. While Truman admired Donovan's war record in the Great War, he did not approve of highflying Republicans in a Democrat administration and initially gave short shrift to organizing a postwar intelligence service.

“THE LAST HERO”

Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson, charged with prosecuting Nazi war criminals, eventually helped convince Truman otherwise. Donovan—who wanted revenge on the Nazis who had tortured and executed his agents during the war—provided OSS personnel and reams of useful information to help Jackson's investigations. In turn, Jackson, a Democrat, helped convince the president that the spy chief and his plans had their merits.
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That, however, was not enough to save the OSS. Truman closed it down in September 1945. He planned to create his own intelligence service, not inherit Donovan's, and eventually did so with the Central Intelligence Agency in 1947.

Instead of leading America's intelligence service after the war, Donovan returned to practicing law—without much serious interest, mainly as a means to pay off his six-figure debts. His boredom and ambition led to another run for office, this time for the Republican nomination for U.S. senator from New York in 1946. New York governor Thomas Dewey, a liberal Republican at odds both personally and politically with the “reactionary” Donovan, made certain he didn't get it. In 1952 Donovan campaigned for Eisenhower. The newly elected president passed him over for appointment as director of Central Intelligence, the job Donovan wanted. As a consolation prize he was offered the ambassadorship to France, which he declined. But when Secretary of State John Foster Dulles asked Donovan to become ambassador to Thailand, he accepted—albeit already with plans (which in the end coincided with Eisenhower's) to transform the position into a seat of covert regional anti-Communist counterinsurgency and propaganda operations. He enjoyed his time in Thailand, but he was starting to feel his age, and in 1954 he asked to be relieved of the assignment. He still hoped to be a freelance
troubleshooter in Southeast Asia but focused, for the nonce, on replenishing his once-again-drained financial coffers.