Authors: Roosevelt's Secret War: FDR,World War II Espionage
Tags: #Nonfiction
The President gave the most convincing explanation for his unexpected switch during a conversation with his Marine captain son, Jimmy. FDR answered when Jimmy asked why he had, in the end, picked Ike for Overlord: “Eisenhower is the best politician of the military men. He is a natural leader who can convince men to follow him and that was what we need in this position more than any other quality.” His own juggling of competing forces in governing the country had taught FDR a priceless lesson. Unless the Overlord leader also possessed a talent to reconcile rival politicians, generals, and admirals from opposite sides of the ocean, military genius alone would not suffice. Marshall could provide the latter. But Eisenhower could best supply the indispensable ingredient, the capacity to guide strong antagonists finally to say yes.
Soon after Eisenhower's appointment, Churchill received encouragement from an unwitting source that he had not acted unwisely in agreeing to support Overlord. Roosevelt made sure that the Prime Minister saw a December 1943 Magic decrypt addressed to Tokyo from Hiroshi Oshima, the Japanese ambassador in Berlin. Oshima had taken up Hitler's invitation to tour the German defenses forming the West Wall in France. In his report, Oshima described fortifications and troop deployments in terms that finally led Churchill to conclude that, while formidable, Hitler's Fortress Europa was not impregnable.
*
By 1943, Russia had dealt Germany its most telling loss thus far in the war, the defeat at Stalingrad. Further, Italy had broken with Germany, surrendered, and been invaded by the Allies. New air and sea anti-submarine tactics, aided by deciphered German codes, had broken the backs of Nazi wolf packs in the North Atlantic. What if, before Overlord could be launched, the Germans bowed to the inevitable and offered to surrender? FDR wanted to be prepared for this possibility, lest the Red Army find clear sailing all the way from the Oder River to the Atlantic Ocean. Thus he endorsed a hyper-secret, three-phased plan code-named Rankin, to which he won Churchill's agreement. Should Germany appear to be collapsing in the west, Rankin A would put an Allied force ashore well in advance of Overlord to take the Cotentin Peninsula and the port of Cherbourg. In the event of a complete Nazi pullout from occupied France and Norway, Rankin B would provide for seizing these territories. Rankin C was predicated on a total German surrender before Overlord. Roosevelt confided to his aides, as part of Rankin C, that if Germany did suddenly collapse, he was prepared to parachute American troops into the heart of Berlin to block the Red Army. “Every regulation, every restriction must go by the board if necessary,” the Rankin plan decreed. International niceties were not to stand in the way. The objective was “to transport the Army to Europe rather than obey Board of Trade regulations.”
However, despite major setbacks, German defenses stiffened rather than softened. In Italy the enemy held fast at the Cassino line, despite the Allied flanking operation at Anzio. The Germans were retreating in Russia, but not in a rout, rather with good order and discipline. The closer the May 1944 invasion date approached, the more irrelevant Rankin became, until, by the spring, it was shut down and its staff transferred to the main show.
*
Karl von Clausewitz, over a century before, had identified the element crucial to the success of Overlord. “. . . [T]here is an indirect way of gaining superiority of numbers,” he wrote. “It does this through surpriseâattacking at an unexpected place. Surprise achieves superiority almost as strongly as direct concentration of forces.” During the Big Three meeting at Tehran, Churchill had made his famous remark, “Truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies.” The plotting of Overlord must not only proceed, its progress must also be concealed. Churchill wrote in his memoirs, “Stalin and his comrades greatly appreciated this remark . . . and upon this formal note, our formal conference ended gaily.” Before leaving Tehran, FDR and Churchill had settled on a passage in “The Military Conclusions” that read, “In particular it was agreed that a cover plan to mystify and mislead the enemy as regards these operations should be concerted between the Staffs concerned.”
Beneath the pavements of Westminster, under four feet of concrete reinforced by old London tramway rails, stood Churchill's wartime command post. Here the British began putting Clausewitz into practice. In December 1943, less than a month after Tehran, two Allied operations were launched, Bodyguard and Fortitude, their planning almost as elaborate as that for Overlord itself. Bodyguard was designed to confuse the Germans as to where the Allies would land. Fortitude was to steer them to the wrong landing site, specifically, to persuade Hitler that a successful invasion across the English Channel had to occur at its narrowest point, the Pas de Calais. London Controlling Section, the deliberately gray-faced organization that oversaw Bodyguard and Fortitude, was led by Colonel John Henry Bevan, sandy-haired, mild-looking, a grandson of the founder of Barclay's Bank, a winner of the Military Cross in the First World War, a stockbroker by trade, and an unlikely professional deceiver.
“I cannot prophesy. I cannot tell you when or where the United Nations are going to strike next in Europe,” FDR said during his 1943 State of the Union address. “I cannot tell you whether we are going to hit them in Norway, through the low countries, or in France, or through Sardinia or Sicily or through the Balkans or through Polandâor at several points simultaneouslyâyes, the Nazis and the Fascists have asked for itâand they are going to get it.” Roosevelt was as much anticipating the necessary deceptions of Bodyguard as he was stoking Allied morale.
Hitler's erratic intuition, sometimes brilliant, sometimes mystifying, sometimes dead wrong, played into Allied hands, at least initially. A decrypt brought to FDR as far back as October 9, 1943, enabled the President to read Hitler's thinking about the invasion site. The Führer invited General Oshima to the Wolfsschanze (Wolf's Lair), his headquarters in Rastenburg, East Prussia, located in a mosquito-infested marshland chosen, Hitler complained, because, “No doubt some government department found the land was cheapest there.” Whatever the discomforts of the dank bunkers at the Wolfsschanze, Ambassador Oshima still prized his private moments with Hitler and the confidences entrusted to him. Oshima's latest intercepted cable reported that Hitler had told him, “I am inclined to believe that the Allies would land in the Balkans. . . .”
Still, a landing in France could never be omitted from Hitler's calculations. By entering the minds of Allied strategists, the Germans could narrow the options considerably. The attack would likely have to get under way by moonlight to help the invading fleet stay in formation. Troops would probably be put ashore just as day was breaking in order to give them some visibility without subjecting them to enemy fire in broad daylight. The attack must occur during a season when the waters were not too rough. The troops would likely come ashore, not at high tide when the landing craft would be impaled on the upright steel girders spiking the West Wall beaches, nor at low tide, when the troops would have to traverse too much open beach under heavy fire. They would probably land midway between high and low tide. All these conditions, as the Germans could calculate as well as the Allies, coalesced on the French coast in a few days in late May or the fifth, sixth, and seventh of June.
*
Early in January 1944, German intelligence services obtained a copy of a British telegram to General Eisenhower classified “Most Secret.” “Our object is to get Turkey into the war as early as possible,” the message read, “and in any case to maintain a threat to the Germans from the eastern end of the Mediterranean until Overlord is launched.” This most zealously guarded code word, Overlord, had found its way into German hands by a convoluted route. Since the message concerned Turkey, a copy had been sent to the British ambassador in Ankara, Sir Hughe Knatchbull-Hugessen. The ambassador had a valet, a swarthy, compact Albanian in his forties, heavily browed and black mustachioed, named Elyesa Bazna. His credentials included petty thief, locksmith, fireman, and chauffeur. Bazna had used his locksmith skills to copy a key to the ambassador's bedroom safe. While the ambassador was in his office or entertaining guests, Bazna was photographing documents from the safe and selling them to the Germans, including the above telegram. He was to become a legend, known to every intelligence buff, moviegoer, and reader of espionage thrillers as Cicero.
The Allies learned of the alarming leak of the invasion code word through OSS Bern's well-placed agent in Berlin, the inconspicuous Fritz Kolbe. While going over incoming traffic in the foreign office, Kolbe spotted the intercepted British message mentioning Overlord which Cicero had sold to the Germans. Kolbe, on his next phony courier run to Bern, strapped the message to his leg along with other Reich secrets and delivered them to Allen Dulles. The Bern OSS chief, upon learning that the Nazis had a source directly inside the British embassy in Turkey, immediately phoned his British counterpart, the MI6 man in Switzerland, and suggested a quiet rendezvous at an inn outside of town. There he explained that an unidentified person somehow had gained access to the most sensitive documents in the British embassy in Turkey and was passing them to the Germans. The Britisher alerted his government, and soon counterespionage agents were swarming over the Ankara embassy and interrogating the staff, except those employed in the ambassador's residence. Cicero, feeling the approaching breath of exposure, smashed his camera, threw it into a river, never photographed another document, and resigned his post on April 20, 1944.
The crafty German ambassador to Turkey, Franz von Papen, meanwhile, had cabled Berlin his guess as to what “Overlord” meant: “Apparently attack out of England.” Still, it was only a single word, submerged in the torrent of communications the Germans intercepted, just as strong signals of a Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor had been lost in the effluvia of unrelated and irrelevant data. The word “Overlord,” by itself, did not betray the crucial where or when. These were the truths that Bodyguard and Fortitude had been created to befog.
British intelligence operatives would later claim that they had known about Cicero all along and had manipulated him as a conduit for supplying disinformation to Berlin. It was a plausible defense from an espionage service caught with its pants down. Years after the war, however, in 1951, the British foreign secretary, Ernest Bevin, admitted in the House of Commons that “the ambassador's valet succeeded in photographing a number of highly secret documents in the Embassy and selling the films to the Germans.” Bevin offered no defense that Cicero had been under British control. The man was never caught.
Chapter XX
The White House Is Penetrated
THE WORLD War II myth that Prime Minister Churchill, through Ultra, knew that Coventry was about to be bombed but failed to alert the city in order to protect the codebreaking secret has proved a durable tale. However, there has remained untold for well over a half century an actual tragedy that was indeed concealed in order to protect Ultra.
Since 1943 clouds of British bombers by night and American aircraft by day had been leveling Germany's cities. President Roosevelt, through Magic and the now-sprawling OSS spy chain, received eyewitness accounts of the depth of this destruction. In one instance, Iran's minister to Sweden had been permitted to stop in Berlin to visit his wife's grave while en route from Stockholm to Tehran. Continuing his journey, the diplomat provided an OSS agent in Turkey with his firsthand account of daily life in the battered German capital. Bill Donovan had the report of the Iranian's debriefing hand-delivered to the White House. From this account, FDR learned that, except for one, “all the major railroad stations in Berlin have been completely demolished . . . 50 percent of the buildings on Unter den Linden are intact and the other 50 percent destroyed. . . . not a wall is standing at the airport which is a shambles. . . . Informant claims he drove in a cab through central and west Berlin for a distance of six miles without observing a single house standing. . . . For the most part, the population of Berlin is living underground.” During a single raid in March, the report went on, forty thousand Polish and Russian conscript workers, barred from shelters, were killed. The Berliners' best hope, the Iranian believed, was “that England and America may, in self interest, turn against Russia once they see that the Soviet is about to assume complete control.” Yet, for all this punishment, the President must have been surprised by the informant's conclusion: “The essential business of Berlin proceeds to function doggedly.”
At one point raids became so devastating that General Marshall warned the President that the Germans were threatening to try downed American and British airmen as war criminals. Marshall recommended that Roosevelt and Churchill issue a joint warning “that immediate retaliatory action will be taken if such threats are carried out.” FDR craftily told Marshall, “It seems to me that such action need not be announced before hand but that it should be put into effect the minute the Germans start anything. I think the American public would back this up. . . . I think I am right in saying that we and the British hold more German prisoners than they hold of ours.”
The Bletchley Park codebreakers contributed to the success of Allied raids. American bomber pilots, gathered in makeshift briefing rooms throughout southern England, heard their meteorological officer describe weather conditions all the way to the target and back. The airmen were unaware that the source of this data was not anemometers, barometers, or balloons, but Ultra decrypts of German weather reports.
On February 15, 1944, General Marshall sent FDR a memorandum concerning a German message out of Rome that Bletchley Hall had broken. The Wehrmacht commander had reported that thirty American bombers attacked a train while it was crossing a bridge near Orvieto, Italy. “Entire train on bridge when first bombs, including heaviest calibre, dropped on it,” the broken report read. Sixteen cars had been completely destroyed. The German commander described a hellish scene: “Half of these [cars] fell into the riverbed and other half burnt or shattered on the bridge. About five hundred prisoners, mainly English, killed. Salvage and rescue hampered or even prevented by considerable number of delayed action bombs so that some of the severely wounded, who would otherwise have been saved, also died.” Churchill, upon learning through this Ultra decrypt of the grisly, unwitting American assault on his own troops, instructed Sir Stewart Menzies, chief of the British secret service, “[T]his information should be given to President with assurance that no feeling of complaint whatsoever is implied.” The “Most Secret” message was to be seen by only General Marshall and the President, “and information should not (repeat not) be made available to any other person.” The British also made clear that knowledge of this catastrophe would be tightly circumscribed at their end. Beyond the Prime Minister, the secret was known to only a handful of top officials “and will not (repeat not) be passed down to lower levels.” Before passing Churchill's message along to FDR, Marshall added a note: “The reason the British authorities are so insistent that no other eyes than yours, mine and [General Clayton] Bissell's [Army G-2] see this, as a leak would point directly to British control of German code.”
The story of Churchill's refusal to warn Coventry that it was to be bombed proved apocryphal. The hushed-up account of American bombers killing hundreds of British POWs, however, provided an actual instance of the Prime Minister's determination to protect Ultra.
*
Two types of bodies circled the Roosevelt heavensâplanets, such as General Marshall, Admiral Leahy, and Secretary Stimson, steady in their orbits, unspectacular, dependable; and shooting stars, fiery, unpredictable, occasionally burning outâa Bill Bullitt, a George Earle, a Wild Bill Donovan. The latter group exhibited a pattern. They were all mold breakers, channel jumpers, charmers, and high-wire artists, mirroring sides of FDR's character. Late in 1943, Donovan embarked on one of his boldest gambits. With the President's approval he flew to Russia to attempt to arrange a swap of American and Soviet intelligence missionsâan OSS station in Moscow for an NKVD station in Washington. Donovan arrived in the snow-blanketed Soviet capital two days before Christmas, where he was taken in tow by FDR's troubleshooting ambassador, Averell Harriman, and greeted warmly by the ordinarily dour Soviet foreign minister, Vyacheslav Molotov. Two days after Christmas, through Molotov's intercession, Donovan and Harriman found themselves inside the NKVD headquarters, a grim, czarist structure at 2 Dzerzhinsky Street. There they met with the Soviet foreign intelligence chief, General Pavel Fitin, and a man introduced only as General Alexander Ossipov. The latter, unknown to the Americans, was Gaik Ovakimyan, the NKVD official in charge of subversion in foreign countries, including the United States. The two Soviets formed a classic good-cop bad-cop duo. Fitin, blond, blue-eyed, and soft-spoken, appeared an unlikely spymaster. Ossipov/Ovakimyan, however, was described by another American present as easily passing for “the boon companion of Boris Karloff.” Donovan proceeded to lay out his espionage exchange scheme, arguing that it would enable two allies fighting the same enemy to trade useful intelligence, to avoid operations that stepped on each other's toes, and to swap methods for carrying out sabotage inside the Reich. As a sweetener, he immediately offered to share with the NKVD the OSS's spy-training curriculum. By the end of the day, Fitin had agreed to the exchange and to allowing Donovan to set up an OSS mission in Moscow under Colonel John Haskell, a close Donovan associate, also present. The proposal was placed before Stalin, who approved with an alacrity that might have aroused suspicion. The Soviets soon announced that their candidate to head a seven-man NKVD office in Washington would be Colonel A. G. Grauer.
On January 6, 1944, in a raging snowstorm, Donovan flew out of Moscow. All that now remained for him was to win approval of his scheme from the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the President. But J. Edgar Hoover beat him to the punch. The FBI chief had quickly ferreted out what Donovan had been up to in Russia, likely tipped off by Army G-2, his ally in the turf battles against Donovan. He dictated a letter to his secretary, Helen Gandy, headed “Personal and Confidential” to “Dear Harry,” and had it hand-delivered to his tested conduit, Harry Hopkins. Hopkins read Hoover's letter and told Grace Tully to make sure the President saw it “at once.” Hoover's warning was dire. Donovan's U.S.-Soviet intelligence swap was a Russian ruse, the FBI chief charged, “a highly dangerous and most undesirable procedure” that would “establish in the United States a unit of the Russian Secret Service which has admittedly for its purpose the penetration into the official secrets of various government agencies.”
Donovan did not get to the President until five days later, and was now on the defensive. He had not yet won approval for the exchange from the Joint Chiefs of Staff, but he gamely assured the President that his prospects looked good. The move was wise, he insisted, offering “[m]ilitary advantages accruing to the United States in the field of intelligence both in so far as Germany and Japan were concerned.” As for Hoover's alarm over Soviet penetration of the United States, in Donovan's judgment, the FBI chief displayed surprising naïveté. “I don't need to suggest to you that the OGPU [predecessor of the NKVD] came here,” Donovan pointed out, “with the coming of Amtorg and is already here under the protection of the embassy. . . . I was not unmindful of someone's trying to make capital of the OGPU's coming here,” he added, “but I think the complete answer is 1. They are already here and 2. The military people who come here are in the open and under such rules as are imposed by us and here solely and only for military reasons and joint operations against our common enemy.” The President, Donovan thought, appeared to agree.
Hoover, however, was leaving nothing to chance. He began squeezing Donovan from another direction. He went to his nominal boss, Attorney General Francis Biddle, warning that the NKVD was already “engaged in attempting to obtain highly confidential information concerning War Department secrets.” Biddle sent Hoover's letter to FDR, alerting the President to another danger. “Under the statutes, these Russian agents would probably have to register,” Biddle pointed out. “Public knowledge of such an arrangement might have serious consequences. I have been informed that you have approved the plan generally, but I do not know whether you have considered its implications.” The implication Biddle so delicately raised was that 1944 was a presidential election year, and Roosevelt must know that Hoover, if thwarted, was not above making damaging leaks to the press.
The President threw up his hands. He sent Biddle's letter to Admiral William Leahy, his military chief of staff, asking, “What do we do next?” Three weeks of infighting ensued among the War Department, the OSS, and the FBI, but Donovan never had a chance. Hoover, in that era, was a national hero, the director whose G-men had triumphed over John Dillinger, “Pretty Boy” Floyd, “Baby Face” Nelson, and other arch criminals who had terrorized the country. Hoover's capture of dozens of Nazi agents and saboteurs had been front-page stories. Donovan's plan may have been good for intelligence but it was risky politics. Going into a possible fourth term campaign with the albatross around his neck that he had allowed Soviet spies to settle on the banks of the Potomac was not something Roosevelt relished. Leaving the delivery of the coup de grâce to Leahy, who also opposed Donovan's scheme, FDR directed the admiral to inform the service chiefs and Bill Donovan that “an exchange of O.S.S. and N.K.V.D. missions between Moscow and Washington is not appropriate at the present time. . . .”
The irrepressible Donovan was not through. His plan to exchange missions had been torpedoed, but he went ahead, on his own hook, swapping intelligence with the NKVD. He provided the Russians with American special weapons manuals, miniature cameras, and microfilming equipment. The Russians, in turn, revealed their techniques for sabotaging German installations. Donovan also assured the Soviets that once the election was out of the way, he could get the mission exchange back on track.
*
One man who knew immediately of the President's decision to kill off the spy swap was Duncan Lee, another lawyer protégé of Bill Donovan's who had become the director's executive assistant. Almost immediately upon formation of the OSS, Moscow had made the fledgling espionage service a priority target. The Soviet intelligence strategy for 1942 specifically stated: “[O]ur task is to insert there our people and carry out cultivation with their help.” The NKVD found a wedge in Lee, who epitomized the establishment figures inhabiting the upper reaches of the OSS. Thirty years old in 1944, he had been born to missionary parents in Nanking, China. He had returned home and graduated from the Woodbury Forest School in Virginia, took a B.A. from Yale, became a Rhodes scholar at Oxford, then received a law degree from Yale. A Communist intermediary described Lee as “[a]verage height, medium brown hair and light eyes, glasses, rather studious looking.” Though Lee was not a Communist, he would prove a profitably placed NKVD source. Immediately after graduating from law school, Lee had been snapped up by Wild Bill's Manhattan law firm, Donovan & Leisure, and subsequently followed his boss to Washington. By the time the COI became the OSS, Lee had received a direct Army commission, risen to the rank of captain, and worked in the Donovan front office secretariat. Essentially, whatever happened in the OSS was known to Duncan Lee.
Early in 1943, Lee opened his fourth-floor apartment door at 3014 Dent Place in Washington to a plain-looking thirty-five-year-old who introduced herself as Helen Grant. “I am the gal who is going to be your contact,” she explained. The woman was Elizabeth Bentley, the Soviet courier. She would one day turn against communism, but at this point she was a steadfast party apparatchik. An FBI agent later described Bentley as “buxom, blue-eyed, had big feet, short, brown curly hair, poor taste in clothes and was neither attractive nor unattractive.” Her background was not dissimilar to Lee's. She claimed ancestry from
Mayflower
forebears and was a bookish 1930 graduate of Vassar. During the Depression, Bentley had become disillusioned with capitalism and was drawn to the Communist Party. This product of a stern New England upbringing became a welcome recruit to the Soviets, one of whom described her as “a genuine American Aryan.” Her principal duty was to collect intelligence from a circle of sources in the American government and pass it on to her NKVD controllers.