Shadow Warrior (6 page)

In the summer of 1941, Colby applied for and received his commission in the US Army. In August, he left for basic training at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. That same month, President Roosevelt and British prime minister Winston Churchill met off the coast of Newfoundland aboard the HMS
Prince of Wales
to sign the Atlantic Charter, which outlined the two democracies' postwar aims and, more important, signified America's growing solidarity with its beleaguered ally. By November, US Navy vessels were convoying British and American transports across the Atlantic. Japan's sneak attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7 propelled the United States into the war against the Axis.

Bill Colby recalled that Pearl Harbor brought him, as well as most of the country, a sense of relief as well as horror and anger. The debate was over; at last, a united America would throw its immense weight into the fight against the Axis powers. The pressing question for Second Lieutenant Colby was how and when he would be able to enter the fray. The “day that would live in infamy” found the young officer in the artillery training program at Fort Sill, Oklahoma. To his dismay, he proved so proficient at
“canon cocking” that he was detailed to the training unit as an instructor rather than being sent to a combat zone. “After six months in that job,” he wrote in his memoirs, “I was afraid the war would be over before I got a chance to fight—a repetition of my father's frustration in Panama during World War I.”
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Fate intervened, however, in the form of a notice on the post bulletin board calling for volunteers for a new type of warfare—parachuting. Colby wasn't sure what that involved, beyond jumping out of an airplane, but he noted that officers hoping to keep their best men could not obstruct those who wanted to volunteer. Like West Point, the parachute program required a vigorous physical. The nearsighted Colby was not to be foiled again. While undressing and dressing in the doctor's office, he memorized the 20/40 line—the minimum required—on the eye chart. Unfortunately, when he “read off” the numbers and letters, he reversed them. He couldn't see the 20/50 line at all. The examining physician asked the young officer if he really wanted to be a parachutist. “You're damn right I do,” Colby replied. “Well I guess your eyesight is good enough for you to see the ground,” the doctor replied, and passed him.
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It was off to Fort Benning, Georgia, where the army's new parachute school was located. Candidates had to undergo weeks of training before they were allowed their first airplane jump. Among other things, they had to leap from four 250-foot-high towers and learn how to properly pack their own chutes. Some of Colby's contemporaries remembered him as handling the whole parachuting experience with nonchalance. A combat assignment was again delayed, however, when he broke his ankle during one of the training jumps. The accident took him out of the training cycle until he could heal. After completing his training, Bill was assigned to an artillery unit within the 82nd Airborne. Unfortunately, he lacked seniority, and when the unit shipped out, Colby was left behind in the officer replacement pool. He was cooling his heels at Camp Mackall, North Carolina, when the OSS came calling.
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L
ike most Americans at that time, Bill Colby had never heard of the Office of Strategic Services—it had only been established in June 1942, and, for obvious reasons, its activities were closely guarded secrets. Until World War II, the United States had not had a permanent intelligence service, even though the other major nation-states of the world had possessed them for centuries. The country had its wartime spies, of course, beginning with the redoubtable Nathan Hale; but once the firing ceased, America's spies had been put on the shelf. Following World War I, Secretary of State Henry Stimson ordered the department's code-breaking unit dismantled, remarking famously: “Gentlemen do not read other gentlemen's mail.”
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The United States had to rely for its intelligence on bits of uncoordinated information provided by ambassadors, foreign correspondents, military attachés, and a small group of military-intelligence cryptography specialists. In the wake of Pearl Harbor, the men around FDR insisted that this would just not do. The Axis powers were waging war on every front, using every possible weapon, including spies, saboteurs, propaganda, and psychological warfare. The activities of fascist “fifth columnists” were already infamous.

The leading advocate of a new agency that could operate an integrated worldwide intelligence network was William Joseph Donovan. Known from his youth as “Wild Bill,” Donovan had earned the Congressional Medal of Honor while leading New York's fabled Fighting 69th during World War I. An Irish-Catholic and a Hoover Republican, Donovan had gone on to build one of the most successful law practices on Wall Street. Republican though he might have been, Donovan was no isolationist. As
the fascist threat emerged in Europe in the late 1930s, he had joined with those urging the administration to lend all possible aid to the Western democracies. FDR had dispatched him on fact-finding missions to Europe and the Middle East. Donovan had reported that the United Kingdom would win the Battle of Britain and thus survive, but that if the Nazis and Fascists were to be defeated, the United States would eventually have to join the war. When the inevitable happened, Donovan argued, irregular warfare would play a major role in the liberation of Axis-occupied Europe.
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While on his trip to Britain in 1940, Donovan had met with newly appointed prime minister Winston Churchill as well as Colonel Stewart Menzies, head of the UK intelligence service. Churchill was a longtime friend of T. E. Lawrence, the irregular war guru who had raised the Arabs in revolt against the Turks and Germans in World War I. In July 1940, Churchill authorized the creation of a new organization called the Special Operations Executive (SOE) and instructed its first director to “set Europe ablaze.” Donovan returned to the United States full of enthusiasm for the creation of an American counterpart to MI-6, as Britain's Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) was called, and the SOE. Impressed by Donovan's “blend of Wall Street orthodoxy and sophisticated nationalism,” as one historian of the OSS put it, Roosevelt, five months before the attack on Pearl Harbor, named him to head the newly created Office of the Coordinator of Information (COI). Six months after America entered the war, in June 1942, COI was renamed the Office of Strategic Services and placed under the US Joint Chiefs of Staff. By then, the relentlessly energetic Donovan was assembling the first of nearly twelve thousand agents who would not only gather and analyze intelligence but go into the field themselves to conduct espionage, counterespionage, propaganda, and paramilitary activities. Initial recruits featured a large number of intellectuals and relatives of influential people, many of whom had been rejected by the regular military as unfit for duty.
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The new intelligence agency would need a leader of Donovan's energy and audacity. From Berlin, Joseph Goebbels's minions denounced the COI/OSS as a “staff of Jewish scribblers,” while in Washington a senior official at the War Department decried it as a “fly-by-night civilian outfit headed up by a wild man who was trying to horn in on the war.” In private, some officers called the operatives the “east coast fagotts.” But a Congressional Medal of Honor recipient who had the president's ear was hard to
dismiss. Like the man in the White House, Donovan was an unconventional administrator. He welcomed, nay, demanded, new ideas. No scheme was too harebrained, no project too expensive. The OSS chief not only tolerated insubordination, but seemed to encourage it. “I'd rather have a young lieutenant with guts enough to disobey an order than a colonel too regimented to think and act for himself,” he said. Although increasingly anti-communist, or at least anti-Stalinist, Donovan insisted on political diversity in the OSS. New Dealers and even communists worked alongside Willkie (moderate) Republicans. Despite the Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact, Donovan and his lieutenants had recognized that once Germany invaded Russia, as it did in 1941, communists everywhere could be counted on to fight the Axis to the death. When FBI director J. Edgar Hoover presented proof that three OSS officers were affiliated with the Communist Party of the United States and demanded their firing, Donovan replied, “I know they are communist; that's why I hired them.” At the same time, Paul Mellon, the son of banker and archconservative Andrew Mellon, served as an officer of the Special Operations Branch in London; J. P. Morgan's sons were both in the OSS.
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In addition to Research and Analysis, the OSS was composed of two other principal branches, the Secret Intelligence Branch (SI) and the Special Operations Branch (SO). This organization mirrored Britain's MI-6, which had been conducting espionage since the early twentieth century. The SO men and women who would be dropped behind enemy lines would be charged with raising an insurrection. “The oppressed peoples must be encouraged to resist and to assist in the Axis defeat, and this can be done by inciting them[,] . . . by training and organizing them,” Donovan wrote in 1941. Most important, the inhabitants of the occupied territories had to be turned into revolutionaries. Those officers who parachuted behind enemy lines were college-educated men under thirty who had grown up during the Depression. The words of the Atlantic Charter had real meaning to them. In their collective mind, they were tasked with bringing not only liberty to oppressed peoples—but democracy and social justice as well. There were, of course, exceptions.
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By the time Bill Colby spied the OSS recruitment poster on the bulletin board at Fort Mackall in 1943, the principal Allied leaders—Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin—had set in motion plans for a massive cross-channel invasion of occupied Europe. General Dwight D. Eisenhower was named
commander of Supreme Headquarters, Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF), and D-Day was set for May 1, 1944. As the Allies began massing the men and materiel required for the assault on Nazi-occupied Europe, both the American OSS and British SOE eagerly joined in the planning. Each submitted proposals for parachuting operatives into France just before and after D-Day to help mobilize and equip the French resistance—the
maquis
—which in turn could harass the Germans from the rear as the Allied armies drove inland from the Normandy beachheads. After some difficulty, SO and SOE agreed to merge, and Operation Jedburgh was born.
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According to legend, Operation Jedburgh took its name from one of the training centers for its operatives situated along the Jed River in the Scots borderland of Roxburghshire. The area was known for its abbey and for “Jeddart Justice,” in which the accused were hanged first and tried later. A variation on this story was that the village of Jedburgh had been the scene of guerrilla warfare during the twelfth-century conflicts between England and Scotland, and thus its name was appropriate as a moniker for an unconventional warfare operation. A French version had it that the name came from the French “J-Jour,” or D-Day.
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Many Americans were uneasy about collaborating with the French; the resistance and, some believed, the Free French Forces headquartered in Britain were riddled with Nazi collaborators. But the need for coordination between the resistance and the invading Allied armies trumped that concern. In conjunction with the cross-channel invasion, three-man teams, each consisting of one British or American officer, one French officer, and a radioman of any nationality, would be inserted into France, where they would help organize and mobilize the maquisards. Using compact, self-powered radios, Jedburgh teams were to coordinate air drops of arms and ammunition, including heavy machine guns, bazookas, and small artillery pieces, to the resistance.
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In the summer of 1943, George Sharp, head of the Western European section of the OSS, set about identifying and recruiting American officers for Operation Jedburgh. Before the war, Sharp had been a partner in the prestigious Wall Street law firm of Sullivan and Cromwell, the entity that had played a major role in America's acquisition of the Panama Canal Zone and that, after World War II, would lobby intensely for a central intelligence agency. Naturally, Sharp's network concentrated on rounding up officers
who already had parachute training and were fluent in French. Bill Colby matched the profile perfectly. When he and his fellow volunteers assembled at Fort Mackall, the OSS recruiter told them only that they would receive additional parachute training and that perilous missions would follow. Anyone could withdraw. Those who chose to remain were interviewed individually. Nothing specific was said to them about the Jedburgh program, but Colby and his comrades assumed they would be dropping behind enemy lines. Colby later speculated that his boredom with the officer replacement pool to which he had been assigned, and his desire not to be left out of the action, both played roles in his decision to join the OSS. “And then too, all those other influences of my youth came into play: an inclination to unorthodoxy in military service, an interest in the political aspects of war, a habit of going my own way and seeking my own band of kindred souls where money or social status, or the prep school you went to, didn't matter.”
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In October 1943, the one hundred officers who had survived the initial selection process began arriving in Washington, DC. From Union Station they were bused across the Maryland countryside to what once had been the Congressional Country Club. Between the wars, the Congressional—with its four-story, Italianate clubhouse, 406-acre golf course, indoor swimming pool, and bowling alleys—had been the playground of the capital's elite. With the coming of the Depression, the enterprise had fallen on hard times, however, and in early 1943, with the promise of restoring the facility after the war, the OSS had acquired it as a training ground. When Colby and his mates arrived, the former country club was known simply as Training Area F. Quonset huts and tents dotted the lawn and covered the tennis courts. The fairways and greens had been turned into an obstacle course. To the north across River Road lay pistol, rifle, and machine-gun ranges.
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