All's fair in love and war.
—Francis Edward Smedley, Frank Farlegh, chapter 50
I would like a medium vodka dry Martini—with a slice of lemon peel Shaken and not stirred.
—Ian Fleming, Dr. No, 1958
Six months before the United States entered World War II, President Roosevelt appointed Col. William Joseph “Wild Bill” Donovan as Coordinator of Information (COI). It was the cover name for America's fledgling attempt at spying.
Donovan was an oddity, an Irish Catholic Republican. His heritage might have made him a lifelong Democrat, but Donovan's life was almost a textbook of how to succeed in a wealthy Republican society. He earned the nickname “Wild Bill” playing football at Columbia University. Law school completed, Donovan married the daughter of one of the oldest and wealthiest families in Buffalo, New York. When World War I broke out, he organized a cavalry troop and fought with the 42d Infantry Division, receiving the Congressional Medal of Honor, the Distinguished Service Cross, and the Distinguished Service Medal.
After the war, Donovan traveled to China and Siberia and was a special counsel in Europe. In Poland, Donovan met Herbert Hoover while Hoover worked with the Rockefeller Institute's food mission. Donovan later became the future president's adviser and speech-writer.
In 1922, Donovan founded a New York law firm, quickly became a millionaire, and was active in state Republican politics. He ran for lieutenant governor and lost; he also ran for governor, a race which he also lost. For a while Donovan was an assistant attorney general during Calvin Coolidge's presidency. He visited Ethiopia, where he witnessed Italy's ouster of Emperor Haile Selassie in 1935, and went to Spain in time for the 1936 Civil War.
Although he opposed Franklin Roosevelt's domestic programs, Donovan agreed with FDR's plans for military preparedness to protect American neutrality. Donovan was an unofficial observer in Great Britain for fellow Republican Frank Knox, Roosevelt's secretary of the navy. Knox was pleased with his reports and, at the secretary's suggestion, Donovan toured southeast Europe and the Middle East to observe resistance movements. When he returned to the United States in July 1941, Roosevelt named Donovan Coordinator of Information (COI).
His was a quasi-intelligence organization, ostensibly a private firm, but in reality funding came from the U.S. Treasury. (Well into the 1960s, CIA employees were technically listed as treasury employees.) As COI, Donovan got in a bit of so-called “black” propaganda, operating a fake German radio station in Britain, broadcasting messages from and to nonexisting anti-Nazi groups. Six months after Pearl Harbor, Donovan's COI became the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), which later became the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Wild Bill Donovan was a fan of Britain's MI6 Secret Service and patterned the OSS after it, often coordinating with British and Canadian espionage operations.
The OSS offices were in Temporary Building Q in Washington, D.C., along the Mall, next to the reflecting pool between the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument. The organization had uniforms made by Brooks Brothers, and many of its supplies came from Abercrombie &Fitch—sleeping bags, air mattresses, and foul weather geax. Not your usual sort.
Donovan gathered around him what historian R. Harris Smith calls “a chaotic organization of left wing activists and intellectuals, right wing corporate attorneys, and people from America's wealthiest families.” Among this disparate group were historian Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. (who wrote, among other things, a biography of FDR and his times), writer Gene Fodor (who went on to author the Fodor Guide series for tourists), Arthur Goldberg (who went on to the U.S. Supreme Court), and Julia Child (who went on to make pastries and tarts on TV). It was Child who once claimed OSS meant “Oh! So Secret!” Many in the group were so famous, however, that the letters took on another meaning: “Oh, So Social.” Social, perhaps; experienced in spying, no. Donovan's OSS eventually recruited upward of 16,000 people and sent many of them behind enemy lines.
At first, the OSS centered its operations in North Africa, from which it launched many of its European operations. Working with Britain's Special Operations Executive (SOE) and the Free French, the OSS launched teams referred to as “Jedburgh agents.” The name “Jedburgh” was derived from the twelfth century border wars between the Scots and the British invaders in the Jedburgh area of Scotland where a local Scottish group conducted guerrilla warfare. William Colby, who later became head of the CIA, was a Jedburgh agent during the war.
Jedburgh squads were made up of agents from each of the three cooperating nations. Wearing uniforms to avoid execution as spies if they were caught, Jedburgh agents parachuted into France following the D-day landing at Normandy. They worked with French Resistance forces to divert German troops from the invasion site.
Other OSS agents operated with British troops in the China-Burma-India theater. Operatives worked in Lisbon, Madrid, and Berne, Switzerland, where Allen W. Dulles was head of OSS operations, coordinating with anti-Hitler elements to arrange the surrender of German troops in Italy. By the end of World War II, the OSS had placed nearly 200 agents in Germany, disrupting Berlin's war effort and sending back information on the results of Allied air raids. General MacArthur, however, refused to allow the agents to operate within his command in the Southwest Pacific.
President Truman abolished the OSS on September 20, 1945, its functions transferred to the State and War Departments. Two years later, Truman used some former OSS personnel as cadre in forming the Central Intelligence Group, later changing the word group to agency.
Donovan returned to his law practice for a while, then served as the U.S. ambassador to Thailand from 1953 to 1954. Perhaps not unexpectedly, this was about the same time American intelligence operations began to expand in Southeast Asia.
To a great degree, Britain's MI6 handled Ultra, the code name given to much of the intelligence derived from deciphering Germany's machine-encoded radio messages. In 1939, Britain set up its Code and Cipher School in an ugly Victorian mansion about forty miles north of London—Bletchley Park in Buckinghamshire. It was there the code breakers went to work on Enigma-generated codes.
Enigma was Germany's typewriter-like machine used to encode and decode messages; it had been around since 1923. The German navy began using Enigma machines in 1926, and the army followed in 1928. The machines were so reliable that the Luftwaffe began using them in 1933. At one point, there were some 20,000 Enigma machines of different types and vintages in use. Making it worse for the Allies, in 1934 Japan began using Enigma machines.
The Enigma had a typewriter-like keyboard, a battery, a series of lights, three removable rotors, and a stationary wheel (called the Umkehrwalze) about the same size as the rotors. The battery tied keys to rotors to tiny flashlight-sized bulbs. They were all joined by a maze of wires and plugs.
To encode a message, a clerk hit a key; the current flowed (via the wires and pins and contacts) through the three rotors to the wheel, which reflected it back through the movable rotors. Lights were lit, messages were sent and received, and the Allies were confounded. Those who know claim “the number of possibly different wired rotors was equivalent to factorial 26,” something like 403,291,461,126,605,635,684,000,000. And that doesn't even take into account the number of possible different Umkehrwalze permutations.
The rotors, wheel, and plug-in connections on the encoding machine had to match exactly those on the decoding machine. Later in the war, the three-wheel system gave way to four-and five-rotor models. The interchangeable rotors and plug connections afforded up to 200 quintillion permutations. To make it more difficult, the rotor settings would be changed several times a day.
Much of the decrypting work was a British show; however, three detachments of Americans were assigned to the program. Secrecy was so strict, many of those in the American detachments didn't know of the others’ existence.
What really helped break the code was the capture of a large Polish machine called the “bombe,” a high-speed electromechanical marvel (something like an early card-carrying computer) that according to one expert “could rapidly move through rotor permutations to find a key within a reasonable amount of time.” Later, an Enigma machine was salvaged from a sunken German submarine. Even knowing that the Allies had Enigma machines didn't faze the German high command, who believed there were so many possible settings as to make Ultra messages indecipherable. Both Great Britain and the United States put a lot of time and effort into cracking the code, and, thanks to the early work done by Polish scientists, by the end of the war the Allies were regularly reading Ultra-encrypted messages.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the war, the U.S. Navy had broken Japan's diplomatic and military codes. Actually, they'd cracked Tokyo's highest code, Purple, two years before the war even started.
Knowing exactly what the enemy is going to do can be hazardous to your mental health. What if you learn, through a secretly decoded message, that the enemy plans to bomb a major city. If you evacuate everybody, that lets the enemy know that you've broken the code.
On the night of November 14-15, 1940, a flight of 449 German bombers dropped 150,000 incendiary bombs along with 503 tons of high explosives on the city of Coventry, England, (the alleged site of Lady Godiva's fabled if unlikely nude horseback ride). Hitler had expressly ordered Coventry bombed in retaliation for Britain's bombing of Munich on November 8, an attack that coincided with the anniversary of der Fuhrers Munich Beer Hall Putsch seventeen years earlier. Coventry was one of Britain's most industrially important and historically appealing cities. The story has circulated since the war that Winston Churchill had advance warning of the attack—thanks to Ultra intercepts—but chose not to inform Coventry officials or call for an evacuation, because it would have tipped the Germans that England had cracked their codes.
Churchill regularly received decoded Ultra intercepts, referring to them as “my eggs,” the nickname indicated perhaps that he considerea them the eggs from the golden goose of Bletchley Park. MI6 called it “Boniface;” by whatever name, it was the “sole form of intelligence, or indeed of spying, in which Churchill was interested.” MI6, however, had other ways of determining British targets.
German agents in England would set up two widely separate narrow-beam radio signals as a sort of pathway for Luftwaffe bombers. The two signals would intersect at the target location. By midafter-noon on November 14, the RAF had triangulated the beams and determined that either Coventry or the London vicinity would be the night's target.
About the same time, a German prisoner of war told a barracks stool pigeon about the coming bombing raid; both the POW and the stoolie were disregarded. Intelligence professionals don't like amateurs telling them their game.
So, did Winston Churchill know about the coming bombing of Coventry and choose not to warn the city in order to protect the breaking of the code? Several self-proclaimed experts now say he did not know, claimj ng that the word Coventry never appeared in any Ultra intercepts. Others say that, since the Luftwaffe aircraft would home in on the radio beams, all they had to do was jam the radios. The RAF apparently tried that but jammed the wrong signal. The raid went off as planned, and Coventry was nearly destroyed: 550 people were killed and 1,000 more were injured; 50,749 houses were destroyed or damaged. Coventry's famed 1,000-year-old St. Michael's Cathedral was also destroyed. Its bombed-out shell remains as a monument beside a new, magnificent cathedral. The rest of the city was rebuilt also, but as one tourist guidebook puts it, Coventry “contains some of the worst postwar rebuilding to be seen in Britain, and the less said the better.”
That the Ultra code was broken remained a secret until 1974, when RAF group captain F. W. Winterbotham published an account tided The Ultra Secret. According to Winterbotham, cracking Ultra was the next best thing to … well, the next best thing to inventing Ultra. Winterbotham claimed that knowing the German code was “crucial in routing the U-boats and winning the Battle of the North Atlantic, had reversed British fortunes against [General Erwin] Rommel in North Africa and had turned the German airborne invasion of Crete into a ghastly Pyrrhic victory.”
An American code the enemy never completely broke wasn't just a code; it was a different language. During World War II, Native Americans from the Navajo tribe served as “code talkers.” Their language in itself is complex; mixing it with short military code words, completely confused the Japanese.
In April 1942, marine recruiters enlisted volunteers from New Mexico and Arizona reservation agency schools. All were fluent in both Navajo and English. They reported to the San Diego Marine Corps Recruit Depot and initially were designated as the 382d Platoon; quickly, they became known as “The Navajo School.” In addition to their regular duties, they helped devise a new Marine Corps military code. They used short, easy to learn and quick to recall words and devised a two-part code. Part one was a 26-letter phonetic alphabet using Navajo names for animals or birds; in addition, they used several different words for letters—ice for 7, nut for N quiverfor Q, and so on to zinc for Z. Part two was a 211-word Navajo vocabulary and the English equivalents. One code talker, a boarding school student before joining the marines, remembers how “the U.S. government told us not to speak Navajo but during the war the government wanted us to speak it.”
Some white officers admitted that they didn't understand how the system worked, but because it did, any initial distrust that the top brass at the Pentagon may have felt soon was erased. By August 1943, nearly 200 Navajo tribesmen had been trained, and more would follow. Eventually, there would be 421 code talkers.
Second-generation Japanese Americans who volunteered for the military served in the all-nisei 442d Regimental Combat Team in Europe. The Navajo marines, however, went to the Pacific, which sometimes meant trouble for them. White Americans often confused Navajos with Japanese, and some code talkers were captured and interrogated as Japanese. Others were almost killed by their fellow troops.
Navajo code talkers served with all six marine divisions in the Pacific as well as with Raider and parachute units. By all accounts, the Navajo code was a deciding factor in many engagements. According to Maj. Howard Conner of the 5th Marine Division, the marines' entire landing operation at Iwo Jima was “directed by Navajo code.” Conners adds that, “during the two days that followed the initial landings I had six Navajo radio nets working around the clock…. They sent and received over 800 messages without an error. Were it not for the Navajo code talkers, the Marines never would have taken Iwo jima.”
When the Navajo code talkers returned after the war, they were greeted by family reunions where purification rites, traditional dances, and curing ceremonies were held. The ceremonies were an ages-old tradition meant to counter any harmful or toxic influences the tribesmen might have encountered while off the reservation.
Back home, they encountered many of the same problems that other veterans did: jobs were scarce, especially on the reservation; readjusting to nonmilitary life was difficult. Add to that the problems between Native Americans and whites; before the war they'd often been abused and scorned, and the same abuse and scorn returned after the war.
The last code talker to leave the Marine Corps finally retired in 1972. For more than twenty years after the war, the Navajos' code was a highly classified military secret. It was declassified in 1968, and the following year the code talkers were honored at the 4th Marine Division's annual reunion in Chicago. Twenty veteran code talkers attended the reunion and marched in a parade with the other veterans down Michigan Avenue. While others wore tired, old uniforms, often faded and tight across the stomach, the Navajos wore their best tribal regalia. They were honored by a presidential certificate of appreciation.
Perhaps the highest honor for the code talkers came from a Japanese general who in the war assigned his most skilled cryptographers to decipher the marines' messages. The Japanese never succeeded. The Navajo code talkers beat the best the enemy could put against them.
Amy Elizabeth Thorpe's friends called her Betty, but her code name was Cynthia. She was one of the Allies' best spies during World War II. Her father was a U.S. Marine Corps officer who took his family to posts around the world. He resigned his commission to study law, and that brought them back home. When Betty was just eleven years old, she used pictures and information on postcards from what the song called “far away places with strange sounding names” to write a romantic novel titled Fioretta. An Italian naval attache much older than Betty met her at a diplomatic picnic and fell in love with her novel (not to mention Betty herself). The two began an apparently platonic relationship. The attache, Alberto Lais, called Betty his “golden girl.”
By the time she was eighteen, Betty Thorpe was described as beautiful, well bred, and graceful. Now a young woman, she ended her platonic relationship with the Italian naval officer and began a fullblown affair with a British embassy official. Arthur Pack was nineteen years Betty's senior, and their relationship led to marriage at Washington's Church of the Epiphany, to dual citizenship for her, and to a son born five months after the wedding. Even with all that, Betty seemed bored with Arthur. For reasons not fully understood, she turned the boy over to foster parents.
When Pack was transferred to Spain on the eve of that nation's civil war, Betty took up undercover operations—smuggling nationalists out to safety and smuggling medical supplies in to Franco's Fascist forces. By 1937, Amy Elizabeth Thorpe Pack was a full-fledged member of His Britannic Majesty's Secret Service, working under MI6's wealthy Canadian-born director, William “Little Bill” Stephen-son. It was Stephenson who gave her the code name Cynthia.
It was her husband, Arthur, however, who gave her another child, this time a girl. Betty, Arthur, their new daughter, and a nanny went off to Warsaw, where Arthur was stationed at the British embassy.
Their marriage, which may have had a tough go all along, floundered seriously when Arthur informed Betty that he was in love with another woman. While Arthur was busy with his new love, Betty got busy working elsewhere—at the game of espionage. Bill Stephenson provided funds for Betty to use in cultivating Polish sources.
Stephenson's nominal title was British passport control officer, and he was sent to New York to train America's Bill Donovan. It was there Stephenson became known as the man called Intrepid, the channel for intelligence between Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt.
With the war under way in Europe, Amy Elizabeth Thorpe Pack left her husband and joined Stephenson in America. As Cynthia, she set up shop in Washington, D.C., posing as a journalist in order to obtain information about the Italian navy's code system. Her old platonic friend Uberto Lais—now Admiral Lais, was sixty years old, apparently still infatuated with Betty, and ready to resume their relationship.
Alberto was back in the States on a special mission. Mussolini was “convinced thai, the United States would soon join the war,” and wanted something done about the more than two-dozen Italian merchant ships being held in American ports.
Betty telephoned Alberto, saying “It's your golden girl. Can we meet?” He couldn't say no. Within hours, Alberto Lais allegedly threw off the thoughts of his wife, threw off his country, and especially he threw off his clothes. Their earlier platonic relationship changed drastically, although Betty herself later hedged a bit about the affair, claiming that their friendship was “sentimental and even sensual, rather than sexual.” Whatever she thought, he obviously thought it involved a whole lot more, especially while the two lay in bed with the admiral whispering sweet nothings in Betty's ear. He apparently also whispered his navy's plans to sabotage those twenty-seven Italian merchant ships. When the bombs exploded, he bragged, the ships would be so heavily damaged that they'd be useless if the United States tried to seize them.
Getting rid of Alberto as quickly as she could, Betty phoned the U.S. Office of Naval Intelligence, but it was too late; most of the bombs had already exploded. A few ships were saved and, just as Mussolini had feared, the United States seized them. Secretary of State Cordell Hull immediately ordered Admiral Lais out of the country. As Alberto prepared to leave, according to Betty, he had one final gift for his golden girl: the Italian navy's code and cipher books.*
Her Italian lover gone, Betty moved on to other conquests: the Vichy French embassy. Back in her pose as an American journalist, she contacted the embassy in May 1941. Almost immediately, press attache Charles Brousse fell for her, and by June he was handing over to her embassy cables, letters, and files. To make the exchange of information easier, Betty moved into the hotel where Brousse and his wife lived.
With the aid of the two Bills—Stevenson and Donovan—she hired a thief nicknamed “Georgia Cracker” to break into the French embassy's safe. Brousse convinced the embassy's watchman to give him a room for a liaison with a lady friend, and the French being the French, the watchman looked the other way. Just to make certain that they would not be interrupted, they slipped phenobarbital into the watchman's food. The Georgia Cracker opened the safe, but it took so long that Betty couldn't copy down the codes. They'd have to try again another night.
The second time, Betty had the combination to the safe (thanks to that good-ol'-boy Cracker) and, voila, it was open! Suddenly, Betty sensed a problem. Quickly she stripped off her clothes, told Brousse to do the same, and as they stood naked a guard walked through the door. His flashlight on Betty as she stood resplendent in necklace and high heels, the guard muttered, “I beg your pardon a thousand times,” and closed the door. Getting dressed she passed the code books out the window, waited while another agent copied them, then—all fingerprints wiped from the books—returned them to the safe.
When the time came for the Allied landings in North Africa, the Allies put to good use the codes Betty had stolen. It's not known, of course, how many lives were saved because the Allies could read the coded messages, but estimates run into the thousands.
In 1945, Betty's husband, Arthur Pack, committed suicide. French press aide Charles Brousse was divorced by his wife, and Charles and Betty married. She and her new husband moved to the south of France and settled in a medieval castle on a mountaintop. When asked whether she was sorry for all the sex-for-secrets acts she had performed during the war, Betty answered:
Ashamed? Not in the least. My superiors told me that the results of my work saved thousands of British and American lives…. It involved me in situations from which “respectable” women draw back—but mine was total commitment. Wars are not won by respectable methods.
Besides, she added, she considered herself a patriot. Patriotism cannot prevent tragedy. Betty died in 1963, the victim of mouth cancer. Her husband lived another ten years until he was accidentally electrocuted by an apparently faulty electric blanket. The fairy-tale castle where Charles and the spy called Cynthia lived their last years was destroyed in the ensuing fire.
James Bond was a fictional spy, but his creator, Ian Fleming, was a real one, and sometimes the deeds of the literary spy mocked the human one. As an aide to the chief of British naval intelligence, Fleming took the code name 17F, not nearly so cool as Bond's code-name, 007. Fleming and the chief, Sir John Godfrey, were in Lisbon, Portugal, headed for the United States when the writer-spy recognized a group of German agents playing cards. In a scene that sounds much like the spy he later created, Fleming decided to try to cripple the German agents' ability to move around the world by gambling with them and winning all their money. The author wasn't up to his character's ability, however, and instead of taking the Germans for all they were worth, Ian Fleming lost all the money he had on him.
Fleming later was ordered to go ashore in the 1942 raid at the French port of Dieppe. The raid failed, apparently because of inadequate preparations by the British and quick intervention by the Luftwaffe. The Allies lost more than 1,200 men killed and about 2,200 taken prisoner. Mostly, the losses were to Canadian units. The Dieppe raid is still a sore point with the Canadians, who believe it was a British publicity stunt more than a real invasion effort. In any event, Ian Fleming wasn't able carry out his mission to collect German code books at Dieppe.
The spymaker-to-be also commanded an assault unit during the invasion of Normandy. Once again, his mission was to capture enemy code boots, but once again he apparently failed.
Fleming's master spy, James Bond (the character almost was called James Gunn), may have liked vodka martinis, but author Ian Fleming preferred gin. Medium dry-martinis, English gin and American vermouth. He preferred them to excess, and by the end of the war he was drinking a quart of gin a day along with about three and a half packs of cigarettes a day; understandably he died at the age of fifty-six. By then he considered himself a very old man, writing about the adventurous deeds of someone far younger.
Although Fleming may have partially modeled his fictional character after himself, apparently he took a lot of James Bond's character—Bond, James Bond—from Dusko Popov, a high-living playboy from Yugoslavia who was a double agent code-named Tricycle. Four months prior to the attack on Pearl Harbor, Tricycle's German masters asked him to gather information about the Hawaiian base's defenses. Instead, Popov warned American FBI director J. Edger Hoover of the Axis' interests. Hoover denounced Popov as nothing more than a Balkan playboy son of a millionaire and ignored the information, which would never have happened to James Bond. Maybe even to Ian Fleming.
In 1967, Alberto Lais's relatives read accounts of how the admiral had betrayed military secrets. They sued in an Italian court and won. In 1988, when David Brinkley's book Washington Goes to War was first released, Lais's sons protested. They claimed their father had never had a sexual relationship with Betty Pack and persuaded the Italian defense ministry to publish ads in three leading East Coast American newspapers, denying the allegations.