OK, you motherfuckers, drop your cocks and grab your socks, let’s go!”
That’s what the corporal bellowed to awaken the troops on Jean Claude’s first morning of basic training at Camp Croft, outside Spartanburg, South Carolina. Jean Claude remembered it for the rest of his life, because it was the first time he heard the word “motherfucker.”
Jean Claude’s journey into this new world began on June 9, 1943, when he was inducted and sworn in to the U.S. Army at a base near his home, in Fort Devens, Massachusetts. He spent a clamorous few days there—such was the chaos that he didn’t recall exactly how many—signing papers, getting shots, waiting in lines, and tramping from one building to another amid shouts of “You’ll be sorry!” from draftees who were only slightly less green. Then he was put aboard a crowded troop train for a journey of two days and a night to Camp Croft. The men ate their meals off paper plates in their laps. Windows were left open because of the heat, and soot from the engine blew in and made the mashed potatoes appear heavily peppered. Jean Claude learned to play cribbage and a little chess from a pair of Czech seatmates who had brought miniature sets.
Jean Claude rather enjoyed his three months of basic training. There were the usual hardships—rising at 4:00 A.M.; KP duty; rifle practice in mind-numbing heat; guard duty in the middle of the night—but the regimentation was a pleasant change from the aimlessness he had felt in college. And Jean Claude had the happy realization that in addition to becoming a soldier, he was learning to be an American.
To Jean Claude, the men in his platoon were exotic: Italian Americans from Boston’s North End, including one whose fine silk shirts and jewelry were taken for Mafia emblems; some genteel recruits from North Carolina, who explained to Jean Claude their theory of the “fairness” of racism; and a group of country fellows from Tennessee, one of whom caused a wild commotion by getting an erection during the platoon’s first “short arm” medical inspection. In the evenings Jean Claude absorbed the stories they swapped in the barracks over fifteen-cent pitchers of beer.
Jean Claude was issued an M1 rifle, two sets of fatigues, a pair of boots, a canteen, a mess kit, leggings, a pack, a helmet, a helmet liner, and an entrenching tool. He was one of the few men who hadn’t handled a rifle before, and he had difficulty disassembling and reassembling his weapon until a draftee who had been a state trooper gave him some tips. A sergeant advised the men to walk through puddles in their new boots to break them in and mold them to their feet.
The training was routine except for a pair of interruptions. First, Jean Claude was called off the firing range and driven in a truck to Spartanburg, where, to his delight, he was sworn in as a U.S. citizen. Second, he was taken to an office near the camp’s headquarters and interviewed by a major—the highest-ranking officer he had met so far—who quizzed him about his French. The major asked if Jean Claude would be interested in some kind of special service, without elaborating, and gave him a sixteen-page questionnaire. Jean Claude filled it out, answering detailed questions about his family background, and mailed it in as instructed. He didn’t give it a second thought.
At the end of basic training Jean Claude asked to be transferred to the U.S. Army Airborne School, for no particular reason other than that he admired the high-laced boots that paratroopers wore with their trouser legs tucked in. His request was granted, and he reported with his orders and duffel bag to Jump School in Fort Benning, Georgia. But after just a few days there—before his paratroop boots could be issued—he was called into the company office, given an envelope with new orders, and told to repack his duffel and be ready to leave in thirty minutes. He was driven to the train station, where he opened his orders and discovered that his destination was Washington, D.C.
Arriving in the capital early on a September morning, Jean Claude took a taxi as instructed to a building in a shabby neighborhood on E Street. He was escorted to an office on an upper floor, where a man interviewed him in French. The man’s command of the language was very good, but he was not, to Jean Claude’s ear, a native speaker. Jean Claude couldn’t tell from his questions what the purpose of the meeting was, and he was too shy to inquire.
The man disappeared for a time, came back with some papers, had Jean Claude sign them, and welcomed him aboard the OSS. He told Jean Claude to take two weeks’ leave, and then present himself in front of the Willard Hotel in Washington at 12:15 P.M. and “board the army truck” when it arrived. He stressed that Jean Claude was never to mention the OSS to anyone. Jean Claude found the admonition unnecessary, as he had no idea what the OSS was.
BEFORE PEARL HARBOR, U.S. intelligence services, like the military in general, were effectively dormant. Henry Stimson, serving as secretary of state, had gone so far as to close down that agency’s code-breaking office in 1929 on the grounds that “gentlemen do not read one another’s mail.”
When war broke out in Europe, President Franklin Roosevelt— who, like Churchill, had a keen interest in unconventional warfare— was concerned about the muddled state of U.S. intelligence gathering. Small operations were run separately by the army, the navy, the Treasury, and the War Department, but there was no central authority for collecting strategic information.
At the time, the British government had an office in Manhattan’s Rockefeller Center, on the thirty-sixth floor of the International Building. It was called the Passport Control Office, but in reality it was the headquarters of Britain’s top spy in the West, a man named William Stephenson. A friend of Churchill’s, Stephenson was a charming, Canadian-born millionaire who had been a fighter pilot in World War I. His job was to gather intelligence, foil sabotage against Atlantic convoys, create anti-Nazi propaganda, and do whatever he could to persuade the Roosevelt administration to enter the war against Germany.
Stephenson cultivated the friendship of a Wall Street lawyer named William J. Donovan, an energetic Irish American who also had served with distinction in the Great War—the men in his platoon nicknamed him “Wild Bill”—and made a fortune afterward. Donovan was an adviser to Roosevelt; the two men had been classmates at Columbia Law School. He was also something of an amateur diplomat who, between the wars, made several fact-finding visits to Europe and Asia. He met privately with Churchill and reported back to Roosevelt (the wheelchair-bound president sometimes referred to him as “my secret legs”). Donovan became, in the words of one biographer, Douglas Waller, “part of an informal network of American businessmen and lawyers who closely tracked and collected intelligence on foreign affairs.” Indeed, Waller writes, a friend recalled that Donovan was “not happy if there is a war on the face of the earth, and he has not had a look at it.”1
Stephenson saw in Donovan an American ally who could help persuade Roosevelt to come to Britain’s defense, and who, if given the tools, could serve the president in much the same way he himself served his prime minister. Stephenson arranged for Donovan to travel to England and receive deep, detailed briefings on the Secret Intelligence Service, better known as MI6, and on SOE. Donovan met with SOE commanders, reviewed tables of organization, and visited secret training camps and airfields.
In the spring of 1941 Donovan, aided by Ian Fleming, then a British Naval Intelligence officer, drew up a plan for an American spy service on the British model. Roosevelt received it enthusiastically, and on July 11 he appointed Donovan to the new post of coordinator of information. With $450,000 from a secret fund controlled by the president, Donovan set about creating the nation’s first nondepartmental strategic intelligence organization. He found office space in a building at Twenty-fifth and E streets in Washington that was being abandoned by the Public Health Service. As Waller describes it, the building “still had caged lab animals the health service had used for syphilis research. Berlin radio mocked it as the new home of 150 professors, 10 goats, 12 guinea pigs, a sheep, and a staff of Jewish scribblers.”2
Six months later came the attack on Pearl Harbor. Roosevelt put the new agency under the command of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, increased its annual budget to $10 million, and gave it a new name: the Office of Strategic Services. The OSS was to be responsible for intelligence gathering, psychological warfare, guerrilla operations, and the coordination of resistance movements.
To give his new agency a flying start, Donovan relied heavily on his undercover British friends. SOE sent instructors and training manuals. Donovan paid a visit to Camp X, an SOE school for assassins and saboteurs near Whitby, Ontario, and then had similar facilities built at two National Park Service campgrounds near Washington—one at Catoctin Mountain Park in Maryland, where Camp David is today, and one at Prince William Forest Park in Virginia, near Quantico. The sites were isolated and heavily forested; they had water, electricity, and rustic cabins; they were owned by the federal government; and they were large enough, at thousands of acres each, for live-fire exercises.
OSS lore has it that ideal recruits were “Ph.D.’s who can win a bar fight” (the OSS Society registered that phrase as a trademark in 2016). At the outset, though, Donovan found agents much the way SOE recruiters did: by soliciting recommendations from friends in government, business, and academe, and supplementing their ranks with useful scoundrels. When the National Archives finally disclosed the names of OSS agents in 2008, it turned out that Donovan’s “glorious amateurs,” as he called them, included future Supreme Court justice Arthur Goldberg, historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr., philanthropist Paul Mellon, diplomat Ralph Bunche, poet Stephen Vincent Benét, major-league catcher Moe Berg, and author and chef Julia Child (who, at six foot two, was too tall for the Women’s Army Corps). The quip that OSS stood for “Oh So Social” was not entirely unfounded; Donovan was, after all, looking for people with connections. On the other hand, “connections” means different things to different people. OSS reportedly hired men from Detroit’s Purple Gang and from the Murder, Inc., crime syndicate.
Donovan understood that when it came to recruiting, the United States had a special contribution to offer for clandestine operations against the Axis powers all over the world. As John Whiteclay Chambers II writes in his history of OSS training methods, “It was one of Donovan’s great insights that he could obtain from America’s multiethnic population combat guerrilla teams that could successfully infiltrate enemy-occupied countries because its members spoke the language, knew the culture, and, in fact, were often the descendants of immigrants from that country. . . . OSS’s Personnel Procurement Branch scoured training camps and advanced schools of all the services looking for intelligent candidates knowledgeable in a foreign language who were willing to volunteer for unspecified challenging and hazardous duty behind enemy lines.”3
Though Jean Claude was still in the dark about all this in the autumn of 1943, he was exactly the kind of man the OSS was looking for.