We were amazed that the Japanese did not immediately surrender after the destruction of Hiroshima, and we had no idea what kind of reception awaited us when we landed at Nanking Airfield between several rows of smoldering Japanese aircraft blistered with holes from Allied fire. We taxied and stopped to unload our plane far away from a large tent where a line of guards stood at attention outside the Japanese command.
After a while, a lone Japanese interpreter tentatively approached us. While the Japanese hierarchy had not yet capitulated, it was plain from the interpreter’s message that the military ranks were awed by the stunning display of America’s new nuclear weapon. In American-accented English, the man informed us that his commanding officer would be pleased to offer our unit some cold beer on this scorching August day.
Our commanding officer, Colonel Al Cox, still not knowing how things would shake out, made a disgusted sound, then replied as if we had a battalion of armed soldiers backing us up.
“Tell your commander that we do not drink with the enemy. He will provide us immediate transportation into the city and an escort to guarantee our safety and will find us suitable lodging.”
The ruse worked, as the interpreter came rushing back in a few minutes with a small detachment of unarmed escorts to show us to a hastily evacuated barracks near the airfield. We created a base there, established headquarters in a hotel, then fanned out to various POW camps.
I will never forget the moment that we opened the gates at the first camp. The starving prisoners knew nothing about how the war was going. They stood frozen and incredulous when they saw our American uniforms and were told that the Japanese had been defeated. We immediately distributed rations to the emaciated men and women and their hungry children, many of whom had actually been born in the camps during the war.
A couple of days later, I was ordered to return to Kunming to join another team that hoped to repeat our success in Shanghai.
Shanghai was the largest, most Westernized and cosmopolitan city in China, home to thousands of English, French, and American traders who had begun appearing in the late 1800s, after the Opium Wars. As such, it also had more POW camps than anywhere else in the country.
Fresh with visions of nightmarish Nanking, our team, Sparrow II, filled two C-46 aircraft with supplies for the mission. We evicted Japanese soldiers from the American Club, took it over as headquarters, mounted a radio antenna on the roof, and forced the reluctant Swiss consul to show us the camps, at which he was supposed to be protecting the rights of Allied prisoners.
We could instantly see what kind of job the ineffectual man had been doing. Conditions in the Shanghai camps were more dismal than anything we could have imagined. The incarcerated populace included thousands of military prisoners, as well as civilians. The camps stank of human waste and mountains of garbage and teemed with rats and flies. Food in the camps had been limited to thin soup and a couple of pounds of fish or meat per week per thousand or so inhabitants, who had been reduced to catching and eating rats, kittens, and puppies that had somehow squeezed through the fences.
Our army rations were much appreciated gourmet fare. Many children had never tasted milk other than their mothers’ and relished the powdered stuff that we abhorred. The staggering amount of their deprivation caused our supplies to run out, so we raided the stores of the Japanese army to continue the relief effort.
Our small unit, working nearly around the clock, was soon exhausted from the effort. Luckily, now that OSS had proved it safe, General Wedemeyer’s China troops arrived, followed by the navy cruiser, Nashville, which sailed into the harbor. We were summarily and happily relieved from most of our duties and became free to bask in the euphoric bacchanalia that marked postwar Shanghai.
But danger came in other forms. A group of OSS officers spent a small fortune buying a large stash of prewar scotch whiskey, filled their hotel rooms with cases of the precious commodity, and boasted about the money they would make from the fleet. Unfortunately, their plans were thwarted when one of the first drinkers of the scotch died in agony outside the American Club bar. In one last desperate act of a defeated army, the Japanese had poisoned random bottles of liquor before departing the city. Of course, all liquor became immediately suspect and worthless, as no foreigner dared partake. Accordingly, the black marketers went bankrupt, much to the general satisfaction of those of us who had not been invited to participate in the promising enterprise.
One night, I was visited in my quarters at the American Club by an older Russian woman and her adult daughter, who apparently wished to offer me a measure of gratitude for my part in saving her mother. While the mother had been incarcerated, the young blonde, Marusha, had been secreted outside of the city, where she had been spared the ordeal of the concentration camps. She would have looked beautiful to me even if I hadn’t been cut off from female companionship as long as I had been.
The young Marusha confessed that she was married to a Russian but that it was just a wartime convenience and she didn’t love him. Her gratitude to me resulted in a discreet affair, but the husband, Valantin, a Soviet spy working for the Tass news agency, was not easily tricked. The jealous man followed her and started shouting at us outside of our covered rickshaw one night. Glancing outside, I saw the enraged husband nearby, brandishing a fist at me. I told the rickshaw runner to get moving, dropped Marusha off where she could not be seen, and continued down the street.
The brawny Russian agent pursued the rickshaw until traffic slowed us to a stop. He whipped back the curtain and was stunned to find only me. He turned red with embarrassment and muttered an excuse, saying that he wanted to thank me for helping his mother-in-law and wanted to buy me a drink sometime. I hastily agreed, and he left looking a bit perplexed. From then on, Marusha and I continued the affair more clandestinely.
Once free, Shanghai quickly came back to life, and even the Shanghai Post started back into operation. Reading the paper one fateful day, I was shattered to see a headline proclaiming that President Truman had disbanded OSS. This was the culmination of a scathing internal battle in the highest echelons of government and geoglobal politicking to which we were not, at the time, privy.
It was all extremely complicated, as over the course of the war, OSS and the Russian secret police, the NKVD (People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs), had worked closely in Eastern Europe against the Nazis. The alliance soured, however, near the end of the war. For one thing, Donovan’s second in command, Princeton alum Allen W. Dulles, was associated with the powerful Wall Street law firm Sullivan & Cromwell, which represented numerous German businesses that supported the Third Reich. Dulles personally handled many of these clients. Second, Stalin was outraged that OSS had made a decision to support and fund a former Nazi general, Reinhard Gehlen, helping him set up ratlines to assist thousands of high-ranking Nazis under the general’s control to exit Germany after the war. In return, OSS gained control of the general’s voluminous knowledge and secret files on Soviet agents. Gehlen would go on to become West Germany’s spymaster during the Cold War.
The Gehlen affair divided the Roosevelt administration and the Donovan/Dulles duo. Presidential advisers wanted to reduce Germany to an agrarian society unable to wage war again; OSS was more worried about Stalin’s expansionist plans—preferring to allow ex-Nazis to rebuild much of the German machine as a levee against the rising Crimson Tide. Adding to OSS’s PR problems was a pervading congressional paranoia that the agency would become a sort of American gestapo, which they could abort by cutting funds to the money-hungry department.
In the end, Roosevelt died of a brain hemorrhage on April 12, 1945, and Harry Truman, elevated to the presidency, quickly disbanded OSS as soon as the war ended.
Before we were even able to digest the news and discuss it among ourselves, General Wedemeyer’s headquarters ordered our group to report for duty in the regular army. The war was over, we had done our part, and we had other plans. We radioed Kunming and requested an air transport to evacuate us forthwith. Two planes airlifted us out the next day, flying across China to return us to base.
At Kunming, we were greeted by a much larger contingent of personnel than had been there when we had shipped out, as teams that had been operating far afield had been straggling back. Some had hiked hundreds of miles on foot. Others had been lucky enough to catch a plane or commandeer some Japanese vehicles. Among the arrivals was Captain Robert G. North, who had been operating commando style for several months in the North China countryside.
We packed our confidential files into cargo containers and filled the courtyard with our weapons, which were supposed to be turned over to Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist forces. Instead, we later learned that Captain Helliwell’s favored asset, General Tu Li-ming, swept through, stole the weapons, and sold them to Mao Tse-tung’s communist forces, which were becoming braver now that the Japanese had been vanquished.
Soon the white peaks of the Himalayas emerged in the distance as we made our final trip over the Hump, where so many of our comrades lay in unmarked graves beneath the snow.
While I was offered the chance to join one of OSS’s successor organizations, the Central Intelligence Group, I decided on other plans.
On my return to the United States, I first went to stay with my parents in Albany, where I found that I had a difficult decision to make between a Guggenheim fellowship in creative writing and a Rhodes scholarship, both of which I had been awarded. Weighing the two was difficult, but I opted against the idea of bad food and worse weather in England, accepting the Guggenheim stipend, somewhere between $1,500 and $2,500 a year, which could fund a grand lifestyle in Mexico, where I hoped to use the time to write another book.
Before I left, my father suffered a near fatal heart attack, so I stayed an extra six weeks, helping my mother care for him. Once assured that he was on the road to full recovery, I acquired a difficult-to-find postwar automobile from a state trooper who lived next door and drove the long haul down to Acapulco.
Acapulco was still just a sleepy seaside village, a virtually unknown, undeveloped paradise. My room at a quiet pension boasted an expansive view of the sparkling turquoise bay. I lounged and swam on Caleta beach in the mornings, and in the afternoons, after feasting on a lunch of fresh fish, plaintains, and exotic fruits, I finished my third novel, Stranger in Town.
A former OSS comrade, the commando Bob North, had also found a career in writing and was out in Hollywood banging out B-movie scripts for a producer named Sol Wurtzel. Bob urged me to team up with him to write original screenplays.
After I sent my book off to a publisher, I drove up to L.A. and joined North at his rented apartment near the Lakeside Country Club, where the scratch golfer earned almost as much playing as he did writing. OSS had recruited from America’s brightest, and North was no exception. From an old California family, Bob had graduated Stanford—a year late, after being suspended for a prank—and had many close contacts he could draw on in the area.
He introduced me around town, where I met with agents, flirted with pretty young starlets at parties, and wined and dined with the best of them at the Brown Derby and Chasens. The fatal flaw in the plot was the unfortunate circumstance that the screenplays Bob and I churned out did not find a home. Several were optioned for small sums, but nothing was green-lighted (at which point you were able to really cash in), as the market had slowed down in response to a greater audience drifting toward television. Also, our scripts were, admittedly, not of the highest quality. Bob’s income dropped as well, when Sol Wurtzel became involved in a dispute with 20th Century Fox and cut production on the films that Bob was working on.
Having caught a common Hollywood disease, EEI (expenses exceed income), I reluctantly paid respects to my friends and made a strategic retreat to Albany, where I hunkered down and wrote my fourth book. The result was a compact action-adventure novel set in the Bahamas, called Bimini Run, published by Farrar, Straus & Co. The advance was adequate enough for me to join the Fort Orange and Albany Country Clubs, where I enjoyed playing tennis, squash, and golf in good weather; I migrated to skiing and hunting when the seasons changed. When spring melted the snow in 1948, however, I started to dream of Paris and decided to figure out some way to move there. Yet another vague inkling that when turned into action, would prove to become a major milestone that would alter my life and become a stepping stone into a new agency called the CIA.