The Secret Warriors

When the ten gentlemen—the group known as the Disciples—gathered to brief and be briefed by Colonel William Donovan, they found him in pain in bed in his suite at the hotel. He had a glass dark with Scotch in his hand, and there was a Scotch bottle on his bedside table.

Though Colonel Donovan, a stocky, silver-haired, ruddy-faced Irishman, was not a professional soldier, neither was he a Kentucky colonel, nor the commanding officer of a National Guard regiment. He had earned both his silver eagle and the Medal of Honor for valor on the battlefields of France in World War I. Between wars, he had become a very successful—and, it logically followed, very wealthy—attorney in New York City, and a power behind the scenes in the Democratic Party, not only in New York but, even perhaps especially, in Washington.

He was again in government employ, this time at an annual stipend of one dollar, as the Coordinator of Information, which meant he ran a relatively new government agency. Donovan reported directly to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Most people, to Donovan’s joy, believed the COI was the United States government’s answer to Joseph Goebbels’s Propaganda Ministry.

COI did, in fact, have an “information” function—in the propaganda sense—headed by the distinguished playwright Robert Sherwood. But it also had another “information” function, headed by Donovan himself, which had absolutely nothing to do with whipping the American people into the kind of patriotic frenzy that would impel them, for the sake of the “war effort,” to abandon “pleasure driving” and donate their aluminum pans to be converted into bombers.

The kind of information that Donovan was charged with coordinating is more accurately described as intelligence. Each of the military services had intelligence-gathering operations, as did the State Department and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and even the less warlike agencies of the federal government like the Departments of Labor, Commerce, Treasury, and Interior.

Despite sincerely made claims of absolute objectivity, President Roosevelt realized that when, say, the Chief of Naval Intelligence made a report on a problem together with a proposal for a solution, that solution generally involved the use of the U.S. Navy. Similarly, the Army seldom recommended naval bombardment of a target. Heavy Army Air Corps bomber aircraft were obviously better suited for that.

It was the Coordinator of Information’s duty—which is to say Colonel William J. Donovan’s—to examine the intelligence gathered by all relevant agencies, and then to evaluate that intelligence against the global war effort. If asked, he would also recommend a course of action. This course of action might well be implemented by an agency different from the one providing the original intelligence.

To assist him in this task, Donovan intended to gather around him a dozen men, each of extraordinary intelligence and competence in his area of expertise. Like Donovan, they would offer to the government for one dollar per annum services that in the private sector would have cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. Because there were supposed to be twelve of these men (he had managed to recruit only ten) and because they were answerable only to Donovan, it was natural that they came to be known as the Disciples. Donovan was Christ, answerable only to God—Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

Donovan and his Disciples’ mandate pleased virtually no one in the intelligence community. The Army and Navy were especially outraged that amateurs would oversee what their long-service professionals had developed.

Their disapproval, however, meant very little as long as Franklin D. Roosevelt, who had come to believe that Donovan’s original suggestion was one of his own brilliant ideas, was pleased with the way things were going. He conferred at least twice a week with Donovan.

One of those meetings had occurred the day before, which was why the Disciples filing into Donovan’s St. Regis Hotel suite found him in bed in his pajamas. On his way to Union Station in Washington, where he had gone to catch the 11:55 to New York, the White House car carrying Donovan had been struck broadside by a taxicab. Though his knee was severely—and painfully—hurt in the impact, he managed to catch the train.

In his compartment, the pain grew intense, and he had the conductor fetch a bucket of ice cubes from the dining car. He wrapped some in a towel and applied it to his knee. That helped, but when he began to experience pain in his chest as well, he knew he had a more serious problem than a bruised knee. After he got to New York and taxied to the St. Regis, he stopped in the lobby and asked the manager to send him a doctor.

The doctor listened to Donovan list his symptoms, prodded the knee, and then announced he was going to call an ambulance and transport Donovan to St. Vincent’s Hospital.

What he had, the doctor told Colonel Donovan, was a blood clot caused by the injury to his knee. The clot had moved to his lung, which was why he had chest pains. The term for this condition was “embolism,” the doctor continued. If the clot completely blocked the flow of blood to his lungs, or if it moved to his heart or to the artery supplying the brain, he would drop dead. In a hospital, he would be given medicine intravenously that would thin the blood. If he was lucky, in a month or six weeks the clot would dissolve.

Reluctantly—and after pressure—the doctor told the colonel that the medicine which would be used to thin his blood was also available in a pill form. It was, Donovan was fascinated to learn, a pharmaceutical version of rat poison. The doctor also reluctantly admitted that giving him this medicine—and bed rest—was about all the treatment the hospital could offer.

The doctor couldn’t argue with that. So he had a pharmacy deliver the blood-thinning medicine, then watched as Donovan took a strong first dose.

“This is the exception,” the doctor replied. “Drink all you want. Alcohol thins the blood. Just stay in bed, and don’t get excited.”

Donovan was normally a teetotaler, but since whiskey was less repugnant than rat poison, he ordered up a bottle of Scotch.

After they had gathered in his room, Donovan told the Disciples how he had damaged his knee, but not about the blood clot.

The first item on the agenda, as always, was the superbomb. The Science Disciple, who was on leave from the Department of Physics of the University of California at Berkeley, reported that there was no question that the Germans were methodically, if not rapidly, engaged in nuclear research. As one proof of this, they had granted the same immunity—“for scientific contributions to the German State”—to Jewish physicists and mathematicians involved in such research as they had to Jews involved in rocket propulsion.

And further, a German delegation had not long before returned from a visit to a plant in Denmark that had been engaged in research into a substance called heavy water. This substance, he explained—until it became apparent that no one else either understood or much cared about it—was water to whose molecular structure had been appended another hydrogen atom. The Germans were apparently trying to cause a chain—or explosive—effect by releasing the extra hydrogen atom so appended.

The Science Disciple then argued that it would be useful to “persuade” scientists engaged in German atomic research to come to this country—or, “persuasion” failing, to kidnap them. Though he was not convinced that these people would be able to make a contribution to the American nuclear effort, it was inarguable that if they were here, they could not contribute to the German effort.

The problem, Donovan said, was that if German nuclear people started disappearing, it would alert the Germans to American interest in the subject. Roosevelt himself had decided that the one American war plan that most had to be concealed from the Axis was the attempt to develop an atomic bomb.

“Even in the case of that obscure mining engineer we just brought out of North Africa,” Donovan went on, “we thought about that long and hard before we went for him. In the end, because we need the uraninite ore from the Belgian Congo, we decided we had to have him. In other words, we’ll have to go very carefully with this. As a general rule of thumb, anybody we got out would have to be very important. So come up with a list, and rate them twice: how important they are to the Germans and how important they are to our program.”

The second item on the agenda was political: the question of Vice Admiral d’Escadre Jean-Philippe de Verbey, French Navy, retired. Not just for organizational but for personal reasons. This affair was the business of C. Holdsworth Martin, Jr., the Disciple who dealt with France and French colonies.

Like Donovan, Martin had served with the American Expeditionary Forces in the First World War. After the war, he had been appointed to the Armistice Commission. A civil engineer, he had met and married a French officer’s widow, and had subsequently taken over the running of her late husband’s construction firm. This he had turned from a middle-size, reasonably successful business into a large, extremely profitable corporation. His wife’s social position (she was a member of the deposed nobility) and his wealth had then combined to permit them to move in the highest social circles.

C. Holdsworth Martin, Jr., brought his wife and children to New York after the fall of France in 1940, purchased an apartment on Fifth Avenue overlooking Central Park, and promptly enraged the Franco-American community and large numbers of sympathetic Americans by proclaiming whenever the opportunity arose that French stupidity, cowardice, and corruption, and not German military prowess, had caused France to go down to such a quick and humiliating defeat.

Even more outrageously, he made no secret of his belief that millions of middle- and upper-class Frenchmen indeed preferred Hitler to Blum,³ and had every intention of cooperating with Hitler’s New Order for Europe.

One of the few people who agreed with any of this was Colonel William Donovan. And so far as Donovan was concerned, C. Holdsworth Martin, Jr., was the ideal man to be Disciple for France. He had spent more than twenty years there, knew the country and its leaders better than most Frenchmen, and, with very few exceptions, cordially detested most of them.

Over luncheon and golf, Donovan had learned from him that Martin detested most of the French as much for their chauvinism as for their inept army. His success with his wife’s firm, because it was an “American” and not a “French” success, earned him more jealousy than respect among his French peers. His wife’s late husband’s family, for instance, referred to him as “le gigolo Américain.”

On January 11, 1942, C. Holdsworth Martin, Jr., entered the service of the United States government, at the usual remuneration of one dollar per annum, as a consultant to the Office of the Coordinator of Information. Three days later, C. Holdsworth Martin III, a 1940 graduate of the École Polytechnique in Paris, by enlisting in the U.S. Army as a private soldier, entered the service of the United States government at a remuneration of twenty-one dollars per month.

Although he acted, and sounded, like a French boulevardier, C. Holdsworth Martin, Jr., was almost belligerently an American.

Now C. Holdsworth Martin, Jr., was engaged in a description of what he referred to as “l’affaire du vieux amiral vicieux” (“the old, vicious admiral”), by which he meant Vice Admiral d’Escadre Jean-Philippe de Verbey.

When the war broke out, Admiral de Verbey was recalled from retirement. He was assigned to the French naval staff in Casablanca, Morocco, and had there suffered a heart attack, which nearly killed him. By the time he’d spent nine months in the hospital, France had fallen and an upstart, six-foot-six brigadier general of tanks, Charles de Gaulle, who had gotten out of France at the last minute, had appointed himself chief of the French government in exile and commander in chief of its armed forces.

The majority of French officers still on French soil considered themselves honor-bound to accept the defeat of France and the authority of Marshal Pétain, the aged “Hero of Verdun” who now headed the French government in Vichy.

Admiral de Verbey did not. He considered it his duty as a French officer to continue to fight. He managed to pass word to de Gaulle in London that he approved of de Gaulle’s actions. He announced further that as soon as he could arrange transportation (in other words, escape house arrest in Casablanca), it was his intention to come to London and assume command of French military and naval forces in exile.

So far as the admiral was concerned, it was as simple as that. Once he reached London, he would be the senior officer outside Vichy control. He had been an admiral when de Gaulle was a major. If de Gaulle wanted to pretend that he was head of some sort of government in exile, fine. But the commander of Free French military forces would be the senior officer who had not caved in to the Boches—in other words, Vice Admiral d’Escadre Jean-Philippe de Verbey.

Brigadier General de Gaulle was not pleased with the admiral’s offer, which he correctly believed would be a threat to his own power. De Verbey’s very presence in London, much more his assumption of command of Free French military forces, would remind people that de Gaulle was not anywhere near the ranking Free French officer and that his self-appointment as head of the French government in exile was of very doubtful legality. He couldn’t have that.

Admiral de Verbey shortly afterward received orders—signed by a major general, in the name of Charles de Gaulle, “Head of State”—ordering him to remain in Casablanca, “pending any need for your services to France in the future.”

Early in 1942, de Verbey, furious, took the great risk of offering his services to Robert Murphy, who was American consul general in Rabat. The Americans, he told Murphy, could use him in any capacity they saw fit, so long as it was concerned with getting La Boche out of La Belle France.

Murphy related the information to Washington, where eventually it reached C. Holdsworth Martin, Jr. Martin knew de Verbey, and suggested to Donovan that the old man be brought to the United States. It might be useful to have a lever available if de Gaulle—who already showed signs of being very difficult—became impossible.

Donovan was aware that since Roosevelt looked fondly upon de Gaulle, he was safe in his self-appointed role as head of the French government in exile. Further, even if they were to have a de Gaulle replacement waiting in the wings, he felt they could find someone better than a long-retired admiral with a serious heart condition. He had not then rejected Martin’s recommendation, however. But he believed that he would ultimately decide that getting the admiral out of Morocco would be more trouble than it would be worth.

But later there came the necessity of bringing out of Morocco the French mining engineer who knew about the stock of uranitite in the Belgian Congo. That operation had a very high priority and was top secret. Which meant they would need good cover for it.

Donovan’s deputy, Captain Peter Douglass, USN, had suggested, and Donovan had agreed, that should something go wrong with the snatch-the-mining-engineer operation, the Germans would begin to suspect an American interest in atomic fission. If, however, the operation had the escape of the admiral as its cover and the operation blew up, there was at least a reasonable chance the Germans would not suspect what was really up.

Thus C. Holdsworth Martin, Jr., had been told that Donovan had decided to bring the admiral to the United States. He had not been told about the mining engineer. The operation had been a success. The admiral and the engineer had arrived at the Brooklyn Navy Yard aboard a submarine, which had picked them up fifteen miles at sea off the Moroccan coast.

The admiral and the engineer were then taken to a seaside mansion in Deal, New Jersey, where they could be kept on ice until a decision was made as to what to do with them. Afterward, Martin told his wife that the admiral was safe in America, and where he was being kept. Madame Martin, who had known the admiral all her life, then drove the fifty miles to Deal, loaded the admiral in her Packard, and took him to the Martin duplex on Fifth Avenue.

When the formidable Madame Martin arrived, the naval officer charged with the security of the mansion incorrectly decided there was nothing he could do to keep the admiral in Deal. Madame Martin, after all, was the wife of a Disciple. So he had helpfully loaded the admiral’s one suitcase into the Martin Packard, and then saluted crisply as it drove off.

As a result of this failure of judgment, he would spend the balance of World War II as a supply officer in the South Pacific, but the damage was done. The admiral was in New York City, prepared to tell anyone who would listen that Brigadier General Charles de Gaulle not only was a megalomaniac but had no legal authority whatever for declaring himself the head of the French government.

“This will never do,” Donovan told Martin. “Maybe we’ll need to let the admiral have his say. But for the time being he has to be kept on ice at Summer Place. If you have to take him back to the mansion by force, then do that. But we absolutely have to keep him away from the press. I have had a word with the New York Times, and they are not going to run the interview they did with him. But it’s only a question of time until the story gets out. God help us if Colonel McCormick gets wind of what we’ve done.”

“He publishes the Chicago Tribune,” Donovan said. “He volunteered for active duty on December eighth. Since Franklin hates his guts—the feeling is mutual—Roosevelt turned him down, ostensibly because of his age. As a consequence, the colonel would be very sympathetic to another old warrior denied active service by that socialist in the White House.”

“For the time being—I really don’t want to lock him up unless I have to—I think we should keep stalling him,” Donovan said. “Maybe pay him some Navy attention. That will infuriate de Gaulle when he finds out about it—and he will. But I still think we can peacefully stop the admiral from calling him a megalomaniac on the front page of the Chicago Tribune.”

“Send some Navy brass to ask his opinion about invading North Africa,” Donovan said. “That might appeal to his ego, keeping his role in the invasion a secret.”

“And he might even be helpful,” Martin said, just slightly sarcastic. “He was the naval commander in Casablanca.”

“Well, you make him feel important, and I’ll arrange with Captain Douglass to send some Navy brass down to confer with him.”

“What about some of the French naval officers in Washington? Can we get him some kind of a small staff? Otherwise, he’ll know we’re just humoring him.”

Donovan thought that over. The moment Free French naval officers were assigned to de Verbey, de Gaulle would hear about it—and be furious. Perhaps that might not be a bad idea. It was Machiavellian. Or perhaps Rooseveltian.

“I’ll speak to Douglass,” Donovan said. “I’m sure we can find several otherwise unoccupied French naval officers to serve the admiral.”

The third item on the agenda was financial. Five million dollars in gold coins had been made available to finance secret operations in Africa, France, and Spain. More would be made available when needed. Five million was enough to get started.

Project Arcadia had two basic objectives: to keep Spain from joining the German-Italian-Japanese Axis, and to keep the native populations of French North Africa (Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia) from throwing in their lot with the Germans. Five million was a lot of money, but worth it. Ten times that much was available if necessary from the President’s secret war appropriation. It would be much cheaper to spend fifty million to keep Spain neutral than to spend two weeks at war with her.

Donovan and his Disciples knew that it had been decided to invade French North Africa as quickly as possible. That would be called Operation Torch. Donovan now told the Disciples something he had learned from the President only the day before: The Army and Navy were shooting for an August or September D-Day for Operation Torch, but he and Roosevelt privately believed the operation could not be executed until October or November.

In addition to the logistical nightmare of sending an invasion force from the United States directly to Africa, there were geopolitical problems. If Spain joined the Axis, the Germans could legally move troops into Spanish Morocco, from where you could almost spit on Gibraltar. The Vichy government was almost certainly going to resist Torch with whatever they had. And they had troops and warships, including the battleship Jean Bart, in Casablanca.

All of these problems would be compounded if the natives decided to support the Franco-Germans against an American invasion. Some of their troops were not only good but in French service; and even the least modernized of their forces could function effectively as guerrillas. On the other hand, the French Army had never been able to pacify the ones who disdained French service.

Donovan ordered the five million to be spent with the missions of Project Arcadia alone in mind. As little as possible would be spent for “general war objectives.” It was further not to be regarded as supplemental funds by intelligence operators on the scene.

Gold was worth $32.00 an ounce, $512.00 a pound. Five million dollars’ worth of gold weighed about ten thousand pounds, five tons. A man named Atherton Richards, a banker on the fringes of the Disciples, would pick up the gold at the Federal Reserve Bank in Manhattan, transport it by Brink’s armored cars to the Navy base in Brooklyn, and load it on a U.S. Navy destroyer, which would then make a high-speed run across the Atlantic to Gibraltar.

Donovan’s Disciples had other plans and operations to discuss, offering suggestions and seeking instructions, and the session continued for two more hours before it died down.

“Is that all?” Donovan finally asked. He was tired and wanted some sleep. The rat poison and the Scotch were getting to him.

“I have one thing, William,” the Near Eastern Disciple said. “Has there been any decision about whether, or how, we’re going to deal with Thami el Glaoui?”

The Disciple, previously professor of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton, believed that Thami el Glaoui, pasha of Marrakech, was not only a very interesting character but that he had every likelihood of becoming king of Morocco.

“Thami el Glaoui,” the Disciple began patiently, pedantically, “bridges, one might say—he’s sixty-some, maybe seventy, no one seems to know for sure—the Thousand and One Nights and what it pleases us to consider modern civilization. He rules over his tribesmen like a sheikh in the desert, as absolute monarch, exercising the power of life and death. But he also owns wineries, farms, a bus company, and phosphate mines. God only knows how much he made by taking a percentage for smuggling diamonds and currency out of Morocco and France.”

“We could not have gotten the mining engineer Grunier out of Morocco without his permission,” he said. “That cost us one hundred thousand dollars. If I may continue?”

“If Thami el Glaoui were to come to believe that we were in favor of his becoming king, or at least that we would not support the present monarch—who would, I should add, like to behead him—it could be quite valuable to us, I think.”

“The man who has led Thami el Glaoui into the twentieth century is another interesting chap,” the Disciple went on, as if picking up a lecture. “He is the old pasha of Ksar es Souk. For years and years and years he was the éminence grise behind Thami’s maneuverings. He was assassinated on December sixth last, probably by the king. Probably with the tacit approval of the Germans. Possibly by mistake—they could have easily been after his son instead. The son was involved in high-stakes smuggling.”

“On the death of the pasha, the eldest son became pasha. The pasha is dead. Long live the pasha. The new pasha of Ksar es Souk is Sidi el Ferruch,” the Disciple went on. “Twenty-five years old. Educated in Switzerland and Germany. A product of this century.”

“He already has,” he said. “He smuggled—with el Glaoui’s permission—Grunier out of Morocco. Charley feels that he could be very useful when we invade North Africa. So do I. But there is, to reiterate, more than one school of thought on the question.”

“You’re thinking about causing a native rebellion, then?” The previously skeptical Italian Disciple was now fascinated.

“The Army’s weighing the pros and cons,” Donovan said, not wanting to get into a lengthy discussion of that now. “It’s something for the back burner. A rebellion could quickly get out of hand, but simply ensuring that Thami el Glaoui’s Berbers stay out of the fight seems worth whatever effort it would take. I’ll let you know what’s decided.”

The Near East Disciple was used to concluding lectures when he wished to conclude them, and not before. He was also, Donovan decided, not immune to the romance of his first venture into international intrigue.

“With an eye to using el Ferruch in the future, and for other reasons,” the Disciple said, “we decided not to bring Eric Fulmar out when we brought Grunier out.”

“Still another interesting character,” the Near East Disciple said. “His father is the Fulmar of Fulmar Elektrische Gesellschaft, and his mother is Monica Carlisle, the actress.”

Now that Charley had the other Disciples’ rapt attention, Donovan knew that silencing him was going to be damned near impossible.

“Very likely to make sure that her dark secret—a son that old—did not become public knowledge,” the Near East Disciple went on, “she sent him to school in Switzerland. Where Sidi el Ferruch, conveniently for us, was also a student.”

“And then el Ferruch and Fulmar went to Germany—to Phillip’s University in Marburg an der Lahn—for college. Where they apparently took honors in Smuggling 101. The pair of them have made a fortune smuggling gold, jewels, currency, and fine art out of France—not to mention the hundred thousand we paid them to get Grunier out. Fulmar now has over a hundred thousand in the Park and Fifty-seventh Street branch of the First National City Bank. And I wouldn’t be at all surprised if there was more money in Switzerland.”

“This Fulmar chap was supposed to come out with Grunier?” Italy asked, and when the Near East Disciple nodded, asked: “Then why didn’t we bring him out?”

“He thought we were going to bring him out,” the Disciple went on. “The Germans were breathing down his neck. They knew about the smuggling, and the son of a prominent Nazi industrialist should be in uniform, preferably with the Waffen SS in Russia. Since he knew that it was a bit below the salt to have made himself rich by helping the French move their assets out from under the benevolent control of the Thousand-Year Reich, he really wanted to get himself out of Morocco. It made him very cooperative.”

“It wasn’t nice, Henry,” Donovan said. “But it was considered necessary. It gave Sidi el Ferruch a choice. He could turn Fulmar in, and cover himself with the Germans. Or he could continue to protect him, and leave the door open to us. And of course, when we’re talking about el Ferruch, we’re talking about Thami el Glaoui. For the moment, at least, he’s decided to leave the door open. Fulmar is in the pasha’s palace at Ksar es Souk.”

“I don’t suppose he thinks very kindly of us,” Donovan said. “We’ll have to deal with that when we come to it. If we come to it. As I said, the decision whether or not to try to use Thami el Glaoui’s Berbers has not yet been made.”

Donovan suppressed a smile. “We’ll have to burn that bridge when we get to it,” he said. “I don’t think waving a flag at him will be very effective, but he likes money.”

There were only verbal reports, nothing that required discussion. When these were concluded, Donovan’s visitors shook his hand and left.

He drained the Scotch in his glass, had another, and then turned the light off. But his mind would not let him go to sleep. He poured more Scotch and drank that. He wondered if he would die. He didn’t want to die now. Not, he thought, until the tide had turned. Not while he was having so much fun. He went to sleep vowing to obey the doctor’s command to stay in bed until the embolism dissolved.

Donovan had been asleep an hour when one of the telephones on his bedside table rang. He had three telephones there: a house phone, a secure telephone, and his personal, unlisted telephone. The last was ringing. It was probably Ruth, he thought as he reached for it. He wondered what his wife wanted at this time of night.

Instead, it turned out to be Barbara Whittaker. Barbara owned Summer Place, the mansion in Deal, and had made it available without cost or question when Donovan told her he needed it. Barbara Whittaker was a very old friend of both Ruth and Bill. She was also the widow of his lifelong friend Chesly Whittaker, and, he remembered, the aunt of Jimmy Whittaker, who was in the Philippines in the Air Corps. Turning over Summer Place and the house on Q Street to Donovan was the only way she could imagine of helping Jimmy.

Donovan concealed his surprise. The best hope he had had for Chesly Whittaker’s nephew was that he would somehow survive both the debacle in the Philippine Islands and the certain confinement in a Japanese POW camp.

“Okay, I’ll tell you,” she said, gently sarcastic, humoring him. “So in case anyone asks you, you’ll know. He got out of the Philippines with Douglas MacArthur, and Douglas sent him from Australia with a letter to Franklin Roosevelt. They’re flying him to Washington tonight with it.”

And then he had another thought, a professional thought. Douglas MacArthur, whom Bill Donovan had known since they had both been young colonels with the AEF in France in 1917, was very likely up to something devious. God only knew what that letter contained. Whatever it said, it could not be allowed to fall into the wrong hands. Donovan realized that the wrong hands were not only those of Colonel McCormick of the Chicago Tribune but those of George Marshall as well. Marshall and MacArthur despised each other.

What Roosevelt did with the letter was his business, but it had to reach him, not get “mistakenly” released to the press, or “misplaced” in the Pentagon. Or “lost.”

Donovan picked up the secure telephone and called the White House. The President was not available, he was told, but would be in half an hour. He left a message for the President: Jimmy Whittaker was in San Francisco, en route to Washington, bearing a personal letter to Franklin Roosevelt from Douglas MacArthur.

After he hung up, he realized that wasn’t enough. Interception of the letter was possible now that he had announced its existence.

He picked up the secure phone again and called the COI duty officer in the National Institutes of Health building. He told him to find Captain Peter Douglass and have him call immediately.

Captain Douglass, whom Donovan had recruited from the Office of Naval Intelligence, was on the phone in three minutes.

“I want to ensure that he delivers that letter to the President,” Donovan said. “Which means I want you to have the airplane met when it lands in Washington. I would prefer that you’re not personally involved, but if need be, meet him yourself. Is there anybody available?”

“Canidy is in Washington,” Douglass replied. “He came back today from visiting his father in Cedar Rapids. He and Whittaker are close. I think I can lay my hands on him. And Chief Ellis is at the house on Q Street, of course.”

Canidy was a naval aviator who had been recruited by General Claire Chennault for his Flying Tigers in China. Canidy had been the first ace of the American Volunteer Group. He had then been recruited again, this time by the COI, to bring Grunier and the old admiral out of North Africa. After he and Eric Fulmar had been left floating in the Atlantic off Safi by the submarine they’d both expected to escape on, Canidy decided he no longer wished to offer his services to COI.

Shortly after his safe return to the States, Canidy had informed Captain Douglass that now that he’d had the opportunity to play Jimmy Cagney as a spy, he’d decided that flying fighters off an airplane carrier didn’t seem nearly as dangerous or unpleasant as what he’d gone through in Morocco, and that he would be grateful if Captain Douglass would arrange for his recommissioning in the Navy.

There were several reasons why Donovan could not permit this. At the top of the list was Canidy’s involvement with the “movement” of Grunier from Morocco to the United States. Canidy knew nothing about why Grunier was important, of course, but he knew about Grunier, and that meant he was privy to a nuclear secret, and that in itself was enough to deny him return to the Navy.

And that wasn’t the only secret he knew. He had been in contact with Sidi Hassan el Ferruch, pasha of Ksar es Souk. Donovan believed that Roosevelt in the end would decide in favor of the notion of using el Ferruch’s Berbers in the invasion of North Africa. But even if he didn’t, the necessity for absolute secrecy about American plans for North Africa was such that Canidy’s knowledge of them—presuming he was not a cheerful, willing, obedient, loyal Boy Scout’s honor COI volunteer—made him a security risk.

So would his very knowledge of the inner workings at the top of COI. For these reasons, if he became “difficult” Donovan would have to have him sit out the war at a remote base in Alaska or Greenland. It might even be necessary for Donovan to order his “hospitalization for psychiatric evaluation.” In the opinion of Roosevelt’s attorney general, the legal right of habeas corpus did not apply to mental patients. If Canidy were “hospitalized,” it would be for the duration.

Captain Douglass could not threaten Canidy with any of this when he asked to return to the Navy. What he did say to him was that he should sit and think a moment about why it might be impossible for him to pin his golden naval aviator’s wings back on. Canidy, who was by no means stupid, saw what the writing on the wall was, and agreed—by no means enthusiastically—to stay on.

“No,” Douglass said to Donovan. “He’s hardly what you could call a happy volunteer, but he seems to have reconsidered his situation.”

“If he were a happy volunteer,” Donovan said, “that would worry me.” Donovan was pleased, and relieved. He liked Canidy personally, and it would have been unpleasant to order his “hospitalization.” And he agreed with Eldon Baker, the longtime professional intelligence officer in charge of the Moroccan operation, that Canidy was one of those rarities who have the strange combination of intelligence, imagination, courage, and ruthlessness that an agent needs. It would have been a pity had it been necessary to lock those talents up for the duration.

“Okay,” Donovan said. “Then he’s the man. Have Chief Ellis get him out of the lady’s bed, tell him what he has to know, and then let him handle it. Didn’t you tell me you’d gotten him a marshal’s badge?”

Chief Boatswain’s Mate Ellis was an old China sailor from the Yangtze River Patrol. Ellis was Douglass’s jack-of-all-trades in Washington.

“And maybe you better go with them too. Sit in the car or something, where nobody can see you. Just make sure that letter is not intercepted.”

“If I have any trouble, I’ll call you back,” Douglass said. “Otherwise, I will call you when Whittaker is safe in the house on Q Street.”

“I’m sitting up in bed drinking rat poison and Scotch whiskey,” Donovan said. “Thank you for asking, Peter.”

Somewhat bitterly, Donovan thought he was spending much too much time in political warfare with the ranking member of the American military establishment. But it couldn’t be helped. His allegiance belonged to Roosevelt, and no one else.