4

Slipping into the Shadows

IN WASHINGTON, DONOVAN HAD set up his Office of the Coordinator of Information, COI, with $450,000 from Roosevelt’s secret fund. He had created it after Churchill had told him about the British Treasury fund for MI6 and MI5. “It’s their no questions asked money box,” the prime minister said.

Having decided his post as COI would require his full attention, Donovan divided his law practice clients between his senior partners, but he took his secretary with him. Eloise Page had managed his office diary, booked his luncheon appointments, and organized his travel plans in her soft southern accent. Five years had passed since she had graduated from the Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore, where she had learned typing and shorthand.

Donovan was her first and only employer. After a short interview and a typing test, which consisted of him dictating a page of a legal document and checking it, he had given her the job. It came with a generous salary, birthday and Christmas bonuses—and learning to cope with his moods and standing up to his Irish temper. Bringing her with him to the Office of the COI as his executive secretary, he told her, “Better salary, more glamour, more interesting work.”

Her first task in the COI’s temporary office in the Apex Building near the White House was to contact the list of names Donovan told her would be the nucleus of his staff. They included journalists and broadcasters who could gather and analyze information from all over the world. Others were lawyers he had met in the courts of New York and Washington who would summarize the latest government reports. Some names she recognized from their visits to his law office. One was David Bruce, a lawyer who had told her he had been in London and had watched RAF fighters dueling with the Luftwaffe over the cliffs of Dover in August 1940, a curtain-raiser for the London Blitz. Next to his name Donovan had scribbled INTELLIGENCE ANALYSIS. Eventually Bruce would become Donovan’s station chief in London.

Edward Buxton, who had served in the Great War with Donovan, was marked down to be an assistant director to organize a unit to interview “friendly foreigners arriving in Washington with useful information.”

One name on the list particularly impressed Eloise Page: Marine Captain James Roosevelt, the president’s son. He would become Donovan’s can-do fixer in Washington. Soon his brusque demands could be heard in government offices from dawn to dusk: “COI needs it now not today.”

In the meantime Donovan had persuaded the navy department to loan him its latest Buick sedan and to install a shortwave radio, which allowed him to make calls while driving. He used it to talk to his staff in what was now COI’s new headquarters on E Street NW. The three-story building was fronted by impressive granite columns and had housed the Public Health Service.

Throughout the summer of 1941, Donovan’s organization became the talk of Washington. More than one newspaper columnist speculated why he could walk into the White House to see FDR at all hours. The Washington Star began to run a comic strip, The Exciting Adventures of Wild Bill Donovan, which became breakfast table must-read in Georgetown homes. When Secretary of State Cordell Hull sniffed at the strip, the president told him, “Bill is doing a good job.”

Donovan had also come to the attention of General Friedrich von Boetticher, the military attaché at the German embassy in Washington. Of average height, blond, heavyset, and genial, Boetticher was fifty-eight years old when the war started, and in Berlin he was seen as one of the most important of the forty-three military, naval, and air attachés serving the Third Reich in thirty countries.

Boetticher had at his command the German consuls in America who eagerly performed the task he set them of obtaining military intelligence. In New York there was Eduard Kurtz, Erich Windels in Philadelphia, Georg Krause-Wichmann in Chicago, Karl Kapp in Cleveland, and Georg Gyssling in Los Angeles. All clipped local newspaper stories on political, cultural, and military affairs. Boetticher would often receive a hundred cuttings in a day. He would compile the information into reports that he would transmit by cable or send in the embassy’s diplomatic bag by air, depending on how important he judged the information to be for the Foreign Office in Berlin. At Wilhelmstrasse 76, at desks in the political or commercial branches, these reports were read by diplomats looking to shape the future foreign policy of Germany. Many were passed on to Adolf Hitler, and Boetticher knew that his reports were among those read by the führer.

He not only used the printed sources from consuls about America’s military forces but also received information in response to questions he put to government departments. He attended maneuvers and parades and military lectures. The State Department also regarded him as one of the most important military attachés in Washington.

His post gave him a comfortable house, a housekeeper, and a cook to host dinner parties in return for invitations to important social engagements. He became a guest at parties at the White House, State Department, and other government departments. His social calendar had given him contact with General Douglas MacArthur and General George C. Marshal, enabling him to tap into their rich sources of information.

Boetticher had taken up his appointment in 1936, when MacArthur was still the only four-star general, on a salary of $10,000 a year and had the exclusive use of the army’s only limousine. Major Dwight Eisenhower, his aide, received $3,000 and acted as the army’s lobbyist in Congress.

In one report to the Foreign Office, Boetticher wrote he had sat next to Professor Robert Goddard, the guest speaker at a dinner, who had explained his rocket experiments and outlined “the first practical reality of a usable rocket” he was close to creating. Boetticher persuaded Goddard to let him have a copy of his speech, in which Goddard had said his rocket would reach an altitude of 2,400 meters and a speed of 1,000 kilometers. Boetticher sent the details to Berlin, adding that the Guggenheim Foundation and the Carnegie Institute financed Goddard’s research.

Boetticher described the funding as “Jew money that controls American military policy.” In Berlin his report was sent to Luftwaffe Chief Hermann Göring, who would later call them “precious pages” in helping to create the V-1 and V-2 rockets that would rain down on London.

After a Thanksgiving luncheon at the State Department in 1941 he cabled Berlin, “No land and air armaments adequate for an aggressive war policy by the United States are to be expected in the near future. The army and air force still do not have the necessary forces to undertake any important aggressive manoeuvres outside the western hemisphere. By that time England would be occupied or turned into a waste of rubble.”

In between his reports Boetticher updated his profiles of important members of the Roosevelt Administration. Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau Jr. was described as “A Jew and close adviser to Roosevelt.” J. Edgar Hoover, the head of the FBI, was called “Anti-German in his speeches.”

Donovan’s profile dealt with his life before his visit to London and his appointment as Coordinator of Information. There were also extracts from society gossip columns about his relationship with women—married or unmarried—some of whom he had represented in their divorces. One was the millionaire Helen Astor; another was Marion Davies, the film actress and mistress of William Randolph Hearst. “The newspaper magnate had told columnist Walter Winchel that the FBI is investigating Donovan for his connection with suspect fascists. Roosevelt has ordered Hoover to send Donovan a letter insisting that the Bureau does not possess any information concerning him.” The latest item in the profile was from a Washington gossip column that Donovan was about to take a tour of the Mediterranean that included the Balkans.

Boetticher took the details to the embassy communications room in a nineteenth-century mansion on Massachusetts Avenue. He instructed the duty officer to mark it IMMEDIATE IMPORTANCE and transmit it to Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, the head of the formidable Abwehr, the German secret service, in its headquarters at 72-76 Tirpitz Ufer in Berlin.

Roosevelt had agreed with Churchill’s suggestion that Donovan should see the importance of Britain’s front line, which extended across North Africa from Gibraltar to Cairo. The friendship between the leaders had deepened since Roosevelt had been returned to office for a third term in the previous November election despite the sustained attacks by the isolationists, who worried that Roosevelt was ready to abandon American neutrality and lead the country to war.

Prime Minister Churchill had ordered William Stephenson—the newly appointed head of British security in the United States—to institute adequate security measures against the threat of sabotage to British property in the country and to organize American public opinion in favor of aid to Britain.

The British ambassador in Washington, Lord Lothian, was further instructed to publicize that Britain would fight the war with additional vigor now that the Lend-Lease Act of March 1941 formally committed the United States to support the war effort. Britain was facing a situation in which a great proportion of its war production, supplies, and shipping depended on the United States.

Between them, Stephenson’s and Lothian’s lobbying in Washington had played a significant part in the agreement in which the United States provided Britain and Canada with fifty badly needed US destroyers. They would fly the Union Jack on Atlantic convoy escort duty in exchange for rights for their bases to be used by the US Navy.

Earlier, with the war only weeks old, MI6 chief Menzies had asked Stephenson to meet J. Edgar Hoover, the head of the FBI, to discuss cooperation between the SIS and the Federal Bureau of Investigation in the event of the United States becoming involved in the war. On April 16, 1940, Stephenson cabled Menzies, “Meeting completely successful. Hoover will cooperate fully. Code names established. You will be ‘S.M. Scott’; he will be ‘H.E. Jones.’ Jones sends Scott assurances of goodwill and a desire to assist far beyond confines of officialdom.”

Hoover had told Stephenson he should “procure an official position and should become Britain’s Passport Control Officer in New York.” The post would give him cover to liaise with the FBI to track Nazi sympathizers and enemy companies. He also should develop contact with journalists, newspapers, and wire services and provide them with pro-British stories. Stephenson’s office in Rockefeller Center would eventually combine the functions of MI6, MI5, and the SOE, as well as liaising with the FBI.

In their work together, the low-key Canadian Stephenson and the hard-driven Donovan would find they were remarkably similar. Both agreed that the Mediterranean was not only strategically important for Britain but would also become important if America entered the war, which Donovan said “would only be a matter of time.” Stephenson cabled Menzies that it was a matter of urgency for Donovan to visit the region.

On January 30, 1941, Stephenson’s official position as British director of British Security Coordination, BSC, in the United States, was registered in the State Department. The formality was required for a foreign intelligence officer of a friendly nation to operate in the country.

Before the war, MI6’s presence in the Americas had been in three stations: Washington was staffed by an intelligence officer and a secretary, Panama City was responsible for Mexico and Central America, and Montevideo covered South America. They would all come under Stephenson in New York, which would become MI6’s most important overseas station in the war. Churchill had instructed him to “create the clenched fist that would provide the knockout blow to the Axis Powers,” and gave Stephenson the code name Intrepid.

However, Stephenson’s position aroused suspicion about his activities in some quarters. Adolf Berle, the assistant secretary of state, told Congress, “Although Stephenson is ostensibly involved with the protection of British supplies under Lend-Lease, he is developing a full-size secret police and intelligence service with a string of secret agents and a much larger number of informers.”

Within days British ambassadors and military commanders in the Mediterranean region had all received cables from the Foreign Office to regard Donovan “as fully in our confidence and will be accompanied by a senior British officer, Naval Commander Ian Lancaster Fleming, of Naval Intelligence.”

Fleming came from a wealthy London banking family. He was educated at Eton College and the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst. He spent less than a year there, leaving in 1927 without gaining a commission, after contracting gonorrhea. Behind his correct manner was a rather perverse sexuality, which led to numerous affairs. To prepare Fleming for possible entry into the Foreign Office, his mother sent him to the Tennerhof in Kitzbühel, Austria, a small private school. After improving his language skills there, he studied briefly at Munich University and the University of Geneva.

Failing the Foreign Office entrance examination he joined Reuters news agency and was sent to Moscow as a correspondent. He wrote to the Soviet premier Joseph Stalin asking for an interview and personally received a handwritten apology for “not having the time.” It made a story for Reuters.

In October 1933, bowing to family pressure, he went into banking with a position at the financiers Cull & Co. In 1935, he moved to Rowe & Pitman as a stockbroker. Fleming was unsuccessful in both roles.

In 1939 he began an affair with Ann O’Neill, the wife of the third Baron O’Neill; she was also having an affair with Esmond Harmsworth, the heir to Lord Rothermere, owner of the Daily Mail. Fleming’s affair with O’Neill was a passport to London society where his charm made him a regular guest at dinner parties.

At one he sat next to a man with clipped speech and probing questions. He was Rear Admiral John Godfrey, director of naval intelligence. By the end of the dinner he had invited Fleming to come and see him at the Admiralty. He offered Fleming the post as his personal assistant. With it came a commission into the Royal Navy as a lieutenant. Fleming accepted. In August 1939, in his new uniform, he started work in room 39, which adjoined Godfrey’s suite on the Admiralty’s third floor.

Navy Intelligence, NI, had direct lines to the prime minister’s office, the Foreign Office, Air Ministry, Scotland Yard, MI5 and MI6, and the SOE. Fleming’s first brief was to study the files, which contained intelligence from Britain’s forty-three seaports, about foreign vessels and their crews. Godfrey called the files “our Scarlet Pimpernels” and told Fleming he was to look for anything that posed a threat to the country. After reading, Fleming would knock on the green baize door of Godfrey’s office and report with his favorite remark: “Well, there it is, nothing untoward.” Godfrey would smile and more than once invited Fleming to join him for lunch in his club, telling Fleming of those days when he had sailed the seven seas; how he had taken Lawrence of Arabia into Arabia and had worked with the navies of Japan, Greece, France, and Italy during the First World War and later had been given command of the battle cruiser HMS Repulse and had taken his ship to evacuate British subjects caught up in the Spanish Civil War. Fleming’s diary began to fill with the admiral’s recollections.

Within months Fleming had shown his skill at running Godfrey’s office and, discovering Godfrey had enemies within government circles, he learned to keep them at bay from the admiral, fielding their calls and responding to their demands with a promise: “I’ll see to it. Your matter will be top of the Admiral’s agenda.” By the outbreak of war Godfrey had promoted him to a commander in the Royal Navy. Fleming became a familiar figure at Whitehall meetings, seated beside Godfrey and anticipating his request for a document from the files he carried in a leather briefcase.

The war was weeks old when Fleming was told to join the morning senior staff conference to discuss ideas that could be offered to MI6, the Joint Intelligence Committee, and the SOE. Godfrey described them as “our three prime customers.” Fleming’s own older brother, Peter, who had served under Gubbins in Norway, had become an analyst at the SOE’s Baker Street headquarters. Ian Fleming’s own suggestions had gained praise from Admiral Godfrey, not only for their possibility but for the style and research. Godfrey had appointed him to accompany Donovan on his visit to the Mediterranean, describing him as “the ideal choice as a traveling companion, witty, a gourmet, and [with] an understanding of secret intelligence.” He would report directly to Menzies during the tour.

In Berlin Boettcher’s encoded message to Wilhelm Canaris about Donovan’s visit to the Mediterranean and the Balkans had resulted in Abwehr agents in the region being ordered to track his every step. An agent in Cádiz, a fishing port on the Spanish coast of the Strait of Gibraltar, reported Donovan and Fleming had arrived on the Rock and had met with a man who was the MI6 agent in the British overseas territory. From there they traveled to British bases in North Africa and Cairo. Abwehr agents cabled Berlin that their informers had told them Donovan had delivered the same message: the United States was not prepared to let the United Kingdom lose the war.

Increasingly the tour involved meetings with British military authorities, diplomats, and MI6 operatives. The more he learned from them the more determined Donovan became to create an intelligence service like Britain’s. Every evening he wrote detailed reports of his meetings and placed them in the leather pouches with the documents he had been given to take back to Washington. The files included reports on the right-wing government of Spain’s General Franco and his pro-German activities, which allowed the German navy to use Spanish ports and detect British ships passing through the Suez Canal and the Strait of Gibraltar.

Throughout the summer, reports continued to reach Canaris, the Abwehr chief. The agent in Madrid reported that “Spanish cabinet circles” feared Donovan’s visit was the precursor of an invasion should the United States enter the war. Franco had assured his ministers that Spain would continue to receive help from Germany as it had from Germany’s elite Condor Legion during the Spanish Civil War. The air fleet had bombed Guernica, the cultural and religious capital of Basque Spain, and reduced it to rubble on April 26, 1937. It was the first blitzkrieg.

The Abwehr spy in Lisbon had a family connection with Portugal’s ruling dictator, António Salazar. Salazar’s discussion with Donovan had centered on the three Atlantic archipelagos. Portugal’s Azores lay a thousand miles west of Lisbon, Cape Verde stood off the bulge of Africa, and Spain’s Canary Islands were off the northwestern coast of Africa. Salazar had told Donovan that Franco was allowing U-boats to refuel in the Canaries before continuing to attack Allied merchant ships on their way to England. Salazar had promised Donovan that Portugal would refuse to provide refueling facilities and was sending troops to the Azores to protect its neutrality.

The Abwehr agent’s reports were a reminder to Canaris of when he had met Donovan on his visit to Berlin in 1937 as Roosevelt’s special representative. He had decided then that Donovan was like the trio of brass monkeys on his desk who symbolized the way he ran the Abwehr: “See all, hear all, say nothing.” The trio had been a gift from his wife, Erika, after he had been appointed by Hitler as head of counterintelligence. However, the strain of his duties as Hitler’s intelligence chief had whitened his hair and given him a frail look accompanied by an occasional lisp and a speech pattern of answering a question with another. He was now also convinced that Donovan was not only still Roosevelt’s spy but was on a mission to prepare for America to enter the war.

What Fleming called “Wild Bill’s tour” reached Sofia, the capital of Bulgaria, where Donovan met its king, Boris III. Donovan had been briefed by one of America’s few Balkan experts, George H. Earle, a former governor of Pennsylvania and a friend of Roosevelt. Donovan planned to use the information to persuade the king to remain neutral.

But for once, Donovan failed to persuade and closed their meeting with the warning that “any nation which submits to Nazism will receive no sympathy from Washington.”

Fleming cabled Menzies that the words marked the end of Donovan’s tour.

Donovan broke his journey back to the States with a stopover in London to meet David Bruce. He had appointed the tall, articulate Maryland lawyer to run the London end of the COI. Its office was in Grosvenor Square and was listed by the Foreign Office as an annex of the American embassy.

After graduating from Princeton, Bruce had traveled extensively through western and eastern Europe before returning home to Baltimore to pass the Maryland bar and win a seat on the state legislature at the age of just twenty-six. Throughout the 1930s he had sat on the boards of some of America’s largest corporations. He was a man at home with the wealthy of Washington and New York, but with a deep fondness for England and Europe. In the summer of 1940, with Britain standing alone among the free states of Europe, he had visited London as a member of the war relief committee of the American Red Cross. He was in London during the Battle of Britain and the Blitz.

On his return to America he had been active in the Fight for Freedom, a group of rich businessmen who lobbied against the isolationists across the Atlantic, and he had spoken on the radio about the resolution of Londoners.

While America’s defense built up and Lend-Lease moved the nation closer to the conflict, Bruce also knew it was still hard to persuade the isolationists to stop accusing the internationalists back home of dragging the United States into the war. Their activities had percolated through Donovan’s mind as he arrived in England. Bruce sent a car to collect him from the RAF airfield at Hendon and had reserved a suite for Donovan at the Savoy.

Driving into the city, Donovan saw that although the bombing destruction was bad enough, his driver told him there had been no air raids for a week, giving time for some of the debris to be removed since his last visit. Bruce was waiting in a soft armchair in the front hall of the Savoy. He was his usual ebullient self. Donovan smiled when Bruce said he had booked a private dining room overlooking the Thames for lunch. An Anglophile like Donovan, Bruce also had a connoisseur’s taste for wine and food.

Donovan explained that as the result of his Middle East visit the intelligence sharing with the British had grown, though there were moments in Cairo when there had been tensions about Britain’s reaction to the attitude of American isolationists. More than once Fleming had played his part in calming matters. The result was that Donovan was returning to Washington with an insight into both British political thinking and intelligence in the region. He was convinced that, when the time came for the United States to enter the war, there would be a role for the COI, but not in its current form. He told Bruce he intended to create America’s first strategic intelligence service, adding that he even had a name for it: the Office of Strategic Services, or OSS. Bruce had arranged for Donovan to meet Gubbins for dinner that evening.

Gubbins suggested that before Donovan fly back to Washington he should first accompany him to visit the SOE paramilitary training schools in Scotland. They spent a day sitting in on lectures and watching agents taking part in unarmed combat and field craft exercises as instructors fired live rounds over their heads.

Some trainees were women, and Gubbins said he would arrange for Donovan to meet Selwyn Jepson and Vera Atkins to learn about the role women would have in the SOE.

When Donovan told them of his plans for women, Jepson said there was still opposition in Whitehall to their doing the same jobs as male secret agents. Atkins asked if there would be similar discrimination in the United States. Donovan said he would overcome it “by recruiting women who came from the same stock which had founded my country.”

Gubbins also arranged for Donovan to meet the head of the SOE’s French Section, Maurice Buckmaster, who said that women had been his first choice to be trained as couriers and wireless operators. He invited Donovan to come with him on his weekly visit to Wanborough Manor, the section’s training school for agents.

Over lunch in the canteen he spoke to some of the other agents. Buckmaster translated his questions, explaining agents were required to speak only French. In between watching them mastering Morse code and learning how to code and decode messages, Donovan saw them learning in the manor workshop how to diagnose and repair faults in their wireless sets. Afterward he went to a classroom to hear a psychologist’s lecture on how to handle the stress of their work once they were in France.

On the drive back to London, Buckmaster said that female recruits were achieving excellent results not only in shooting and sabotage but also as potential clandestine radio operators. The next day Donovan flew back to Washington to begin the search for such women.

The pilots of RAF 138 Squadron sensed their time at Newmarket racecourse was coming to an end. There had been flights out over the Channel, flying at no more than fifty feet above the water before turning back and giving the correct Morse code signal that would allow them to reenter friendly airspace. By day there was firearms training at the shooting range and lectures on escape and evasion tactics should they be shot down on a mission.

At night they were awakened from their bunks, driven in a closed truck several miles away, and dropped after being told they would be hunted by the local and military police as escaped prisoners from a local army lockup. Their instructors warned they could expect to be roughly treated, a forerunner of what they would face if they crash-landed in occupied Europe.

One morning, returning from an exercise, the pilots found new faces in the officers’ mess with their aircraft parked on the airfield. The newcomers told them they were joining the squadron in time to go with them to their new base.

For the first time in weeks, William Donovan had taken off a Sunday afternoon on that December 7, 1941. Wrapped in an overcoat he had bought in Savile Row on his visit to London, he sat in the stands in New York’s Polo Grounds, one of fifty-five thousand fans who’d come to watch the National Football League matchup between the Giants and the Brooklyn Dodgers.

He had hardly settled in his seat before a voice came over the loudspeakers: “Attention please! Here is an urgent message. Will Colonel William J. Donovan call operator 19 in Washington immediately.”

Donovan left his seat and found a phone booth under the bleachers. In moments operator 19 connected him to his assistant, James Roosevelt. “Bill, the Japs have attacked Pearl Harbor. The President wants you back as soon as possible. I’ve booked you on the 5:15 flight out of La Guardia.”

Donovan ignored the reporters waiting at the terminal. He had asked James Roosevelt to call Eloise Page and have her drive his car to the airport to collect him so he could use its radio to communicate on the way to the office. In the meantime, playwright Robert Sherwood and his team in the COI’s Foreign Information Service, based on New York’s Madison Avenue, would prepare stories to distribute around the world about America’s response to the attack.

Page drove him at speed to headquarters on Navy Hill. He used the car radio to give orders. He told Sherwood to contact the radio networks and instruct them to prepare their anchormen to broadcast the stories crafted by Sherwood’s staff. Priority to the copy would be given to stations in Los Angeles and San Francisco to broadcast on their shortwave transmitters to Latin America and the Far East. By the time Donovan reached his office he was told that four thousand words of copy had been broadcast. Each story carried the same words that Donovan had provided: “What the Japanese have done doesn’t frighten but unifies the United States.”

Stephenson had called to say that Churchill had phoned FDR and told him, “We are all in the same boat now.” Donovan told Sherwood to use the words in the next stories, which were broadcast to Canada and Europe throughout the night.

As evening fell, he visited every office. He told staff the point of no return had been reached when the Rising Sun, Japan’s emblem, had arrived over Pearl Harbor earlier that Sunday and “by God had caught our planes on the ground, crippled our battleship, and killed Americans.” Donovan called it a day of infamy.

Radios in the building continued to report the mood in Washington. Cherry trees outside the Japanese embassy had been cut down by super patriots among a crowd watching smoke rising from the building’s chimney. The Japanese were burning diplomatic papers. Police cars were patrolling the streets, and officers were calling for calm.

Donovan drove to the White House. He found the president alone in his study behind his desk, its top scattered with cable messages from naval headquarters in Pearl Harbor. The empty chairs that cluttered the room were a reminder of the visitors who had come and gone. His voice thick with the start of a cold, Roosevelt asked Donovan if Hitler could have had prior knowledge of the attack. Donovan said he didn’t know but Hitler would almost certainly have been the first to be briefed by Tokyo after the raid.

Roosevelt said, “I’m glad you pushed so hard to have an intelligence agency.”

Donovan said he would like to rename the COI. He wanted it called the Office of Strategic Services, or OSS. Roosevelt nodded approval. If he was curious he did not show it. But it would be something to tell Churchill when he arrived in Washington.

While they sat there, Grace Tully, Roosevelt’s secretary, brought messages from the navy and Pearl Harbor to the study. Thumping his fist on the desktop at the latest news that 90 percent of the Pacific fleet had been lost, Roosevelt asked Donovan how the American public would react. Donovan was reassuring; Americans would be ready to go to war and not just talk about it. He suggested that the speech Roosevelt would make to Congress at noon the following day to declare war on Japan should start, “What they have done on this Sunday will live in infamy.” The president wrote down the words on a pad. Later, they would form one of the most powerful speeches of his presidency.

Returning to his office, Donovan worked until daylight, drinking coffee that Eloise Page regularly brought in. He requested reports from the Research and Analysis section on what foreign radio stations were saying about how vulnerable the United States was to another attack.

James Baxter, the head of R&A, produced several scenarios: The Japanese navy could send its aircraft carriers in pursuit of the remaining American Pacific fleet if it attempted to head back to the mainland. The Japanese could attack the Panama Canal. The attack on Pearl Harbor could “discourage the Russians from joining forces with us.”

On December 9, Stephenson alerted Donovan that Germany was about to declare war on the United States. Hours later the American embassies in Berlin and Rome were closed down. Two days later, in a joint statement, Hitler and Mussolini declared war against the United States.

With the Middle East trip still fresh in his mind, Donovan suggested that Roosevelt should contact Portugal’s ruler, António Salazar, and persuade him to accept a joint American and British force to protect the nine hundred miles of Azores coastline, which American convoys passed on their way to Britain. Roosevelt decided to put the idea on hold until Churchill arrived. Other proposals from Donovan were circulated to government departments and rejected.

The navy rejected a scheme that Japanese Americans could be selected by the OSS and trained at Camp X in Canada before being sent to the South Pacific to spy and wage guerrilla war against the Japanese. General Douglas MacArthur, no admirer of Donovan, bluntly told him he needed “broadcasts and leaflets to counter Tokyo broadcasts to the Philippines urging its soldiers to desert.”

The idea of using Japanese Americans continued to preoccupy Donovan. He sent a memo to Roosevelt that they did not pose a sabotage threat and to intern them, as some newspapers were demanding, would only make enemies of loyal citizens. He said he would like to recruit some to broadcast OSS propaganda aimed at Japan and to decipher Japanese broadcasts. He had asked Sherwood to prepare a draft speech in which Roosevelt would stress the “government has faith in their loyalty and feels no enmity toward the Japanese people, but only for the clique of military leaders in Tokyo who had betrayed Japan.”

The draft remained in Donovan’s office. Roosevelt had gone ahead and ordered the internment of Japanese Americans.

On December 22, wearing a Royal Navy pea jacket and yachting cap, Winston Churchill and his advisors arrived in Washington. They included Averell Harriman, the US ambassador to Britain, Menzies, and Gubbins. Stephenson and Hoover, the FBI chief, had flown up from New York to join Donovan.

The second floor of the White House was code-named Arcadia and became the base for the British party. Churchill had the Rose Suite and the Lincoln Study, where he could confer with his staff. Its walls were covered with maps of Europe his staff had brought with them and which they updated morning, noon, and night with information from London. Menzies, Gubbins, and Stephenson had adjoining bedrooms. Donovan chaired his own meetings with Menzies, Gubbins, and Stephenson to discuss cooperation between the SOE and OSS.

Initially the White House meetings took place in an atmosphere of mutual wariness among the various groups, despite the magnificent rhetoric of Churchill at meals, which convinced Roosevelt that Britain would fight for her life and that a two-way exchange between both countries would help them to win the war.

It was left to Churchill to tell his own advisers, “We are here to bring our ally into the war with us. How wonderful it will be if Hitler can be made to fear when he is going to be next struck by such a powerful force.” He looked around the Lincoln Study, his voice firm. “We must cooperate with our hosts as they do with us.”

At their meeting next morning, Menzies told Hoover that the MI6 agent in Mexico City had learned that four German ships were preparing to outrun the Royal Navy blockade across the Gulf of Mexico; the US Navy had stopped the ships and escorted them back to harbor, where they would remain “until further notice.” The details were transmitted to the Admiralty’s Royal Navy intelligence department, NI, and encoded and sent to the patrolling warships in the gulf.

Meantime Hoover, after saying that “South America is FBI territory,” revealed that Italians in New York were in the process of smuggling $4 million in cash to finance attacks against British companies in South America. The FBI had stopped the transaction and confiscated the money. In answer to Donovan’s smiling question, Hoover said it was “now in the US Treasury and waiting to see if they will claim it. If they do I’ll tell you.”

It was the start of a growing relationship between the FBI and BCS as they exchanged intelligence about enemy activities in the United States, South America, and the Caribbean. The White House meetings concluded with Donovan and Gubbins finalizing the relationship between the OSS and SOE.

Donovan was frank. He wanted his agents trained to the level he had seen in England and Scotland at OSS training camps in Maryland and Virginia. America’s foreign-born and first-generation population—close to forty-five million—would be tapped for those who spoke the languages of occupied Europe, especially German. Donovan would also like the OSS to have its own airfield in Britain. Gubbins said if OSS pilots flew their own planes to England, he would make sure they had their own base. He would also arrange for SOE instructors to work in OSS training camps in the United States and would help to select OSS agents to be trained in Canada.