OSS AND HOW IT GREW

In the early days of OSS (when it was still COI) there came to Washington an historian and scholar from Harvard University. He came to Washington because he had been asked to head the Research Section of the Division of Special Information within OSS.

When he arrived at his office, he found another man and he learned that the other man was already the head of the Research Section of the Division of Special Information within OSS.

He was perplexed, and a little annoyed. Eventually he took his problem to the top office where he explained his position and asked for a clarification.

“Oh I see, well, we’ll settle that,” came the decision. “He can be the Director, and you can be the Chief.”

The only man in Washington who could say that sort of thing and make it stick is an ebullient Irishman with an expansive personality, a ready wit, a tremendous drive, and a penchant for doing the things which not only need doing, but which nobody else would ever think of doing. His name is William J. Donovan.

Donovan is a short man with mild blue eyes, and a soft Irish voice. His enormous energy is concealed beneath an easy slow-going manner which gives the impression that he has nothing in particular to do, and would like nothing better than to sit back and listen for an hour or so to whoever happens to be next on the list of callers for the day. This manner is extremely effective, and it is not altogether deceitful. Even for the lowliest private in OSS, it was always surprisingly easy to get an interview with General Donovan, and almost as easy to get a favor granted or a promise made. His subordinates in OSS were often at pains to correct mistakes which the General had made because he found it so hard to say no.

One of Donovan’s parachuting officers, a man known for his wild ideas, who had done an astoundingly brave job in France, once came to him with an idea for a combination rocket, bomb, and parachute, with pedals. As the officer described it, he would sit astride the rocket-bomb, steering with his feet until it neared enemy territory; then he would aim it at the enemy and press a pedal which would catapult him toward the ground, and open his parachute at the same time. The bomb would go on, presumably to land upon the enemy, and “I’d be safe enough,” the officer explained, “because I’d land outside the perimeter of the enemy defenses.”

As it turned out, the war ended before the officer could persuade anybody to let him try it, but the one man who was enthusiastic was Donovan.

An expansive enthusiasm has been the hallmark of “Wild Bill” Donovan’s career. Donovan was born in a lace-curtain Irish home in Buffalo. He won the Congressional Medal of Honor while leading the famous Fighting 69th in World War I, and afterwards rose to such prominence as a lawyer that he was the Republican nominee for Governor of New York in 1933. Throughout his career he had a shrewd penchant for first names, for meeting the right people, and for expanding generously in every direction. OSS was a direct reflection of Donovan’s character. He was its spark plug, the moving force behind it. In a sense it can be said that Donovan was OSS.

Nobody knows for sure just when Donovan got the double-barreled idea of doing something specific about the underground movement in Europe, and also doing something specific about American intelligence. Apparently he had it vaguely in mind when he came back from Europe in the fall of 1940 after a trip as a special observer for President Roosevelt. To the President, Donovan’s support had appeared as an enormous windfall. Here was a man who was an Irish Catholic, a war hero, a Republican, and an interventionist. There were not many men in the United States in the summer of 1940 of whom the same could have been said.

But if Donovan’s stock was high with the President when he left for Europe in the summer of 1940, it was still higher a few months after he got back.

For when Donovan returned to America in August of 1940, there was a strong body of opinion among the President’s Washington advisors which held that the British would not be able to hold the British Isles. Dunkirk was history. Hitler’s Luftwaffe had already begun to pound the channel airfields. The RAF had retreated inland. Even Lord Lothian, the British Ambassador to the United States, was pessimistic. He flirted with the idea that the best solution was to move the government, the King and Queen, to Canada, pull the British fleet to western bases, and abandon England for the time being to the inevitable conquest.

Our own G-2, the Intelligence Section of the War Department, reported to the President their considered opinion that within nine days of the anticipated assault of the Luftwaffe, the RAF would be driven to bases in Scotland and Ireland. Amazingly enough, after that prediction, G-2 also estimated that nevertheless, the British would be able to hold their islands against an invasion, though how they were to do this without air support, and with only one fully equipped division, G-2 did not say.

Into this atmosphere of deepest gloom, Donovan moved like a spring breeze. Certainly, he proclaimed, the British would hold. Certainly, he predicted, there would be no invasion. The RAF, he said, would beat the Luftwaffe out of the skies.

It was a startling prediction, but Donovan knew the facts upon which it was based. He had heard from the British about the new invention called radar. He had seen the performance of the Spitfire, and had been shown proof of its ability to knock down anything the Germans had. He had been let in on the secret of England’s coastal defenses, the fires of burning oil.

One month later came the Battle of Britain. Day by day and night by night, as Washington read its newspapers, Donovan’s importance grew. More and more the President turned to Bill Donovan. After all he—it was almost he, alone—had been right.

Apparently also both he and Roosevelt had the resistance-intelligence idea in mind behind the vague and innocuous announcement of July, 1941, which authorized COI, and in which the President said, “Mr. Donovan will collect and assemble information and data bearing on national security … and will analyze and collate such materials for the use of the President.” By that time he and Roosevelt had already discussed another idea Donovan had borrowed from the British. The idea was a new type of military unit, which, Donovan said, would do even more unconventional fighting than the British commandos.

Two things are certain about Donovan’s idea for combining intelligence and resistance leadership. One is that the idea was already largely explored and the work begun by the time of Pearl Harbor. Various Roosevelt directives, enlarging on the functions of COI long before the United States was at war, were summed up in the Presidential Order of June 13, 1942, which revoked the name COI, and instituted OSS to “collect and analyze strategic information” and to “plan and operate … special services.” The words were purposely made empty for publication, but Donovan and Roosevelt knew that among other responsibilities, OSS was to have charge of resistance, intelligence, and sabotage, and so did the Joint Chiefs of Staff, under whose direction it was placed.

The other certainty is that the idea of directing the resistance and centralizing intelligence, partly through resistance, bore the double impress of the Donovan trade mark: it was a big job which needed doing and nobody in America had ever successfully done it before.

Outside of America, the idea, or at least one part of it, is as old as history. Britain, Germany, all European countries, have maintained some form of espionage system for centuries. Codes, fake documents, agents in the inner circle of foreign governments, plans for secret weapons sewn in the leaves of a book and smuggled out by men who didn’t know what they carried, double agents, who worked for two countries, agents whose business was to watch other agents: all this is an old story to Europe.

So also is the combining of all the information that those agents uncover with all the information that scholars can deduce from the study of a country’s newspapers and statistics, and with all the information which slips out in an ordinary way and becomes the property of various agencies of government who may or may not have anything to do with intelligence.

But in America, this was not an old story. It was new. America did not like spies outside of spy stories. Furthermore, America does not like centralizing itself, and even the agencies and departments of American government treasure their own particular functions and duties, and will fight to keep them whether they duplicate the functions and duties of other agencies or not.

The Navy, the Army Air Forces, the Army, the FBI, the State Department, the Departments of Commerce and Agriculture, the Board of Economic Warfare, all had intelligence units and all would have liked to use them to operate undercover abroad. The virtues of the Donovan plan were obvious. There would be one intelligence organization rather than eight.

Its defects, unfortunately, were equally obvious. Here, as the men in the established organizations were able to point out, was an amateur if scholarly group charged with collecting the deepest secrets of the United States government. Here, in the same organization, was another group whose function was propaganda, and which consisted of men whose every instinct and training as newspapermen was to publish whatever facts they could learn.

The argument was a cogent one and Donovan had to step carefully past it, and through the maze of jealousies and the American reluctance to use agents abroad, until Roosevelt, after a full cabinet meeting, gave him the go-ahead signal in the late fall of 1941.

The manner in which Donovan accomplished his task of swinging the bulk of the existing or projected overseas intelligence functions of the government into his organization is typical, not only of Donovan himself, but of American politics.

The chief opponents to the Donovan plan were the Army, the Navy, and the FBI. But the Army, the Navy, and the FBI were fully conscious of Donovan’s close friendship with Roosevelt. They knew that if it came to a showdown, the back door of the White House was always open to William J. Donovan and a special plea. Consequently it never came to a showdown. At a series of meetings between Donovan and the chiefs of Army and Navy intelligence—J. Edgar Hoover of FBI sulked conspicuously by refusing to attend—Donovan did not need to play his trump card, nor to mention the fact that he had it. He could discuss his proposition coolly, and solely on the basis of its undeniable assets. He could move slowly, and make as few enemies as possible by keeping up the pleasant if unrealistic pretense that all of the players around the table held equal cards.

His methods were not entirely successful. Donovan’s occasional antagonists during the war years to come were from the Army and the Navy. It is probable that General Douglas MacArthur’s persistent refusal to allow OSS to function under his command, despite its outstanding successes in other theaters of war, sprang from the hostility which resulted among old Army staff men when Donovan’s organization was given intelligence functions. The FBI was not satisfied either. Roosevelt later made it clear that OSS was to function in all countries outside the western hemisphere. The western hemisphere was to be the sole domain of the FBI. To the FBI that did not seem a large enough domain.

Donovan, of course, knew of these antagonisms. James T. Murphy, his former law clerk, and his assistant in the days when Donovan was an Assistant Attorney General, once remarked that the General had brought him into OSS to “keep the knives out of his back.” But his new enemies were only by-products of the Donovan method. By October, 1941, it was clear that his chief purpose had been accomplished.

In that month, Wallace D. Phillips, who had been hired as Special Assistant to the Director of Naval Intelligence for the express purpose of developing a secret intelligence service for the Navy, shifted himself and his task to the Donovan organization. That same month, Donovan wrote to Roosevelt, telling the President about the meetings which had been held and of the decision which had been reached. He cited the advantages of a civilian organization, and of one intelligence head rather than three, and he ended with a statement which like the rest of his letter, must have been more of a reminder to Roosevelt than a declaration: the new organization, Donovan said, was now getting to work on North Africa.

The note came back to Donovan, bearing a familiar scrawl on the margin: “O.K.,” it said, “but get approval of State—F.D.R.” Thus America’s first foreign espionage and central intelligence agency was born.

Donovan moved more slowly on organizing sabotage and guerrilla warfare behind the lines. The President had liked the idea he brought home from England. In fact Roosevelt suggested a permanent force of American commandos—an idea which eventually brought forth the famous Ranger Battalions. But until Pearl Harbor, the only thing Donovan could do about his idea of using the resistance to help win the war was to ask the British, who were already doing it, how it was done.

From the beginning, the British gave him full co-operation. They told him how they trained their men, what weapons they had, and how they communicated with the resistance. Breaking the precedent of centuries, they even sent a man over to sit down with Donovan and explain the workings of British espionage. The British were not motivated to these unprecedented disclosures from sheer altruism. In the fall of 1941, Lend Lease was an issue on which England might survive or fall. By generously baring to Donovan their most sacred secrets, the British were certain they were gaining “a direct pipeline to the White House.”

When he had started on the work of getting intelligence from behind the lines, Donovan deliberately set out to do what it had taken Britain centuries to do. Donovan is, after all, what some people call an “empire builder.” He personally built OSS into an organization of 12,000 people, including military and civilian personnel. Occasionally, he would get lost in its vastness himself. At such times he would wistfully remark that he wished he had been able to keep the entire staff down to 35!

The remark may have been Donovan’s way of admitting that he was not a first-rate administrator, a fact which everyone in OSS knew. Before Donovan hit upon intelligence and resistance leadership as the principal roles for his organization, there was some doubt among the people in OSS as to just what they were supposed to do. One department began collecting pictures, and advertising in national publications for citizens to send in any pictures taken on foreign soil. They came by the thousands, most of them of the variety which OSS knew as “Aunt Minnie.” There was Aunt Minnie in front of the Taj Mahal, Aunt Minnie on a camel, Aunt Minnie on the steps of Shepheard’s in Cairo. It took a large staff of workers to sort them and put them away—where they remain to this day.

Again, there was a million-dollar division which had as its head a man who found it extremely difficult to be interested in anything except the theater. He particularly enjoyed first nights. First nights, in Washington, are rare and inferior, and so Donovan woke up one morning to the fact that the entire division of 900 people had sometime since been moved to New York, where its chief was thoroughly enjoying the new season.

What happened was that Donovan was busy having ideas.

When he was told to handle propaganda to foreign countries, he decided to ask playwright Robert Sherwood to help him. Sherwood was a spokesman for the democratic idea; he was an old fighting man of World War I, and he was famous. All of these things appealed to the General. Sherwood set up the propaganda branch of the organization, which eventually split off from OSS to become OWI, and of course Sherwood began hiring people to help him.

When he was told to analyze information, Donovan thought of Archibald MacLeish in the Library of Congress, and together they thought of scholars like W. L. Langer and Edward S. Mason of Harvard, of G. T. Robinson of Columbia and Preston E. James of Michigan. MacLeish suggested using the Library of Congress, where a vast amount of information was to be had for the searching, and as these men began to work and found that there was a great deal of work to be done, they suggested others and got them.

Eventually OSS collected a galaxy of academic stars from leading American universities. There was James P. Baxter of Williams, Wilmarth S. Lewis and Sherman Kent of Yale, Richard Hartshorne of Wisconsin, Burton Fahs of Pomona, Maurice Halperin of Oklahoma, Arthur Robinson of Ohio State, and Conyers Read of Pennsylvania. The complete list would have put the faculty of any one university to shame. The most renowned experts on the history, geography, economics, and politics of all the nations of the world were assembled under one roof and put to work, writing, collecting, and organizing information in their special fields.

Some of these scholars and historians found themselves a trifle befuddled in the face of Washington’s wartime hurly-burly. Of one of them it was said that his work for OSS represented the first time in forty years that he had emerged from a period in time which ended sharply in 1648. Nevertheless they proved that it was frequently possible to find out more, for example, about a railroad line between Paris and Bordeaux by consulting the French colonial records and the files of Baldwin Locomotive than by dropping a paratrooper in to look at it. They accumulated a vast amount of information, and eventually the War Department was prevailed upon to use it.

When his staff began to grow, Donovan thought of administration. He called on his old business and World War I friends, Colonel Edwin Buxton, who with Donovan had helped to found the American Legion in 1919, Atherton Richards, president of the Hawaiian Pineapple Company, Junius P. Morgan, Elmo Roper, who conducts the Fortune surveys, and Russel B. Livermore, World War I hero and lawyer.

As the functions of OSS grew, these men needed help and got it.

It was MacLeish who suggested to Donovan that all the government agencies possessed important facts about the enemy, and that these facts might lie there forever if somebody didn’t dig them out and assemble them. But government agencies are touchy about other government agencies. So Donovan hired James Roosevelt to do the job. Roosevelt proved, as might be expected, that he had a better than fair entree to government agencies.

It was all done like that. Donovan would be having breakfast with somebody who would suggest an idea. Donovan would say, “Why don’t you do it?” The man would then go out and hire a staff to do it, and by the time the war started OSS was big and still growing and there were more and more enormous jobs to do.

Somebody came in who knew France; somebody came in who had been in Donovan’s regiment in the last war; somebody came in with a British major who threw knives, somebody came in with a pencil which secreted a .22 caliber pistol. If people were going behind the lines, they had to have documents. Somebody thought of an expert forger, an expert printer, an expert on paper. If OSS was going to have bases all over the world, communications were needed. All of the messages would have to be separate and secret from all of the other government messages. So there had to be experts on radio.

And so it grew. It grew so fast that even the expert on charts, Mr. Atherton Richards, who had a profound faith in expressing everything by means of a graph, had difficulty in keeping up. He would walk into Donovan’s office with dozens of charts, charts for the budget, charts for the administration, charts for the various divisions, charts which divided everything up neatly and then charted it. Donovan would glance at them, smile at them, approve them with a mild wave of the hand, and then he would have another idea, and he would forget them completely.

The General didn’t want things neatly separated. When the organization reached the 5,000 mark, he still visualized everybody working together as they had done when there were 35. And he didn’t want to be bothered with details. From July, 1941, until he was made a brigadier general in April of 1943, Donovan drew no salary whatsoever. Roosevelt had told him he could submit an expense account. He did so just once. It was for a thousand dollars, and he withdrew it immediately when the Treasury told him it had to be itemized.

Two months after the war was over, when OSS was about to close up for good, Donovan called one of his secretaries and said he wanted to look at the files.

“Which files, sir?” the secretary asked.

“All of them,” said the General. “Now that it’s all over and I have a little time, I want to read everything.”

The secretary called the reports office where all the papers from all the OSS branches and projects and offices overseas had been deposited throughout the years. After four hours of calculated research and analysis, the man at the reports office called back. Working at a steady eight hours a day on a six-day week, he said, the General could complete a cursory inspection of all OSS reports in sixteen and a half years.

“I’m going to handle this myself,” and “Leave it all to me.” Those were two of the General’s favorite phrases, calculated to bewilder the smartest and the most breathless of the smart young lawyers in uniform who strode breathlessly through his administration offices. Obviously, Donovan didn’t handle everything himself. But he ran OSS like a country editor, not like a businessman. Donovan would have an idea and get it started. One of his more intuitive secretaries would then wheedle the job away from him’ in time to leave him free for other ideas. But he would still have a finger in the pie.

The General spread himself, and he expected his men to do the same. Did the question of German power come under the domain of an expert on Germany or an expert on electric power? Let them settle it down below. Did a colonel arriving in England on the General’s authority to head the organization there have to take orders from a colonel who was already in England on the same authority? Let them settle it between them. Somebody had just come to Donovan with a new idea, and the General had just said, as he nearly always did, “Sure, let’s give it a try.”

Who was in OSS? Representative Rankin says, “Communists.” Drew Pearson says, “Wall Street bankers.” General Donovan used to say, “Write me a memorandum saying how you could be of service to this organization, and if I agree with you, you’re hired.”

It is possible to compile an interesting list: Raymond Guest, ten-goal polo player, and cousin of Winston Churchill; René Dussaq, “the human fly,” and Hollywood stunt man who won the DSC behind the lines in France; James Phinney Baxter III, president of Williams College; Jumping Joe Savoldi, the Notre Dame halfback; T. Ryan, son of the millionaire; Irving Fajans, union organizer at Macy’s; Gertie Legendre, African big-game hunter who was captured in Germany joy riding through the lines in a jeep; Bill Dewart, owner of the New York Sun; Milton Wolff, major in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, who fought the Germans for three years in Spain, then joined the American Army as a private to spend the same amount of time before he could get commissioned a second lieutenant; Louis Stoddard, gentleman jockey; Tommy Bridges, Detroit Tiger pitcher; A. M. Wilson, Dartmouth history professor; Lou Zelenka, George Washington University halfback; Lucy Starling, Thailand missionary; Prince Serge Obolensky, general in the Russian armies under the Tsar; Paul Mellon, philanthropist heir to the Mellon fortune; George Seabury, Yale tackle; Junius Morgan, another heir to a fortune; John Papajani, All-Pacific center; Virginia Hall, who parachuted with a wooden leg. There was whitehaired Major Edwin Lord, who jumped into France, and who was nearly 50, and there was Henry L. Lassucq, who did the same thing, and even more dangerously, at the age of 63. There were men who did careful scholarly work; men who did sensationally dangerous work; and men who did absolutely nothing except travel around the world on a high priority at government expense.

They came from everywhere and, in the peculiarly amateur atmosphere of OSS, friends chose friends, had them security-checked and installed them in a Washington office or sent them off overseas. The result of the rush to get people into an expanding, booming agency, which, as soon as the war started, could request military personnel, was that OSS collected more than its share of civilians in uniform whose only qualification for a commission was that they wanted one. In the beginning, it was said, you could get a direct commission or a transfer from the Army or Navy to OSS just by being a good lawyer. During the boom season, all you had to do was to know one.

Many of the civilians who had been in OSS before Pearl Harbor quickly got themselves commissioned and into uniform after December 7. “It was embarrassing, terribly embarrassing,” one of them reported later. “We all turned up at the office one morning in our uniforms and there was poor old John, only a lieutenant commander.” In those days of the speeded-up draft and the scrambling for war jobs, OSS was frequently the last refuge of the well-connected.

Did OSS need agents to go behind the enemy lines? The New York membership, lounging at the Racquet Club on week ends from Washington, cast a searching eye over the waiters. If none of them spoke French, well, there was always Armando’s. Actually, OSS listed among its foreign-language speaking personnel, a bartender from the Yale Club, a bartender from Armando’s, and the chef at the River Club, two of whom were killed, all of whom performed brave deeds behind the lines.

Sometimes getting the right man for the job into an American uniform created unforeseen difficulties. There is the story of the officer from New York’s French quarter, who jumped into France long before D-Day. OSS headquarters in London got a message from General Eisenhower saying that upon the officer’s return, General Eisenhower wished to decorate him personally. Proudly, headquarters looked up the man’s record. It was horrified at what it found. When he returned to England, he was met at the train, rushed off to a hotel room, locked up for two days, and carefully and continually coached until he could repeat correctly, if haltingly:

“I am very proud to meet the General.”

“Will the General please speak in French? He will understand that after so long in France, my English is rusty.”

Headquarters had discovered a small point which General Eisenhower might be expected to know: you cannot give a commission in the Army of the United States to a man who cannot speak English at all.

OSS was the last refuge also for men like that one, who wanted to do something worthwhile and who didn’t fit the regulations, or for men already in uniform who were stuck at a desk job in an Army post and wanted to go off overseas. Donovan was a veritable godfather to these men. He would refuse none of them. Even within the organization, it was impossible to keep a man at a desk if he didn’t want to be at a desk, and if Donovan knew he didn’t.

One officer, already in London, approaching 40, and with an injured back which could have kept him out of combat had he chosen to mention it, walked up to the General on one of his inspections of the London office, saluted smartly, told him his name, and said, “Sir, I’m in the office here and I want to do something. What about going to Greece?”

General Donovan looked him squarely in the eye and spoke, as he frequently did, in the manner in which generals of fiction are supposed to speak: “My boy,” he said, “there’s a bigger show than Greece coming up, and any man in my organization who wants to be in it, is going to be in it.”

After the General had returned to America, OSS headquarters in London received a cable ordering that man to parachute school. Two weeks later came another cable, “Has Reeve Schley been assigned to a mission in France?” Both cables were signed personally by Donovan.

Going behind enemy lines, according to the rules of warfare, is not a task which one man can command another to do. Perhaps one tenth of the men who were in OSS saw service behind the lines, but all of them who did so volunteered to do so, and the volunteers knew no bounds of money or political belief.

There were, it is true, a high proportion of very rich men in OSS. Donovan made light of it. “You know,” he once remarked to an audience, “those Wall Street bankers and corporation lawyers make wonderful second-story men.” The fact is that some of the rich men risked their necks too.

There were Communists in OSS. Four of them had fought the fascists in Spain, and had friends in occupied Italy who had fought with them, and whom they could trust. These men, Irving Goff, Irving Fajans, Milton Wolff, and Vincent Lassowski, established a parachute circuit with their friends, and brought back information daily for the American army. Without a doubt, theirs was the best intelligence work done in that theater.

“I understand that Irving Goff is on the honor roll of the Young Communist League,” was a charge thrown at Donovan.

“I don’t know if he’s on the Communist honor roll,” the General replied, “but for the job he did in Africa and Italy, he’s on the honor roll of OSS.”

And then there were the men from occupied countries, who had made their way to England or Africa in order to fight their way home again. There were the men from New York’s East Side, from Jersey City, from San Francisco, from farms in Pennsylvania and Minnesota, who had lived, or whose parents had lived in Yugoslavia, or Greece, or Austria, and who volunteered to go back there by parachute to blow a bridge or get some knowledge for the United States. Some of them were killed, and of those who were killed, a large percentage died by torture. Many of them were among the 831 OSS men decorated for bravery. They took, as Donovan said, “some of the gravest personal risks of the war.” And they took them, as he also said, “on the express understanding that their heroism would have to remain unsung.”