Death and Honor

[TWO]

Office of the Director Office of Strategic Services National Institutes of Health Building Washington, D.C. 0930 29 June 1943

Every once in a great while, there is not much going on that requires me to make an immediate major decision, Brigadier General William J. Donovan, the director of the United States Office of Strategic Services, mused, so it therefore logically follows that when that happens—as now—I am presented with idiotic suggestions, off-the-wall analysis, and problems I really don’t want to—shouldn’t have to—deal with.

There were several such suggestions, analyses, and problems on the desk of the stocky, well-tailored, sixty-year-old Wall Street lawyer who had been chosen by his Columbia Law School classmate and close personal friend, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, to coordinate the flow of “war information.” That meant both intelligence and propaganda.

Donovan had learned—or maybe brought with him from the practice of law—that idiot suggestions, on closer examination, sometimes proved really not to be so idiotic after all. And that off-wall-analysis sometimes contained information that was quite useful. And that problems he was reluctant to deal with were really the ones that deserved his full attention.

Reminding himself of this, he unwound the string holding together an accordion folder. He peered inside, then dumped the contents onto his desk.

He shook his head in disbelief. A thirty-second glance at what was being proposed showed him that this really was an idiotic suggestion: Someone wanted to give OSS agents badges and credentials, as if they were policemen, or agents of the Bureau of Internal Revenue.

Sample credentials had been prepared. Donovan picked up one of them, examined it carefully, and shook his head again.

The original organization—the Office of the Coordinator of Information— had given William J. Donovan the responsibility for coordinating both propaganda and intelligence generated by all the agencies of the federal government. It was created on 11 July 1941 by Executive Order of the President.

It had immediately become apparent that that idea wasn’t going to work.

For one thing, Donovan knew little—and admitted it—about influencing public opinion. More important, the Army’s and Navy’s intelligence organizations didn’t like the idea of anyone else coordinating, reviewing or having anything else to do with their intelligence data. Even more important, neither did J. Edgar Hoover, the powerful director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, who had quickly made it clear that he wasn’t going to willingly share FBI files with anyone.

Shortly after war came to the United States, on 7 December 1941, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, which was to control all the armed forces, was formed. Donovan, believing that there was a place in the military organization of the United States for a covert intelligence-gathering and sabotage organization serving all the armed forces, struck a deal with the new Joint Chiefs under which the COI—less the propaganda function, which would become the Office of War Information—would be placed under the Joint Chiefs.

The Joint Chiefs—underestimating “Wild Bill” Donovan—believed this would give them control of the intelligence-gathering and sabotage operations of what would be known as the Office of Strategic Services. President Roosevelt issued another Executive Order on 13 June 1942, establishing the OSS and naming Donovan, still a civilian, as director. Very importantly, the OSS would have access to the President’s virtually unlimited “unvouchered funds” provided by Congress to be spent as the President wished, and not subject to public scrutiny. The JCS thought this was a fine idea, too, as it would relieve them of the responsibility of paying for Donovan’s operations, which they considered useful and important mainly because the President said they would be.

Donovan immediately began a relatively massive recruitment of all sorts of people for the OSS. They came from business and academia, as well as from the armed forces. He set up a training camp at the Congressional Country Club and began to dispatch agents around the world.

It took about a month for the JCS and the FBI to realize that Donovan’s OSS was about to give the phrase “loose cannon” a new meaning. Subtle, and then not-so-subtle, suggestions to the President that maybe the OSS wasn’t such a good idea after all and should be sharply reined in—or, better yet, disbanded—fell on deaf ears. Donovan had told President Roosevelt what he intended to try to do, and the President had liked what he heard.

So did Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt, the President’s formidable wife, who had been present at many of these private dinner conversations. Moreover, Mrs. Roosevelt was very sympathetic to Donovan’s concerns that he would be thwarted in carrying out his mission by the military establishment. She had had her own problems with them. They had trouble accepting her firm belief, for example, that there was absolutely no reason Negroes could not be taught to fly military aircraft. It had taken the personal intervention of her husband—who was, after all, commander in chief of the nation’s armed forces—to overcome the military establishment’s foot-dragging and get them to set up a pilot-training program for Negroes at Tuskegee University in Alabama.

When he was still the Coordinator of Information, Donovan had made a quiet deal with the State Department—which then had a very limited intelligence-gathering capability, and was getting little intelligence from either the Office of Naval Intelligence or the Army’s G-2—to send a dozen intelligence officers to North Africa. Working undercover as vice consuls, they were able to keep an eye both on the French fleet, which had been sent to Morocco when the French surrendered, and on the Germans who had sent “Armistice Commissions” to North Africa to make sure the French fleet stayed there.

Donovan’s “vice consuls” were also able to establish contact with French officers unhappy with their new, German-controlled government in Vichy, and smarting under the humiliating defeat France had suffered in 1940.

These contacts, and the intelligence developed, had been of enormous importance when the U.S. Army invaded North Africa in November 1942. The invasion—America’s first victory in World War II—had been relatively bloodless and had done a great deal to restore morale in America, which had sagged when the Japanese had wiped out Battleship Row in Pearl Harbor, Territory of Hawaii, on 7 December 1941, and gone on to conquer the Philippine Islands, and a good deal else, in the months that followed.

This had been enough to squelch the suggestions that the OSS be disbanded, but the OSS—now derogatorily dubbed the “Oh, So Social” because of the prominence of many of Donovan’s well-connected recruits—was still a thorn in the sides of the JCS and the FBI, and they counterattacked. They were now joined by the State Department, which had been somewhat shocked to learn that Donovan’s “vice consuls” had considered their primary loyalty to be to Donovan, and had shown an alarming propensity to take action on their own, without waiting for an opinion—much less permission—from the ambassadors for whom they were theoretically working, or from the State Department itself.

Donovan was not on the short list of government agency heads given access to intercepted Axis communications. He had no access at all to MAGIC intercepts of Japanese messages, and only limited access to ULTRA-intercepted German messages. The OSS was told that the FBI, G-2, and ONI would handle counterintelligence within the United States, and that J. Edgar Hoover was assured by Roosevelt that the FBI was still responsible for intelligence gathering and counterintelligence in the entire Western Hemisphere.

In the latter case, however, Roosevelt did not tell Donovan he could not conduct operations in South America. The result of that omission was that in just about every South American country—particularly Argentina and Mexico— there were detachments of FBI agents competing with—and usually not talking to—Donovan’s OSS agents.

And in the Pacific, General Douglas MacArthur had made it clear that he didn’t want the OSS operating on his turf. Period.

The JCS and the FBI suspected—with more than a little justification—that Donovan was, perhaps with the tacit approval of the President, ignoring any and all edicts and directives that he thought were getting in the way of what he considered to be his mission.

The military tried one more thing to rein in Wild Bill. He was recalled to active duty as a colonel and promoted to brigadier general. They somewhat naively thought this would point out to him that he was only one—a very junior one—of the platoon of one-star generals attached to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and should conduct himself accordingly.

Donovan chose to believe that putting on a uniform had not changed what the commander in chief had told him when he’d signed on at an annual stipend of one dollar as Coordinator of Information: that he worked directly under the President and was answerable only to him.

And there was a psychological advantage to wearing the uniform when dealing with other senior officers. He had been awarded the nation’s highest award for valor in action in France in the First World War. Although he rarely actually pinned the blue-starred ribbon of the Medal of Honor to his tunic, everyone seemed to look for it, and were aware that he could have pinned the ribbon on had he wished to. It reminded every professional soldier that this civilian-in-a-general’s-uniform was in fact a soldier who had not only performed superbly in combat, but had seen much more of it than had most of his professional soldier critics.

The idiotic suggestion to give OSS agents badges and identification cards would have been funny, Donovan thought, had it not represented the expenditure of a lot of time and effort, and revealed an appalling ignorance of how OSS agents were supposed to work, which was, of course, in absolute secrecy.

Some nitwit—probably a half-dozen nitwits—on a lower floor of the building had come up with an absolutely nonsensical idea, then spent much of their own—and other OSS personnel’s—time in getting it ready to submit to the boss for his approval.

A mental image came to him, and he smiled:

“Guten tag, Herr Oberburgermeister, my name is John Smith. I’m a spy for the OSS. Here are my credentials. What can you tell me about German efforts to make an atomic bomb?”

Four sets of credentials had been prepared for Donovan’s approval, which made him wonder, very unkindly, how much time the Documents Branch— which was charged with preparing counterfeit credentials and identification badges—had wasted on this idiotic idea.

Each set of credentials held a gold badge in one side of a leather folder, and a sealed-in-plastic photo identification card in the other. The photo ID was clearly patterned after the Adjutant General’s Office identification cards issued to commissioned officers. There was space for a photo, a thumbprint, and the individual’s name, rank, and date of birth.

Besides that, the badges were unlike any other Donovan had ever seen. Donovan had to admit they were both impressive and attractive. In the center was the great seal of the United States. In two curved lines at the top was the legend THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, and under that, OFFICE OF STRATEGIC SERVICES.

Under the badge, in a rectangular block, was space for the individual’s rank. One of the badges read SPECIAL AGENT; the second, SENIOR AGENT; the third, SUPERVISORY AGENT; and the fourth, AREA COMMANDER.

There were no such ranks in the OSS, and the armed forces rank that an individual might have brought with him into the OSS carried little weight. There were people in charge of this and that, of course, and their assistants and deputies, but authority was given to station chiefs, for example, based on who was the best man for the job, not on his date of rank—if indeed he had a rank.

Donovan’s imagination flew again.

Well, hell, we might as well go whole hog.

We can have a badge for Saboteur. And Assassin. And Burglar.

The possibilities are limitless!

He pulled a pad of interoffice memorandum forms to him and picked up his pen. Then he changed his mind.

This was too spectacular of an idiotic idea to be dismissed by one of his “Not only no but HELL NO!” memos, with the addendum, “Destroy these! ”

This dedicated idiocy deserved more. He decided he would think about it after he had dealt with the off-the-wall analysis and then the problem he really shouldn’t have to deal with himself but had to.

He put the leather folders back in the accordion folder and turned to the analysis.

The analysis was labeled: “Geo-Political Analysis Division Document #1943.24.04.717. An Analysis of Japanese Infiltration Among the Muslims Throughout the World.”

It was a thin document stapled together under a pale yellow cover stamped TOP SECRET at the top and bottom, and carrying the names of the authors who appended PhD to their names. Donovan recognized both names. They were distinguished academics. One had come into the OSS from Yale, the other from the University of Chicago.

Neither of them was a fool—although one of them was truly strange-looking—and Donovan knew he wouldn’t be able to dismiss their argument as quickly as he had the badges; he would have to read the entire document.

He was a lawyer, of course, who was capable of not only reading rapidly but also of retaining the important points a document made. Still, it took him ten minutes to read the analysis and sort out its pertinent points.

If the scholars who had prepared the analysis could be believed—and Donovan decided they could be—Japan had been courting the Muslim countries since the 1880s. After the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-1905, Japan intensified its efforts, and as early as 1906 had begun to plant rumors that the emperor was preparing to make Islam Japan’s state religion.

In 1909, according to the analysis, the notion was given semiofficial approval when a number of influential Japanese signed “The Muslim Pact,” which promised to promote Islam to the Japanese people. Among the Japanese who signed it was Tsuyoshi Inukai, who had later become prime minister. Others who signed it were Ryohei Uchida, who was known to be close to the emperor, and Mitsuru Toyama, who was very active in an odd facet of Japanese politics, the secret societies. On the Muslim side was a well-known and powerful writer, Abdurrashid Ibrahim, whose writings pushed the idea that the time had come for a worldwide expansion of Islam.

After World War I, the analysis went on, the Japanese began to spread the word in the Muslim world that thousands of Japanese had converted to Islam and that Japan as a whole was ready to convert en masse, because the Mikado himself was coming to see himself as the head of a religion embracing the tenets of Muhammad.

In 1923, the analysis reported, a Japanese named Sakuma, who was reliably reported to have close contacts with the Japanese military, the foreign ministry, and the emperor’s closest advisers, went to Shanghai and established “The Society of Light,” a Muslim evangelical center with the announced purpose of promoting Islam in China.

More recently, the analysis went on, in the 1930s forward, Japan had been excusing its expansion into Southeastern Asia as “necessary to liberate those countries from Anglo-American tyranny.” To Muslims, that might mean from “Christian tyranny,” especially when the Japanese were portraying themselves as seriously considering conversion to Islam.

It pointed out that the “cultivate the Muslims” policy was being run by General Sadao Artaki, a former war minister and one of Premier Tojo’s closest allies.

The analysis concluded that Japan considered its program a success and very likely would try something similar elsewhere—for example, with a “Catholic Policy” in Latin America. If Muslims could be convinced that the Mikado was about to become a Muslim, why couldn’t Latin American Roman Catholics be convinced that the emperor was about to embrace the Pope, and all Japan was trying to do was protect them from the evils of Anglo-American Protestantism?

Phrased in academic jargon, the analysis said that while to Western eyes the Japanese emperor’s conversion to Islam was about as likely to happen as the Pope embracing Shintoism, it wasn’t how things looked to Western eyes that mattered, but what the people in Asia and South America thought.

The analysis summarized: “Japan has expended on Muslim policy many years of patient labor and has assigned to it some of her ablest political and military leaders. Her cunning and opportunism, her flexible approach and unscrupulous manipulation of the facts have borne fruit in many lands,” and then went on to recommend that the OSS immediately begin its own propaganda campaign in Muslim countries exposing “Japan’s barefaced duplicity” by documenting what the Japanese were in fact doing, forcing emperor worship on the Muslim populations of territories they had “liberated.”

Donovan exhaled audibly. This was the first he’d heard of anything like this—and that was more than a little embarrassing, as he took pride in his knowledge of things like this—and obviously it had to be looked into.

He reached for his pen and the pad of interoffice memoranda forms again, and wrote two. One was to the authors of the analysis: “Thank you. Good job. I’ll get back to you. WJD.” The second was to the assistant deputy director for Asia, as he knew the deputy director himself was in Asia, trying to reason with General Douglas MacArthur about the potential value of the OSS: “Read this carefully. Look into it. Get back to me soonest. WJD.”

Then he turned to the problem that he really shouldn’t have to deal with but knew he had to.

It was in the form of an interoffice memorandum: “Bill, I need to talk to you about Frade. I’ll be here all morning. AFG.”

Donovan recognized the initials as those of the deputy director of the OSS for Western Hemisphere Operations, Colonel Alejandro Federico Graham, USMCR.

And Donovan knew that Frade was Major Cletus Howell Frade, USMCR, an OSS agent presently in Argentina.

Donovan had no idea what Graham wished to talk to him about vis-à-vis Major Frade, but he suspected he wasn’t going to like it at all. And he was sure that Colonel Graham wasn’t going to like at all what he was planning to tell him vis-à-vis Major Frade. He had planned, until he found Graham’s interoffice memo on his desk, to send him one. It would have read much the same: “Alex, I need to talk to you about Frade. I’ll be here all morning. WJD.”

Donovan leaned forward and depressed the talk switch on his intercom device.

“Helen,” he said. “Would you please ask Colonel Graham if he has a minute for me? Bring in coffee, and then no calls—except from the President—until we’re through. Okay?”