Joseph E. Persico Read online

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Acknowledgments

  A Note to Readers

  Illustrations

  Prologue

  Chapter I. Gentleman Amateurs

  Chapter II. Spies, Saboteurs, and Traitors

  Chapter III. Strange Bedfellows

  Chapter IV. Spymaster in the Oval Office

  Chapter V. The Defeatist and the Defiant

  Chapter VI. “There Is No U.S. Secret Intelligence Service”

  Chapter VII. Spies Versus Ciphers

  Chapter VIII. Donovan Enters the Game

  Chapter IX. “Our Objective Is to Get America into the War”

  Chapter X. Catastrophe or Conspiracy

  Chapter XI. Secrets of the Map Room

  Chapter XII. Intramural Spy Wars

  Chapter XIII. Premier Secret of the War

  Chapter XIV. Enter the OSS

  Chapter XV. “We Are Striking Back”

  Chapter XVI. An Exchange: An Invasion for a Bomb

  Chapter XVII. Leakage from the Top

  Chapter XVIII. Distrusting Allies

  Chapter XIX. Deceivers and the Deceived

  Chapter XX. The White House Is Penetrated

  Chapter XXI. If Overlord Fails

  Chapter XXII. Cracks in the Reich

  Chapter XXIII. A Secret Unshared

  Chapter XXIV. “Take a Look at the OSS”

  Chapter XXV. Sympathizers and Spies

  Chapter XXVI. A Leaky Vessel

  Chapter XXVII. Who Knew—and When?

  Chapter XXVIII. “Stalin Has Been Deceiving Me All Along”

  Chapter XXIX. “The Following Are the Latest Casualties”

  Chapter XXX. Aftermath

  Notes

  Bibliography

  About the Author

  Also by Joseph E. Persico

  Copyright Page

  To the next generation,

  Amanda, Joshua, and Georgia,

  and my literary agent,

  Clyde Taylor

  If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.

  Sun-tzu The Art of War

  Acknowledgments

  WRITERS of history and of historical figures must stand on the shoulders of numerous others in order to tell their story. This book could not have been written without the unstinting cooperation of the staff of the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library in Hyde Park, New York. At the time I began, the library’s director was Verne W. Newton, who, in addition to steering me initially in wise directions, read my final manuscript with great care and to the author’s profit. I especially benefited from the assistance of the library’s supervisory archivist, Raymond Teichman, and Lynn Bassanese was unfailingly helpful and imaginative in handling my queries. Others who aided me at Hyde Park were Robert Parks, Nancy Snedeker, Alycia Vivona, and Mark Renovitch, who was especially helpful in finding photographs. Verne Newton’s successor, Cynthia Koch, continued to provide the backing of her staff.

  At the National Archives I relied on William Cunliffe, Larry Macdonald, John Taylor, and Sidney Shapiro. At the Library of Congress, I was assisted by Margaret Krewson, former chief of the European Division, Mark Matucci, and Marvin Kranz. I thank Meredith Butler, director of libraries at my alma mater, the State University of New York at Albany, and among her staff I am deeply indebted to William Young for tracking down my endless queries. I have been well served by a talented reference team at the Guilderland, New York Library who researched numerous matters for me. That staff, under the library’s director, Carole Hamblin, included Margaret Garrett, Gillian Leonard, Maria Preller, Eileen Williams, Joseph Nash, and Thomas Barnes. At the New York State Library, I was assisted by Jean Hargrave and Eileen Clark.

  I received valuable help from the Truman Library in Independence, Missouri, beginning with the library’s director, Larry Hackman, and particularly from Randy Sowell. The Truman scholar Robert Ferrell was extremely generous to me. Duane A. Watson of Wilderstein Preservation Incorporated opened for me the files of FDR’s confidant Margaret Suckley. I was measurably helped by two noted historians of intelligence, Michael Warner of the Central Intelligence Agency and Robert L. Benson of the National Security Agency. Five other accomplished writers in the intelligence field, Thomas Troy, David Kahn, Hyden Peake, Arnold Kramish, and Rick Russell, also provided me with invaluable help. Nicholas B. Sheetz, manuscripts librarian at Georgetown University, generously opened his collection to me. Several of my requests dealing with military matters were filled by the staff of retired General Colin Powell, including his chief aides, William Smullen, Peggy Cifrino, and Larry Wilkerson. Derek Blackburn provided useful Churchill material.

  I benefited enormously from the time and freedom provided by fellowships to the Rockefeller Institute Study Center at Bellagio, Italy, and the Bogliasco Foundation, also in Italy. My daughter, Vanya Perez, ably prepared the manuscript. And I thank Edwin Sours, Henry Jurenka, John Foley, and Michael Mattioli, each of whom knows what he did to keep this project moving.

  Others who read the manuscript and provided invaluable guidance included my wife, Sylvia LaVista Persico, and fellow writers Bernard Conners and Tanya Melich. I further want to recognize the valued role of my late agent, Clyde Taylor, in the publication of this and my other works. Finally, I was the fortunate author guided by the sure hand of Robert Loomis, my editor, who supplied enthusiasm, judgment, and encouragement throughout this project.

  A Note to Readers

  THERE exists, for intelligence practitioners and scholars, precise distinctions between codes and ciphers, cryptology and cryptanalysis, coding and encryption, decoding and decryption. However, in the interest of reducing confusion for the general reader, these terms are used here in their broader colloquial sense. Were purist rules to be followed, the Hugh Whitemore play about Alan Turing’s role in Ultra would have to be entitled Breaking the Ciphers, not Breaking the Code. This is a linguistic straitjacket that I have hoped to avoid.

  As a Harvard student, FDR developed a code to mask his diary entries, particularly those about his relations with a young Boston lady. (FDR Library)

  FDR as assistant secretary of the Navy. His favorite component of the Navy Department was the Office of Naval Intelligence, which he expanded and staffed with trusted socialite friends. (FDR Library)

  FDR with his friend Vincent Astor (left), who carried out espionage from his oceangoing yacht and who fed the President intelligence before World War II through The Club, a secret society of highly placed Americans. (FDR Library)

  John Franklin Carter, a Washington columnist who ran a spy ring for FDR directly from the Oval Office. (Sonia C. Greenbaum)

  British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and FDR along a stream at the President’s retreat, Shangri-la. Their partnership began with secret correspondence predating America’s entry into the war. (FDR Library)

  General Claire Chennault (center), the American aviation advisor to China, who became involved in FDR’s scheme to firebomb Tokyo—before Pearl Harbor. The plan fell through but led to Chennault’s formation of the legendary Flying Tigers. (FDR Library)

  The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, was the result of the greatest intelligence failure in American or perhaps all military history. Responsibility for the incident is still hotly debated. (FDR Library)

  FDR with Vice President Henry Wallace, who unwittingly provided Germany with some of its highest-level intelligence through leaks t
o his brother-in-law, a Swiss diplomat. (FDR Library)

  William J. “Wild Bill” Donovan, a World War I Medal of Honor winner, served with the famous Fighting Irish, the 69th Infantry Regiment. He became America’s first spy chief when FDR appointed him director of the Office of Strategic Services. (National Archives)

  Passport photo of Sir William S. Stephenson, the head of British intelligence in the United States, who fed FDR fabricated evidence of alleged hostile Nazi intentions in the Americas in order to draw the United States into the war. (Thomas Troy)

  The map of South America that British intelligence sent to FDR supposedly revealed how Hitler proposed to divide the continent into five Nazi duchies. (FDR Library)

  FDR gave Adolf Berle the thankless task of coordinating rival U.S. intelligence services. Berle learned early on of possible penetration of the Roosevelt administration by Soviet spies. (FDR Library)

  The Duke of Windsor, formerly King Edward VIII, aboard the USS Tuscaloosa shortly before he sought to suggest to FDR a near-treasonous peace plan between Britain and Germany. (FDR Library)

  Frank B. Rowlett, leader of the cryptanalytic team that broke Japan’s Purple diplomatic code and thus provided the best U.S. intelligence of the war. FDR, with his preference for spies over ciphers, did not initially appreciate these decrypts, which were designated Magic. (National Security Agency)

  General Hiroshi Oshima, Japan’s ambassador to Germany and FDR’s best source of intelligence from Hitler, thanks to the breaking of the Purple code by American cryptanalysts. (National Archives)

  In this decoded message from Ambassador Oshima to Tokyo, Hitler speculates on where the Allies are likely to launch the “second front.” (National Archives)

  Bletchley Park in England, site of Ultra, which broke the cipher of Germany’s Enigma coding machine. This achievement was a secret so zealously guarded that Churchill and Roosevelt concealed an American blunder that cost hundreds of American lives rather than reveal that the tragedy was discovered through a decoded German message. (National Security Agency)

  Inmates at the Buchenwald concentration camp. FDR had early access to information on the fate of the Jews and other victims of the Nazis through smuggled eyewitness accounts and German messages intercepted by British codebreakers. (FDR Library)

  Two of eight captured German saboteurs, Herbert Haupt (left) and Georg Dasch (right), flank an Army officer during their trial. Dasch and another defendant escaped execution by betraying the other members of Operation Pastorius, including Haupt. (Federal Bureau of Investigation)

  Ernst “Putzi” Hanfstaengl, a former member of Hitler’s inner circle, was smuggled into the Washington area, where he reported to FDR on everything from rivalries among Nazis to the possibility that the Führer would commit suicide. (National Archives)

  It was universally assumed that FDR would want General George C. Marshall to lead the invasion of Europe. But General Eisenhower, seen here with FDR in Sicily in 1943, had a sense that the President was secretly auditioning him. (National Archives)

  Hollywood’s leading swashbuckler, Errol Flynn, volunteered to spy for FDR, claiming that no one would suspect a movie star. FDR declined the offer. (National Archives)

  Navy Lieutenant Joseph P. Kennedy Jr., eldest brother of the future President, volunteered for a controversial secret mission proposed by FDR, which ultimately led to the young flier’s death. (National Archives)

  Myron Taylor, FDR’s personal representative to the Vatican, with Pope Pius XII. Taylor exposed the biggest intelligence hoax committed against the White House in World War II. (FDR Library)

  FDR with Joseph Stalin at the Big Three summit in Tehran, where a plot to assassinate the President was uncovered. (FDR Library)

  Russian maids prepare a room in the American quarters during FDR’s meeting at Yalta with Stalin and Churchill. The Soviets had planted dozens of hidden listening devices in all the rooms. (FDR Library)

  An American sailor trains a Russian sailor during Operation Hula, in which the United States secretly turned warships over to the Soviet Union as part of FDR’s strategy to draw Stalin into the war against Japan. (Naval Historical Center)

  Churchill’s pressure on FDR to make Britain a full partner in the development of the atom bomb led to the assignment of British scientists to Los Alamos, among them Klaus Fuchs, who stole secrets about the bomb for the Soviet Union. (UPI/Bettmann Archive).

  FDR with his 1944 running mate, Senator Harry S. Truman. Truman later claimed he knew nothing of the atomic bomb before becoming President, but Roosevelt may have told him of the weapon during this lunch on the White House lawn. (FDR Library)

  Lauchlin Currie, a close FDR aide. Was he consciously providing White House secrets to the Soviet Union, or was he merely an ingenuous dupe? (FDR Library)

  Elizabeth Bentley, a former courier for the Soviet Union, who went to the FBI and then before Congress to denounce alleged spies in the Roosevelt administration. (National Archives)

  FDR aboard the presidential yacht Potomac with his distant cousin and confidant, Margaret “Daisy” Suckley (center), with whom he shared wartime secrets. She was with him at the time of his death. (FDR Library)

  Foreword

  THE genesis of this book lies in my lifelong fascination with Franklin D. Roosevelt. As a boy growing up in New York State, it seemed to me that the nation was governed by a triumvirate as immutable as the heavens. Fiorello La Guardia was New York City’s mayor, Thomas Dewey was the state’s governor, and Roosevelt was the president. Subsequent ascendents to these offices seemed, to an immature mind, unwelcome interlopers. The brightest star in this constellation was, of course, FDR.

  Most of my previous books have dealt, in whole or in part, with espionage and World War II. After a search of some six hundred Roosevelt entries in the Library of Congress, I was surprised to find that none covered specifically the President’s involvement in World War II intelligence. I saw an opportunity to fuse my interests in the man, the field, and the era.

  Few leaders have been better suited by nature and temperament for the anomalies of secret warfare than FDR. “You know I am a juggler, and I never let my right hand know what my left hand does,” he once confessed. “I may be entirely inconsistent, and furthermore I am perfectly willing to mislead and tell untruths if it will help me win the war.” His style of leadership bears out this admission. FDR compartmentalized information, misled associates, manipulated people, conducted intrigues, used private lines of communication, scattered responsibility, duplicated assignments, provoked rivalries, held all the cards while showing few, and left few fingerprints. His behavior, which fascinated, puzzled, amazed, dismayed, and occasionally repelled people, parallels many of the qualities of an espionage chief.

  FDR’s talent for intrigue was merely another weapon in the Rooseveltian arsenal, along with vision, courage, charm, and unquenchable spirit, that he employed toward laudable ends—combating the Depression, seeking social justice, and winning the war. As for the last objective, his benign duplicity was best captured by his son James. “I had a conversation with father,” the young Marine officer writes, “in which I discussed the dishonesty of his stand on war.” “Jimmy,” FDR explained, “I knew we were going to war… . But I couldn’t come out and say a war was coming, because the people would have panicked and turned from me… . If I don’t say I hate war, then people are going to think I don’t hate war. If I say we’re going to get into this war, people will think I want us in it. If I don’t say I won’t send our sons to fight on foreign battlefields, then people will think I want to send them… . I couldn’t take every congressman into my confidence because he’d have run off the Hill hollering that FDR is a war monger… . So you play the game the way it has been played over the years, and you play to win.”

  Still, the President took almost childish delight in subterfuge for its own sake. Roosevelt loved being told secrets and retailing gossip. He was accused by enemies and friends alike of being devious and lacking
in candor, and justly so. He dangled people like puppets on the string of his whims. He would fool those who thought they could predict his moves by changing course. His early New Deal ally Rexford Tugwell observed, “He deliberately concealed the processes of his mind.” His vice president Henry Wallace concluded that the only certainty in dealing with the man was the uncertainty of “what went on inside FDR’s head.” As one scholar put it, “Nothing would have pleased him more than to observe historians arguing passionately about what constituted the ‘real Roosevelt.’” His inscrutable nature found full play when America went to war. The man with the instincts of a spymaster now had a war in which to indulge his attraction to the clandestine.

  Wars are won by superior might wedded to military performance. Espionage is a handmaiden, not the instrument of victory. But a war’s outcome is affected by the genius or ineptitude, the coups or blunders, the measures and countermeasures of secret warriors. How FDR performed on that clandestine front is the story that follows.

  Albany, New YorkJuly 19, 2001

  Prologue

  THE President had been awake since eight-thirty this Sunday morning, December 7, 1941. He sat in bed flipping through the thick Sunday editions of The New York Times, the Herald Tribune, the two Washington papers, even the hateful Chicago Tribune, snapping the pages with a rapidity that created a breeze; yet he would later be able to recall what he read with a retentiveness that daunted his aides. His valet, Navy Petty Officer Arthur Prettyman, helped FDR out of bed and into his wheelchair, a makeshift affair adapted from a kitchen chair with the legs cut off and the seat mounted onto a metal frame. Prettyman wheeled FDR into the bathroom, where the President began shaving himself with a straight razor. He dressed casually this morning, finishing his attire with a baggy sweater that belonged to his son Jimmy. He was looking forward to a day of rest. The night before Mrs. Roosevelt had arranged dinner for thirty-four guests, an eclectic list including relatives, friends, White House aides, middle-ranking government officials, and military officers. To one guest, the ensemble suggested an exercise in social catch-up. The President had excused himself early and left before the musicale led by the violinist Arthur LeBlanc, not precisely FDR’s cup of tea. One guest, Bertie Hamlin, whom FDR had known since his youth, thought the President “looked very worn… . He had an unusually stern expression.”