The Soldier Spies (Men at War 3)

But separately and—more important—together the two were a very persuasive pair. When the problem of transporting the crates of radios and special explosives (earmarked for Casablanca but sent in error to England) came up at a staff meeting in London, Canidy and Whittaker had quickly made convincing arguments that the obvious solution was for them to fly the crates down to Casablanca in the B-25: There was no reason they couldn’t be absent from Whitbey House for seventy-two hours; the crates would not be misdirected again; and there wouldn’t be all the bureaucratic crap involved in arranging for the priority shipment through normal channels.

Stevens had let them go, though it was even money they wouldn’t be back in seventy-two hours—Canidy and Whittaker being Canidy and Whittaker. But he had not expected they would return with Colonel Donovan aboard. Still, Canidy and Whittaker being Canidy and Whittaker…

And the truth was that what they’d done was a good thing. It had provided a more secret mode of travel than one of the courier flights from Casablanca: There was no question in Colonel Stevens’s mind that the Abwehr had a 90 percent accurate passenger manifest of VIP courier flights. And besides, Donovan was human, and there had to be some jolt of pleasure derived from traveling aboard “his own” aircraft, flown by two of “his own” pilots.

On receipt of the Air Corps message that “Colonel Williams” would be aboard a B-25 aircraft, Stevens had been so confident that “Williams” was Donovan that he had gone to East Grinstead with two cars. Donovan would be carried to Whitbey House in the long, black Austin Princess limousine assigned to the Chief of Station, while Canidy, Whittaker, and Ellis would go in a 1941 Ford staff car driven by Captain Stanley S. Fine.

Stevens had with him a thick sheaf of Top Secret messages that Donovan would want to deal with right away. Canidy and the others had no “need to know.” Thus, separate cars.

When the B-25 landed, a checkerboard-painted “Follow Me” truck led it away from Base Operations to a remote corner of the field where the Princess and the Ford sedan were waiting.

Donovan was first off the airplane. He was wearing a simple olive-drab woolen uniform, with the silver eagles of a colonel and the crossed flint-locks of infantry. On his head was a soft “overseas” hat.

Technically, Donovan was assigned to the Joint Chiefs of

Staff, and probably should be wearing the insignia of a General Staff Corps Officer and not the flintlocks. It was interesting to wonder why he wore infantryman’s rifles: Perhaps he simply wanted to—and was confident no one would call him on improper insignia. In Europe, he was answerable only to Eisenhower, and Ike had much too much on his mind to notice the insignia Donovan wore.

But Stevens knew that as open-faced and disingenuous as Donovan appeared, there was more than a little subtlety in him: Donovan was a longtime mandarin in the political establishment and an old buddy of Franklin Roosevelt. Without these credentials he would never have been pegged by Roosevelt to create out of practically nothing America’s first true spy network. But he was doing this in a country at war, and he was doing it officially as a soldier. Which meant working as much with the military establishment as the political one.

Which meant that all other things being equal, Donovan would have been treated like an amateur by the military establishment (an amateur being defined as anyone who had not been on active duty prior to 1938). Which meant that America’s young spy organization would have had about as much chance of getting off the ground as a balloon in a needle factory. Thus the infantry rifles: Anyone who has commanded an infantry regiment in combat is, Q.E.D., not a military amateur. And Donovan had not only commanded a regiment (in War I with the "Fighting 69th" Infantry) but he’d won the Medal of Honor doing it.

The crossed flintlocks would subtly remind the senior officers with whom he dealt (including Eisenhower, who had spent War I at Camp Colt, New York) that he had seen more than his share of combat, which meant that he was not just a civilian politician in uniform who could be ignored because he “just doesn’t understand what the Army is all about.”

And the Army establishment was not half of the stone wall Donovan had had to break through before he could even begin to worry about the enemy. Long, long ago (that is to say, a few weeks earlier) during the hectic seventy-two hours between Colonel Stevens’s orders to report to active duty and his departure by plane to London, Donovan half jokingly, half bitterly had looked at Stevens and sighed. “You know, Ed,” he told Stevens, “I consider it a good day if I can devote fifty-one percent of my time to the armed enemy.”

There was no doubt whom he meant by the “unarmed” enemy: a number of people, ranging downward from J. Edgar Hoover, who loathed William J. Donovan. The authority granted to Donovan by the President (which came with virtually unlimited access to nonaccountable funds) had turned him into a very real threat to long-established government fiefdoms. He was particularly a thorn in the side of the FBI, the ONI (the Office of Naval Intelligence), G2 (Military Intelligence), and the State Department Intelligence Division. These bodies had quickly proved to be a thorn in the side of William J. Donovan.

Lt. Colonel Stevens and Captain Fine saluted when Donovan walked over to them. Donovan returned the salute, smiled, and then shook their hands. Then he walked to the tail of the aircraft and met the call of nature. By that time, Canidy and Whittaker had climbed out of the aircraft and begun to unload the luggage. Fulmar, Stevens saw, was not with them.

As Canidy and Whittaker approached the Austin Princess, Donovan said, “Canidy would like to keep the airplane.”

“I’ll bet he would,” Stevens said, smiling.

“He thinks he can get it in and out of the strip at Whitbey,” Donovan said, seriously. “Would keeping it pose problems?”

“No, sir,” Stevens said.

Donovan nodded. It was an order. Stevens would now have to somehow arrange for the transfer—or at least the indefinite “loan”—of the B-25 to the London Station. Another victory for the persuasive Canidy-Whittaker combination.

“I see you brought your lawyer with you, Colonel,” Canidy said to Stevens as he offered his hand. “Been behaving yourself, Stanley?”

Prior to his entry into military service, Captain Stanley S. Fine, a tall, skinny, somewhat scholarly-looking man of thirty-three, had been Vice President, Legal, of Continental Studios, Inc. Before he had been recruited for the OSS, he had been a B-17 Squadron Commander.

“I see you brought this one back in one piece,” Fine said, nodding at the B-25.

“We try to learn from our little mistakes,” Whittaker said, wrapping an affectionate arm around Fine and then kissing him wetly on the forehead. Fine was torn between laughter and annoyance.

The trouble with Dick Canidy, Fine thought as Canidy hugged him, is that l both like and admire the sonofabitch.

If I didn’t like him, both of them, the goddamned Bobbsey Twins, it would be very easy to stay pissed off, because they get to fly around in airplanes, while I sit on my ass and clean up the paperwork mess they leave behind them.

Fine was not just kidding when he needled Whittaker and Canidy about bringing the B-25 back in one piece. Not too long ago the pair had wrecked a Navy R-5D Curtiss Commando transport aircraft on takeoff from the airfield in Kolwezi in the Belgian Congo. And Fine had wound up dealing with the problem of how to explain the lost airplane.

Fine had flown one of the R-5Ds involved in the Kolwezi Operation. After that Operation was successfully (miraculously was a better word) completed, Fine had started to “make himself useful” in London,“until something else comes up.” Before long he’d turned into something like Stevens’s deputy. He wasn’t sure how he felt about this: It was important work, but he was a pilot, and pilots should be flying.

Just before Canidy and Whittaker talked Stevens into letting them take the B-25 to North Africa, Captain Peter Douglass, Sr., USN, Donovan’s deputy, made a two-day trip to London. Ten minutes after he arrived at Berkeley Square, he tossed a thick folder, red-stamped SECRET, on Fine’s desk.

“Come up with how you think we should handle this, Stan,” he said. Then, chuckling, he added,“It’s right down your alley.”