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!