Death and Honor

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.