A few weeks after Willi Münzenberg’s disappearance, a shortish man with a ruddy face and blue eyes boarded a Pan American Clipper flying boat bound for London via Lisbon. William J. Donovan was an American hero.
Born in 1883 to Irish immigrant parents in Buffalo, New York, he had starred as quarterback for Columbia University, emerged from World War I as one of the most heavily decorated veterans of the American Expedi-tionary Force, and amassed a small fortune as a corporate lawyer on Wall Street. For all the wealth and adulation, though, “Wild Bill” carried about him a palpable air of frustrated ambition. Apparently bound for high political office in the 1920s, he was passed over for the post of attorney general in Herbert Hoover’s administration, then defeated in New York’s 1932 gubernatorial race. Banished to the political sidelines, he channeled some of his prodigious energies into lengthy foreign excursions in North Africa, Spain, and the Balkans, where he indulged a taste for spying he had acquired during the Russian civil war of 1919. His mission to London of July 1940 was tailor-made. In addition to investigating German Fifth Column activities and the state of Anglo-American naval intelligence collaboration, Donovan was personally charged by his Columbia classmate, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, with reporting on Britain’s
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ability to withstand the Nazi advance. (Roosevelt wanted to help the British cause but was stymied by American anti-interventionism and the consistently defeatist dispatches he was receiving from his Ambassador to the Court of St. James, Joseph P. Kennedy.) Here then was both an excellent opportunity to learn from the British masters of the secret arts and an unexpected entrée into the White House.14
This time, Donovan did not squander his chance. Fêted by the British—the king, Prime Minister Winston Churchill, and Colonel Stewart Menzies (“C,” or the chief of MI6) all granted him personal audiences—
he returned to the United States with the message that FDR wanted to hear: Britain could repel the Nazi horde, but only if America sent more destroyers. Now performing the function of the crippled president’s “eyes and legs,” Wild Bill began lobbying in earnest for something he had desired fervently for years: an American national intelligence agency.15
There already existed several organizations tasked with gathering and analyzing information bearing on the nation’s security: the Army’s venera-ble Military Intelligence Division, or G-2; the Office of Naval Intelligence; the newly created Office of Inter-American Affairs (overseen by a precocious scion of one of the country’s wealthiest families, Nelson A.
Rockefeller); and, of course, J. Edgar Hoover’s Federal Bureau of Investigation. But these agencies’ intelligence efforts were badly fragmented, and none of them was equipped to carry out the sort of secret political warfare that other nations were waging with ever greater skill and sophistication.
In pushing for a central body that would combine the functions of espionage and covert operation, Donovan ran up against several obstacles—
including the opposition of bureaucratic rivals like the formidable Hoover, conservative qualms about adding further to government powers already vastly augmented by the New Deal, and a deeply ingrained American dislike of spying (“Gentlemen do not read each other’s mail,”
Secretary of State Henry Stimson had famously pronounced when some deciphered Japanese messages landed on his desk in 1929).16 Still, helped by some well-placed words of support from his British friends, in particular William C. Stephenson (the secret agent code-named “Intrepid”), Wild Bill persevered and in July 1941 was rewarded by his appointment as Coordinator of Information (COI), a new position vested with considerable powers of oversight over the existing intelligence agencies.17 The Irish al-tar boy had at last arrived in the American establishment.
T H E O R I G I N S O F T H E C I A F R O N T
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