1 Donovan’s Dragoons
“Wild Bill” Donovan didn’t fear the hellish circumstances of war. Instead, the thrill of combat excited him “like a youngster at Halloween,” he wrote home to his wife. He had been fighting along the Western Front for less than a year, but in that short time he had already taken shrapnel to his leg, survived a poison gas attack, and rescued Allied soldiers buried under debris, for which the French awarded him the Croix de Guerre medal.
On October 15, 1918, Donovan and his men of the U.S. Army’s 69th Infantry Regiment, the “Fighting Irish,” found themselves bunkered down in shell holes while an onslaught of German bullets grazed the ground. They were supposed to make an advance behind an escort of tanks, but the tanks never showed up. They started anyway.
Donovan leapt out of his muddy hole to lead the advance. As he cleared the ledge, a machine-gun bullet ripped through his right knee, destroying his tibia. He later said that it “felt as if somebody had hit me on the back of the leg with a spiked club.” Although nauseated from the pain, he continued to yell orders at his men. And despite his injury, none of them dared to disobey. He was known to sock them in the jaw for less, a punch that one soldier said carried enough force to rival a kick from a mule.
While Donovan lay in the crimson-tinted mud with a mangled leg, a German artillery shell exploded in the hole beside him. Three of the men whom he had been yelling at were instantly blown apart. Donovan was “showered with the remnants of their bodies.” Then, he said, “Gas was thrown at us, thick and nasty.” He inhaled the noxious fumes. His mind became groggy. His body slumped over.
Five hours later, during a lull in the action, a group of soldiers put Donovan in a blanket and carried him more than a mile through exploding shells and whizzing bullets—one soldier was hit in the process—to a makeshift hospital. They arrived to find a harrowing scene. One officer had been shot through the stomach and was bleeding out on the floor. Two more had undergone surgery and were begging their nurse to hold their hands and smooth their brows. Another man died while crying for his wife and children.
Donovan survived his injuries, but he ultimately lost half his regiment, a fact that would weigh heavily on his conscience for years to come. Nevertheless, despite the mental and physical anguish that he had endured, and despite the men whom he had lost, when he returned home from Europe, he hungered for another taste of combat.
In 1923, Donovan was awarded the Medal of Honor for his heroic actions in World War I, making him the most decorated officer in the entire U.S. military. At an emotional ceremony in front of a crowd of four thousand veterans, he unfastened the medal from his neck and gave it to his regiment. Tears welled up in his piercing blue-gray eyes. “It doesn’t belong with me,” he said. “It belongs to the boys who are not here, the boys who are resting under the white crosses in France or in the cemeteries of New York, also to the boys who were lucky enough to come through.”
* * *
Bill Donovan was a star athlete from a tough, working-class neighborhood in Buffalo, New York. He had graduated from Columbia Law School in 1907, the same year that classmate Franklin Roosevelt had dropped out after passing the New York bar exam. The two men differed greatly in their politics and social circles—one was a Republican of humble Irish ancestry, the other a Democrat from the upper class—but they shared a common character defined by bravery, energy, and optimism that would unite them in the years to come.
After World War I, Donovan worked in the Department of Justice as an attorney for the Western District of New York and enforced Prohibition with a vigor that rivaled his appetite for war. He once launched a liquor raid on the famous Saturn Club, a swanky social club in Buffalo to which he himself belonged. Afterward, he told the angry members who called to complain, “The law is the law and I have sworn to uphold it.”
Donovan himself never drank. Only once did his acquaintance Carleton Coon ever see him hold a glass of amber-tinted liquid, and even then, he never took a sip. “Nor did he smoke,” Coon added.
During the 1928 presidential election, Donovan campaigned and wrote speeches for Republican candidate Herbert Hoover, who promised to make Donovan the attorney general if he won. Hoover did win, but he reneged on the promise under pressure from a group of anti-Catholic Southerners. A contemptuous Donovan thereafter resigned from the Department of Justice and opened a private law firm. He then ran to succeed Franklin Roosevelt as governor of New York, but he lost the election—in part because of grudges held over from the Saturn Club raid.
Although Donovan was a Republican, he wasn’t against cooperating with the Democrats across the aisle. When Franklin Roosevelt defeated Hoover for the presidency in the midst of the Great Depression, he sent Donovan on a series of trips to Europe to gather information on the state of international affairs (and to gather rare stamps for Roosevelt’s private collection). On one of these trips, Donovan spoke with high-ranking members of the Nazi Party and sensed that their authoritarian calls to restore Germany’s pride, rebuild its military, and appropriate land from others would inevitably lead to another world war.
Given this prospect, Donovan urged President Roosevelt to create a centralized intelligence organization to oversee the collection of intelligence abroad. Ideally, this organization would rise above the bureaucratic rivalries that stymied other intelligence organizations—the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Army’s Military Intelligence Division, the Office of Naval Intelligence—and provide the president with the most accurate and up-to-date information possible. Donovan also wanted this centralized intelligence organization to engage in espionage, sabotage, propaganda, and disinformation campaigns against America’s enemies. “Modern war operates on more fronts than battle fronts,” he explained to Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox. “Each combatant seeks to dominate the whole field of communications. No defense system is effective unless it recognizes and deals with this fact.”
For thousands of years, humans had fought by land and sea. In the early twentieth century, they had added aerial combat to the mix. Now, Donovan reasoned, the United States needed to officially expand its arsenal to include a fourth domain: “Underground.”
* * *
On September 1, 1939, a blitzkrieg of German tanks, planes, and soldiers poured east into neighboring Poland, initiating World War II. Donovan’s plea to Roosevelt to create a centralized intelligence organization grew louder, and Roosevelt grew more receptive. He confided in a letter to Secretary Knox, “Bill Donovan is an old friend of mine—we were in law school together—and frankly, I should like to have him in the Cabinet, not only for his own ability, but also to repair in a sense the very great injustice done him by President Hoover.”
But before Roosevelt could create the organization, another great injustice struck Donovan. In 1940, his twenty-three-year-old daughter, Patricia, skidded her car on a wet highway and crashed into a tree. A passing motorist found her lying unconscious on the side of the road. She was rushed to a hospital, but she died before Donovan could reach her. The emotional toll on him was so great, it was said, that his hair turned gray overnight.
As the conflict in Europe escalated—Germany soon invaded Norway, Denmark, the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, and France—President Roosevelt sent Donovan on two more trips to Europe, during which he met with King George, Queen Mary, and Winston Churchill, and visited the British and Mediterranean coasts to gauge their preparedness for a potential German invasion. Churchill made sure that Donovan received full British cooperation because, he said, Donovan had “great influence with the President.” On returning to the United States, Donovan’s message to Roosevelt was simple: The British needed American support, and the United States needed a centralized intelligence organization.
Roosevelt finally relented to Donovan’s plea. On July 11, 1941, he named Donovan to the new position of Coordinator of Information (COI). The COI was essentially responsible for collecting any intelligence related to national security and performing other “supplementary activities”—a euphemism for espionage, sabotage, propaganda, and disinformation—as necessary. Roosevelt, paralyzed from the waist down due to what was diagnosed as a late case of polio, began referring to Donovan as “my secret legs.”
* * *
In September 1941, Donovan moved COI headquarters to a three-story limestone building near the Potomac River in the Foggy Bottom district of Washington, D.C., a quarter mile north of the Lincoln Memorial. The dreary neighborhood contained a skating rink, a row of dilapidated warehouses, and a brick brewery with a green copper roof that emitted the telltale stench of fermenting yeast. Little about the area invited attention except, once the COI moved in, the armed guard who stood beneath the building’s ionic colonnade.
The COI headquarters had previously been occupied by the National Institutes of Health, and signs of the former tenant were apparent. When Donovan first arrived, the windows were barred, and the third floor still contained caged animals—test subjects for syphilis research—that were destined for the incinerator. German radio joked that the building contained a zoo of “fifty professors, twenty monkeys, ten goats, twelve guinea pigs, and staff of Jewish scribblers.”
In reality, the building mostly contained cubbyhole offices filled with filing cabinets, walls plastered with maps of Europe and Asia, desks stacked with piles of paper that only grew taller over time, and COI workers who were “as unromantic as their surroundings,” one employee said. There were analysts and anthropologists, forgers and foreign language experts, safecrackers and scientists. The different species of animal test subjects had been replaced by their human counterparts.
Donovan’s organization quickly came to resemble his own restless personality. James Aswell, a recruit, wrote in a letter to his superiors that he felt as if he were working in a “meat grinder turned by a maniac.” Army intelligence officer Edwin Sibert visited the new COI headquarters and similarly said that it “closely resembled a cat house in Laredo on a Saturday night, with rivalries, jealousies, mad schemes, and everyone trying to get the ear of the director.”
As chaotic as the COI was, it nevertheless projected an intimidating aura. Three months after its creation, a German newspaper announced that “a secret bureau” had been formed in Washington “to which very few have entrée.” The paper said that Donovan had first come to Germany’s attention when Roosevelt had sent him as his “special envoy” to Europe “in order to incite the people of those countries to rebellion against Germany.” The paper further claimed that “a second and more monstrous meddling is at present underway, and as usual under the leadership of Colonel Donovan. Roosevelt has named the Colonel Coordinator of Information. Hiding behind this title he is brewing a Jewish-Democratic crisis which is directed at all of Europe. Donovan has unlimited power. He can spend any sum of money he desires. He can have as many assistants as he chooses. And he can get any information he desires.” Donovan delighted in reading the Nazi rant against him. Ironically, disinformation was spreading about the COI before he even had a chance to spread it himself.
* * *
On December 7, 1941, Donovan joined 55,050 fellow spectators at the Polo Grounds stadium in Upper Manhattan to watch a rivalry game between the New York Giants and Brooklyn Dodgers football teams. According to the next day’s New York Times, the Giants looked like “dismal cellar tenants” compared to the nimble Dodgers, in part because of the injuries that the Giants sustained on the gridiron. Ben Sohn sprained his ankle. Frank Cope bruised his shoulder. George Franck fractured his pelvis. Orville Tuttle split open his big toe. Lou DeFilippo took a shot to his nose, then “flattened” Dodger Jim Sivell in a fist fight. Mel Hein, the Giants’ center, nicknamed “Old Indestructible,” broke his nose and suffered a concussion, forcing him to leave a game for the first time in eleven years. A cleat ripped open Nello Falaschi’s leg, laying bare his right shin bone, “and the rest of the Giants were as cut and torn by cleats as if they had gone through a meat chopper.” In an upset, the Dodgers won 21–7.
In the middle of the game, as the crowded spectators cheered from the stands, a curious announcement came over the loudspeaker: “Attention, please! Attention! Here is an urgent message. Will Colonel William J. Donovan call operator nineteen in Washington, D.C.” Donovan, surprised, walked to a nearby phone booth. He called the operator, who patched him through to James Roosevelt, President Roosevelt’s son and an early member of the COI. The exchange was short and to the point. Donovan was informed that at that very moment, six time zones to the west, Japanese aircraft were attacking the U.S. Pacific Fleet at the Pearl Harbor naval base in Hawaii. President Roosevelt wanted him back in Washington immediately.
Eleven hours later, at a few minutes past midnight, Donovan entered Roosevelt’s private study. Roosevelt sat behind his desk, his face illuminated by a small lamp, obviously exhausted from the torrent of generals, admirals, and aides who had been vying for his attention all day. He nibbled on a sandwich and sipped a beer. His stamp album, which he had been working on when he first learned of the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, had been moved to a far corner of the room, and on his desk sat the latest damage report from Hawaii. The death toll ultimately amounted to 2,403 Americans. The Japanese had destroyed 350 planes and damaged or sunk nearly two dozen Navy vessels, including five battleships. Roosevelt glanced at the report, then up at Donovan. “They caught our ships like lame ducks! Lame ducks, Bill!… It’s a good thing you got me started on this [intelligence business]. They caught our planes on the ground—on the ground!”
The next day, Roosevelt addressed a joint session of Congress to ask for a formal declaration of war on Japan. Steel braces locked his knees in place so that he could deliver the speech standing up. He gripped the lectern to steady himself. All nine justices of the Supreme Court were on his left; all ten cabinet secretaries were on his right. He began, “Yesterday, December 7, 1941, a date which will live in infamy…” In his most rousing statement, Roosevelt vowed in a resonant cadence, “No matter how long it may take us to overcome this premeditated invasion, the American people in their righteous might will win through to absolute victory.” Before he could even finish the last of these words, a deafening chorus of cheers filled the chamber. Congress passed the war declaration within an hour. The United States had entered World War II.
* * *
By the beginning of 1942, the COI’s payroll included six hundred personnel, known among old-line military men as “Donovan’s Dragoons.” The organization generated a slew of additional epithets around Washington, D.C. Some called it the “Bad Eyes Brigade” or “Draft Dodger Heaven” because many of its personnel escaped deployment. The COI, one saying went, handed out “cellophane commissions,” so-called because they were see-through and kept the Draft off. Others called it a group of “East Coast Faggots.” Donovan preferred the nickname “League of Gentlemen,” and gentlemen there were in the COI, but not without a relatively high proportion of women in administrative roles and serving as undercover agents overseas where they were less likely to arouse suspicion when traveling alone.
Donovan bitterly defended his organization against the insults. At one formal dinner party, Admiral Horace Schmahl called the COI “a Tinker Toy outfit, spying on spies.” Donovan overheard the slight and said, “I don’t know, Admiral, I think that we could get your secret files and blow up your ammunition dump on the other side of the river before midnight.” Schmahl laughed, thinking the suggestion outrageous. Donovan then excused himself from the table and called COI headquarters with an urgent request. Within an hour, a group of agents broke into Schmahl’s office at the Navy Building. They cracked his safe, removed the secret documents, and sped them over to Donovan. Next, they snuck into the ammunition dump and planted fake dynamite. At the end of the dinner party, Donovan walked up to Schmahl and handed him the contents of his own safe. He then informed the slack-jawed admiral where to find the dummy dynamite.
* * *
In the wake of Pearl Harbor, the COI grew too fast to remain a White House operation. On June 13, 1942, President Roosevelt signed an order establishing the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the successor to the COI and the precursor to the Central Intelligence Agency. The order placed the OSS under the purview of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, a group composed of the highest-ranking members of the military branches. Donovan remained its director.
Despite the name change, the epithets kept coming. One popular quip was that “OSS” stood for “Oh So Social.” Being a secretive organization by definition, the OSS cast an aura of exclusivity that struck many as elitist and snobbish. Nor did the OSS help its uppity reputation by hiring members of many of the wealthiest families in the United States: DuPont, Mellon, Morgan, and Vanderbilt among them.
Austine Cassini, a columnist for the Washington Times-Herald, visited OSS headquarters and commented on its composition:
If you should by chance wander in the labyrinth of the OSS you’d behold ex-polo players, millionaires, Russian princes, society gambol boys, scientists and dilettante detectives. All of them are now at the OSS, where they used to be allocated between New York, Palm Beach, Long Island, Newport and other meccas frequented by the blue-bloods of democracy. And the girls! The prettiest, best-born, snappiest girls who used to graduate from debutantedom to boredom now bend their blonde and brunette locks, or their colorful hats, over work in the OSS, the super-ultra-intelligence-counter-espionage outfit that is headed by brilliant “Wild Bill” Donovan.
Copyright © 2023 by John Lisle
