The Secret Warriors Read online

  Though Colonel Donovan, a stocky, silver-haired, ruddy-faced Irishman, was not a professional soldier, neither was he a Kentucky colonel, nor the commanding officer of a National Guard regiment. He had earned both his silver eagle and the Medal of Honor for valor on the battlefields of France in World War I. Between wars, he had become a very successful—and, it logically followed, very wealthy—attorney in New York City, and a power behind the scenes in the Democratic Party, not only in New York but, even perhaps especially, in Washington.

  He was again in government employ, this time at an annual stipend of one dollar, as the Coordinator of Information, which meant he ran a relatively new government agency. Donovan reported directly to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Most people, to Donovan’s joy, believed the COI was the United States government’s answer to Joseph Goebbels’s Propaganda Ministry.

  COI did, in fact, have an “information” function—in the propaganda sense—headed by the distinguished playwright Robert Sherwood. But it also had another “information” function, headed by Donovan himself, which had absolutely nothing to do with whipping the American people into the kind of patriotic frenzy that would impel them, for the sake of the “war effort,” to abandon “pleasure driving” and donate their aluminum pans to be converted into bombers.

  The kind of information that Donovan was charged with coordinating is more accurately described as intelligence. Each of the military services had intelligence-gathering operations, as did the State Department and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and even the less warlike agencies of the federal government like the Departments of Labor, Commerce, Treasury, and Interior.

  Despite sincerely made claims of absolute objectivity, President Roosevelt realized that when, say, the Chief of Naval Intelligence made a report on a problem together with a proposal for a solution, that solution generally involved the use of the U.S. Navy. Similarly, the Army seldom recommended naval bombardment of a target. Heavy Army Air Corps bomber aircraft were obviously better suited for that.

  It was the Coordinator of Information’s duty—which is to say Colonel William J. Donovan’s—to examine the intelligence gathered by all relevant agencies, and then to evaluate that intelligence against the global war effort. If asked, he would also recommend a course of action. This course of action might well be implemented by an agency different from the one providing the original intelligence.

  To assist him in this task, Donovan intended to gather around him a dozen men, each of extraordinary intelligence and competence in his area of expertise. Like Donovan, they would offer to the government for one dollar per annum services that in the private sector would have cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. Because there were supposed to be twelve of these men (he had managed to recruit only ten) and because they were answerable only to Donovan, it was natural that they came to be known as the Disciples. Donovan was Christ, answerable only to God—Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

  Donovan and his Disciples’ mandate pleased virtually no one in the intelligence community. The Army and Navy were especially outraged that amateurs would oversee what their long-service professionals had developed.

  Their disapproval, however, meant very little as long as Franklin D. Roosevelt, who had come to believe that Donovan’s original suggestion was one of his own brilliant ideas, was pleased with the way things were going. He conferred at least twice a week with Donovan.

  One of those meetings had occurred the day before, which was why the Disciples filing into Donovan’s St. Regis Hotel suite found him in bed in his pajamas. On his way to Union Station in Washington, where he had gone to catch the 11:55 to New York, the White House car carrying Donovan had been struck broadside by a taxicab. Though his knee was severely—and painfully—hurt in the impact, he managed to catch the train.

  In his compartment, the pain grew intense, and he had the conductor fetch a bucket of ice cubes from the dining car. He wrapped some in a towel and applied it to his knee. That helped, but when he began to experience pain in his chest as well, he knew he had a more serious problem than a bruised knee. After he got to New York and taxied to the St. Regis, he stopped in the lobby and asked the manager to send him a doctor.

  The doctor listened to Donovan list his symptoms, prodded the knee, and then announced he was going to call an ambulance and transport Donovan to St. Vincent’s Hospital.

  What he had, the doctor told Colonel Donovan, was a blood clot caused by the injury to his knee. The clot had moved to his lung, which was why he had chest pains. The term for this condition was “embolism,” the doctor continued. If the clot completely blocked the flow of blood to his lungs, or if it moved to his heart or to the artery supplying the brain, he would drop dead. In a hospital, he would be given medicine intravenously that would thin the blood. If he was lucky, in a month or six weeks the clot would dissolve.

  Reluctantly—and after pressure—the doctor told the colonel that the medicine which would be used to thin his blood was also available in a pill form. It was, Donovan was fascinated to learn, a pharmaceutical version of rat poison. The doctor also reluctantly admitted that giving him this medicine—and bed rest—was about all the treatment the hospital could offer.

  “I can do that here,” Donovan announced. “I can’t go to the hospital now.”

  The doctor couldn’t argue with that. So he had a pharmacy deliver the blood-thinning medicine, then watched as Donovan took a strong first dose.

  “Take a couple of good stiff drinks, too,” the doctor said.

  Donovan asked the natural question: “I thought you weren’t supposed to mix drugs with alcohol?”

  “This is the exception,” the doctor replied. “Drink all you want. Alcohol thins the blood. Just stay in bed, and don’t get excited.”

  Donovan was normally a teetotaler, but since whiskey was less repugnant than rat poison, he ordered up a bottle of Scotch.

  After they had gathered in his room, Donovan told the Disciples how he had damaged his knee, but not about the blood clot.

  The first item on the agenda, as always, was the superbomb. The Science Disciple, who was on leave from the Department of Physics of the University of California at Berkeley, reported that there was no question that the Germans were methodically, if not rapidly, engaged in nuclear research. As one proof of this, they had granted the same immunity—“for scientific contributions to the German State”—to Jewish physicists and mathematicians involved in such research as they had to Jews involved in rocket propulsion.

  And further, a German delegation had not long before returned from a visit to a plant in Denmark that had been engaged in research into a substance called heavy water. This substance, he explained—until it became apparent that no one else either understood or much cared about it—was water to whose molecular structure had been appended another hydrogen atom. The Germans were apparently trying to cause a chain—or explosive—effect by releasing the extra hydrogen atom so appended.

  The Science Disciple then argued that it would be useful to “persuade” scientists engaged in German atomic research to come to this country—or, “persuasion” failing, to kidnap them. Though he was not convinced that these people would be able to make a contribution to the American nuclear effort, it was inarguable that if they were here, they could not contribute to the German effort.

  The problem, Donovan said, was that if German nuclear people started disappearing, it would alert the Germans to American interest in the subject. Roosevelt himself had decided that the one American war plan that most had to be concealed from the Axis was the attempt to develop an atomic bomb.

  “Even in the case of that obscure mining engineer we just brought out of North Africa,” Donovan went on, “we thought about that long and hard before we went for him. In the end, because we need the uraninite ore from the Belgian Congo, we decided we had to have him. In other words, we’ll have to go very carefully with this. As a general rule of thumb, anybody we got out would have to be very important. So come
up with a list, and rate them twice: how important they are to the Germans and how important they are to our program.”

  The second item on the agenda was political: the question of Vice Admiral d’Escadre Jean-Philippe de Verbey, French Navy, retired. Not just for organizational but for personal reasons. This affair was the business of C. Holdsworth Martin, Jr., the Disciple who dealt with France and French colonies.

  Like Donovan, Martin had served with the American Expeditionary Forces in the First World War. After the war, he had been appointed to the Armistice Commission. A civil engineer, he had met and married a French officer’s widow, and had subsequently taken over the running of her late husband’s construction firm. This he had turned from a middle-size, reasonably successful business into a large, extremely profitable corporation. His wife’s social position (she was a member of the deposed nobility) and his wealth had then combined to permit them to move in the highest social circles.

  C. Holdsworth Martin, Jr., brought his wife and children to New York after the fall of France in 1940, purchased an apartment on Fifth Avenue overlooking Central Park, and promptly enraged the Franco-American community and large numbers of sympathetic Americans by proclaiming whenever the opportunity arose that French stupidity, cowardice, and corruption, and not German military prowess, had caused France to go down to such a quick and humiliating defeat.

  Even more outrageously, he made no secret of his belief that millions of middle- and upper-class Frenchmen indeed preferred Hitler to Blum,3 and had every intention of cooperating with Hitler’s New Order for Europe.

  One of the few people who agreed with any of this was Colonel William Donovan. And so far as Donovan was concerned, C. Holdsworth Martin, Jr., was the ideal man to be Disciple for France. He had spent more than twenty years there, knew the country and its leaders better than most Frenchmen, and, with very few exceptions, cordially detested most of them.

  Over luncheon and golf, Donovan had learned from him that Martin detested most of the French as much for their chauvinism as for their inept army. His success with his wife’s firm, because it was an “American” and not a “French” success, earned him more jealousy than respect among his French peers. His wife’s late husband’s family, for instance, referred to him as “le gigolo Américain.”

  On January 11, 1942, C. Holdsworth Martin, Jr., entered the service of the United States government, at the usual remuneration of one dollar per annum, as a consultant to the Office of the Coordinator of Information. Three days later, C. Holdsworth Martin III, a 1940 graduate of the École Polytechnique in Paris, by enlisting in the U.S. Army as a private soldier, entered the service of the United States government at a remuneration of twenty-one dollars per month.

  Although he acted, and sounded, like a French boulevardier, C. Holdsworth Martin, Jr., was almost belligerently an American.

  Now C. Holdsworth Martin, Jr., was engaged in a description of what he referred to as “l’affaire du vieux amiral vicieux” (“the old, vicious admiral”), by which he meant Vice Admiral d’Escadre Jean-Philippe de Verbey.

  When the war broke out, Admiral de Verbey was recalled from retirement. He was assigned to the French naval staff in Casablanca, Morocco, and had there suffered a heart attack, which nearly killed him. By the time he’d spent nine months in the hospital, France had fallen and an upstart, six-foot-six brigadier general of tanks, Charles de Gaulle, who had gotten out of France at the last minute, had appointed himself chief of the French government in exile and commander in chief of its armed forces.

  The majority of French officers still on French soil considered themselves honor-bound to accept the defeat of France and the authority of Marshal Pétain, the aged “Hero of Verdun” who now headed the French government in Vichy.

  Admiral de Verbey did not. He considered it his duty as a French officer to continue to fight. He managed to pass word to de Gaulle in London that he approved of de Gaulle’s actions. He announced further that as soon as he could arrange transportation (in other words, escape house arrest in Casablanca), it was his intention to come to London and assume command of French military and naval forces in exile.

  So far as the admiral was concerned, it was as simple as that. Once he reached London, he would be the senior officer outside Vichy control. He had been an admiral when de Gaulle was a major. If de Gaulle wanted to pretend that he was head of some sort of government in exile, fine. But the commander of Free French military forces would be the senior officer who had not caved in to the Boches—in other words, Vice Admiral d’Escadre Jean-Philippe de Verbey.

  Brigadier General de Gaulle was not pleased with the admiral’s offer, which he correctly believed would be a threat to his own power. De Verbey’s very presence in London, much more his assumption of command of Free French military forces, would remind people that de Gaulle was not anywhere near the ranking Free French officer and that his self-appointment as head of the French government in exile was of very doubtful legality. He couldn’t have that.

  Admiral de Verbey shortly afterward received orders—signed by a major general, in the name of Charles de Gaulle, “Head of State”—ordering him to remain in Casablanca, “pending any need for your services to France in the future.”

  Early in 1942, de Verbey, furious, took the great risk of offering his services to Robert Murphy, who was American consul general in Rabat. The Americans, he told Murphy, could use him in any capacity they saw fit, so long as it was concerned with getting La Boche out of La Belle France.

  Murphy related the information to Washington, where eventually it reached C. Holdsworth Martin, Jr. Martin knew de Verbey, and suggested to Donovan that the old man be brought to the United States. It might be useful to have a lever available if de Gaulle—who already showed signs of being very difficult—became impossible.

  Donovan was aware that since Roosevelt looked fondly upon de Gaulle, he was safe in his self-appointed role as head of the French government in exile. Further, even if they were to have a de Gaulle replacement waiting in the wings, he felt they could find someone better than a long-retired admiral with a serious heart condition. He had not then rejected Martin’s recommendation, however. But he believed that he would ultimately decide that getting the admiral out of Morocco would be more trouble than it would be worth.

  But later there came the necessity of bringing out of Morocco the French mining engineer who knew about the stock of uranitite in the Belgian Congo. That operation had a very high priority and was top secret. Which meant they would need good cover for it.

  Donovan’s deputy, Captain Peter Douglass, USN, had suggested, and Donovan had agreed, that should something go wrong with the snatch-the-mining-engineer operation, the Germans would begin to suspect an American interest in atomic fission. If, however, the operation had the escape of the admiral as its cover and the operation blew up, there was at least a reasonable chance the Germans would not suspect what was really up.

  Thus C. Holdsworth Martin, Jr., had been told that Donovan had decided to bring the admiral to the United States. He had not been told about the mining engineer. The operation had been a success. The admiral and the engineer had arrived at the Brooklyn Navy Yard aboard a submarine, which had picked them up fifteen miles at sea off the Moroccan coast.

  The admiral and the engineer were then taken to a seaside mansion in Deal, New Jersey, where they could be kept on ice until a decision was made as to what to do with them. Afterward, Martin told his wife that the admiral was safe in America, and where he was being kept. Madame Martin, who had known the admiral all her life, then drove the fifty miles to Deal, loaded the admiral in her Packard, and took him to the Martin duplex on Fifth Avenue.

  When the formidable Madame Martin arrived, the naval officer charged with the security of the mansion incorrectly decided there was nothing he could do to keep the admiral in Deal. Madame Martin, after all, was the wife of a Disciple. So he had helpfully loaded the admiral’s one suitcase into the Martin Packard, and then saluted cris
ply as it drove off.

  As a result of this failure of judgment, he would spend the balance of World War II as a supply officer in the South Pacific, but the damage was done. The admiral was in New York City, prepared to tell anyone who would listen that Brigadier General Charles de Gaulle not only was a megalomaniac but had no legal authority whatever for declaring himself the head of the French government.

  “This will never do,” Donovan told Martin. “Maybe we’ll need to let the admiral have his say. But for the time being he has to be kept on ice at Summer Place. If you have to take him back to the mansion by force, then do that. But we absolutely have to keep him away from the press. I have had a word with the New York Times, and they are not going to run the interview they did with him. But it’s only a question of time until the story gets out. God help us if Colonel McCormick gets wind of what we’ve done.”

  “Who’s Colonel McCormick?” Martin asked, confused.

  “He publishes the Chicago Tribune,” Donovan said. “He volunteered for active duty on December eighth. Since Franklin hates his guts—the feeling is mutual—Roosevelt turned him down, ostensibly because of his age. As a consequence, the colonel would be very sympathetic to another old warrior denied active service by that socialist in the White House.”

  “I can get de Verbey back to Deal, Bill,” Martin said. “But how are you going to keep him there?”

  “For the time being—I really don’t want to lock him up unless I have to—I think we should keep stalling him,” Donovan said. “Maybe pay him some Navy attention. That will infuriate de Gaulle when he finds out about it—and he will. But I still think we can peacefully stop the admiral from calling him a megalomaniac on the front page of the Chicago Tribune.”

  “What do you mean by ‘Navy attention’?” Martin asked.