1 07 976
F
S
s
by Stanley P* Lovell
PRENTICE-HALL, INC., ENGLEWOOD CLIFFS, N. J.
Copyright under International and Pan-American Copyright
Conventions
<g> 1963 by Stanley P. LoveH
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, or
any portions thereof, in any form, except for the inclusion of
brief quotations in a review. Printed in the United States of
America. Library of Congress Catalog Number: 63-8620
Prentice-Hall International, Inc.
(JLondon, ToJkyo, Sidney, Paris)
Prentice-Hall of Canada, Ltd.
Prentice-Hall de Mexico, S .A.
Second printing May, 1963
Portions of Chapters 1-3, in a somewhat different form, appeared in
The Saturday Evening Post.
Printed in the United States of America
63059-T
To the men and women of O.S.S.^
working in solitary clanger behind
enemy lines, so many of Tinhorn gave
flieir lives for us, with no Jhope of
recognition or reward. Others znacfe
the \veapons anc? devised the strata-
gems, but they were the real heroes,
To them this E>ooJc is humbly and
reverently dedicated.
FOREWORD
This book is an account of one man's experiences in
World War II, of matters that can now be told. If the story
lacks the smooth continuity of fiction, it is because the Office
of Strategic Services was itself opportunistic and experimental.
Nothing like it had ever existed in earlier American wars.
We had to "play it by ear" or not at all. Like a pianist, im-
provising his melodies and rhythms, the chords had to be
found and the dissonances corrected or ignored. No one
could tell us how to do our job.
For my activities, the Director, Major General William
J. Donovan, laid out the objectives in the broadest possible
terms and left me wholly free to develop unorthodox weapons
and stratagems for O.S.S.
It is understandable that this unprecedented and often
loosely disciplined organization became anathema to the well-
established intelligence agencies: of the other services. The
Federal Bureau of Investigation, the U.S. Army Intelligence
(G-2) , the U.S. Navy Intelligence (O.N.I.) and, at the be-
ginning, our comparable organizations in Great Britain
(S.I.S. and S.O.JE.) all resented and distrusted this amateur
group. Our greatest tribute was that, at war's end, they gen-
erally applauded it.
General Donovan had arranged it so that, at the very
start, O.S.S. would be a child of die Joint Chiefs of Staff.
FOREWORD
How wise that proved to be, as otherwise O.S.S. would surely
have been crucified as soon as it started to function. Being
the offspring of J.C.S. made it well-nigh invulnerable to com-
petitive attacks.
This book is but a part of the O.S.S. story the part that
came within the author's purview. In the secret work to which
I was committed, it is necessary to point out that the results
of stratagems and the actual use of weapons were often re-
ported to me second-hand, through "cut-outs" intermedi-
aries who were used to protect and conceal the identity of
the spy or saboteur. It makes for a redundancy of "I was
told" or "it was said/' but in such work, where life and death
were at hazard, this is unavoidable. I solicit the reader's under-
standing of this devious reporting.
To the best of my belief these accounts are truthful, but
much of what I have to tell was of so sensitive a nature that
it is truth based more on my trust of individuals than on docu-
ments.
8
CONTENTS
1. I GO TO WASHINGTON 13
2. SCHEMES AND WEAPONS 23
3. SUPPLYING THE SABOTEURS 35
4. CAMOUFLAGE 64
5. THE LETHBRIDGE REPORT 70
6. SCHEMES THAT FAILED TO WORK 79
7. HYPNOTISM 89
8. "C-I2" 92
9. CHARACTERS 98
10. THE MCGREGORS ARE COMING 114
11. THE NIGHT CHURCHILL ALMOST
GAVE UP THE WAR 122
12. THE BOMBING OF PEENEMUNDE 126
13. CAPRICIOUS 131
14. AN INTERVIEW WITH OSWALD SPENGLER 138
15. THE NAZI AGENT WHO BECAME A
BRITISH KNIGHT 146
16. LONDON 158
17. THE GREAT FEUD 163
CONTENTS
18. THE GREAT OPPORTUNIST 170
19. W./.D, AN INTIMATE APPRAISAL 176
EPILOGUE 189
10
s-
I
I GO TO WASHINGTON
One day in 1942, as I was crossing Boston Common on
my way to a luncheon date at the Parker House, I saw Dr.
Karl T. Compton coming toward me. I had a nodding ac-
quaintance with him. We smiled at each other and passed,
when suddenly he called out my name. He asked me if I
knew what the National Defense Research Committee in
Washington was.
I said, "Aren't they a group of college professors?"
"Exactly, Lovell, but they are all snarled up with busi-
nessmen, with whom they are placing big contracts. Neither
seems to understand the other. It just struck me, as I passed
you, that you have both a strong business experience and a
scientific training as well. Come down to Washington and
help us/'
I was fifty-two years old and a hard-won business success
of sorts seemed to be at stake. I consulted Earl P, Stevenson
of Arthur D. Little Co. the next day. He confirmed the ur-
gent need Dr. Compton mentioned. He said, "You'll regret
it all your life if you refuse Uncle Sam now." I reported at
13
I GO TO WASHINGTON
1530 P Street, the N.D.R.C. Washington headquarters, that
week.
Dr. Vannevar Bush sent me to Dr. H. M. Chadwell.
After I had received a favorable security clearance, I *was as-
signed to work with the Quartermaster Corps. Somewhere
along the line everyone forgot all about the liaison or arbi-
tration of professors' disputes with businessmen.
The Quartermaster Corps had a world of problems.
General Gregory was most cooperative but Colonel Georges
Doriot seemed to me to be the one officer there with imagina-
tion and zest. Despite his help, the problems were rather
prosaic: how to make a grommet from plastics rather than
metal and thus save so many pounds of steel or tin; how to
redesign the Army canteen; how to make mold-proof tents,
shoes, leggings, etc. Of course, the solutions to these prob*
lems would undoubtedly help win the war, but none of them
could get me out of bed in the morning with a wild enthusi-
asm to charge down the streets of Washington.
To be sure, there were accidental moments of excite-
ment, as when I was reporting on my problems to a group of
N.D.R.C. Committeemen, presided over by learned, lovable
Dr. Roger Adams. The problem to explore was to find some
poncho or garment material suitable for desert fighting,
where it became bitter cold at night and broiling hot at noon-
day. I spoke with a cigarette in my mouth and asked, "What
can we do about the thermal armor?" A voice from the rear
of the hall said, "Shoot the son-of-a-bitch!" Only then did I
realize he understood me to say "Thurman Arnold" a New
Deal luminary most unpopular with this obviously Republi-
can professor.
We often met at Dumbarton Oaks, lent to us by Robert
14
I GO TO WASHINGTON
Woods Bliss for N.D.R.C. meetings. Over the stage in the
great hall was an inscription in Arabic. One day, our discus-
sion was on how much advanced chemical knowledge we
should pass on to our British and Fretich allies. I asked Mr.
Bliss, beside whom I happened to sit, to translate the Arabic
inscription for me. He said it read, "Trust in Allah, but keep
your camel tied."
I was saved from the humdrum of canteens and grom-
mets by a problem Dr. Bush gave to all his aides.
"You are about to land at dead of night in a rubber raft
on a German-held coast. Your mission is to destroy a vital
enemy wireless installation that is defended by armed guards,
dogs and searchlights. You can have with you any one weapon
you can imagine. Describe that weapon."
Here was something to get my teeth into. I walked the
streets of Washington at night, imagining myself wading
ashore a hundred times; but with what? I early abandoned
such fantasies as a death ray, which I knew would require a
great power plant to implement it. After soul-searching for
a week, I submitted, "I want a completely silent, flashless gun
a Colt automatic or a submachine gun or both. I can pick
off the first sentry with no sound or flash to explain his col-
lapse, so the next sentry will come to him instead of sounding
an alarm. Then, one by one, 111 pick them off and command
the wireless station."
My answer won the first prize in the contest.
Shortly afterwards, I was ordered to report one evening
to an office at 25th and E Streets in Washington.
It was in the early evening that I took a taxi to my mys-
terious appointment. The driver left me at the corner, and
I walked around a brick building to find myself in a delight-
15
I GO TO WASHINGTON
ful little quadrangle. In its miniature square were flowering
trees and shrubs; ahead of me was an imposing stone build-
ing with Greek pillars across its front; on either side were
flanking buildings, one of stone and one of brick, but all com-
bining to make a unified and most pleasing effect.
I guessed that the main building was my rendezvous, so
I walked up its stone steps and into a narrow hall which led
to a longer hallway at right angles to it. No one was to be
seen and I started to roam around, when a touch on my shoul-
der and a uniformed guard brought me up short.
"Where did you come from?" I asked, startled.
"Follow me," he said, and I still think he simply ma-
terialized like some ectoplasm. He led me to a small room
with two chairs in it, one window, one picture on the wall
and nothing else. There I waited. I had eaten a very sketchy
lunch and what with no dinner in hand or in prospect, my
empty stomach complained with rumblings and calls for at-
tention. I concentrated on the one picture, a colored map
depicting the world as it was thought to be five hundred
years ago. Beyond the Mediterranean Basin, the British Isles
and an amorphous mass labelled Africa, most of it was
marked "Terra Incognita." That, I thought, was where I now
was an unknown land on an unknown mission.
It seemed to me hours before the door was quietly
opened. A man came in, shut the door, shook hands and sat
down in the other chair with great rapidity.
He was all in gray: a gray suit and tie, gray hair and blue-
gray eyes. He was about sixty years old, I judged, and thus
seven or eight years my senior. He was not a military figure-
but somewhat pear-shaped, with pudgy hands and a thickset
neck. Powerful, I thought, but rather overweight
16
I GO TO WASHINGTON
His voice was a surprise soft-spoken, beautifully modu-
lated. "I'm Colonel Donovan, Dr. Lovell. Dr. Conant and
Dr. Roger Adams have told me about you. You know your
Sherlock Holmes, of course. Professor Moriarty is the man
I want for my staff here at O.S.S. I think you're it"
"Do I look to be as evil a character as Conan Doyle
made him in his stories?"
"I don't give a damn how you look," Donovan replied
sharply. "I need every subtle device and every underhanded
trick to use against the Germans and the Japanese by our
own people but especially by the underground resistance
groups in all occupied countries. You will have to invent all
of them, Lovell, because you're going to be my man. Come
with me."
I had never met a man of such magnetism. I heard my-
self say, "I will."
He said, "Start tomorrow. Oh, there's one thing: no mat-
ter what you do or hear when you're with me, I must have
your word of honor that you'll write nothing until twenty
years from now. Will you give me that?"
Again I said, "I will," and nothing would be told here
were it a day less. I recall I left him, humming to myself
"Give me but ten who are stout-hearted men." My instant
acceptance was partly due to his charm, partly that silly tune
and partly a German professor named Oswald Spengler. Tfl
explain his part in it later on.
As soon as I could do so, I looked up all references A.
Conan Doyle had made to his fictional Professor Moriarty.
Most of them were discouraging to a chemist suddenly called
to play the role. "Famous scientific criminal" well! The
greatest schemer of all time the organizer of every deviltry!
17
I GO TO WASHINGTON
The controlling brain of the underground. But come! Come!
Then I came on the phrase that for four years was to be
my credo. I actually kept it, typed in capital letters under the
blotter of my desk and when vainglory or credit tempted me,
I would peek at it and find comfort from it. It read, "So aloof
is he (Moriarty) from general suspicion, so immune from
criticism, so admirable in his management and self-efface-
ment/'
Here was a better ideal to try to attain than my Omar
Khayyam paraphrase, "Take the cash (the known achieve-
ment) and let the credit go (to whomever falsely claims it) ."
I moved into a small office in a temporary building down
by a brewery. I had the title of Director of Research and
Development, O.S.S. and, happily, Dr. Bush also retained me
as a Special Aide to him and to his new-created Office of Sci-
entific Research and Development. As the days passed by
with no instructions, I met Harry and Junius Morgan, Rich-
ard Mellon, Alan Scaife, William Vanderbilt and dozens of
other prominent gentlemen. Yankee-like, it appeared to me
that Colonel "Wild Bill" Donovan, the great Wall Street
lawyer, was staffing up his O.S.S. with a galaxy of potential
postwar clients. Years later I had to admit that they might be
socialite bluebloods, but they were stout-hearted men who
knew how to fight.
Many of the personnel I met at a lower level seemed to
be rah-rah youngsters to whom O.S.S. was perhaps an escape
from routine military service and a sort of lark. I wondered,
at the time, what either group could contribute in our nation's
struggle to the death.
Before I, too, became infected with these undisciplined
18
I GO TO WASHINGTON
opportunists, I considered resigning. Better an unimpressive
grommet than a company of schizophrenics.
That very night, Major David K. E. Bruce, whom I had
met only casually, invited me to his apartment for dinner and
the evening. I poured out to him my doubts and my troubles.
David Bruce said, "Chaos is perfectly normal for any
new war agency, Lovell. Colonel Donovan is so great a leader
that he attracts to himself not only the finest men, but often
a sorry lot who ride on his coat-tails. Your job and mine is to
keep him looking ahead and not behind at some of these odd
recruits. We can accomplish that by doing our job so su-
premely well that they the undesirables will drop away or be
ignored/'
"But Major/' I said, "just what is my job?"
"That's precisely why I invited you here tonight to tefl
you that it's whatever you can make of it. Colonel Donovan
is a lawyer, not a scientist or an inventor. Never ask him what
to do. Do it and show him what you have done/'
Without his wise counsel, I would have foregone a rich
and rewarding experience. I forgot or ignored the playboys
and went to work.
David Brace's kindly and shrewd advice was supple-
mented a few days later when Colonel G. Edward Buxton
sent for me. I knew nothing whatever about this man, but
such was his instant appeal that within a half-hour we became
lifelong friends. He had a bubbling sense of humor.
"Welcome to St Elizabeth's" was his greeting. St. Eliza-
beth's was the great Washington insane asylum presided over
by Dr. Oberholzer (whom I later found helpful on one of
our projects) . In no time it was "Ned" and "Stan."
Colonel Buxton was "Wild Bill's" Deputy Director and
19
I GO TO WASHINGTON
strong right arm. Their commands in World War I had been
side by side. Together they had helped found the American
Legion. Ned Buxton was never Bill Donovan's alter ego,
rather he was his indispensable balance wheel. Because he
recognized this to be so, Colonel Buxton was the first man
Colonel Donovan recruited. He was the only man in O.S.S.
who could make the Director reverse a decision when it was
poorly thought out or woefully premature reverse it and have
the Director thank him for asking that it be done.
None of us stood in awe of Ned Buxton, as many did of
the legendary Wild Bill, but all of us loved him. His orders
to me were similar to David Bruce's advice. "You decide what
needs to be done. See me if you want to check on it, but don't
bother Colonel Donovan until it's accomplished. You're ex-
perienced enough to know how to operate."
Another thing he told me stood me in good stead all
through the years ahead.
"A group such as we're organizing, Stan, tends to attract
two types of people. Beware of both. There are the zealots
whose hearts beat high for the red-white-and-blue, but who
have little if anything between the ears. The other type is the
apparently dedicated, convincing people whose real objective,
nevertheless, is to get their mitts on our Unvouchered Funds
the boys on the make."
Wonderful, sapient Colonel Buxton. I met plenty of
both types and sent them to limbo as fast as I could, often
with no authority whatsoever to do so. But by that time, the
status or prestige of Professor Moriarty was adequate to ex-
pedite their transfers to some less sensitive branch of the war
effort.
Before I really believed and followed the advice of either
20
I GO TO WASHINGTON
David Bruce or Ned Buxton, I decided to talk it over a bit
further with Colonel Donovan. We met at his home in
Georgetown one evening, He poured sherry for me but drank
nothing himself. Somewhere, flitting across my vision, in the
back of the room was a woman I assumed to be Mrs. Dono-
van, but I never met her.
Without ado I opened up on my basic problem.
"The American people/' I said, "are a nation of extro-
verts. We tell everything and rather glory in it. A Professor
Moriarty is as un-American as sin is unpopular at a revival
meetiAg. I'd relish your assignment, Colonel, but dirty tricks
are simply not tolerated in the American code of ethics. It
may be a holdover or inheritance from the playing fields of
Eton, but whatever its source may be, Americans want to win
within the rules of the game and devious, subtle devices and
stratagems are, as the British say, 'just not cricket/ "
"Don't be so goddam naive, Lovell," said Donovan.
"The American public may profess to think as you say they
do, but the one thing they expect of their leaders is that we
will be smart. Don't kid yourself. P. T. Barnum is still a basic
hero because he fooled so many people. They will applaud
someone who can outfox the Nazis and the Japs. Never for-
get that the Connecticut nutmegs were made of hardwood.
Outside the orthodox warfare system is a great area of
schemes, weapons and plans which no one who knows Amer-
ica really expects us to originate because they are so un-
American, but once it's done, an American will vicariously
glory in it. That is your area, Lovell, and if you think America
won't rise in applause to what is so easily called 'un-Ameri-
can' you're not my man."
"But, Colonel, I believe I am," I said. 'What I have to
21
I GO TO WASHINGTON
do is to stimulate the 'Peck's Bad Boy' beneath the surface of
every American scientist and to say to him, 'Throw all your
normal law-abiding concepts out the window. Here's a chance
to raise merry hell. Come, help me raise it/ "
"Stanley/' he responded, using my first name as a sort
of password, I felt, to his inner circle, "go to it/'
As to the socialite group whom I had assumed to be po-
tential law clients-with hardly an exception, they did out-
standing service to their country. Not one was of an age where
service was to be expected, and every one risked his future
status as a banker or trustee or highly-placed politician in
identifying himself with illegality and unorthodoxy.
22
SCHEMES AND WEAPONS
I decided that the very first job to be done was the or-
ganization of a plant for documentation a fascinating, me-
ticulous, deadly business, indeed. It was obvious that any
spies or saboteurs O.S.S. placed behind enemy lines would
have short shrift unless they had perfect passports, workers'
identification papers, ration books, money, letters and the
myriad little documents which served to confirm their as-
sumed status. These are the little things upon which the very
life of the agent depends.
Nor was reproduction of enemy documents ordinary.
All such documents had the most secret security built into
them, just so no one could imitate them. Even the paper on
which they were printed or engraved was made of special
fibers, not to mention invisible inks, trick watermarks and
special chemicals incorporated into the paper so the Japanese
or German counterintelligence could instantly expose a
forged or spurious document.
I consulted Colonel Otto J. Doering of the O.S.S. staff in
order to get the approval of the U.S. Treasury and of the
23
SCHEMES AND WEAPONS
Secret Service, both of which were vital to us if we weren't to
be closed up and arrested as soon as we started work. Colonel
Doering said, "Let me see Randolph Paul, Under-Secretary
to Henry Morganthau, Jr. and find out if we can get a go-
ahead signal."
In the meantime, I recruited Kimberly Stuart, an expert
in paper making, and Dr. Westbrooke Steele, President of the
Papermakers' Institute. Both started at once to duplicate en-
emy papers of all sorts. In a remarkably short time, Colonel
Doering had done his part so well that I met with Secretary
of the Treasury Morgenthau. He had agreed to ask President
Roosevelt if we might proceed. Morgenthau said, "You come
over here tomorrow at eleven o'clock. If I say, 'The President
has a cold and I was unable to see him on your problem/ that
means he allows you to go ahead at full speed. If I say, I took
that matter up with the President and he refuses authoriza-
tion/ that means exactly what I say/'
The next day I called on him at the appointed time. I
was ushered into his office to find Randolph Paul, Daniel W.
Bell and at least ten other men gathered around his confer-
ence table. As I entered, he turned to them and said, "Excuse
me, Gentlemen; this is Dr. Lovell of the O.S.S." Swinging
around to me he said, "Now, on that matter you asked me
about, I was unable to see the President for approval because
he has a cold. Do you understand that, Dr. Lovell?" I said,
"Yes, I do, Mr. Secretary, and thank you/'
In the midst of my elation at this top-level permission
to establish a complete documentation plant, I suddenly
realized how utterly exposed I was. If anything misfired, if
our forgeries and duplicates were to be discovered by some
newspaper columnist, and a wave of criticism be loosed
24
SCHEMES AND WEAPONS
against such "un-American" activity, then Secretary Morgen-
thau had more than a dozen witnesses to say he had not
taken up my problem with President Roosevelt. If anything
went wrong there was but one sacrificial goat . . . me.
The chief of the Bureau of Engraving and Printing was
most helpful when I explained my project, although, of
course, absolutely no contact the press or the public could
ever identify was really possible. It would, indeed, have been
disaster if any suspicion of our counterfeiting and forgery
shop had ever cast the faintest shadow on the U.S. Gov-
ernment's legitimate activities.
At the same time I went over our program with Chief
Frank Wilson of the Secret Service, who could have instantly
closed us up if our purposes and our personnel were not
known to his men. He said, "Go ahead."
I recall, on a tour of the Bureau of Engraving and Print-
ing with its chief, that he showed me the enormous tank of
dextrin solution used to coat the back of stamps and the flaps
of envelopes. It was quite exposed and accessible. Mindful of
die possibilities of sabotage, I pointed out how easily a viable
bacteria or toxin could be dropped into that tank, causing a
whole nation of stamp-lapping Americans to be disabled or
sickened or worse. Many organisms, such as the common
cold viruses, are believed to be especially activated by lap-
ping and labial wetting.
The tanks were protected at once, but it serves to illus-
trate how, once one is in the sabotage and subversion busi-
ness, everything takes on an offensive or defensive aspect. I
still don't lick stamps or envelopes.
I went full speed ahead. I recruited Major Reddick, an
expert printer, and Major Kelly, the finest engraver and
25
SCHEMES AND WEAPONS
siderographer in the country. We had armed guards twenty-
four hours a day and no access to the plant by anyone. From
relatively simple ration cards and identification folders we
went on to the difficulties of German, French and Japanese
passports. Next came occupational currency, without which
one could not live in an enemy-occupied country. Philippine
money proved to be the toughest job of all, because the fibers
from which that paper money was made were kudsu and mit-
sumata, to be found only in Japan. No substitute fiber would
do it would not give the "feel" to the bill. It looked like an
impasse.
I learned that a stock of Japanese paper existed in the
United States that was made of those very fibers. We knew
we could rework it into currency paper if we could possess it.
However, were we to go out and buy it, someone would
surely reason that the O.S.S. was up to some irregular and
illegal act, and might, in fact, reason that we wanted it for
counterfeit Japanese money. In that quandary I turned to
former Supreme Court Justice James Byrnes, then assistant
to the President, and presented our problem to him. How he
did it, 111 never know, but within a week the entire lot of
Japanese paper was in a warehouse in Jersey City available to
us, and to us only. Mr. Byrnes moved effectively and quickly,
with never a leak or rumor to follow.
And in the very nick of time. General Douglas Mac-
Arthur sent word to the Joint Chiefs of Staff that Japanese
occupational currency was vital for use in the Philippines or
else his "I shall return" promise looked hopeless. We knew
how extremely difficult it was to manufacture the money,
even with the proper Japanese fibers on hand. The "banana
tree" engraving on the bills was a most intricate and in-
26
SCHEMES AND WEAPONS
volved piece of art work, and the issue had several color en-
gravings as well.
Even more baffling was the fact that all Japanese money
in the Philippines was surcharged or overstamped to identify
the particular city or district in which, alone, it was valid as
money. This was a most ingenious method of immobilizing
the entire population and controlling all travel. If a bill
marked or surcharged for Davao were offered in payment in
Manila, its possessor was arrested at once and forced to ex-
plain what he was doing, and why he was in Manila. Each
Filipino was frozen in his town or city as completely as if
barricades surrounded him. This curtailment of travel made
MacArthur's organization of any resistance forces all but im-
possible.
We engraved a quantity of money sufficient to fill a large
cargo plane, the currency being surcharged in direct propor-
tion to the last population census. The precious stuff was de-
livered to MacArthur and distributed by his staff to the
Philippine underground. We were justly proud of our job. The
fibers were crisp kudsu and mitsumata, the inks had identical
fluorescence under ultraviolet light and all secret marks were
exactly duplicated. We knew that by any test a suspicious
Japanese might give them, these bills would be passed as
genuine. They did pass everywhere. General MacArthur
wrote General Donovan that the work our experts had ac-
complished made the reoccupation of the Philippines a
reality. The Japanese never realized that the O.S.S. had ut-
terly destroyed their population currency control.
General Donovan showed me the MacArthur letter of
commendation and said, "Well done, Professor Moriarty."
I received word from our O.S.S. detail in Java and Su-
27
SCHEMES AND WEAPONS
matra that little resistance against the Japanese could be ex-
pected there by bribes of Japanese occupational currency. It
was necessary to have it by all means; but the real money for
which the Indonesians would do anything and everything was
the Maria Theresa thaler. This coin, about the size of a
twenty-five cent piece or an Italian fifty lira piece, was minted
in Austria in 1870. By a peculiar circumstance it has persisted
as the most popular money in Arabia.
Indonesians are Mohammedans and the law of Islam
compels them, once in their lifetime, to make the "hajj" (or
great pilgrimage) to Mecca and Medina during the holy
period, or the "umra" (lesser pilgrimage) at any time. The
only money that was sure to be acceptable in their holy cities
was this Maria Theresa thaler, and since becoming eligible
to the Muslim heaven with its black-eyed houris might de-
pend on the pilgrimage, these coins were both desirable and
precious.
For them, my informant said, the Javanese and Suma-
trans would promise to do anything: a mass revolt against the
occupying Japanese soldiers, multiple assassinations and East
Indian subtleties of attack too Asiatic and vulgar to be told
in English.
Accompanying the information was a note saying,
"Nothing to be done: the last Maria Theresa thalers were
made in 1870."
Anyone with scientific training would have had the same
reaction I did. It's well expressed in Porgy and Bess "It
ain't necessarily so."
We located two or three authentic Maria Theresa thalers
from collectors and a New York numismatist. We studied
28
SCHEMES AND WEAPONS
the metal on an alloy-analyzing machine. Silver wasn't hard
to get.
We made an excellent mold that held twenty-four cavity
reproductions. The molten metal was poured in the voids,
cooled, the flash trimmed off and there were as fine thalers
as Maria Theresa had ever seen. My group was not a
bit enthusiastic about carrying out the project. They all felt
a counterfeit coin made of some cheaper alloy would do as
well and be more in their avocational line. It was the most
honest job we ever did. While I could appreciate their dis-
taste for it, I felt the native Indonesians would bite the coins
and listen to their ring on a hard stone, so I insisted on abso-
lute integrity.
We tumbled them in a rotating drum with a dark com-
pound to imbed in the depressions, and off they went to bribe
the Indonesians to do what any self-respecting conquered
people should do spontaneously.
As so often happened in my work, I was not able to
follow Maria Theresa beyond the shipping door. Did she con-
tribute to the overthrow of the Greater East Asia Co-Pros-
perity Sphere or was she added to the secret hoard of a few
rascally Javanese and Sumatrans? Ill never really know.
It suddenly occurred to me that the large amount of
Japanese occupational currency we were making for the
Dutch East Indies might have a most expensive end result
for Uncle Sam, once the war was won and the Dutch Gov-
ernment back in power.
It would then be necessary for the Dutch Government
to call in all of the occupational money and exchange it for
Dutch gulden notes. They could very well daim that much of
this Japanese money they had now redeemed was actually our
29
SCHEMES AND WEAPONS
O.S.S. counterfeit money, which no one could distinguish
from the bills made in Japan. Although we had made it at
their urgent request and as a means of regaining their terri-
tories, they would have a case against the United States in
asking us to reimburse them for whatever part of the currency
on the islands they felt was our production.
With this in mind, I saw the Dutch Government in
Exile and explained my dilemma. Their top men, General
A. G. H. Dyxhoorn and Captain de Kuyper, were most cordial
(I don't mean to pun on De Kuyper's world-wide cordial
business) , but when I asked them to sign an agreement for-
ever holding the United States harmless from any fiscal claim,
the cordiality rapidly vanished. No agreement of any sort.
I telephoned my office in their presence and said, "Stop
the presses on the Java and Sumatra run/'
They both signed the agreement with muttered Dutch
phrases which, I assumed, cast some doubt on my legitimacy.
By this time I had established many contacts with vari-
ous groups, all of whom became invaluable liaisons as the
war continued. Of greatest value to me and the O.S.S. was
the constant interchange of ideas and field tests with the
equivalent British organization. It had begun in England as
a sort of "Scarlet Pimpernel" society of gentlemen adventur-
ers, who smuggled key people out of Hitler's Germany after
the Nazis invaded Poland, but before their Norwegian con-
quest. You may recall that, during those months, the war was
like a thunderstorm in which the first terrifying bolt of light-
ning gives way to rumblings and semi-darkness, but the fury
of the tempest is momentarily withheld.
Operating with the greatest secrecy, it took the name of
S.O.,E. The comma in the name seemed to us Americans to
30
SCHEMES AND WEAPONS
,be typically British. It meant "Special Operations
(comma) Executive/' A certain parallel existed with the
O.S.S., since S.O.,E. was staffed right out of Burke's Peerage
or its industrial equivalent Sir Charles Hambro, Maurice
Lubbock and many others of British nobility or of the Mor-
gan-Mellon-Vanderbilt banking and industrial status were in
it.
S.O.,E. and the British Secret Intelligence Service
(called "Broadway," usually) became so welded and inter-
twined as the war went on that it was often difficult to know
which organization was involved in what we were doing.
The Washington head of S.O.,E. was William Stephen-
son. Being a man half the size of our Bill Donovan, he was
nicknamed "Little Bill." In 1942 I met two of his top opera-
tors in New York City where they had rented offices. They
were a Mr. Billinghurst and a Mr. Freeth. Both men com-
ported themselves so melodramatically that almost anyone
would guess them to be secret agents and, for that reason
alone, very poor ones. Mr. Freeth was, I gathered, a faculty
member from Oxford University. I never learned much about
Mr. Billinghurst except that, at our first meeting, he confided
in me that Hitler's Abwehr agents were feeding him poison.
In August I visited Billinghurst in a hospital. He dared
eat nothing and drank little. He was obviously a very sick
man. I went to the medical head of the hospital staff and said,
"I'm a chemist. I think I should test Mr. Billinghurst's food
and drink. He says he's being poisoned/'
The doctor said with a wan smile, "I'm sure he has
never had a bit of poison he's dying of cancer."
"Does that induce his illusion?" I asked.
"Cancer is enough. It makes its own poisons."
31
SCHEMES AND WEAPONS
After the death of Agent Billinghurst from a tougher
killer than the Abwehr could boast, the S.O.,E. assigned a to-
tally different man to my office. Wing Commander T. Rich-
ard Bird was a dashing Scotsman. His premature gray hair
("Dunkirk, you know") , his Savile Row Royal Air Force uni-
form and his Edinburgh accent made him instantly a person
of striking importance. He was, naturally, a demoralizing in-
fluence on every female in my outfit, but with my male staff
he was as canny a lad as ever left Scotland.
He had never been to America and, at first, we found
ourselves "divided by a common language/' It was in the
days of strictly limited telephone toll calls. He asked to use a
private office to telephone Cincinnati. Some time later he
stormed into my office, furious.
"IVe haired so much aboot your fine telephone sarvice.
But, sir, it is terrible/'
"What happened?" I asked.
"Four times I got me party on the line and then the tele-
phone gal cuts in and asks 'Axe you through?' I said, 'You
silly gal, of course I'm through/ and then they disconnected
me!"
I explained that "through" might mean "connected" in
Britain, but in our country it meant "terminated."
I took him to lunch and suggested an Old Fashioned
cocktail. "Odd people you are," he observed. "You drink
your fruit salads!"
But "Dicky" Bird was a treasure. He was enthused over
our developments, and was, throughout, a wise and imagina-
tive counsellor.
As soon as our documentation shop was well under way,
I concentrated on weapons for spies and saboteurs. You will
32
SCHEMES AND WEAPONS
realize that a spy (or, more delicately put, an intelligence
agent) must actually never have a weapon at all. His job is
to collect and transmit information. He does require invisible
inks, minute cameras camouflaged as match-boxes, or other
small objects logical for him to possess and, wherever possible,
a clandestine radio transmitter and receiver.
The transmission of information was, as you would as-
sume, a whole study in itself. The oldest known mechanism
was the use of a "cut-out," that is, some third person who
delivers the message from the spy to the headquarters. But,
there had to be less dangerous and more dependable methods
than that.
One I thought up, because I was familiar with footwear
construction, was the "welt shoe technique." In the making
of a "welt shoe," where the wearer treads inside the stitches,
holding the upper part of the shoe and sole together, there
is a broad, flat space. This has to be filled to make the shoe
bottom flat. It is therefore loaded with "bottom filler" a com-
bination of ground cork and wax tailings, or some similar
sticky binding compound. In messages to Allen Dulles, who
was in Berne, Switzerland, I insisted he make contact with my
friends at die Bally Shoe Company at Schoenenwerd.
Throughout the war they had salesmen traveling in Germany
and the conquered countries. In the rather commodious area
where the bottom filler is normally put, there could be placed
a very considerable message on paper or on cloth.
The shoe sole was laid over this, Goodyear-stitched and
levelled and the edge stained and set. No inspection of that
shoe, short of literally cutting it all apart, could expose the
fact tibat it contained a surprisingly large quantity of informa-
tion between the outer and the inner soles.
33
SCHEMES AND WEAPONS
Another device we made for intelligence agents origi-
nated when a spy told me he was all but trapped in the Adlon
Hotel in Berlin. "I would have given anything/' he said, "if
I could have created a panic in that lobby. As it was they
picked up someone else, Gott sei dank"
My answer to the spy's suggestion was "Hedy." Hedy
was a simple firecracker device which, when you pulled a
small wire loop, simulated the screeching Doppler effect of
a falling Nazi bomb and then ended in a deafening roar but
all completely harmless. By activating Hedy the agent could
have a chance to escape in the turmoil he had created. It was
named after Hedy Lamarr, because my lusty young officers
said she created panic wherever she went.
General Donovan and I gave lectures before many mili-
tary groups. I vividly recall one on August 28, 1943 before
the Joint Chiefs of Staff. After General Donovan's talk on
O.S.S. objectives, he asked me to demonstrate several of our
simpler devices. I showed our "booby-traps," our derailing
system for enemy trains and our incendiaries, and I explained
the need and use for Hedy Lamarr. As I spoke I activated one
and dropped it casually into a nearby metal wastebasket. Hedy
interrupted me by suddenly shrieking and howling with an
ear-piercing wail. Then came the deafening bang. To my sur-
prise I saw two- and three-star Generals clawing and climbing
to get out through the room's single door. It was a most suc-
cessful demonstration, but somehow we were never again in-
vited to put on a show before the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
General Donovan said, "Professor Moriarty, we overdid that
one, I think."
34
3
SUPPLYING THE SABOTEURS
The saboteur is a man of violence and action. He must
teach and inspire the people in occupied and enemy countries
to harass and destroy the enemy and his works.
As we entered the war, most saboteurs had nothing to
work with. If they decided to burn down a German ammuni-
tion dump or a Nazi headquarters, they had to be there with
a match and kerosene. Of course the Gestapo threw a noose
around the site and our saboteur was shot forthwith. It is true
that the British had a time-delay pencil, but that was all.
Dr. Bush instituted a special Division of O.S.R.D, to
serve us in O.S.S. It was Division 19, headed by Dr. H. M.
Chadwell and his brilliant assistant Dr. W. G. Lothrop.
Our first weapon in the arsenal was a pocket incendiary,
the size of a small booklet It was a celluloid case filled with
napalm jelly with an ignition that could be set for any time
you wished, from fifteen minutes to three days. Now the sabo-
teur could be conspicuously protesting his ration allowance
at German headquarters when the ammunition dump went
35
SUPPLYING THE SABOTEURS
up, and his alibi was impregnable. The success of this simple
device led to a wave of requests from resistance groups.
How to derail a train was a common question and, we
thought, an easy one to answer simply take out one rail and
the train falls over. It just doesn't work. Saboteurs were sus-
pected of lying when they reported they had done this on the
Orient Express, yet it came in on time. We studied the situa-
tion with the Corps of Engineers and proved it didn't work.
After months we learned how to do it, but the solution is still
not publishable information.
The Polish Underground officers I met laughed at all
such subtleties. Their leader said, "Lovell, it's nonsense to be
so complicated. We put two men out where the train runs
through a cut like a slice through a little hill. As the engine
passes below them, each throws a hand grenade into the cab
and then one of your incendiaries with very short delay tim-
ing. That takes care of the engineer and fireman and the train
runs on to its own destruction/'
"Into the cab?" I asked skeptically.
"Oh yes, our engine cabs are all open not closed up like
yours."
"But doesn't the 'dead man's throttle' stop the train as
soon as the engineer is killed?"
"Dead man's throttle? Of that I never heard before."
m "American, perhaps, not Polish."
One weapon we abandoned, this time after it was per-
haps too successful, was "Beano." Major Fairless of O.S.S.
with a group of Partisans was slipping down a road in
Yugoslavia. They could see a line of automobiles coming
their way and climbed up the rocky roadside. It was a high
command group with staff flags flying from the lead car. Flat-
36
SUPPLYING THE SABOTEURS
tened against the hillside they made no impression on the
Germans but Major Fairless saw a chance to destroy them all.
He ordered each man to arm his Mills hand grenades and
bombard the convoy with them.
The Mills grenade explodes several seconds after its arm-
ing lever is pulled. Because of that the volley of grenades
bounced off the German automobiles, and exploded harm-
lessly in the ditch and underbrush beside the highway.
The Germans, now alerted, got out of their cars and
sprayed the hillside with machine gun fire. Major Fairless and
most of his cadre were killed.
"Why can't we make a hand grenade that will explode
on impact?" I asked. Every American boy knows how to
handle a baseball, so why not have it the size and shape of
one rather than the awkward "pineapple" that was the British
Mills "hand grenade."
In country fairs a poor lad used to get on a sling over a
tub of water and for a quarter the visitors could pitch a few
baseballs at a target over his head. If it was hit, down went
the unlucky man for a ducking and the crowd roared
"Beano"!
The Office of Scientific Research and Development eag-
erly undertook our assignment. They made a "Beano" so that
it became armed or active during its flight through the air, re-
quiring about twenty-five feet before it became dangerous,
thereby discharging when it hit anything. We laid great hopes
on the final tests at Aberdeen Proving Grounds of the United
States Army Ordnance, with many top commanding officers
present.
One of the Army's civilian engineers who had, we as-
sumed, been thoroughly instructed in this new grenade, gave
37
SUPPLYING THE SABOTEURS
a most enthusiastic lecture on it and then proceeded to dem-
onstrate. To the horror of us all, he said it would be handled
like any baseball and tossed it high in the air over his head.
Of course the throw automatically armed the grenade. When
he stepped under the missile and caught it, he was killed in-
stantly.
We were all shocked beyond belief. Somehow death
should occur properly on a battlefield. This fatality caused
the Army to stop all further "Beano" tests and abandon the
grenade as unsafe a most illogical decision, as a Mills grenade
under identical armed conditions would have been also lethal.
One special device for saboteurs was perhaps the perfect
weapon for the underground, because it involved virtually no
risk for the resistance groups which used it, and it was infal-
lible as a tactical device. Its name was "Casey Jones." It con-
sisted of a very strong permanent magnet of alnico on one
side of a small box. This magnet was to stick the box firmly
to steel or iron plates on the underside of railway cars. On
the downward side of the little box was a special electric eye,
designed for us by the Bell Laboratories. This eye looked
down on the railroad track and right of way.
The function of Casey Jones was to derail trains not
trains in France or Germany but those in Italy, those which
sooner or later would traverse tunnels in daylight. Our elec-
tric eye was not at all affected by a slow, gradual diminution
of light, such as nightfall; but only by a sudden sharg^cutting
off of light, as when a train entered a tunnel. This activated it
instantly, and the explosive charge would blow a wheel off the
car.
Italy depended on Germany for munitions, coal and a
host of supplies, and the rails were replete with unloaded cars
38
SUPPLYING THE SABOTEURS
returning to Germany for more materiel. From the start we in-
sisted that the San Marco Resistance Group put out no Casey
Jones devices, until they were first installed on the wrecking
trains in each rail-division headquarters. After that, men,
women and children placed them on any rolling stock at all,
generally at night, and regardless of whether the freight cars
were empty or loaded.
A long line of empty cars would wind its way north.
Sooner or later, an explosion and derailment in a pitch-black
tunnel followed. A call for the wrecking train with its derricks
and cranes would follow. When it crawled in to repair the
wreck, it, too, was derailed in the cramped tunnel. Now both
wrecks had to be worked on by hand, and the through line
was blockaded for a long period of time.
Every Casey Jones had on it a decalcomania in German
type which read, 'This is a Car Movement Control Device.
Removal or tampering is strictly forbidden under heaviest
penalties by the Third Reich Railroad Consortium. Heil
Hitler."
Few, if any, were ever removed because, we guessed, the
German soldier was regimented to let Berlin think for him.
It is significant that the German High Command in Italy
surrendered to Allen Dulles of the O.S.S., not to our regular
Armed Forces. Perhaps they recognized that O.S.S. subver-
sion had denied them supplies without which they could no
longer fight.
In September, 1943, the silent, flashless pistol and sub-
machine gun, the concept of which caused my selection to
the O.S.S. staff, finally passed all tests and went into produc-
tion.
The success achieved was due to the untiring work of
39
SUPPLYING THE SABOTEURS
Professor Gus Hammar of the University of Washington, to
Dr. Robert King of the American Telephone & Telegraph re-
search group and to John Sibelius of Hi-Standard Manufac-
turing Co. Now that it was an actuality, I became terribly
worried for fear the weapon would get into the hands of
criminals and thus make law enforcement all but impossible.
Accordingly, I set up the strictest accounting system on each
individual firearm. My worries were justified, however. De-
spite the most careful checking, several dozen weapons were
reported "destroyed or expended in combat/' It was impos-
sible to verify or question that statement.
The missing items showed up later in Palestine, in the
hands of the Jewish Underground, the Haganah, when Britain
ruled Palestine under a Mandate. These guns were used with
devastating effect. By night or day to wear a British uniform
was to risk assassination, with no way whatever to trace the
bullet or determine the location of the franc-tireur. Every
flat-topped house in Tel Aviv and Haifa was a source of sud-
den death. One reason for Britain's surrender of her Mandate
and her withdrawal was that this merciless sniping could not
be traced.
General Donovan was pleased as punch when I presented
him with one of the first of the silent, flashless pistols. It was
a Colt action Hi-Standard with clips of a special .22 bullet I
prefer not to describe. He sent for a small duffle bag which
was filled with sand and he fired several shots into it, in his
office.
"Get me another, Stan," he said in high glee. "I want
to present one to President Roosevelt."
I did so at once, realizing that Director Donovan was
eager to impress the President with any achievement which
40
SUPPLYING THE SABOTEURS
would strengthen the O.S.S. in the eyes of the White House.
A day or so later General Donovan phoned me to come
to his office. When I arrived there, he was still chuckling over
what had taken place at his interview with the President in
Roosevelt's private office.
'1 went in/' he told me, "with the pistol in a shoulder
holster and I carried a bag full of sand in my hand. 'Pa' Wat-
son waved me in. I set the sandbag over in one corner of the
room on the floor. The President was dictating a letter to
Miss Grace Tully, but he looked up and motioned me to
come in. While he was talking to her, I fired the entire clip of
bullets into the bag of sand. She left and I then presented the
gun to President Roosevelt with my handkerchief wrapped
around the still-hot barrel.
"I said, 'Mr. President, I've just fired ten live bullets
from this new O.S.S. silent and flashless pistol into that sand-
bag over there in the corner. Take the gun by the grip and
look out for the muzzle, as it's still hot'
"His eyes opened as wide as saucers. If he could, physi-
cally, have jumped to his feet, he would have. He was obvi-
ously shocked. In a second he got hold of himself and said
how pleased he was to have the wonderful new gun and he
sent his congratulations to all who had contributed to its de-
velopment. He looked the gun over carefully, laid it gently
on his desk and said, 'Bill, you're the only black Republican
I'll ever allow in my office with a weapon like this!' "
Security is often a one-way street. The gabby stenog-
rapher who lets slip some mildly classified trivia at a cocktail
party is sent packing back to her home in disgrace, but higher
authority is above such discipline. Who makes the rules may
break them with impunity.
41
SUPPLYING THE SABOTEURS
Our silent flashless gun was classified Top Secret. Presi-
dent Roosevelt, after showing it to Admiral Leahy, General
Marshall and others, sent it straightaway to the Roosevelt
Museum at Hyde Park, New York, where it was put on public
display. Sic transit gloria secretorum/
To attack an enemy automobile or a Tiger military tank
one could take two approaches the fuel tank which has to be
filled by someone, and the "breather pipe" of the oil system
which has to be checked for oil levels and replenishment.
Both projects were submitted to Division 19 and the re-
doubtable team of Doctors Chadwell and Lothrop went to
work on them. The attack on the fuel tank was solved by a
device suggested by Wing Commander Bird the S.O.,E.
liaison person attached to my office and the most lethal Scots-
man ever to graduate from the University of Edinburgh.
Into the gas tank was dropped a small plastic cylinder,
easily palmed by the gas filling station attendant. It contained
an explosive charge which, fired only after the gasoline had
slowly swelled a rubber retaining ring. This took several hours,
so the German vehicle was far away from the point at which
it was inserted.
We named the device "The Firefly." Unhappily, re-
peated trials showed that the gas tank would explode all right;
but, alas, the gasoline quenched any fire, so the weapon was
only half as effective as we wished.. You see, if the Firefly
would burst the tank, rendering the military vehicle useless
until a new tank could be installed, that was half the battle,
but only half. If the gasoline could be ignited simultaneously,
then the average driver, startled at the bang in the rear of his
tank or car, would stop. He then .would be sitting over a very
hot seat indeed, with his vehicle burning up under him. In the
42
SUPPLYING THE SABOTEURS
case of a Tiger tank, it would become a carapace in which he
would be cremated along with his gunner and companions.
At last we found an additive to the Firefly which infal-
libly burst the gasoline storage tank and fired it also.
Fireflies were rushed to the Maquis, the French Under-
ground, in advance of Operation Anvil, the cover name for the
landings in the south of France. I was informed that two
German Divisions, ordered to repulse this attack, proceeded
down the French highways. All gasoline pumps en route were
staffed by the French resistance groups. As the gasoline sta-
tion attendant inserted his hose in the filling pipe or as he
withdrew it he dropped a little Firefly into it
The results were dramatic and strategically dynamic.
Along the highways, off in fields or smack in the roadway,
there were the two tank division vehicles, abandoned if the
driver kept moving and leaving a trail of burning gasoline
behind him, but crematoriums if he stopped. Before anyone
could escape through the tank hatch, the fumes of the gaso-
line burning under the tank had asphyxiated the tank person-
nel. The success of the Marseille landings owed much to the
little Firefly.
The O.S.S. attack through the breather pipe and the oil
lubricating system of an auto or a tank was harder going, in-
deed. At Beacon, New York, the Texas Company tried every
suggestion we or Division 19 advanced. All the time-honored
tricks failed. Sugar? No result whatever. Sand? Dirt? A little
scoring of the pistons, but so wonderful is the gasoline engine,
so designed to take abuse, that it kept on running as if it never
would give up. I think we tried over fifty additives until my
respect for the standard six-cylinder engine almost overcame
any further work to destroy it
43
SUPPLYING THE SABOTEURS
One day a Harvard scientist, best left unidentified, sug-
gested a compound to be put up in a small rubber sac and
dropped into the oil through the breather-pipe. With little
hope of success we did it. After it was hot and the rubber
container had opened up, his compound became a colloidal
dispersion in the oil. To our amazement (and delight) , when
this hit the small mechanical tolerances of the bearings, all
"seized" simultaneously.
"Look out!" somebody yelled, and in time's nick.
The whole cylinder head burst into a hundred shrapnel
pieces and the device had succeeded. Being a Harvard man,
steeped, no doubt, in the Classics, it was named "Caccolube."
Perhaps your Greek will help you figure out why.
I always like the Bushmaster probably because I in-
vented it. Reports of fighting the Japanese in the days of
jungle warfare repeatedly emphasized that a cadre of our
boys, infiltrating down a jungle path and hacking their way
through to make a pathway, would be followed by camou-
flaged Japanese patrols. The advance jungle fighters of the
Japanese would expect a rear guard GI to be watching down
the path. They would encircle him, kill him and then come
upon our soldiers without warning. How to stop it?
Our answer was the Bushmaster. It was not an Amazon
snake, but an innocent tube, eight inches long with a wire
spring attached to it. If marked with a white band, it would
fire in about an hour; green was three hours but red meant
twenty minutes. All it was, was a steel tube containing a 30-
calibre rifle cartridge which, when the time delay mechanism
was activated, fired at the selected time.
Now as we see the American soldiers threading their
way through the tropical growth, they leave no rear guard to
SUPPLYING THE SABOTEURS
be assassinated by the Japanese who may be pursuing them.
Instead, one agile soldier climbs the trees as they go along
and clamps his Bushmasters to branches, so they will point
down the trail. When the zooming 3O-calibre cartridge comes
screaming at whomever is following, the recoil of the little
device waves the branches or fronds so realistically you'd be
sure a sharpshooter was in that tree. Simple, but it worked.
Equally simple was the explosive candle. Pretend you
know a French girl who has access to a German officer's study
or bedroom. Give her your candle to replace the half-con-
sumed one already there. It will burn perfectly until the flame
touches the high explosive composing the lower two-thirds of
the candle. Since the wick extends into a detonator and the
latter is embedded in the explosive, the burst is as effective
as any hand grenade.
Often the most simple weapons were the best Perhaps
this is so because the patriots, the resistance groups had few
Ph.D/s in their number, but many pkin men and women.
Simple faith is worth more than Norman blood, I do believe.
The simplest weapon we ever made was a piece of steel
so shaped that however it fell, there were three prongs or legs
pointing downward and one erect. About three inches high
and weighing only an ounce, what possible value or use could
this have?
I blush for its simplicity. Thrown out on a highway,
three prongs down, one prong up, it would always cause a
tire blowout. Too small for the driver to see as he bowled
down the road, it really destroyed any tire that ran over it.
No patching when our spike had been encountered.
You wfll at once think of its use on airfield runways, and
that's exactly where the spike did its best job. An enemy
45
SUPPLYING THE SABOTEURS
fighter plane, either on takeoff or on landing, would go into
an uncontrolled ground loop when one of our little spikes
blew a tire. The perfect tribute to any saboteur weapon is, of
course, never to have the enemy know what hit him never to
suspect its existence. In this category we had a few our
summa cum laude list but you will not learn about them
here, because they can be of use again some day.
The next list (perhaps just cum laude) were those weap-
ons and devices which the enemy warned their troops to
avoid, to beware, to destroy. High on that list was our little
four-cornered spike. Actually, in Africa and in France, in Hol-
land and in Belgium, to possess one became an automatic
death warrant. An O.S.S. spike, eh? Der Tod!
One weapon the Germans or Japanese never did discover
was simple enough and was founded on an American peculi-
arity of costume.
I learned that only the United States uniforms had a
small slit pocket over the right hip the "fob pocket/' Could
a weapon be made to fit into this small pocket, the existence
of which might not be known to enemies searching our men?
I posed the problem to my associates. After repeated bull
sessions we evolved "The Stinger" a 3-inch by half-inch little
tube as innocent-looking as a golfer's stub pencil, but men
are alive today because of it.
When captured, no enemy searching our people in-
spected the area below the belt and almost exactly over the
appendix. The Stinger was a one-shot miniature gun which
could not be reloaded, but a man's life may hang on one shot
as against no shot at all. The tube held a .22 overloaded car-
tridge. It was cocked by lifting up an outer integument of the
tube with the fingernafl, holding the Lilliputian gun in the
46
SUPPLYING THE SABOTEURS
palm of the hand, close to one's target. It fired by squeezing
the little raised lever down into place again.
An O.S.S. agent was picked up by the Gestapo inside
the German lines. The German security officer was in doubt
about him something in his story or manner didn't quite fit
his ostensible calling. They frisked him and found no weapon,
but the officer put him in a staff car. Being unarmed, our man
rode on the back seat with the security officer. They were en
route to German headquarters for further interrogation. In a
small village the officer got out to telephone ahead and assure
himself that a certain interrogator would be called in.
Our O.S.S. agent, left alone with the military chauffeur
in the front seat, took out the overlooked Stinger, cocked it,
held it near the back of the driver's head and fired. He
pushed the body to one side, took over the wheel and drove
at breakneck speed to the American line.
The Stinger not only saved the man's life but allowed
our pknes to destroy the German Headquarters where he was
to be taken. By telling the driver what route to take, the
security officer had unwittingly given the O.S.S. man priceless
information. A little Stinger is a dangerous thing.
I have not mentioned the booby trap devices, largely be-
cause they are widely known. Essentially there are three types:
the ones activated by pressure (you sit down in a chair and
go boom!) , those that fire only when weight or pressure is re-
leased (you pick up a book but never live to read it) and,
finally, the pull type, where a wire you trip over ends that trip
for you.
This last kind (the pull booby traps or pull switches)
had an infinite number of applications. A heavy bomb, called
by the S.O.,E. "a Spigot Mortar" is screwed into a tree on
47
SUPPLYING THE SABOTEURS
one side of a railroad track. A pull-type booby trap has a wire
which crosses the track at the approximate height of a loco-
motive smokestack. The wire is tautiy fi&d to a tree or build-
ing across the track. All enemy railroads had a corps of
trackwalkers, but our wire is over their heads and they are
looking down, anyway. Along comes the enemy train, the
stack pulls on the wire, the bomb hits the engine and, in ac-
tual use by the underground, frequently bowls the target
engine right over on its side.
Our saboteur is hard at work in an enemy-operated fac-
tory when all this happens. Good things, those "pull''
switches!
The O.S.R.D. developed a perfect answer to one of our
problems. We asked for a high explosive which would act and
look like ordinary wheat flour, thus arousing no suspicion if
found in the possession of saboteurs in enemy territory. Dr.
George Kistiakowsky, then head of the Bruceton, Pennsyl-
vania, Explosives Laboratory, presented us with just what we
needed. His white powder, u^ed just as it was, had almost the
brisance of TNT. It could be wet with water or milk, kneaded
into a dough, raised with yeast or baking powder and actually
baked into biscuits or bread. In any form it was a terrific ex-
plosive. I called it "Aunt Jemima."
We made exact duplicates of Chinese flour bags and
sent them, properly stencilled, to Admiral Milton E. "Mary"
Miles, the head of Sino-American Co-operative Organization
in Chungking. Inserting a time-delay detonator into this trick
explosive was all the Chinese operator had to do. I was told
that bags of this cleverly camouflaged explosive were laid
against the steel compression members of a great bridge over
the Yangtze River, destroying it completely.
48
SUPPLYING THE SABOTEURS
My personal troubles with Aunt Jemima began when I
found I had about 100 pounds in my office at 25th and E
Streets in Washington. I telephoned an expert to come and
take it away. He said, "No need for that, Lovell; simply flush
it down the toilet."
It took some time for Dr. Allen Abrams, my assistant,
and myself to do that. When I returned to my desk the ex-
pert's boss was on the phone. "Don't flush that explosive
down the toilet," he warned. "The organic matter in fee sewer
will react with it and blow the whole Washington sewer sys-
tem sky-high, including every building over it."
I thanked him as calmly as I could. There was no point
in his worrying, too. The sewer ran diagonally from our offices
across to i6th Street near the White House.
I could imagine Professor Moriarty retiring rapidly from
real life back to fiction. It would be the end of us; indeed, the
end of O.S.S., as General George V. Strong of G-2 needed
only one such episode to have Donovan's Amateur Playboys
liquidated. The hours dragged by as Dr. Abrams and I de-
bated whether to tell Weston Howland, our Security Chief,
the District of Columbia Engineer, Donovan, or no one at
all. Every truck that backfired, every door that slammed,
raised the hackles on our necks, but we set our teeth and kept
mum.
We dined at the Cosmos Club that night Just as we
were beginning to breathe easier, what with a bit of drink for
courage, a waiter dropped a loaded tray of dishes right beside
our table. Seconds later we found ourselves out in the garden
with no recollection of how we had got there.
In the morning we decided that the War College or
some more remote building might blow up, but that the
49
SUPPLYING THE SABOTEURS
White House was safe. We knew it because we stood at its
gates at sunrise. Happily, the Potomac River has long since
laid its burden of Aunt Jemina softly in the bosom of the sea.
A device we called our anerometer was a barometric fuse
so set that an increase of 5,000 feet in altitude would make
it work. About the diameter of a garden hose, it was attached
to an actual length of hose which was filled with explosives.
All military planes had inspection ports in their tail sections,
so our anerometer would neatly slide into the rear of the fu-
selage and fall down between the ribs and struts out of sight.
Whatever the airport's altitude, as soon as the plane carrying
this device had risen 5,000 feet above it, the tail section would
blow off. Our biggest user was the Chinese force at Chung-
king, which got them into many Japanese planes. General
Montgomery told me in London that similar British devices
greatly influenced the victory at El Alamein.
In at least one reported case, however, the victim was not
Japanese. The most hated man in Chiang Kai-shek's govern-
ment was Gen. Tai Li, the ruthless chief of the secret police,
whom even the Chinese called "the Himmler of China." As-
sassinations and executions were so common that his name was
something to be whispered. When Japan surrendered, Tai Li
and his staff in Chungking boarded his plane to fly to Peiping,
where a great purge of all Chinese who were even rumored to
have collaborated with the Japanese was to be organized.
Everyone felt this would be a blood bath without justice. Tai
Li's plane, I was later told, had risen about 5,000 feet when
the tail section exploded.
There is another side to the controversial Tai Li coin.
Lieutenant John E. Crabtree of the Marines was attached to
the Navy's SAGO outfit. He was intimately associated with
50
SUPPLYING THE SABOTEURS
General Tai Li during the period when the latter was Chief of
the Bureau of Investigation for Chiang Kai-shek's National
Military Council.
John Crabtree, like Admiral Miles, felt that Tai Li was
grossly abused and misrepresented and in no way the ruthless,
inhuman character painted by his many enemies. On March
17, 1946 General Tai Li died in his plane crash near Pang-
chow. Who now can say that it was bad weather or an aner-
ometer bomb that killed him? Had he lived, several who knew
him well, felt that he would have led the Nationalists to vic-
tory over the Communists in China. Others are equally sure
that he would have bathed all China in human blood.
No figure in World War II is more black, seen from one
side; more white viewed from the other. My own evaluation
of this mysterious Oriental is that, since Admiral Miles held
him in esteem, General Tai Li must have been somewhat
more sinned against than sinning.
As F.S.C. Northrop writes in his The Meeting of East
and West, "Unless we of the Occident find in our own experi-
ence the factors to which their remarkably denotative philo-
sophical and religious terminology refers, we can never hope,
regardless of our information or our observation, to under-
stand the Chinese/'
A special weapon of the saboteur is the limpet A limpet
is a small shellfish which adheres to rocks like grim death. The
saboteur's limpet was originally an Italian and British device
which, by means of a permanent magnet or by explosive
rivets, anchors to a ship below the water line. It only holds a
few pounds of high explosive. Although the hole it opens in
the side of the target ship is small, the result is utterly devas-
51
SUPPLYING THE SABOTEURS
tating and generally the ship is promptly sunk. This is so be-
cause water is incompressible, and the great recoil of the
ocean upon that hole opens it up to a twenty-foot aperture.
Our saboteur in a kayak or canoe, at night, puts the lim-
pet against the ship's side by means of a long pole. It is so
fashioned that withdrawing the pole activates the tiny explo-
sive in the limpet face and attaches it securely. A magnesium
alloy window on the limpet is slowly etched away by salt wa-
ter after several hours, the saboteur being far away when the
explosion takes place. We used a cast explosive called "Tor-
pex," which was a shaped charge, so we got the "Munro"
effect whereby the ship's side was ruptured in a predetermined
pattern.
In April 1944 the Norwegian Underground advised that
the Germans might be ready to withdraw their Army of Oc-
cupation in large part, and they must have a lot of our limpets
to put on the German troop ships. The cast "Torpex" was in
Hastings, Nebraska. How to get it to England and to Nor-
way? Express, Parcel Post, railroads or airlines were ruled out,
as it is a temperamental high explosive, as delicate as eggs. I
asked for volunteers. An Army Captain and a Sergeant in my
command offered to get it if I would provide an automobile.
I gave them my own car and they were off. Their drive from
Hastings to Washington was an epic. The load of sensitive
high explosive weighed the small car down on its axles mak-
ing holes in the road a real hazard.
Were they to be stopped by some police officer and their
illegal load discovered and given publicity, the whole venture
would have to be abandoned. To prevent this, I thought of
our competent Documentation Branch. The letter we typed
on authentic White House stationery said:
52
SUPPLYING THE SABOTEURS
"Captain Frazee and Sergeant Walker are on a secret
mission for me as Commander-in-Chief. Any assistance
given these two officers will be helping to win the war. Any
interference with their vital mission, any search, questioning
or delay of any sort will be followed by my severest disci-
plinary action. This is a Top Secret operation/'
Franklin D. Roosevelt would have sworn that he had
signed it. The letter had a seal (quite illegible) on it. Twice
my men were stopped by local police and twice this letter
evoked abject apologies. The car stalled once on a railroad
grade crossing, but the engine started again before any train
appeared. The vital load of 'Torpex" was transported to Nor-
way and encased in limpets by the Norwegian Underground.
General Gubbins and Wing Commander Byrd told me that
our timing was perfect The Germans were recalling troops
from Oslo, Stavanger and Narvik. The Norwegians went out
at night in their little kayaks and installed the limpets below
the waterline, all timed to explode as the troopships made
their way from the docks down the tortuous fjords.
Those two officers of the British S.O.,E. said that when
Hitler most needed the reinforcement of his Norwegian Army
of Occupation to defend "Festung Europa," the fjords were
in possession of many sunken German ships, with troops
caught in that watery graveyard. The little limpets from Hast-
ings, Nebraska had fulfilled their mission.
The Norwegians were the most deadly of all under-
ground organizations we met or worked with in the QJS.S.
The French Maquis and the Italian San Marcos often had
political overtones, but I found the Norwegians inspired
solely by their passion to free Norway. They were ruthless to
53
SUPPLYING THE SABOTEURS
their own citizens, perhaps because "quisling" had become
an international byword.
In May and June 1943 I spent some time with their
training groups in the north of Scotland. We showed them
all our devices and told them our stratagems. Their leader, in
turn, described to me their many ways of fighting the Ger-
mans, using subtlety rather than force.
The German Command had one time ordered the entire
Stavanger sardine pack to be delivered to them, the choicest
and best to go to St. Nazaire, France. Knowing this to be the
Nazi U-Boat Headquarters, the Norwegians asked the British
S.O.,E. to get them all the croton oil tibey could locate. Cro-
ton oil is a drastic purgative, but its acrid taste would be cov-
ered by the fishy tang of smoked sardines. The Norwegian
resistance leader said that in the entire shipment of sardines
sent to the German Submarine Command, croton oil was
used in place of the oils normally employed. It was frustrating
(as all subversion tends to be) not to know what the result
actually was, but he felt that many a U-Boat, nesting on the
ocean floor, waiting for the next convoy for Archangel to ap-
pear overhead, never surfaced again.
I knew what stark realists those Norwegians were, and I
knew what a problem it had been to prevent betrayal of their
underground personnel to the Germans. I asked a Norwegian
agent how they handled that.
'We have no trouble, anymore, with quislings/' he said.
"Many of our people could not resist the promise of the Nazis
to double their rations if they would betray us, but we devel-
oped a system that stopped all that."
"What on earth did you do?" I asked.
'Well, we plan a meeting of the Resistance Groun a
54
SUPPLYING THE SABOTEURS
cell of say eight women and men. All are told, 'It's Olson's
garage at one o'clock tomorrow morning/ All but one person
are then advised it's not Olson's now, but has been changed
to Lemberg's cottage. We post watchers at Olson's and if the
Gestapo raid it, we know for sure that the one man we didn't
notify of the change is a traitor/'
"But now you've identified him, how do you handle it?"
"Ah, that's what works so well. We wait our time and
we kidnap him. He's blindfolded and driven in a car high up
in the mountains near the Swedish border. There we have a
little hunting lodge which we have made over into an im-
maculate miniature hospital. The traitor is anesthetized with
expert care and our surgeon cuts out his tongue. Enough of
a stump is left in his mouth so he can manage to gulp down
his food, but he can never talk again. When it is all healed
up, he is blindfolded and driven back to his native city."
"That's ghastly!" I cried. He smiled and shook his head.
"Treason is ghastly. At first we shot traitors but it didn't
stop the quislings. This tongue surgery does. We had to do
it perhaps fifteen or twenty times, but now no one ever be-
trays our underground groups. You see, nobody wants to live
out his life making animal noises instead of speech, when each
effort to talk brands him and advertises to all Norway that
once he tried to betray our beloved land."
Professor Moriarty never thought of a better cure for
treason.
This tongue amputation on informers by the wonderful
Norwegian Resistance Group has been categorically denied
by some surviving members of that brave band. I can only
report what I was told and add the comment that in all secret
operations none of us knew everything that took place. If fif-
55
SUPPLYING THE SABOTEURS
teen or so tongue amputations stopped informing to the Ger-
mans, one would say it was not inhumane but a life-saving
stratagem for the underground corps certainly nothing of
which to be ashamed in Norway's glorious fight for freedom.
There was so much that was grim, bloody and sordid
about the creation of new and special weapons to kill people
that I searched for comic relief. The anthropologists in O.S.S.
were asked to come up with some tabu that was uniquely
Japanese, something to which only that race was sensitive. I
was told the answer was bowel elimination. A Japanese
thought nothing of urinating in public, but he held defeca-
tion to be a very secret, shameful thing. A Japanese soldier,
even in jungle fighting, even at great risk, would seek a private
place to defecate. Here was my comic relief.
I had a group of chemists work out a skatol compound,
a liquid which duplicated the revolting odor of a very loose
bowel movement. It left no doubt in anyone's mind as to
what it was. We put this obnoxious chemical in collapsible
tubes, and I named it, 'Who? Me?" The tubes were flown
over the hump to Chungking and distributed to children in
Japanese-occupied cities Peiping, Shanghai, Canton, etc.
When a Japanese officer, preferably of high rank, came walk-
ing down die crowded sidewalk, the little Chinese boys and
girls would slip up behind him and squirt a shot of "Who?
Me?" at his trouser seat. As a sort of extra dividend, our chemi-
cal was insoluble in soap and water, but very soluble in dry-
cleaner's fluids, so, when sent for cleaning, the contaminated
uniform endowed all the clothing in the batch with its of-
fense. "Who? Me?" was no world-shaking new evolvement,
but it cost the Japanese a world of "face" and did more to lift
the spirit of the Chinese than potent blockbusters.
56
SUPPLYING THE SABOTEURS
Sometimes a joke can go too far. A small supply of
"Who? Me?" tubes, which were our original test samples,
began to disappear. I had the cabinet locked. The lock was
picked, which was not at all surprising, since we instructed all
of our saboteurs in the art of picking open all makes of locks
and door latches. With the help of an assistant I booby-
trapped the locker by having a tube of "Who? Me?" filled
under such an aerosol pressure, that when the cabinet door was
opened it would spray the thief, causing him to lose both his
self-composure and his anonymity. That stopped all the mon-
key business but the culprit, so easily identified, was too highly
placed to be scolded.
A most urgent research job was done to find "T.D." a
rather transparent cover-symbol for "truth drug." Everyone
wanted it, and quite properly so. Our schools and recruiting
people needed it to help screen out of our groups any German
spies or sympathizers. Despite the Geneva Conventions with
their limitations on questioning captives, the prisoner-of-war
officers wanted to try it.
Dr. Roger Adams, the world's expert on mescaline and
cannabis indica (among many other subjects) , was delighted
to help. I saw Harry Anslinger, Commissioner of the Bureau
of Narcotics. He was most cooperative and assigned to
my staff one of his finest agents, Major George White.
There never was any officer in American uniform like Major
White. He was roly-poly, his shirt progressing in wide loops
from neck to trousers, with tension on the buttons that
seemed more than bearable. Behind his innocent, round face
with the disarming smile was the most deadly and dedicated
public servant IVe ever met
Did we have a new hypnotic or narcotic to try? Major
57
SUPPLYING THE SABOTEURS
White would take it and report, "I tried it myself here are
my notes on it."
One "medication" that looked very promising took me
to a prisoner-of-war camp. There a U-Boat Commander was
interrogated by a German-speaking American officer a Cap-
tain in the Army. The T.D. was put in the German's beer,
and the camp commander and I eavesdropped over a micro-
phone pickup.
The German was stolid, stodgy; stuck by his rights and
even after two doctored beers merely recited his name, mili-
tary number and German naval unit to which he was assigned.
"Das Jkann Ich nicht sagen" became his constant answer.
The American interrogator, on the contrary, became
more and more voluble. During the second beer he blurted
out, "I'm going to tell you something, Heinie. My boss, Major
Quinn, is making passes at my wife. I'm going to shoot him
sure as hell if he doesn't stop it."
The C.O. whispered to me, "The beers got switched
our boy has your truth drug. This ought to be real good!" The
American Captain went right up the line of command. His
criticisms regarding the Colonel listening beside me were
virile, forthright, vulgar and no doubt so slanderous a court-
martial was indicated.
"He's doped doesn't know what he's saying," the Colo-
nel said and he turned off the microphone receiver.
"Too bad the beers were switched," I said.
When I came to my office the next morning, my As-
sistant said, "Hate to tell you but that bottle you took to the
prisoner-of-war camp was just half an ounce of ethyl alcohol.
Here's the TJD."
There's more than one way to tell off your boss, but only
58
SUPPLYING THE SABOTEURS
a clever opportunist can do it in uniform and be exempt from
even a reprimand.
Today one can read in weekly magazines all about the
lauryl compounds and tricyano-amino propene but we never
had them to use, as they hadn't yet been developed.
Major George White was far too valuable in counter-
intelligence to keep him on what was only a research of hope,
so I had him transferred to James Murphy in the Far East. I
was told that he was sent to Calcutta to locate the head of the
Japanese spy ring in that city. Airplane cover was absent when
the planes flew on "over the hump/' and the new wings had
not yet arrived from Karachi. At that unprotected hour the
Japanese planes would blast the undefended city.
After some study of the situation (the story is told),
George White was walking down one of the principal Cal-
cutta streets when he saw a pitiful old Chinese approaching,
leaning feebly on a staff and crooning softly as he came.
White seized him, pulled off his wig and upper garments and
shot him dead. This caused a British-American incident com-
parable to the Boston massacre in reverse. I never knew what
happened, precisely, but it was the head of the Japanese spy
system, and when the air raids stopped the British apparently
decided to forgive the unforgivable.
One day General Donovan said to me, "You know, I've
never met Dr. Vannevar Bush."
I could hardly believe it. I engaged a private dining room
at the Carlton Hotel and Dr. Bush and Dr. James B. Conant,
General Donovan, Colonel Edward Buxton and I met for
dinner one evening. At this time Drs. Bush and Conant were
completely absorbed in the potential of nuclear fission, which
ultimately became the atom bomb, but so tightly-held was
59
SUPPLYING THE SABOTEURS
the security on this subject that nothing could be discussed
with Wild Bill Donovan. Conversely, O.S.S. plans and opera-
tions were far too secret to be even hinted to the two eminent
scientists.
I recall Van Bush, with his typical Will Rogers smile,
asking General Donovan, "Have you succeeded in getting any
of your people really inside Germany?"
"A few," said General Donovan rather casually.
I knew we had perhaps eight hundred in Germany and
occupied countries that minute, but I also knew that Dr. Bush
would be even more evasive if General Donovan had asked
him, "What, Dr. Bush, is this Manhattan Project all about?"
And there I sat, the genial host, knowing enough on both
subjects, but muted by that man-made monster, wartime se-
curity regulations. Colonel Buxton, the most lovable man in
or out of uniform, told of how frustrating war actually was for
him.
"Here's Bill Donovan who came out of World War I
as the most decorated hero in American history. And what
happened to me? I fought side by side Landres and St.
Georges, at Baccarat and the Battle of the Meuse and the
Argonne Forest and I was known as the colonel of Sergeant
York's Regiment. Why did that guy have to be assigned to
me?"
When we broke up General Donovan said, "Let's walk
down to the office and see what messages have come in,
Stanley."
There was a full moon and I was elated to have all my
heroes as my guests this one night.
Bill Donovan put his arm around my shoulders, in the
manner he had, and said, "Stanley, I'm so glad to have met Dr.
60
SUPPLYING THE SABOTEURS
Bush. He's a great man but did you notice he began every
single sentence with T? Quite an egotist, wouldn't you say?"
The next morning I was at a meeting at 1530 P Street
where Dr. Bush presided. He came in, got on the dais, saw me
in the group and came down to speak to me.
"I didn't have a chance to thank you adequately last
night for that fine dinner, Stan. You know it was rather no-
ticeable, I thought, that Bill Donovan talked so much about
himself. I couldn't get a word in edgewise."
In Washington (and perhaps in Podunk, too) the hum-
ble may inherit the earth, but the egotists own it right now.
The very self-assurance and self-confidence, which is the com-
mon denominator of men of achievement, may rub the hum-
ble and self-effacing the wrong way a bit, but without it no
great deeds were ever done. I learned that egotism was often
a vital and necessary concomitant to great accomplishment.
Here, twenty yearsr later, you may encounter evidences
of my own but at least it has had two decades of hibernation.
By this time, the realization in Washington that the
O.S.S. would welcome unorthodox weapons and strategies
made General Donovan the man to whose desk all such ideas
gravitated. He shunted them to me for evaluation, and also,
I suspected, to get many of the wild-eyed enthusiasts off his
neck. Every one had to be given honest consideration, as we
never knew when the "genius idea" might arrive, nor from
what unlikely source.
Perhaps the strangest venture we were called upon to
pursue was the bat idea. One man got the ear of Eleanor Roo-
sevelt with the following idea. Everyone knew the Japanese
homes were made of paper and cardboard, highly inflamma-
ble. In our Carlsbad Caverns existed millions of bats, a great,
61
SUPPLYING THE SABOTEURS
unused national asset. Bats go to sleep (hibernate) when
chilled. In such a comatose state, load the bats into a U.S.
submarine and release them at dawn off the Japanese coast.
Each little bat will have a small incendiary bomb clamped
to its back. Each bomb will have a time-delay mechanism so
it will ignite only when the bat has flown to the shade of the
eaves of millions of Japanese homes. With a mysterious terror
their cities will burn down.
I called in a bat expert who declared that our Carlsbad
bats were a species that lived only in caves that they would
die rather than go under anyone's eaves. My attempts to veto
the project were killed by higher authority. The bat-ologist's
opinion was cavalierly brushed aside, and the distinguished
Dr. Louis Feiser of Harvard was commissioned to make the
minute bat incendiaries.
An abandoned mining town out West was selected by
an Air Corps general for tests, as it was all made of dried
wood and thus simulated a Japanese community. A trucHoad
of Carlsbad batsr was sent overland to arrive refrigerated and
ready for the little bombs to be soldered to their hibernated
bodies. When the van arrived and the doors were opened, all
the bats flew out in a great cloud, the refrigeration having
somehow failed. They left at full speed, no doubt in search
of a cave.
For the second attempt to prove the Bat Project right
or wrong, Dr. Feiser had set up a soldering shop in an old
shed, with gas burners and little clamps to hold the bats. The
bats arrived, well inactivated this time. The incendiaries were
all soldered in place and the lot was packed into the bomb bay
of a plane and released over the abandoned town.
Alas, the bats were unable to take wing at the airplane
62
SUPPLYING THE SABOTEURS
speed and they ignobly fell to earth like so many stones. The
town did burn up magnificently, however. Some person doing
the soldering had carelessly left a Bunsen burner going under
a wooden shelf and the whole town was a mass of flames. This
ended the Invasion by Bats, a Die Fledermaus Farce if there
ever was one.
Perhaps word of the Bat Project stimulated a visit from
a feline expert whose name I happily forget His idea started
(as they all did) with incontestable facts. Everyone knows
that a cat always lands on her feet. Everyone knows that a cat
hates water. Ha! here we have the idea that will help win the
war. Simply sling a cat, feet down, in a harness below an
aerial bomb with mechanism so set that the cat's every move
will guide the vanes of the free-falling bomb. An enemy war-
ship, like the Von Tirpitz, hiding in a Norwegian fjord is our
target. Cat-guided bomb is away! Cat sees expanse of hated
water and one area of dry land (the battleship) . Cat guides
bomb to the Von Tirpitz and cat becomes a hero like Sidney
Carton. It's a far, far better thing for a cat to do.
The idea had the enthusiastic support of a U.S. Senator
who, alas, was Chairman of the Appropriations Committee
and no argument from O.S.S. could squelch it. We had to
drop a cat in a harness to prove the animal became uncon-
scious and ineffective in the first fifty feet of fall, and had no
control of the bomb's direction, even if kitty tried.
CAMOUFLAGE
As the number of secret agents sent into enemy lands by
the O.S,S. increased, the invention and production of camou-
flaged items became an important activity. Disguised articles
and concealed receptacles to keep messages secure from
enemy inspectors, self-defense weapons such as stilettos and
one-shot miniature guns were our first products. I must add
that a secret place to keep the "K" tablets, which were so fatal
that a moment in the mouth would save, by instant death,
the agony of torture and the shame of disclosure, was our first
grim problem.
Since Gillette razors were everywhere in Europe, I sent
%n engineer to the company's factory in Boston. That com-
pany worked out a handle so cleverly made that it was iden-
tical with their standard' holder, yet, if you knew how to
operate the instrument, it at once became a capacious hollow
receptacle. I do not recall a single case where the Nazis dis-
covered this deception.
Buttons on clothing were a favorite camouflage con-
tainer. The top and base of the button were separated and a
64
CAMOUFLAGE
surprisingly commodious space was hollowed out At first the
top of the button was made to unscrew by turning to the left
that is, counterclockwise. But the Germans soon found out
about it, and all buttons on a suspected person's clothing
were stoutly tested by turning them that way. If any one
opened up, the Gestapo needed no further evidence to con-
vict the spy.
We were about to abandon the item when one of my
group suggested reversing the thread, so that twisting or turn-
ing to the left only served to tighten the assembly. Right up
to Germany's surrender we never learned of one instance of
this simplest of deceptions being discovered by enemy inspec-
tors or police. Often such utterly uninvolved stratagems as
that were more valuable than highly complicated ones. The
German mind was not too flexible.
Cigarette lighters were easily altered to give them sec-
tions and areas for concealment. I soon stopped this activity,
however, because whether they were trick lighters or perfectly
normal ones, they were usually appropriated by police and
inspectors everywhere. We not only lost the lighter, but also
any message it contained.
Women's accessories offered a far wider source of con-
cealment. It is easy to melt a lipstick, pour the molten wax
around the message tube and recast it in its original shape.
All containers for the female form divine become themselves
available as concealment areas. Steels in corsets and founda-
tion garments can be deadly stilettos provided they don't
work loose and stab the operator in a critical area.
We are, as it happens, considering a still sensitive area
of activity in camouflage, so the reader's imagination will
have to supply the devices omitted from this recitation. One
65
CAMOUFLAGE
which we can discuss is coal. A lump of coal is tossed onto
a passing freight car or truck loaded with coal. It looks like
all the other lumps, but this particular one contains a heat-
sensitive detonator in its center and is, in fact, a camouflaged
shape made entirely of a powerfully high explosive. Its pur-
pose is to be shoveled into a firebox in a power-plant boiler,
a locomotive or, in fact, wherever coal is burned. When hot
enough, this lump of mock coal will explode with sufficient
violence to open up the plates of any boiler. The boiling wa-
ter, rushing down on the hot grates, will warp them beyond
repair. Thus the enemy is deprived of whatever facility the
explosive coal attacks.
In our ignorance, we assumed that soft coal was soft coal
and it all looked very simple, with mass production possibili-
ties of molding the camouflaged lumps. How little we knew!
The coal from the Ruhr is recognizably different from the soft
coal from Poland, Thuringia, Czechoslovakia or any other
mining region. When I asked our agents to obtain, label and
air-express lumps of coal from each area to me, I'm sure they
felt I was off my rocker. But they came, nevertheless, and each
was duplicated with the exact gloss, the same planes of cleav-
age and the same weathering characteristics, when it would
be kid among the authentic lumps of coal in a railway coal-
car, on a coal pile, or on a locomotive coal tender.
How many boilers were ruined, how seriously the Nazi
economy was affected, we never knew. That frustration is not
unusual in intelligence work, and we learned to go on to
something else and not waste our time, money and energy
trying to check up on each end result. In this case the futility
of doing so is self-evident. Our agent gives the lump of ex-
plosive coal to a member of the resistance group who places
66
CAMOUFLAGE
it on a pile of coal wherever and whenever he can. That's it.
From there on it's wholly up to the fates which govern boil-
ers and fireboxes or else, ridiculously, the enemy organizes a
Department of Lump Inspectors.
The camouflage of a human being is the most challeng-
ing of all. In England I was told that a prominent Dutchman
desperately wanted to be parachuted into Holland to help
direct the underground movement there. He was so well-
known and so outstanding in his appearance that discovery
would have resulted in certain death. At a conference in Lon-
don one of the group suggested that his great crop of black
hair be shaved off and he be given a special chemical which
would maintain baldness. His striking blue-black eyes had to
be changed somehow, so I suggested contact lenses into which
were made a pale, washed-out, gray iris. Knowing something
about shoemaking, I ventured the thought that if one of his
shoes was built up internally, he would have to walk with a
slight limp. At least his gait and posture would be altered
beyond recognition. I heard that, so camouflaged and pro-
vided with counterfeit papers, ration coupons, identification
cards and all other necessary documentation, he was smug-
gled into Holland.
Camouflage is but one form of deception, and just as the
O.S.S. sought for all possible information concerning our
enemies, it also fed them many sorts of plausible falsehoods.
We felt sure that the Japanese respected our inventiveness
and our technical capability, so we wove many a tangled web
on that subject. Hawaii was known to have clandestine Japa-
nese radio transmitters on the islands, so it was at Honolulu,
especially, that we planted our stories. Loud-mouthed drink-
ers blurted out exciting but untrue intelligence information
67
CAMOUFLAGE
in the bar at the Officer's Mess, with confederates hushing
them up ineffectually. The bartender, known to be a rabid
Japanese sympathizer, was allowed to overhear and transmit
his findings.
Ireland, being neutral, was full of blonde, blue-eyed Ger-
man agents. The lobby of the Glentworth Hotel in Limerick
became an ideal spot to feed deceits to the Nazis, because
scientists and military personnel, returning from Britain, were
so often guests there awaiting the Atlantic fogs to lift. The
fine colleen on the hotel switchboard kept us informed of the
many telephone calls the German agents put through to their
embassy in Dublin.
Those of us in scientific work were always aware that
some absurd story we invented for enemy consumption, so
they would waste their skilled personnel on its verification,
might well become a reality next yearso rapid is progress in
science. In that event, our men disseminating the Jules Verne
tale might be accused of a horrible breach of security, but
that was the risk of the game and we boldly assumed it. I am
truly thankful that no "death ray" was discovered until very
recently, as we used that hardy perennial to good effect, again
and again.
A most important field of deception and concealment
concerned the landing of spies and saboteurs on enemy-occu-
pied coastlines, and at the exact spot where he or she would
be met by friendly personnel from the underground organiza-
tions. This proved to be a most difficult problem for us to
solve. Such landings had to be made on nights with no moon.
Early in the war fixed lights and blinkers were used on the
shore to mark the rendezvous, but enemy airplanes and sur-
face vessels often spotted them. Many an agent and his re-
68
CAMOUFLAGE
ception committee of resistance fighters were surrounded,
picked up and summarily shot
The ideal shore signal to guide the O.S.S. agent to the
selected place was an ultra-violet beacon. A small UV bulb,
powered by a single dry-cell battery, would flash intermit-
tently for almost a year. The difficulty arose when we found
that even a person with superior eyesight could pick out the
ultra-violet signal in the blackness of night only from a dis-
tressingly short range. I could not detect it at all beyond one
hundred feet I was about to abandon the UV system of land-
ing signal as worthless, when a surgeon specializing in cataract
removals told me by chance that patients who had undergone
that operation had extraordinary sensitivity to ultra-violet
light. We asked for volunteers and tested several people whose
cataracts had been removed. To our astonishment we found
that they could see and pinpoint the little, flashing ultra-
violet light from over a mile away, whereas the rest of us could
see nothing but inky blackness.
Brave, elderly people, so selected, guided our operators
infallibly to these normally invisible rendezvous. I am certain
the Germans and the Japanese never had the faintest idea of
how it was done.
69
5
THE LETHBRIDGE REPORT
Few officers, even those with great responsibility in the
conduct of the war, knew of The Lethbridge Report. It ranks
along with the Manhattan Project (MED) as one of the best
kept secrets of the war.
The Chemical Corps of the Army had developed a series
of gases for use on limited objectives. The mustard gases and
their derivatives had been replaced by nerve gases. These or-
ganic phosphates create casualties before the senses can de-
tect them. Called "Sarin" or "GB," they are most effective in
local tactical use.
Two nations refused, years ago, to sign that part of the
Geneva Convention banning the use of gas as a weapon in
warfare; these two nations could, therefore, use it legally.
They were the United States and Japan. In June of 1944
the next military objective in the campaign against Japan was
the volcanic cone called Iwo Jima. Someone in the Joint
Chiefs of Staff asked the British liaison for advice. The result
was the Lethbridge Report.
What it recommended was i) jamming the Iwo Jima
70
THE LETHBRIDGE REPORT
radio transmitter; 2) with our fleet standing at optimum
range (about five miles) , soak the little island with gas shells;
and 3) change the yellow banding of the shells so even the
gunners would never know they had fired other than high
explosive shells, a few of which were to be interspersed with
the gas.
After a short time, when natural decontamination had
made the island safe, our forces were to land and without a
single casualty capture a vital stepping-stone to Tokyo.
The Lethbridge Report contained a map of Iwo Jima
showing the only beach on which troops could land. It was
small and, said the report, it was checker-boarded. By that it
was meant that each square yard could receive a shell from
the fortifications above. No cover no hiding place. Estimated
casualties by such orthodox assault 2 3,000 men.
I was told that this hush-hush plan had been approved
in secret by the Joint Chiefs and that it only required "Thea-
tre Commander Approval," namely Admiral Chester W.
Nimitz. Our chief in Hawaii, Commander Davis Hallowell,
asked me to fly out there. The Sunday before I was to leave
June 25, 1944! had lunch at the Chevy Chase Club outside
Washington with Secretary of the Navy James ForrestaL He
gave me verbal mesages for Admiral Niinitz and said, "You
know, if Nimitz continues to show the genius he has so
far demonstrated, he'll end this war as the greatest naval com-
mander since Horatio Nelson/'
As I flew to San Francisco, the Democratic Convention
was in full swing. Amid a pandemonium of cheers, Franklin
D. Roosevelt was nominated for a fourth term as President.
No one seemed to be concerned with the identity of his run-
ning mate, but we in O.S.S. cared. We had seen a report
71
THE LETHBRIDGE REPORT
from the Lahey Clinic in Boston whose doctors, after examin-
ing the President, stated that he would not survive another
term. One could not share such information. Our mission was
entirely military, not civilian. So off I went to the Pacific
Theatre.
That flight from Treasure Island in San Francisco to
Pearl Harbor was memorable, to put it mildly. The pilot of
the flying boat happened to be a man I had flown with before
and he recognized me. He took me aside before we were air-
borne and said, "Lovell, I'm going to trust you with some-
thing that would cost me my rating. These antique old planes
they give us on this long run over the ocean are really in ter-
rible shape. We have a planeload of admirals this afternoon,
and tonight I'm going to put on a show so well have decent
equipment on this Pearl Harbor run. Whatever happens don't
be upset." I thanked him and said I wouldn't.
In the middle of the night our pilot barked over the in-
tercom, "Number One port engine is failing, gentlemen. I'm
switching it off/' At once we flew on a thirty degree cant.
The intercom spoke again. "We're in for some more trouble
with this old flying boat. I'm getting pretty bad vibration."
Aeronautics is outside my ken, but I vaguely recalled being
told that, if you change the pitch of your propellers on a four-
engine plane just right, you can set up a devastating vibration.
Whatever our demon pilot did, the result was an aircraft that
shook from stem to stern in a petrifying manner.
Again the intercom. "We're going to climb all we can
and then do a power dive to try to get our dead engine firing.
Thank you."
I wondered if what was intended to scare Navy brass into
ordering better planes had turned into the real tiling. That
72
THE LETHBRIDGE REPORT
power dive was never forgotten by anyone aboard. Finally,
when we all felt we would dive straight into the black Pacific
Ocean, the engine caught on and stayed firing. Maybe our
pilot simply threw on the ignition, but my relief was so great
I neither knew nor cared. We were an utterly exhausted lot
as we taxied on the water at Hickain Field. On every hand,
the navy officers were saying to me and to each other that
these obsolete flying boats must be scrapped and proper
planes be ordered for the Hawaiian run. That was the last use
of the flying boats by the Navy on that long over-water course.
Despite my tip-off, I had died the coward's thousand deaths,
along with all the other passengers.
In Admiral Nimitz' office, I used as my introduction a
current copy of Time, which had his picture on the cover. I
said to him, "I had lunch with Secretary Forrestal two days
ago. He told me, 'If you, Admiral, continue your fine work,
you'll end this war as the greatest naval commander since
Horatio Nelson!' "
Admiral Nimitz threw his head down on his desk in a
mock sob. I was amazed. He looked up with a twinkle in his
blue eyes and cried out, "Oh my Godi Only since Nelson?"
Forrestal, whom I found to have absolutely no sense of
humor, commanded this naval genius with a priceless sense
of it a man who knew how to fend off and joke about a great
but embarrassing compliment, however sincere and deserved.
Much later, Admiral Nimitz referred to the Nelson com-
parison by telling me, "There's one way I resemble him . . .
both of us get awfully seasick the first few days at sea. Do
you?"
I had to boast that I had never been seasick.
"That's quite a boast, Lovell."
73
THE LETHBRIDGE REPORT
We discussed the Lethbridge Report. The enormous
casualties estimate impressed him, but not decisively. When
I pointed out that for twenty-eight years the Japanese had
built tunnels and poured concrete until Iwo was stronger
than Gibraltar; that an orthodox shelling would give us an
island of rubble, whereas gas would allow all their labor to be
employed in defense of the island fort then he was for it, I
thought
I explained the O.S.S. strategy. The Japanese had a great
fear that America was creating new weapons to destroy them.
We could use that to deceive them. Have Admiral Halsey ra-
dio Admiral Nimitz, using a code we knew they had "broken."
Have him say our new death ray was tried out on such and
such an uninhabited island with tethered animals on it. All
animals died instantly at a range of ten miles, but sorry to
report eighty-five natives living on a small island directly in
line with this test were all killed, although twenty miles be-
hind the test island.
Then jam the Iwo Jima radio so they cannot report.
Then the shells of gas and ultimately our landing and capture
of Iwo. Tokyo would most certainly attribute the radio silence
to the new American death ray.
When my orders came through to return to Washing-
ton, instead of air travel they read "Fox 1 3." There I reported
to Captain D. E. Wilcox of the baby flat-top, Thetisf Bay
CVE go. He assigned me to the navigator's cabin a little
cubicle high up on the "island." The navigator went below
and there I swayed and rocked across the Pacific doing an in-
credible arc that would make a porpoise seasick. Capt. Wil-
cox was to report how soon I had mal de mer. I didn't.
74
THE LETHBRIDGE REPORT
Half way to California I was called to the bridge where
a "pip" was showing on the iconoscope.
"It's a Jap sub," Capt. Wilcox said. "It's a shame we
have only one gun and that's aft on the fantail Every time we
maneuver to get it to bear, the damned sub eludes us, then
picks us up a bit later."
It was a foggy gray morning. I knew very little about
radar or sonar, so I looked over the side of the small bridge
into the sea where we might all very well be in a short while.
A yellow mass rose out of the water. I called Capt. Wilcox
away from the hypnotic "pip" on the instrument "It's a
whale," I said, pointing.
That night they presented me with a "Plankowner's Cer-
tificate." "The lesson," said the too generous Capt. Wilcox,
"was not to rely so goddam much on instruments and to use
our eyes once in awhile. If we'd reported that we fired on a
whale, we'd been the laughing stock of Alameda."
In Washington I was told that the Lethbridge Report,
approved on all sides, had gone to the White House. It had
been returned, "All prior endorsements denied Franklin D.
Roosevelt, Commander-in-Chief."
Each reader will have his own opinion about whether
this denial of the use of gas was wise or not
I do know that the most famous picture taken in the
war shows the flag-raising on Mount Surabachi at Iwo Jima.
It's an inspiring photo, the men struggling to put Old Glory
erect and straight, the wind whipping the time-honored stars
and stripes. I have seen usually unemotional men catch their
breath as they gaze on that photograph. I, too, catch my
breath. I think of 20,000 American casualties on Iwo Jima,
I have written that I found Secretary Forrestal to have
75
THE LETHBRIDGE REPORT
had no sense of humor. Opinions vary as to how essential this
quality is in a great wartime administrator. Perhaps it cannot
exist in the personality of a successful stockbroker, most of
whom I suspect are manic depressives or incurable Pollyannas.
At Pearl Harbor Headquarters, Admiral Forrest Sherman
told me the Navy joke at Leyte. It seems that at one side of
the island ran a deep gut or passage with a small rocky islet
beyond. Here Leyte ended in a rather steep cliff down to the
ocean a natural place for the Army to construct their latrines
and multiple Chic Sales seats. With the thoroughness of
Army routine at a certain time every morning, here were
seated, said the Admiral, a long line of G.I.'s whose peristaltic
routine was thereby expedited.
At that precise time a Navy Destroyer Escort, barely able
to negotiate the narrow passage, came high-balling through
at absolute top speed. Swoosh and she was through, but her
wake was tremendous and the unfortunate soldiers, concen-
trating on nature's oldest problem, found themselves in water
up to their armpits. The Navy men called it "The Navy
Douche" and held it to be both sanitary and timely.
When I reported to Secretary Forrestal on my visit to
Admiral Nimitz, I told him the verbal messages entrusted to
me. I then said, "The favorite joke in the P.O.A. (Pacific
Ocean Area) is the Leyte one/' I fear I laughed several times
in the telling. Not so Secretary Forrestal. He called for his
aide, Captain John Gingrich. "Take an order to CINCPOA
(Commander in Chief Pacific Ocean Area) Stop repeat stop
Navy insult to Army comrades at Leyte so-called Navy
Douche. Report when order executed."
When discussing gas warfare, there's always the question
raised, why wasn't it used in World War II? Doesn't the fact
76
THE LETHBRIDGE REPORT
that neither side employed it prove that where two warring
nations have a powerful weapon in equal strength, then
neither will use it? Doesn't it have a parallel in the present
nuclear bomb stalemate where both the USSR and the USA
can destroy each other, so neither will?
Gas was withheld neither because of humanitarian rea-
sons or because we feared retaliation. Let's dismiss the argu-
ment that gas was not employed because it was too inhumane
and horrible. The fact is, the sole business of war is to till,
slaughter, maim and incapacitate human beings. Once war is
declared, to reason is treason. Start killing and a soldier who
kills twenty-eight Germans is rewarded twenty-eight fold over
the soldier who kills only one. And, oddly enough, gas war-
fare need not kill your enemy. It may be far smarter to use a
gas that bewilders him so that, for an hour or more, he simply
can't think. Perhaps best of all would be to employ a gas
which completely although temporarily removes the thin
veneer of civilization which overlays the troglodyte in all of
us. For the first time since Cain killed Abel this would make
warfare highly amusing. Khrushchev and his shoe-banging
would be trivial compared to what most private soldiers would
do to their officer corps.
We knew the Germans had large stores of Gas Blau, the
nerve gas that reacts with cholinesterase to disrupt bodily
nerve messages. Symptoms proceed from vomiting to convul-
sions and death. Why didn't Hitler use it at the Normandy
landings, June 6, 1944?
At the time of the War Trials at Nuremberg, General
Donovan was asked to submit questions to the German
leaders, although the O.S.S. no longer existed. Gen. Donovan
asked me if I had any ideas. I suggested "Why no nerve gas
77
THE LETHBRIDGE REPORT
*
at Normandy?" and directed it to Marshal Goering. The
transcript of the interview, which was made, I believe, two
days before he crunched the cyanide capsule that ended his
fantastic life, can be paraphrased as follows:
Q. We know you had Gas Blau which would have
stopped the Normandy invasion. Why didn't you use it?
A. Die Pferde (the horses) .
Q. What have horses to do with it?
A. Everything. A horse lies down in the shafts or be-
tween the thills as soon as his breathing is restricted. We
never have had a gas mask a horse would tolerate.
Q. What has that to do with Normandy?
A. We did not have enough gasoline to adequately sup-
ply the German Air Force and the Panzer Divisions, so we
used horse transport in all operations. You must have known
that the first thing we did in Poland, France, everywhere, was
to seize the horses. All our materiel was horse-drawn. Had we
used gas you would have retaliated and you would have in-
stantly immobilized us.
Q, Was it that serious, Marshal?
A, I tell you, you would have won the war years ago if
you had used gasnot on our soldiers, but on our transporta-
tion system. Your intelligence men are asses!
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SCHEMES THAT FAILED TO WORK
It was my policy to consider any method whatever that
might aid the war, however unorthodox or untried. In the
very nature of such thinking it became obvious that we would
have failures. It also was obvious that the orthodox military
mind would likely be opposed to any idea not taught at West
Point or Annapolis.
The basic philosophy behind the O.S.S. attitude was
that one subtle, deceptive plan, if successful, was worth a
hundred routine military decisions. American wits and in-
ventiveness were applied to both implementing the resistance
groups in all occupied countries and, hopefully, to make a
decisive stroke beyond the purview or technique of standard
warfare.
Some problems of great importance, where the solution
would have had inestimable value, could not be answered.
Such a problem was named "Simultaneous Events/* Every
underground organization from Norway to Italy asked for it.
The idea was to produce a switch or other means of activating
79
SCHEMES THAT FAILED TO WORK
a charge of high explosives, which would be unaffected by
any outside source except an air raid.
With such a device the operator in, say, a German city
could secretly plant his charge of explosives at any worthwhile
site, such as a German-controlled communication center, a
power plant, a dam or an ammunition dump. The operator's
safety would be insured, as nothing would happen until an
Allied air raid took place. At that time the target would blow
up and the blast would be blamed on the airplane bombings.
This would furnish an ideal alibi for the underground opera-
tor, as he never could be associated in any way with enemy
raids. Also, he could pinpoint the damage to the installations
whore it would hurt the Germans the most
I put the finest brains of the O.S.R.D. on this project
We approached it from two angles; one was the ground
shock of a raid, the other a chorded radio signal to be sent
from one of the bombers. If the ground tremor could be made
to activate the planted explosion, it would be the simpler so-
lution, as the radio signal necessitated an antenna which
would be difficult to conceal.
Nothing we invented ever passed our user tests and trials.
The ground shock devices would detonate prematurely from
a falling wall or a passing heavy truck. The radio signal de-
pended on dry cell batteries for reception, as well as an objec-
tionable antenna. When Germany surrendered we were still
working on "Simultaneous Events/ 7
In wartime, every change in the world scene presents to
a group of secret warriors like ours in the Q.S.S. a chance to
reexainine and reappraise the situation. We asked, "what new
points of vulnerability are now exposed? What avenues of at-
80
SCHEMES THAT FAILED TO WORK
tack are newly opened what old ones must be instantly aban-
doned?"
I had repeatedly pointed out in O.S.S. staff meetings the
often-forgotten fact that the great advantage a democracy
possessed over any dictatorship was the government's relative
invulnerability, as opposed to the terrific risks inherent in any
one-man rule. I said, "Lop off the head and the body falls/'
With Hitler and Mussolini dead it would be safe to pre-
dict chaos or, at the very least, a murderous scramble for their
empty chairs. A democracy, on the other hand, has its succes-
sion legally established and usually functions about as well
when its titular head is dead or incapacitated. The United
States did not collapse after the assassination of Lincoln or
Garfield or McKinley. It is a result, I hold, of a stable two-
party system.
Contrast this with Alexander's empire after his death,
the turmoil in Rome after Caesar's assassination or France
after Napoleon. Another way of comparing the two types of
society is to say that a democracy is a pyramid structure with
its broad, solid base in the grass-roots. Dictatorship is an in-
verted pyramid, teetering on its apex and thus unstable, tem-
porary and vulnerable.
One day we learned from agents that Hitler and Musso-
lini were to have a war conference at the Brenner Pass. Here
was a tremendous exposure of the vulnerable apex. At an
O.S.S. meeting, the S.O. (Subversive Operations) group sug-
gested, "Let us parachute a cadre of our toughest men into
the area and shoot up the bastards! Sure, it'll be a suicide op-
eration, but that's what we're organized to carry out"
When it came my turn, General Donovan asked, "How
would Professor Moriarty capitalize on this situation?" I said,
81
SCHEMES THAT FAILED TO WORK
"I propose an attack which they cannot anticipate. They'll
meet in the conference room of an inn or a hotel. If we can
have one operator for five minutes or less in that room, just
before they gather there, that is really all we need."
There were many murmurs of none-too-polite skepti-
cism, but General Donovan said, "Gentlemen, hear Professor
Moriarty out, if you please. Now what do you propose to have
your one man do in this conference room?"
I said, "I suggest that he bring a vase filled with cut
flowers in water, and that he place it on the conference table
or nearby."
"So what?" said a general on the O.S.S. staff. He was a
West Pointer and they hadn't taught dirty tricks at his trade
school.
"In this janitor's hand is a capsule containing liquid ni-
trogen-mustard gas. It's a new chemical derivative which has
BO odor whatever, is colorless and floats on water. I have it
available at my laboratory.
"As our man places the big bouquet on the conference
table, he crushes the capsule and drops it in between the flow-
ers. An invisible, oily film spreads over the water in the dish
and starts vaporizing. Our man is safely out and I think he
should disappear into Switzerland if possible."
"Forget our agent," said the general. "What happens
to the men at the conference?"
"Well, if they are in that room for twenty minutes, the
invisible gas will have the peculiar property of affecting their
bodies through the naked eyeballs. Everyone in that room
wffl be permanently blinded. The optic nerve will be atro-
phied and never function again. A blind leader can't continue
the war-at least I don't believe he can/'
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SCHEMES THAT FAILED TO WORK
Three or four people started talking at once. I said,.
"There's a big pay-off possible, if it is done."
"What's that, Professor?" *
"Let's be completely bold in capitalizing on the event
If the Pope in Rome would issue a Papal Bull or whatever ii
appropriate, it might read something like this:
" 'My children, God in His infinite wisdom has stricken
your leaders blind. His sixth Commandment is Thou Shalt
Not Kill. This blindness of your leaders is a warning that you
should lay down your arms and return to the ways of peace/ "
I turned to General Donovan and asked, "General, this
may appear to be a suggestion of hypocrisy that the Pope is
asked to practice, but a great number of the German and
Italian fighting forces are Roman Catholics. They will heed
Pius XII. If he can use his high office to stop this killing, isn't
he advancing the cause of Christianity more than any man on
earth?"
General Donovan said, "Hm" and looked out the win-
dow in that way he had of weighing a sensitive issue,
"I'll see my friend about that idea, Professor Moriarty,"
he said, mentioning the name of a high church official.
He turned to the group with the same sort of anticipatory
smile Groucho Marx has when he is about to launch a wise-
crack.
"You see, Gentlemen," he said, "why we have so de-
praved an idea man as Professor Moriarty on the staff! If he
had been born a German I wouldn't give ten cents for Frank-
lin Roosevelt's life."
I couldn't resist it. "But General," I said, "I was born
a Cape Cod Republican."
"You see?" said Wild Bill. "A villain, a scientific thug
83
SCHEMES THAT FAILED TO WORK
with a sense of humor. He knows that I'm a Republican, too,
so it's a double-edged pleasantry."
The Brenner Pass idea deserves only a few more words.
I can say that the German security service showed again that
clever (too clever) thinking which so many times saved the
life of der Fiihrer. With all preparations made for the confer-
ence as and when publicized, the two leaders, Hitler and
Mussolini, met elsewhere. At the very last minute they
changed the date as well. I was told they met in Hitler's pri-
vate railroad car with a ring of S.S. troops thrown tightly
around it.
The nitrogen mustard gas capsule was never crushed,
and the O.S.S. had this time failed to change the course of
history. But we had tried and that thinking, by itself, was a
new way for America to wage a war. I submit it as more in-
telligent by far than killing a man in the enemy's uniform a
man unknown to you, set on killing you only because he is so
ordered, but without power or responsibility. You win the
game much faster if you checkmate the King and treat the
pawns as the relatively unimportant nuisances they are. They
always surrender when told to do so.
My favorite attack on Adolf Hitler was a glandular ap-
proach. America's top diagnosticians and gland experts agreed
with me that he was definitely close to the male-female line.
His poor emotional control, his violent passions, his selection
of companions like Roehm, all led me to feel that a push to
the female side might do wonders. The hope was that his
moustache would fall off and his voice become soprano.
Hitler was a vegetarian. At Berchtesgaden, the vegetable
garden that supplied his melodramatic Eagle's Nest on the
rocky peak had to have gardeners. A pkn to get an O.S.S.
84
SCHEMES THAT FAILED TO WORK
man there, or an anti-Nazi workman, was approved. I supplied
female sex hormones and, just for variety's sake, now and then
a carbamate or other quietus medication, all to be injected
into der Fiihrer's carrots, beets or whatever went up to his
larder.
Since he survived, I can only assume that the gardener
took our money and threw the syringes and medications into
the nearest thicket. Either that or Hitler had a big turnover
in his "tasters/'
I explored with specialists the theory that Hitler was an
epileptic the petit mal type. The stories of his biting rugs
might mean a catalepsis or epileptoid condition. Dr. Elmer
Bartels, a famous authority on the ductless glands and a keen
student of medical history, holds that Hitler, Napoleon, Julius
Caesar and probably Alexander the Great were all epileptics.
What is it about that disease that leads its victims to world
conquest? We made a study of how to accelerate the disease
or, conversely, overcome it and hopefully get Herr Schickel-
graber down to normalcy. Nothing came of it, but again we
tried.
Another plan that failed was the brain child of Lieuten-
ant (j.g.) John M. Shaheen, later a Navy Captain. Shaheen
was a fertile source of unorthodox ideas. His project was
called "Campbell." It comprised a small boat operated by
remote control and television. He took a Hacker craft, had it
loaded with five tons of high explosive and equipped with
triggers in the bow and contact firing devices around the gun-
wales.
This thirty-seven foot bomb was then disguised as a fish-
ing boat, like he hundreds of Japanese fishermen going into
Japanese harbors each nightfall with their day's catch. John
85
SCHEMES THAT FAILED TO WORK
Shaheen was no man to stop with only the idea. A craft which
duplicated Copenhagen fishing boats was built. The dummy
fisherman at the tiller moved realistically. A condemned
freighter, the S.S. San Pablo, was the target ship. Guided by
the remote control operator, Shaheen's "Campbell" ma-
neuvered around buoys and hit the San Pablo amidships. She
sank by the stem and was under water in one minute and a
half.
Armed with a fine moving picture of the whole operation
Lt Shaheen, Colonel Edward Bigelow of O.S.S. and myself
made our presentation before Navy officers on Plans and Op-
erations- It was obvious the Navy would have to carry the
explosive craft to its enemy harbor entrance. At the end of
a most convincing session, one veteran Admiral spoke up.
"It's ingenious? but we won't buy it. It's certainly too
dangerous as a deck load on any of our vessels, and we aren't
going to risk a submarine to cany it. You get it to Tokyo har-
bor and our men will handle the remote controls from a Navy
plane. Let us know when you have it off on its mission/'
Colonel Bigelow said, "Johnny, & you have is a can of
film and a big idea/' And that was the end of "Campbell."
On one of his flying visits to Washington, Admiral Mil-
ton Miles came to see me. With him was Dr. Cecil Coggins,
a Navy Captain, who was returning with "Mary" Miles to
Chungking to teach in the Chinese School of Assassination
and Sabotage under General Tai Li.
They wanted to furnish some poison or toxin to Chinese
prostitutes, which these girls could employ against the high-
ranking Japanese officers with whom they consorted in Pei-
piag, Shanghai and many other occupied Chinese cities. It
was delicately explained to me that the poison had to be in a
86
SCHEMES THAT FAILED TO WORK
very clever form, almost invisible, as these Chinese girls, in
the nature of their work, had little chance to conceal anything
whatsoever.
We decided on botulinus toxin, that is, the inert poison
developed by the botulinus bacterium. This was selected be-
cause it is a natural toxin, often found in vegetables, sausages
and other foodstuffs which are inadequately cooked. It is so
deadly that housewives tasting string beans put up by the
cold pack methods have been instantly killed by eating a
single bean. Botulism would be likely to divert suspicion from
the Chinese hostesses.
Our bacteriological consultants suggested the virulent
toxin be encased in a gelatine capsule. The lethal dose was so
infinitesimally small that gelatine coating and all, it was less
than the size of the head of a common pin.
Instructions were to wet the minute speck and stick it
back of the ear or in the hair of the head. When needed, it
was to be detached and dropped into a drink or a serving of
soft food, leaving no evidence of unnatural additives or tam-
pering.
We supplied these deadly specks to Admiral Miles
through Dr. Coggins. Admiral Miles had arranged with me
that, if the operations were successful, I would be advised by
radio that the "tea gardens were in bloom." If it failed, then
the tea gardens were not flowering.
Some time later the radio message was received by me
and, "no flowers at all/ 7 I assumed that the botulinus toxin
had somehow lost its potency, so I abandoned the project
forthwith. Only much later did I get the true story. The Navy
detail at Chungking took nothing for granted, so they admin-
87
SCHEMES THAT FAILED TO WORK
istered the little gelatine pills to donkeys. Nothing happened,
consequently they reasoned that the toxin was harmless. They
didn't know that donkeys are one of the few living creatures
immune to botulism. Poor Lotus Blossom.
7
HYPNOTISM
In the O.S.S. we were anxious to know if we could use
posthypnotic suggestion as one of our stratagems. Would it
work? I asked two of the most famous psychiatrists in the
country about it and had them come to O.S.S. headquarters
for a thorough discussion of the subject.
If we could repeatedly hypnotize a German prisoner of
war, learn that his loved ones were being persecuted by Hey-
drich or the Gestapo and then through hypnotism stimulate
and activate that sore spot, something might be accomplished.
On my favorite thesis that, if you cut off the head, the body
falls, we hoped to so indoctrinate such a German, posthyp-
notically, that, if we smuggled him into Berlin or Berchtes-
gaden, he would assassinate Hitler in that posthypnotic state,
being under a compulsion that might not be denied.
Both the Doctor brothers Karl and William Menninger
and Doctor Lawrence S. Kubie, to whom I referred the
scheme, hedged on it.
"There is no evidence," the Menningers said, "that sup-
ports posthypnotic acts, especially where the individual's
89
HYPNOTISM
mores or morals produce the slightest conflict within him. A
man to whom murder is repugnant and immoral cannot be
made to override that personal tabu/'
Dr. Kubie said, "If your German prisoner-of-war has
adequate and logical reasons to kill Hitler, Heydrich or any-
one else you don't need hypnotism to incite or motivate him.
If he hasn't, I am skeptical that it will accomplish anything."
Thus advised by our best experts, I was understandably
a bit cynical when Colonel Buxton invited me to meet a hyp-
notist in his office one who alleged he was a master of post-
hypnotic suggestion.
I encountered a gentleman from South Carolina, whom
I will call Mr. Yancey. He told us, "I have two soldiers at a
nearby camp whom I have hypnotized frequently and know
are fine subjects. Let me bring them to your office, Colonel
Buxton, and 111 prove I can produce posthypnotic action/'
So we met the next day. The two G.I.s were something
out of Li'l Abner, I thought, right off some impoverished
South Carolina farm. I suspected their Army issue shoes might
be the first ones they ever wore.
Mr. Yancey went into his act He mesmerized the two
soldiers to whom hypnotic sleep seemed to be but a small step
away from their normal state. Once under the influence, Yan-
cey told them, "It is now ten o'clock. At precisely eleven
o'clock you will come again to this room. You will sit down
and suddenly you'll have a terrible itch on the soles of both
feet. You will take off your shoes and your socks because you
just have to scratch that itch/'
They were then dismissed, presumably to get in an hour
with some cans of beer. At exactly eleven o'clock the hypno-
tist and cretins appeared. As an extra fillip Colonel Buxton
90
HYPNOTISM
had General John Magruder in his office. With a rather silly
smirk the two G.I.s sat down. They looked at the office clock.
It showed exactly eleven. Both young privates began to unlace
their shoes and pull off their heavy wool socks. A certain
aroma wafted its fetid way through the office.
Slowly, each now scratched and massaged his bony and
scabrous feet. Both seemed to me to be pedal exhibitionists
they obviously enjoyed waving these ugly, loathsome cal-
loused monstrosities about. It was the most necessary itch of
all time.
"Here, here," admonished Colonel Buxton, "don't you
see there's a General here? What's the matter with your feet?"
"Gotta scratch 'em-itch like hell"
"Oh/' said hypnotist Yancey. "Put your socks and shoes
back on and wait out in the hallway/'
"Well, how about that!" Yancey asked when they had
left.
"Horsefeathers," I observed none too scientifically.
"What private in the whole U.S. Army wouldn't enjoy taking
off his shoes and socks before a general when he knew in ad-
vance he couldn't be disciplined for so doing? It's a wonder
they kept their pants on."
91
"CJ2"
I have wanted very much to identify and to validate the
story that circulated in Q.S.S. after the Tehran conference,
where Roosevelt and Churchill were at their ministries at one
end of the city and the meetings with Stalin were held at the
other end of town.
The agent whom I knew only as C-i2 made an admirable
showing during his training period. He passed the bridge test
with high marks. A group of men were left beside a stream.
A pile of lumber was situated there, and the problem was to
fit the timbers together without anyone going to the other
bank. No one piece of wood was long enough to span the wa-
ter. When the exhibitionists had been quieted by their fail-
ure, C-i2 calmly took charge. He ordered the planks sorted
out as to size and finally got the job done. He scored 100 on
the leadership test
C-12 tore Baltimore apart on his final examination in
January of 1943. He was left outside the city with no identi-
fication whatever, only a ten-dollar bill on his person. The
problem was to bring back evidence that he had secured em-
92
"C-12"
ployment in a factory engaged in war work of a highly classi-
fied nature. To make the assignment doubly impossible the
local police, the FBI and Army Intelligence were all told by
anonymous phone calls that a German spy fitting his descrip-
tion would be at the Emerson Hotel at 9: 30 A.M.
He lost the inevitable "tail" by ducking across the street
into the Equitable Building but, instead of the sure-tobe-
caught technique of riding the elevators, C-12 ran down a
stairway into the basement, through the boiler-room and out
into an alley. He whipped through a basement and up into
what proved to be the Western Union office on St. Paul
Street There he was given directions to the addresses he had
checked off in the Baltimore Sun classified advertising section.
At the American Radiator Standard Sanitary plant, he
filled out the forms; he was given a job on amphibious jeeps,
to begin the next day. He promised to have his birth certifi-
cate mailed to the company in a few days.
It had been so easy for a potential saboteur to walk in off
the street and, with a glib tongue and an honest face, stroll
out with credentials of employment, that C-i2 took on the
Lever Brothers factory. The guard at the gate told him they
made nitro-glycerin. When C-i2 said to the personnel mana-
ger that he had worked for years for Procter and Gamble in
California, the latter agreed to put him on the payroll as a
roving operator in production. Left alone in the office (it was
Saturday afternoon) , C-12 went on a tour of the entire plant.
He stole an employment card to help pass his exam at the
O.S.S. training camp.
By three that afternoon he had two jobs and seven hours
to kill until he was to be picked up at the Emerson Hotel. He
decided to manufacture some impressive credentials for him-
93
"C-12"
self. He had a passport photograph taken; he telephoned the
Public Relations office of Army Intelligence in Washington
and an obliging girl gave him the address of the Baltimore
branch with the name of the Commanding Officer.
At the Third Service Command he hung up his coat and
hat and told a junior officer he was the G-2 Inspector from
Fort Banks. Explaining he had to type a most confidential
letter, he was given some letterhead stationery and the use of
a typewriter by a corporal. He went out to a store, bought a
cheap identification card case, returned to the office and typed
out and stapled his own identification card. He countersigned
it (probably with the name of G-2 chief Major General
George V. Strong) and took a taxi to Holabird Arsenal.
The faked paper was never questioned and he had a fine
dinner at the Officer's Club- As he left he picked up an im-
pressive looking briefcase and made his ten P.M. appointment
just in time. C-i2 passed his examination all too brilliantly.
The papers in the briefcase he had lifted were classified
"Secret/" The two employment cards caused the unemploy-
ment of some personnel managers. The FBI, the Baltimore
police and Washington's Army Intelligence were seething.
With sound reason they held that they had been grossly
misused by this bunch of amateur spies, and that it was par-
ticularly galling to receive bogus tips on spies in training. C-12
went a bit too far or was a bit too brilliant, perhaps.
The story of what he did in the Middle East must be
written by me with the reservation that I will make at the end.
He was sent to Baghdad as an intelligence agent, I was told.
Orders came for him to be parachuted into Dohuk. Speaking
Kurdish was a great asset to C-i2, but so was penicillin, strep-
and such simple anti-febriles as aspirin and codeine.
94
"c-ir
His life with the Kurdish tribesmen in the Zagros mountains
is lost in obscurity, but it's easy to imagine, in the tradition
of spy romances, his curing the chieftain's daughter of her
fever or relieving the old boy himself of the arthritic pains in
his joints.
One dayand I follow the only story I was told word
came that a small group of men had fallen from the sky into
a valley a kilometer or so away. At the head of a Kurdish
group, C-12 and the group rode over on ponies to meet them.
Their German was an open book to him, but he used only a
few French words by means of which he became their inter-
preter.
It was evident they planned to go to Tehran to assassi-
nate Roosevelt and Churchill. They knew that these two men
would have to drive the length of the town daily to meet at
the Russian Ministry with Joseph Stalin. A heavy load they
were carrying was identified by G-i2 as trinitrotoluol, al-
though the Germans called it paraffine de pefrole.
When they said, in halting French, that they wanted a
guide to take them to Sulaimaniya and Tehran, C-i2 volun-
teered, but only for a fat fee in rials and dinars. It was the late
autumn of 1943 and the mountainous trip was an ordeal. At
last they came into the city. C-iz spoke Farsi and had no
trouble renting a single-story house on Ferdousi Avenue, the
road Roosevelt and Churchill had to travel each day to their
conferences.
In the cellar they dug a tunnel under the street In the
center they placed their whole lot of T.N.T. enough to blow
up the entire area and Roosevelt and Churchill with it. Now
everything was exactfy as the German saboteurs had planned
it, but where were the detonators with which the high ex-
95
plosive had to be set off? C-12 knew where they were, as he
had hidden them securely. A frantic search was made while
C-12 slipped away.
Our O.S.S. operator reported at the U.S. Ministry at the
north end of town beyond the Ferdousi statue and proved to
the officials there that his flea-infested, billowy pants and tas-
seled turban covered an authentic Colonel, AUS. A cadre of
U.S. troops quietly surrounded the house with its tunnel un-
der the street and removed the T.N.T. Roosevelt and
Churchill were summarily moved across Tehran to the Russian
headquarters. The Germans were shot. In a borrowed uni-
form, C-i2, smart as all get-out, was given an appointment
with the President, whose life he had surely saved. Dreams of
the Congressional Medal of Honor went 'round in his head. A
Presidential aide later told the story.
Instead of thanks or praise for a daring and successful
rescue of two invaluable lives, he was verbally castigated. Why
had he risked the life of his Commander-in-Chief , when the
German assassins might have been arrested and executed the
instant they crossed the Iranian frontier? "But on what
grounds?" C-12 asked. "I had to wait until evidence was
clearly established. Germany is not at war with Iran and I
couldn't expose anything until the tunnel was dug and the
explosives placed in it"
A furious, unreasoned tirade followed. C-i2 was abruptly
ordered to return to Baghdad and to stay there. This was the
tale as C-i2 told it after the war was over.
Recently I located C-i2 under his present name, some
thousands of miles away from my Boston home. I asked for
permission to use his amazing and brave experience with or
without the use of his real or "cover" name anyway, so long
96
"C-12"
as this O.S.S. performance could be saved from the oblivion
which often overtakes so many noble deeds.
He wrote me, "I was never in Kurdistan in my life, I was
in Tehran months after the Roosevelt-Churchill-Stalin Con-
ference. A German plot to assassinate someone? Never heard
of it! You knew so many of our O.S.S. saboteurs and agents,
Lovell. Think hard it was someone else, not I"
I have "thought hard" but I cannot deny what my ears
have heard or reports my eyes have scanned. But why? What
possible pressure from what conceivable source would induce
a man, twenty years after the event, to deny a great act of
courage? Did he report a fabrication which he now dares not
have resurrected? Has he had a physical malaise that might
explain his denying it? Yes, he has had a "shock" and perhaps
the part of the brain in which memory is stored was badly
affected.
Whatever the reason, my tale has no more confirmation
than Horatio at the Bridge or Theseus and the Minotaur but
I choose to regard it as one of the outstanding exploits in the
history of O.S.S.
97
9
CHARACTERS
You would expect an agency such as the Office of Stra-
tegic Services to attract many unorthodox and rugged indi-
vidualsand you would be absolutely right.
I never discovered a common denominator that distin-
guished O..S, personnel. Love of high adventure would
perhaps approach it, yet, on the other hand, many a timid
man or woman, motivated by a deep patriotism or an equally
deep hatred of the enemy, outperformed the boys of derring-
do.
Our operators were picked to be either spies, gathering
and transmitting intelligence, or they were selected as sabo-
teurs, trained to weaken the enemy by deeds of violence. No
person could be both. The spy or intelligence agent had to
have a "cover" story, a fictional life, so intimately a part of
him by long practice and indoctrination that it became more
true to him than the reality of his existence before he joined
theO.S.S:
You will realize that a spy, infiltrated into an enemy
country with a clandestine radio, adequate papers, ration
98
CHARACTERS
cards, business letters, clothing, money and all other acces-
sories needed to make him authentically the person he pur-
ported to be-such a valuable agent could never risk or
endanger his established status by any act of violence. His
whole objective was information and no sabotage, however
tempting or apparently safe, could be hazarded.
Quite different was the role played by the Subversive
Operations people. Their training was in weapons, from sim-
ple incendiaries to what steel members of a bridge would best
cause its collapse if blown out. It was they who worked with
the secret underground in Europe and Asia. It was their aim
to bring to the subjugated peoples both leadership and our
best technology. Perhaps of equal importance, it was these
men who proved to all resistance groups that Uncle Sam 7 a
continent away, had not abandoned them to the Nazis and
the Japanese.
In both groups were hundreds of people, each of whom
would supply the material for a story or a character study.
Even though it now is two decades ago, I will limit myself to
a few I knew. To publicize others might be a great disservice
to them and to our country, as their value may not be at an
end.
Those I mention and describe are no longer sensitive.
As the Office of Strategic Services expanded its activities
in its unrehearsed and often unplanned way, it took into its
ranks the zealots and the con men Colonel Ned Buxton had
warned me about, but these were not difficult to identify and,
where possible, to isolate.
99
CHARACTERS
Impossible to classify by any standards whatever were
men, some in uniform, some civilians, who conformed to no
pattern and each of whom made his own rules as he went
along.
A big strapping Irishman named Sean O'Feeney was
outstandingly original, daring and utterly undisciplined. You
would recognize him more readily under his Hollywood name
of John Ford, the great motion picture director. He was just
under fifty years old, a Lieutenant Commander in the Navy.
General Donovan recruited him to make moving pictures of
O.S.S, projects and, knowing our director, Ford probably
was told to do whatever his great talent in pictorial presenta-
tion indicated as needing to be done. He certainly carried out
that broad instruction in the true Hollywood manner.
The first thing I knew, Ford had installed a complete,
continuous motion picture film developing, printing and du-
plicating machine in the Department of Agriculture building.
I believe it cost about a half-million dollars.
Proud of his Maine heritage, he made much of my Cape
Cod origins as causing us to be almost neighbors. Independ-
ent as a hog on ice, he would disappear for periods of time
and our 9 A.M. morning staff meetings would see him no
more. After one long absence he was welcomed back as a hero.
General Donovan told us, "Commander Ford has a story
to tell and some film to prove it" Ford took us to his pro-
jection room.
"I was flying to the China-Burma-India theater," he said,
"and the plane put down at Midway to re-fuel. Midway is a
mere dot on the goddam Pacific Ocean, and we had a hell of
a time finding it, what with our gas running low. I was
bushed and took my cameras to some quarters assigned me
100
CHARACTERS
for a nap. I barely made it when all hell broke loose a major
Jap air raid on the island.
"All I thought of was getting some films, so I took every-
thing in sight from the Jap pknes peeling off from formation
to the big gasoline reserve tanks going up in a burst of fire. I
kept the camera running until the raid was over. Here's what
I got" and an unbelievable film of a murderous assault from
the air came on the screen, leaving us breathless.
The only way anyone could concentrate on picture-tak-
ing in that inferno was if he imagined it to be a Hollywood
set instead of the real thing. Superb personal courage sub-
lime disregard of self one of the greatest films ever recorded,
where life surpassed art.
Several weeks later I noticed that Ford again was missing
at staff meetings. I mentioned it to Colonel Ned Buxton and
asked, "Is he off on another trip?"
"No. He's over at his office in the Agriculture building
like Achilles, sulking in his tent."
A few days later Ned said, "Stan, would you be willing
to call on John Ford and see what's eating him? General
Donovan asked me if you'd find out."
Couldn't the Director find out? "Hasn't 109 (The Gen-
eral) ordered him to report at staff meetings?"
"Yes, but he ignores the order. Get over and see if you
can straighten him out."
I went over and had a rather unhappy time with the
"Great Director." "Those staff meetings are just crap and
I've too much to do to waste time at them."
"Are you sure, John?" I asked, "it isn't because you
haven't been cited for the Congressional Medal or some other
101
CHARACTERS
ribbon to wear on your coat? That's Browning, you Peake's
Island egotist," and I stormed out
I didn't see Ford again until the summer of 1944. There
he was, beaming on one and all with another hero's introduc-
tion from General Donovan. Here is his story, and Tin sure
every word is true.
"I was ordered to photograph the Normandy landings
and had my cameras in the bow of the ship I was assigned to.
The morning I set them up there was just mist and fog
ahead nothing to put on film. Then I looked behind us and
there was the whole goddam invasion fleet. The bastards at
Admiral Ramsay's office had put me in the lead ship the one
that would bump every mine and beach obstacle the Nazis
had planted-
"We got through by ludk and here are the films." They
were magnificent, an historical document of Operation Over-
lord, from the first soldier who landed to a secured beachhead.
You'd forgive that insubordinate Hollywood director of any-
thing, everything.
He went on, "I got to London pretty well pooped and
remembered that my friend Alexander Korda had told me to
bunk in with him any time in his London flat. Korda was out
somewhere in the country, but his houseman put me up in
the apartment. Along one whole side against the windows
were hung the most magnificent stained glass windows-
priceless early primitives Korda had bought in Spain before
their Civil War could destroy them.
"Wham! The first of the V-i's (buzz bombs) exploded
a block away. I got the houseman to help and by working all
night we managed to get those invaluable windows off their
102
CHARACTERS
hangings and flat on the floor with all of Korda's oriental rugs
and blankets wrapped around them.
"The next morning I was in the toilet at the far end of
the apartment when a buzz-bomb hit in the mews outside the
bathroom window. I went sailing the length of the flat and
my face was cut in a dozen places. I slapped toilet paper on
the injuries to stop the bleeding and went to an O.S.S. address
to get it dressed.
44 'You can't fool us/ the receptionist said, 'that's no dis-
guise. You're John Ford/ Toilet paper!
"I went down country to Korda's estate and with great
pride told him, *Your flat's a mess, a V bomb hit the back
alley, but you can thank me that I got those priceless stained
glass windows all packed flat on the floor and they're safe and
uninjured.'
" 'You damned fool, Ford! I had them insured against
bomb damage for four times what I paid for them. Why did
you think I left them hanging by the windows?' "
The last I knew of John Ford's O.S.S. activities was
through a yarn that, in Cairo, I think it was Cairo, he saw a
rather plump General, back-to, gray hair and General Dono-
van for sure. Whether a bit high I know not, but on impulse,
the story went, John Ford let him have it with the full force
of his boot, square in the stern. The General who picked him-
self up wasn't Donovan. Back to Hollywood, but a Navy Cap-
tain's retirement rank as a sop to a non-conforming genius.
The pleasantest, nicest man in the whole group of ex-
perts forming the Documentation Branch was a quiet little
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CHARACTERS
fellow whose last name I never knew. His first name was Jim,
short for "Jim the Penman."
Jim was a superb craftsman in his highly specialized field.
His one mistake had been to forge the name of certain Treas-
ury officials on engraved papers having a reasonable resem-
blance to U.S. Government bonds.
I will not deny that Jim was on leave from a Federal
penitentiary, but I will say without equivocation that he was
the foremost signature duplicator who ever has lived. On a
ruled pad of paper he would dare you to write your name,
"just the way you would on a check," he'd say. He would
study it a few minutes. In front of him were perhaps twenty
pens in their holders; stub pens, coarse pens, even a quill.
Next to the instruments was an imposing array of ink bottles,
from a squat India Ink to every color and shade. At last he
would dip the selected pen in the ink of his choice and dash
off a signature one each on all the ruled lines above and be-
low the one you had written.
"How about five dollars? No, too much, well one dollar
then that you can't pick out your own handwriting."
No one ever could do so and Jim would pocket the bill
with a big infectious grin. "There's a fortune in just writing
people's names," he would say.
The names Jim wrote were famous, in Germany and
France, that is, but his nerve had to equal his art. The un-
signed document we had made would be a Directoire G6n-
6rak de h Police Nafionale of the Vichy Government or a
JKemJcarte, Deutsches Reich or an Organization Todt Dienst-
buch for "den Frontarbeiter" or an engraved letter of Der
Staaissefaretar Im Reichsministermm fur Volksauflclaning undf
Propaganda.
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CHARACTERS
With a copy of the proper signature before him, Jim
would write in the correct names with gusto. Any hesitation
or retracing of the work would be fatal. Goebbels, Himmler,
Hitler, Mussolini, Petain, Laval, Heydrich and Canaris were
familiar jobs for Jim the Penman. I never recall one of his
works of art that was questioned.
The more illegible the signature to be duplicated, the
more accurately he seemed to forge it. "No two times exactly
alike," he explained to me as he was writing Heinrich Him-
mler's name on thirty or forty S.S. identification papers. "Any-
body making a photographic duplication is foolish," he said.
"I have to feel I'm the person I'm impersonating, so to
speak," and he chuckled as he dashed off the signatures, one
after another. Somehow I couldn't imagine this mild man
standing in for the head of the Gestapo.
I had warned all my group to always refer to Jim's ar-
tistry as "duplication" and never as "forgery." Jim was a very
sensitive artist, and I knew he was bursting with pride to find
an outlet for his great talent that did not entail a Secret Serv-
ice man breathing down his neck.
I wish I knew what happened to Jim when the O.S.S.
was suddenly disbanded. I had tried to induce the proper
officials to have his patriotic illegality recognized in some
way, but I never had a response. I was away when he left but
there was a note of farewell I swear it was in my own hand-
writingwith "thanks to an understanding boss."
I never heard from him again, but of course I never knew
his right name.
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CHARACTERS
One of the most intriguing and mysterious characters in
General Donovan's whole war agency had the lilting Irish
name of James St. Lawrence CXToole. It fitted him so per-
fectly that the whole name had to be used, I felt, and never
contracted to J. S. OToole. It had an appropriate rhythm
like "King of the Mountain Range" or "Girl of the Golden
West" one of those happily balanced phrases that come trip-
ping off the tongue.
And James St. Lawrence O'Toole came tripping into the
O.S.S. to occupy a position no one else could possibly fill.
A rather slight, black-haired Irishman with a deceptively
soft voice and bland manner; he had been bom in an Irish
castle. His brogue was as thick as the fog over Adair. From his
earliest memories he had been surrounded with great works of
such artists as Rembrandt, Van Dyck, Vermeer, Goya, Velas-
quez, Holbein and Constable.
Whether it was paternal indolence or good Irish whiskey
or a run of unlucky horses or whatever, one by one the master-
pieces had to go to raise cash to maintain the indolence or
whiskey or horses. As the last ones were taken down from the
ancient walls and sent to Sir Joseph Duveen for auction,
young James St. Lawrence O'TooIe felt that he, too, should
go. He surprised Duveen with his knowledge of art and was
straightaway hired as a salesman. "After all," he told me, "I
saw them all from my crib and I never knew what bad art was
until I went to London/'
One night he told me, "I was in the Paris salon of Du-
veen*s when I learned what was going to happen to the Mona
Lisa. A rascal from the Left Bank it was, and he knowing
what a fine copy had been made. They gave it to the oxygen
to crack it a bit and the canvas was one of da Vinci's time
106
CHARACTERS
with its unimportant oil painting removed by long soaking in
the solvents you'd know so well as a chemist
"So the deal to sell the original was made, they told me,
for a sum that would stagger the whole world and then they
stole it, as you know. What they delivered to their customer
was the copy, of course, and why anyone would buy the
world's most famous portrait he could never show, 111 never
know. I suppose multimillionaires have their eccentricities.
"Months or was it a year later, the original pops up in a
Paris art store, and everybody's happy except the fallen guy/'
"You mean the fall guy?" I interjected.
" Tis all the same, Lovell. Now down to business. I
have my legitimate Irish passport and a fine Vatican passport
which a Cardinal obtained for me. General Donovan also
wants me to have an American and a French passport, as I
may need them all wherever I'm going."
James St. Lawrence O'Toole was to be an S.I. man, I
gathered, and Secret Intelligence men often disappeared from
my sight with only a chance rumor of their assignment or duty
coming back to my ears.
I never saw this charming, fascinating operator again,
but I was told that during the war he was frequently inside
Germany and the occupied countries. The James St Law-
rence O'Toole story grew almost beyond the bounds of
credulity. He entered Germany, it was said, as an Irish sym-
pathizer of the Nazi regime and an Anglophobe. The next
installment said he had a commission from Marshal Hermann
Goering to find great art works wherever hidden by the
Dutch, Belgians and French. My following bit of the saga
was that he bought them from the over-run nationals on threat
of seizure, which would have meant no pay at all, and then
107
CHARACTERS
had them delivered wherever Goering specified. He was sent
scouting all over Europe for more to add to the Marshal's
collection.
This may be all poppycock the extravagant extrapola-
tion that often gives heroic casts to a relatively unimpressive
tale but this I know, of all the O.S.S. operators I met, James
St. Lawrence OToole was the one man I would deem capa-
ble of exactly that God bless him for whatever intelligence
he got back to the O.S.S., and the back of me hand to his
enemies.
Beyond any doubt the toughest, deadliest hombre in the
whole O.S.S. menagerie was Colonel Carl Eifler.
An enormous mass of a man with a temper as big as his
hulk, he could fly an airplane, box better than most pros, and
few marksmen with pistol or carbine ever have matched his
record.
On the Mexican Border Patrol it was said he discouraged
"wet backs" swimming the Rio Grande for illegal entry into
the United States by shooting a perfect circle of live bullet
splashes around a man's head.
The O.S.S. recruited him when he was captain of an in-
fantry company. He in turn recruited John Coughlin and Ray
Peas, both regular army officers. Carl Eifler organized the
famous Detachment 101 whose exploits in Burma with the
Kachin tribesmen have passed into legend.
Eifler started with twenty men. By the time Japan sur-
rendered, the Kachin Raiders (the outgrowth of Detachment
101 ) were officially credited with 5447 Japanese troops
108
CHARACTERS
killed and an estimated 10,000 wounded. The Kachin natives,
in accomplishing this result, lost 70 lives and the Q.S.S. fif-
teen men.
This gives no credit for the rescue of 217 airmen shot
down behind enemy lines, nor the invaluable intelligence
they constantly sent out by radio. Even "Vinegar Joe" Stil-
well, who had little good to say of anyone, wrote, "Services
rendered by 101 were of great value."
Coughlin and Peers were more responsible, by far, than
Carl Eifler for their amazing success but, after all, Eifler
picked them to do the job and he knew in his heart, I think,
that he was an impresario, a one-man act and, like his Direc-
tor, no great shakes as an organizer.
In August of 1943 General Donovan told me he was
leaving to visit Detachment 101 behind the enemy lines in
Burma. He said, "We'll fly to Calcutta and go from there in
a Piper Cub two-seater." "We?" I asked. "Yes, Colonel Eifler
and I he's a pilot you know."
When General Donovan returned, he told us in staff
meeting that they flew at almost tree-top level to avoid Japa-
nese fighter planes and anti-aircraft installations. Somehow
in landing near the secret headquarters of Colonels Peers and
Coughlin, something went awry and they sheared off their
landing gear. From this pancake landing I can imagine the
two stout men climbing out to meet the O.S.S. and Kachin
reception committee as cool as if it were the National Airport
in Washington, and not an obscure, dangerous hideout in an
enemy jungle.
The repairs to the little plane were sketchy at best, but
after an inspection of Detachment 101 they somehow took
109
CHARACTERS
off and made it safely back to Calcutta. I think General Don-
ovan enjoyed adventures with Carl Eifler largely because in
him he found a fellow spirit who dared throw heavy hazards
into the teeth of Fate and who, like himself, was completely
devoid of fear.
The bravery that comprises knowing danger, feeling its
clammy touch on your brow, yet by some inner compunction,
forcing yourself to walk into it, to face it, is quite a different
quality than the actual courting of thrills and hazards. I'm
certain that these two men, General Donovan and Colonel
Eifler, enjoyed personal risks. They would have easily made
two of the Three Musketeers, but Carl EiSer was an uninhibi-
ted extrovert, whereas Wild Bill Donovan was the calm, rela-
tively unemotional type to whom danger was only delectable
when blended with duty.
There was nothing of the braggart or show-off in Wil-
liam J. Donovan. Somewhat less than that has to be said for
Carl Eifler.
I had Colonel Eifler talk before my group. Never, even
in the movies or on TV where shots are faked, have I seen
such a demonstration of marksmanship. After hitting every
bull's eye set up on the firing range, he brought down with a
single shot a passing seagull as a sort of postscript, and I swear
his head didn't move one inch to sight on the unfortunate
migrant.
Such a flamboyant, virile person as Carl Eifler should be
leading desperate- charges in Viet Nam or the Casbah. I was
told recently that he had taken holy orders and was training
to be a minister or a priest I hereby warn his future congre-
gations to heed the admonitions from his pulpit, or I would
110
CHARACTERS
expect a dum duin to zing down among the communicants.
'The devil a monk would be."
The finances of the Office of Strategic Services were,
like so much of its activity, shrouded in secrecy. Like all other
O.S.S. branch chiefs, I had to submit an estimate of the needs
of the department I supervised for each corning fiscal year. I
then underwent an inquiry by our Inspector General to justify
it in every detail. As soon as all estimates were approved by
him, they were assembled and the total went over to the Bu-
reau of tiie Budget, where, General Donovan told me, only
the Director of the Budget ever saw it The amount, when
finally accepted, was never exposed to Congressional appro-
priation committees or to any other person whatever, as it
was absorbed and blended into the many and various mili-
tary figures.
All our military personnel, which constituted about one-
half of the complement, received the regular pay set for
their rank. The civilians were paid the established Civil
Service remuneration fixed for their civil service ratings.
This left two areas of compensation to be resolved, and both
became big problems, indeed. One was expense accounts,
those out-of-pocket spendings beyond travel orders. The type
of person found in O.S.S. was inclined to be a bit casual, to
say the least, in keeping track of his or her expenses, and
many of the personal bills submitted had to be disallowed for
lack of adequate supporting data and receipts.
Most important and most dangerous was the matter of
U.V.K unvouchered funds. Here, cash in great quantity had
111
CHARACTERS
to be paid out for often sinister and always secret ends. To
whom it was paid could never be made a matter of record.
Even those who disbursed it were not revealed. U.V.F. was
dollar dynamite. Always haunting us was the specter of some
postwar Congressional investigating committee, which might
well be empowered by the Congress to ignore all wartime
secrecy and which, assuming a hostile attitude, might make a
Teapot Dome type of thing out of these large sums, for which
no accounting whatever existed.
Faced with this ever-present danger, General Donovan
and Colonel Buxton put the whole responsibility for U.V.F.
into the hands of men of known probity and of immense per-
sonal wealth. As chief of all unvouchered funds he appointed
Junius S. Morgan. It was a brave and patriotic thing for
Morgan to assume this duty, which he could have so easily
avoided. Here he was, intimately responsible for cash outlays
running into millions of dollars and paid out to God knows
who, for all sorts of skullduggery, every conceivable venal act
(in peacetime, that is) from stealing to assassination. All
credit to Junius S. Morgan, who risked his worldwide reputa-
tion and his status as head of our greatest banking family in
his country's behalf. His famous brother, Henry S. Morgan,
did a splendid job in O.S.S., but in a less sensitive field of
activity.
Serving under J. S. Morgan was Robert H. Ives Goddard
of Providence, Rhode Island and, while his fame as a financier
was perhaps more local than Morgan's, the same tribute to his
patriotism and courage is strongly due. Ives Goddard was a
man of immense wealth a meticulous custodian and care-
taker who carefully ferreted out the rascals who reached into
this rich, sugar-plum fund. Ives was tall, thin as a fence-rail
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CHARACTERS
and, on first knowing, quite unimpressive, so self-effacing and
modest was he. He approached his delicate job of monitoring
these cash expenditures with such hesitancy and apparent
timidity that you would consider him the last man alive to be
a financial wizard of the very first rank. Everyone concerned,
however, soon learned that you simply could not bluff or fool
this stately Rhode Islander.
The third guardian of this "easy money" was Colonel
W. Lane Rehm, who, before the war, had been the financial
genius of one of the country's great investment trusts. Be-
tween them, these three men of unquestioned integrity and
financial acumen held the U.-V.F. money, so susceptible to
abuse, in amazing control. All three confessed to me, at one
time or another, that the job was bringing their gray hairs in
sorrow to the grave, but without these services to their coun-
try, at an age in life when they had to do nothing to still be
respected without them this vast unvouchered fund of many
millions would have been a Donnybrook Fair for the boys on
the make.
113
IO
THE MCGREGORS ARE COMING
Take a Chicago press agent for Frank Knox, add a fa-
mous Notre Dame fullback, an heir to the Ringling circus, a
CBS radio announcer and an Italian-American from New
York City, and what do you get? An O.S.S. team on a secret
mission, of course. Only the owl and the pussycat were less
logical mates. Because no Scottish connection whatever ex-
isted, this oddly assorted group was named The McGregor
Project A skilled radio operator was needed, so they added
one Carolos Conti to their team, he having escaped by the
skin of his teeth from the Falangista in the Spanish Civil War.
Captain Edward A. Hayes of the Navy became liaison
officer for this slightly inad O.S.S. cadre, with Captain Ellis
Zacharias and Colonel William C. Eddy helping to get thea-
ter commander approval for their madcap scheme.
It was during the critical Battle of Italy in the early sum-
mer of 1943. Our McGregor Project had no less ambitious
an objective than the winning of the entire Italian Navy away
from the Germans and over to the Allies, plus the securing
of all secret Italian weapons. We in the O.S.S. knew that the
114
THE MCGREGORS ARE COMING
greatest naval weapon the Nazis possessed was the SIC tor-
pedo, which they had commandeered from Italy. Those
initials stood for Silvrifici Italiano Calosi. It was a magnetic-
activated torpedo, conceived and invented by Professor Carlo
Calosi at the University of Bologna. The professor was now
an Italian Naval Captain at the torpedo works at Baia. The
Germans had ordered 12,000 of these torpedos, which were
so made that they never had to hit a target ship at all, but
only to pass under it, When the steel magnetic signature of
the vessel was at its peak, this SIC torpedo exploded. Water
is incompressible, so the shock of the explosion broke the keel
of the ship in two. This weapon explains the terrible toll of
transports on the Murmansk run, which we had erroneously
blamed on faulty shipbuilding.
Chief of the mission was John M. Shaheen, a mere Lieu-
tenant (j.g.) , mentioned earlier as the Operation Campbell
originator. Young Johnny Shaheen impressed you at once as
a dark-haired, eye-flashing bundle of enthusiasm and drive.
Slight of build, dark-skinned, quick as a cat, he is a born en-
thusiast. John M. Shaheen convinced everybody he met, from
Secretary Knox to General Donovan, that his plan merited
complete support. He even convinced me, although I had felt
that the proverbial snowball in hell had a somewhat better
chance of survival. His team-mate were John Ringling North,
Ensign E. M. Burke, football hero Jumping Joe Savoldi,
Peter Tompkins of CBS, Carolos Conti and the indispensable
New Yorker, Marcello Girosi.
No one but General Donovan would have bet ten rents
on so quixotic a venture. But Donovan was subtle. Before the
war began, he had formed a deep friendship with General
Badoglio, who had become wartime Prime Minister of Italy.
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THE MCGREGORS ARE COMING
From this old friend he learned, by means not yet possible to
disclose, that Italy was on the verge of capitulation, so this
gave the wild scheme less of a madcap quality than any of the
participants knew.
Marcello Girosi of New York City's Upper East Side was
the brother of Rear Admiral Massimo Girosi of the Italian
Joint Chiefs of Staff (Commando Supremo), so the first
move of the group was to try to get an impassioned letter from
Marcello to Massimo, using a messenger who was an escaped,
anti-Fascist soldier. Basing their operation on Sicily, their
emissary was finally landed on the beach at Calabria at the tip
of the Italian boot. An earlier attempt to land him at Terra-
cina had run into a whole squadron of enemy MAS (torpedo)
boats on patrol, and our little mission escaped capture and
probably shooting by a miracle.
The messenger delivered the letter but the agreed upon
rendezvous two weeks later was never kept, so none of our
men knew what had transpired. Months later we learned that
Admiral Massimo Girosi presented the letter to the entire
Joint Chiefs of Staff, but his associates knew that Marshal
Badoglio was already conferring with General Eisenhower
and General Donovan, and so they deferred any action. Our
little group, of course knew nothing of these moves in high
places and so continued to attempt a direct contact with
Admiral Girosi.
They all knded on the mole at Salerno and tried to pene-
trate the German line. They reported that, had they had
Mussolini himself as their chauffeur, it would have been im-
possible. They high-balled it out of Salerno in a hailstorm of
88 mm, shells. At this point, the grandiose scheme of bringing
the Italian Navy over to our side was set aside in favor of
116
THE MCGREGORS ARE COMING
importing to America the great Italian scientist and inventor,
Carlo Calosi and his deadly SIC torpedo.
Unknown to me, I had been designated as the host or
chaperone for Dr. Calosi, when and if he reached Washing-
ton. Equally unknown to me, the Italian Secretary of the
Navy, Raffaele de Courten, had ordered Vice Admiral Eu-
genio Minisini, chief of their torpedo works, to cooperate
fully with the O.S.S. and to make himself available for the
difficult job of reconstructing the SIC torpedo. As so often
happens in wartime, no one thought to brief me on any of this
background.
At Baia, Fusaro and Naples our O.S.S. group salvaged
all they could of the SIC torpedos and their parts, The all-
important inventor, Dr. Calosi, was hiding from the Ger-
mans. He was at last located, under the very noses of the
Nazis, in a Roman convent On December 24, 1943 he was
asked to slip out secretly to Viterbo and told if he then went
to the seashore, south of Orbetello, he would be taken out of
Italy. For eight long nights he stood on the beach and flashed
a green light, that being the prearranged signal for the O.S.S.
team to pick him up. Nothing happened. At last, as he was
sure the whole affair was hopeless, on January 3, 1944, the
PT boat slid up onto the sand and he was carried to Bastia on
the island of Corsica. There, by the merest chance, O.S.S.
agent David Crockett was momentarily located, acquiring
some French francs. Then Ajaccio and finally Algiers, where
Colonel Serge Obolensky of the O.S.S., one of New York's
famous hosts, was appropriately his receptionist
117
TOE MCGREGORS ARE COMING
On January 24th, Dr. Calosi and his party, consisting of
Admiral and Signora Minisini and twelve technicians, landed
in Washington and into the lap of my ignorance. How often
in the exigencies of war, someone has to "run with the ball"
with not a scintilla of knowledge as to the team play or even
the objective. At that time, everyone had forgotten to tell me
anything.
Dr. Carlo Calosi proved to be a tall, thin man of perhaps
forty. Understanding not a word of the English language, he
was naturally nervous at being in an enemy land where his
anti-Fascist political feelings and his motives might well be
misunderstood. Because of his rank of Captain, I should have
sensed that Vice Admiral Minisini was his superior officer,
without whose approval he could not make a move. This
sixty-five-year-old man, in turn, seemed to be under orders
from his wife at least, it so impressed all of us.
We housed the group in a Washington hotel until ar-
rangements could be made to best use the vital knowledge
they had bravely visited us to give. All were understandably
apprehensive and uncertain. To make matters worse, General
Donovan was off on other matters and no one could, or would,
fill in the background for me. I felt it was of first importance
to know for certain if this rather ascetic, somewhat dour Dr.
Calosi really was an outstanding scientist in the field of elec-
tro-magnetism or were we all being misled. I had Marcello
Girosi take him to see Dr. I. I. Rabi, head of the Radiation
Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology,
where a three-day scientific inquisition took place. Dr. Rabi
reported to me that Dr. Calosi was undoubtedly one of the
world's two or three best qualified experts in his field,
Armed with this report, I visited Admiral F. C. Home,
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THE MCGREGORS ARE COMING
Vice Chief of Naval Operations, to whom I told the whole
story and to whom I recommended that Dr. Calosi, the Ad-
miral and spouse and all their party of twelve be invited to the
Newport, Rhode Island Torpedo Station to reconstruct the
famous SIC torpedo and, God willing, work out a counter-
measure for it. He agreed at once, and the whole group found
themselves in a tourist hotel in Newport, some distance from
the torpedo station. At this point, the baffling, frustrating,
often juvenile incidents began.
The commanding officer of the station appeared to re-
gard this invasion of Italian torpedo experts as a distasteful
criticism of his own torpedo, rather than as a glorious chance
to obtain the enemy's best undersea weapon. Rumors of duds
made at Newport were rife, especially of one American sub-
marine which dared to enter Tokyo harbor and fire her whole
complement of torpedos at the rich prizes there, only to have
not one of them detonate. This had left Newport sensitive
and "touchy/* to say the least
I pleaded with the C.O. to capitalize upon, for our Navy,
every little scrap of technical information we could possibly
extract from our expert Italian guests. The result was, at most,
a half-hearted tolerance. For example, Doctor Calosi and his
technicians needed a standard bench vice to disassemble the
parts of the Italian SIC torpedo so expensively and daringly
brought to us from the ruins of Baia. The Navy delivered to
Dr. Calosf s workshop a vise, all right It came in a mammoth
truck and was a four-ton monster with jaws three feet wide.
At this point, the Office of Naval Intelligence personnel
detailed to the station, who previously had endured months
of monotony, found the* Calosi-Minisini group of enemy
aliens a gift from the gods, and proceeded to have a field day.
119
THE MCGREGORS ARE COMING
Apparently, Washington headquarters of O.N.I, had neg-
lected to take Newport into its confidence. All telephones
were tapped and monitored, all mail intercepted and read.
All scraps of paper in waste baskets were carefully saved and
pasted together. If the Admiral's wife went to her clothes
closet to select a dress, there hiding behind her wardrobe
would be an O.N.L man. Screams! Near-fainting. "Take me
back to Italy!" It would have been something out of a French
farce had the stakes for the United States not been so all-im-
portant Viewed after twenty years, the affair has a burlesque
quality but at the time, I could only think of the drowned
American sailors in those cold north seas, lives which this
Italian volunteer mission might save.
About this time, Admiral Minisini resigned and Dr. Ca-
losi, perforce, did likewise. The squad of skilled technicians
resigned, and Marcello Girosi exploded with some pictur-
esque Italian oaths. I couldn't blame any of them. Girosi
then showed his great skill at directing a company that was,
postwar, to make him a famous figure in Italian movie pro-
ductions. While he quieted the injured temperaments all
about him, I had another conference with Admiral Home in
Washington. Shocked at the whole situation, he at once
straightened it out. The Newport personnel overnight became
as cooperative as they had previously been antagonistic. Such
is the power of military discipline when reasons are explained
rather than assumed to be understood.
The SIC torpedos were at last reconstructed, their mech-
anism demonstrated to our Navy, the remarkable devices
tested and approved. Dr. Calosi then proceeded at his own
suggestion to develop an effective counter-measure which
would make his own torpedo harmless if used against a ship
120
THE MCGREGORS ARE COMING
so equipped. When he felt he had this safeguarding device
perfected, he went all alone on an abandoned and condemned
hulk out in Narragansett Bay. He installed his protective sys-
tem on it, but would allow no one else to be aboard. He
stayed there while live SIC torpedos were fired point-blank
at him and the vessel. Every one exploded offside. His
counter-measure was a success, and we were humble at his
sublime personal courage.
Today he is the Vice-President, Europe, for the Ray-
theon Company, one of our largest electronic manufacturers.
The madcap McGregor Project had come a long way from
the imaginative dream of (now) Captain John M. Shaheen,
USNR.
121
THE NIGHT CHURCHILL
ALMOST GAVE UP THE WAR
One of General Donovan's most delightful customs was
to use me as a substitute for him if he had to break an en-
gagement. I will never forget March 18, 1943 when he asked
me, in his stead, to keep a date in a private room at the Wash-
ington Hotel.
It proved to be an intimate birthday luncheon for Sir
John G. Dill, K.C.B., C.M.G., D.S.O., Chief of the British
Imperial General Staff. There were six of us present, as I
recall it. He was a graying, quiet man, modest and a bit em-
barrassed at the birthday toasts.
After liqueurs, someone said, "Sir John, I think you owe
us a story. What has been the most unforgettable day of your
distinguished career?**
'That is easy to select," he said. "I'm an Ulsterman and
that means an army life for us. The Boer War, Indian and
African service, but my career appeared ended when I pub-
lidy opposed the remilitarization of the Rhinelandand Cham-
berlain's appeasement at Munich. Then, in May 1940,
122
THE NIGHT CHURCHILL ALMOST GAVE UP THE WAR
Winston Churchill came to power and picked me to head up
our armed forces.
"Barely three weeks later he phoned me to fly to France
with him and General Isinay. We knew things were in poor
shape over there. In Paris we met with Marshal Petain, Gen-
eral Weygand and Premier Paul Reynaud. They threw the
bad news at us.
"Churchill asked, 'Aren't you going to resist in the
South of France? 7
" 'No. It's impossible/
" 'But you'll keep the African colonies and fight from
there, won't you?'
" 'No. We surrender them/
" 'But the fleet Darlan will put to sea and deliver it to
us that will be saved?'
" 'No. It's complete surrender to Hider. After the way
you British abandoned us by running home at Dunkirk, you
left us no other choice/
" 'So France is deserting us completely!' Churchill ex-
claimed.
" 'Just as you did to us/ answered Petain.
"The Prime Minister rose. We were driven to our Fla-
mingo and flown back to London. Not a single word was
spoken on the return flight, and I was too deeply upset to care
much if our escort of Hurricanes showed up or not.
" Tm all alone tonight, Sir John/ he said. 'Come keep
me company at 10 Downing Street/ It was late and we
washed a sandwich down with some brandy and soda.
" 'Sir John,' he said as he walked about the room, *I have
no choice but to address Parliament in the morning. Ill have
123
THE NIGHT CHURCHILL ALMOST GAVE UP THE WAR
to tell them and the nation that France has? gone over to Hit-
ler lock, stock and barrel You and I know it's impossible to
defend this island against the full force of that Austrian
bastard. It's Napoleon all over again, but Napoleon never
had the German air force, and we have few guns and less am-
munition. This may be the last night of the British Empire-
it may be/
"I could have wept for him and for Britain. At last he
said, 'There are two things we can do, Sir John. Write the
speech that will actually ask Hitler for terms of surrender
or go to bed and sleep on it I propose to sleep. Goodnight,
Sir John. My man will show you to your bedroom. See you at
breakfast/
"He may have slept he took a part bottle of brandy
with him but I know I didn't. The end of the British Empire
was coming tomorrow!
"At breakfast perhaps our last as a free people I was
sober and glum. Winston Churchill ate everything set before
him. Finally, he pushed his chair away at an angle and said,
'Sir John, I have to tell Parliament the bad news I can't
avoid that, but I do not have to suggest negotiating with those
Nazi madmen. Yes, France has fallen, the United States is
pacifist and won't help us, but, all alone, by God, we'll fight
*em on the beaches, we'll fight 'em at the hedge rows, we'll
fight 'em on our village greens!' He paused. 'By heaven,
that's damned good, Sir John/
"He pulled a pad of paper out of his breakfast jacket
pocket and started writing down the greatest speech since
your Gettysburg address. That, gentlemen, was my most un-
forgettable day/'
124
THE NIGHT CHURCHILL ALMOST GAVE UP THE WAR
An unforgettable day for myself was this sixty-second
birthday party for Sir John Dill. He had told us of a day on
which the freedom of mankind had balanced on one man's
courage.
125
I a
THE BOMBING OF PEENEMUNDE
It was in 1943 that a series of coincidences took place
which are, for a scientist, hard to explain. As a special aide
to Dr. Bush of O.S.R.D. I had worked with Colonel W. A.
Consodine, Colonel John Lansdale, Jr. and Colonel R. R.
Furman, who were the three security officers under Lieuten-
ant General Leslie R. Groves charged with the secrecy and
protection of the work done on the Manhattan Project. Gen-
eral Groves had established liaison with the O.S.S., and I had
been kept reasonably informed of progress in their atomic
research.
This is the first coincidence. One morning, my secretary,
Mrs. Norman Cooley, told me that for one excuse or another,
all my appointments of the forenoon had been cancelled.
Coincidence number two. On my desk were tissue paper
carbons of the messages O.S.S. had received by radio during
the past period of twenty-four hours. I thumbed through
them, noting they had been stacked up following a code num-
ber designating the importance of each. Thus the top one
was a report from one of our spies in Germany detailing troop
126
THE BOMBING OF PEENEMUNDE
movements from somewhere to somewhere in Russia. And
so on down in order of significance.
Near the bottom of the pile I read one from #110 (that
was Allen Dulles in Switzerland) . It said, "One of my men
got dry clothes and a breakfast for a French ouvrier who swam
the Rhine to Rehen last night Told following improbable
story. Said he was forced labor guard for casks of water from
Rjukan in Norway to island of Peenemunde in Baltic Sea."
I tossed that into the wooden tray along with the others
and then, suddenly, snatched it back.
Coincidence number three. A week before I had at-
tended a discussion by scientists involved in nuclear fission
studies in which someone had said, "I think graphite would
be a more efficient neutron arrester than heavy water/*
So Fm a simple French workman escaping into Switzer-
land from German-infested France. So I have to justify my-
self with a story. If Fm clever and want to be believed, I have
been guarding gold, munitions, food anything but water/
But I tell the O.S.S. man I have been guarding water.
Ergo, I am a simple French peasant-worker not smart or
shrewd, but it was water, so I say water. The only water in the
world worth guarding is deuterium, ''heavy water."
I rush to the maps and the O.S.S. encyclopedias. What
is Rjukan? The biggest hydro-electric development in Europe
and perhaps the only location where "heavy water" could be
produced. I obtained air photos of Usedom, the water-en-
circled land mass where Peenemunde sat on the landward
tip. Dairy farms, thatched farmhouses a peaceful, bucolic
spectacle if ever I saw one.
I didn't believe it Instead I barged into General Dono-
127
THE BOMBING OF PEENEMONDE
van's office with scant courtesy. I said, "Bill, this may be
vitally important/*
He was closeted with God-knows-who but he dismissed
the fellow with a "See you later/'
"Bill/' I said, "this radio message from Al Dulles may
be the most important message CXS.S. will ever receive. What
do you know about the developments on an atom bomb?"
"Stanley, I don't know what you're talking about'* and
he didn't. So tight was General Leslie Groves' security that
my Director had never heard a whisper about it.
Intelligence should now and then be intelligent. I told
him straightaway all I knew, which was about as much as any-
one not actually in the project then knew.
I said, "This little French workman has told us where
the German heavy water comes from, but vastly more impor-
tant, where the German physicists are working to make a
bomb employing nuclear fission. It all adds up perfectly."
"Adds up to what?" he asked.
"To a catastrophic Nazi victory. This explains the 'ski'
sites. Don't leave. I'll be back in a minute."
I ran to my nearby office and returned with a secret map
of the ski sites on the French coast Let me explain that they
were so called because from the air they looked like a ski laid
on edge a long passage perhaps forty feet with a curved,
closed twist at the unopened end.
Beginning at Hazebrouck, west of Boulogne, there were
seventy-odd such structures sweeping down to Valognes,
about 40 kilometers south of Cherbourg (a mystery that had
completely baffled the British Secret Intelligence Service and
those of us they had told about it) .
Part of the greatness of William J. Donovan was his hon-
128
THE BOMBING OF PEENEMUNDE
est self-appraisal. "Lovell, I'm a lawyer and you're a scientist.
If you say this is 'hot 7 111 believe it, although it sounds like
Jules Verne to me/'
"General, remember Hitler said, We will have a weapon
to which there is no answer' remember? The whole thing
falls into place. Every ski site is pointed directly at London,
Bristol, Birmingham and Liverpool They must be launching
sites for unmanned missiles containing enough nuclear fission
bombs to utterly destroy each of those cities. Britain can't re-
sist if they're obliterated. If we bomb the very hell out of
Peenemiinde, we stop it cold before it has a chance to start."
No lawyer trusts a scientist without corroborative evi-
dence. Only when Doctors Vannevar Bush and James B.
Conant became equally excited did the Director really believe
me. That I was flown instantly to London was evidence in-
deed. There I told my story to Colonel David K. E. Bruce-
the same man whose sapient counsel had prevented my resig-
nation. He was now Chief of O.S.S. in London. He believed
me because in a small way, I was his protege. He at once met
with Lord Portals of the RAF. and General 'Tooey" Spaatz
of our 8th Air Force and by persuasion and that diplomacy of
which he is America's greatest example, got the Peenemiinde
air raid 'laid on."
In August of 1943 the R.A.F. staged a heavy raid at
Peenemiinde that killed more than a thousand people and in-
flicted heavy damage on this "rural" island.
Dr. Martin Schilling,* chief of the Test Section at
Peenemiinde, recalls that the raid was terrifying. He says that
it delayed the use of V-i's and V-z's until after the Normandy
* Dr. Schilling is now Vke-Piwident in charge of Research and Engineering
for the Raytheoa Company, of which the author is a director.
129
THE BOMBING OF PEENEMUNDE
landings in June, 1944. He believes that, had those rockets
landed on England prior to that date, the invasion of France
would have been materially delayed. When the Vergeltung
(vengeance) rockets were finally fired, they could not be
ranged on the invading troops, and thus fell only on British
civilians.
But what of the heavy water that was being shipped to
Peenemunde for atomic energy research?
The French ouvrier, whose message caught my eye, was
right, so far as he knew. Dr. Schilling was informed by the
chief of the Rjukan facility that, for reasons of security, the
guards and crew were told that the heavy water shipments
were headed for Peenemunde. Actually, the ships skirted
within a mile or so of Peenemunde, and then slipped into
Wolgast. From there the load was sent by rail to the Kaiser
Wilhelm Institute and other destinations where nudear re-
search was being carried on.
Production of the heavy water at Rjukan approached the
substantial amount of 5,000 tons. The first objective of the
German research physicists was to build an atomic power
plant for a fleet of U-Boats, but an atomic bomb would cer-
tainly be developed from this activity.
And so, the strangest coincidence of all. The O.S.S.
message was incorrect, yet its interpretation helped (the Brit-
ish themselves were suspicious of Peenemiinde's pastoral
scene) implement the decision to bomb the headquarters of
German rocket research. The development of a terrible new
weapon was delayed until its primary target was beyond its
reach.
130
CAPRICIOUS
Like Alice in Wonderland, nothing in wartime Wash-
ington appeared too strange to be taken in stride.
One day, I was invited to the Academy of Science build-
ing where I met four distinguished men Dr. George Merck,
President of Merck and Company, Dr. Edwin B. Fred, later
President of the University of Wisconsin, Admiral Rollo Dyer
and John P. Marquand, the great satiric novelist. Thereupon
I was admitted to the inner circle on bacteriological warfare.
Dr. William Searles and Lord Stamp joined us and we
visited the bacteriological laboratories at Frederick, Maryland,
John P. Marquand proved to be a scholarly bacteriolo-
gist and virologist. He named the laboratories where virulent
organisms were cultured, **The Health Farm." By this time I
had ceased to be surprised at the versatility of men, all over
military age, who from so many varying angles were helping
in the war. I would not have been surprised to have found a
big league baseball catcher studying langue d*oc, so he could
pose as an etymologist behind enemy lines in occupied
131
CAPRICIOUS
France. A good thing, too, because Red Sox hero Moe Berg
did just that for the O.S.S.
In my many sessions with John Marquand we discussed
much besides pestilence and pandemic organisms.
He called Shakespeare "that Punk from Stratfordhe
never taught his three daughters to read or write of course
he wasn't the real author/' He told me that when he went
through Harvard on a high school fellowship, no Fly or Por-
cellian Club looked at him, and he was not on the invitation
lists of the Back Bay cotillions.
I accused him of harboring, perhaps quite subcon-
sciously, a deep resentment of those undergraduate days,
when social recognition was denied him and no one recog-
nized in him a worthwhile talent.
''John/' I said, "your frustration so long submerged and
your rapier so long kept in the scabbard found expression in
Tiie Late George ApJey."
He said, "Stanley, you're right, but I don't like to have
it laid in front of me. You'll pay for that nasty crack, old
boy!"
What he did was to bisect me. In Point of No Return,
Lawrence Lovell who "thought himself too good for Clyde"
and Francis Stanley "the sordid business man" made a riposte
that only I could appreciate.
Two Canadian bacteriologists from McGffl University,
Professor E. G. D. Murray and Doctor Reed, called on me
and offered their skills and services whenever needed.
In the autumn of 1940, Mussolini's army dominated
North Africa. General Wavell with a handful of men faced
a half million Italian soldiers. The British fleet sank or routed
132
CAPRICIOUS
the Italian navy at Taranto, and the Italian army invaded
Greece where the Evzones cut them to shreds.
General Wavell then moved westward from Alexandria
and by February 1941 had defeated the Italians from Sidi
Barrani and Tobruk to Benghazi. Now Hitler and the Nazis
took over from a routed Fasdsti and General Erwin Rommel
was put in charge. Many considered him to be the one great
military genius of World War II. In ten days of April 1941,
Rommel had recovered for the Axis almost all of North Af-
rica which the Italians had lost.
Backing and filling, the German advance was stopped
at the famous battle of El Alamein. Then, in November
1942, Operation Torch began. It got its name from its ob-
jective, which was to apply a torch to the tail of the famed
Desert Fox Rommel. Many miles away, the American force
landed at Casablanca, Oran and Algiers. From Casablanca
a long, ancient single-track railroad ran eastward through the
foothills of the Adas Mountains to Oran, Algiers and Tunis.
It was the tenuous lifeline of supplies for the whole venture.
The idea was to catch Rommel between this invading force
to his west and the British in Egypt to his east.
I knew that everyone from President Roosevelt down
was violently opposed to the Merck Committee and its ac-
tivity in studying germ warfare. Dr. Vannevar Bush be-
came profane when it was mentioned, and General Donovan
despised it, as most heroes who had withstood shot and shell
were prone to do.
I held no brief for its study or use in orthodox warfare,
but I saw in it just the subtle, covert weapon that might be
ideal in some anti-personnel problem.
The Canadian allies, Professors "Joberg" Murray and
133
CAPRICIOUS
Reed held no reservations about it. While we Americans
tended either to belittle or loathe bacteriological weapon re-
search, they were actually producing a range of viable or-
ganisms.
I read the Marine Corps Bayonet Instructions and I de-
cided that to expose an enemy to a lethal or an incapacitating
organism was infinitely less barbarous than to stab him in the
viscera, twist the bayonet to contaminate the wound thor-
oughly and leave him to die from the horrors of general sep-
ticemia.
Shortly after these contacts with bacteriologists had been
made, there occurred the Battle of the Kasserine Pass.
Erwin Rommel's Afrika Korps was far from conquered.
By a powerful surprise thrust, he moved westward from Paid
Pass. The American soldiers, mainly untrained and new to
battle, tried to hold the Kasserine Pass.
I saw the German movie of that battle, the film of which
one of our men later 'liberated" from a Nazi cameraman.
The camera gave a panoramic sweep of the desolate brown
terrain. The German voice said, "See our Tiger tanks on
either side, row on row, waiting for the enemies of the Third
Reich to walk into our trap/ 7 With another swing over the
pass at a higher level the voice said, "See our machine guns,
our anti-tank cannon ready to send a rain of German steel
on the Americans/'
Then the American Army advance troops inarched into
the picture. Silence. More and more Americans, and we in
the Pentagon projection room wanted to shout, to warn these
lx>ys so lately interviewed by their local draft boards. The
film ended by showing a drab earth-colored pass in which the
1M
CAPRICIOUS
khaki-covered bodies were barely distinguishable from the
African land.
Five thousand American boys were killed, wounded or
missing when the defeat at Kasserine Pass was complete. To
add to the total dejection and shame of it all, a squadron or
two of Flying Fortresses, ordered to bomb the Germans in the
Pass, dropped all their bombs one hundred miles away on the
town of Souk el Arba, killing and wounding a number of
Arabs.
I never quite understood General Eisenhower, himself
untried in battle, for writing in his report that, although the
American troops were green and insufficiently trained, the
Kasserine Pass made veterans of the American Army! I as-
sume he meant those who were lucky enough to survive.
Little detail of this disastrous action appeared in news-
papers in the United States. The United States Joint Chiefs
of Staff could not know in this dark hour that in three months
the German forces would be cut in two by Anderson, Mont-
gomery and the American Second Corps.
To our High Command in Washington, it looked like
the prelude to a disaster beyond description. To appreciate
it, you must realize that fourteen German U-boats were in a
ring outside the Straits of Gibraltar and even a rowboat
couldn't pass into the Mediterranean Sea to supply the Allied
troops.
Marshall Herman Goering made a radio speech in which
he promised a greater defeat than Dunkirk to the American
and British troops in North Africa. If Hitler had said it, I
think the Pentagon pundits would have given it less weight,
but Herman Goering commanded a certain respect through-
135
CAPRICIOUS
out the conflict, and his boast added nothing to the American
peace of mind.
O.S.S. agents in Tangier and Melilla, in Morocco, sud-
denly flooded us with reports that significant numbers of Ger-
man troops were concentrating there. This was a totally
unexpected development. We feared they were engineers,
expert in railway demolition. The reports suggested they were
largely detachments of the Schutz-Staffel.
At this precise time, Francisco Franco's Foreign Minis-
ter General Jordana, was being feted in Berlin and it seemed
likely that Spain would follow Italy into the Axis.
The United States Joint Chiefs of Staff, who had top
responsibility for the conduct of this theater, were able to
come to only one conclusion. To summarize the factors in-
volved, they had the defeat at the Kasserine Pass, with its evi-
dence from Eisenhower himself, that our soldiers were no
match for Rommel's veterans, and the concomitant fear that
Eisenhower was no match for Rommel; the only way support
could reach Eisenhower was the ancient single-track railroad
from Casablanca to Algiers; the dramatic news that Ger-
many's war-hardened veterans were piling into Spanish
Morocco (obviously with Franco's consent and cooperation)
for the puipose of cutting the one fragile lifeline and making
Goering's prophecy of an American defeat to be no idle boast.
It would slice the jugular vein in the exposed neck of Opera-
tion Torch.
I was called to the Pentagon. After the desperate plight
of our expeditionary force in Africa was reviewed, I was or-
dered to take whatever steps I could contrive that would
eliminate Spanish Morocco. This was clearly "out of chan-
nels," and I said so. In no uncertain terms I was told that this
was not to be discussed or disclosed to General Donovan or
136
CAPRICIOUS
anyone else, except the very highly placed person talking io
me.
I knew why the secrecy was necessary. "Whatever steps"
meant any and every means to destroy the threat to our forces.
I made a suggestion to the person and he nodded his head.
With Doctors Murray and Reed I evolved a simulated
goat dung. Spanish Morocco was reported to have more goats
than people. Goat dung, therefore, would be everywhere.
This goat dung was very special. It contained an attrac-
tant for house flies so powerful it would call that insect out
of hibernation. It also had an assortment of bacteria from
tularemia and psittacosis to all the pests known to the Fourth
Horseman of tibe Apocalypse. It was summer, and flies were
everywhere in Spanish Morocco.
A fly has the nasty habit of regurgitating whatever he
has eaten when more attractive food comes his way. Thus,
the Moroccan house fly was to be the vector to incapacitate
all of Spanish Morocco.
To be sure, this goat dung had to be delivered by air-
planes. Most of the houses in that country have flat roofs. I
was asked how could one explain goat excrement on the roofs,
whereas everyone knew goats couldn't fly. My only answer was,
"The orders are to take out Spanish Morocco when ordered to
do so, and if we do there'll be mighty few people inspecting
rooftops."
We were well along on* our project (which I named
"Capri-cious") when, happily, our agents radioed that all
Germans were leaving en masse and being thrown into Hit-
ler's obsession the Battle of Stalingrad. No one was more
relieved than I, and Doctors Murray and Reed. General
Donovan would have been even more relieved if he had
known about it!
137
AN INTERVIEW
WITH OSWALD SPENGLER
John P. Marquand was a master of "flash back" writing,
the technique by which he would take the reader back in
time to some incident or setting, which rationalized or ex-
plained the present.
In that spirit, let me revert to why I so eagerly acted on
Dr. Karl T. Compton's invitation to abandon a hard-earned
position in the chemical industry and throw my future into
the wartime lottery.
I had read Oswald Spengler's Decline of the West when
it was published in America in the late 1920*5. I wrote the
author about an apparent contradiction the glorification of
war in one volume, the vituperation of war in the next vol-
ume. He answered by inviting me to visit him in Munich,
and I finally did on June 30, 1934.
Oddly, that was the day of Hitler's great purge, when
military motorcycles screeched through the streets, calling
families to their doorways and killing them in cold blood.
More than six hundred were so assassinated, and all the time
I was in Dr. Spengler's enormous apartment on the bank
138
AN INTERVIEW WITH OSWALD SPENGLER
of the Green Isar river. I asked a thousand questions and
made furious notes of his answers. He invited me to stay
through the day and evening until almost midnight. It was
no charm of mine, I'm sure, but more likely the possible pro-
tection an American guest might afford if the wailing motor-
cycle murderers came to his door.
My notes were published September 18, 1934 in Walter
Lippmann's column in all of his syndicated newspapers. They
constitute an amazing historical prophecy. Note that, seven
years before the event, there is the foreshadowing of Pearl
Harbor. Forgive him his acceptance of Hitler. I have never
believed that he died of a heart attack in May of 1936. More
likely he was assassinated by Nazi ruffians when he disagreed
with Dr. Alfred Rosenberg, the Hitler historian and stooge.
SPENGLER WAJRNS U.S.
By Stanley P. Lovell
(North American Newspaper Alliance)
(Dr. Oswald Spengler, celebrated German philosopher,
whose "Decline of the West" has been the subject of
world discussion, warns Americans of a day of reckon-
ing and presents his views in a talk with Stanley P.
Lovell, a Boston manufacturer, chemist and patent kw-
yer, who returned recently from Germany.)
All of one day a few weeks ago I talked with that great
German savant, Dr. Oswald Spengler, at his home in Mu-
nich- For me it was as if I had turned back the pages of
history and were spending a day with Voltaire.
Dr. Spengler, a short, stocky man, with a great bullet-
shaped head, wearing a rather loud brown golf suit, and in
139
AN INTERVIEW WITH OSWALD SPENGLER
appearance anything but a great pontiff of historical analy-
sis, was vastly inquisitive about America.
Dr. Spengler feels America is done with democracy
as such. It may, he says, keep the empty forms of Govern-
ment perhaps for 100 years and an outworn Congress lack-
ing in significance, but the German philosopher believes
that democracy, whether the American people like it or not,
is done.
"Indications," he said, "are the great concentration of
power converging in a President-dominated bureaucracy in
Washington; the steady growth of lawlessness, bringing a
clamor for a national military police unhindered by state
boundaries; the persistence of the strike as the preferred
weapon of labor and disappearance of the lockout as a
weapon of management**
* * *
I asked Dr. Spengler if he thought Franklin Roosevelt
was the first American dictator.
"Either he is your first Caesar," was the reply, "or quite
unconsciously he is a sort of St John the Baptist who comes
to make ready the way for the ruler.
"Previous Presidents, from Washington to Hoover,
generally have represented wealth and the wealthy classes,
which are the American aristocracy/* the German went on.
"Always, in history, the only aristocracy that a democracy
can have is the aristocracy of money. Now the United States
has in power a President who does not represent this ele-
ment, but the great masses.
"Once this change has come the course must never be
retraced, and in the future always the President must repre-
sent the great American masses and in policy oppose wealth
and capital, even seizing and confiscating it when necessary.
"America will have anarchy if a movement arises which
140
AN INTERVIEW WITH OSWALD SPENGLER
puts in the White House a President who represents the
wealthy classes as McKinley or Coolidge did.
'"This is the historical course of a dictator rising out of
a democracy, and it is significant that Julius Caesar in an-
cient Rome was hated by the wealthy Senate because he
first appealed to the Roman masses/'
# * *
Dr. Spengler sees in the United States a dangerous
dogma, injected into political thought by the present Ad-
ministration; namely; that the average American now is led
to believe the government not only owes him an orderly
nation in which he may or may not make his living, but
owes him also adequate food, shelter and clothing.
This, Spengler says, is the complete breakdown of the
spirit of the early settlers, who never looked to their govern-
ment for maintenance, but only for order within and respect
from without.
"An early American," Dr. Spengler said, "would have
scoffed at the idea the government owed him maintenance.
That was distinctly up to him as an individual and in no
way a function of his government.
"Now the education of the American people to the
easily-accepted theory that, by some magic, the government
is to support its citizens, leads inevitably to the extension of
government credit beyond the normal things a government
has been called upon for, and, as long as this philosophy
endures, there will be an unbalanced budget America will
live on its credit rather than on its income.
"Inexhaustible as this credit may seem now, it exists
solely as an intangible something in the minds of the Ameri-
can people. Just as, during the dark closing days of the
Hoover Administration, the American people lost confi-
dence in their banks, so there will come a day when they
141
AN INTERVIEW WITH OSWALD SPENGLER
will lose confidence in the credit of America as an inex-
haustible treasure house. Then will occur the flight from
the dollar, and people wfll want things instead of money.
"Inflation in America will be, in a way, different from
the European method. It will not be called inflation, but
will appear as baby bonds, non-interest bearing; as a con-
trolled commodity dollar, or as some other American ex-
pression. But it will come inexorably and inevitably unless
the philosophy of a government supporting its people is
reversed, and of that reversal there now seems little hope."
# * #
Dr. Spengler believes the position of the United States
as regards Japan is vital and significant
I asked this author of Decline of the West about the
Philippines.
*The United States must not become weary," he ob-
served. *The only respect Japan will have is toward a nation
virile and strong like herself.
"I believe Hawaii is America's Heligoland and, from
that point, to avoid war in Asia, America must maintain an
attitude of calm and assured force, almost aggressive but
never actually being aggressive.
'If America becomes weary, Japan will seize the mo-
ment to overcome her, since Japan is in the full flush of her
conscious strength as a nation. If America shows no indica-
tion of age and makes no overtures of friendliness, Japan
wfll leave her strictly alone."
I stated that most Americans, I thought, were now iso-
lationists, relying on tremendous ocean frontiers to separate
them from European or Asiatic conflict
"That is not possible; Americans cannot be isolation-
ists any longer/' said Dr. Spengler. "Once having entered
142
AN INTERVIEW WITH OSWALD SPENGLER
the arena of world politics, they can never return to their
comfortable seat in the audience/'
"It is not a matter of what America thinks, but rather
what America has done, that dictates without option her
future course. As a nation, she has remade the map of Eu-
rope. Having assumed so much (and the devil himself
could not have traced out a map more certain to provide
future wars than did President Wilson), it is impossible
historically for America to withdraw from that world, and
it is silly and childish reasoning if her people think they
live in another world.
"Everything of major importance that happens in the
world profoundly affects America now. It is one of Ameri-
ca's mistakes that, while other nations devote their best
brains to world politics, America is intent only on inner
problems, domestic difficulties of elections and drought and
unemployment"
Germany, Dr. Spengler feds, is far better off under
Hitler than under a president. Not only ihe German people,
but the whole world, exclusive of England, he says, has
reached a point where it is natural to look to a leader more
or less on a pedestal, and this feeling is concentrated in Ger-
many.
* * *
What I did not dare to include in the above account
was Spengler's timetable. He was, at one and the same time,
the head of the Department of Mathematics and of History
at the University of Munich. His theory was that it required
so many years for a culture to harden into a civilization and
then to progress to its decline and extinction. Toward its later
years there were always, he said, three world wars. In the
143
AN INTERVIEW WITH OSWALD SPENGLER
Egyptian culture, that of the Upper and the Lower Nile; in
China that of the Five Contending States; in the Classical
Age the three Punic wars between Rome and Carthage. In
our day, he said, we will have the three wars also. The first two
would settle no issues.
"What are the issues, Dr. Spengler?"
Only one always the same. Will government be based
on the mass of the people, or, alternatively, will it be imposed
from above. Democracy versus Dictatorship.
This, please, was in 1934.
"And how can one arrive at a timetable in so delicate,
and yet a world-wide matter?" I asked.
'That is easy to answer, Herr Lovell. No one generation
of men can successfully fight two wars. It is only when men
who have never seen war firsthand are available that another
world conflict can start. Here we are in 1934. World War I
was in 1914. A generation is twenty-five years, so World War
II will begin in 1939. It will settle nothing, of course as it
historically awaits the Third War and only in that one will
the issues be resolved."
"And this Third World War will be in 1964?"
"Precisely. Always they will say conditions have changed;
new weapons are available; it will never take pkce, but it will;
I remind you of your Cato: 'Ceterium censeo Caithaginein
esse delendain/ Government from below or imposed on man-
kind from dictators, above, will only be settled after 1964."
Now when Dr. Compton suggested I become active in
World War II, I laid awake at night recalling Dr. Spengler's
Hawaiian prophecy, now the stark reality of Pearl Harbor. In
Europe it had begun in 1939, just as he had said. It was the
ghost of this great German savant telling me our beloved
144
AN INTERVIEW WITH OSWALD SPENGLER
country must not lose this war or there would be no World
War III, but rather a dictator-dominated world in which we
could not survive to win the ultimate, the final victory, when-
ever that last war might come.
These were lonely and disturbing thoughts when I vol-
unteered for service. I wonder now if the third war he prophe-
sied will come to pass.
145
5
THE NAZI AGENT
WHO BECAME A BRITISH KNIGHT
The greatest intelligence system in the world is the Brit-
ish Secret Intelligence Service, called "Broadway" from its
headquarters in London. It was founded by Sir Francis Wal-
singhaxn, one of the first Queen Elizabeth's courtiers in 1 567.
History credits him with serving Elizabeth and Cecil (Lord
Burghley) as Secretary of State and, at various times, Am-
b0jjjjdor to France, the Netherlands and Scotland. He foiled
the Spanish Ridolfi Plot and the famous Babington Plot, the
latter leading to the execution of Mary, Queen of Scots.
What the histories do not record, but what S.I.S. holds
to be true, is that Walsingham employed many hundreds of
spies all over Central Europe. From them he learned, about
1586, that Philip II of Spain was recruiting shipwrights and
sailmakers from Sweden to Italy. To an expert like Sir Francis,
this was a golden opportunity.
In droves the workmen, now all in the pay of Walsing-
ham, traveled to Spain and reported for duty on the great
fleet King Philip was building. All received Britain's pay in
addition to the Spanish wages, with Walsingham's deputies
146
THE NAZI AGENT WHO BECAME A BRITISH KNIGHT
telling them what to do and they, in turn, advising Britain of
the fleet's progress.
Treenails, having only a token head driven in their pas-
sagesinstead of going through to tie the planks together they
would be shallow plugs only; stems with sawcuts halfway
through and filled with putty and sawdust; ribs insecurely
fastened to the keel in short a magnificent sabotage designed
to produce the faulty construction of over 130 Spanish fight-
ing ships. They informed ine at S.LS. that Drake, Hawkins
and Frobisher repulsed this Spanish Armada with stout
British courage and seamanship, but the first real weather it
met, off the Irish coast, reduced the fleet to kindling wood.
That was Walsingham's victory.
For almost 400 years Walsingham's Secret Intelligence
Service has had an unbroken existence. Not Charles I or
Cromwell, not Labor or Austerity dared to abandon or curtail
it as a vital arm of the British Government
It was very much on the job as the war clouds darkened
in 1939. This was by no means the first war S.LS. had faced.
One day before Hitler invaded Poland on September ist, this
ancient service swooped down on the German spy ring head-
quarters in London. They arrested the head of tiiat organiza-
tion and all of his staff. I was told by General Gubbins that
all but one of the group were imprisoned in a special little
bastille in London. Perhaps it was one not far from St. Paul's
Cathedral, in that area where the Nazi bombers reduced ev-
erything to rabble.
AH but one. The man S.LS. held out of prison was the
clandestine radio operator. He was a man with a peasant back-
ground and a stubborn, indoctrinated Nazi to whom no
bribe appealed nor threat intimidated. He let drop that his
147
THE NAZI AGENT WHO BECAME A BRITISH KNIGHT
grandmother "was almost nobility" and that remark dis-
closed his Achilles' heel to the S.LS. They promised him
British Knighthood if he would desert the Nazis and work
for them with an English name to be knighted under-
as Saxe-Coburg became Windsor and Battenburg became
Mountbatten. One story I heard was that the King himself
visited the man and gave him his regal promise.
It could well be true, because from obscurity the radio
operator had suddenly become the most important cap-
tive of the war. At any rate, to help win his coveted title of
nobility, he agreed to transmit over his clandestine radio what-
ever messages the S.LS. gave him, and to carry on with his
radio mate in Berlin just as if nothing had happened in Lon-
donjust as if his boss, the German chief spy, were not in
prison.
It has been demonstrated, time and time again, that a
pair of radio operators a sender and a receiver who have
lived and trained together, simply cannot be deceived by the
employment of a substitute. No one but the authentic Ger-
man sender could touch the key as he did, or know the little
personal messages to exchange with his fellow trainee, now his
Berlin receiver. No one alive could fool that receiver for a
single message.
Now began the dangerous game, the daring exploit of
sending what the British Secret Intelligence Service wanted
the Nazis to receive. The German High Command must have
felt that its London spy ring was the greatest in the world.
With lightning rapidity came the German breakthrough,
May 15, 1940, the retreat to Dunkirk and the miracle salvage
of 225,000 British and 112,000 French soldiers soldiers but
no anus or ammunition.
148
THE NAZI AGENT WHO BECAME A BRITISH KNIGHT
From the London spy radio, "Britain is swarming with
troops. All landing sites are defended by new flame throwers
and secret weapons I'm working to discover. No invasion can
possibly succeed at this time. Result of continental victories
is concentration of all British and Colonial forces here, well
equipped. Estimate it will take force impossible now for us
to assemble to establish and hold adequate beach-heads/*
A message sent July 17, 1940 to Admiral Canaris read,
"Whole foreign press and, in particular, British press com-
ments that a major German attack is expected. Thousands of
barges and vessels are standing by attack is expected in
Dover area, albeit defenses here are the strongest. Heavy air
attacks lasting several days are expected to precede a landing/*
Two days later the S.LS- message was, "English defense
measures are first coastal defense by the army, based on mo-
bility and concentration of tenific fire power. No fixed de-
fense line. Task of the British Fleet and the RAF. will be to
render impossible the landing of armored units or surprise
landing by troops anywhere. The R.A.F. is so organized that
strong units can be quickly concentrated at any danger point
and also to attack the new German bases in Northern France
and Holland and to search out all indications of German ac-
tivity, such as the assembly of ships and barges/'
On September 17, 1940, the supposed Nazi spy in Lon-
don radioed, "Despite German air attacks, the RA.F. is by
no means defeated on the contrary, it shows increased ac-
tivity. Weather reports do not permit us to expect any period
of calm/'
The last authentic message I have of this critical period
is dated September 19, 1940. It reads, "Our preparations for
landing on the Channel coast are all known here and more
149
THE NAZI AGENT WHO BECAME A BRITISH KNIGHT
countermeasures are being taken. Symptoms are British air
attacks over German operational harbors, the frequent appear-
ance of British destroyers in Dover Straits and Franco-Belgian
coast. Main units of home fleet are being held in readiness to
repel any landing. All my information indicates that the Brit-
ish Naval Forces are solely occupied with this theater of oper-
ations."
By the spring of 1941 the German invasion plans were
shelved. They abandoned all idea of invading England in
January 1942. While Hitler used the conquest of Russia as
his excuse, these false messages and hundreds of others which
will never be available to us for one reason or another, had a
great deal to do with saving England during those months
after Dunkirk, when she was an apple ripe for Hitler's ex-
tended hand.
Colonel Harold Morgan showed me how easy the pick-
ing would have been. He was in command of all the East
Anglia Home Guard. Their insignia was a crown and Georgus
Rex around it
With rather pathetic British humor, even for those dark
days, Colonel Morgan always referred to his command as
"gorgeous wrecks," and many of them were human wrecks,
indeed, with their courage the one gorgeous attribute they
possessed.
Colonel Morgan took me along the beaches and showed
ine the heavy wooden cases, spaced perhaps a thousand feet
apart, extending as far as the eye could see. They were pad-
locked. Inside were stones and nothing else.
"Our men believe they are cases of guns and ammuni-
tion put here so our patrols can get at them when the com-
mand unlocks them if the Nazis come. One day, at dawn, a
150
THE NAZI AGENT WHO BECAME A BRITISH KNIGHT
green fog or mist started to roll in from the east The guards
wakened me. 'Gas!' they cried, and we with no gas masks
whatever!"
"What did you do?" I asked.
"Stood our ground, of course. There was nothing else to
do. Actually it was some kind of atmospheric inversion, they
tell me, and it rolled over the Wash and Norfolk with no
harm done. Rather frightening when it was all over, you
know!"
The first Commando raid hit the island of Guernsey and
was a poor show. The natives thought the British raiders were
Germans and refused any information. The landing dinghies
swamped in the surf and nothing useful was accomplished.
The Lofoten raid on the fishery installations was an-
other matter, however. Our secret radio had told Berlin that
these islands would be attacked about March 6, 1941. The
Commandos landed there March 461. The islands produced
large quantities of cod liver oil and other fish oils. Contrary
to popular belief the oils were not valuable to the Germans as
baby foods, but were most important as a raw material for
nitrogenous explosives.
The Lofoten raid was all over when the German ships
and airplanes, which were feverishly sent to the scene, arrived,
to find only smoking ruins and a folly British sign stuck up on
the beach, "We'll smoke your fish for you!"
Nine months later the Commandos hit Vaagsoy in Nor-
way. This was a more deadly affair and, while the controlled
German radio in London had designated another Norwegian
151
THE NAZI AGENT WHO BECAME A BRITISH KNIGHT
town as the target, Vaagsoy was much better defended than
the British had expected.
Three months after that, March 27, 1942, the raid on
St. Nazaire was put on. In this case, the S.I.S. controlled spy
radio sent over its accurate, but retarded information after the
expedition had reported on March 28, 1942 that the destroyer
Campbelltown loaded with high explosive and a delayed fuse
had entered the River Loire and was crashing into the gates
of the St. Nazaire drydock. This was the only drydock along
the coast big enough to take a Nazi U-boat for overhauling
and repair.
.After St. Nazaire Hitler issued the order, "From now on,
Commando missions are to be slaughtered to the last man."
British morale was sagging and a great raid on the Ger-
man-occupied French coast was planned not only as a lift to
the spirit, but as a poignard thrust into Nazi military forces
with high hopes of capturing important documents and per-
sonnel. Dieppe was selected as the target city, barely one hun-
dred miles across the Channel from Portsmouth. A gallant
band of trained Commandos Anzacs, Canadians, de Gaulle
Free French and Poles all were rehearsed in central England
with models of the shoreline, the streets and the fortifications,
until they knew Dieppe as well as their home towns.
This great raid was so important that it was put under
the personal command of Lord Louis Mountbatten. At the
appointed time the little invasion fleet made its rendezvous off
the English coast in the fog.
The S.LS., we can be sure, knew all about it. After an
agreed upon waiting period, the German radio operator was
given a message to flash to Berlin.
"A great Commando raid is laid on, destination Dieppe.
152
THE NAZI AGENT WHO BECAME A BRITISH KNIGHT
Biggest operation since Dunkirk evacuation. Scheduled for
Dieppe. Time: Tuesday at dawn."
The actual timing was quite otherwise. The invasion fleet
was to be ready Sunday when Lord Mountbatten was due to
arrive and to sail Sunday night, striking Dieppe at dawn Mon-
day. The message was to be sent late Monday evening and
thus be another accurate but "just too late" bit of intelli-
gence.
In the fog Sunday, the invasion boats waited and waited.
Lord Louis Mountbatten had not arrived and the second in
command did not, could not, go ahead without him. No way
to tell London of the delay as they had strict orders not to
break radio silence and thereby bring on the Focke-Wulf
bombers.
So Sunday and all day Monday, Broadway (S.I.S.) had
no way to receive news of the delay and naturally proceeded
on the timetable they had been given. Late Monday eve-
ning the message went over the air to Berlin. At last Mount-
batten arrived, and Monday night the little fleet was also on
its way to attack at dawn Tuesday; not Monday as agreed.
I saw and heard that masterpiece of Nazi propaganda
film taken on the Dieppe raid. "Let us show you how all at-
tacks on Festung Europa will be repulsed for a thousand
years," the voice cried. Then, through the thick fog the cam-
era showed the Commando boats nosing silently toward the
sandy shore. The camera swung to show the German machine
gun nests placed to enfilade the entire landing area, others
poking their tubes of death out of every window, on every
roof and porch.
The film ended at sunset with the golden orb sinking be-
low the slow swells of the Atlantic Ocean, then with a pano-
153
THE NAZI AGENT WHO BECAME A BRITISH KNIGHT
rama of sheer horror the camera swept down to the water-line.
There, turning in the soft breakers, as far as the eye could see
were the bodies of Mountbatten's Commandos. As each body
turned, the shoulder patch identification was caught and held
for a moment in the camera's cold eye Australia, New Zea-
land, Canada, Poland, Free France.
I could have killed the exulting German voice who ended
the awful film with a shriek worthy of Hitler himself, "So we
will treat all enemies of the Third Reich swine for the fish to
eat Hefl Hitler!"
The dangerous game of maintaining a supposed London
spy ring information service to the Germans had by mischance
and delay at a rendezvous caused the death of perhaps 2,000
brave Commandos.
We can imagine the bitter soul-searching that followed
at Broadway and in the British Cabinet meeting. An S.O.,E.
official told me that the whole process and scheme of further
fooling the German Intelligence was decided as being too
hazardous, when some one quoted Lincoln's Gettysburg Ad-
dressthe part, "that we here highly resolve that these dead
shall not have died in vain." By the thinnest of margins and
the bitterest of head-shakings, S.LS. was permitted to carry
on.
And now we come to the famous secret ski sites, These
mysteries had been noted from the air for some time. They
were so called because, looking down on them from an air-
plane, all one saw was a narrow building perhaps thirty or
more feet long with a curled end, exactly like a ski on its edge.
Bombing them was utterly ineffective they were too small
and, anyway, a lucky direct hit found them easily replaced a
few days later.
154
THE NAZI AGENT WHO BECAME A BRITISH KNIGHT
There were seventy or eighty of these inexplicable things,
the northernmost in a great group about St. Omer and Haze-
brouck, swinging in an arc south as far as Bacqueville and
Tougouse; then no more until there was a cluster of eight
around Valognes, south of Cherbourg.
It was a mystery that frightened both British and Ameri-
cans as only the unknown can. The gayest cocktail party was
stilled if someone blurted out, "What can they be, these ski
sites?" It was always referred to as "Crossbow" a sort of bolt
aimed at England's heart
One thing we all knew. Laid out on a map, a straight line
from each ski ran plumb into London or Bristol or Birming-
ham or Manchester or Liverpool. Those at Cherbourg ranged
precisely on Portsmouth and Southampton.
In this tense time the German radio operator was sending
over his messages every day. After Dieppe there was, there
could be, no question whatever of his authenticity. Two thou-
sand Commando bodies turning in the surf were compelling
proof of the fact that the Nazi spy ring was marvelously on
the job in Great Britain. The messages, while accurate, were
of less importance during this time: "Fury of the British Navy
that two U-boats had refuelled and provisioned at an Irish
port. An unbelievable number of American motor trucks and
jeeps at Cheltenham. Don't bomb Isle of Man our prisoners
erf war are all there. A Dr. Henderson, Director of Porton
Bacteriological Laboratories, has new powerful spore devel-
oped for invasion. Will try to get name for you."
As the calendar progressed that spring, the messages be-
came ever more excited: "American troops pouring into Great
Britain! Landing operations being practiced in Scotland!
Enormous quantity of pipe and big pumps being collected!
155
THE NAZI AGENT WHO BECAME A BRITISH KNIGHT
Suggest they intend to pump gasoline to Calais when inva-
sion is made!"
Finally the messages reached a feverish pitch: "They
plan to land early July, but great difference of opinion as to
where. One powerful group advocates Schleswig-Holstein, an-
other strong for the Dutch beaches."
The final culminating message was a long and detailed
one:
Allied War Council in twenty-hour bitter debate on
where to land. Each proponent had good arguments, but
Churchill kept saying "Ski sites, ski sites/* Our mystery in-
stallations on the Pas de Calais, Dunkirk to Dieppe have
won the decision. The Supreme Allied Command is un-
able or unwilling to effect an invasion landing anywhere
else and leave these unknown objects on its flank. Churchill
thinks they can be pivoted to devastate in any direction.
Final orders are to invade Europe, Calais to fifty miles
south. This is most vital message I have sent at any time
and fate of Dritte Reich depends on your action thereon.
Glorious repulse if you mass all defenses there.
At Broadway the tension became almost a tangible thing.
Would Himmler and the German High Command fall for
this deception? Would the deathly fiasco of Dieppe be re-
deemed and the courage of maintaining the mechanism of
deceit be now justified? Would all Nazi forces concentrate on
the Pas de Calais?
And there they did mass! Only a recuperation battalion
or two were quite by accident opposed to Allied forces behind
the Normandy beaches. But die two thousand killed at
Dieppe did not die in vain; there was a new birth of freedom
and many a soldier who landed on Omaha Beach with no
156
THE NAZI AGENT WHO BECAME A BRITISH KNIGHT
knowledge of the machinations at work, owed his life to
the gallant Commandos of Dieppe.
The surrender of Germany ended the usefulness of the
German radio operator but not the promise of Britain. A
subsequent New Year's brought the King's list of elevations to
knighthood. Don't look for his name on the list. It may have
been Sir Hubert Throckmorton or Sir William Beacham or
Sir Harry Hawkins. I know he was there, but when I asked
for the name, I received a bland British smile. If any man
ever deserved knighthood, he did, whoever he is.
157
i6
LONDON
I had never observed a city under air attack before. As I
stood by London's St. Paul's Cathedral, as far as my eye could
view there was nothing but nibble. St. Paul's was unharmed be-
cause its dome could be seen far away on moonlit nights and
those Luftwaffe raiders who were not yet expert at navigation
wanted it spared as a guide and beacon.
It was a shocking sight to see and I wondered if any
American metropolis, so devastated, could maintain its fight
and courage. Could we in the States find things to joke about
amid such terrific destruction? Yet, the story circulating with
relish in London Town concerned four "fish-and-chips" girls
those women whose little stalls with a greasy melange of
immature minnows and potato chips had been a London fix-
ture. The story went that supplies were running short, so one
put up a sign, "Because of Hitler my servings will be littler/*
Similarly, short on materials, the second posted, "Account of
Hess I'm serving less/' But the little fish and the chips were
now unobtainable, so a lady down the street made a sign read-
ing, "Because of Goering am forced to return to my previous
158
LONDON
means of livelihood/' The last fish-and-chips girl announced
to the world, "Because of Himmler I'm doing sim-ler."
I was billeted in Claridge's Hotel on Brook Street Reg-
ulations gave a visitor one week's occupany of a hotel room
and the authorities enforced that rule with asperity. I was far
too occupied to look elsewhere. One morning as I was rush-
ing for a waiting military car, the manager stopped me. He
was obviously French and wore a modified cutaway coat and
striped trousers. He was abrupt, to the point of incivility.
"Out you go tonight, Mr. LovelL Your week is up. No ex-
ceptions. Your things will be packed by our man, and your
luggage will be in the check room."
The car was honking. With a heavy heart I left for Por-
ton, angry at his rude approach, angry at myself for not attend-
ing to the matter as I should have.
It was after ten that night when I returned. An air raid
was on and the anti-aircraft guns in Hyde Park were filling
the night with sound and shells. I worked my way through the
blackout barriers and up the broad stairs to the Claridge's
lobby. Where to lay my weary head? How to locate a room
so late at night?
At the top of the stairway the same manager awaited me.
I frowned at him, but to my surprise he was all smiles and
obsequiousness.
"I waited for you to return, sir, to beg you to forget the
gauche remarks I made to you this morning. Will you accept
my profound apologies and consider yourself a guest of Clar-
idge's as long as you care to stay?"
Dumbfounded, I murmured my thanks and went to the
reception desk. With my room key, the derk handed me a
great sheaf of notices.
159
LONDON
"Mr. Anthony Eden phoned. Save lunch tomorrow for
him."
"Air Chief Marshall Sir Charles Portals must see you
without fail at earliest."
"The Prime Minister's secretary telephoned to ask that you
be sure to pay him a visit while here."
I asked the desk clerk if I might see the names of the
guests who had registered during the day. I added casually,
"I'm expecting a most important personage."
There was the registration card of Robert A. Lovett,
America's Assistant Secretary of War for Air. He had written
it in a hurry, I suppose, because the double "t" was a pair of
loops and the cross mark far out to the right. So, of course, it
was read as Lovell, and in the confusion his notices were put
in my box.
I stayed as the guest of Claridge's for my full duty in
Britain. When he realized his mistake, the French manager
glared fiercely at me, but I smiled sweetly. Hadn't he told me
to be their guest as long as I cared to stay?
In addition to the Rjukan-Peenemiinde Intelligence, I
was charged with several other matters, among them the task
of arranging, if possible, for the U.S. Navy to use a one-man
submarine. The target was the great German warship, the
von Tirpitz, hiding in its Norwegian fjord.
This meant clearing the matter with Admiral Harold
Stark, our CominCh, U.S. Navy in European waters, univer-
sally known as "Betty" Stark. We met at Dorchester House
for lunch, with notable Englishmen such as Honorable Mr.
Brackett, Honorable Mr. Penfield and Wing Commander
Boyle, After the lunch Admiral Stark led me to a far comer
df the deserted lobby. It was an enormous room panelled in
160
LONDON
walnut, and we took chairs perhaps fifty or seventy feet away
from everyone.
I told the Admiral that the O.S.S. one-man submarine
had successfully passed the most rigorous tests at sea and that
it and two trained operators were at his disposal. He thanked
me and was very pleased that O.S.S. agents did not attempt
to put on the operation themselves, but were giving it to the
U.S. Navy with no strings attached.
We parted at the door of Dorchester House and I re-
turned to O.S.S. headquarters in Grosvenor Square. David
Bruce was waiting for me with a face that betokened bad
news, indeed.
"Stan," he said, "British Security Police just telephoned
me that you have completely broken security and that I must
order you to leave for Washington immediately, otherwise
you will be arrested/ 7
"In God's name, what is the charge?"
"I don't know, but come in my office and 111 attempt to
find out/'
After a somewhat heated phone conversation he hung
up and said, "All they'd say was it had something to do with
the von Tirpftz-does that help?"
It surely did. I told him of my private talk with Admiral
Stark. I pleaded that if I had broken security, the Admiral
had, also, and we should both be sent home together.
A telephone call from Colonel Bruce to Admiral Stark,
another from the Admiral to British Security Office with, I
was later told, plenty of salty oaths, and finally a call to me at
O.S.S. headquarters from the Chief London Security officer.
"Awfully sorry about the whole matter. You see, Dr.
Lovefl, you never once mentioned the name of the person to
161
LONDON
whom you were talking, so it might have been a German
agent The high-ranking naval person whom we verified by
calling him has validated your story and everything's quite
all right.
"By the way, sir, this is a bit of an object lesson to you
that quite regardless of how isolated you may seem to be, such
highly confidential matters should never be mentioned in
public places. Our electronic conversation pick-ups are very
sensitive, you know/'
"Thank you. I understand. Big Brother is listening/*
"Quite/'
162
7
THE GREAT FEUD
None of the classic feuds of history or fiction exceeded
the clan warfare between William J. Donovan and George
Veazey Strong that is, between the Office of Strategic Serv-
ices and the U.S. Army Intelligence (G-2) . The Montagues
and the Capulets, the Guelphs and the Ghibbelines, and the
Hatfields and McCoys had their counterpart in this brawl be-
tween two fine war agencies.
It started with the violent upset of orderly law enforce-
ment in Baltimore, where the O.S.S. trainees made a shambles
of that city's military security.
There was Operator C-iz whose story is told elsewhere
in this narrative. There was John Toulmin, who posed as a
Marine Corps colonel on sick leave and walked out of a most
critical defense plant with the entire set of blueprints for a
revolutionary new gun that was about to be manufactured.
Both Generals, Donovan and Strong, were far beyond
military age when World War II started, and each was sixty
or thereabouts when the rivalry and antagonism began. It is
easy to appreciate the point of view of both men, unfortu-
163
THE GREAT FEUD
nately, as it would be more satisfying if blame could be
squarely placed on one man or the other.
George Veazey Strong graduated from West Point in
1904, then from Northwestern University in 1916. There fol-
lowed the War College and the General Staff School in 1924.
He rose through the military commissions in the Cavaliy
Division to become a Brigadier General in 1938. In 1941, the
year of Pearl Harbor, he was made a Major General and
the following year our first of the war he was appointed the
Chief of Military Intelligence.
A great student of languages, he wrote the invaluable
Japanese-English Military Dictionary and a masterful syllabus
of Chinese-Japanese characters and symbols.
A professional soldier to his fingertips, ambitious to make
his Military Intelligence an outstanding contributor to an
American victory, he at once set out to build a fine collection
and appraisal system of all information to be had on our
enemies, east and west. It was his duty to advise the President
and the Joint Chiefs of Staff of his evaluation of these facts
and his forecasts of the enemies' actions.
And now into this ambitious, orthodox machine, Presi-
dent Roosevelt threw the monkey wrench of a newborn ama-
teur agency, the O.S.S. To make matters more irritating, its
Director was no West Point graduate who had won his way
up from a lieutenancy but a World War I hero who could
boast no military training whatever. A brilliant war record,
surpassing almost any West Pointer, but no school tie, no
ring, and an alma mater (Columbia) that was on the wrong
bank of the Hudson River.
Both men had one thing in common, the ear of Presi-
dent Roosevelt; General Strong because of his official status
164
THE GREAT FEUD
in the American war apparatus, General Donovan because he
had proven to be a true prophet in his appraisal of Great Brit-
ain's ability to withstand the Nazi blitz.
I think Roosevelt considered Donovan to be more knowl-
edgeable in the sensitive field of world politics, with Strong
better posted on the facts and implications of battle and
troop intelligence. Thus, the President might reason that no
duplication or overlap of activity would take place, but that
each could smoothly function to the advantage of all.
It was probably some minor and insignificant indiscretion
at a cocktail party, perhaps which irritated General Strong.
Instead of facing General Donovan with it so that discipli-
nary action might be taken against the "flannel-mouth/* he
went to one of the top men of the Federal Bureau of In-
vestigation, with the evidence. The latter, in turn, went to the
President with, by now, a vividly-painted version of the verbal
slip.
Inevitably, these actions were relayed back to General
Donovan, losing nothing, you can be sure, in the re-telling,
and the feud was on. It is said that the start of the Hatfield-
McCoy business occurred when a member of one family or
the other, while out hunting, saw a movement in the woods
and fired to get a deer. The McCoy or Hatfield slightly
wounded, identified the hunter as a deliberate assailant and
so the long line of murders began in error.
Uncorrected, such trivial origins soon become lost in the
venom they create, so it no longer matters what started it all,
only that it is spontaneously maintained. It permeated both
fine organizations and hit at random, viciously, impartially,
quite irrationally. For example, in August of 1943 a Captain
in General Strong's office preferred charges against me, stat-
165
THE GREAT FEUD
ing I had "broken security in a flagrant manner." I was flab-
bergasted and profoundly disturbed. My value to General
Donovan and to the O.S.S. would be zero if such a charge
were to be validated. But, like some Gestapo proceeding, to
whom do you appeal? How do you face your accusers?
Colonel Buxton was deeply upset over this accusation of
my infidelity. "Search your memory, Stanley," he said, "and
tell me of any possible indiscretion." I did, and so help me,
I hadn't! Two weeks or so after the blanket accusation from
Strong's office did I, somewhat by force and somewhat less by
persuasion, catch the Captain alone and literally force from
him the nature of my awful sin. It seemed that a Colonel
close to General Strong originated the insecurity charge, and
the Captain, God help him, was merely "carrying out orders."
By the time I met the Colonel I had a big enough dos-
sier on the gentleman to satisfy a most vengeful person. We
met and his letter which I brought out with me, had such ad-
jectives as "unsupported," and "apologetic," but I couldn't
get "vindictive" into it. Almost, but not quite! At any rate,
the charges evaporated in a single-paged letter and I was re-
established on Donovan's staff and completely exonerated of
an utterly false charge I should never have been forced to
defend.
As I told the Colonel, we had enough of a problem
fighting the Germans and the Japanese at one and the same
tune without trumping up mendacious changes against each
other.
Another Colonel on General George Strong's staff hap
pened to be a pre-war friend of my wife and mine.' He was
Geoige Lusk who, before the war, had been a textbook pub-
lisher in Boston. It was Colonel Lusk who convinced me that
166
THE GREAT FEUD
General Strong was not a jealous monster, but a sincere
patriot. Colonel Lusk thus became a channel of common sense
and sanity in a situation that was rapidly becoming, to all of
us in O.S.S., an intolerable war in itself.
One of my biggest personal problems at the time was
whether or not to go into uniform. Almost everyone in O.S.S.
was doing so. It would be rather nice to be Colonel or perhaps
Brigadier General after the war, but I knew that I had not
given up my business position merely to get an officer's com-
mission.
At this point, please forgive a sentimental journey into
the past. I had been an orphan since childhood just me and
a sister six years older and there was a real paucity of money.
Convinced by her that only in the United States could a poor
boy with no family backing get a fine education, that became
my all-possessing goal. Naturally, realizing that I had such a
glorious opportunity led to a deep appreciation of the kind
of a country to which I was fortunate enough to belong that
and a keen sense of indebtedness to it. Now in O.S.S. I was
happily making some payment on that debt.
In all this intelligence agency bitterness, the Navy's
O.N.L held a neutral, if not cooperative, attitude toward the
O.S.S. Admiral Forrest Sherman, whom I had first met at
Pearl Harbor on the Lethbridge matter, when he threw his
great weight to the side of approval, was a bulwark of help.
Some of us will always wonder if his untimely death in a pub-
lic hotel in Genoa, Italy was due to natural causes. Genoa
was a hotbed of Communists, and Admiral Sherman had just
concluded some vital conferences with Franco on air bases in
Spain.
The antagonism which Army Intelligence held toward
167
THE GREAT FEUD
O.S.S. was at such a point that Major General George Veazey
Strong and William J, Donovan were no longer on speaking
terms.
Colonel Ned Buxton asked me to see if I could soften
or in any way help the distressing situation. I had an appoint-
ment with General Strong and found him bristling with re-
sentment before I was barely introduced as one of Donovan's
staff.
He let go with real anger at the silly upsets to his men
that our training stunts were causing. He said, "Lovell, go
back to Wildman Donovan and tell him that his amateur
gang is going to be thrown out of the war effort entirely. I'm
seeing the President on it and J. Edgar Hoover is going with
me. Good-bye/'
I said, "General Strong, I believe you are a consecrated
man. I think you would give your life for our country. I know
Bill Donovan would he has proved it many times in World
War I. God help America if two great soldiers put their per-
sonal egos ahead of their country."
"Get out" I did. Just as I closed the door of his office
he shouted, "Gome back here." I did so, without a word.
"If you were in uniform, Lovell, I'd prefer charges
against you for talking to me like that. Being a civilian I can't
do it" Then in a calmer tone, "So you think that two over-
grown egos are at fault?"
"Egotism, jealousy and the usual superior attitude a pro-
fessional assumes toward an amateur. All I ask is that you
give the O.S.S. a chance to prove its mettle."
"Ill think about it," he said, but in a normal tone and
almost absent-mindedly he extended his hand for a farewell
shake.
168
THE GREAT FEUD
Before General Bissell succeeded him, I saw him on any
potential cause of friction or clash between the two intelli-
gence agencies and proudly numbered him among my friends.
General Donovan and General Strong softened to the
point of nodding and smiling at one another at various func-
tions, but both used me as liaison rather than risk a personal
visit with its probable explosion.
Later, General Donovan asked me, when I returned from
General Strong's office with a letter of approval on a touchy
matter, "Stanley, how do you do it?"
'That's easy, Bffl. I'm a civilian, that's why/'
"Well, then/' he said, "no commission or uniform for
you/'
169
THE GREAT OPPORTUNIST
The great intelligence agent of our time is Franz von
Papen- He was born in 1880, a proud descendant in a direct
line from Wilhelm von Papen who died in 1494. At the age
of eleven, he was a cadet and at seventeen a page in the Em-
peror's Court. A year later he was commissioned a Second
Lieutenant in a regiment of Uhlans. When he was twenty-
five he married a girl of French descent. The War Academy
graduated him and by 1913 he was appointed to the German
Army General Staff. That same year he was sent as Military
Attache to both the United States and Mexico. In Mexico he
met a Lieutenant Canaris of the German Navy, a contact
that was later to become most important in von Papen's
career, when Admiral Canaris became the chief of Hider's
Abwefer, the Nazi foreign intelligence agency and spy ring.
In his memoirs, published in 1953, von Papen assured
us that the Kaiser did not want war, but had to order it when
Russia made Germany's position untenable. In Washington
he became the center of German intrigue and sabotage. He
admits having false passports made, ordering the Welland
170
THE GREAT OPPORTUNIST
Ship Canal blown up and blocked, and hiring thugs, like von
Rintelen, who probably executed the "Black Tom" Disaster.
Von Papen denies any complicity in this violent act against
a nation not at war. The Austrian Ambassador, Heir Dumba,
reported in detail to Vienna on von Papen's spying and sabo-
tage in our neutral country and somehow the British S.LS.
intercepted the Dumba report and published it. This famous
report was called the "Albert Papers/' Von Papen, in his
memoirs, called this "an unfortunate occurrence."
In 1915 he managed to sail to England and was arrested
at Falmouth. The British would have been wise to intern him
for the duration of the war, but in those days a diplomatic
passport was still a paper to be honored by the meticulous
British, so they searched him and then allowed him to pro-
ceed to Rotterdam and thereafter, home. He was sent to the
front in Turkey to fight against Allenby and Lawrence of
Arabia. When the Fatherland surrendered, he came home.
Of the postwar period, he said the philosophy of the
Weimar Constitution was detestable because it held that "all
power derives from the people." "The Versailles Treaty," he
wrote, "was founded in hysteria." He entered politics largely
to represent the old idea of German aristocracy and hoped
that the Hohenzollerns would be restored to power.
He became Chancellor of Germany but not for long. He
held that the rising Nazi Party under Adolph Hitler must be
represented in the government Despite the sanctimonious
protestations of Christian piety he did, in effect, turn Germany
over to the Nazi rabble. Then came the Great Purge in Mu-
nich and Berlin, and we find von Papen as Vice Chancellor
under house arrest He pleaded with Hitler that his diplo-
matic standing would expedite a union with Austria so, once
171
THE GREAT OPPORTUNIST
again, he escaped a violent end and became Ambassador at
Vienna,
He writes that he fully expected to be arrested for treason
after the Anschluss or union with that little country, but by
1939 ^ ot himself appointed Ambassador to Turkey. Per-
haps he sincerely felt war could be avoided, yet, so shrewd
a man surely could have seen little hope in the Nazi regime
he had helped to power. When war started he told his secre-
tary^ 'This is the worst crime and greatest madness that Hitler
and his clique have ever committed. Germany can never win
this war. Nothing will be left but ruins."
He contemplated becoming a refugee, but decided he
could limit the conflict if he remained in Ankara, One won-
ders if the "Great Opportunist" didn't really hope to return
to power by some future machination. Throughout the war
he operated German intelligence in Turkey with a gusto that
fitted poorly with his pious Christian attitude. "I found it
possible to exercise normal instincts and refuse to obey un-
principled orders," he wrote. While serving Hitler and Rib-
bentrop in March of 1945, he contacted ex-Governor Earle
of Pennsylvania as an intermediary to President Franklin
Roosevelt. Von Papen's argument was much like that of Ru-
dolph Hess in his historic flight to England stop our fighting
with each other or Russia will be the great victor of this war.
He quotes Mr. Earle from a Philadelphia. Inquirer interview
of January 30, 1949 as, in turn, quoting President Roosevelt
"that Russia, made up of so many peoples, speaking so many
languages need not be worried about and would, in fact, fall
apart after the war/'
Von Papen painted himself as the apostle of peace dur-
ing all the war years. Not a word of plotting or spy activity,
172
THE GREAT OPPORTUNIST
except the famous "Operation Cicero," which had doubtless
received so much publicity it could not be ignored. Even
here, the typical von Papen touch. It has been established
that "D," the Albanian informer was paid off by von Papen
in counterfeit, worthless British pound notes. Not a sentence
of this in the memoirs!
One significant gap in the autobiography is found be-
tween August 5, 1944 and April 9, 1945 eight months cul-
minating in his arrest by American troops. He had praise for
"gallant Goering," he was shocked at the disclosures of con-
centration camp atrocities; his old associates {barring Goer-
ing) he called Spiessburgers insincere Philistines. But it's
all the fault of the United States and Great Britain! Locarno
and Lausanne both ignored the necessity of building a strong
Germany.
He favored Hitler, he says, only to avoid civil war. "I am
under no illusion as to the reputation I enjoy, but the whole
German disaster is clearly due to the bad treatment van-
quished Germany received after World War I."
Franz von Papen can only be compared to Liza, crossing
the ice in Uncle Tom's Cabin. As the ice cake of Kaiser Wil-
helm started to sink, he jumped to the Weimar Republic
cake. As that began to fail, he leapt to the Nazi support.
There was yet another ice cake to jump to. It was the O.S-S.
His excoriation of Adolph Hitler, when der Fuhrer was
safely dead, came a little late from the man who told the Aus-
trian Chancellor von Schuschnigg in 1938, "You can trust
Adolph Hitler's immaculate word of honor/'
The O.S.S. realized that this brilliant, devout Catholic
layman, this worshipper of the vanished Kaiserlicie regime,
was a stark realist and a ruthless and clever opportunist
17?
THE GREAT OPPORTUNIST
In March of 1943, General Donovan had me meet our
chief O.S.S. operator for the Near East, who had that day
flown in from Ankara, Turkey. I knew him only as "Mac/"
Like almost all intelligence operators, Mac exchanged infor-
mation with enemy spies, but he was a very special case,
indeed, as his contact was direct with Franz von Papen.
Here, it seemed to me, was a fine chance to use bac-
teriological "medication." My Canadian friends supplied us
with viable staphylococcus aureus in crushable glass ampules.
It was considered to be a powerful but non-lethal organism.
I gave it to Mac and told him to introduce it into food
preferably custard when he called on von Papen. I told Mac
to take it himself, also, and assured him it would cause dis-
comfort, but would never kill him or von Papen, The O.S.S.
gave Mac some very hot information to relate to von Papen,
but it was so timed that its receipt in Berlin would be just a
little too late to be valuable or allow any countermeasures.
I was told that the whole idea worked even better than
we had hoped. At dinner in the German Embassy in Ankara,
Mac managed to get the yellow powder both into his food
and the Ambassador's. After dinner they sat before a fireplace
in the study and Mac gave von Papen his true, but just-too-
late information. Shortly after, they were both seized with
cramps so severe that the German physician put them to bed
in the same room, upstairs. The doctor blamed the attack on
the custard. Convalescence was slow. Had the toilet been ten
feet further away, it would have been of no use. What took
place with these two men lying side by side can best be de-
duced from what happened to von Papen thereafter.
This man, who had switched his loyalty from the Kaiser
to the Weimar Republic to von Hindenburg to Adolph Hit
174
THE GREAT OPPORTUNIST
Ier 7 who had avoided the great Munich purge of June 30,
1934 by being appointed Papal Legate the week before this
man was an expert at shifting gears and joining the side he
felt would win. Mac undoubtedly convinced him that the
Nazis would lose the war. At anv rate, it is a fact that he and
* '
Schacht were the only Nazi leaders exonerated at the war
trials in Nuremberg. No one seemed to notice that, immedi-
ately after the breakthrough at the Remagen Bridge, von
Papen was in his castle in Bavaria. If he was in Ankara the
day before, only the U.S. Air Force could have made the
flight possible. My guess is that Mac promised von Papen
immunity from any trial if he would come over to our side
and that we kept our promise to him, and he to us- The mu-
tual convalescence from the Canadian bacteriological inges-
tion paid off handsomely.
175
WJT.D., AN INTIMATE APPRAISAL
On April 17, 1951 I was in William J. Donovan's law of-
fice at 2 Wall Street, New York City. He was, as always,
interested in the successor organization to O.S.S., the Central
Intelligence Agency.
He said, "Stanley, Beetle Smith is out as head of C.LA.
Ulcers, you know. The other day, Allen Dulles came in here
and said that President Truman had offered him the job
and what did I advise? I told him, 'Allen, you were a great
performer as a lone operator. You did a wonderful intelligence
fob in Switzerland during the war but, Al, this C.I.A. fob
needs an expert organizer, and you're no good whatever at
that Tell the President you're flattered that he thought of
you, but the answer has to be "no." You're the best man we
ever had at collecting intelligence but you know nothing
about sabotage or any violent operation. Admit it, AI, the fob
isn't for you/
"He left damned upset with me, but God help America
if he heads up C J.A. It's like making a marvelous telegraph
operator the head of Western Union."
176
W.J.D., AN INTIMATE APPRAISAL
The point of starting an appraisal of William J. Dono-
van with this account is that all who knew him and worked
under him recognized that Donovan was the worst organizer
of all. A great agency grew up under him because he didn't
really try to organize it he just authorized it. I'm sure the
C J.A. under Allen Dulles was far better organized than the
O.S.S. ever was. That its contribution seems less is partly due
to its being a peacetime agency and partly because it has to
"clear" so much with the State Department, the Army, Navy
and Air Force, and, I sometimes feel, the Home Owners Loan
Agency and the Better Business Bureau. But most of all, be-
cause it never had William J. Donovan as its Director.
No one who knew him intimately can ever appraise Don-
ovan in any simple or glib manner, because there were so
many facets to his personality. The mild blue eyes needing
no glasses in his seventh decade; the rather dumpy, corpulent
figure; the soft, almost restrained voice; the gray hair and the
none-too-well fitting clothes were in no way indicative of the
man inside that exterior.
Born in Buffalo, New York on New Year's Day, 1883,
he received his A.B. degree from Columbia when he was
twenty-two and his law degree two years later. He started at
once to practice law in his hometown. Mrs. Judge Carroll
Hincks of Cheshire, Connecticut was a debutante in Buffalo
at that time. She says that Bill Donovan was the most eligible
and popular bachelor of the city. Every unmarried girl dreamed
of becoming his wife, and, I suspect, some married ones did,
too. He withstood the feminine assaults until he was thirty-
one when, shortly before Europe burst into the flames of
World War I, he married Ruth Rumsey. She was the belle
177
W.J.D., AN INTIMATE APPRAISAL
of the Delaware Avenue set. Her family had wealth. She was
a Protestant, he a Roman Catholic.
Their honeymoon was barely over before he started rais-
ing a company of soldiers because he felt Wilson's promise
to keep America out of war was either insincere or impossible
to keep. He was a captain in the New York State National
Guard when the American Expeditionary Force was orga-
nized. Thus, at the age of thirty-four, he made his first success
at anticipating world events.
Soon he had risen to be Assistant Chief of Staff of the
2yth Division. Promoted to be a major in the proud old 69^1
New York Infantry Regiment, he won his coloneFs eagles by
spot promotions on the battlefields of France. His name be-
came a legend for daring, bravery and total disregard of per-
sonal danger. A baseball hero of those days was called "Wild
B2r Donovan, and his troops nicely appropriated that nick-
name for their leader. He was wounded three times.
The second battle of the Marne in July, 1918 is called
by Captain Basil Liddell Hart "the turning of the tide of
World War I." Here, the Allies captured the initiative and
the Germans never regained it. The River Ourocq protected
the German army under Ludendorff , which had so far met no
reversals. Colonel Donovan led his troops across the Ourocq.
For this, and his bravery in the Baccarat sector, he was given
the Distinguished Service Medal. In the famous Meuse-Ar-
gonne offensive in October, 1918, he received the Congres-
sional Medal of Honor for his action near Londres and St.
Georges.
Colonel Ned Buxton always maintained, in his joking
way, that Bill Donovan should have been court-martialed for
the very action that won him the Congressional Medal of
178
W.J.D., AN INTIMATE APPRAISAL
Honor. Colonel Buxton's command was alongside Donovan's
and whether told as fact or a joke, Buxton straight-facedly
averred that orders came to both men to withdraw one kilo-
meter and consolidate their positions. To Buxton's amaze-
ment, Donovan advanced on the double, so there was no
choice but to do the same or expose the whole Donovan regi-
ment to encirclement by the Germans.
Ned Buxton who had a Lincolnesque way with a story,
ended the anecdote, "I asked Wild Bill what the hell he
meant by disobeying orders."
"What orders?" he blandly asked.
At the end of World War I he returned to Buffalo, the
most decorated man in American military history. He was
made commander of the Legion of Honor, the Order of the
British Empire, the Croci di Guerra, the Order of Leopold,
the Cross Polonia Restituta and a special Croix de Guerre
with palm and silver star. At the age of thirty-five, this Buffa-
lonian who had not made his mark in the law, was the coun-
try's hero.
The most exclusive clubs welcomed him and political ap-
pointments were many. In 1922 he was U.S. District Attor-
ney for Western New York. During Prohibition, his exclusive
Buffalo club served any alcoholic drink desired to its mem-
bers of which William J. Donovan was one a prominent one.
He had the place raided and many a socialite member
found his name on the police blotter with a whacking fine
for the club. I can only speculate that Donovan's oath to
enforce the Federal law compelled him to do it, but Buffalo
was splattered with speakeasies, so why raid his own select
group of important friends? Whatever the motive, lofty or
179
W.J.D., AN INTIMATE APPRAISAL
merely a determination to use his new-found power, it cost
him dear in 1932.
He opened a law office in New York City in 1929 and
his clients were such potent names as the Standard Oil Com-
pany of New Jersey and some of the biggest New York City
banks. He told me that he had advised the oil company to
withdraw from its extensive investment in China, which they
did in the nick of time. His law practice became more and
more involved in international politics, and his advice proved
to be amazingly accurate.
In 1932 he ran for Governor of New York State as a Re-
publican. A bitter Buffalo group, remembering his Prohibi-
tion raids, threw its upstate weight to Herbert Lehman, and
pulled every connection to defeat Donovan, and a decisive
defeat it was. If he was hurt, he never showed it
During the next six years he made vital contacts in Great
Britain. Sir Charles Hambro of Hambro's Bank, Winston
Churchill and men of that stripe, in or out of office, used him
more and more as their agent and advisor on matters legal
and political in the United States. Franklin D. Roosevelt had
been at Columbia Law School at the same time as Donovan-
He travelled almost continually. General Pietro Badoglio
of Italy was a warm friend. He became an unofficial observer
for Roosevelt when the latter became President His greatest
decision was when he returned from London during the cru-
cial Battle of Britain. He knew about the British invention of
radar. After the crushing defeat of Dunkirk in 1940, all of the
President's advisors assured the White House that Great
Britain had no choice but to surrender to the Nazis all ex-
cept Wild Bill Donovan. Army Intelligence gave the Royal
AirJForce only a week or two to survive,
180
W.J.D., AN INTIMATE APPRAISAL
Colonel Donovan was almost offensively confident and
buoyant in a Washington that had Britain dead and buried.
The most that the professional intelligence agencies would
concede was that a second-rate resistance might be maintained
against Hitler in Canada, Australia and New Zeaknd.
Colonel Donovan told President Roosevelt that Great
Britain would win over the Nazis in the air and on the sea.
As the months rolled by, it became ever clearer that Donovan
was a true prophet and every other advisor surrounding the
President, military and civilian, was his inferior.
When it was assured that, standing all alone, Great Brit-
ain was able to withstand the terror and might of the Nazi
war machine; or, put in another way, that the Hitler gang had
missed the great moment to invade England and win the war,
Colonel Donovan told President Roosevelt the thrilling story
of British Secret Intelligence and its twin, Special Opera-
tions, Executive. In July 1941, five months before isolationist
America was changed overnight at Pearl Harbor, these two
men planned a parallel intelligence-sabotage agency, and who
better to head it than the man who had so correctly evaluated
the indomitable stamina of Britain?
On one of his travels as Special Representative for the
President, he had his baggage and all his papers and reports
stolen. I recall it as happening in Cairo or perhaps, Baghdad.
I recall, too, thinking how much better it would have been
not to report and publicize the loss which was bound to make
him appear rather naive and not a little stupid.
But what would have ruined the career of anyone else
somehow turned into an asset for him. The press picked up
the story, calling him "Colonel Donovan, America's Secret
181
WJIX, AN INTIMATE APPRAISAL
Agent/' Overnight, he became the kind of person who is the
hero of all the spy stories ever written.
A man of mystery, about whom legends are born. Re-
member, our country was krgely indifferent to the travail of
Europe, something to be avoided at all costs. Yet hearts were
warmed to realize that we had someone meeting with kings
and presidents and probably with conspirators in dark alleys,
and advising Washington on the "inside facts."
And so, six months before the Japanese attack, these two
men, Republican and Democrat, Catholic and Protestant, in-
stituted a new idea in our government, a wartime agency for
espionage and subversion.
That sort of activity had never been attempted in the
U.S A It was given the vague and meaningless name of Co-
ordinator of Information one could hardly cavil at that. After
the Japanese attack, it was changed to a "Service" to include
the development and supplying of unorthodox weapons, and
anything else that was wanted, to resistance groups every-
where. "Strategic" implied planning and advising such groups,
so Office of Strategic Services was decided upon as a correct
name that did not reveal the business of the agency.
Here was the activity and the duty for which he was
born. How can any man's work be fudged, except by balanc-
ing the good and the bad? Right from the start, to name a bad
qualify, Bill Donovan drove his security officers Weston How-
land and Archibald van Beuren to the brink of despair. Bill
Donovan would talk about the most secret affairs at a cocktail
party or a dinner, according to our Chief of Security, and be
furious if he were criticized for it. I recall being in his private
automobile with his chaffeur, we two on the rear seat with
no interior barrier (as in a limousine) , when he began talking
182
W.J.D., AN INTIMATE APPRAISAL
to me of the exact date and place of the landings at Marseilles.
I mutely pointed to the driver in the seat ahead. For some
reason General Donovan didn't take offense.
"Oh, Harry's all right, aren't you, Harry?"
"If you say so, Boss, then I sure am!" Hairy said.
I cannot rationalize his often flagrant breaching of se-
curity and secrecy. Certainly, we on his staff were held to the
most rigid and meticulous standards. As in my own case, when
an extremely sensitive matter, like the Lethbridge Report, was
discussed, he would remind me, "Stanley, not one word to
anyone for twenty years!"
William J. Donovan made a fetish of acquiring distin-
guished college professors. In his mind they outranked scien-
tists, I'm sure, and, I think, even lawyers and bankers. Perhaps,
highest in his regard was William L. Langer, Coolidge Profes-
sor of History at Harvard, James L. McConnaughy, President
of Wesleyan University and kter Governor of Connect-
icut, Edward S. Mason, James Phinney Baxter, President of
Williams College, Sherman Kent, and W. S. Lewis of Yale,
Maurice Halperin of Oklahoma, Congers Read of the Univer-
sity of Pennsylvania, and a host of others of whom, I, being
a simple chemist, never knew the scholastic stature. The group
of scholars and educators was called the Research and Analy-
sis Branch.
Under Dr. Langer, they assembled an incredible mass
of information about practically every nation in the world:
its history, geography, political and economic structure, its
ethnology, ecology and other ologies too numerous to men-
tion.
Those of us in applied sciences, working with tangible
tools ttf meet the subtle demands of the resistance forces in
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W.J.D., AN INTIMATE APPRAISAL
Europe and Asia were, I think, inclined to belittle the work
of this academic group. How wrong we were. It was intelli-
gence at its best, and it had never been done before until
Bill Donovan created it. After the war was over, I was told by
Army, Navy and Air Force friends that a request for data on
the most obscure seashore or inland location produced in-
stantly an encyclopedia on that very place.
When the professors returned to their classrooms, they
must have had a rich pride in their wartime service, one which
no faculty members in earlier American wars could have made
for their country.
On the other hand I was told that Professor Halperin ad-
vocated the smuggling of two banished leaders back into their
homeland, so they might better organize the resistance to the
Nazis. The men were, as I recall it, in Mexico and in South
America, and Halperin sold his associates on the idea. One of
the refugees he had O.S.S. smuggle into France was Maurice
Thorez; into Italy Palmiro Togliatti. Each later became head
of the Communist Party in his country.
After the dissolution of the O.S.S., this same Professor
Halperin joined the faculty of Boston University. When Sen-
ator Joseph McCarthy swooped into Boston academic circles,
looking for witches among the teachers of our youth, he struck
pay dirt in Professor Maurice Halperin. Put on the witness
stand under oath, Halperin resorted to that refuge of equivo-
cation, the Fifth Amendment He was held over to the next
day for further questioning, but he never again could be asked
which side he was on. He fled to Mexico. In 1958 he went to
Moscow where, I am told, he writes vitriolic anti-American
articles and lectures to Russian youth on the depravity of the
American way of life,
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W.J.D., AN INTIMATE APPRAISAL
Communist groups were constantly functioning inside
the O.S.S. Early in January, 1943, Carroll Wilson, then Secre-
tary to Doctor Bush, asked us to make a color motion pic-
ture for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, which for the first time dis-
closed the wonderful new aid to navigation which Donald
Fink had invented. It was called "Loran" and was a Top
Secret classification. By its use, a navigator could pinpoint his
location in air, in fog, on sea, on land.
Two reels were delivered to Dr. Bush. By sheer coinci-
dence I discovered that a third print had been made. I charged
in on the O.S.S. photographic crew. They denied any holdout
I got an armed guard and threatened them with everything in
the book. As a last bluff I said I knew the Russian Embassy
was sending a man down for the secret print My bluff worked
and it was produced out of a clothes locker.
After the war, some of this group was tried for spying for
the U.S.S.R. I reported the shocking story, of course, to Gen-
eral Donovan. He told me later that he had mentioned it to
President Roosevelt and that the President had said, "Bill,
you must treat the Russians with the same trust you do the
British. They're killing Germans every day, you know."
Hindsight is so simple. In one staff meeting General
Donovan said, "I saw the President yesterday. He again said
to treat the Russians as we would treat the British. A delega-
tion of Russians is coining soon to inspect Professor Moriarty's
bag of tricks/'
Perhaps, because I am of British descent, albeit the break
with the mother country came three hundred years ago, I
quoted Shakespeare to my group and we honored General
Donovan's order more in the breach than in the observance.
The stolid, dead-pan Russian colondb came. I served them
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W.J.D., AN INTIMATE APPRAISAL
pure ethyl alcohol and water which I called vodka. I said
"Tovarich," and we showed them only the simplest devices
we had, booby traps and the like. Our silent, flashless gun had
been so altered that when fired in a dark room, it was both
deafening and blinding. They mumbled some Russian equiva-
lent of a most derogatory nature, I'm sure. They carried the
quart bottle of synthetic vodka with them when they left, but
that's all they took away of any value to the U.S.S.R.
I'm not particularly proud of failing to carry out General
Donovan's orders, but the incident illustrates the loose rein
with which he drove the office. Parenthetically, I can't imag-
ine the C.I.A. having a branch chief do such a thing.
One thing I never could understand about him. In a
group of say, ten to fifty men, he was a dynamic speaker,
forceful and utterly captivating, yet on the platform before a
hallfull an audience of hundreds or a thousand or so he was
ineffectual. His conversational voice became flat and his mes-
sage which would have read well became lost in his poor de-
livery. He was far too smart not to have realized his inability
to hold an audience, yet he never refused an invitation to talk
from a rostrum.
Little personal matters endeared him to me. At the low
point of our African invasion, when we knew the U-boats had
closed the Strait of Gibraltar, and the defeat at the Kasserine
Pass had us all in the depths of despair, Bill Donovan started
every morning staff meeting by reading aloud a chapter from
a history of the War of 1812. "They haven't burned the
White House yet," he said, as he closed the book. "You know,
boys, no one in their senses would have bet a dollar that the
United States would survive. England had every facility to
destroy us completely, yet here we are. Our country, I believe,
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W.J.D., AN INTIMATE APPRAISAL
has a destiny and a meaning in human history that no nation
has ever before possessed. Nothing can ever stop us, but the
will of God."
A revealing sidelight on this remarkable man appeared
when I noticed a language primer on his desk.
"I'm studying Italian/' he said, noting my glance. "It
may be we'll split Italy out of the Axis and 111 have to move
headquarters to Rome/'
"Andiamo alia tavola," I said, for I had been to Berlitz.
He came back at me with an avalanche of Italian beyond my
grasp, so I said, "Si/' and smiled. "Wrong answer," he said,
"I told you Americans were interested only in their almighty
dollar."
A quality that General Donovan lacked so completely
that I never ceased to marvel at it, was fear, of which he lit-
erally had none. On our explosives proving range at the Con-
gressional Country Club in Washington, my branch put on
a demonstration for the Pentagon top brass. General George
Marshall was there and shoulder stars were in abundance.
Colonel John Jeff eries demonstrated our Aunt Jemima camou-
flaged explosive. He wet it with water and made it into a
dough. He inserted a short time delay into the moist mass-
Some Army Ordnance General asked him to lay a piece of
armor plate over it or near it, which he did with obvious re-
luctance.
He asked the audience to move back a considerable dis-
tance, which they didn't all do. When it exploded, a chunk of
steel went a few feet away from General Donovan's head and
buried itself into a tree behind him. I was near enough and
scared enough to notice everything, being responsible for the
whole performance. General Donovan had not flickered an
187
W.J.D., AN INTIMATE APPRAISAL
eyelash, while I was trembling like an aspen leaf. He turned
to me and asked in a soft, calm voice, "What's next on the
program?"
As we left, we found that the biggest piece of the armor
plate had gone right through the shatterproof windshield of
General Marshall's automobile, but fortunately there was no
one in it.
No word picture of General Donovan would be complete
without mention of a peculiar and valuable asset he had,
whether or not he knew he had it The man had a "presence."
I have repeatedly seen him walk into a crowded room, filled
with military personnel or a mixed group as at a reception.
The instant he appeared, conversation died down and all
eyes turned toward him. The first time it happened, I ex-
plained it to myself by thinking the host or hostess had tipped
off the guests that the mysterious General Donovan was ar-
riving. No such explanation could rationalize the many times
it happened thereafter.
188
EPILOGUE
It may disturb some readers to depart abruptly from the
narrative I have related and for me to lay before them the
conclusions and course of action which these experiences in-
dicate to me.
If this change from reporting events to deducing a policy
from them is distasteful, please consider the book as ending
on the previous page.
I feel that our whole concept of war is obsolete and out-
moded, and thus irrational. Always, after the death and misery
of a war, a peace treaty is the orthodox climax. About this time
a strange thing begins to happen. We discover that the enemy
we fought is actually our friend, and some of the allies we
had are real or potential enemies. For example, Germany, Italy
and Japan become trustworthy compatriots and Russia is an
implacable enemy.
Our concept, which is to avoid war as long as possible,
leads but to an unworkable peace. What other alternatives are
there? There is neutrality, or non-involvement in the outside
world; in short, isolation. Many Americans still wistfully hold
189
EPILOGUE
to this as an ideal state and quote George Washington's Fare-
well Address. But Pearl Harbor proved the impossibility of a
rich nation being safe from attack by the hungry and the am-
bitious. With nations like Russia bent on world domination,
insulation would become our prison.
Another concept is "to play it by ear," which implies a
skill at opportunism which we have seldom shown. The Mar-
shall Plan and NATO come under this sort of a concept. They
buy valuable time, to be sure, but time for what? As we arm
beyond the point of total world destruction, is there any step
left but to use the armaments, be the results what they may?
This idea really concludes that Armageddon is ultimately pref-
erable to continued, intolerable suspense and tension.
The different point of view which I propose is based on the
fact that all wars start in ignorance ignorance of the other
country's intentions and its power to resist or to strike. "Had
we only known/' is the wail of all world political leaders. Had
Engknd known the depth of feeling for independence among
her thirteen colonies. Had Hitler known the truth about Eng-
land after Dunkirk. Had we known Japanese intentions and
potential.
We can know. Iron curtains and Bamboo curtains are only
impenetrable to those who will not open their eyes. We have
the Central Intelligence Agency whose business it is to know
but whose record is not as good as it should be. Part of its
inadequate performance is due to the belief of many Ameri-
cans that it is somehow un-American to know the plans and
the power of another nation. Spying is a dirty word. The ex-
troverted, good-fellow approach is natural to us and snooping
or penetrating secrets is held to be a tawdry, ignoble business.
Despite this national distaste, my plea is for an American
190
EPILOGUE
intelligence service so effective that we may know and assess
the plans of all other nations and correctly evaluate their
ability and their timing. This means a far more expert organ-
ization than we now have. It means diverting perhaps a quarter
of our military budget to this end alone. It means that our
intelligence people hold important positions in every critical
government abroad and that knowing the facts of world poli-
tics becomes a prime business of our Federal Government
The concept of war was really changed in 1946 when it be-
came vital to the USSR to know how to make the nuclear
fission bomb, if she were to achieve world equality with us.
With this massive demonstration of what secret intelligence
can accomplish for a nation, it should be apparent that the
Cold War is actually this new concept of conflict. The use
of accurate information, however acquired, and at whatever
expense, has won more victories for Russia than their armies
won in World War IL At the very time Russia made intel-
ligence her prime concern, our own OSS was being dissolved
by Executive Order.
We cannot bring back the fabulous team of Donovan and
Buxton, yet, though their great organization was dissolved, an
even superior one can be built. It can be, provided the United
States wakes up to its peril and to an awareness of how war-
fare is now to be fought.
Ignorance may have been an affluent bliss in the past, but
it is henceforth national suicide not to be wise.
191
