Wild Bill Donovan: The Spymaster Who Created the OSS and Modern American Espionage

welcome to this evening's program I'm Mike Devine i'm the director of the harry s truman library in Independence Missouri and it's a delight to be here at the Truman forum to welcome all of you and introduce tonight's speaker I certainly like to begin by acknowledging our partners the Truman library Institute a private not-for-profit organization that supports the work of the Truman Presidential Library and of course the Kansas City Public Library that operates this magnificent facility and has worked with us on a variety of programs including the presidential series hail to the Chiefs which has been a great success and has also is also working with the library and the Institute on beyond the gowns a history of the number of presentations on the US Supreme Court and Dateline Washington with David vondre Lee I'd also like to acknowledge the great support that all of these partners have had from the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation without the funding from that important source of philanthropy here in the Kansas City community we wouldn't be able to do what we do and certainly were grateful to Tom McDonald and the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation for their support tonight's program is offered in conjunction with a new exhibit we've recently opened at the harry s truman library and independence it's an exhibit entitled americans in fear spies lies and paranoia and it deals with the early years of the Cold War which I suspect some of you in the audience are of a certain age as I am who have some vague memories of the early years of the Cold War when we were looking for spies just about everywhere the US State Department government agencies in general Hollywood elected officials possible even presidential candidates might have been tainted with communism and not to mention also fears of a nuclear holocaust and overriding all of this are concerned for alien invaders from outer space outer space we are Believe It or Not from time to time ask at the Truman library if we have information on what happened in Roswell New Mexico in 1947 and maybe we have the green guys locked up in the basement somewhere and at this paranoia while there were real enemies out there in real concerns to some extent was a fueled by government by individuals in government elected officials and government officials as well telling us how we should be concerned about possibly our own neighbors being spies and also the popular media the biography that we'll hear about tonight from its author Douglas Waller concerns one of the most powerful men in modern espionage Wild Bill Donovan a swashbuckling larger-than-life spy master who created the Office of Strategic Services the OSS during the Second World War and introduced Americans really for the first time to a wide-ranging espionage operation I mean there had been spies even during the American Revolution but nothing quite as systematic and as vast as Bill Donovan created during the Second World War our author tonight also I'd like to point out receive support from the Truman library in the Truman library Institute the Institute provided him with a I'll grant to come to the library and conduct his research and these travel grants have been an important part of preserving and enhancing the the legacy of the Truman administration the Truman library was really the first presidential library to make travel grants available to researchers Harry Truman himself provided some of the funding he would turn over his little two hundred and three hundred dollar honoraria for giving public appearances to the presidential library to help build a fund that supported research and so just to an extent tonight's presentation as a result of research conducted at the Truman library and supported by a travel grant from the Truman library Institute let me get to the matter at hand introducing our speaker but first of let me do say that the Truman library exhibit on spy's lies in paranoia is open every day and will be up and running for the next several months and we do encourage you to come out there you'll get a chance to be a spy yourself when you go through that exhibit you are given a little special decoding device and as you go through the exhibit you there are messages that need to be decoded and if you're skillful enough to decode these messages at the end of the exhibit you'll be able to to solve a riddle that has been presented to you're related to to espionage so that's that's all the all the hyping I'm going to do this evening for our exhibit at the Truman library our talk our speaker tonight Douglas Waller is a veteran magazine correspondent author and lecturer in almost two decades as a Washington journalist he has covered the Pentagon Congress the State Department the White House and the CIA from 1994 to 2000 Douglas Waller served in Time Magazine's Washington's Bureau first as a correspondent and then as senior correspondent at time mr. Waller covered foreign affairs traveled throughout Europe Asia and the Middle East I spent a great deal of time in the Persian Gulf area his biography of General William Wild Bill Donovan the world war ii director of the Office of Strategic Services is the 8th book he has either offered authored or co-authored us-born Doug Waller was born in Norfolk Virginia and holds a BA from Wake Forest University and a master's in urban end ministration from North Carolina University at Charlotte he is also a former captain in the United States Marine Corps Reserve so please join me in welcoming to the podium this evening our speaker Douglas Waller didn't you just love the spy music that was on right before James I that was kind of set the mood here and everything yeah I us it's good to return to Kansas City I was here for in your neck of the woods for about three weeks I spent a week and a half at the Truman library in Independence Missouri then I took a car to the Eisenhower library in Abilene Kansas I had delightful time I know I can I highly recommend going if you go can go out to those libraries not only to see the music museums which are excellent there but also maybe just sit down and read through some of the material a lot of people just mean you can walk any of you can walk in and get a reader's card and start looking through it and you can really see how history comes alive through the words on the papers there you can you can almost see the president talking to you you know with the little notes he writes on the side on the memo while Bill Donovan basically we're talking here about three different stories we're talking about a story of a person with a very compelling personal biography who actually met with a lot of tragedy in his life this is a spy story too about espionage and intrigue and subterfuge during war to a very very exciting spy story and it's a tale of political intrigue in Washington at the highest level of government and this is where Harry Truman fits into it and we'll talk about that later and this is a part that actually kind of interested interested in me the most since I'm a former journalist in fact I've said that I would have loved to have been a reporter back then covering Donovan and if I had been I probably would have covered him extensive extensively Donovan like reporters he routinely leaked to reporters all the time he had in fact he had reporters on his staff serving as propagandists and spies in some cases while they were still reporting for their newspapers yeah rules back then of journalism were a little loosey-goosey he he wasn't particularly tall man he was only about five feet nine one of his agents Betty McIntosh said that when he ran the OSS he kind of looked penguin shape to her in fact she told him that one day and he didn't really appreciate it another of one of his agents Mary Bancroft said he looked like a kewpie doll does anybody know what a kewpie doll is yeah I didn't have a clue what it was until somebody at a book talk brought one to me it's a little bald-headed thing with the ears and everything he he slept five hours or less at night read speed read about three books a week he was an excellent ballroom dancer he loved to sing Irish songs in fact you go to Broadway to buy up the latest sheet music so he can memorize the words he didn't smoke rarely drank enjoyed fine dining although it tended to add to the weight he spent lavishly had no concept for a dollar in fact when he was roaming the world visiting his different OSS stations he was always bumming dollars in quarters office the aides who are with him because he never kept any money with him he was witty but he never laughed out loud he never told a dirty joke he never showed anger and steady let it boil inside of him he was also rakish ly handsome he had these bright blue eyes that women found absolutely captivating his life also was filled with a lot of personal tragedy his daughter died in an automobile accident in college his daughter-in-law died of a drug overdose one of his granddaughter's four when she was four years old died when she accidentally swallowed silver polish a lot of sadness in his life he was born on New Year's Day 1883 in Buffalo New York's poor Irish first Ward in fact I gave a book talk to Buffalo to the Irish Center in the first ward everybody was drinking Guinness and whiskey shooters so after 15 minutes it didn't matter what I said and I was in the middle of the talk and somebody raised their hand and politely informed me that I've been mispronouncing Donovan's name throughout the talk that if you were from the Irish first Ward you were pronounced at dune oven not Donovan like I did of course it fouled me up for the rest of the talk he thought he might wanted to become a priest in every Irish Catholic family was always assumed that one of the sons would become a priest and Donovan thought that was going to be him realize later on that he wasn't cut out to be a man of the cloth he went to Columbia University was a star quarterback on the football team his senior year until he got hobbled by a cheap tackle by a Princeton lineman he then went to Columbia Law School franklin roosevelt also attended the law school at that time fact roosevelt later liked to say that he and donovan were old buddies in law school and Donovan said oh that's a bunch of baloney roosevelt was on a much higher social straighter than than a poor kid from Buffalo he returned to Buffalo after law school set up a law practice married one of the richest women in town World War one he led a battalion for the with the 69th Irish Regiment the very famous regimen in fact they did a movie on it Jimmy Cagney played played in it Donovan was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor for heroism in battle during World War one fact his the chaplain of the 69th Irish Regiment a guy named father Francis Duffy said Donovan was the only man he had ever met in his life who actually enjoyed combat and he really did he would write home to his wife Ruth that going out on combat missions was like going out trick-or-treating at night he he was also also during World War one is when he got his nickname Wild Bill he was a very rigorous almost a brutal trainer of his men because he realized they were going to be going into a meat grinder of combat in World War one which they did so before they actually went into action in France he had him running over Hill and Dale and over obstacle courses under Bob wired and everything finally they all the entire battalion collapsed in front of him and he stood up there all Johnny and said well you know what the heck's the matter with you I'm 35 years old carrying the same pack that you are you don't see me out of breath from somewhere in the back of soldiers shouted out he never figured out who but we're not as wild as you are bill from that day on while Bill Donovan stuck he claimed he didn't like that nickname because it ran counter to the cool calm quiet spy image he wanted to project but his wife Ruth said it he really did like to be called Wild Bill he returned to New York a hero he became an assistant to the Attorney General and the Coolidge administration during the roaring 20s his goal at that point was to become Attorney General of the United States and he thought Herbert Hoover who succeeded Calvin Coolidge had promised him that position and in fact Hoover had promised him the attorney generalship but this is the late 1920s the Ku Klux Klan is a very powerful political movement in this country and it was up in arms of the idea of a Roman Catholic becoming a Attorney General of the United States Donovan as any prominent figure in Washington also made his share of enemies there he was a prominent Republican Senate Democrats vowed to block his nomination Hoover reneged on the promise until the day he died Donovan never forgave Herbert Hoover for denying him the attorney generalship he returned to New York went to New York City founded the Donovan leisure law firm a very prominent law firm in New York said he made millions of dollars as a Wall Street lawyer in 1932 he decided to dip his toe into politics once more he ran for governor of New York his idea then was to become the first Irish Catholic president of the United States and the governorship of New York was an ideal stepping-stone for the presidency many respects that may still be today keep in mind 1932 Franklin Roosevelt was running for his first tournament office and he had been governor of New York Donovan ran against a guy named Herbert layman who was Roosevelts lieutenant governor he ended up running as much against Roosevelt as he did against layman said some pretty nasty things about FDR on the campaign trail at one point he accused Roosevelt of being quote crafty it sounds kind of mild by today's standard but back then that was fighting those are fighting words another time he cues to Roosevelt being a Hyde Park fakir because Roosevelt claimed he was a simple farmer from Hyde Park and Donovan said that was a bunch of baloney Roosevelt for his part sent out surrogates on the campaign trail to take the shots at Donovan in fact Eleanor hit the trail and went after Donovan on different issues now the reason I gave you some of this backstory is it's amazing then that Franklin Roosevelt made Donovan his top spymaster very senior position considering all the nasty things these two guys had said about each other in New York politics but fast-forward to 1940 going in 1941 Roosevelt is building up the nation's defenses he's preparing the nation for war that he can see on the horizon Donovan even though he was a conservative Republican and he believed the New Deal was a communist plot to take over America he believed he though was a member of the internationalist wing of the Republican Party he too also thought that the nation needed to build itself up for war needed to build up its defenses so he had to very canny savvy politicians here who saw common cause in working with each other in the summer of 1940 Roosevelt sends Donovan to England basically just to answer a very simple question can Britain survive this war or is it going to be occupied by Nazi Germany and this was a question that Roosevelt didn't really have a clear answer to he didn't really have a good read on Winston Churchill either later on they would become very very close but at that point he didn't know who this prime minister really was so he sat down a man over Donovan was given access to the top levels of the British government which is actually kind of unusual because here's an Irish American going over and the British government particularly Churchill's office didn't know whether this guy is going to be an Anglophile or an Anglo folk turned out Donovan was a committed Anglophile he was given access to mi6 mi5 naval intelligence the war ministry the Foreign Office came back to Washington with a bag full of secret documents and an answer to Roosevelt's question which was yes Britain could survive the war but it's going to need a considerable amount of material aid from the United States which eventually came in the form of AX lend-lease at the end of 1940 the beginning of 1941 Roosevelt sent Donovan on a second mission to Europe this time not only to England to collect more material but also to tour the Balkans the Middle East and Eastern Europe again to gather up intelligence there but also to deliver a very private message particularly to Balkan leaders and that was that a view of Balkan leader were sitting on the fence in this war and many of them were at this point just keep in mind that Franklin Roosevelt does not intend to let Great Britain lose this conflict so if you're trying to decide which side you want to be on keep in mind the winning side is going to be the Allied side Roosevelt was delighted with this message that Donovan conveyed throughout the region he sent a cable to run sorry/not wrote Churchill was delighted with the message that Donovan conveyed in the region he sent a cable to Roosevelt saying that Donovan had been a heartwarming warming flame Churchill also supplied a British plane to take Donovan around to the different countries and British escorts officers to open doors for him and also to keep an eye on to report back to London to make sure he stayed on message one of those escorted officers was Ian Fleming who wrote the James Bond novels and we've been listening to his music here with it James Bond music the State Department though wasn't so pleased with this trip because here you had somebody with no official government standing and the US government or the British government strong-arming Balkan leaders behind closed doors in fact at one point senior state Department aides discussed the the possibility of whether Donovan should be prosecuted for violating the Logan Act which makes it a crime for a private individual private citizen to negotiate on behalf of the US government Roosevelt however was only too happy to have Donovan out there freelancing because keep in mind 19:40 going in to 41 Roosevelt has no foreign intelligence service to speak of there were tiny foreign espionage units in the Navy and the army but they were largely largely dumping grounds for poor performing officers Roosevelt is facing a very tough re-election fight for an unprecedented third term he's running against Wendell Willkie who's a very strong candidate roosevelt was actually seriously worried that he was going to lose that race and here he is making major foreign policy decisions overseas largely blind to what lay ahead of him overseas in fact it worried him so much at times that he would become physically ill when donovan returns from those two european trips that's when our spy story begins in July 1941 Roosevelt signed an executive order it made Donovan his coordinator of information a year later the organization beery designated the OSS the Office of Strategic Services but it started out as a coordinator of information it was just a one-page document he signed very vaguely written it said Colonel Donovan which had been as World War one rank will collect information of national security interests for me and will do other unspecified jobs in fact the document was so vague that members of Roosevelt's CAM cabinet scratched their heads and wonder what in the heck is Franklin doing here appointing this Republican Wall Street lawyer who had been mentioned as a possible presidential candidate for the GOP to this nefarious position in the administration doing all kinds of unspecified things Donovan said that he loved he began his organization really 4-0 which is really the case he only began with one guy which was himself in the in the beginning he was kind of like a player and a pickup basketball game looking for agents and operations anywhere he could find him so for example the Phillips lamp company they made lamps sold lamps worldwide they're still in business Donovan arranged privately with the Phillips lamp company that when its salesman went overseas particularly into occupied countries they would report back to the OSS on anything they saw that might be of interest or military value the Eastman Kodak Company my day you know they made brownie cameras you all remember that they I think they just went recently went out of business back then the Eastman Kodak Company had thousands of camera company a camera clubs around the country Donovan arranged for those camera clubs to send him photos that tourists had taken when they were overseas on vacation particularly militarily important sites Pan Am airways probably all flown on Pan American at one time or another Donovan had a project codenamed cigar where he secretly had ticket agents for Pan Am stations throughout Africa that would report back to him whenever up there Gestapo agents moved into the airports or came in or came out on different flights he cooked up all kinds of wild schemes when he was OSS director he's open to really any idea that crossed his desk his code number if you look on the secret OSS documents was always 109 which just happened to be the room number of his office in his head course excuse me which was on Navy Hill right next to the State Department his secretaries actually had another codename for him they used to call him Seabiscuit you know after the racehorse because he always seemed to be on the move all the time he kept $2,000 in his desk or at all times and that was to pay for informants for information when he was roaming around Washington I don't think he'd find a CIA director today keeping two grandidis in his desk he had a research and development chief a guy named Stanley Lovell who was a very famous New England inventor in his own right and he was the guy who created all the spy gadgets for Donovan Donovan used to call him his Professor Moriarty after the Sherlock Holmes character sadly Lovell built the things like the miniature cameras that spies used the pistols with silencers pencil like explosive devices that could be used to detonate charges or for discreet assassinations Donovan was also very very interested in truth drugs and how they might be able to be secretly administered to an unwitting official to get him to spill the beans on different secrets so one time they decided to test the truth truth drugs out on a New York mobster a guy named little Augie there was an OSS officer who had been a new york city cop who had busted a little Augie a number of times and eventually befriended the gangster so one day he invited a little awkward Augie up to his apartment for some smokes and a chat will laced within the cigarettes was a truth drug whose Tetra hikers cycling and so little Augie starts puffing away of huffing away so slowly getting a silly grin on his face and chuckling and telling the officer about working for Lucky Luciano and all the mob hits he's carried out and all the congressmen he's bribed of course little Augie secrets were safe with Donovan he couldn't bring him to trial or would give away the truth drugs he had all that other kind of wild ideas that he would propose to Roosevelt one of them was that he proposed that Roosevelt would have a button at his desk that he could punch at any time and it would put him in instant radio communication with every radio in America so that way if the Japanese were going to bomb Los Angeles or the Germans were going to attack New York where Roosevelt could alert everybody Roosevelt ignored that idea but Roosevelt was a spy buff spy aficionado in his own right ever since he was a teenager he he always enjoyed subterfuge and intrigue and keeping secrets and in fact Roosevelt sent ideas to Donovan that were kind of off-the-wall - one of them was bats that you know bats that fly right they were gonna fit these bats with incendiary devices tie them around them okay I'm not making this up folks and they're gonna fly over Japan drop the bats out of the plane and the bats would fly into the paper and would homes in Japan into the eaves the incendiary devices would go off and burn down Japan great idea Ellen someone had written Eleanor with the ideas she passed it along to Franklin Franklin I thought it was cool gave it to Diamond so Stanley Lovell and his guys went out to the Midwest somewhere got the bunch of these bats fitted him with the incendiary devices took him up in a plane dropped him out of the plane guess what happened to the bats they all sink like stone there was no idea what way that idea was going to work but you know Roosevelt didn't mind the failures and Donovan was willing to try anything in addition to being the the father of the modern CIA Donovan is also the father of modern special operations if you go down to Tampa Florida through there the headquarters of the US Special Operations Command they have in the main foyer in a glass case Donovan's uniform there and a lot of memorabilia from them he is also considered the father of what we call today modern information warfare things like psychological operations and cyber warfare in Donovan's day though it was done with a technology that was really pretty cruel and it was called morale operations back then and it consisted mainly of newspapers leaflets radios and rumors so for example Donovan's agents spread rumors in international papers New York Times Associated Press or whatever that top Nazis were fleeing Germany and going to hide out in Argentina it was going to leave the German army high and dry Marlena Dietrich there may remember her a very sultry German American singer she's saying propaganda film music for propaganda broadcasts that were beamed German soldiers another among the billions of leaflets they dropped on German soldiers one of them was the League of lonely women leaflets and what this had printed on it was that back home there was a league of lonely women and that was having sex with the soldiers comrades when they went back on leave now who knows whether that had any effect or the frontline troops but I mean another another psyops plan they tried out was Stanley Lovells had a group of scientists concoct a set of female hormones okay and if they could find Hitler's vegetables hey guy stay stay with me on this thing if they could if they could find Hitler's vegetables and inject it in there it would make his mustache fall awesome give him a falsetto voice which of course would be a real bummer for the Fuhrer Donovan turned out to be a horrible manager in the four years he ran the OSS he violated every rule they teach you at Harvard Business School of Public Administration school and at one point his own senior age aids there tried to oust him they tried to stage what became known as the palace revolt move him up and out Donovan who by then had launched enough coos to smell one on it being launched on himself squashed it like a bug but too into his credit though he was a very charismatic a leader okay he rarely ever issued an order or a command it was usually always a request and his agents would follow him loyally and blindly and eventually Donovan built a spy organization of over 10,000 espionage agents research analyst commandos and support staff scattered in OSS stations all over the world they mounted a number of covert operations for the torture invasion of North Africa November 1942 did a lot of analysis of the Vichy French defenses there for the army invading in they had extensive operations in Sicily in Italy had a lot of problems though in Italy a lot of failures with the OSS there and actually a lot of corruption that occurred within the units there sounds bad but keep in mind Marc Clarke's fifth army had a tough time conquering Italy and had a lot of problems with his forces they amounted extensive operations the OSS did in the Balkans aiding partisan guerrillas in the in Greece and Yugoslavia interestingly they had little operations going on in Asia Douglas MacArthur the commander of the southwest Pacific Theater band the OSS from his theater didn't want to have anything to do with him Admiral Chester Nimitz who's commander of the northern Pacific Fleet didn't see any use for Donovan spies either he thought he was fighting mainly a naval and amphibious war didn't need spies roaming around there Donovan's force then was relegated really to China and Burma that was the only part of Asia that he really operated in they had extensive operations before and after the Normandy landing and for France his research analysts did a considerable amount of analysis topographic analysis of the beaches at Normandy for the invading armies he had an economist on his staff who picked out bombing targets for half Arnold's 8th Air Force he had hundreds of commandos and spies that dropped into occupied France before and after the invasion on many of them very daring dangerous missions Donovan himself also like to go in on every Allied landing which horrified his senior staff because the last place you want your top spy master with all those secrets in his head is at the front where he might be captured he can be a very very valuable prize for the other side General George Marshall the chief of staff of the Army thought he had Donovan banned from going in prohibited from going in on the Normandy landing and so did Dwight Eisenhower commanded the European forces Donovan though managed to talk his way aboard a navy heavy cruiser and in land at Utah Beach the second day after the first wave he gets to the beach and a Germans Messersmith flies by straights the beach and he has to dive under the Jeep for cover dusts himself off then walks inland about three or four miles looking for some of his operatives there he wasn't gonna find him but he thought you just go in there looking for him he gets pinned down by a German machine-gun nest he's with another aide he reaches into his jacket pocket to pull out his L pill that's a potassium cyanide capsule every oh s s agent carried that he could chomp it out on and kill yourself instantly so you want to be tortured realize though that he left his L pill at Claridge's Hotel in London very very worried about in fact he had his aide radio in London as soon as they got back to the beach because he was worried you know a maid might come in there mistake it for an aspirin it took Don him in almost two years to really build up his spy organization to get into this fight and it sounds like a long time I keep in mind took the US Army almost that amount of time so unprepared were we for World War two like any other intelligence agency Donovan also had his fit intelligence failures one of the most notable ones was the vessel case Donovan thought he had a Silver Bullet agent planted inside the Vatican who was supplying him with verbatim transcripts of papal conversations that Pius was Pope Pius was having with Nala he was senior and envoys all around the world but also with foreign diplomats at the Vatican including the the Japanese ambassador there turned out vessel was an Italian pornographer with a very vivid imagination and a real talent for concocting dialogue and snookered Donovan's organization now the third part of the story the story of the political intrigue Donovan liked to say that his enemies in Washington were as fierce as Adolf Hitler was in Europe and that was really really the case he had ferocious feuds with J Edgar Hoover the director of the FBI Hoover thought Donovan's organization was the biggest collection of amateurs he'd ever seen and truth be told it was a collection of amateurs in the beginning Hoover had spies and moles planted in Donovan's organization reporting to him on what Donovan was doing Donovan had spies and moles and Hoover's organization reporting to him on what Hoover was doing when I was doing the research of this book I wonder what the hell they have time to spy on the axis they seem to be spying on each other so much the Pentagon at first bitterly opposed the setting up of the Office of Strategic Services George Marshall the chief of staff of the army thought that Donovan was trying to make himself an intelligence czar and was going to try and take over Army and Navy intelligence which if Roosevelt had let him was exactly what Donovan wanted to do eventually Marshall warmed up to Donovan and thought he did a lot of good things during the war but Marshalls senior generals particularly as intelligence generals never did and fought a rearguard battle bureaucratic battle against Donovan throughout the war in fact at one point they even set up a secret espionage unit in the Pentagon behind Donovan's buy it back it was nicknamed the pond and its mission was not only to spy on the axis behind Donovan's back but despite on Donovan to spy on his OSS saucers they even collected information on the wives of the OSS officers now in any war generals and admirals on the same side will fight among themselves there's always fierce bureaucratic battles on world war ii is no exception but in the case of donovan the bureaucratic battles became even more ferocious because conventional generals and admirals just didn't understand what this guy was about I mean when Donovan started talking about little Auggie and legal only women leaflets and sex hormones for Hitler senior officers in the Pentagon really were truly disturbed by this they thought he the guy was deranged Donovan also brought a lot of this a lot of the problems on himself he he was a guy who never took no for an answer so if you know someone in from a general in front of them said no you can't do that or won't help you out he had a habit of making an end run around the officer to get the decision reversed that doesn't win you any friends in the Pentagon one time he was at a Washington cocktail party talking to an admiral he had his OSS officers burglarized the Admirals office and steel documents off his desk and bring it to the cocktail party to show off to the Admiral what is meant to do there was nothing in the records I could fight it with what the Admirals reaction was but I assumed he was probably non-plus by it Donovan would also show up to Pentagon meetings usually late immaculately tailored in his generals uniform was he bought it from Wetzel's in New York and on the uniform he would have sewn on it just as Medal of Honor ribbon as a not-so-subtle reminder to all the generals and admirals in the room with their rows of ribbon all that fruit salad that he had the only one that really counted out in the field though he could be what one of his aides said was incorrigibly civilian he would show up in his fatigues all wrinkled look like he just got out of bed sometimes he'd be wearing a Paisley Ascot with him you know I don't I don't think he'd find a commander in the Army today wearing Paisley asked God while his fatigues again as a reminder to everybody around him this was an unconventional guy and he was running an unconventional unit eventually Donovan couldn't overcome his political enemies he had drafted a plan for a post-war Center Central Intelligence Agency CIA after the war and he wanted to lead that agency walter tro han who was a reporter for the mccormick patterson newspaper chain mccormick patterson newspaper chain which was a strong Republican newspaper chain really anti Roosevelt they despised Roosevelt Roosevelt despised the chain tro Hann got leaked to him a copy of Donovan's secret plan to set up a post-war CIA and he published the entire plan in the Chicago Tribune The Washington Times Herald and a New York paper on the same day along with a very inflammatory story accusing Donovan of wanting to set up a quote gestapo-like organization that was going to spy not only on people overseas but Americans at home back then if you accused any organization of being Gestapo like that about Sanket politically and it did with Franklin Roosevelt he basically shelved the plan in comes Harry Truman okay Donovan and Truman just don't like each other okay didn't gonna work out with these two guys Hoover J Edgar Hoover had an agent spread a particularly nasty rumor with Truman's senior military aide that got passed on to Truman that Donovan was having an affair with his daughter-in-law now they play pretty hardball back then I had to run that rumor to ground check it out and I could find that there was no evidence that was a case but Donovan had it did have a number of affairs over the years and it was common knowledge in Buffalo and Washington among military intelligence circles and also the CIA that probably isn't what sunk Donovan with a Harry Truman what really did a min was remember I mentioned the pond it managed through a conduit in the White House to have a fifty nine page report placed on Truman's desk accusing Donovan's OSS of all manner of malfeasance and corruption and blown operations in fact at one point accused OSS officers of staging a sex orgy in India again I couldn't find the evidence that was the case also as I say there was bad chemistry between Truman and Donovan them you know the one hand you had a millionaire of Wall Street Republican lawyer smooth-talking lawyer and on the other hand you had a very plain spoken diehard Democrat who had not done as well done so well as a Missouri haberdashery okay there was just bad karma between these guys on September 20th 1945 Truman this is after the war's over Truman shuts down the OSS and parcels out its functions to the Pentagon and the State Department now Truman was not deaf and dumb to the dangers that lay ahead of him overseas I mean he was just a pretty savvy president he could see and he was going to see the Cold War rolling out and he realized he needed a foreign intelligence service and he just didn't want to have Donovan or so OSS to be any part of that in 1947 Truman sets up organizes the Central Intelligence Agency as part of the Defense Department Act Donovan wanted to lead that CIA in 1947 in fact he had surrogates Lobby Truman to make him CIA director but Truman wasn't gonna have any part of that particularly after Donovan had said some mean things about Truman on the campaign trail on presidents usually don't forget that kind of stuff that's said about him 1953 Eisenhower becomes president a fellow Republican like Donovan I could thought Donovan had done some fine work in Europe Donavan thought he had his best chance to be CIA director then instead though Eisenhower and points Allen Dulles as CIA director Dulles had been Donovan station chief and Bern Switzerland had done a fabulous job there are a lot of intelligence coos even so Donovan was very bitter that Dulles became CIA aid chief that he thought Dulles would screw up the agency he went around bad-mouthing Dulles behind his back let me stop there I didn't mean to drone on so long if anybody's got any questions we talked a little more about Truman intelligence or you know the legacy of the OSS or anything else you want to yeah Donna Donovan's case he well first off Roosevelt I'd say it was a big spy buff a big spy aficionado he kept Donovan on a short leash although very often Donovan we didn't realize he was on a short leash and so he pulled him back a number of times I mean there's things Roosevelt didn't allow Donovan to do didn't allow him to take over Army and Navy intelligence Roosevelt had senior generals there who were Donovan's rivals men who these are men who despise one another and Roosevelt you know worked with them to you know yeah Donovan though where he could he bent the rules so for example Roosevelt worked out an agreement that J Edgar Hoover would be in charge of spying in South America you know actually all of Latin America and Donovan couldn't have any agents there but Donovan managed to get agents down there and in fact he managed to set up secret programs that he kept the accounts of overseas so Hoover couldn't sniff him out in Washington so he could do some operations in there basically he was view was well I can't spy there but if somebody walks into my door I'm not going to be able to refuse him but overall he has say he was kept on a leash in the case of Allen Dulles and also in case of John Foster Dulles everything they did you know from you know patrice lumumba to to the you know the Bay of Pigs of you know over the preparation of that of the assassination plots that was all I mean you know Eisenhower you know gave him that leeway to do it and in fact was a a union lon - so but again you know there sometimes the you know you know they'll stray outside the floor you know the four corners of the piece of paper God your book very much just a fella my story would you mind talking a little bit about Donovan's relationship with William Stephenson oh yeah okay William Stephenson was just by way of background was Great Britain's intelligence representative in the United States he was head of what was benignly called British security coordination it was office an office set up in New York his official job was to liaison with the intelligence agencies here and also with Hoover the FBI and also to monitor to make sure that the Nazi Nazi agents didn't sabotage any lend-lease war items they got say safes sent to Britain his real job was spying on the United States and undercutting through covert operations the isolationist movement that was very large in the United States before the war it's also is also his mission also from Frank from Churchill was to get the United States and end of the war Donovan and Stevenson were very very close in fact Donovan could not have built up his organization the OSS in the beginning without Stevenson's help and without the help of British intelligence of mi6 the intelligence arm and mi5 the counterintelligence arm and Naval Intelligence - so Stephenson Ian Fleming and others were camped out Donovan's Georgetown home as he was putting together the OSS giving him advice on how to do it and they shipped him a lot of documents eventually though that relationship became strained I mean it's kind of like you know you've got a 16 year old kid that's been through driver's ed finally gets their license and everything the first thing I want to do is drive without death dad in the car which is what Donovan wanted to do and so there were fierce battles between Donovan and the British intelligence over territory who would cover cover what fierce turf battles a lot of bad blood between vac Donovan had spies and moles within Churchill's government reporting to him on what Churchill was doing Churchill had moles and spies keeping an eye on Donovan on his movement in the movement of senior OSS officers I mean we've had this recent profile about you know spying and Coletti NSA collecting evidence on our allies you know I can assure you that has a rich history going back all the way to World War two yep okay suited to their present situation with NSA and what have you developed any insights at all in terms of how civilian government can pull Secret Service the you know the apparatus since their basic function is to lie Wow and we just had a situation where effective intelligence national intelligence whatever you told Congress just a flat-out lie you know we're not doing this this is problems throughout history but I appreciate your yeah it's I mean that that's that's why Espionage services are set up to lie I mean they're set up to break the laws of foreign countries and to lie there in the cover story and you know about what they're doing the problem happens of course when that carries over to Congress Richard Helms a former CIA director got convicted of lying to Congress this was on the CIA operation in Chile to destabilize Salvador Allende Helms's view was that you know Congress didn't need to know this secret it's a very dangerous for you to take in a constitutional government the I think and just you know doing you know years and years of research on it a government particularly a democratic government has to have tight controls over its intelligence service culturally very often democratic forms of government and espionage and intelligence gathering we are going to clash and you're seeing that clash right now with the National Security Agency how much you know data collection or we're going to allow in terms of you know the fight against worldwide terrorism you know where does it cross into intrusion so that you know every one of your phone calls being listened to or recorded by somebody or at least the phone number being kept track of it and it has to involve then leaders and presidents who a have to know and want to know what's going on and can keep a tight rein on it now what I've discovered in past histories is that the presidents aren't as out of the loop as very often they you know claim to be say Eisenhower knew in great detail what Allen Dulles was doing you know at the CIA the covert operations the ones that got got the agency in trouble so did Kennedy - so but I think in any democratic government you're going to need you know it's essentially I've you know you have tight oversight and tight controls and I think the agencies can work work under those those type of strictures you mentioned the personality clashes between Truman and Donovan and also MacArthur's antipathy toward the OSS mm-hmm in the southwest Pacific area that led to the disestablishment of the OSS creation of the CIA would you comment on how all of that then directly affected intelligence collection prior to the outbreak of the Korean War since it all occurred right within that a couple of years part of that yeah I had a profound effect you also have MacArthur's case it had a profound effect on the in the intelligence collection in his operation his chief intelligence officer was a guy named captain Willoughby who if you look among military historians they insist that he was probably the dummest intelligence officer that ever walked on two feet and MacArthur had you know significant intelligence failures and a lot of his campaigns you know miss reading of Japanese defenses miss reading of beach conditions he was saved by magic does everybody know what magic was that was the interception radio interception and decoding capability the Army and the Navy had four Japanese diplomatic and naval codes even so there were a lot of people a lot of GIS and Marines that lost their lives in the Pacific because of poor intelligence now whether of the OSS could have made much of a difference the OSS claim they could have in the case of I'm not a Korean War expert in terms of the lead up to that but I know there was a gap there from well basically from 1945 to 1947 we had a lot of interim type of organizations one was the Central Intelligence Group and there were other ones and they were kind of rube rube goldberg type of collections patched together that didn't really work out until you actually had a CIA formed but I'm telling say at least in the Pacific Theater there was you know there was a lot of problems out there I mean actually MacArthur at one point he offered to allow Donovan's men to come in but they had to basically switch in uniforms they had to come under directly under his command just like any other private and not under Donovan not be part of the OSS and oh this goes back to just before World War two when Donovan is probably just getting his feet wet hmm but dust go pop off read his book and he was a double agent working with the British DoubleX Committee mainly out of Lisbon but he did go to New York tried to pass the word about Pearl Harbor and Hoover wouldn't listen I'm just wondering how Donovan yeah might have hooked into that that's the called the tricycle case the code name for it and I didn't do a whole lot of research into it although it was interesting I the CIA's top historian a guy named Thomas Troy who did a dissection of all that and this is whether Popov had alerted Hoover to the attack on Pearl Harbor and Hoover ignored the intelligence the CIA eventually included concluded that that wasn't really the case that there was kind of what they call a lot of you know a lot of noise intelligence noise coming in most of which never got to Hoover and the in fact there wasn't a silver bullet piece of intelligence that would alert them that Pearl Harbor was going to happen keep in mind just in the kind of the context it was no it was no big revelation that the Japanese were you know that Pearl Harbor was a dangerous targeted I mean as early as 1920 the War Department had plans for secret sneak attack on on Pearl Harbor and how they were going to deal with it and Roosevelt even the day before the attack had gotten the last intercepted magic message of a diplomatic cable traffic and knew of you said it in the White House talking with Harry Hopkins they said no this means war so he knew the Japanese you know we're going to war what he didn't know was the time in the place and in fact nobody really knew that mainly because magic the code-breaking capability was only breaking diplomatic codes at that point not the naval codes so he didn't have the exact time in place there are a lot of kind of these conspiracy books about well maybe for example did Roosevelt know ahead of time and allow the attack to happen which is really not the case but there there just really wasn't any you know silver bullet agent that could have provided the news that would you know stop that terrible tragedy from having this will have to be the last question okay I'm constraint so go ahead just one quick question sir colonel Aaron Bank is often referred to as the father of Army Special Forces his book is entitled OSS to Green Beret right was there a relationship between him and Donovan or was he low enough in the organization that he really didn't have any faced with them they may have met Aaron Bank who was a very famous green beret was a member of the JED Berg's which was a commando force that parachuted into occupied France after the invasion and organized act as liaison with Eisenhower and shafe and did a lot of commando operations an errand Bank was one of the Jedburgh that parachuted in to occupied France very dangerous mission I'm sure he met Donovan because Donovan loved his commandos in fact he would have jumped in himself if they let him in fact at one point he went to Roosevelt said you know I'd like to command a you know a division of gorillas and the Philippines you know let me go there of course MacArthur didn't think too highly that idea so I'm sure Aaron Bank met him in fact yeah correct all the Jedburgh commandos had to be interviewed by Donovan before they finally you know when it went over to Europe so he saw him there now it's interesting though if you talk to Aaron banking where I said yet we were old friends DOM and talked to me like you know I was one of his son son and everything you know arm around the shoulder turning on the Irish charm Donovan did that with everyone you know you forget his name then you know the next minute but when he was you know talking to that agent then it was like your Uncle Fred there and in fact that was one of the reasons the agents would follow them everywhere anywhere I mean he would talk in kind of that soft purr and say you know I know this is a dangerous mission but if I could I would go with you and he actually meant it and so then they went off on a dangerous mission usually late I mean in fact it got be kind of a joke within OSS circles you know about you know Donovan coming and putting his arm around an agent saying you know this is an easy you know if I could go with you I would that meant you were gonna you were headed for trouble well our thanks to Douglas Waller for a wonderful presentation let me remind you that his biography of Wild Bill Donovan is for sale right outside in the lobby and we look forward to seeing all of you at the next program here thank you very much you

Channel: The Kansas City Public Library

Views: 15,333

Rating: 4.7297297 out of 5

Keywords: Kansas City Public Library, Office Of Strategic Services (Organization), Espionage (TV Genre), William J. Donovan, Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) (Organization), Douglas C. Waller, Lecture (Type Of Public Presentation), Author (Ontology Class)

Id: SVuOUaymRQg

Length: 63min 33sec (3813 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 26 2014