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

from the Library of Congress in Washington DC well good afternoon and welcome to the Library of Congress I'm John Cole I'm the director of the libraries Center for the book which is its reading promotion arm and we promote books and reading throughout and literacy and libraries throughout the country largely through two networks we have affiliated centers in every state and also national reading promotion partners which consists of organizations which are interested we hope in promoting books and reading here at the Library of Congress we're deeply involved in the National Book Festival which is an annual event the center not only works on the author program that we sponsor basically something called the pavilion of the States if you've not been to the Book Festival if you have been you know what the pavilion of the States is it's the largest pavilion where all the states are here our state centers are here in state libraries and they have tables and they talk about how they promote authors and writing and books in their States and it's a very very busy pavilion we also sponsor talks such as this one the books and Beyond series focuses largely well almost entirely on books that have some kind of special connection with the Library of Congress either through the collections which our speaker will mention today he relied heavily on the library's collections particularly the manuscript collections but also of books coming out of special projects that the library is involved in so we're pleased you're here and there are a couple of still some seats in the middle up here so we're gonna be just about right I think all of the books and Beyond programs are videotaped for our website and today is no exception that means I'd like to ask you to turn off all things the electronic our format is roughly of about a 40-minute talk from our speaker then time for questions and answers and book signings are very much a part of the books and Beyond series and the signing of Doug will be signing the books out in the foyer just beyond the on the other side as I said many of our most of our books and Beyond talks are now available on our website there also is a ebooks and Beyond Club Facebook where we keep track of our speakers and encourage you to sign on and learn what's coming up and make comments about talks that that you have seen I would like to say that we are especially privileged today to have an author whose book has been so well reviewed it's also a topic in which there's widespread interest he and I were chatting a little earlier about the run that he's on not only with talks around the Washington area but the wonderful run of good reviews this book is receiving and it had a front page review if I'm not mistaken at in the New York Times Book Review a week before last and he tells me that even yesterday he was on the road talking to employees at the CIA so you can see that this is a topic that is of great interest to all of us our speaker is Doug Waller Douglas Waller a former veteran correspondent for Newsweek and time and he has written he reported on the CIA for six years he also covered the Pentagon the State Department the White House and the Congress before reporting for Newsweek in time he served eight years as a legislative assistant on the staffs of Representative Edward Markey and Senator William Proxmire he is the author of the bestsellers the commandos the inside story of America's secret soldiers which chronicled u.s. special operations forces with the lineage tracing back to the OSS our topic one of our topics today and also the author of big red the three-month voyage of a Trident nuclear submarine he is the author of a question of loyalty general Billy Mitchell and the court-martial that gripped the nation another of his books that depended heavily on the Library of Congress in particular the Mitchell papers and the manuscript division you know and it was a critically acclaimed by aughh Murphy of the of the world war two general I will leave it to our author Douglas water to begin telling us all about his book and the central character Wild Bill Donovan I'm pleased to introduce Doug Walter Doug thanks Joe it's really nice from nice to be here it's kind of Old Home Week for me being back at the Library of Congress because during the research for the Donovan book for one year I spent every Saturday every single Saturday in the manuscript division room going through I think it was something like 15 sets of papers Don vinay who's an eminent historian here at the Library of Congress was my mentor one of the things you discover if you're doing histories or biographies is you need to have an archivist helping you out in the collections otherwise you can get totally lost and gone as a bulldog when it comes to the collections in the manuscript division room when I wasn't in the manuscript room I was in the main reading room over in the Jefferson building although I have to admit I don't know if other historians admit this either I had a hard time paying attention in there because I kept looking up at the beautiful artwork all the time never saw any Hawks up there Birds or Eagles or whatever never any never any wildlife up there but the the the view is just spectacular while Bill Donovan it's a book really with three stories in it the first is a very compelling biography of a truly heroic figure whose life met a lot of personal tragedies it's also a spy story the tale of some very daring operations that occurred during World War two and it's a tale of Washington political intrigue at the highest levels of government that was the part of it I guess being a journalist that interested interested in me the most start with the personal story for it's a very very rich one in fact I've always said I would have loved to have been a reporter back then in the 1940s covering him and interestingly I probably would have covered him Donovan like reporters he leaked to them all the time yeah they worked on his staff as spies and propagandists before he formed the OSS he would go overseas on informal intelligence collection missions and sometimes work part-time as a correspondent for different newspapers earning a little money on the side he he was not a particularly tall person only about five foot nine Mary I say Elizabeth Macintosh one of his female agents thought he when he headed up the OSS he looked kind of penguin shaped effect he told her that one time he didn't really appreciate it Mary Bancroft another one of his agents said he looked like a kewpie doll don't anybody ask me what a kewpie doll looks like I never looked it up he slept five hours or less at night he could speed read at least three books a week he was an excellent ballroom dancer he loved to sing Irish songs he would go to New York and collect all the latest sheet music from Broadway so he could learn the words he didn't smoke rarely drank he'd enjoyed fine dining which unfortunately put on the pounds for him in his later years he spent lavishly with no concept for a dollar in fact when he was out on trips or in the field his aides always carried money because he was always mooching quarters and dollars off of them he was witty but he never laughed out loud rarely ever told a dirty joke he never showed anger he instead let it boil inside him he was rakish Lee handsome particularly as a young man he had bright blue eyes that women found absolutely captivating but his life also was filled with tragedy his daughter his granddaughter one of his granddaughter's and his daughter-in-law all died at early ages he was born New Year's Day 1883 in Buffalo New York's poor Irish first ward first he thought he'd become a priest of course in most Irish families it was always assumed that one of the sons would become a priest and Donovan thought that would be him turned out he wasn't really cut for the cloth so instead he went to Columbia University was court quarterback the football team at Columbia senior year went to Columbia Law School Franklin Roosevelt was a classmate of his Roosevelt later like to say that they knew each other at Columbia Law School but Donovan said that was a bunch of baloney Roosevelt was at a much higher social strata than Donovan was law school he returned to Buffalo married into Protestant wealth married one of the most wealthy women in Buffalo during World War one he commanded a battalion first in the 69th Irish Regiment which was a very famous New York regiment later he became the Potala brigades I'm sorry the regiment's executive officer and it's on ground commander he was absolutely fearless in combat his uh the chaplain of the 69th Regiment father of Francis Duffy said Donovan was the only guy I ever met who really enjoyed combat okay he won the Medal of Honor in World War one that's where he also got his nickname Wild Bill before they went to war and they were still training in France Donovan was a really a brutal commander very very tough he would have boxing matches with the gloves off or his men just to toughen him up and after one particular because he knew they were going to be you know experiencing just horrific combat in this attrition wharf warfare that you saw in World War one but after one particular grueling exercise where he had run them over up and down hills and through obstacle courses they all collapsed on the ground just exhausted and panning and he stood up there and said you know what the heck's the matter with you I'm 35 years old carrying the same package you and you don't see me out of breath from being far behind the battalion somebody shouted out he'd never figured out who it was but we're not as wild as you are bill from that day on Wild Bill stuck he claimed that he didn't like the nickname because it ran counter to the spy cool collected quiet professional image that he wanted to project but his wife Ruth knew that he really did like he enjoyed being called Wild Bill he returned a new Orca hero he became assistant attorney general in the Coolidge administration during the roaring 20s his goal was to become Attorney General of the United States he wanted that position really wanted him and he thought Herbert Hoover who followed Coolidge had promised him the attorney generalship and in fact Hoover had the Hoover reneged on the promise the Ku Klux Klan very very powerful political party back then plus Democrats in the Senate Donovan was a prominent Republican vowed to block his nomination so Hoover instead backed off reneged on the promise it dissapointed Donovan greatly he never forgave Herbert Hoover for that he moved to New York City formed a very prominent law firm the Donovan leisure law firm which is what it came eventually earned millions as a Wall Street lawyer then in 1932 he ran for governor of New York again as a Republican he was a conservative Republican anti new dealer he thought the New Deal was a communist plot to take over the US government his ultimate goal was to be the nation's first Irish Catholic president okay in New York was the ideal stepping-stone for it as it was Franklin Roosevelt was running of course in 1932 and had been governor of New York Donovan was running against Roosevelt's lieutenant governor a guy named Herbert layman he ended up running as much against Roosevelt as he did laymen during the campaign he said some pretty nasty things about Roosevelt at one point he accused him of being quote crafty okay now back then those were fighting where that was pretty nice senior or one time he said Roosevelt was a Hyde Park fakir because Roosevelt claimed that he was a simple gentleman farmer from Hyde Park and Donovan thought that was a bunch of baloney Donovan lost the election got trounced in it just like Herbert Hoover did in 1932 turned out he was a horrible campaigner okay if he was in this room talking to you he would hold he would captivate your attention particularly with those bright blue eyes he had a very magnetic charismatic personality he could really turn on the his charm in front of a large audience on the stump he was even more wooden than Al Gore I mean he was just he was terrible in fact his the guy running with him as a lieutenant governor his running mate Truby Davison thought he was such a lousy campaigner that Davison thought he should have been running for governor and they should have made Donovan the lieutenant gubernatorial candidate and out of the way so he was never in front of the public it's amazing that Roosevelt eventually picked Donovan as his top spy my master considering the two disagreed strongly on domestic issues and they'd fought each other in in New York politics but we're talking now 1940-41 Roosevelt's building up the country preparing the country for the war he sees looming over the horizon Donovan was one of the few well not a few but he was part of the internationalist wing of the Republican Party he believed that the country needed to prepare for war needed to mobilize his defense in fact he wanted to get into the fight - he wanted to command an infantry division at one time he sent a memo to Roosevelt and said what we should do is recruit older men for the war guys my age you know in their late 50s because we've were more seasoned and we can fight better Roosevelt thought that was a silly idea but Donovan and Roosevelt saw each other as having a common cause here with preparing the country for war Roosevelt sent Donovan on to diplomatic missions in 1940 and 41 the first one in 1940 was to England to assess whether Britain could survive the Nazi Nazi onslaught you know was Britain going to come out of this alive Donovan got access to top British officials top military officials collected literally hundreds of pounds of documents from London met with Roosevelt met with some of the spy people at that point came back with it all to Washington and concluded the yes Britain could survive the war but it would need u.s. material aid in order to survive the second trip he took for Roosevelt was in late 1940 early 1941 he spent more time with Churchill this time Churchill started to realize is that this Irish American which at first he didn't yeah he didn't know yeah it was kind of suspicious of was actually or could be a close ally so Churchill arranged for Donovan to tour the Balkans in Eastern Europe and the Middle East in fact he went on a British plane he had British SS courts taking him around they paid all the bills Ian Fleming you know the James Bond was his at one of his escorts and would file reports back to London on what exactly Donovan was doing and in these at these different countries what he was doing was telling Balkan leaders in Middle East early Middle East leaders that Franklin Roosevelt did not intend to let Britain lose this war so you better decide which which side you're on it had better be the winning side which is the ally side Roosevelt was just delighted with this message going out throughout the Middle East and the Balkans so it's so it was a Churchill - and then Churchill actually even more so the State Department was a little miffed over it in fact at one point they debated internally whether Donovan should be prosecuted for violating the Logan Act which makes it a crime for a private US citizen to negotiate on behalf of the US government overseas Franklin Roosevelt however was absolutely delighted with with Donovan's trip because keep in mind we're talking 1940 41 Roosevelt has no foreign intelligence service to speak of telling him what's happening overseas the Army and the Navy had very very small intelligence collection units overseas and mainly they were dumping grounds for poor performing officers the State Department had practically no intelligence collecting capability among its embassies overseas so Roosevelt was going into major foreign policy decisions in 40 and 41 things like lend-lease how much to supply the British how he's going to get around us laws that constricted that supply or forbade it and he was facing re-election he was going going up for an unprecedented third term he's making these major foreign policy decisions overseas practically blind to what lay ahead for him overseas or what was really happening overseas and in fact it worried Roosevelt so much that he would at times become physically ill over it when Donovan comes back from the the two missions to Europe that's when our spy story begins in July 1941 Roosevelt signs a one-page executive order setting up the the coordinator of information with a very bland sounding name it was a very vague document it just said that Colonel Donovan he had been a colonel in World War one you still return that retained that title Colonel Donovan is going to collect information for me of national importance and he's going to do other unspecified things in fact the document was so vague that the rest of Roosevelt's cabinet started scratching their head like you know what the heck is this guy up to what are they doing and Roosevelt had to send out follow-up memos to explain exactly what he wasn't Donovan to do Donovan's spy organization the coordinator of information which later became with renamed the Office of Strategic Services the OSS as we know it started out with one person while Bill Donovan he liked to tell friends that he started out with minus zero and it really was in the beginning he was kind of like a player and a pickup basketball game looking for agents and operations and programs really anywhere he could find it so for example the Phillips lamp company they maybe I'm still in business for all I know but back then they had salesmen that sold lamps overseas all over the world Donovan privately contracted with them so that the Phillips lamps salesmen when they were making calls sales calls for example in occupied countries of the axis occupied they'd also collect information that would be useful for Donovan's organization military intelligence and information perhaps that they saw the Eastman Kodak Company you know my day it was all with the brownie cameras and now I think they have the disposable cameras back then they had thousands of camera clubs around the United States Donavan arranged for Eastman Kodak to send him photos tourists are taken from the camera clubs of militarily important sites overseas so as people could start analyzing them Pan American Airways you know Pan Am it he arranged secret contracts with Pan Am ticket agents in Africa to monitor the movements of Nazis in that in that continent the project was codenamed cigar Donavan went for practically any wild idea anybody could ever think up and he thought up a lot of wild ideas himself his code number was 109 which is actually and that was the number you see on the secret OSS documents 109 always that was actually the room number for his office in which was located in a headquarters of Navy Navy Hill which is next to what what is now the State Department his secretaries actually had another codename for him they called him Seabiscuit because like the racehorse he always seemed to be running around every which way and they could never keep track of him he kept 2,000 dollars in his desk drawer at all times to pay sources of information around Washington he always be darting off to different parts of Washington for secret meetings with these sources he had a research and development chief a guy named Stanley Lovell who was a very famous New England inventor of his time Donovan called him his professor Moriarity after the Sherlock Holmes character and Lovell invented all the gadgets for the OSS pistols with silencers the miniature cameras you know tiny pencil like explosive devices one of the experiments Donovan was very very interested in was truth drugs he really got into that and so did Stanley level one time they decided to test the truth drugs on a unwitting mafia thug okay a guy named little Augie okay an OSS officer had worked new york city cop invited new little Augie up to his apartment for some smokes and a chat okay laced within the cigarettes were the truth drug and some little dog he's puffing away on these cigarettes finally gets a silly grin on his face it starts chuckling and talking about all the mob hits he's carried out and his work with Lucky Luciano and how he's bribed this congressman or that congressman fortunately for little Augie his secrets were safe with Donovan because they never brought him to trial because that would expose the truth drug he had other kinds of wild ideas for example he proposed one time to Franklin Roosevelt that he have a button on his desk that he could push at any time and instantly communicate with every radio in America to alert them if the Japanese were attacking Los Angeles or the Germans were attacking New York Roosevelt ignored the idea but Roosevelt was open to all these ideas he considered Donovan kind of his sparkplug for thinking out of the box I mean he had George Marshall Admiral King HAP Arnold the Air Force that was Roosevelt's inner circle of advisers the his inner war council Donovan was never part of that inner circle but he was kind of the guy outside thinking off-the-wall ideas and Roosevelt loved him he was kind of Roosevelt was kind of a spy buff himself he'd been ever since he was a young boy so he was intrigued by espionage and intelligence operations so for example one of the ideas that Stanley levels men tested was fitting bats you know bats that fly in the eaves of buildings with incendiary devices and what they were going to do is they were going to drop these bats from a plane over Tokyo the bats would fly into the eaves of the wooden and paper houses in Tokyo and burn down all the homes terrific idea Eleanor Roosevelt had been told that a friend had told her this this just might work an elder passed it on to Franklin Franklin thought it was kind of cool passed it on to Donovan so Stanley level went out to some desert they flew a plane over there they'd fitted these bats with this incendiary devices dropped him out of the plane unfortunately all sank like a stone didn't work but Donovan thought oh you know that was the kind of ideas that he would test out and he was totally unfazed by the failures in addition to being also the father of modern American espionage Donovan was also the father of informational warfare and by information warfare we're talking about psychological operations you see him today that's in cyber warfare things that psych out the enemy in Donovan's day the technology for this was fairly crude it basically consisted of rumors leaflets radios and newspapers so for example he would have his agents plant rumors in the New York Times The Associated Press and overseas papers that the top Nazi leaders were fleeing to South America and leaving the Germans high and dry Marlena Dietrich very sultry German singer sang for propaganda broadcasts that Donovan beamed in to German soldiers there were also the League of lonely women leaflets and these were dropped over German soldiers and what this told him was that their wives and girlfriends back home belonged to the League of lonely women and they were having sex with their comrades that were coming back on leave nobody can her figure out what kind of effect that had another thing they another thing they couldn't figure out what the effect was they dropped mail bags over Germany inside of him were stuffed with poison pen letters that OSS officers had written in German with addresses they've gotten from German directories telephone directories in them hoping that German people would pick up the mail bags give them to the post office figuring they'd been lost and the mail would get delivered again they'd never really figured out whether that was going to work or did work or not Stanley Lovell had an idea at one point he concocted hormones that they figured if there's some way they get injected into Hitler's vegetables they didn't know where that was vegetables were bits they get injected into Hitler's vegetables it would make his mustache fall off and he speak he would speak in a falsetto voice which had definitely been a bummer for the Fuhrer right Donovan turned out to be a horrible manager a horrible organizer in the four years he ran the OSS he violated practically every rule you learn in Harvard Business School or public administration school and it would drive his senior people nuts and in fact at one point about a half dozen of his inner circle stage what was called later the palace revolt was basically a coup they tried to oust him what's cooler than what they wanted to do is move him up and out as a broad overseer and they would run the OSS organization because he seemed to be constantly on the move he was constantly traveling all the time and never at his desk doing paperwork in fact there was a saying in the OSS that if they had a private out front raising the flag up and down every time Donovan was in and out he'd have to be there on 24-hour duty because he was always in and out Donovan who had launched enough coos by this point could smell one that was being launched against himself and he squished it like a bug and the palace revolt went away even so he was a very charismatic leader with his own agents overseas and he was overseas most of the time they revered him he rarely ever issued a command overseas he usually just asked and they they would follow him loyally and eventually Donovan built up an organization of over 10,000 espionage agents special operations command OHS research analysts administration personnel in stations all over the world again a fairly remarkable achievement again because he started out with just one guy which is law Bill Donovan they mounted covert operations for example before the invasion of North Africa in November 1942 provided a lot of good information for Eisenhower's forces on beach conditions that the forces would face when they landed at North Africa a lot of information on you know different factions within North Africa they failed though to organize the Vichy French in North Africa so that they would accept Eisenhower's forces in and so in the first couple of weeks there you know there was some ferocious bad with the Vichy French he had operations in Sicily in Italy his Italian operations had a lot of failures he had a lot of problems in Italy but keep in mind Mark Clark Smith army had a lot of problems in Italy too I mean that was a slow attrition warfare that was a wage there he mounted extensive operations in the Balkans organizing resistance and supplying resistance against Hitler's occupation army particularly in Yugoslavia and in Greece in Asia he his men operated in Burma and China against the Japanese Douglas MacArthur would never let him in his theater the southwest Pacific Theater neither would Chester Nimitz both of them didn't think they had any use for Donovan's people over there so they basically only accepted maybe a few propagandists and a few frogmen and that was it yeah for Normandy though Donovan had extensive operations his research and analysis people who originally started here in the Library of Congress by the way produced a lot of valuable information on beach conditions of the Normandy coast their target analysis people did a lot of work for HAP Arnold's Air Force identifying targets in Germany and occupied France and Jonathan dropped in hundreds of commandos operational group commandos they called him oh jeez or Jedburgh commandos after the training site in Scotland were they trained who landed behind the lines before the invasion and even afterwards to organize French resistance against the against the Germans incidentally Donovan also loved to go in on the landings the Allied landings he went in to the ones in Sicily Italy and also in Normandy much to the chagrin of his own staff who thought that was no place for the America's top spy master to be right at the front you know with the fire coming overhead in fact George Marshall thought he had Donovan banned from the Normandy landing so did Eisenhower but Matt Donovan managed to talk his way aboard a Navy Cruiser and land at Utah Beach the the day after the initial wave he had a grand time Messerschmitts came over and strafed his jeep and he had to roll over and escape that he got pinned down by a German machine-gun nest but it was you know quite a lark for him the it took almost two years for Donovan's OSS to really build itself up into a professional organization and really get into the fight it may seem like a long time but keep in mind it also took the US Army quite a while to build itself up as a professional organization in World War two and get itself really into the fight and Donovan also had his intelligence share of intelligence failures like we see with the CIA today one of the most spectacular failures he had was the vessel case he thought he had the Silver Bullet agent planted in the Vatican codename vessel who was giving him transcripts verbatim transcripts of private sensitive diplomatic conversations that Pope Pius II was having with other envoys with his own envoy stationed in Japan and with Japanese envoys turned out vessel though was a Italian pornographer who had a very very vivid imagination and a talent for inventing dialogue but he snickered Donovan and his organization you know just they bought him hook line and sinker not unlike what you see today for example in the lead up to the Iraq war with the Silver Bullet agent that the CIA thought they had which was curveball who was giving them what they thought was ironclad information on biological weapons capability in fact there was an interview in the British newspaper just recently where curveball in fact admitted that he made it all up he was a fabricator so history really does repeat itself but again as I say as the US Army improved Donovan's organization approved but this is also a story of political intrigue okay Donovan liked to say he had enemies in Washington as fierce as Adolf Hitler in Europe he had ferocious fights with J Edgar Hoover Hoover thought he Donovan's organization was the biggest collection of amateurs he'd ever seen and in fact in the beginning it was the biggest collection of amateurs anybody had ever seen it took a while for it to professionalize Hoover mounted spy operations against the OSS and its senior people and against Donovan literally until the day he died he was constantly snooping on Donovan was had moles in Hoover's FBI that were feeding him information on what what Hoover was doing the Pentagon at first bitterly fought the formation of the OSS and eventually the Army Intelligence set up its own secret spy unit they nicknamed it the pond which spied behind Donovan's back not only spied against the axis but spite against Donovan his men even though even as men's wives they spied against in fact they if you look in the ponds documents they used to call the OSS the Dons you know what that meant but you know they were always constantly monitoring what the Dons were doing around the world Nelson Rockefeller okay governor of New York vice-president the United States at one point back in the in Roosevelt's administration he was a coordinator of Latin American affairs in charge of propaganda in Latin America a job and a mission that Donovan thought his OSS should be in charge of in its propaganda operation should be in charge of he had fierce fights with Nelson Rockefeller over turf in Latin America in fact at one point they got into such an argument at the State Department that Donovan threatened to throw Rockefeller out the window and I think they're on the second floor in any given war generals and admirals fight among themselves all the time and that was certainly the case in World War two I mean Howard had fierce battles with you know top commanders under him fierce battles with the British the battles though that Donovan had with the War Department and army generals and Navy Admirals were particularly fierce because they just didn't understand what this guy was all about I mean when he went to them and he started talking about espionage operations in covert warfare League of lonely women and everything they just really couldn't figure him out and they found him genuinely disturbing to their operations Donovan also had a penchant for not taking no for an answer so when a commander would block something he was going to do he usually made an end run around the commander to his superior officer to try and get it reversed which doesn't win you many friends in the Pentagon so for example he would go to the commander of the Navy the Admiral in charge of the Navy say I need more officers from the Navy for my for my unit and the Admiral would say no so Frank Knox I mean Donovan would go to Frank Knox who's the secretary of the Navy and old Republican pal and Frank Knox would call up the Admiral to try and pressure him to give up the officers again that doesn't win your friends among the sea Service one time he was at a cocktail party in Washington talking to an admiral and he had his agents burglarized the Admirals office steal documents off his desk and the agents brought it back to Donovan and so Donovan can show the Admiral and show off what his agents could do I never was able to determine what the reaction was of the Admiral but I got a feeling he may have been nonplussed by it Donovan would also show up at Pentagon meetings he'd always usually show up it was a senior officers very often late he would come in his uniform would be immaculately tailored from Wetzel's in New York very often he would only wear his Congressional Medal of Honor which he wanted World War two that ribbon on his uniform just as a not-so-subtle reminder to the Admirals and the generals in the room with their rows of ribbon all that fruit salad up there that he had the only metal that counted when he was in the field however he could be as one agent called incorrigibly civilian okay he would all his fatigues would always be very very rumpled one several times you'd catch him in the field and he'd we be wearing a Paisley Ascot with his fatigues I don't think they let the generals do that nowadays but but he did it back then I mean it was kind of again a not-so-subtle reminder to anybody else in the field that he was an unconventional warrior and this group he was commanding was an unconventional group for the Allies the British played an integral role in setting up the OSS for Donovan and helping him set it up in fact Donovan's relationship with the British in many respects was even closer than it was with it than with his own war department even so he had fierce battles with the British British intelligence special operations and Winston Churchill over turf you know who would spy where around the world and who would conduct operations in what parts of the world Donovan at one point even mounted spy operations against the British to find out what Churchill was doing Churchill's men if you go to the archives in London had a very vigorous spy operation monitoring Vaughn Donovan to figure out what he was up to around the world our other ally Shanghai check in China Donovan enlisted the help of a guy named Cornelius v-star who was a big publisher back then and Starr set up a newspaper in Chongqing for him that Donovan bankrolled a half a million dollars it put into it and brought in his OSS officers to pose as reporters and they filed stories for the newspaper but they also collected intelligence on the side and filed it on what the Japanese were doing in China and more importantly what Shanghai check was doing in China to the Soviets another ally of ours at one point Finnish intelligence offered Donovan 1500 in KGB and Soviet military documents that had been shaken KGB codes in them and Donovan eventually bought that bought the codes for sixty two thousand five hundred dollars when the State Department learned of that they were up in arms over it because the Soviets were our allies and they got Franklin Roosevelt to order Donovan to return the codes to the Soviets and so Donovan had them all packed up in boxes had one of his aides take it to the Washington embassy here Andrei Gromyko was the ambassador then and he looked on this but these bunch of boxes are very very skeptically with kind of a look on his face that said you expect me to believe that you haven't copied these and looked at them all over and they send Ivan said no I assure you you know we have it of course he didn't believe that cock-and-bull story and it turned and the Soviets of course immediately changed their codes when they learned that the Finns had him and were selling him and it's a good thing they did because the enterprising finns also so this sold the codes to the japanese for seventy thousand dollars the free market was always alive and well during World War two Donovan however eventually couldn't overcome his political enemies he had drafted a post-war Central Intelligence plan a plan to set up a CIA after the war and he wanted to lead it walter tro han who was a reporter for The Washington Times Herald which was owned by the McCormick Patterson chain that was Colonel Robert McCormick in Chicago and Cissy Patterson in Washington was a very only anti Roosevelt despised Roosevelt and Roosevelt despised the chain tro han had been slipped a copy of Donovan's highly secret post-war CIA plant and he published it in the Chicago Tribune The Washington Times Herald among the among two papers and wrote a very very inflammatory story accused Donovan of setting up a quote American Gestapo that was going to spy not only on people overseas but Americans at home now if you called anybody or any organization that gets toppled back in back then that was you know pretty incendiary words so it's it pretty much st. Donovan's plan with Roosevelt and particularly with Marshall he also had a problem Hoover spread a particularly nasty rumor with Harry Truman's staff he Hoover had an agent spread the rumor with Harry Truman's staff that Donovan was sleeping with his daughter-in-law now there was no truth to it that I could determine I researched it quite heavily Donovan's daughter-in-law he treated as a daughter and only as a daughter in fact she became a surrogate daughter to him when his his first daughter died but Donovan did have a number of affairs and a number of mistresses which was common knowledge in Washington and in Buffalo and other parts and even military intelligence knew about it so it was given some credence by people back then in addition the pond remember with that's the Pentagon spy unit they managed to arrange for a 59 page report to be placed on Truman's desk that had been written ostensibly by an Army colonel on the White House staff there actually was written by by the pond which accused Donovan's organization of all kinds of misdeeds and blown operation and corruption they even accused him of staging a sex orgy in India at one point you also had the problem here that Truman and Donovan just really didn't like each other particularly Truman really didn't like Donovan there was bad chemistry between the two guys on the one hand you had a millionaire Wall Street Republican lawyer and on the other hand you had a failed Missouri haberdasher who was a staunch Democrat okay they just they just weren't going to get get along so eventually Truman shut down the OSS in September 1945 and parceled out its functions to the State Department in the White House Truman eventually formed the CIA as everybody knows in 1947 modeled largely after Donovan's vision of what that organization should look like Donovan wanted to head up the CIA in fact he had surrogates privately Lobby Truman to see if he could become CIA director the Truman wasn't going to here you know ever consider that fact Donovan had said some nasty things about Truman on the presidential campaign trail so that wasn't gonna happen when Eisenhower became president Donovan thought he had his best chance to become CIA director and again he had surrogates Lobby Ike to make him head of the CIA but Donovan still didn't have a chance in that case because john foster dulles who was going to be Eisenhower's president was pushing to have his brother Allen Dulles head up the CIA and Dulles slid right in to be CIA chief Donovan was deeply disappointed over that he thought in Dulles who had worked for him headed up his station and burned Switzerland and done some amazing operations he still thought Dulles was a poor administrator who's going to be a disaster at the CIA why don't I leave it we'll stop right there answer any questions you have we can talk about what Donovan then did after the war his legacy what it meant for the agency today because it's still heavily debated by historians today they still argue over you know you know whether what he and his agency did were really worthwhile in World War two so any questions yeah well in Bulgaria first okay this was the relations with Bulgaria the operations there and also Yugoslavia Donovan and the OSS or and his when he visited I think Bulgaria - and and Yugoslavia also in the case of Bulgaria when Donovan visited there he visited with King Boris of willget Bulgaria he found King Boris to be a fairly frightened creature understandably because King Boris had German divisions from Romania poised that his border ready to invade Boris thought Donovan was a knucklehead thought he was very naive about you know the Balkans situation and the Balkans probably knows it was a caldron of different types of competing politics and Boris thought Donovan was entering into a place he really didn't know much about and the reason I found out about that was because Boris told that to the German ambassador after Donovan left that this guy you know it's clueless and he had a low opinion of them in Yugoslavia again it was a cauldron of different competing factions you had you know the Croatian faction supporting the Nazis you had Tito's partisans you had the Chetnik syndrome mihaela vich and Donovan basically the British were in there first in fact they were very upset that Donovan was barging his way into there with his operatives Churchill was moving aid from the hay Levitch to Tito's partisans and Ivan basically wanted to have spies planted with all the camps he had some very fierce fights with Churchill and with Roosevelt over trying to get his men man in there eventually everything shifted to Tito's partisans Churchill insisted on it and Roosevelt would not fight him on that issue one point Donovan proposed to have himself parachute into Yugoslavia he never actually really did Churchill thought that was a horrible idea and told Roosevelt that basically took him to the woodshed on it and Churchill I mean Roosevelt backed off and in the end Tito's partisans basically kicked everybody out as the Soviets moved in war - oh it was yes he did he did in fact and talked with the senior air force general I don't have his name my head and it was just after that yes some of its right it was just after that then that Hitler invaded Yugoslavia gurbles claim that the reason Hitler invaded was because Donovan went in there and filled symma bitch's ears and the the rebel Yugoslavia military leaders with all these promises that Franklin Roosevelt was going to come to their aid was just stirring things up I was a bunch of baloney he didn't he when you read the transcripts of what he actually said he was very very careful and stuck to his talking points that the US and the British ambassador had drafted for even so the conservative press in the United States conservative magazines bought the German line and criticized Donovan heavily for being the instigator of the Soviet invasion of the German invasion of Yugoslavia so it became kind of a messy affair for me yeah good question they had a problem particularly with little Augie cigarettes okay they couldn't figure out because what the ultimate goal in the Army was very very interested in they helped fund it too because what they wanted to do was use it for example if they had somebody who might be a mole or whatever they wanted to have a way to give it to someone unwittingly so they really didn't know they were getting it and they weren't sure about little Augie because after the second sessions of smokes he started wondering you know why am I so why is this such a terrific meeting I'm having with this guy Donovan though was was very very intensely interested effect he had Cornell University do some experimental work continued on it and they tried all kinds of drug drugs from marijuana mescaline and everything else never got anything really off the ground so they could use it on a mass production basis but he put a lot of money into it no yeah okay I'm sorry yeah the question is could Donovan exist in the CIA today or is there any function out there in the US intelligence community like the OSS today yeah I've always kind of said somewhat tongue-in-cheek that the Pentagon and the CIA could use a Wild Bill Donovan just not two of them right I think you would have had a tough time although there is an intense debate if you read op-ed pages scholarly journals particularly the military press over whether the CIA and also the US Special Operations Command which is headquartered in Tampa Florida should consider you know the idea of returning to its roots to its OSS roots and kind of those swashbuckling days in fact I was down actually in Tampa last month at a conference that the commander of the US Special Operations Command was having on this very subject you know should we you know return to our OSS roots and there's a debate within the CIA on it you know that was a fun period back then but we've got you know 70 years it passed it's you know we live in a different world today I said at one audience one time as Phoebe be like the US Army you know say what we need is a good horse cavalry charge nowadays but then I thought wait a minute in Afghanistan we had CIA officers covert officers on horses leading charges so maybe that that analogy didn't work but you know I say that the targets are somewhat different today you still see some of the same failures I think you know Donovan wanted men and I say men because there were only about 4,500 or about 4,000 women in his group some of them were we're agents he paid him more than the regular federal government did but it was still a glass ceiling so he always referred to him as his men but he wanted men of quote discipline daring and I think the two words are very important you know you have to have daring but you also have to have discipline and what you learned from looking at the history is that yeah it would be nice to have you know you need an intelligence service with discipline daring with the spirit the Elan the esprit de corps that you saw with Wild Bill Donovan but you do need the discipline you need control by the president United States so it's kind of a roundabout non-answer it wasn't it Hey the question is Donovan's interaction first with Roosevelt if I talk to any people who knew Donovan well also did he play chess okay on the chess playing I don't don't know about that he played bridge he learned to play bridge in the nineteen mid 1930s and played it a lot afterwards usually lost he was not a very good bridge player he had a complicated relationship with the Roosevelt White House and Roosevelt himself keep in mind Donovan is you know a prominent conservative Republican for his day I mean he was an internationalist but he's still domestically he was conservative Roosevelt had brought into his cabinet because he formed a coalition cabinet going into the war much like what Churchill did he brought in Frank Knox a Secretary of the Navy Henry Stimson his Secretary of the war both prominent Republicans and Donovan as his top spy master a prominent Republican mentioned still mentioned when he joined Roosevelt's cabinet as a possible presidential candidate so there were a lot of people inside the White House and in fact you read some of their letters here at the Library of Congress and they are kind of worried like hey you know what are we doing here setting up a farm team for future presidential candidates they're gonna run against Franklin Roosevelt so there was some suspicion there even Eleanor had some suspicions of Donovan coming in initially although Donovan worked assiduously to smooth Eleanor to cultivate her Donovan for his part never really wanted to be Franklin Roosevelt's friend never wanted to get too close to him he thought it was kind of a moth to the flame type of situation that he'd get caught in he saw a lot of top aides to Roosevelt getting burned up if they got really too close to him and Roosevelt himself really was never close to any of his aides he kept them all in the dark on some of the things they were doing I mean if you read the papers of Harry Hopkins the other Steve early they all didn't know completely what Donovan I mean what Roosevelt was doing neither did Donovan Roosevelt had a secret spy unit that was set up basically behind Donovan's back it was run by a guy named John Franklin Carter who was a columnist here a newspaper columnist in Washington that continued to write his column while he ran a secret off-the-books operation for Roosevelt out of the White House Donovan only learned about it when he was interviewing one guy asked him to join his own organization said no I can't do it I'm working for a Carter's organization yeah said very very complex question oh okay yeah oh yeah the experiment of that visible length question is did he ever use codes and visible links dead-drops that sort of thing yeah and they had to learn as they do Stanley Lovell perfected an invisible ink that you can not only write on paper but also on your undershirt you know and so you could take it out you know if you were captured nobody would see it they everybody every officer had overseas particularly the espionage ones had codes in fact they had so many number codes that they had a hard time keeping track of who was who in the codes they called it a numbers racket and in fact they insisted that a lot of these guys who really weren't truly undercover didn't need a code you know it was great to cool to have a code you know if you particularly it was a lower ranking lower number of near Donovan's Dulles his code was 110 and then that meant you were you know you were a cool spy right the question is the Good Shepherd and the portrayal of Donovan by Robert De Niro I know that upset a number of people within the OSS the OSS Society they and they're about 500 former OSS errs who are still alive in fact I did indeed answer your other question that I've talked to a number of them who knew Donovan and they're only a few actually is still alive who knew knew Donovan the an italian-american actor playing an irish-american you know glad-hander they thought that didn't really come off so there was a you know a lot of concern over the portrayal of that movie okay the question is was Donovan involved in an assassination of General Patton and that's circulated in the internet for a long time there's no truth to it Donovan and Patton actually were big buddies they were next-door neighbors Patton had a home in Middleburg Virginia and Donovan had a country home in Berryville Virginia they used to pal around together a lot and Patton liked Donovan and Donovan liked like Patton they went Patton invaded Sicily they Donovan met him at gala Sicily where they had a you know a lunch of cold sea rations and you know talk to old times so no there's no evidence that was ever the case we are going to conclude with just a little footnote on the Library of Congress in the OSS Doug mentioned that the lot of the research was done at the Library of Congress I'd always heard about this unit and never checked into it as somebody's interested in the library's history but today inspired by our speaker I got busy in the 1943 annual report and they're in the finance section it has the numbers of this total major portion of money spent in 1943 on government directed research 390 1852 was made available by the coordinator of information now this Office of Strategic Services for the division of special information which was established by the library in September 1941 to provide service to that agency during fiscal 94 90 43 the division was liquidated and the personnel transferred to the staff of the Office of Strategic Services however a special and restricted reading room of room reading room service for OSS is still maintained on funds transferred for this purpose this is June of 43 then over in the finance section there's something about the space use which I'd never seen before said the research and analysis branch of the OSS services occupied the full length and subsequently half the length of this whole floor on the annex so it was a substantial research outfit that research service that the Library of Congress provided for the OSS and that was because of Archibald MacLeish who was the librarian of Congress who was part of the war effort and I know a good friend of Donovan's let's thank our speaker again we're gonna sign books outside and you'll have a chance to answer get some answers for some of those many many questions this has been a presentation of the Library of Congress visit us at loc.gov

Channel: Library of Congress

Views: 25,145

Rating: 4.7637129 out of 5

Keywords: library, congress, espionage

Id: -oKvWxDoygA

Length: 61min 38sec (3698 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 02 2011

Reddit Comments

[u/Penultimate_Push]

To be fair, England had a large hand in creating the OSS.