Ike's Spies (12 page)

In addition, Taylor carefully indoctrinated the
SLUS
in all aspects of intelligence gathering, which gave them a perspective that was crucial to their effectiveness. The temptation to rely completely on
ULTRA
was always there, but usually spurned. In 1978, Rosengarten wrote, “I am bold to say that Ultra was
primus inter pares
, some of the time but not all of the time, among the sources of information which were available to our section. These were principally prisoners, civilians who crossed the line, air photography, and low level deciphering.”
²³

Rosengarten's point was made over and over again by the American
SLUS
. After the war, Taylor had each of his men answer a long questionnaire about their experiences. In his summary of these reports, Taylor noted that “the need for careful study of all sources of intelligence was stressed by most of the representatives.” Everything that the commanding general's G-2 section knew, the
SLU
knew, because he made it his business to read all papers passing through the G-2 situation room. This enabled him to fuse
ULTRA
with other intelligence.

One
SLU
wrote, “It is most easy for the Ultra representative to allow himself to become isolated from the mainstream of the intelligence section, so that he loses awareness of what other sources are producing. Another facile error, induced by inertia, is to permit Ultra to become a substitute for analysis and evaluation of other intelligence. The two easy errors, isolation from other sources and the conviction that Ultra will provide all needed intelligence, are indeed the Scylla and Charybdis of the representative. Ultra must be looked on as one of a number of sources; it must not be taken as a neatly packaged replacement for tedious work with other evidence.”
²⁴

Another point Taylor stressed in his final report was that
ULTRA'S
“normal function was to enable the
SLU
and his recipients
to select the correct information from the huge mass of P/W, agent, reconnaissance, and photographic reports. Ultra was the guide and the censor to conclusions arrived at by means of other intelligence; at the same time the latter was a secure vehicle by which Ultra could be disseminated under cover.”
²⁵

As will be seen, the system Taylor created worked well. Time and again his
SLUS
were able to get crucial information to their commanders in time for decisive action. Most
SLUS
had a daily briefing for the general; some held two briefings; all had round-the-clock access to the general if they had an intercept that called for immediate action. It was Anglo-American cooperation at its most highly developed—recall that all decoding and translating was done by British at
BP
—and as the Germans can testify, it was remarkably effective. As Lewin concludes, “After the Americans first became fully involved in Ultra they entered into an enormous inheritance which they did not squander.”
²⁶

IF THE SLUS WERE THE PICK
of America's young men, Donovan's
OSS
agents were supposed to be almost as good. But in Sicily, and then during the invasion of Italy in September 1943, the
OSS
was of no help to Ike, unless it was to provide some comic relief.

Colonel Donovan claimed that the
OSS
had proved itself in North Africa and that it should therefore be given a free hand in Sicily and Italy. He nearly got it, although Ike was able to stop one or two harebrained schemes before they got started. In late June, for example, Donovan wanted to send an
OSS
team to Sicily for sabotage operations, but when Eisenhower learned of the plan he vetoed it, on the obvious grounds that sending in agents at so late a date would alert German coastal defenses.

Donovan ran a far more serious risk on D-Day for
HUSKY
when he went ashore with Patton's troops to direct the efforts of his ten-man
OSS
unit for Sicily. How it happened is a mystery, except that Donovan somehow managed to do it without Ike finding out. It was a bit of madness, obviously, for a man who knew all about
ULTRA
, the atomic bomb, the British Secret Service organization for France, not to mention the
OSS
secrets, to put himself in a position where he might be captured. Anthony Cave Brown, the British journalist, comments, “This rash behavior on the part of senior
OSS
officials was one of the root causes of the intense suspicion with
which the British secret services were now coming to regard their American comrades-in-arms.”
²⁷

It was probably inevitable that the American Government's secret agencies, initially the
OSS
and then the
CIA
, would find occasion to work in close cooperation with another secret organization that also had nearly unlimited funds, the Mafia. It happened first in 1943 during the Sicilian campaign. Assistant New York District Attorney Murray Gurfein, at that time attached to the Office of Naval Intelligence (
ONI
), later an
OSS
colonel in Europe, and eventually a federal judge in New York, made a deal with Mafia chief “Lucky” Luciano. Luciano was in prison for crimes concerning prostitution. The deal was that if the Mafia in Sicily cooperated with the
OSS
there to provide information, the
ONI
would get him out of prison. Although no concrete evidence has been produced to indicate that the Mafia turned over intelligence of any value, on the day World War II ended in Europe,
ONI
sent a petition for executive clemency for Luciano to Governor Thomas E. Dewey of New York. The petition said Luciano had “cooperated with high military authorities” and had rendered “a definite service to the war effort.” Dewey approved the appeal and Luciano was let out of prison and deported from the United States.
²⁸

As the Mafia connection indicated, the Americans had a tremendous potential advantage in carrying out spying in Italy—millions of Americans were from Italy or second-generation immigrants with close personal ties to the old country. Speaking the language perfectly, knowing the country and its ways thoroughly, the Italian-Americans were ideal agents. Donovan had gone deep into the military to find volunteers; the leader of his Sicily unit was Max Corvo, a U. S. Army private of Sicilian descent. Corvo in turn recruited twelve Sicilian-Americans and two young lawyers to become recruiters and organizers. One
OSS
man who helped train the larger group remembered them as “tough little boys from New York and Chicago, with a few live hoods mixed in.… Their one desire was to get over to the old country and start throwing knives.” One or two had been recruited directly from the ranks of Murder, Inc., and the Philadelphia “Purple Gang.”
²⁹
They did not, unfortunately, meet expectations. Although Corvo's group did recruit on Sicily, they were unable to find a sufficient number of Sicilians who, in the words of one
OSS
wit, were willing “to take a shot at their relatives.”
³⁰

OSS
had all the problems of a new organization, compounded by the fact that it had more agents and more money to spend than it could use effectively. The result was its own private war, often either at odds with the aims of the real war or a duplication of effort. During the invasion of Italy,
OSS
agents dashed off on missions without the knowledge or approval of Eisenhower's headquarters. It was the only time in the war that Ike allowed this to happen—during the Normandy landings nine months later nothing went on that he had not personally approved—and it appears to have been a result of Donovan's enthusiasm plus FDR's strong backing of Donovan.

The absence of communication between
OSS
and the regular forces was the cause of an absurd mix-up on D-Day at Salerno. A “MacGregor unit” (
OSS
code name for a sabotage team), consisting of Peter Tompkins, John Shahhen, and Marcello Girosi, commandeered a high-speed British motorboat. They had a wild plot to reach the Italian Naval Command, there to force the Italian admirals to turn their fleet over to the Allies. What they did not know was that the secret surrender negotiations with the Italians, which had been going on for some weeks, had already made arrangements for turning over the fleet, which was indeed sailing at that moment to surrender to the British at Malta.

Elsewhere the ninety-man
OSS
detachment for Italy, commanded by Colonel Donald Downes, did some good service. Wading ashore on D-Day, the agents managed to exploit the early confusion in order to infiltrate through enemy lines, make contact with resistance groups, and recruit spies. An occasional piece of helpful information came out of this effort.
³¹

Before much could be accomplished, however, Donovan came onto the scene to reorganize the unit. He had Downes join him on a typical Donovan expedition—a jaunt to the Isle of Capri, just across the bay from Naples, which was still held by the Germans. On the way over, Donovan told Downes that Colonel Eddy had taken ill and would be replaced in Algiers by a West Point colonel. Another colonel, Ellery Huntington, Jr., a Wall Street lawyer and former Yale quarterback, would take Downes' place as head of the
OSS
detachment in Italy. Downes would stay in the country, but only as chief of counterintelligence. Finally, Donovan said that in the future the
OSS
would have to follow the President's political line, which in Italy meant that the
OSS
could work only with or recruit
Italians who pledged their loyalty to the King, Victor Emmanuel.

All this was rather too much for the idealistic Downes, who told Donovan point-blank that he would not serve under Huntington, “a good-natured incompetent” who had been a key fund raiser for Donovan in 1932 when Donovan ran for governor of New York. As to the political directive, he asked Donovan, “How could we betray all the Italian democrats, almost to a man rabidly anti-House of Savoy, by insisting that they swear allegiance to the ridiculous little king who had saddled them with fascism and thumped for Mussolini until military defeat was inevitable?”

They arrived at Capri, where a MacGregor team was plotting a new daredevil operation to rescue an Italian scientist from German-occupied Italy. Capri was peaceful. “Elegant ladies in sun suits and big hats strolled about followed by their little dogs and gigolos. The smart hotels were open and at cafe tables the indolent conversation of the idle rich was to be heard.” To Downes' amazement, Donovan announced that his first objective was to visit the villa of Mona Williams, wife of a prominent New York utilities magnate who had made the second largest contribution to Donovan's 1932 campaign. Donovan explained that he had promised to protect her magnificent resort home from being “ruined by a lot of British enlisted personnel.” He told Downes to get on it. Downes replied curtly, “I don't want to fight a war protecting Mrs. Williams' pleasure dome.” That night, Donovan ordered Downes to get out of Italy and stay out.
³²

The contrast between Taylor's
SLUS
and Donovan's
OSS
could scarcely have been greater. The one was professional, serious, efficient, dedicated, and self-effacing, while the other was amateur, comic, unproductive, and self-serving.

THE ITALIAN CAMPAIGN WAS
, for the Allies, the most frustrating of the war. Hopes were high and expenditures of men and equipment were heavy, but results were slim. In August, three weeks before the invasion,
ULTRA
revealed that Hitler had decided to pull out of southern and central Italy. He wanted Kesselring to bring his divisions north and put them under Rommel, who had taken over command in northern Italy. As this plan seemed to make good strategic sense, and because the Italians were negotiating secretly with Ike's chief of staff, Bedell Smith, and his G-2, Ken
Strong, to pull a double-cross on the Germans, Eisenhower expected a relatively unopposed landing at Salerno. What he got was some of the toughest fighting of the war, and another lesson in the perils of undue reliance on
ULTRA
.

It is widely believed that Hitler kept a tight control on the various Wehrmacht battlefields, retaining for himself the right to make not only strategic but also tactical decisions. That may have been generally true on the Russian front, but elsewhere the German generals seem to have been able to use their own judgment and even flaunt Hitler's direct orders. If it worked, they got away with it. For Kesselring, in Italy, it worked.

Kesselring did not like Rommel and liked even less the prospect of turning his troops over to Rommel's command. Further, Kesselring believed that Rome could be successfully defended. He therefore delayed and obstructed the movement of his troops northward, so that when the attack came on September 9 he still had the bulk of his forces south of Rome. Against Hitler's better judgment and contrary to his orders, Kesselring decided to launch an all-out counterattack against the Allied beachhead at Salerno.
ULTRA
revealed only a little of Kesselring's movements, mainly because the Germans had relatively secure telephone lines in Italy and thus did not need to use the radio.
³³

ULTRA
could provide only an insight into the enemy's plans, intentions, and capabilities. It could not provide fighting men, tanks, planes, ships, or aggressive generals. At Salerno, Mark Clark had expected a cakewalk. Instead, his troops were under terrific pressure from the Germans in what was one of the most dangerous moments of the entire war for the Allied armies in Europe. An army of two corps, with four divisions, was on the verge of annihilation. Ike received a message from Clark that indicated that Clark was about to put his headquarters on board ship. It made Ike almost frantic. He told Butcher that the headquarters should leave last, that Clark ought to show the spirit of a naval captain and if necessary go down with his ship. Like the Russians at Stalingrad, he should stand and fight.