Ike's Spies (3 page)

But if your team consisted of eleven out-of-shape office workers who had never played together and who were all smaller and slower than their opposite numbers, all that perfect information would do you no good. The professional team would still score on every play.

Code breaking could work both ways, of course, since the Allies also used the radio. Patrick Beesly, who worked in the Naval Intelligence Division of the Admiralty, points out in his excellent work
Very Special Intelligence
that “no service in any of the belligerent powers during the Second World War succeeded in keeping every cipher it used secure.” Before Winterbotham broke the
ULTRA
secret, the ups and downs in the crucial Battle of the Atlantic were inexplicable. German sinkings of Allied merchant vessels would rise dramatically one month, then fall off sharply while Allied sinkings of German submarines went up. The explanation lay
with the thousands of men and women, in Germany and England, who toiled night and day to break the other side's code. Success at this tremendously difficult and demanding task was immediately translated into ships sunk at sea. The ups and downs came as one side or the other changed its code, or broke the code the enemy was using that month.

The British won the Battle of the Atlantic partly because the Royal Navy was good, partly because of American reinforcements, but mainly because Churchill's code breakers were better than Hitler's. To a lesser extent this was also true on land, although some of Rommel's victories in North Africa came about because his people had broken the British code and were reading the radio traffic. Beesly points out, “While each nation accepted the fact that its own cryptanalysts could read at least some of their enemy's ciphers, they were curiously blind to the fact that they themselves were being subjected to exactly the same form of eavesdropping.”
¹⁰

Curious, too, was the fact that some Americans had to be sold on the value of
ULTRA
. Ike fairly beamed as Churchill brought him in on the secret, but others were to be dubious at best, especially Eisenhower's deputy, General Mark Clark. Shortly after Eisenhower's visit to Chequers, Winterbotham went to Eisenhower's headquarters in London to brief Clark. Accompanying him was the legendary Menzies, head of
MI
-6, “to lend a bit of weight to the proceedings.” Eisenhower introduced Clark and three members of his intelligence staff, then excused himself since he already knew about
ULTRA
. It is a measure of the tightness of security around
ULTRA
that this visit by Winterbotham and Menzies did not get entered into Eisenhower's official office log, which makes it a unique event.

Winterbotham recorded what happened: “Mark Clark was restless from the start. I explained not only what the source was, but in an endeavour to catch Mark Clark's interest gave some pertinent examples of what it could do. I had intended to follow this with an explanation of how the information would reach him, and the security regulations which accompanied its use. But Mark Clark didn't appear to believe the first part, and after a quarter of an hour he excused himself and his officers on the grounds that he had something else to do.”
¹¹

Patton was equally cavalier. When Winterbotham sought to
brief him in Algiers, Patton cut him short, saying, “You know, young man, I think you had better tell all this to my Intelligence staff, I don't go much on this sort of thing myself. You see I just like fighting.”
¹²

Ike was not so foolish. He saw at once the value of
ULTRA
, both immediate and potential, just as he responded to everything Churchill had told him. One of the reasons Ike had won Marshall's confidence was his openness to new ideas, new techniques, new approaches to old problems. Marshall liked to say that Ike was broad-based, not narrow or traditional. Churchill and Eisenhower were neither scientists nor engineers, but they both loved gadgets, inventions, technology, especially when the new devices could help them win a war.

As Ike drove back to London after his evening at Chequers, he reflected on how lucky the United States was to have the British for allies. What an inheritance to fall into! Churchill, for his part, looked forward to working with this American general, who did not seem so stuck in the mud, so resistant to scientific and technological change, as his British generals. Together, they would make a fine team.

MCGOWAN WAS RELIEVED
because he was not the man he seemed to be. He had nothing to do with the highly publicized air war that his plane was about to join. His uniform was fake, his name was false, his instructions were secret. Those instructions had come directly from the President himself, after a secret meeting at Hyde Park. Franklin Roosevelt's last words to McGowan were, “Don't tell anybody in the State Department about this. That place is a sieve!” The disguise came about because Army Chief of Staff George C. Marshall believed “nobody ever pays any attention to a lieutenant colonel.” McGowan's secrecy was a result of an order from the Commander of the European Theater of Operations, U. S. Army, Lieutenant General Dwight David Eisenhower.
¹

“McGowan's” real name was Robert Murphy. He had been a State Department employee for twenty years, but was now on special assignment, reporting directly to the President. His mission was to brief Eisenhower on the political and military situation in French North Africa, and on
OSS
activities in the area. Murphy
thought all the secrecy stuff rather silly and was not inclined to take it seriously until the morning of September 16, when his plane touched down at Prestwick. Murphy got out to stretch while the plane was being refueled for the flight to London and heard a familiar voice call out, “Why, Bob! What are you doing here?” It was an old friend from the Foreign Service, Don Coster. Eisenhower's chief security officer, Colonel Julius Holmes, had Coster arrested almost before he finished speaking. As Murphy gaped, Coster was hustled off by two burly policemen.

At noon, Murphy landed at a military airfield near London. There he was picked up in an unmarked car driven by Lieutenant Kay Summersby, Eisenhower's personal driver. They went by a circuitous route around the outskirts of London until they arrived in midafternoon at Ike's private retreat, Telegraph Cottage.

The first of Ike's spies had come to report. Over the next twenty years, Eisenhower would hear hundreds of secret reports from dozens of spies, but none ever surpassed Murphy's in excitement, if only because his was the first. And the first thing Ike wanted to know from Murphy was, “Who is your boss?”
²

Murphy really did not know. Although his paycheck came from the Department of State, he was under direct orders from the President to avoid all contact with Secretary of State Cordell Hull or any other member of the department hierarchy. In Algiers, Murphy directed the activities of a few dozen
OSS
agents, but he did not work for or take orders from the
OSS
. He was the principal American official in North Africa, which was soon a theater of war under Eisenhower's command, but he had no connection with Ike's headquarters. The lines of authority were badly blurred, even nonexistent. In his initial encounter with the world of spies, therefore, Eisenhower had to face problems that would persist for the next two decades and beyond: To whom does the spy report? Who gives him orders? Who decides where and when covert operations will take place? In short, who is in charge?

IT WAS NOT
a new problem to Eisenhower, because he had been involved since 1941 in the attempts to create clear-cut lines of authority for America's first intelligence-gathering and covert-operations agency. On July 11, 1941, Roosevelt, acting at Prime Minister Winston Churchill's suggestion, had created a new office, the Coordinator of Information (
COI
) under William Donovan,
who had insisted on a military title and had been granted the rank of colonel. FDR's directive to Donovan had given him a wide scope, and the President's fondness for Donovan and his interest in the secret war had led him to give virtually unlimited funds to the
COI
.

The arrangement upset the military, where the chain of command is sacrosanct even in peacetime. With a worldwide war going on, the Joint Chiefs of Staff wanted to ensure that all activities carried on by Americans anywhere were controlled by them. Donovan, a free-wheeling type who hated restraint of any kind, resisted. Eisenhower became involved four months after Pearl Harbor, when he urged his boss, General Marshall, to advise the President to make the
COI
directly responsible to the
JCS
. But the Army did not want to sully its reputation by having its officers engage in spying or subversive actions, so Ike recommended that such work in foreign countries “should be conducted by individuals occupying a civilian rather than a military status.” Despite their status, Ike recommended that they “should be subject to the higher control of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.”
³

Marshall accepted Eisenhower's proposal, which remained in effect until June 1942. Meanwhile, there was a furious bureaucratic struggle going on for control of intelligence and covert operations between the Army, the Navy, the State Department, the White House, and various other agencies and departments, all of whom could see that however restricted
COI
was at the time, its growth potential was unlimited. But in wartime, the military usually gets what it wants, and so it was here. In June 1942, Roosevelt changed the name of
COI
to Office of Strategic Services, put Donovan at its head, and placed
OSS
directly under the
JCS
in the chain of command.
⁴

Donovan still hoped that he could operate independently, as FDR had intended that he should, but Eisenhower had not spent a lifetime in the Army without learning the crucial importance of flow charts and lines of authority. After he became commander of the European Theater of Operations and was placed at the head of the invasion force for North Africa (code named
TORCH
), Ike moved to bring Donovan under his authority. On September 10, a week before Murphy's arrival in London, he got what he wanted. The
JCS
informed Donovan that his activities in England, Europe, and North Africa were all subject to the supervision and direction
of General Eisenhower, including such matters as paying bribe money, propaganda radio broadcasts, equipment to be supplied to guerrilla groups, distribution of leaflets, and the collection and dissemination of intelligence.
⁵

That directive put Donovan where Eisenhower wanted him, but what of Murphy? He did not belong to the
OSS
, although FDR had casually placed
OSS
agents in North Africa under his authority. Eisenhower would not have anyone in his theater of operations who was not under his command. Both as soldier and later as President, Ike was a self-confessed fanatic on the subject of unity of command, perhaps because he came to command so late in life (he was fifty-two years old when he took over at
ETO
, his first real command). “As I am responsible for the success of the operations I feel that it is essential that final authority in all matters in that theater rest in me.”
^6
*
Further, it was important that the Allies present the French with “a clean cut and single authority.”
⁷
Roosevelt then made Murphy a “political adviser,” responsible directly to Ike.

WITH MURPHY'S STATUS SETTLED
, Ike was ready to listen to his report. The two men went out onto the lawn of Telegraph Cottage. They sat down under some pine trees, facing the fifth green of the neighboring golf course. Hedges protected them from curious eyes. Ike listened with what his aide, Harry Butcher, described as “horrified intentness” as Murphy spent the afternoon telling his long and complex story. Murphy, Butcher said, “talked more like an American businessman canvassing the ins and outs of a prospective merger than either a diplomat or a soldier.”
⁹

Murphy's story was full of plots and intrigues, proposed assassinations, possible coups, secret contacts with the enemy, the whole tangled mess of French politics under the German occupation, and bureaucratic in-fighting among various American agencies as well as between American and British groups maneuvering for power. The military operation Eisenhower was about to launch added to the complications. The United States, along with the British, was
going to invade a neutral nation in a surprise attack without provocation and without a declaration of war. Murphy's job was to arrange for the active cooperation of the armed forces of the nation being attacked!

On the face of it, this was an absurd situation. It came about as a result of the inglorious surrender of the French Army to Germany in 1940, and the armistice that followed. Hitler had allowed the French to retain administrative control over the southern part of France and over the French colonies, the most important of which was Algeria. The capital of “independent” France was in Vichy; the head of government was the aging hero of World War I, Marshal Henri Pétain. Vichy was collaborationist, but that did not necessarily mean that it was unpopular, especially with the hierarchy in the French Army and in the colonies. Many French leaders in civil service, in business, in the military, and in the Church welcomed a semi-fascist government that emphasized work, discipline, and law and order.