Wild Bill Donovan: Godfather of the CIA
Wild Bill Donovan:
The Spymaster who Created the OSS and Modern American Espionage
By Douglas Waller
Free Press, 466 pp.
Journalist Douglas Waller’s Wild Bill Donovan: The Spymaster who Created the OSS and Modern American Espionage is billed as the first definitive biography of William Donovan, head FDR’s Office of Strategic Services. Donovan ran covert ops in WWII and was effectively the godfather of the CIA.
But the differences between the modern American espionage agency exposed in Ishmael Jones’s The Human Factor and the force envisioned by Donovan is evident from the book’s title. “Wild Bill” would never have allowed his agency to become a deskbound and risk-averse bureaucracy in a dangerous world where Americans are under constant threat.
What readers are most likely to take away from reading Wild Bill Donovan is that he did a truly amazing job of creating his spy agency out of whole cloth, while his country was at war — and with more opposition domestically than he faced from the enemy. Despite heroic service in WWI, Donovan’s only experiences with espionage were his pre-war travels in which he, somewhat informally, reported his findings back to FDR — despite his vocal opposition to the New Deal as a Republican candidate for governor of New York.
One might think this means that Donovan was an ultra-organized master of bureaucracy. But Waller makes it plain that Donovan was a “lousy manager” who wrestled the OSS into existence through creativity and the sheer force of will.
“Wild Bill” also earned his nickname by being a lousy husband, perhaps the least discreet public figure of his era. He also took needlessly reckless risks by “participating” in most of the amphibious landings in the European theater for no practical reason. Shortly after D-Day, he came close to capture, not only risking the lives of those around him, but of all of America’s secret operations.
Waller has a villain for his story too — FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover. Hoover is basically a cartoon character in this book, which is unfortunate since Donovan’s antics did give anyone who thought of him as an amateur in his field a valid point. This OSS was no MI-6, and Donovan was no Stewart Menzies.
Waller is dismissive of the late great Anthony Cave Brown’s epic biography Wild Bill Donovan: the Last American Hero as being “wildly speculative” in parts and containing “numerous errors.” But at least Cave Brown covered the activities of the OSS (too exhaustively for some critics) enough to put Donovan’s contribution in perspective. Waller focuses so much on the personal that one might wonder what all the fuss is about. He also is not error free. In his discussion of the Valkyrie plot (which Cave Brown does much better), Waller misidentifies resistance stalwart Count von Helldorf (the man played by Kenneth Branagh in the film) as a “longtime Nazi.”
Donovan’s achievements during the war were somewhat modest — burgling the embassies of neutral embassies to steal the keys to codes and arming the Maquis to delay the German’s reinforcement of Normandy stand out. His intelligence network in Istanbul, run by a handpicked agent, was a complete and corrupt disaster, however.
While the OSS was disbanded because Harry Truman feared a central intelligence agency would become an American “Gestapo,” Donovan was active in the prosecution of German war criminals — only he had foreseen the need to collect evidence and dossiers as the war ended — and he finished his career as the staunchly anti-communist ambassador to Thailand. There, he was ironically working more like a CIA station chief than an ambassador, and supervised by his former underling, Allen Dulles, director of the CIA.
Despite the OSS’s mistaken assessment of Ho Chi Minh as merely a “nationalist” during WWII, Donovan became a vocal advocate of fighting his Communist movement in Southeast Asia.
At times, Waller’s narrative seems as disorganized and wrongly focused as its subject was wont to be. However, it is a valuable — and mostly fascinating — look at a woefully under-reported subject. When you consider sheer volume of WWII literature and the numerous biographies of minor characters and generals that fill the shelves, it’s almost criminal that Wild Bill Donovan would be so neglected.
Donovan’s seeming compulsion to burgle embassies to steal Axis codes and cipher keys was generally more trouble to the Allies than it was worth.
In 1943 Donovan’s crew hit the Japanese embassy in Lisbon, Portugal. They made copies of the Japanese diplomatic code the ambassador used to communicate with Tokyo by radio.
There were two problems with this. First of all, the break-in was discovered. Secondly, the Japanese concluded that their code was compromised, and changed to a new one.
This was a problem because the U.S. Army’s Signal Security Agency had already broken the code Donovan’s boys made off with. They had been intercepting the Japanese legations’ messages back to Tokyo, and reading them for nearly three years. Those messages contained a wealth of information about German and Italian activities, in addition to instructions from Tokyo as to what Japan needed from her allies.
With the discovery of the OSS’ action, and the code change, this channel of intelligence was abruptly cut off. The cryptanalysts at SSA had to start all over again on the new code. They broke it in turn, but the resulting blackout of information lasted for nearly two months. And it came at a critical time in the war. To be exact, just before the Sicily invasion and the Battle of Kursk.
OSS was a covert military special operations unit, not an intelligence agency per se. It was at its best waging unconventional warfare by direct means like sabotage, in the field, in enemy-occupied territory.
When it tried to “play spy”, especially in neutral countries, things tended to go badly.
Source; Kahn, David. The Codebreakers; The Story of Secret Writing. New York; Macmillan, 1967. P. 508.
cheers
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That Wild Bill Donovan could get as much done as he did by creating what turned out to be his own personal intelligence agency was and still is amazing. Sure, he was far from perfect. But he was basically winging it throughout World War II, proving to the American government the value of having an intelligence agency. I think he would be literally amazed at the size and scope of the CIA today. Just shows you how far a person with a really good idea can go in this country. With all the layers upon layers of bureaucracy we now have in government, I wonder if someone could ever accomplish the same thing today? I doubt it.
Bungling intelligence is routine for many governments…i think it was Senator Orrin Hatch that blew phone surveillance on Osama Bin Laden. After Hatch shot his mouth off the Taliban and Al Queda switched to other means of communication. It took many years to recover from that blunder.
Most organizations like the OSS, NASA, and the like are created by risk takers, and once matured become the stodgy corporate entities we all know and love.
So you think it was Orrin Hatch who spilled the beans to the NY Times? Do you think he was a traitor or just a guy who liked to shoot off his mouth?
Actually, I think you’re wrong, but maybe you have some evidence?
“Despite the OSS’s mistaken assessment of Ho Chi Minh as merely a “nationalist” during WWII”
This statement is an echo of one of the major problems with U.S. handling of Indochina from WWII through the Vietnam War. We failed to understand the nature of the enemy. Ho Chi Minh was a nationalist first, communist second. We could not wrap our collective heads around this fact and our decision to treat Ho Chi Minh as a pure communist undermined the situation. First, post-WWII we reversed the idea of national determination by giving Indochina back to the French. Then in the late 1940s Ho Chi Minh reached out to President Truman for help because of a famine in Vietnam that killed millions. The State Department did not forward his appeal to the White House. Finally, during the French-Indochina War we supplied the French military forces in Vietnam to the point of financing the entire operation. Remember, this is post-WWII and the French were in no shape to pay for the war themselves. Actions like these forced Ho Chi Minh further into the communist camp for support; however, he was always at heart a nationalist.
That’s not a Fonda-esque apology for Ho Chi Minh’s actions, it is a flat statement of fact. Had we understood that he was a nationalist first, it would have changed how we prosecuted the war.
Actually, as revealed in Jung Chang and Jon Halliday’s monumental biography of Mao, http://www.davidforsmark.com/4756/mao-the-unknown-story, Ho was hand picked by Stalin and Mao as a member in good standing of the Comintern to be the guy in Southeast Asia. The book is based on Soviet documents that were briefly made available for researchers before Putin closed a lot of that activity down again.
“Giving” Indochina back to the French? The U.S.A. wasn’t in a position to do anything about it one way or the other, any more than than it could do anything about the Dutch returning to Indonesia. It wasn’t occupying either France or Indochina, the way it did (southern) Korea. In Indochina (like Indonesia), the Japanese were asked to keep going until the best placed allies could replace them as temporary occupiers: the British in Indonesia, and the British and the Nationalist Chinese in Indochina. The most the U.S.A. could have done to stop the former colonialists returning, short of war, was to apply diplomatic and economic pressure to withdraw. That was just precisely what happened in Indonesia (where the Dutch had basically won), but that pressure took years to work since the colonialists correctly reckoned that they needed those colonial resources to have a chance to rebuild after the Second World War in an economically independent way – the pressure couldn’t prevent a return. If China hadn’t gone communist the French would probably have won there too (as they did in Madagascar when they took that back from the British and the South Africans who had invaded it during the war), even though the U.S.A. wouldn’t have backed it, and they wouldn’t have been as vulnerable as the Dutch to pressure to withdraw.
This is fascinating. My dad was an Army Staff Sargent in England and was recruited into the OSS. He was Wild Bill Donovan’s driver for a time. The early days of the OSS were indeed “wild” and wooly according to my dad’s depictions. He was recruited because he had worked in the mines in Western Colorado and knew how to handle dynamite. After the D-Day invasion, my dad was responsible for the destruction of more than one bridge. I will have to read this book to see if it matches the sentiment and accounts that my dad shared with me while he was alive.
My dad was also a Donovan Devil! He was a paratrooper and somewhere I have a sketch of him with a grenade ” going fishing”
It shows him blowing up fish in a pond. Dad was Bill Wheeler. I am now going on the hunt to find this and other documentation about his being a hero and a great servant to our country. I love knowing about your story.
I had a business partner back in the 70′s who had worked directly under Donovan in WW2 with something called the Board of Economic Warfare…his job was to go recruit farmers throughout the South to deliberately cultivate the most horrible vine yet known to man..Kudzu….it seems that the processed pith of the plant stem was what the Japanese used to make the paper for their Imperial currency..the wartime yen…so the BEW harvested the Kudzu,processed it into counterfeit yen notes,and had them dropped by air all over eastern China….with the expected deleterious effect on the yen….prices for rice and staples went through the roof till the war was over…Donovan’s boys did do a few things right apparently
I you want to read a difinitive book on the OSS and WWII, shag a copy of “A Man Called Intrepid” by William Stevenson.