Given the new evidence, it is hardly surprising that many commenta-tors have concluded that the American communist movement was a mere automaton, the unswervingly loyal servant of the Kremlin. Such a verdict on the CPUSA leadership is, it seems, inescapable. Yet it does not entirely account for the motives and aspirations of ordinary communists, the vast majority of whom were never involved in anything remotely resembling espionage. (Even the most generous estimate of the number of spies within the Party, 300, seems small when placed in the context of a total membership during World War II of some 50,000.)12 For the average member of a Popular Front organization—a Jewish fur-worker dismayed by the rise of anti-Semitism in Hitler’s Germany, a student inspired by the Republican cause in the Spanish Civil War, an African American protesting Mussolini’s invasion of Ethiopia—the communists might have deserved praise for their efforts resisting fascism, but supporting the Soviet Union was far down his or her list of priorities, under other, more pressing concerns, such as fighting unsafe working conditions, challenging the in-justices of racial segregation, or alleviating the hardship caused by unem-ployment. True, in the background were the Soviet paymasters and their agents in the United States, the apparatchiks of the CPUSA; but the fronts would never have got off the ground if they had not also reflected the particular values and needs of the groups they represented.
Ironically, for Willi Münzenberg himself, the man who, to quote Koestler again, “produced Committees as a conjurer produces rabbits out
T H E O R I G I N S O F T H E C I A F R O N T
15
of his hat,” the advent of the Popular Front marked the beginning of the end.13 Forced to abandon Germany for France after Hitler’s rise to power, he strove to maintain Stalin’s favor as, one by one, his old Bolshevik friends disappeared. It was not long before the Gestapo spies who shadowed him in Paris were joined by agents of the NKVD (the predecessor organization to the KGB). Expelled from the German Communist Party in 1938, he began feeling out contacts in the western intelligence services, raising the intriguing possibility that, had he survived the war, he might have been on hand to advise the CIA as it began setting up its own front operations in the late 1940s. Such an outcome was not to be, however. After France fell to the Wehrmacht, he fled south toward the Swiss border, disappearing in late June 1940 somewhere between Lyons and Grenoble. Precisely how he met his end remains a mystery, although there is general agreement among historians that the coroner’s verdict of suicide was unsound. As Trotsky’s assassination in Mexico in the same year showed, Stalin’s reach could be long and deadly.
A few weeks after Willi Münzenberg’s disappearance, a shortish man with a ruddy face and blue eyes boarded a Pan American Clipper flying boat bound for London via Lisbon. William J. Donovan was an American hero.
Born in 1883 to Irish immigrant parents in Buffalo, New York, he had starred as quarterback for Columbia University, emerged from World War I as one of the most heavily decorated veterans of the American Expedi-tionary Force, and amassed a small fortune as a corporate lawyer on Wall Street. For all the wealth and adulation, though, “Wild Bill” carried about him a palpable air of frustrated ambition. Apparently bound for high political office in the 1920s, he was passed over for the post of attorney general in Herbert Hoover’s administration, then defeated in New York’s 1932 gubernatorial race. Banished to the political sidelines, he channeled some of his prodigious energies into lengthy foreign excursions in North Africa, Spain, and the Balkans, where he indulged a taste for spying he had acquired during the Russian civil war of 1919. His mission to London of July 1940 was tailor-made. In addition to investigating German Fifth Column activities and the state of Anglo-American naval intelligence collaboration, Donovan was personally charged by his Columbia classmate, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, with reporting on Britain’s
16
I N N O C E N T S ’ C L U B S
ability to withstand the Nazi advance. (Roosevelt wanted to help the British cause but was stymied by American anti-interventionism and the consistently defeatist dispatches he was receiving from his Ambassador to the Court of St. James, Joseph P. Kennedy.) Here then was both an excellent opportunity to learn from the British masters of the secret arts and an unexpected entrée into the White House.14
This time, Donovan did not squander his chance. Fêted by the British—the king, Prime Minister Winston Churchill, and Colonel Stewart Menzies (“C,” or the chief of MI6) all granted him personal audiences—
he returned to the United States with the message that FDR wanted to hear: Britain could repel the Nazi horde, but only if America sent more destroyers. Now performing the function of the crippled president’s “eyes and legs,” Wild Bill began lobbying in earnest for something he had desired fervently for years: an American national intelligence agency.15
There already existed several organizations tasked with gathering and analyzing information bearing on the nation’s security: the Army’s venera-ble Military Intelligence Division, or G-2; the Office of Naval Intelligence; the newly created Office of Inter-American Affairs (overseen by a precocious scion of one of the country’s wealthiest families, Nelson A.
Rockefeller); and, of course, J. Edgar Hoover’s Federal Bureau of Investigation. But these agencies’ intelligence efforts were badly fragmented, and none of them was equipped to carry out the sort of secret political warfare that other nations were waging with ever greater skill and sophistication.
In pushing for a central body that would combine the functions of espionage and covert operation, Donovan ran up against several obstacles—
including the opposition of bureaucratic rivals like the formidable Hoover, conservative qualms about adding further to government powers already vastly augmented by the New Deal, and a deeply ingrained American dislike of spying (“Gentlemen do not read each other’s mail,”
Secretary of State Henry Stimson had famously pronounced when some deciphered Japanese messages landed on his desk in 1929).16 Still, helped by some well-placed words of support from his British friends, in particular William C. Stephenson (the secret agent code-named “Intrepid”), Wild Bill persevered and in July 1941 was rewarded by his appointment as Coordinator of Information (COI), a new position vested with considerable powers of oversight over the existing intelligence agencies.17 The Irish al-tar boy had at last arrived in the American establishment.
T H E O R I G I N S O F T H E C I A F R O N T
17
Accompanying Donovan in his wartime ascent was another middle-aged corporate lawyer who, though different in background and temperament from Wild Bill, nonetheless shared his sense of unfulfilled potential—and his fascination with the clandestine. From the age of seven, when he wrote a history of the Boer War that was published by his proud family, Allen Dulles appeared bound for great things. The grandson of one secretary of state and nephew of another, he had served with distinction in several U.S. missions during World War I, discovering in the elegant Swiss city of Bern a penchant for espionage that was, as writer Burton Hersh has noted, “damned near glandular.”18 He was also a member of the American delegation to the Versailles peace conference, advising Woodrow Wilson as the president attempted to make the world safe for democracy. After these heady early experiences, however, nothing else quite measured up. Like Donovan, Dulles made a great deal of money out of the law and investment banking, and tried unsuccessfully for political office—in his case, a Manhattan congressional seat—while continuing to travel and dabble in intelligence. The weight of his family’s expectations was burdensome, especially because next to the “somber granite edifice”
that was his older brother John Foster Dulles, he could not help looking lightweight.19
The eve of World War II found Dulles as genial and raffish as ever (qualities that apparently made him irresistible to women—his sexual conquests, in addition to his long-suffering wife Clover, included the queen of Greece, a daughter of Toscanini, and Clare Booth Luce) but drifting professionally. This explains why, when Wild Bill Donovan invited him to run the New York office of the COI in 1941, he leaped at the chance. In November 1942, after a year spent gathering data on the Nazis and perfecting his spying tradecraft under the tutelage of William Stephenson, who shared his office building in New York, Dulles returned to Bern as Donovan’s European second-in-command.20 He spent most of the rest of the war in Switzerland, “a prisoner in Heaven.”21
By this point, of course, the United States was a belligerent power, and the COI had been reconstituted as a military agency, the Office of Strategic Services. Wild Bill Donovan’s OSS has been the subject of much mythmaking regarding its contribution to both the eventual Allied victory and the later creation of the CIA. In fact, the organization was excluded from most of the major theaters of the war, badly hampered by fric-
18
I N N O C E N T S ’ C L U B S
tion with rival services and Donovan’s notoriously poor administrative skills (which one subordinate likened to a person “pouring molasses from a barrel onto the table”), and involved in some frankly harebrained schemes, including a plan to drive Hitler insane with lust by showering his headquarters with pornography.22 For all that, there were individual acts of astonishing bravery, such as those performed by the Jedburghs, who in 1944 parachuted into occupied France to help the resistance cut Nazi supply lines ahead of the Normandy landings, not to mention the unsung efforts of the nine hundred or so Washington-based scholars in the OSS’s Research and Analysis branch, who strove to retrieve and analyze every available scrap of information on the Axis powers.23 There were also some notable espionage coups, such as Dulles’s success in establishing links with anti-Hitler elements in Germany, including the Abwehr officers who plot-ted to assassinate the Führer in 1944.24 For all his managerial shortcom-ings, Donovan deserves credit for having called into existence, almost overnight, a remarkably diverse and dynamic organization, which at the very least proved a considerable nuisance to the enemy—and partly laid the foundations of America’s postwar intelligence establishment.