Sub Rosa: The O. S. S. and American Espionage

By Stewart Alsop and Thomas Braden

A thrilling history of the Office of Strategic Services, America’s precursor to the CIA, and its secret operations behind enemy lines during World War II.
 
Born in the fires of the Second World War, the Office of Strategic Services, or OSS, was the brainchild of legendary US Maj. Gen. William “Wild Bill” Donovan, designed to provide covert aid to resistance fighters in European nations occupied by Germany’s Nazi aggressors. Paratroopers Stewart Alsop and Thomas Braden—both of whom would become important political columnists in postwar years—became part of Wild Bill’s able collection of soldiers, spies, and covert operatives. Sub Rosa is an enthralling insider’s history of the remarkable intelligence operation that gave birth to the CIA.
 
In Sub Rosa, Alsop and Braden take readers on a breathtaking journey through the birth and development of the top secret wartime espionage organization and detail many of the extraordinary OSS missions in France, Germany, Dakar and Casablanca in North Africa, and in the jungles of Burma that helped to hasten the end of the Japanese Empire and the fall of Adolf Hitler’s powerful Reich.
 
As exciting as any international thriller written by Eric Ambler or Graham Greene, Alsop and Braden’s Sub Rosa is an indispensable addition to the literary history of American espionage and intelligence.
 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Media
• Release date: Jun 7, 2016
• ISBN: 9781480446014

Stewart Alsop

Stewart Alsop (1914–1974) was a longtime political columnist and commentator on American affairs. A graduate of Yale University, he worked in book publishing until World War II. Rejected by the US Army for medical reasons, he joined the British Army and fought with the King’s Royal Rifle Corps in Italy. He transferred to the US Army in 1944 to carry out missions planned by the Office of Strategic Services (OSS)—the topic of his book Sub Rosa, written with OSS compatriot Thomas Braden. He was awarded the Croix de Guerre with palm for his work on wartime missions in France.   From 1945 to 1958, Stewart Alsop was cowriter, with his elder brother Joseph Alsop, of the thrice-weekly “Matter of Fact” column for the New York Herald Tribune. He went on to become the Washington editor of the Saturday Evening Post and wrote a weekly column for Newsweek from 1968 until his death in 1974. His final book, Stay of Execution, traces the years—his last—after his diagnosis with a rare form of leukemia.

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AUTHORS’ NOTE

The late Office of Strategic Services was a vast and chaotic organization of more than 12,000 people who did many different things. While a professor in Washington was studying the transportation system in France, an ex-Hollywood cameraman was making movies of war crimes for the benefit of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, a sergeant in Washington was drawing a chart for the use of generals in Kandy, an Italian-speaking American was parachuting into the area of the Brenner Pass, and a major in London was cabling home in secret code, asking about his promotion.

Some day the complete history of all that those 12,000 people did may be written. This is certainly not such a history.

We were parachutists in OSS. Perhaps that fact has influenced our point of view. Nevertheless we believe that the most important work accomplished by OSS was in the fields of resistance and intelligence. We have told about that work—not about all of it, for all of it would fill volumes—but we have told what security and our own information will permit us to tell, and we have tried to show the kind of thing which OSS did in those fields.

Major General William J. Donovan, who headed OSS, once said that the credit for his organization should go to the men who volunteered for duty with the express understanding that they would never get any credit. They were the men who did the work behind the lines in intelligence and resistance, who fought in the secret war. Theirs is the story we have tried to tell.

INTRODUCTION

On the night of June 5, 1944, the powerful transmitters of the BBC, beaming the nightly news broadcast to France, seemed to be sending out gibberish. A queer sentence was interspersed throughout the usual news, and when it came, the announcer’s voice took on an unusual high-pitched strain: "Ecoutez, écoutez, le vin est rouge. More news; then there it was again: Listen; listen, the wine is red." Gibberish, even in English.

On that same night of June 5, a German panzer division, fully equipped and up to strength, left Bordeaux in the south of France to make the three-day run to Normandy. There was talk of an invasion; nobody knew when or where it was coming. Perhaps, the German commander thought, this move had something to do with it. He ordered full speed.

Exactly three weeks later, one third, 3,500 out of the 10,000 men in the panzer division, straggled on foot into the fighting in Normandy. They had no tanks, and no artillery: their armor and equipment had been capsized in ditches, immobilized by road blocks and pits; most of their comrades had been killed.

As a military machine, that panzer division had been totally destroyed. The gibberish had made sense to the men of the French maquis.

At about the same time in another, more populous section of France, a man struggled up the steps of a railway station, a battered suitcase in either hand. He was an anonymous little man, respectably but not smartly dressed. His suit had the peaked lapels, the broad herringbone pattern of the country; he wore the universal crushed black felt hat.

Fussily he searched for his ticket, handed it to the collector, and walked toward the train. Someone tapped him on the back, and he turned, slowly, casually. The Gestapo man gestured toward the suitcases.

The little man put the two suitcases on the platform, and opened one; soiled clothes, a razor, a toothbrush, a piece of gritty war soap, a cheap novel. The other? He was desolated, but the patron had the key. He believed it contained the personal belongings of the patron. He was desolated. He could find the patron and return within the hour. Such an innocuous little man. The Gestapo man shrugged, and gestured him on.

A few hours later and the little man was in a room of a shabby little hotel in the outskirts of another town. The suitcase of the patron was open, lying on the bed, revealing the dials and the key of a portable transmitter. The antenna was attached to the bidet in the corner. Expertly the little man tapped on the key, dot-dash, dash-dash, dot-dot-dash, dash-dot.

In London a sergeant, headphones clamped over his ears, took down the meaningless jumble of letters—AMUNK LSTPH KRUCK LMBST. Not far from the little man in the capital city of the département, another sergeant, in another uniform, listened into his headphones, took down the same letters. The German radio direction-finders were going to work, triangulating, searching for the new transmitter, trying to get a fix.

It was not easy. There were so many thousands of transmitters all over the country and the Germans were short of equipment. Nevertheless, sooner or later, perhaps tonight, perhaps next week, the anonymous little man would have to move. In the meantime, dot-dash, dash-dash, dot dot dash: SEVEN THCOR PSHQA TJUNCT IONNE XTTOW NPERI OTXXX.

Two days later, the answer to the message was reported in a small story in the English newspapers: A road junction near the town of Periot, thought to house the German Seventh Corps Headquarters, was severely strafed yesterday by a flight of American fighter-bombers.

These two facts, the rising of the maquis, and the mysterious movements of a secret agent, are related in more ways than one. They are peculiar to France. Yet with minor variations in time and scene, they took place again and again in Yugoslavia, in Greece, in Italy, in the Lowlands, and in the Far East.

They are facts which have had little attention in an America proud to be extolling the virtues of its conquering armies. Yet two of the leaders of those armies have been outspoken on these subjects.

General Dwight D. Eisenhower has said: I consider that the disruption of enemy rail communication, the harassing of German road moves, and the continual and increasing strain placed on the German war economy and internal services throughout occupied Europe by the organized forces of the resistance played a very considerable part in our victory. And Lieutenant General A. M. Patch has said, During the planning phase for our landing in southern France we were constantly kept informed of the enemy’s strength and activities by American agents behind the lines.

They are strange facts. Strange that in countries subjugated by an army, which up to June 6, 1944, was still, despite serious defeats, among the most powerful in the world, thousands of armed men could come out of hiding in their woods and homes to fight and run and fight again. Strange also that in a country where an estimated 26 German divisions were devoting themselves solely to guard duty, men with radios could travel from place to place by public conveyance, reporting everything they saw to a faraway invasion headquarters.

Yet the men who came out of the woods to fight that night were not a motley mob. They did not rise disorganized, as candidates for slaughter. They had direction. They were told where to strike, and when. They had arms and ammunition. They had huge stocks of food and clothing. Often they had with them Allied soldiers in uniform, parachuted to them behind the enemy lines, to direct or to aid their efforts.

The little man with the radio was just as well prepared. He knew by heart the country over which he traveled, the dangerous areas and the relatively safe ones. He knew where to find friends. He carried in his pocket enough false identification to satisfy anything but the most searching examination.

These are minor similarities but they point to the common source. The most important relationship between the men of the resistance and the secret agent with the radio is that both were directed and supported by the outgrowth of an idea which was as new to the American mind before 1942 as the atomic bomb, and which, like the bomb, was seldom mentioned outside the covers of ten-cent thrillers. The men of the maquis in France, the partisans in the rest of Europe and in Burma, Siam, and China were armed, supplied, and generally directed by a joint British-American effort in secret intelligence and resistance. The secret agents in Europe owed their presence behind the lines to the same effort. Both the partisans and the secret agents looked for their American orders and their American aid to a vast, secret, sprawling organization in Washington with the boondogglelike name, Office of Strategic Services.

OSS, as America abbreviated the title, has, in fact, been called a boondoggle. It has also been called, Oh So Social, in reference to some of the men who were in it, Oh So Secret, in reference to the armed guards and the I’m-terribly-important-but-I-can’t-say-why atmosphere with which its Washington buildings were surrounded, and Oh So Silly, in reference to what some people—not all of them wrong-minded—thought of it.

A case could be made for all these titles, and probably will be. That they were coined at all, however, is significant evidence that OSS throughout the war did at least one job thoroughly well, namely the job of not letting anybody know very much about what OSS was doing.

The fact is that OSS did two main jobs. One was tying the resistance effort of the occupied countries to the military effort of the Allied powers. The other was ferreting out and accumulating in one vast central organization all the intelligence about enemy countries, enemy people, and enemy plans which America had or could discover.

Both these jobs involved tremendous study and research. Both also required that soldiers and civilians in OSS risk torture and worse by going behind enemy lines on missions which came to be known in the polite understatement of official phraseology as hazardous. Both required the expenditure of large sums of money. Both required that America, contrary to the instincts of Americans, lean heavily on the experience of her British ally.

Most important of all, both these jobs required learning from the beginning, for neither of them had ever been done by Americans before.

OSS (it was originally called COI, or Co-ordinator of Information, but to avoid confusion its later title will be used from now on) began as an agency for collecting information, and for disseminating propaganda. Its staff consisted in the main of scholarly experts who collected information—principally about enemy or occupied countries—from the Library of Congress and other sources; and publicists who sent out propaganda,—although there was a good deal of confusion in the beginning as to just where the propaganda was to go.

As a sort of sideline effort to this work, there was a division which took movies, and one which made charts of the war effort. As the years went by, it became more and more difficult to explain the presence of these last two in an intelligence organization, but in the beginning they seemed quite logical, since not even Major General Donovan was quite certain what it was supposed to do.

How OSS, with those beginnings, got into the field of resistance and intelligence is a story of amoebic growth which probably could not have happened outside of the United States. Donovan says that, like Topsy, OSS just growed. It would be more accurate to say that it oozed.

Mr. Atherton Richards, one of Donovan’s early department chiefs, is reported to have defined this oozing quality about as follows: Bill Donovan’s method of running an organization is like pouring molasses from a barrel onto the floor. It will ooze in every direction, but eventually he’ll make it into some sort of pattern. It was precisely so.

OSS AND HOW IT GREW

In the early days of OSS (when it was still COI) there came to Washington an historian and scholar from Harvard University. He came to Washington because he had been asked to head the Research Section of the Division of Special Information within OSS.

When he arrived at his office, he found another man and he learned that the other man was already the head of the Research Section of the Division of Special Information within OSS.

He was perplexed, and a little annoyed. Eventually he took his problem to the top office where he explained his position and asked for a clarification.

Oh I see, well, we’ll settle that, came the decision. He can be the Director, and you can be the Chief.

The only man in Washington who could say that sort of thing and make it stick is an ebullient Irishman with an expansive personality, a ready wit, a tremendous drive, and a penchant for doing the things which not only need doing, but which nobody else would ever think of doing. His name is William J. Donovan.

Donovan is a short man with mild blue eyes, and a soft Irish voice. His enormous energy is concealed beneath an easy slow-going manner which gives the impression that he has nothing in particular to do, and would like nothing better than to sit back and listen for an hour or so to whoever happens to be next on the list of callers for the day. This manner is extremely effective, and it is not altogether deceitful. Even for the lowliest private in OSS, it was always surprisingly easy to get an interview with General Donovan, and almost as easy to get a favor granted or a promise made. His subordinates in OSS were often at pains to correct mistakes which the General had made because he found it so hard to say no.

One of Donovan’s parachuting officers, a man known for his wild ideas, who had done an astoundingly brave job in France, once came to him with an idea for a combination rocket, bomb, and parachute, with pedals. As the officer described it, he would sit astride the rocket-bomb, steering with his feet until it neared enemy territory; then he would aim it at the enemy and press a pedal which would catapult him toward the ground, and open his parachute at the same time. The bomb would go on, presumably to land upon the enemy, and I’d be safe enough, the officer explained, because I’d land outside the perimeter of the enemy defenses.

As it turned out, the war ended before the officer could persuade anybody to let him try it, but the one man who was enthusiastic was Donovan.

An expansive enthusiasm has been the hallmark of Wild Bill Donovan’s career. Donovan was born in a lace-curtain Irish home in Buffalo. He won the Congressional Medal of Honor while leading the famous Fighting 69th in World War I, and afterwards rose to such prominence as a lawyer that he was the Republican nominee for Governor of New York in 1933. Throughout his career he had a shrewd penchant for first names, for meeting the right people, and for expanding generously in every direction. OSS was a direct reflection of Donovan’s character. He was its spark plug, the moving force behind it. In a sense it can be said that Donovan was OSS.

Nobody knows for sure just when Donovan got the double-barreled idea of doing something specific about the underground movement in Europe, and also doing something specific about American intelligence. Apparently he had it vaguely in mind when he came back from Europe in the fall of 1940 after a trip as a special observer for President Roosevelt. To the President, Donovan’s support had appeared as an enormous windfall. Here was a man who was an Irish Catholic, a war hero, a Republican, and an interventionist. There were not many men in the United States in the summer of 1940 of whom the same could have been said.

But if Donovan’s stock was high with the President when he left for Europe in the summer of 1940, it was still higher a few months after he got back.

For when Donovan returned to America in August of 1940, there was a strong body of opinion among the President’s Washington advisors which held that the British would not be able to hold the British Isles. Dunkirk was history. Hitler’s Luftwaffe had already begun to pound the channel airfields. The RAF had retreated inland. Even Lord Lothian, the British Ambassador to the United States, was pessimistic. He flirted with the idea that the best solution was to move the government, the King and Queen, to Canada, pull the British fleet to western bases, and abandon England for the time being to the inevitable conquest.

Our own G-2, the Intelligence Section of the War Department, reported to the President their considered opinion that within nine days of the anticipated assault of the Luftwaffe, the RAF would be driven to bases in Scotland and Ireland. Amazingly enough, after that prediction, G-2 also estimated that nevertheless, the British would be able to hold their islands against an invasion, though how they were to do this without air support, and with only one fully equipped division, G-2 did not say.

Into this atmosphere of deepest gloom, Donovan moved like a spring breeze. Certainly, he proclaimed, the British would hold. Certainly, he predicted, there would be no invasion. The RAF, he said, would beat the Luftwaffe out of the skies.

It was a startling prediction, but Donovan knew the facts upon which it was based. He had heard from the British about the new invention called radar. He had seen the performance of the Spitfire, and had been shown proof of its ability to knock down anything the Germans had. He had been let in on the secret of England’s coastal defenses, the fires of burning oil.

One month later came the Battle of Britain. Day by day and night by night, as Washington read its newspapers, Donovan’s importance grew. More and more the President turned to Bill Donovan. After all he—it was almost he, alone—had been right.

Apparently also both he and Roosevelt had the resistance-intelligence idea in mind behind the vague and innocuous announcement of July, 1941, which authorized COI, and in which the President said, Mr. Donovan will collect and assemble information and data bearing on national security … and will analyze and collate such materials for the use of the President. By that time he and Roosevelt had already discussed another idea Donovan had borrowed from the British. The idea was a new type of military unit, which, Donovan said, would do even more unconventional fighting than the British commandos.

Two things are certain about Donovan’s idea for combining intelligence and resistance leadership. One is that the idea was already largely explored and the work begun by the time of Pearl Harbor. Various Roosevelt directives, enlarging on the functions of COI long before the United States was at war, were summed up in the Presidential Order of June 13, 1942, which revoked the name COI, and instituted OSS to collect and analyze strategic information and to plan and operate … special services. The words were purposely made empty for publication, but Donovan and Roosevelt knew that among other responsibilities, OSS was to have charge of resistance, intelligence, and sabotage, and so did the Joint Chiefs of Staff, under whose direction it was placed.

The other certainty is that the idea of directing the resistance and centralizing intelligence, partly through resistance, bore the double impress of the Donovan trade mark: it was a big job which needed doing and nobody in America had ever successfully done it before.

Outside of America, the idea, or at least one part of it, is as old as history. Britain, Germany, all European countries, have maintained some form of espionage system for centuries. Codes, fake documents, agents in the inner circle of foreign governments, plans for secret weapons sewn in the leaves of a book and smuggled out by men who didn’t know what they carried, double agents, who worked for two countries, agents whose business was to watch other agents: all this is an old story to Europe.

So also is the combining of all the information that those agents uncover with all the information that scholars can deduce from the study of a country’s newspapers and statistics, and with all the information which slips out in an ordinary way and becomes the property of various agencies of government who may or may not have anything to do with intelligence.

But in America, this was not an old story. It was new. America did not like spies outside of spy stories. Furthermore, America does not like centralizing itself, and even the agencies and departments of American government treasure their own particular functions and duties, and will fight to keep them whether they duplicate the functions and duties of other agencies or not.

The Navy, the Army Air Forces, the Army, the FBI, the State Department, the Departments of Commerce and Agriculture, the Board of Economic Warfare, all had intelligence units and all would have liked to use them to operate undercover abroad. The virtues of the Donovan plan were obvious. There would be one intelligence organization rather than eight.

Its defects, unfortunately, were equally obvious. Here, as the men in the established organizations were able to point out, was an amateur if scholarly group charged with collecting the deepest secrets of the United States government. Here, in the same organization, was another group whose function was propaganda, and which consisted of men whose every instinct and training as newspapermen was to publish whatever facts they could learn.

The argument was a cogent one and Donovan had to step carefully past it, and through the maze of jealousies