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Sub Rosa
The O. S. S. and American Espionage
By Stewart Alsop, Thomas Braden OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA
Copyright © 1946 Stewart Alsop and Thomas Braden
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4804-4601-4
CHAPTER 1
PART ONE — INTELLIGENCE
The theory of intelligence through the co-operation of a friendly population is far from a new one. Allied soldiers who invaded Sicily and Italy used it instinctively. There was hardly a GI who, two weeks after he had reached the front lines, did not know the meaning of the Italian phrases, "Dove mini?", "Where are the mines?"; and "Dove tedeschi?", "Where are the Germans?" The answers they got, accompanied by much sign language and posturing, sometimes saved their lives.
The "dove tedeschi" of the GI in Italy had obvious and important strategic implications. It was impossible for the Germans or the Japanese to keep their movements secret when those movements took place before some millions of hostile and observant eyes.
An observant eye behind the enemy lines is useless unless what it sees can be told. In all wars of the past, the agent's great problem was not finding out what the enemy was up to, but rather getting the information back. Often when the information did get back, it was dated and useless. With a radio and an unbreakable code, the agent of World War II could have his information at his headquarters in a matter of minutes.
An agent's job is never easy. OSS men, watching their agents move casually through the routine of their training, often wondered what motives, what accidents of experience or birth, thrust them forward from the mass of their countrymen. Those whose duty it was to dispatch them into occupied territory never lost a deep sense of admiration for these men and women, in their nondescript clothes and paper-soled shoes, lying huddled in blankets in the belly of a giant aircraft, a sympathetic contrast to the fur-jacketed, heavy-booted soldiers whose duty it was to open the great door of the bomb bay, look down through the mist onto the target, clap them on the back, and shout, "Go."
Sometimes the agents saw their plans of months changed overnight. A long spell of windy weather, a sudden thrust into new territory by one of the Allied armies, would necessitate shifting their targets hundreds of miles. The shifts were made and were cheerfully accepted.
Sometimes these men and women dropped, not to reception committees of welcoming resistance groups, but into territory where there was no resistance, and no single friend on the ground.
In the late winter and early spring of 1945, Germany was a vast and disorganized cauldron. An aerial photographic flight might determine that a certain field was empty and peaceful. The next night that field might be milling with German troops racing to breach a gap in the lines, or digging in for a new stand. No one could be sure. Yet, with very few exceptions, these men and women, priests, former soldiers, retired businessmen, plain housewives — some of whom had never been in an airplane before — leaped into the dark and the unknown.
There was strain, and the self-imposed strain on the imagination was the greatest strain of all. Some of the agents who popped into the light and revealed themselves after occupation of their areas, or after VE-Day, made interesting studies of the effect of this haunting strain on the human character. Their movements were quick and nervous, they talked interminably, they were apt to wear conspicuous clothes, and to delight in making flamboyant speeches before large crowds, in contrast to their former anonymity.
But great as the strain was, and heroic as was the job done by the thousands of agents all over the world, it was an easier job than it might have been. In France, for example, there were only some 500,000 Germans, and there were 40 million Frenchmen, the majority of whom hated the Germans and would do what they could to bring about their defeat.
In Italy too, with a whole army fighting on the front, the Germans were able completely to dominate only the large highways, ports, and cities. The mountain peaks, the hillside caves, the smaller towns and villages: these were the domain of the partisans, and Allied agents — even those in uniform — were able to maintain a precarious existence by knowing the folds and the winding trails.
In Burma, an American, guided by natives who knew the trails, might walk hundreds of miles behind Japanese lines and never see a Jap. In China, the Japanese really held only the major towns and railroads. Whole stretches of country, hundreds of miles in breadth, which appeared on the military maps as Japanese-occupied, were in fact unknown to any Jap.
There were isolated instances, it is true, when the phrase "partisan-held," which OSS men delighted to write across their office maps, proved to be something of an exaggeration. "Partisans, hell," one lieutenant in Italy reported of the area to which he had been parachuted, "those partisans consisted of three old men on a hill trying to keep the Germans from stealing their sheep."
But the fact was that the enemy, even in Germany itself, could not be everywhere. One American agent remarked, "An awful lot of those Germans were just dumb necktie salesmen." What he meant was that the Germans were, after all, human beings, and no human being can be always on the alert, always suspicious. Some agents were able to extricate themselves from situations which seemed at the time utterly horrifying, merely by remembering that to the enemy, the situation might seem quite normal.
One agent remembers such a situation in his dreams.
He was returning from Paris to Bordeaux. He had made the initial trip, accomplished his business of setting up a Safe House. The dangers of getting permission to travel and purchase a ticket had been overcome. The only thing that seemed queer and not right to him was that the platform where the train pulled in was deserted. He was on it, but he was alone. The train came, paused, and he got aboard, carrying with him his little suitcase full of radio.
Not until he had taken a seat in the compartment did he realize why the station was deserted, and why the train had paused such a short time. Through the doors of his compartment to a seat directly facing him and his equipment strode the unmistakable figure of Field Marshal Rommel, accompanied by his adjutant.
The agent thought quickly and spoke first. He did not presume to disturb the Herr Field Marshal; he was bound for Bordeaux and had taken the wrong train; these old women who directed one nowadays; it was too absurd; he asked permission to withdraw.
"Pas du tout." The Field Marshal spoke excellent French. This train was for German staff officers only, but it was bound for Bordeaux and these days the army must share with civilians when it could.
The Field Marshal was quite talkative. He was making, he said, a tour of the Southern Defenses, and he spoke of the danger of traveling, what with "the terror bombers" about. Then he and his adjutant rose and departed.
The agent had just relaxed when the door opened again. It was the adjutant, and he was alone. With difficulty the agent remained calm. He did not rise; he restrained a glance at his suitcase. But he knew it was the end.
Then the adjutant spoke. The Field Marshal had wondered if the gentleman would care for some tea.
Though he was never to know it, Field Marshal Rommel was paying high tribute to the caliber of work accomplished by OSS men in the series of complicated and interdependent tasks which are necessary to put into the field a man who could conceivably sit down to tea with an unsuspecting chief of an enemy army.
That series of tasks began on May 15, 1943, in the city of London. The date is a notable one. It marked the first attempt in the history of the United States to erect an intelligence network behind enemy lines in support of a decisive military campaign. On that date, OSS in London received explicit orders from Washington to reopen negotiations with the British Secret Intelligence Service, and to insist that the United States have a full and equal share in the developing of an intelligence system on the European continent.
Early in the history of OSS, the British had been more than willing to divulge their plans and secrets. But it is probable that at that time they hoped that secret intelligence in the European Theater would be left to them; that the United States would turn to other fields. At any rate, for more than a year preceding the date when the order was received, OSS in England, asking only to serve as a junior partner to the British, had been kept waiting, hat in hand.
The British attitude is understandable. OSS in London was staffed by a handful of men, none of whom had had the slightest experience with the complicated task of maintaining an agent in the enemy camp. Furthermore, OSS in London, though it had been given full powers in Washington, had run into the snag which so often resulted during the war, when orders or intentions in Washington conflicted with the orders and intentions of the commander of the United States forces in the theater of operations. In this instance, the high command in the European theater had made it clear that it intended to rely solely upon the British for secret intelligence.
Thus the British knew that OSS did not even have the confidence of its own high command.
The British also knew what a difficult task lay ahead. Their organization had been operating alone for centuries, and it seemed logical to them to continue in that fashion. There was something more in the British attitude. They, a powerful nation, were being asked to help an even more powerful nation to build an intelligence network on a continent 21 miles away. The British have never conceived of an intelligence organization as existing solely during war. They must have thought of the days of peace with some trepidation.
But the order of May 15 clinched the argument. The United States insisted on a full and equal share. By implication, if Britain was not prepared to share, the United States, in spite of its handicap of inexperience, would strive to be equal. Undoubtedly, such a program would have led to destructive competition. The British decided to share. The union which began on that day in May flourished into a highly successful partnership, in which both parties gave information and aid to the other, when such aid did not conflict with either nation's security.
The handful of secret intelligence men in London, confident now of their own standing as full-fledged partners of the British, could turn to the work ahead. That work divided itself naturally into five separate tasks: the recruiting of agents, their authentication, training, dispatch into the field, and the communication with them once they got there. If, and only if, all of these steps were carefully and conscientiously carried out could the work end in the accumulation of intelligence and the safe return of the agent.
Considered in its broadest implications, that series of tasks is the whole story of American secret intelligence as it was accomplished by agents in OSS. They were, in sum, the raison d'être of the organization of OSS in its intelligence role. Therefore it is well to take them up one by one.
The first task, that of finding and recruiting the innocuous little men who could fool the Gestapo, was made easier for the United States than it was for Britain, for two reasons. First, many of the agents were to be found in America, among foreign-born citizens or citizens who were second-generation Americans. Some of these could be recruited directly from the Army. Secondly, many of those who came eventually from enemy-occupied territory were encouraged to volunteer because, since childhood, they had believed in the dream of the United States of America. They were escaped prisoners of the Gestapo, prisoners of war who had passed the rigid and searching OSS security tests, or people who were never fond of their German overlords, and saw their chance to help defeat them by helping OSS. The picture of America as the land of the free was, in this war as in the last one, an enormous help to America.
The point can be overemphasized. Like the soldiers in the Allied armies, OSS agents held views ranging from communism to monarchism. One thing they did not share with many Allied soldiers was having no belief at all. But not all of them took the enormous chances of their trade for the sake of a brave new world.
Joe, for example, a young Italian from a well-to-do family, fought the British in the Mediterranean because the tradition of an old Navy family is to fight when and where the commander-in-chief is fighting. When Marshal Badoglio surrendered, Joe saw it as his duty to follow his commander. In slow, straining English, he told about it later:
"There is big room, the Germans," he said. "A man behind desk is colonel, also German. He say 'OK. Who is for Badoglio and who is for Italy? If for Italy, we are allies. If for Badoglio, to prison.' We go up one by one. I say, 'Badoglio is commander. So, I am for Badoglio.'" Joe springs mockingly to attention and laughs, "So off to prison."
Joe escaped by falling off the prison train on the way through the Brenner Pass. He reached the sea, got a small rowboat, and somehow, under the hot sun and through four days with neither food nor water, he managed to row south in the Adriatic to land behind the lines of the British Eighth Army.
"Four days bad," Joe said, "but landing where are Germans — worse." Three months later he went back to the Brenner Pass area by parachute for OSS.
Recruiting men like Joe was the first job, and in the rush of signing up agents, the right men were not always chosen. The most important qualification an agent can possess is a passion for not thinking of himself as an agent. A secret agent's trade is romantic, exciting, dangerous, and cloaked in mystery. The moment the secret agent begins to write or talk or even to think of himself as being romantic or cloaked in mystery, he is well on the way to being no longer secret. OSS made the inevitable mistake of recruiting a good many amateur agents who never learned to be anything but amateurs. They were the people who lived in a dream world of cloaks and masks and daggers and "Secret Agent X reporting to his chief," and who usually got themselves into trouble or became utterly useless as agents. In the words of one OSS man, "They were constantly tripping on their cloaks, and sticking themselves with their daggers."
OSS had one former advertising executive in a neutral country who so romanticized himself and his trade that every time he entered his favorite restaurant, the orchestra would strike up a local parody called, "Boo, Boo, I'm a Spy."
It was the amateur also, usually the high-ranking Army officer posing as a spy, who wrote hundreds of pages of reports on his own feats of valor when he got back to headquarters. Some of the reports did credit to little but the man's imagination. The reports of the professional, on the other hand, were more likely to be taciturn and casual. One American woman agent who twice went into France before D-Day, and against her own protests was later awarded the DSC for the enormous quantity of information she obtained, was asked to write a report describing her life with the maquis. Others, asked to do the same, had filled chapters. This girl wrote: "My life consisted of taking the cows to pasture, milking them and the goats, and distributing the milk through the village."
The same casualness was reflected by an agent in Italy, a blond, English-speaking Italian, who had come back from the relatively dangerous area of Milan, and was resting and getting a new radio code before jumping back in again. One of the authors of this book, who expected shortly to be parachuting into the same general vicinity, asked the agent how it would be possible to communicate with him; if in fact, some clandestine meeting place might not be arranged. "Oh, that's quite easy," the Italian replied. "If you come in civilian clothes, go to the German headquarters in Milan and ask the garrison commander for my telephone number. He and I are very good friends."
It was hard to tell what characteristics to look for in selecting an agent, except of course the essential qualities of loyalty and courage. The casualness of the milkmaid in France, or of the Italian in Milan was worthwhile, but on the other hand, a certain amount of flamboyance was permissible, and sometimes very valuable.
One colorful character in Greece discovered the date of birth of the local German commander, and mailed him a present. Fortunately, the mails from Germany had been bad, and the German commander's pleasure overruled his suspicions. He called his staff around him to watch him open it, and when the birthday present blew up in his face, there were twelve fewer Germans in Greece.
Another American officer, tired of pretending he wasn't, crossed the German border north of Yugoslavia long before D-Day, and committed what was possibly at once the most childish and the most magnificentbeau geste in the history of the war. He wrote out the following postcard, addressed it to Adolf Hitler, Wilhelmstrasse, Berlin, and mailed it in the village postbox:
"Dear Hitler:
---- you.
(Signed) An American captain IN GERMANY."
There were some strange characters, perfect agents, who failed for curious reasons. An example was the village monk whom OSS recruited in France. With his shaven head, long brown robe, and dirty tassels, and his strong desire to help his American friends, he was an obvious choice. Not until he was about to set forth through the lines did OSS officers discover his one weakness as an agent. "I cannot," he told the OSS men, "tell any lies. Anything, but not lie."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Sub Rosa by Stewart Alsop, Thomas Braden. Copyright © 1946 Stewart Alsop and Thomas Braden. Excerpted by permission of OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA.
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