As Roosevelt gives his speech in Fenway on this cold Saturday night, Wild Bill is busy sabotaging America’s relationship with Winston Churchill and Great Britain—in order that the United States and the Soviet Union can achieve a tighter bond.
Donovan’s location seems innocuous enough. He is at home in Washington, DC, safe and secure in his tony Georgetown mansion on Thirtieth Street. Donovan has a sizable fortune, and lives a lavish lifestyle that would make few suspect he is America’s top spy.
Yet Donovan’s Office of Strategic Services (OSS, as this covert group of top-secret operatives he commands is known) is in constant contact with him. While he might be relaxing at home, Donovan is well aware that troops of the Soviet Red Army are rolling into Yugoslavia on board American tanks, trucks, and jeeps. Donovan soon orders that ten tons of medical supplies be flown into the Balkans at U.S. expense, an extravagance that will assist the Communist takeover. The OSS is also sowing seeds of discord in Greece, the country that Winston Churchill covets more than any other.
Thus begins a sideshow to the war itself: the undercover battle led by William Donovan and the OSS to ensure that Eastern Europe fall into the hands of Soviet Russia. Above all else, FDR does not want a confrontation with the Soviet Union. He thinks of Joseph Stalin as his friend, and a true ally. Better to let Stalin have a part of the world where the United States has few interests. And even when Winston Churchill complains that the Soviet expansion is hurting England, it is explained to him that Donovan is out of control—and unstoppable. “I have always been worried by his predilection for political intrigue,” Gen. Walter Bedell “Beetle” Smith, one of Dwight Eisenhower’s top staff members, writes to Churchill about Donovan, “and have kept a firm hand on him so he keeps away from me as much as possible.”
But Wild Bill Donovan reports only to the president of the United States.
* * *
Two weeks after that triumphant night in Fenway Park, Franklin Delano Roosevelt relaxes in the White House, safely reelected to a fourth term. No other American president has ever served this long.
Roosevelt sits at his Oval Office desk in his wheelchair, the one specially built to look as much as possible like a normal piece of office furniture. The day is not a busy one, not beginning until almost noon with a private meeting with British admiral James Somerville, a war hero who has just been assigned to Washington as head of Britain’s naval delegation. Later on there will be a brief reception with a group of female newspaper correspondents and a small formal dinner for fourteen guests in the cavernous East Room of the White House. The affair will be short, lasting from 7:30 to precisely 9:00 p.m. Roosevelt will rattle around the White House for three more hours after that, but the time will be unstructured, unplanned, and completely his own. November 18, 1944, will mark that rarest of all days for a wartime president: one without crisis.
But today will one day be seen to hold monumental significance, thanks to a memo Roosevelt now grasps in his hand. Typed and organized into a single sheet in the form of a letter, it arrived between appointments. The memo comes straight from the desk of Wild Bill Donovan, who has scrawled his signature at the bottom. Roosevelt personally requested this piece of paper on October 31. Its highly confidential contents will soon get leaked, through no fault of Roosevelt’s, and he will be forced to defend Donovan when the newspapers report that the OSS chief is trying to create an “American gestapo.”
When that moment comes, Roosevelt will have no choice but to distance himself from Donovan in the same manner as Beetle Smith. Noting to an aide that Donovan loves “power for its own sake,” Roosevelt will try to “find a way to harness that guy, because if we don’t he’ll be doing a lot of things other than what we want him to do.”
But Roosevelt has no intention of stopping Donovan, because Wild Bill is doing what FDR wants.
“Pursuant to your note of October 31, 1944,” Donovan writes, “I have given consideration to the formation of an intelligence service for the postwar period.
“Though in the mist of war, we are also in a period of transition,” he adds. “We have now in the government a trained and specialized personnel needed for the task.”
Neither Roosevelt nor Donovan has any further concern about the German army. The war will soon be won; that is a foregone conclusion. And just as Donovan once traveled the globe at Roosevelt’s behest in the days before Pearl Harbor, warning that the United States should expand its navy and army in anticipation of the day it would join the war, Roosevelt now asks him to see the future once again. Both men anticipate that another great conflict might follow once Germany is defeated. But rather than suffer another surprise attack, as at Pearl Harbor, Donovan is pressing Roosevelt to allow him to design a new postwar intelligence agency that will anticipate clear and present dangers. In the absence of openly belligerent enemies, this new agency’s role will be to spy on America’s friends as well as her adversaries.
Roosevelt endorses the new group. His typewritten reply is signed, simply, “FDR.”
And so the Central Intelligence Agency is born.
* * *
As history will show, both Roosevelt and Donovan are taking their eyes off the ball much too early. Adolf Hitler and the armies of Nazi Germany are far from conquered. As Wild Bill Donovan strategizes about postwar power consolidation, Wehrmacht soldiers, guns, and tanks are quietly grouping near the German border. They do so under strict radio silence, lest the Americans hear their chatter and anticipate the biggest surprise attack since Pearl Harbor.
The Germans face west, toward the American lines, and the thick wilderness in Belgium known as the Ardennes Forest. It is here that U.S. forces are weakest, because it is assumed that an attack through this primeval wood is impossible. To tilt the odds even further in the Germans’ favor, it has been ascertained that George Patton and his Third Army are more than one hundred miles southeast, still in dire need of gasoline, guns, and soldiers—and still unable to conquer Metz.
Hitler and his generals are sure that Operation Watch on the Rhine will be a successful counterattack that not even the great George Patton can thwart. The Nazis are poised to turn defeat into victory with this counterattack and the development of a new atomic weapon that Hitler believes is almost ready.
The Führer is still certain of ultimate victory.
Very certain.
6
WAR ROOM
THIRD ARMY HEADQUARTERS
NANCY, FRANCE
DECEMBER 9, 1944
7:00 A.M.
Col. Oscar Koch thinks that Hitler is up to something.
The G-2, as General Patton’s top intelligence officer1 is known in military parlance, is certain that the German army is far from defeated. In fact, he is the only intelligence officer on the Allied side who believes that the Wehrmacht is poised to launch a withering Christmas counteroffensive.
Only, until now, nobody will listen to him.
The sun has not yet risen on what promises to be yet another bitter cold and wet day in eastern France. Koch stands amid the countless maps lining the walls of his beloved War Room, thirty miles south of the front lines. The forty-six-year-old career soldier stands ramrod straight. He is bald, and wears thick glasses that give him a professorial air.
Just a few feet away, George S. Patton sits in a straight-backed wooden chair as Koch begins the morning intelligence briefing. Patton wears a long overcoat and scarf to ward off the cold, even indoors. He is pensive, and eager to be once again on the attack. In just ten days, Patton is launching his Operation Tink, a bold new offensive that will take the Third Army into the heart of Nazi Germany for the first time. Metz has finally fallen after two long months of battle. Patton systematically worked his way toward Metz, bypassing the network of forts as needed, while at the same time depriving their inhabitants of food and water. Fort Driant surrendered on December 8, 1944. The invasion of Germany now awaits. Patton plans to cross the Rhine and press hard toward Frankfurt, then on to Berlin.