OF



OF

SPIES &

STRATAGEMS

by Stanley P. Lovell

Since 1942 the author of this book has been sworn to secrecy as to what he saw, heard and did while serving as the Director of Research and Development for the OSS during World War II.

Now, after twenty years, he is able to reveal untold stories about the Office of Strategic Services, the highly-secret sabotage and intelligence arm of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Many of the schemes and secret weapons you‘ll read about made a dramatic impact upon the outcome of World War II.

One such instance occurred during 1943 when Lovell received a radio message from OSS agent #110, the code name for Allen Dulles who was operating in Switzerland. Dulles re ported that an escaping Frenchman revealed that he was a forced labor guard for casks of "water" being trans ported from Rjukan in Norway to the seemingly pastoral island of Peenemunde hi the Baltic Sea. Lovell reasoned the only water worth guarding was "heavy water” one of the key sub stances used in perfecting a bomb employing nuclear fission. The British, already suspicious of activities on the island, then laid on a major bombing raid.

As it turned out, Peenemunde was actually the headquarters for German rocket research. The raid materially delayed the use of V-l and V-2 rockets by the Germans until after the Normandy landings in June, 1 944. Lovell later learned that the heavy water was being shipped elsewhere for nuclear research but the guards and crew were misinformed about its actual destination for security reasons.

Some of the extraordinary weapons described by Lovell include a completely silent, flashless pistol and sub machine gun ... a highly explosive powder that could be kneaded and baked to look like harmless wheat flour ... a one-shot miniature gun only three inches long ... a small bomb containing a special electric eye that derailed trains . . . and a particularly effective weapon called Who? Me? that caused great embarrassment to the Japanese.

PRENTICE-HALL, INC.

Englewood Cliffs New Jersey

Of spies & stratagems, Englewood Cliffs, N.J., Prentice-Hall

Stanley P. Lovell

PRENTICE-HALL, INC., ENGLEWOOD CLIFFS, N. J.

Copyright under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions

1963 by Stanley P. Lovell

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, or any portions thereof, in any form, except for the inclusion of brief quotations in a review. Printed in the United States of America. Library of Congress Catalog Number: 63-8620

Prentice-Hall International, Inc. (London, Tokyo, Sidney, Paris) Prentice-Hall of Canada, Ltd. Prentice-Hall de Mexico, S.A.

Second printing May, 1963

Portions of Chapters 1-3, in a somewhat different form, appeared in The Saturday Evening Post.

Printed in the United States of America 63059-T

To the men and women of O.S.S., working in solitary danger behind enemy lines, so many of whom gave their lives for us, with no hope of recognition or reward. Others made the weapons and devised the stratagems, but they were the real heroes.

To them this book is humbly and reverently dedicated.

6317930 CI1Y (MO.) PUBLIC LIBRARY

FOREWORD

This book is an account of one man's experiences in World War II, of matters that can now be told. If the story lacks the smooth continuity of fiction, it is because the Office of Strategic Services was itself opportunistic and experimental. Nothing like it had ever existed in earlier American wars. We had to "play it by ear" or not at all. Like a pianist, improvising his melodies and rhythms, the chords had to be found and the dissonances corrected or ignored. No one could tell us how to do our job.

For my activities, the Director, Major General William J. Donovan, laid out the objectives in the broadest possible terms and left me wholly free to develop unorthodox weapons and stratagems for O.S.S.

It is understandable that this unprecedented and often loosely disciplined organization became anathema to the well- established intelligence agencies' of the other services. The Federal Bureau of Investigation, the U.S. Army Intelligence (G-2) , the U.S. Navy Intelligence (O.N.I.) and, at the beginning, our comparable organizations in Great Britain (S.I.S. and S.O.,E.) all resented and distrusted this amateur group. Our greatest tribute was that, at war's end, they generally applauded it.

General Donovan had arranged it so that, at the very start, O.S.S. would be a child of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

FOREWORD

How wise that proved to be, as otherwise O.S.S. would surely have been crucified as soon as it started to function. Being the offspring of J.C.S. made it well-nigh invulnerable to competitive attacks.

This book is but a part of the O.S.S. story the part that came within the author's purview. In the secret work to which I was committed, it is necessary to point out that the results of stratagems and the actual use of weapons were often re ported to me second-hand, through "cut-outs" intermediaries who were used to protect and conceal the identity of the spy or saboteur. It makes for a redundancy of "I was told" or "it was said” but in such work, where life and death were at hazard, this is unavoidable. I solicit the reader's under standing of this devious reporting.

To the best of my belief these accounts are truthful, but much of what I have to tell was of so sensitive a nature that it is truth based more on my trust of individuals than on documents.

CONTENTS

1. I GO TO WASHINGTON

2. SCHEMES AND WEAPONS

3. SUPPLYING THE SABOTEURS

4. CAMOUFLAGE

5. THE LETHBRIDGE REPORT

6. SCHEMES THAT FAILED TO WORK

7. HYPNOTISM

8. "C-I2"

9. CHARACTERS

10. THE MCGREGORS ARE COMING

11. THE NIGHT CHURCHILL ALMOST GAVE UP THE WAR

12. THE BOMBING OF PEENEMUNDE

13. CAPRICIOUS

14. AN INTERVIEW WITH OSWALD SPENGLER

15. THE NAZI AGENT WHO BECAME A BRITISH KNIGHT

16. LONDON

17. THE GREAT FEUD

18. THE GREAT OPPORTUNIST

19. W.D., AN INTIMATE APPRAISAL

EPILOGUE

I GO TO WASHINGTON

One day in 1942, as I was crossing Boston Common on my way to a luncheon date at the Parker House, I saw Dr. Karl T. Compton coming toward me. I had a nodding acquaintance with him. We smiled at each other and passed, when suddenly he called out my name. He asked me if I knew what the National Defense Research Committee in Washington was.

I said, "Aren't they a group of college professors?"

"Exactly, Lovell, but they are all snarled up with "businessmen, with whom they are placing big contracts. Neither seems to understand the other. It just struck me, as I passed you, that you have both a strong business experience and a scientific training as well. Come down to Washington and help us."

I was fifty-two years old and a hard-won business success of sorts seemed to be at stake. I consulted Earl P. Stevenson of Arthur D. Little Co. the next day. He confirmed the urgent need Dr. Compton mentioned. He said, "You’ll regret it all your life if you refuse Uncle Sam now." I reported at 1530 P Street, the N.D.R.C, Washington headquarters, that week.

Dr. Vannevar Bush sent me to Dr. H. M. Chadwell. After I had received a favorable security clearance, I was as signed to work with the Quartermaster Corps. Somewhere along the line everyone forgot all about the liaison or arbitration of professors' disputes with businessmen.

The Quartermaster Corps had a world of problems. General Gregory was most cooperative but Colonel Georges Doriot seemed to me to be the one officer there with imagination and zest. Despite his help, the problems were rather prosaic: how to make a grommet from plastics rather than metal and thus save so many pounds of steel or tin; how to redesign the Army canteen; how to make mold-proof tents, shoes, leggings, etc. Of course, the solutions to these problems would undoubtedly help win the war, but none of them could get me out of bed in the morning with a wild enthusiasm to charge down the streets of Washington.

To be sure, there were accidental moments of excitement, as when I was reporting on my problems to a group of N.D.R.C. Committeemen, presided over by learned, lovable Dr. Roger Adams. The problem to explore was to find some poncho or garment material suitable for desert fighting, where it became bitter cold at night and broiling hot at noon day. I spoke with a cigarette in my mouth and asked, "What can we do about the thermal armor?" A voice from the rear of the hall said, "Shoot the son-of-a-bitch!" Only then did I realize he understood me to say "Thurman Arnold" a New Deal luminary most unpopular with this obviously Republican professor.

We often met at Dumbarton Oaks, lent to us by Robert Woods Bliss for N.D.R.C. meetings. Over the stage in the great hall was an inscription in Arabic. One day, our discussion was on how much advanced chemical knowledge we should pass on to our British and French allies. I asked Mr. Bliss, beside whom I happened to sit, to translate the Arabic inscription for me. He said it read, "Trust in Allah, but keep your camel tied”

I was 1 saved from the humdrum of canteens and grommets by a problem Dr. Bush gave to all his aides.

"You are about to land at dead of night in a rubber raft on a German-held coast. Your mission is to destroy a vital enemy wireless installation that is defended by armed guards, dogs and searchlights. You can have with you any one weapon you can imagine. Describe that weapon”

Here was something to get my teeth into. I walked the streets of Washington at night, imagining myself wading ashore a hundred times; but with what? I early abandoned such fantasies as a death ray, which I knew would require a great power plant to implement it. After soul-searching for a week, I submitted, "I want a completely silent, flashless gun a Colt automatic or a submachine gun or both. I can pick off the first sentry with no sound or flash to explain his collapse, so the next sentry will come to him instead of sounding an alarm. Then, one by one, I’ll pick them off and command the wireless station”

My answer won the first prize in the contest.

Shortly afterwards, I was ordered to report one evening to an office at 25th and E Streets in Washington.

It was in the early evening that I took a taxi to my mysterious appointment. The driver left me at the corner, and I walked around a brick building to find myself in a delightfill little quadrangle. In its miniature square were flowering trees and shrubs; ahead of me was an imposing stone building with Greek pillars across its front; on either side were flanking buildings, one of stone and one of brick, but all combining to make a unified and most pleasing effect.

I guessed that the main building was my rendezvous, so I walked up its stone steps and into a narrow hall which led to a longer hallway at right angles to it. No one was to be seen and I started to roam around, when a touch on my shoulder and a uniformed guard brought me up short.

"Where did you come from?" I asked, startled.

"Follow me he said, and I still think he simply materialized like some ectoplasm. He led me to a small room with two chairs in it, one window, one picture on the wall and nothing else. There I waited. I had eaten a very sketchy lunch and what with no dinner in hand or in prospect, my empty stomach complained with rumblings and calls for attention. I concentrated on the one picture, a colored map depicting the world as it was thought to be five hundred years ago. Beyond the Mediterranean Basin, the British Isles and an amorphous mass labeled Africa, most of it was marked "Terra Incognita' That, I thought, was where I now was an unknown land on an unknown mission.

It seemed to me hours before the door was quietly opened. A man came in, shut the door, shook hands and sat down in the other chair with great rapidity.

He was all in gray: a gray suit and tie, gray hair and blue- gray eyes. He was about sixty years old, I judged, and thus seven or eight years my senior. He was not a military figure- but somewhat pear-shaped, with pudgy hands and a thickset neck. Powerful, I thought, but rather overweight.

His voice was a surprise soft-spoken, beautifully modulated. "I'm Colonel Donovan, Dr. Lovell. Dr. Conant and Dr. Roger Adams have told me about you. You know your Sherlock Holmes, of course. Professor Moriarty is the man I want for my staff here at O.S.S. I think you're it

"Do I look to be as evil a character as Conan Doyle made him in his stories?"

"I don't give a damn how you look' Donovan replied sharply. "I need every subtle device and every underhanded trick to use against the Germans and the Japanese by our own people but especially by the underground resistance groups in all occupied countries. You will have to invent all of them, Lovell, because you're going to be my man. Come with me."

I had never met a man of such magnetism. I heard my self say, "I will"

He said, "Start tomorrow. Oh, there's one thing: no matter what you do or hear when you're with me, I must have your word of honor that you'll write nothing until twenty years from now. Will you give me that?"

Again I said, "I will” and nothing would be told here were it a day less. I recall I left him, humming to myself "Give me but ten who are stout-hearted men” My instant acceptance was partly due to his charm, partly that silly tune and partly a German professor named Oswald Spengler. I'll explain his part in it later on.

As soon as I could do so, I looked up all references A. Conan Doyle had made to his fictional Professor Moriarty. Most of them were discouraging to a chemist suddenly called to play the role. "Famous scientific criminal" well! The greatest schemer of all time the organizer of every deviltry!

The controlling brain of the underground. But come! Come!

Then I came on the phrase that for four years was to be my credo. I actually kept it, typed in capital letters under the blotter of my desk and when vainglory or credit tempted me, I would peek at it and find comfort from it. It read, "So aloof is he (Moriarty) from general suspicion, so immune from criticism, so admirable in his management and self-efface ment.

Here was a better ideal to try to attain than my Omar Khayyam paraphrase, "Take the cash (the known achievement) and let the credit go (to whomever falsely claims it) ."

I moved into a small office in a temporary building down by a brewery. I had the title of Director of Research and Development, O.S.S. and, happily, Dr. Bush also retained me as a Special Aide to him and to his newly created Office of Scientific Research and Development. As the days passed by with no instructions, I met Harry and Junius Morgan, Richard Mellon, Alan Scaife, William Vanderbilt and dozens of other prominent gentlemen. Yankee-like, it appeared to me that Colonel "Wild Bill" Donovan, the great Wall Street lawyer, was staffing up his O.S.S. with a galaxy of potential postwar clients. Years later I had to admit that they might be socialite bluebloods, but they were stout-hearted men who knew how to fight.

Many of the personnel I met at a lower level seemed to be rah-rah youngsters to whom O.S.S. was perhaps an escape from routine military service and a sort of lark. I wondered, at the time, what either group could contribute in our nation's struggle to the death.

Before I, too, became infected with these undisciplined opportunists, I considered resigning. Better an unimpressive grommet than a company of schizophrenics.

That very night, Major David K. E. Bruce, whom I had met only casually, invited me to his apartment for dinner and the evening. I poured out to him my doubts and my troubles.

David Bruce said, "Chaos is perfectly normal for any new war agency, Lovell. Colonel Donovan is so great a leader that he attracts to himself not only the finest men, but often a sorry lot who ride on his coat-tails. Your job and mine is to keep him looking ahead and not behind at some of these odd recruits. We can accomplish that by doing our job so supremely well that they the undesirables will drop away or be ignored”

"But Major," I said, "just what is' my job?"

"That's precisely why I invited you here tonight to tell you that it's whatever you can make of it. Colonel Donovan is a lawyer, not a scientist or an inventor. Never ask him what to do. Do it and show him what you have done."

Without his wise counsel, I would have foregone a rich and rewarding experience. I forgot or ignored the playboys and went to work.

David Brace's kindly and shrewd advice was supplemented a few days later when Colonel G. Edward Buxton sent for me. I knew nothing whatever about this man, but such was his instant appeal that within a half-hour we became lifelong friends. He had a bubbling sense of humor.

"Welcome to St. Elizabeth's" was his greeting. St. Elizabeth's was the great Washington insane asylum presided over by Dr. Oberholzer (whom I later found helpful on one of our projects) . In no time it was' "Ned" and "Stan."

Colonel Buxton was "Wild Bill's" Deputy Director and strong right arm. Their commands in World War I had been side by side. Together they had helped found the American Legion. Ned Buxton was never Bill Donovan's alter ego, rather he was his indispensable balance wheel. Because he recognized this to be so, Colonel Buxton was the first man Colonel Donovan recruited. He was the only man in O.S.S. who could make the Director reverse a decision when it was poorly thought out or woefully premature reverse it and have the Director thank him for asking that it be done.

None of us stood in awe of Ned Buxton, as many did of the legendary Wild Bill, but all of us loved him. His orders to me were similar to David Brace's advice. "You decide what needs to be done. See me if you want to check on it, but don't bother Colonel Donovan until it's accomplished. You're experienced enough to know how to operate."

Another thing he told me stood me in good stead all through the years ahead.

"A group such as we're organizing, Stan, tends to attract two types of people. Beware of both. There are the zealots whose hearts beat high for the red-white-and-blue, but who have little if anything between the ears. The other type is the apparently dedicated, convincing people whose real objective, nevertheless, is to get their mitts on our Unvouchered Funds, the boys on the make."

Wonderful, sapient Colonel Buxton. I met plenty of both types and sent them to limbo as fast as I could, often with no authority whatsoever to do so. But by that time, the status or prestige of Professor Moriarty was adequate to expedite their transfers to some less sensitive branch of the war effort.

Before I really believed and followed the advice of either

David Bruce or Ned Buxton, I decided to talk it over a bit further with Colonel Donovan. We met at his home in Georgetown one evening. He poured sherry for me but drank nothing himself. Somewhere, flitting across my vision, in the back of the room was a woman I assumed to be Mrs. Donovan, but I never met her.

Without ado I opened up on my basic problem.

"The American people” I said, "are a nation of extroverts”. We tell everything and rather glory in it. A Professor Moriarty is as un-American as sin is unpopular at a revival meeting. I'd relish your assignment, Colonel, but dirty tricks are simply not tolerated in the American code of ethics. It may be a holdover or inheritance from the playing fields of Eton, but whatever its source may be, Americans want to win within the rules of the game and devious, subtle devices and stratagems are, as the British say, 'just not cricket/ "

"Don't be so goddam naive, Lovell," said Donovan. "The American public may profess to think as you say they do, but the one thing they expect of their leaders is that we will be smart. Don't kid yourself. P. T. Barnum is still a basic hero because he fooled so many people. They will applaud someone who can outfox the Nazis and the Japs. Never for get that the Connecticut nutmegs were made of hardwood. Outside the orthodox warfare system is a great area of schemes, weapons and plans which no one who knows America really expects us to originate because they are so un- American, but once it's done, an American will vicariously glory in it. That is your area, Lovell, and if you think America won't rise in applause to what is so easily called 'un-American' you're not my man."

"But, Colonel, I believe I am," I said. "What I have to do is to stimulate the 'Peek's Bad Boy' beneath the surface of every American scientist and to say to him, Throw all your normal law-abiding concepts out the window. Here's a chance to raise merry hell. Come, help me raise it"

"Stanley” he responded, using my first name as a sort of password, I felt, to his inner circle, "go to it."

As to the socialite group whom I had assumed to be potential law clients with hardly an exception, they did out standing service to their country. Not one was of an age where service was to be expected, and every one risked his future status as a banker or trustee or highly-placed politician in identifying himself with illegality and unorthodoxy.

SCHEMES AND WEAPONS

I decided that the very first job to be done was the organization of a plant for documentation a fascinating, meticulous, deadly business, indeed. It was obvious that any spies or saboteurs O.S.S. placed behind enemy lines would have short shrift unless they had perfect passports, workers' identification papers, ration books, money, letters and the myriad little documents which served to confirm their assumed status. These are the little things upon which the very life of the agent depends.

Nor was reproduction of enemy documents ordinary. All such documents had the most secret security built into them, just so no one could imitate them. Even the paper on which they were printed or engraved was made of special fibers, not to mention invisible inks, trick watermarks and special chemicals incorporated into the paper so the Japanese or German counterintelligence could instantly expose a forged or spurious document.

I consulted Colonel Otto Doering of the O.S.S. staff in order to get the approval of the U.S. Treasury and of the Secret Service, both of which were vital to us if we weren't to be closed up and arrested as soon as we started work. Colonel Doering said, "Let me see Randolph Paul, Under-Secretary to Henry Morganthau, Jr. and find out if we can get a go- ahead signal”

In the meantime, I recruited Kimberly Stuart, an expert in paper making, and Dr. Westbrooke Steele, President of the Papermakers' Institute. Both started at once to duplicate enemy papers of all sorts. In a remarkably short time, Colonel Doering had done his part so well that I met with Secretary of the Treasury Morgenthau. He had agreed to ask President Roosevelt if we might proceed. Morgenthau said, "You come over here tomorrow at eleven o'clock. If I say, 'The President has a cold and I was unable to see him on your problem that means he allows you to go ahead at full speed. If I say, I took that matter up with the President and he refuses authorization that means exactly what I say”

The next day I called on him at the appointed time. I was ushered into his office to find Randolph Paul, Daniel W. Bell and at least ten other men gathered around his conference table. As I entered, he turned to them and said, "Excuse me, Gentlemen; this is Dr. Lovell of the O.S.S." Swinging around to me he said, "Now, on that matter you asked me about, I was unable to see the President for approval because he has a cold. Do you understand that, Dr. Lovell?" I said, "Yes, I do, Mr. Secretary, and thank you”

In the midst of my elation at this top-level permission to establish a complete documentation plant, I suddenly realized how utterly exposed I was. If anything misfired, if our forgeries and duplicates were to be discovered by some newspaper columnist, and a wave of criticism be loosed against such "un-American" activity, then Secretary Morgenthau had more than a dozen witnesses' to say he had not taken up my problem with President Roosevelt, If anything went wrong there was but one sacrificial goat . . . me.

The chief of the Bureau of Engraving and Printing was most helpful when I explained my project, although, of course, absolutely no contact the press or the public could ever identify was really possible. It would, indeed, have been disaster if any suspicion of our counterfeiting and forgery shop had ever cast the faintest shadow on the U.S. Government's legitimate activities.

At the same time I went over our program with Chief Frank Wilson of the Secret Service, who could have instantly closed us up if our purposes and our personnel were not known to his men. He said, "Go ahead”

I recall, on a tour of the Bureau of Engraving and Printing with its chief, that he showed me the enormous tank of dextrin solution used to coat the back of stamps and the flaps of envelopes. It was quite exposed and accessible. Mindful of the possibilities of sabotage, I pointed out how easily a viable bacteria or toxin could be dropped into that tank, causing a whole nation of stamp-lapping Americans to be disabled or sickened or worse. Many organisms, such as the common cold viruses, are believed to be especially activated by lapping and labial wetting.

The tanks were protected at once, but it serves to illustrate how, once one is in the sabotage and subversion business, everything takes on an offensive or defensive aspect. I still don't lick stamps or envelopes.

I went full speed ahead. I recruited Major Reddick, an expert printer, and Major Kelly, the finest engraver and siderographer in the country. We had armed guards twenty- four hours a day and no access to the plant by anyone. From relatively simple ration cards and identification folders we went on to the difficulties of German, French and Japanese passports. Next came occupational currency, without which one could not live in an enemy-occupied country. Philippine money proved to be the toughest job of all, because the fibers from which that paper money was made were kudsu and mit- sumata, to be found only in Japan. No substitute fiber would do it would not give the "feel" to the bill. It looked like an impasse.

I learned that a stock of Japanese paper existed in the United States that was made of those very fibers. We knew we could rework it into currency paper if we could possess it. However, were we to go out and buy it, someone would surely reason that the O.S.S. was up to some irregular and illegal act, and might, in fact, reason that we wanted it for counterfeit Japanese money. In that quandary I turned to former Supreme Court Justice James Byrnes, then assistant to the President, and presented our problem to him. How he did it, I’ll never know, but within a week the entire lot of Japanese paper was in a warehouse in Jersey City available to us, and to us only. Mr. Byrnes moved effectively and quickly, with never a leak or rumor to follow.

And in the very nick of time. General Douglas Mac- Arthur sent word to the Joint Chiefs of Staff that Japanese occupational currency was vital for use in the Philippines or else his "I shall return" promise looked hopeless. We knew how extremely difficult it was to manufacture the money, even with the proper Japanese fibers on hand. The "banana tree" engraving on the bills was a most intricate and involved piece of art work, and the issue had several color engravings as well.

Even more baffling was the fact that all Japanese money in the Philippines was surcharged or overstamped to identify the particular city or district in which, alone, it was valid as money. This was a most ingenious method of immobilizing the entire population and controlling all travel. If a bill marked or surcharged for Davao were offered in payment in Manila, its possessor was arrested at once and forced to ex plain what he was doing, and why he was in Manila. Each Filipino was frozen in his town or city as completely as if barricades surrounded him. This curtailment of travel made MacArthur's organization of any resistance forces all but impossible.

We engraved a quantity of money sufficient to fill a large cargo plane, the currency being surcharged in direct proportion to the last population census. The precious stuff was de livered to MacArthur and distributed by his staff to the Philippine underground. We were justly proud of our job. The fibers were crisp kudsu and mitsumata, the inks had identical fluorescence under ultraviolet light and all secret marks were exactly duplicated. We knew that by any test a suspicious Japanese might give them, these bills would be passed as genuine. They did pass everywhere. General MacArthur wrote General Donovan that the work our experts had accomplished made the reoccupation of the Philippines a reality. The Japanese never realized that the O.S.S. had utterly destroyed their population currency control.

General Donovan showed me the MacArthur letter of commendation and said, "Well done, Professor Moriarty."

I received word from our O.S.S. detail in Java and Sumatra that little resistance against the Japanese could be expected there by bribes of Japanese occupational currency. It was necessary to have it by all means; but the real money for which the Indonesians would do anything and everything was the Maria Theresa thaler. This coin, about the size of a twenty-five cent piece or an Italian fifty lira piece, was minted in Austria in 1870. By a peculiar circumstance it has persisted as the most popular money in Arabia.

Indonesians are Mohammedans and the law of Islam compels them, once in their lifetime, to make the "hajj" (or great pilgrimage) to Mecca and Medina during the holy period, or the "umra" (lesser pilgrimage) at any time. The only money that was sure to be acceptable in their holy cities was this Maria Theresa thaler, and since becoming eligible to the Muslim heaven with its black-eyed houris might depend on the pilgrimage, these coins were both desirable and precious.

For them, my informant said, the Javanese and Suma- trans would promise to do anything: a mass revolt against the occupying Japanese soldiers, multiple assassinations and East Indian subtleties of attack too Asiatic and vulgar to be told in English.

Accompanying the information was a note saying, "Nothing to be done: the last Maria Theresa thalers were made in 1870."

Anyone with scientific training would have had the same reaction I did. It's well expressed in Porgy and Bess "It ain't necessarily so."

We located two or three authentic Maria Theresa thalers from collectors and a New York numismatist. We studied the metal on an alloy-analyzing machine. Silver wasn't hard to get.

We made an excellent mold that held twenty-four cavity reproductions. The molten metal was poured in the voids, cooled, the flash trimmed off and there were as fine thalers as Maria Theresa had ever seen. My group was not, a bit enthusiastic about carrying out the project. They all felt a counterfeit coin made of some cheaper alloy would do as well and be more in their vocational line. It was the most honest job we ever did. While I could appreciate their distaste for it? I felt the native Indonesians would bite the coins and listen to their ring on a hard stone, so I insisted on absolute integrity.

We tumbled them in a rotating drum with a dark com pound to imbed in the depressions, and off they went to bribe the Indonesians to do what any self-respecting conquered people should do spontaneously.

As so often happened in my work, I was not able to follow Maria Theresa beyond the shipping door. Did she con tribute to the overthrow of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere or was she added to the secret hoard of a few rascally Javanese and Sumatrans? I'll never really know.

It suddenly occurred to me that the large amount of Japanese occupational currency we were making for the Dutch East Indies might have a most expensive end result for Uncle Sam, once the war was won and the Dutch Government back in power.

It would then be necessary for the Dutch Government to call in all of the occupational money and exchange it for Dutch gulden notes. They could very well claim that much of this Japanese money they had now redeemed was actually our O.S.S. counterfeit money, which no one could distinguish from the bills made in Japan. Although we had made it at their urgent request and as a means of regaining their territories, they would have a case against the United States in asking us to reimburse them for whatever part of the currency on the islands they felt was our production.

With this in mind, I saw the Dutch Government in Exile and explained my dilemma. Their top men, General A. G. H. Dyxhoorn and Captain de Kuyper, were most cordial (I don't mean to pun on De Kuyper's world-wide cordial business) , but when I asked them to sign an agreement for ever holding the United States harmless from any fiscal claim, the cordiality rapidly vanished. No agreement of any sort.

I telephoned my office in their presence and said, "Stop the presses on the Java and Sumatra run.”

They both signed the agreement with muttered Dutch phrases which, I assumed, cast some doubt on my legitimacy.

By this time I had established many contacts with various groups, all of whom became invaluable liaisons as the war continued. Of greatest value to me and the O.S.S. was the constant interchange of ideas and field tests with the equivalent British organization. It had begun in England as a sort of "Scarlet Pimpernel" society of gentlemen adventurers, who smuggled key people out of Hitler's Germany after the Nazis invaded Poland, but before their Norwegian con quest. You may recall that, during those months, the war was like a thunderstorm in which the first terrifying bolt of lightning gives way to rumblings and semi-darkness, but the fury of the tempest is momentarily withheld.

Operating with the greatest secrecy, it took the name of S.O.,E. The comma in the name seemed to us Americans' to be typically British. It meant "Special Operations (comma) Executive” A certain parallel existed with the O.S.S., since S.O.,E. was staffed right out of Burke's Peerage or its industrial equivalent. Sir Charles Hambro, Maurice Lubbock and many others of British nobility or of the Morgan-Mellon-Vanderbilt banking and industrial status were in it.

S.O.,E. and the British Secret Intelligence Service (called "Broadway," usually) became so welded and inter twined as the war went on that it was often difficult to know which organization was involved in what we were doing.

The Washington head of S.O.,E. was William Stephen- son. Being a man half the size of our Bill Donovan, he was nicknamed "Little Bill” In 1942 I met two of his top operators in New York City where they had rented offices. They were a Mr. Billinghurst and a Mr. Freeth. Both men comported themselves so melodramatically that almost anyone would guess them to be secret agents 1 and, for that reason alone, very poor ones. Mr. Freeth was, I gathered, a faculty member from Oxford University. I never learned much about Mr. Billinghurst except that, at our first meeting, he confided in me that Hitler's Abwehr agents were feeding him poison.

In August I visited Billinghurst in a hospital. He dared eat nothing and drank little. He was obviously a very sick man. I went to the medical head of the hospital staff and said, "I'm a chemist. I think I should test Mr. Billinghurst's food and drink. He says he's being poisoned”

The doctor said with a wan smile, "I'm sure he has never had a bit of poison he's dying of cancer”

"Does that induce his illusion?" I asked.

"Cancer is enough. It makes its own poisons."

After the death of Agent Billinghurst from a tougher killer than the Abwehr could boast, the S.O.,E. assigned a to tally different man to my office. Wing Commander T. Richard Bird was a dashing Scotsman. His premature gray hair ("Dunkirk, you know") , his Savile Row Royal Air Force uniform and his Edinburgh accent made him instantly a person of striking importance. He was, naturally, a demoralizing influence on every female in my outfit, but with my male staff he was as canny a lad as ever left Scotland.

He had never been to America and, at first, we found ourselves "divided by a common language”. It was in the days of strictly limited telephone toll calls. He asked to use a private office to telephone Cincinnati. Some time later he stormed into my office, furious.

"I've heard so much about your fine telephone service. But, sir, it is terrible”

"What happened?" I asked.

"Four times I got me party on the line and then the telephone gal cuts in and asks 'Are you through?' I said, 'You silly gal, of course I'm through and then they disconnected me!"

I explained that "through" might mean "connected" in Britain, but in our country it meant "terminated."

I took him to lunch and suggested an Old Fashioned cocktail. "Odd people you are," he observed. "You drink your fruit salads!"

But "Dicky" Bird was a treasure. He was enthused over our developments, and was, throughout, a wise and imaginative counsellor.

As soon as our documentation shop was well under way, I concentrated on weapons for spies and saboteurs. You will realize that a spy (or, more delicately put, an intelligence agent) must actually never have a weapon at all. His job is to collect and transmit information. He does require invisible inks, minute cameras camouflaged as match-boxes, or other small objects logical for him to possess and, wherever possible, a clandestine radio transmitter and receiver.

The transmission of information was, as you would assume, a whole study in itself. The oldest known mechanism was the use of a "cut-out”, that is, some third person who delivers the message from the spy to the headquarters. But, there had to be less dangerous and more dependable methods than that.

One I thought up, because I was familiar with footwear construction, was the "welt shoe technique” In the making of a "welt shoe” where the wearer treads inside the stitches, holding the upper part of the shoe and sole together, there is a broad, flat space. This has to be filled to make the shoe bottom flat. It is therefore loaded with "bottom filler" a combination of ground cork and wax tailings, or some similar sticky binding compound. In messages to Allen Dulles, who was in Berne, Switzerland, I insisted he make contact with my friends at the Bally Shoe Company at Schoenenwerd. Throughout the war they had salesmen traveling in Germany and the conquered countries. In the rather commodious area where the bottom filler is normally put, there could be placed a very considerable message on paper or on cloth.

The shoe sole was laid over this, Goodyear-stitched and leveled and the edge stained and set. No inspection of that shoe, short of literally cutting it all apart, could expose the fact that it contained a surprisingly large quantity of information between the outer and the inner soles.

Another device we made for intelligence agents originated when a spy told me he was all but trapped in the Adlon Hotel in Berlin. "I would have given anything” he said, "if I could have created a panic in that lobby. As it was they picked up someone else, Gott sei dank."

My answer to the spy's suggestion was "Hedy." Hedy was a simple firecracker device which, when you pulled a small wire loop, simulated the screeching Doppler effect of a falling Nazi bomb and then ended in a deafening roar but all completely harmless. By activating Hedy the agent could have a chance to escape in the turmoil he had created. It was named after Hedy Lamarr, because my lusty young officers said she created panic wherever she went.

General Donovan and I gave lectures before many military groups. I vividly recall one on August 28, 1943 before the Joint Chiefs of Staff. After General Donovan's talk on O.S.S. objectives, he asked me to demonstrate several of our simpler devices. I showed our "booby-traps”, our derailing system for enemy trains and our incendiaries, and I explained the need and use for Hedy Lamarr. As I spoke I activated one and dropped it casually into a nearby metal wastebasket. Hedy interrupted me by suddenly shrieking and howling with an ear-piercing wail. Then came the deafening bang. To my surprise I saw two- and three-star Generals clawing and climbing to get out through the room's single door. It was a most successful demonstration, but somehow we were never again invited to put on a show before the Joint Chiefs of Staff. General Donovan said, "Professor Moriarty, we overdid that one, I think."

The saboteur is a man of violence and action. He must teach and inspire the people in occupied and enemy countries to harass and destroy the enemy and his works.

As we entered the war, most saboteurs had nothing to work with. If they decided to burn down a German ammunition dump or a Nazi headquarters, they had to be there with a match and kerosene. Of course the Gestapo threw a noose around the site and our saboteur was shot forthwith. It is true that the British had a time-delay pencil, but that was all.

Dr. Bush instituted a special Division of O.S.R.D. to serve us in O.S.S. It was Division 19, headed by Dr. H. M. Chadwell and his brilliant assistant Dr. W. C. Lothrop.

Our first weapon in the arsenal was a pocket incendiary, the size of a small booklet. It was a celluloid case filled with napalm jelly with an ignition that could be set for any time you wished, from fifteen minutes to three days. Now the saboteur could be conspicuously protesting his ration allowance at German headquarters when the ammunition dump went up, and his alibi was impregnable. The success of this simple device led to a wave of requests from resistance groups.

How to derail a train was a common question and, we thought, an easy one to answer simply take out one rail and the train falls over. It just doesn't work. Saboteurs were suspected of lying when they reported they had done this on the Orient Express, yet it came in on time. We studied the situation with the Corps of Engineers and proved it didn't work. After months we learned how to do it, but the solution is still not publishable information.

The Polish Underground officers I met laughed at all such subtleties. Their leader said, "Lovell, it's nonsense to be so complicated. We put two men out where the train runs" through a cut like a slice through a little hill. As the engine passes below them, each throws a hand grenade into the cab and then one of your incendiaries with very short delay timing. That takes care of the engineer and fireman and the train runs on to its own destruction."

"Into the cab?" I asked skeptically.

"Oh yes, our engine cabs are all open not closed up like yours."

"But doesn't the 'dead man's throttle' stop the train as soon as the engineer is killed?"

"Dead man's throttle? Of that I never heard before."

"American, perhaps, not Polish."

One weapon we abandoned, this time after it was per haps too successful, was "Beano." Major Fairless of O.S.S. with a group of Partisans was slipping down a road in Yugoslavia. They could see a line of automobiles coming their way and climbed up the rocky roadside. It was a high command group with staff flags flying from the lead car. Flattened against the hillside they made no impression on the Germans but Major Fairless saw a chance to destroy them all. He ordered each man to arm his Mills hand grenades and bombard the convoy with them.

The Mills grenade explodes several seconds after its arming lever is pulled. Because of that the volley of grenades bounced off the German automobiles, and exploded harmlessly in the ditch and underbrush beside the highway.

The Germans, now alerted, got out of their cars and sprayed the hillside with machine gun fire. Major Fairless and most of his cadre were killed.

"Why can't we make a hand grenade that will explode on impact?" I asked. Every American boy knows how to handle a baseball, so why not have it the size and shape of one rather than the awkward "pineapple" that was the British Mills "hand grenade."

In country fairs a poor lad used to get on a sling over a tub of water and for a quarter the visitors could pitch a few baseballs at a target over his head. If it was hit, down went the unlucky man for a ducking and the crowd roared "Beano"!

The Office of Scientific Research and Development eagerly undertook our assignment. They made a "Beano" so that it became armed or active during its flight through the air, requiring about twenty-five feet before it became dangerous, thereby discharging when it hit anything. We laid great hopes on the final tests at Aberdeen Proving Grounds of the United States Army Ordnance, with many top commanding officers present.

One of the Army's civilian engineers who had, we assumed, been thoroughly instructed in this new grenade, gave a most enthusiastic lecture on it and then proceeded to demonstrate. To the horror of us all, he said it would be handled like any baseball and tossed it high in the air over his head. Of course the throw automatically armed the grenade. When he stepped under the missile and caught it, he was killed instantly.

We were all shocked beyond belief. Somehow death should occur properly on a battlefield. This fatality caused the Army to stop all further "Beano" tests and abandon the grenade as unsafe a most illogical decision, as a Mills grenade under identical armed conditions would have been also lethal.

One special device for saboteurs was perhaps the perfect weapon for the underground, because it involved virtually no risk for the resistance groups which used it, and it was infallible as a tactical device. Its name was "Casey Jones” It consisted of a very strong permanent magnet of alnico on one side of a small box. This magnet was to stick the box firmly to steel or iron plates on the underside of railway cars. On the downward side of the little box was a special electric eye, designed for us by the Bell Laboratories. This eye looked down on the railroad track and right of way.

The function of Casey Jones was to derail trains not trains in France or Germany but those in Italy, those which sooner or later would traverse tunnels in daylight. Our electric eye was not at all affected by a slow, gradual diminution of light, such as nightfall; but only by a sudden sharp cutting off of light, as when a train entered a tunnel. This activated it instantly, and the explosive charge would blow a wheel off the car.

Italy depended on Germany for munitions, coal and a host of supplies, and the rails were replete with unloaded cars returning to Germany for more materiel. From the start we insisted that the San Marco Resistance Group put out no Casey Jones devices, until they were first installed on the wrecking trains in each rail-division headquarters. After that, men, women and children placed them on any rolling stock at all, generally at night, and regardless of whether the freight cars were empty or loaded.

A long line of empty cars would wind its way north. Sooner or later, an explosion and derailment in a pitch-black tunnel followed. A call for the wrecking train with its derricks and cranes would follow. When it crawled in to repair the wreck, it, too, was derailed in the cramped tunnel Now both wrecks had to be worked on by hand, and the through line was blockaded for a long period of time.

Every Casey Jones had on it a decalcomania in German type which read, "This is a Car Movement Control Device, Removal or tampering is strictly forbidden under heaviest penalties by the Third Reich Railroad Consortium. Heil Hitler."

Few, if any, were ever removed because, we guessed, the German soldier was regimented to let Berlin think for him. It is significant that the German High Command in Italy surrendered to Allen Dulles of the O.S.S., not to our regular Armed Forces. Perhaps they recognized that O.S.S. subversion had denied them supplies without which they could no longer fight.

In September, 1943, my silent, flashless pistol and sub machine gun, the concept of which caused my selection to the O.S.S. staff, finally passed all tests and went into production.

The success achieved was due to the untiring work of Professor Gus Hammar of the University of Washington, to Dr. Robert King of the American Telephone & Telegraph re search group and to John Sibelius of Hi-Standard Manufacturing Co. Now that it was an actuality, I became terribly worried for fear the weapon would get into the hands of criminals and thus make law enforcement all but impossible. Accordingly, I set up the strictest accounting system on each individual firearm. My worries were justified, however. Despite the most careful checking, several dozen weapons were reported "destroyed or expended in combat” It was impossible to verify or question that statement.

The missing items showed up later in Palestine, in the hands of the Jewish Underground, the Haganah, when Britain ruled Palestine under a Mandate. These guns were used with devastating effect. By night or day to wear a British uniform was to risk assassination, with no way whatever to trace the bullet or determine* the location of the franc-tireur. Every flat-topped house in Tel Aviv and Haifa was a source of sudden death. One reason for Britain's surrender of her Mandate and her withdrawal was that this merciless sniping could not be traced.

General Donovan was pleased as punch when I presented him with one of the first of the silent, flashless pistols. It was a Colt action Hi-Standard with clips of a special .22 bullet I prefer not to describe. He sent for a small duffle bag which was filled with sand and he fired several shots into it, in his office.

"Get me another, Stan”. he said in high glee. "I want to present one to President Roosevelt”.

I did so at once, realizing that Director Donovan was eager to impress the President with any achievement which would strengthen the O.S.S. in the eyes of the White House.

A day or so later General Donovan phoned me to come to his office. When I arrived there, he was still chuckling over what had taken place at his interview with the President in Roosevelt's private office.

"I went in," he told me, "with the pistol in a shoulder holster and I carried a bag full of sand in my hand. 'Pa' Wat son waved me in. I set the sandbag over in one corner of the room on the floor. The President was dictating a letter to Miss Grace Tully, but he looked up and motioned me to come in. While he was' talking to her, I fired the entire clip of bullets into the bag of sand. She left and I then presented the gun to President Roosevelt with my handkerchief wrapped around the still-hot barrel.

"I said, 'Mr. President, I've just fired ten live bullets from this new O.S.S. silent and flashless pistol into that sand bag over there in the corner. Take the gun by the grip and look out for the muzzle, as it's still hot/

"His eyes opened as wide as saucers. If he could, physically, have jumped to his feet, he would have. He was obviously shocked. In a second he got hold of himself and said how pleased he was to have the wonderful new gun and he sent his congratulations to all who had contributed to its development. He looked the gun over carefully, laid it gently on his desk and said, 'Bill, you're the only black Republican I'll ever allow in my office with a weapon like this!' "

Security is often a one-way street. The gabby stenographer who lets slip some mildly classified trivia at a cocktail party is sent packing back to her home in disgrace, but higher authority is above such discipline. Who makes' the rules may break them with impunity.

Our silent flashless gun was classified Top Secret. President Roosevelt, after showing it to Admiral Leahy, General Marshall and others, sent it straightaway to the Roosevelt Museum at Hyde Park, New York, where it was put on public display. Sic transit gloria secretorum/

To attack an enemy automobile or a Tiger military tank one could take two approaches the fuel tank which has to be filled by someone, and the "breather pipe" of the oil system which has to be checked for oil levels and replenishment.

Both projects were submitted to Division 19 and the re doubtable team of Doctors Chadwell and Lothrop went to work on them. The attack on the fuel tank was solved by a device suggested by Wing Commander Bird the S.O.,E. liaison person attached to my office and the most lethal Scots man ever to graduate from the University of Edinburgh.

Into the gas tank was dropped a small plastic cylinder, easily palmed by the gas filling station attendant. It contained an explosive charge which fired only after the gasoline had slowly swelled a rubber retaining ring. This took several hours, so the German vehicle was far away from the point at which it was inserted.

We named the device "The Firefly” Unhappily, repeated trials showed that the gas tank would explode all right; but, alas, the gasoline quenched any fire, so the weapon was only half as effective as we wished. You see, if the Firefly would burst the tank, rendering the military vehicle useless until a new tank could be installed, that was half the battle, but only half. If the gasoline could be ignited simultaneously, then the average driver, startled at the bang in the rear of his tank or car, would stop. He then would be sitting over a very hot seat indeed, with his vehicle burning up under him. In the, case of a Tiger tank, it would become a carapace in which he would be cremated along with his gunner and companions.

At last we found an additive to the Firefly which infallibly burst the gasoline storage tank and fired it also.

Fireflies were rushed to the Maquis, the French Under ground, in advance of Operation Anvil, the cover name for the landings in the south of France. I was informed that two German Divisions', ordered to repulse this attack, proceeded down the French highways. All gasoline pumps en route were staffed by the French resistance groups. As the gasoline station attendant inserted his hose in the filling pipe or as he withdrew it he dropped a little Firefly into it.

The results were dramatic and strategically dynamic. Along the highways, off in fields or smack in the roadway, there were the two tank division vehicles, abandoned if the driver kept moving and leaving a trail of burning gasoline behind him, but crematoriums if he stopped. Before anyone could escape through the tank hatch, the fumes of the gasoline burning under the tank had asphyxiated the tank personnel. The success of the Marseille landings owed much to the little Firefly.

The O.S.S. attack through the breather pipe and the oil lubricating system of an auto or a tank was harder going, in deed. At Beacon, New York, the Texas Company tried every suggestion we or Division 19 advanced. All the time-honored tricks failed. Sugar? No result whatever. Sand? Dirt? A little scoring of the pistons, but so wonderful is the gasoline engine, so designed to take abuse, that it kept on running as if it never would give up. I think we tried over fifty additives until my respect for the standard six-cylinder engine almost overcame any further work to destroy it,

One day a Harvard scientist, best left unidentified, suggested a compound to be put up in a small rubber sac and dropped into the oil through the breather-pipe. With little hope of success we did it. After it was hot and the rubber container had opened up, his compound became a colloidal dispersion in the oil. To our amazement (and delight) , when this hit the small mechanical tolerances of the bearings, all "seized “ simultaneously.

"Look out!" somebody yelled, and in time's nick.

The whole cylinder head burst into a hundred shrapnel pieces and the device had succeeded. Being a Harvard man steeped, no doubt, in the Classics, it was named "Caccolube." Perhaps your Greek will help you figure out why.

I always like the Bushmaster probably because I in vented it. Reports of fighting the Japanese in the days of jungle warfare repeatedly emphasized that a cadre of our boys, infiltrating down a jungle path and hacking their way through to make a pathway, would be followed by camouflaged Japanese patrols. The advance jungle fighters of the Japanese would expect a rear guard GI to be watching down the path. They would encircle him, kill him and then come upon our soldiers without warning. How to stop it?

Our answer was the Bushmaster. It was not an Amazon snake, but an innocent tube, eight inches long with a wire spring attached to it. If marked with a white band, it would fire in about an hour; green was three hours but red meant twenty minutes. All it was, was a steel tube containing a 30-calibre rifle cartridge which, when the time delay mechanism was activated, fired at the selected time.

Now as we see the American soldiers threading their way through the tropical growth, they leave no rear guard to be assassinated by the Japanese who may be pursuing them. Instead, one agile soldier climbs the trees as they go along and clamps his Bushmasters to branches, so they will point down the trail. When the zooming 3O-calibre cartridge comes screaming at whomever is following, the recoil of the little device waves the branches or fronds so realistically you'd be sure a sharpshooter was in that tree. Simple, but it worked.

Equally simple was the explosive candle. Pretend you know a French girl who has access to a German officer's study or bedroom. Give her your candle to replace the half-consumed one already there. It will burn perfectly until the flame touches the high explosive composing the lower two-thirds of the candle. Since the wick extends into a detonator and the latter is embedded in the explosive, the burst is as effective as any hand grenade.

Often the most simple weapons were the best. Perhaps this is so because the patriots, the resistance groups had few Ph.D/s in their number, but many plain men and women. Simple faith is worth more than Norman blood, I do believe.

The simplest weapon we ever made was a piece of steel so shaped that however it fell, there were three prongs or legs pointing downward and one erect. About three inches high and weighing only an ounce, what possible value or use could this have?

I blush for its simplicity. Thrown out on a highway, three prongs down, one prong up, it would always cause a tire blowout. Too small for the driver to see as he bowled down the road, it really destroyed any tire that ran over it. No patching when our spike had been encountered.

You will at once think of its use on airfield runways, and that's exactly where the spike did its best job. An enemy fighter plane, either on takeoff or on landing, would go into an uncontrolled ground loop when one of our little spikes blew a tire. The perfect tribute to any saboteur weapon is, of course, never to have the enemy know what hit him never to suspect its existence. In this category we had a few our summa cum laude list but you will not learn about them here, because they can be of use again some day.

The next list (perhaps just cum laude) were those weapons and devices which the enemy warned their troops to avoid, to beware, to destroy. High on that list was our little four-cornered spike. Actually, in Africa and in France, in Holland and in Belgium, to possess one became an automatic death warrant. An O.S.S. spike, eh? Der Tod!

One weapon the Germans or Japanese never did discover was simple enough and was founded on an American peculiarity of costume.

I learned that only the United States uniforms had a small slit pocket over the right hip the "fob pocket” Could a weapon be made to fit into this small pocket, the existence of which might not be known to enemies searching our men?

I posed the problem to my associates. After repeated bull sessions we evolved "The Stinger" a 3-inch by half-inch little tube as innocent-looking as a golfer's stub pencil, but men are alive today because of it.

When captured, no enemy searching our people inspected the area below the belt and almost exactly over the appendix. The Stinger was a one-shot miniature gun which could not be reloaded, but a man's life may hang on one shot as against no shot at all The tube held a .22 overloaded cartridge. It was cocked by lifting up an outer integument of the tube with the fingernail, holding the Lilliputian gun in the palm of the hand, close to one's target. It fired by squeezing the little raised lever down into place again.

An O.S.S. agent was picked up by the Gestapo inside the German lines. The German security officer was in doubt about him, something in his story or manner didn't quite fit his ostensible calling. They frisked him and found no weapon, but the officer put him in a staff car. Being unarmed, our man rode on the back seat with the security officer. They were en route to German headquarters for further interrogation. In a small village the officer got out to telephone ahead and assure himself that a certain interrogator would be called in.

Our O.S.S. agent, left alone with the military chauffeur in the front seat, took out the overlooked Stinger, cocked it, held it near the back of the driver's head and fired. He pushed the body to one side, took over the wheel and drove at breakneck speed to the American line.

The Stinger not only saved the man's life but allowed our planes to destroy the German Headquarters where he was to be taken. By telling the driver what route to take, the security officer had unwittingly given the O.S.S. man priceless information. A little Stinger is a dangerous thing.

I have not mentioned the booby trap devices, largely because they are widely known. Essentially there are three types: the ones activated by pressure (you sit down in a chair and go boom!), those that fire only when weight or pressure is released (you pick up a book but never live to read it) and, finally, the pull type, where a wire you trip over ends that trip for you.

This last kind (the pull booby traps or pull switches) had an infinite number of applications. A heavy bomb, called by the S.O.,E. "a Spigot Mortar' 7 is screwed into a tree on one side of a railroad track. A pull-type booby trap has a wire which crosses the track at the approximate height of a loco motive smokestack. The wire is tautly fixed to a tree or building across the track. All enemy railroads had a corps of trackwalkers, but our wire is over their heads and they are looking down, anyway. Along comes the enemy train, the stack pulls on the wire, the bomb hits the engine and, in actual use by the underground, frequently bowls the target engine right over on its side.

Our saboteur is hard at work in an enemy-operated factory when all this happens. Good things, those "pull" switches!

The O.S.R.D. developed a perfect answer to one of our problems. We asked for a high explosive which would act and look like ordinary wheat flour, thus arousing no suspicion if found in the possession of saboteurs in enemy territory. Dr. George Kistiakowsky, then head of the Bruceton, Pennsylvania, Explosives Laboratory, presented us with just what we needed. His white powder, used just as it was, had almost the brisance of TNT. It could be wet with water or milk, kneaded into a dough, raised with yeast or baking powder and actually baked into biscuits or bread. In any form it was a terrific ex plosive. I called it "Aunt Jemima”

We made exact duplicates of Chinese flour bags and sent them, properly stencilled, to Admiral Milton E. "Mary" Miles, the head of Sino-American Co-operative Organization in Chungking. Inserting a time-delay detonator into this trick explosive was all the Chinese operator had to do. I was told that bags of this cleverly camouflaged explosive were laid against the steel compression members of a great bridge over the Yangtze River, destroying it completely.

My personal troubles' with Aunt Jemima began when I found I had about 100 pounds in my office at 25th and E Streets in Washington. I telephoned an expert to come and take it away. He said, "No need for that, Lovell; simply flush it down the toilet”

It took some time for Dr. Allen Abrams, my assistant, and myself to do that. When I returned to my desk the expert's boss was on the phone. "Don't flush that explosive down the toilet," he warned. "The organic matter in the sewer will react with it and blow the whole Washington sewer system sky-high, including every building over it."

I thanked him as calmly as I could. There was no point in his worrying, too. The sewer ran diagonally from our offices across to 16 th Street near the White House.

I could imagine Professor Moriarty retiring rapidly from real life back to fiction. It would be the end of us; indeed, the end of O.S.S., as General George V. Strong of G-2 needed only one such episode to have Donovan's Amateur Playboys liquidated. The hours dragged by as Dr. Abrams and I debated whether to tell Weston Howland, our Security Chief, the District of Columbia Engineer, Donovan, or no one at all. Every truck that backfired, every door that slammed, raised the hackles on our necks, but we set our teeth and kept mum.

We dined at the Cosmos Club that night. Just as we were beginning to breathe easier, what with a bit of drink for courage, a waiter dropped a loaded tray of dishes right beside our table. Seconds later we found ourselves out in the garden with no recollection of how we had got there.

In the morning we decided that the War College or some more remote building might blow up, but that the White House was safe. We knew it because we stood at its gates at sunrise. Happily, the Potomac River has long since laid its burden of Aunt Jemina softly in the bosom of the sea.

A device we called our anerometer was a barometric fuse so set that an increase of 5,000 feet in altitude would make it work. About the diameter of a garden hose, it was attached to an actual length of hose which was filled with explosives. All military planes had inspection ports in their tail sections, so our anerometer would neatly slide into the rear of the fuselage and fall down between the ribs and struts out of sight. Whatever the airport's altitude, as soon as the plane carrying this device had risen 5,000 feet above it, the tail section would blow off. Our biggest user was the Chinese force at Chung king, which got them into many Japanese planes. General Montgomery told me in London that similar British devices greatly influenced the victory at El Alamein.

In at least one reported case, however, the victim was not Japanese. The most hated man in Chiang Kai-shek's government was Gen. Tai Li, the ruthless chief of the secret police, whom even the Chinese called "the Himmler of China” Assassinations and executions were so common that his name was something to be whispered. When Japan surrendered, Tai Li and his staff in Chungking boarded his plane to fly to Peking, where a great purge of all Chinese who were even rumored to have collaborated with the Japanese was to be organized. Everyone felt this would be a blood bath without justice. Tai Li's plane, I was later told, had risen about 5,000 feet when the tail section exploded.

There is another side to the controversial Tai Li coin. Lieutenant John E. Crabtree of the Marines was attached to the Navy's SACO outfit. He was intimately associated with General Tai Li during the period when the latter was Chief of the Bureau of Investigation for Chiang Kai-shek's National Military Council.

John Crabtree, like Admiral Miles, felt that Tai Li was grossly abused and misrepresented and in no way the ruthless, inhuman character painted by his many enemies. On March 17, 1946 General Tai Li died in his 1 plane crash near Pang- chow. Who now can say that it was bad weather or an anerometer bomb that killed him? Had he lived, several who knew him well, felt that he would have led the Nationalists to victory over the Communists in China. Others are equally sure that he would have bathed all China in human blood.

No figure in World War II is more black, seen from one side; more white viewed from the other. My own evaluation of this mysterious Oriental is that, since Admiral Miles held him in esteem, General Tai Li must have been somewhat more sinned against than sinning.

As F.S.C. Northrop writes in his The Meeting of East and West, "Unless we of the Occident find in our own experience the factors to which their remarkably denotative philosophical and religious terminology refers, we can never hope, regardless of our information or our observation, to understand the Chinese”

A special weapon of the saboteur is the limpet. A limpet is a small shellfish which adheres to rocks like grim death. The saboteur's limpet was originally an Italian and British device which, by means of a permanent magnet or by explosive rivets, anchors to a ship below the water line. It only holds a few pounds of high explosive. Although the hole it opens in the side of the target ship is small, the result is utterly devastating and generally the ship is promptly sunk. This is so because water is incompressible, and the great recoil of the ocean upon that hole opens it up to a twenty-foot aperture.

Our saboteur in a kayak or canoe, at night, puts the limpet against the ship's side by means of a long pole. It is so fashioned that withdrawing the pole activates the tiny explosive in the limpet face and attaches it securely. A magnesium alloy window on the limpet is slowly etched away by salt water after several hours, the saboteur being far away when the explosion takes place. We used a cast explosive called "Torpex," which was a shaped charge, so we got the "Munro" effect whereby the ship's side was ruptured in a predetermined pattern.

In April 1944 the Norwegian Underground advised that the Germans might be ready to withdraw their Army of Occupation in large part, and they must have a lot of our limpets to put on the German troop ships. The cast "Torpex" was in Hastings, Nebraska. How to get it to England and to Norway? Express, Parcel Post, railroads or airlines were ruled out, as it is a temperamental high explosive, as delicate as eggs. I asked for volunteers. An Army Captain and a Sergeant in my command offered to get it if I would provide an automobile. I gave them my own car and they were off. Their drive from Hastings to Washington was an epic. The load of sensitive high explosive weighed the small car down on its axles making holes in the road a real hazard.

Were they to be stopped by some police officer and their illegal load discovered and given publicity, the whole venture would have to be abandoned. To prevent this, I thought of our competent Documentation Branch. The letter we typed on authentic White House stationery said: "Captain Frazee and Sergeant Walker are on a secret mission for me as Commander-in-Chief. Any assistance given these two officers will be helping to win the war. Any interference with their vital mission, any search, questioning or delay of any sort will be followed by my severest disciplinary action. This is a Top Secret operation."

Franklin D. Roosevelt would have sworn that he had signed it. The letter had a seal (quite illegible) on it. Twice my men were stopped by local police and twice this letter evoked abject apologies. The car stalled once on a railroad grade crossing, but the engine started again before any train appeared. The vital load of "Torpex" was transported to Norway and encased in limpets by the Norwegian Underground. General Gubbins and Wing Commander Byrd told me that our timing was perfect. The Germans were recalling troops from Oslo, Stavanger and Narvik. The Norwegians went out at night in their little kayaks and installed the limpets below the waterline, all timed to explode as the troopships made their way from the docks down the tortuous fjords.

Those two officers of the British S.O.,E. said that when Hitler most needed the reinforcement of his Norwegian Army of Occupation to defend "Festung Europa," the fjords were in possession of many sunken German ships, with troops caught in that watery graveyard. The little limpets from Hastings, Nebraska had fulfilled their mission.

The Norwegians were the most deadly of all under ground organizations we met or worked with in the O.S.S. The French Maquis and the Italian San Marcos often had political overtones, but I found the Norwegians inspired solely by their passion to free Norway. They were ruthless to their own citizens, perhaps because "quisling'' had become an international byword.

In May and June 1943 I spent some time with their training groups in the north of Scotland. We showed them all our devices and told them our stratagems. Their leader, in turn, described to me their many ways of fighting the Germans, using subtlety rather than force.

The German Command had one time ordered the entire Stavanger sardine pack to be delivered to them, the choicest and best to go to St. Nazaire, France. Knowing this to be the Nazi U-Boat Headquarters, the Norwegians asked the British S.O.,E. to get them all the croton oil they could locate. Croton oil is a drastic purgative, but its acrid taste would be covered by the fishy tang of smoked sardines. The Norwegian resistance leader said that in the entire shipment of sardines sent to the German Submarine Command, croton oil was used in place of the oils normally employed. It was frustrating (as all subversion tends to be) not to know what the result actually was, but he felt that many a U-Boat, nesting on the ocean floor, waiting for the next convoy for Archangel to appear overhead, never surfaced again.

I knew what stark realists those Norwegians were, and I knew what a problem it had been to prevent betrayal of their underground personnel to the Germans. I asked a Norwegian agent how they handled that.

"We have no trouble, anymore, with quislings," he said. "Many of our people could not resist the promise of the Nazis to double their rations if they would betray us, but we developed a system that stopped all that”

"What on earth did you do?" I asked.

"Well, we plan a meeting of the Resistance Group a cell of say eight women and men. All are told, It's Olson's garage at one o'clock tomorrow morning” All but one person are then advised it's not Olson's now, but has been changed to Lemberg's cottage. We post watchers at Olson's and if the Gestapo raid it, we know for sure that the one man we didn't notify of the change is a traitor."

"But now you've identified him, how do you handle it?"

"Ah, that's what works so well. We wait our time and we kidnap him. He's blindfolded and driven in a car high up in the mountains near the Swedish border. There we have a little hunting lodge which we have made over into anim maculate miniature hospital. The traitor is anesthetized with expert care and our surgeon cuts out his tongue. Enough of a stump is left in his mouth so he can manage to gulp down his food, but he can never talk again. When it is all healed up, he is blindfolded and driven back to his native city."

"That's ghastly!" I cried. He smiled and shook his head.

"Treason is ghastly. At first we shot traitors but it didn't stop the quislings. This tongue surgery does. We had to do it perhaps fifteen or twenty times, but now no one ever betrays our underground groups. You see, nobody wants to live out his life making animal noises instead of speech, when each effort to talk brands him and advertises to all Norway that once he tried to betray our beloved land."

Professor Moriarty never thought of a better cure for treason.

This tongue amputation on informers by the wonderful Norwegian Resistance Group has been categorically denied by some surviving members of that brave band. I can only report what I was told and add the comment that in all secret operations none of us knew everything that took place. If fifteen or so tongue amputations stopped informing to the Ger mans, one would say it was not inhumane but a life-saving stratagem for the underground corps certainly nothing of which to be ashamed in Norway's glorious fight for freedom.

There was so much that was grim, bloody and sordid about the creation of new and special weapons to kill people that I searched for comic relief. The anthropologists in O.S.S. were asked to come up with some tabu that was uniquely Japanese, something to which only that race was sensitive. I was told the answer was bowel elimination. A Japanese thought nothing of urinating in public, but he held defecation to be a very secret, shameful thing. A Japanese soldier, even in jungle fighting, even at great risk, would seek a private place to defecate. Here was my comic relief,

I had a group of chemists work out a skatol compound, a liquid which duplicated the revolting odor of a very loose bowel movement. It left no doubt in anyone's mind as to what it was. We put this obnoxious chemical in collapsible tubes, and I named it, "Who? Me?" The tubes were flown over the hump to Chungking and distributed to children in Japanese-occupied cities Peking, Shanghai, Canton, etc. When a Japanese officer, preferably of high rank, came walking down the crowded sidewalk, the little Chinese boys and girls would slip up behind him and squirt a shot of "Who? Me?" at his trouser seat. As a sort of extra dividend, our chemical was insoluble in soap and water, but very soluble in dry- cleaner's fluids, so, when sent for cleaning, the contaminated uniform endowed all the clothing in the batch with its offense. "Who? Me?" was no world-shaking new evolvement, but it cost the Japanese a world of "face" and did more to lift the spirit of the Chinese than potent blockbusters.

Sometimes a joke can go too far. A small supply of "Who? Me?" tubes, which were our original test samples, began to disappear. I had the cabinet locked. The lock was picked, which was' not at all surprising, since we instructed all of our saboteurs in the art of picking open all makes of locks and door latches. With the help of an assistant I booby- trapped the locker by having a tube of "Who? Me? 7 ' filled under such an aerosol pressure, that when the cabinet door was opened it would spray the thief, causing him to lose both his self-composure and his anonymity. That stopped all the monkey business but the culprit, so easily identified, was too highly placed to be scolded.

A most urgent research job was done to find "T.D." a rather transparent cover-symbol for "truth drug”. Everyone wanted it, and quite properly so. Our schools and recruiting people needed it to help screen out of our groups any German spies or sympathizers. Despite the Geneva Conventions with their limitations on questioning captives, the prisoner-of-war officers wanted to try it.

Dr. Roger Adams, the world's expert on mescaline and cannabis indica (among many other subjects) , was delighted to help. I saw Harry Anslinger, Commissioner of the Bureau of Narcotics. He was most cooperative and assigned to my staff one of his finest agents, Major George White. There never was any officer in American uniform like Major White. He was roly-poly, his shirt progressing in wide loops from neck to trousers, with tension on the buttons that seemed more than bearable. Behind his innocent, round face with the disarming smile was the most deadly and dedicated public servant I’ve ever met.

Did we have a new hypnotic or narcotic to try? Major White would take it and report, "I tried it myself here are my notes on it."

One "medication" that looked very promising took me to a prisoner-of-war camp. There a U-Boat Commander was interrogated by a German-speaking American officer, a Cap tain in the Army. The T.D. was put in the German's beer, and the camp commander and I eavesdropped over a micro phone pickup.

The German was stolid, stodgy; stuck by his rights and even after two doctored beers merely recited his name, military number and German naval unit to which he was assigned. "Das cann ich nicht sagen" became his constant answer.

The American interrogator, on the contrary, became more and more voluble. During the second beer he blurted out, "I'm going to tell you something, Heinie. My boss, Major Quinn, is making passes at my wife, I'm going to shoot him sure as hell if he doesn't stop it."

The C.O. whispered to me, "The beers got switched our boy has your truth drug. This ought to be real good!" The American Captain went right up the line of command. His criticisms regarding the Colonel listening beside me were virile, forthright, vulgar and no doubt so slanderous a court- martial was indicated.

"He's doped doesn't know what he's saying," the Colonel said and he turned off the microphone receiver.

"Too bad the beers were switched," I said.

When I came to my office the next morning, my Assistant said, "Hate to tell you but that bottle you took to the prisoner-of-war camp was just half an ounce of ethyl alcohol. Here's the T.D."

There's more than one way to tell off your boss, but only a clever opportunist can do it in uniform and be exempt from even a reprimand.

Today one can read in weekly magazines all about the lauryl compounds and tricyano-amino propene but we never had them to use, as they hadn't yet been developed.

Major George White was far too valuable in counter- intelligence to keep him on what was only a research of hope, so I had him transferred to James Murphy in the Far East. I was told that he was sent to Calcutta to locate the head of the Japanese spy ring in that city. Airplane cover was absent when the planes flew on "over the hump”. and the new wings had not yet arrived from Karachi. At that unprotected hour the Japanese planes would blast the undefended city.

After some study of the situation (the story is told) , George White was walking down one of the principal Calcutta streets when he saw a pitiful old Chinese approaching, leaning feebly on a staff and crooning softly as he came. White seized him, pulled off his wig and upper garments and shot him dead. This caused a British-American incident com parable to the Boston massacre in reverse. I never knew what happened, precisely, but it was the head of the Japanese spy system, and when the air raids stopped the British apparently decided to forgive the unforgivable.

One day General Donovan said to me, "You know, I’ve never met Dr. Vannevar Bush”.

I could hardly believe it. I engaged a private dining room at the Carlton Hotel and Dr. Bush and Dr. James B. Conant, General Donovan, Colonel Edward Buxton and I met for dinner one evening. At this time Drs. Bush and Conant were completely absorbed in the potential of nuclear fission, which ultimately became the atom bomb, but so tightly-held was the security on this subject that nothing could be discussed with Wild Bill Donovan. Conversely, O.S.S. plans and operations were far too secret to be even hinted to the two eminent scientists.

I recall Van Bush, with his typical Will Rogers smile, asking General Donovan, "Have you succeeded in getting any of your people really inside Germany? 77

"A few, “ said General Donovan rather casually.

I knew we had perhaps eight hundred in Germany and occupied countries that minute, but I also knew that Dr. Bush would be even more evasive if General Donovan had asked him, "What, Dr. Bush, is this Manhattan Project all about? “

And there I sat, the genial host, knowing enough on both subjects, but muted by that man-made monster, wartime security regulations. Colonel Buxton, the most lovable man in or out of uniform, told of how frustrating war actually was for him.

"Here's Bill Donovan who came out of World War I as the most decorated hero in American history. And what happened to me? I fought side by side Landres and St. Georges, at Baccarat and the Battle of the Meuse and the Argonne Forest and I was known as the colonel of Sergeant York's Regiment. Why did that guy have to be assigned to me?”

When we broke up General Donovan said, "Let's walk down to the office and see what messages have come in, Stanley."

There was a full moon and I was elated to have all my heroes as my guests this one night.

Bill Donovan put his arm around my shoulders, in the manner he had, and said, "Stanley, I‘m so glad to have met Dr. Bush. He's a great man but did you notice he began every single sentence with I? Quite an egotist, wouldn't you say?"

The next morning I was 1 at a meeting at 1530 P Street where Dr. Bush presided. He came in, got on the dais, saw me in the group and came down to speak to me.

"I didn't have a chance to thank you adequately last night for that fine dinner, Stan. You know it was rather noticeable, I thought, that Bill Donovan talked so much about himself. I couldn't get a word in edgewise."

In Washington (and perhaps in Podunk, too) the humble may inherit the earth, but the egotists own it right now. The very self-assurance and self-confidence, which is the common denominator of men of achievement, may rub the humble and self-effacing the wrong way a bit, but without it no great deeds were ever done. I learned that egotism was often a vital and necessary concomitant to great accomplishment.

Here, twenty years' later, you may encounter evidences of my own but at least it has had two decades of hibernation.

By this time, the realization in Washington that the O.S.S. would welcome unorthodox weapons and strategies made General Donovan the man to whose desk all such ideas gravitated. He shunted them to me for evaluation, and also, I suspected, to get many of the wild-eyed enthusiasts off his neck. Every one had to be given honest consideration, as we never knew when the "genius idea" might arrive, nor from what unlikely source.

Perhaps the strangest venture we were called upon to pursue was the bat idea. One man got the ear of Eleanor Roosevelt with the following idea. Everyone knew the Japanese homes were made of paper and cardboard, highly inflammable. In our Carlsbad Caverns existed millions of bats, a great, unused national asset. Bats go to sleep (hibernate) when chilled. In such a comatose state, load the bats into a U.S. submarine and release them at dawn off the Japanese coast. Each little bat will have a small incendiary bomb clamped to its back. Each bomb will have a time-delay mechanism so it will ignite only when the bat has flown to the shade of the eaves of millions of Japanese homes. With a mysterious terror their cities will burn down.

I called in a bat expert who declared that our Carlsbad bats were a species that lived only in caves that they would die rather than go under anyone's eaves. My attempts to veto the project were killed by higher authority. The batologist's opinion was cavalierly brushed aside, and the distinguished Dr. Louis Feiser of Harvard was commissioned to make the minute bat incendiaries.

An abandoned mining town out West was selected by an Air Corps general for tests, as it was all made of dried wood and thus simulated a Japanese community. A truckload of Carlsbad bats' was sent overland to arrive refrigerated and ready for the little bombs to be soldered to their hibernated bodies. When the van arrived and the doors were opened, all the bats flew out in a great cloud, the refrigeration having somehow failed. They left at full speed, no doubt in search of a cave.

For the second attempt to prove the Bat Project right or wrong, Dr. Feiser had set up a soldering shop in an old shed, with gas burners and little clamps to hold the bats. The bats arrived, well inactivated this time. The incendiaries were all soldered in place and the lot was packed into the bomb bay of a plane and released over the abandoned town.

Alas, the bats were unable to take wing at the airplane speed and they ignobly fell to earth like so many stones. The town did burn up magnificently, however. Some person doing the soldering had carelessly left a Bunsen burner going under a wooden shelf and the whole town was a mass of flames. This ended the Invasion by Bats, a Die Fledermaus Farce if there ever was one.

Perhaps word of the Bat Project stimulated a visit from a feline expert whose name I happily forget. His idea started (as they all did) with incontestable facts. Everyone knows that a cat always lands on her feet. Everyone knows that a cat hates water. Ha! here we have the idea that will help win the war. Simply sling a cat, feet down, in a harness below an aerial bomb with mechanism so set that the cat's every move will guide the vanes of the free-falling bomb. An enemy war ship, like the Von Tirpitz, hiding in a Norwegian fjord is our target. Cat-guided bomb is away! Cat sees expanse of hated water and one area of dry land (the battleship) . Cat guides bomb to the Von Tirpitz and cat becomes a hero like Sidney Carton. It's a far, far better thing for a cat to do.

The idea had the enthusiastic support of a U.S. Senator who, alas, was Chairman of the Appropriations Committee and no argument from O.S.S. could squelch it. We had to drop a cat in a harness to prove the animal became unconscious and ineffective in the first fifty feet of fall, and had no control of the bomb's direction, even if kitty tried.

CAMOUFLAGE

As the number of secret agents sent into enemy lands by the O.S.S. increased, the invention and production of camouflaged items became an important activity. Disguised articles and concealed receptacles to keep messages secure from enemy inspectors, self-defense weapons such as stilettos and one-shot miniature guns were our first products. I must add that a secret place to keep the "K" tablets, which were so fatal that a moment in the mouth would save, by instant death, the agony of torture and the shame of disclosure, was our first grim problem.

Since Gillette razors were everywhere in Europe, I sent an engineer to the company's factory in Boston. That company worked out a handle so cleverly made that it was identical with their standard holder, yet, if you knew how -to operate the instrument, it at once became a capacious hollow receptacle. I do not recall a single case where the Nazis discovered this deception.

Buttons on clothing were a favorite camouflage container. The top and base of the button were separated and a surprisingly commodious space was hollowed out. At first the top of the button was made to unscrew by turning to the left that is, counter-clockwise. But the Germans soon found out about it, and all buttons on a suspected person's clothing were stoutly tested by turning them that way. If any one opened up, the Gestapo needed no further evidence to convict the spy.

We were about to abandon the item when one of my group suggested reversing the thread, so that twisting or turning to the left only served to tighten the assembly. Right up to Germany's surrender we never learned of one instance of this simplest of deceptions being discovered by enemy inspectors or police. Often such utterly uninvolved stratagems as that were more valuable than highly complicated ones. The German mind was not too flexible.

Cigarette lighters' were easily altered to give them sections and areas for concealment. I soon stopped this activity, however, because whether they were trick lighters or perfectly normal ones, they were usually appropriated by police and inspectors everywhere. We not only lost the lighter, but also any message it contained.

Women's accessories offered a far wider source of concealment. It is easy to melt a lipstick, pour the molten wax around the message tube and recast it in its original shape. All containers for the female form divine become themselves available as concealment areas. Steels in corsets and foundation garments can be deadly stilettos provided they don't work loose and stab the operator in a critical area.

We are, as it happens, considering a still sensitive area of activity in camouflage, so the reader's imagination will have to supply the devices omitted from this recitation. One which we can discuss is coal. A lump of coal is tossed onto a passing freight car or truck loaded with coal. It looks like all the other lumps, but this particular one contains a heat- sensitive detonator in its center and is, in fact, a camouflaged shape made entirely of a powerfully high explosive. Its purpose is to be shoveled into a firebox in a power-plant boiler, a locomotive or, in fact, wherever coal is burned. When hot enough, this lump of mock coal will explode with sufficient violence to open up the plates of any boiler. The boiling water, rushing down on the hot grates, will warp them beyond repair. Thus the enemy is deprived of whatever facility the explosive coal attacks.

In our ignorance, we assumed that soft coal was soft coal and it all looked very simple, with mass production possibilities of molding the camouflaged lumps. How little we knew! The coal from the Ruhr is recognizably different from the soft coal from Poland, Thuringia, Czechoslovakia or any other mining region. When I asked our agents to obtain, label and air-express lumps of coal from each area to me, I'm sure they felt I was off my rocker. But they came, nevertheless, and each was duplicated with the exact gloss, the same planes of cleavage and the same weathering characteristics, when it would be laid among the authentic lumps of coal in a railway coal- car, on a coal pile, or on a locomotive coal tender.

How many boilers were ruined, how seriously the Nazi economy was affected, we never knew. That frustration is not unusual in intelligence work, and we learned to go on to something else and not waste our time, money and energy trying to check up on each end result. In this case the futility of doing so is self-evident. Our agent gives the lump of ex plosive coal to a member of the resistance group who places it on a pile of coal wherever and whenever he can. That's it. From there on it's wholly up to the fates which govern boilers and fireboxes or else, ridiculously, the enemy organizes a Department of Lump Inspectors.

The camouflage of a human being is the most challenging of all. In England I was told that a prominent Dutchman desperately wanted to be parachuted into Holland to help direct the underground movement there. He was so well- known and so outstanding in his appearance that discovery would have resulted in certain death. At a conference in London one of the group suggested that his great crop of black hair be shaved off and he be given a special chemical which would maintain baldness. His striking blue-black eyes had to be changed somehow, so I suggested contact lenses into which were made a pale, washed-out, gray iris. Knowing something about shoemaking, I ventured the thought that if one of his shoes was built up internally, he would have to walk with a slight limp. At least his gait and posture would be altered beyond recognition. I heard that, so camouflaged and pro vided with counterfeit papers, ration coupons, identification cards and all other necessary documentation, he was smuggled into Holland.

Camouflage is but one form of deception, and just as the O.S.S. sought for all possible information concerning our enemies, it also fed them many sorts of plausible falsehoods. We felt sure that the Japanese respected our inventiveness and our technical capability, so we wove many a tangled web on that subject. Hawaii was known to have clandestine Japanese radio transmitters on the islands, so it was at Honolulu, especially, that we planted our stories. Loud-mouthed drinkers blurted out exciting but untrue intelligence information in the bar at the Officer's Mess, with confederates hushing them up ineffectually. The bartender, known to be a rabid Japanese sympathizer, was allowed to overhear and transmit his findings.

Ireland, being neutral, was full of blonde, blue-eyed Ger man agents. The lobby of the Glentworth Hotel in Limerick became an ideal spot to feed deceits to the Nazis, because scientists and military personnel, returning from Britain, were so often guests there awaiting the Atlantic fogs to lift. The fine colleen on the hotel switchboard kept us informed of the many telephone calls the German agents put through to their embassy in Dublin.

Those of us in scientific work were always aware that some absurd story we invented for enemy consumption, so they would waste their skilled personnel on its verification, might well become a reality next year, so rapid is progress in science. In that event, our men disseminating the Jules Verne tale might be accused of a horrible breach of security, but that was the risk of the game and we boldly assumed it. I am truly thankful that no "death ray" was discovered until very recently, as we used that hardy perennial to good effect, again and again.

A most important field of deception and concealment concerned the landing of spies and saboteurs on enemy-occupied coastlines, and at the exact spot where he or she would be met by friendly personnel from the underground organizations. This proved to be a most difficult problem for us to solve. Such landings had to be made on nights with no moon. Early in the war fixed lights and blinkers were used on the shore to mark the rendezvous, but enemy airplanes and surface vessels often spotted them. Many an agent and his reception committee of resistance fighters were surrounded, picked up and summarily shot.

The ideal shore signal to guide the O.S.S. agent to the selected place was an ultra-violet beacon. A small UV bulb, powered by a single dry-cell battery, would flash intermittently for almost a year. The difficulty arose when we found that even a person with superior eyesight could pick out the ultra-violet signal in the blackness of night only from a distressingly short range. I could not detect it at all beyond one hundred feet. I was about to abandon the UV system of landing signal as worthless, when a surgeon specializing in cataract removals told me by chance that patients who had undergone that operation had extraordinary sensitivity to ultra-violet light. We asked for volunteers and tested several people whose cataracts had been removed. To our astonishment we found that they could see and pinpoint the little, flashing ultra violet light from over a mile away, whereas the rest of us could see nothing but inky blackness.

Brave, elderly people, so selected, guided our operators infallibly to these normally invisible rendezvous. I am certain the Germans and the Japanese never had the faintest idea of how it was done.

THE LETHBRIDGE REPORT

Few officers, even those with great responsibility in the conduct of the war, knew of The Lethbridge Report. It ranks along with the Manhattan Project (MED) as one of the best kept secrets of the war.

The Chemical Corps of the Army had developed a series of gases for use on limited objectives. The mustard gases and their derivatives had been replaced by nerve gases. These organic phosphates create casualties before the senses can de tect them. Called "Sarin" or "GB," they are most effective in local tactical use.

Two nations refused, years ago, to sign that part of the Geneva Convention banning the use of gas as a weapon in warfare; these two nations could, therefore, use it legally. They were the United States and Japan. In June of 1944 the next military objective in the campaign against Japan was the volcanic cone called Iwo Jima. Someone in the Joint Chiefs of Staff asked the British liaison for advice. The result was the Lethbridge Report.

What it recommended was i) jamming the Iwo Jima radio transmitter; 2) with our fleet standing at optimum range (about five miles) , soak the little island with gas shells; and 3) change the yellow banding of the shells so even the gunners would never know they had fired other than high explosive shells, a few of which were to be interspersed with the gas.

After a short time, when natural decontamination had made the island safe, our forces were to land and without a single casualty capture a vital stepping-stone to Tokyo.

The Lethbridge Report contained a map of Two Jima showing the only beach on which troops could land. It was small and, said the report, it was checker-boarded. By that it was meant that each square yard could receive a shell from the fortifications above. No cover no hiding place. Estimated casualties by such orthodox assault-2 3,000 men.

I was told that this hush-hush plan had been approved in secret by the Joint Chiefs' and that it only required "Theatre Commander Approval," namely Admiral Chester W. Nimitz. Our chief in Hawaii, Commander Davis Hallowel asked me to fly out there. The Sunday before I was to leave- June 25, 1944 I had lunch at the Chevy Chase Club outside Washington with Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal. He gave me verbal messages for Admiral Nimitz and said, "You know, if Nimitz continues to show the genius he has so far demonstrated, he'll end this war as the greatest naval commander since Horatio Nelson”

As I flew to San Francisco, the Democratic Convention was in full swing. Amid a pandemonium of cheers, Franklin D. Roosevelt was nominated for a fourth term as President. No one seemed to be concerned with the identity of his running mate, but we in O.S.S. cared. We had seen a report from the Lahey Clinic in Boston whose doctors, after examining the President, stated that he would not survive another term. One could not share such information. Our mission was entirely military, not civilian. So off I went to the Pacific Theatre.

That flight from Treasure Island in San Francisco to Pearl Harbor was memorable, to put it mildly. The pilot of the flying boat happened to be a man I had flown with before and he recognized me. He took me aside before we were air borne and said, "Lovell, I'm going to trust you with some thing that would cost me my rating. These antique old planes they give us on this long run over the ocean are really in terrible shape. We have a planeload of admirals this afternoon, and tonight I'm going to put on a show so we'll have decent equipment on this Pearl Harbor run. Whatever happens don't be upset” I thanked him and said I wouldn't.

In the middle of the night our pilot barked over the intercom, "Number One port engine is failing, gentlemen. I'm switching it off." At once we flew on a thirty degree cant. The intercom spoke again. 'We're in for some more trouble with this old flying boat. I'm getting pretty bad vibration." Aeronautics is outside my ken, but I vaguely recalled being told that, if you change the pitch of your propellers on a four- engine plane just right, you can set up a devastating vibration. Whatever our demon pilot did, the result was an aircraft that shook from stem to stern in a petrifying manner.

Again the intercom. "We're going to climb all we can and then do a power dive to try to get our dead engine firing. Thank you”

I wondered if what was intended to scare Navy brass into ordering better planes had turned into the real thing. That power dive was never forgotten by anyone aboard. Finally, when we all felt we would dive straight into the black Pacific Ocean, the engine caught on and stayed firing. Maybe our pilot simply threw on the ignition, but my relief was so great I neither knew nor cared. We were an utterly exhausted lot as we taxied on the water at Hickam Field. On every hand, the navy officers were saying to me and to each other that these obsolete flying boats must be scrapped and proper planes be ordered for the Hawaiian run. That was the last use of the flying boats by the Navy on that long over-water course. Despite my tip-off, I had died the coward's thousand deaths, along with all the other passengers.

In Admiral Nimitz' office, I used as my introduction a current copy of Time, which had his picture on the cover. I said to him, '1 had lunch with Secretary Forrestal two days ago. He told me, "If you, Admiral, continue your fine work, you'll end this war as the greatest naval commander since Horatio Nelson!' "

Admiral Nimitz threw his head down on his desk in a mock sob. I was amazed. He looked up with a twinkle in his blue eyes and cried out, "Oh my God! Only since Nelson?"

Forrestal, whom I found to have absolutely no sense of humor, commanded this naval genius with a priceless sense of it a man who knew how to fend off and joke about a great but embarrassing compliment, however sincere and deserved.

Much later, Admiral Nimitz referred to the Nelson comparison by telling me, "There's one way I resemble him . . . both of us get awfully seasick the first few days at sea. Do you?"

I had to boast that I had never been seasick.

"That's quite a boast, Lovel."

We discussed the Lethbridge Report. The enormous casualties estimate impressed him, but not decisively. When I pointed out that for twenty-eight years the Japanese had built tunnels and poured concrete until Iwo was stronger than Gibraltar; that an orthodox shelling would give us an island of rubble, whereas gas would allow all their labor to be employed in defense of the island fort then he was for it, I thought.

I explained the O.S.S. strategy. The Japanese had a great fear that America was creating new weapons to destroy them. We could use that to deceive them. Have Admiral Halsey radio Admiral Nimitz, using a code we knew they had "broken” Have him say our new death ray was tried out on such and such an uninhabited island with tethered animals on it. All animals died instantly at a range of ten miles, but sorry to report eighty-five natives living on a small island directly in line with this test were all killed, although twenty miles behind the test island.

Then jam the Iwo Jima radio so they cannot report. Then the shells of gas and ultimately our landing and capture of Iwo. Tokyo would most certainly attribute the radio silence to the new American death ray.

When my orders' came through to return to Washing ton, instead of air travel they read "Fox 13." There I reported to Captain D. E. Wilcox of the baby flat-top, Thetis' Bay CVE 90. He assigned me to the navigator's cabin-a little cubicle high up on the "island” The navigator went below and there I swayed and rocked across the Pacific doing an in credible arc that would make a porpoise seasick. Capt. Wilcox was to report how soon I had mal de mer. I didn't.

Half way to California I was called to the "bridge where a "pip" was showing on the iconoscope.

"It's a Jap sub” Capt. Wilcox said. "It's a shame we have only one gun and that's aft on the fantail. Every time we maneuver to get it to bear, the damned sub eludes us, then picks us up a bit later."

It was a foggy gray morning. I knew very little about radar or sonar, so I looked over the side of the small bridge into the sea where we might all very well be in a short while. A yellow mass rose out of the water. I called Capt. Wilcox away from the hypnotic "pip" on the instrument. "It's a whale," I said, pointing.

That night they presented me with a "Plankowner's Cer tificate." "The lesson," said the too generous Capt. Wilcox, "was not to rely so goddam much on instruments and to use our eyes once in awhile. If we'd reported that we fired on a whale, we'd been the laughing stock of Alameda."

In Washington I was told that the Lethbridge Report, approved on all sides, had gone to the White House. It had been returned, "All prior endorsements denied Franklin D. Roosevelt, Commander-in-Chief ."

Each reader will have his own opinion about whether this denial of the use of gas was wise or not

I do know that the most famous picture taken in the war shows the flag-raising on Mount Surabachi at Iwo Jima. It's an inspiring photo, the men struggling to put Old Glory erect and straight, the wind whipping the time-honored stars and stripes. I have seen usually unemotional men catch their breath as they gaze on that photograph. I, too, catch my breath. I think of 20,000 American casualties on Iwo Jima.

I have written that I found Secretary Forrestal to have had no sense of humor. Opinions vary as to how essential this quality is in a great wartime administrator. Perhaps it cannot exist in the personality of a successful stockbroker, most of whom I suspect are manic depressives or incurable Pollyanna’s.

At Pearl Harbor Headquarters, Admiral Forrest Sherman told me the Navy joke at Leyte. It seems that at one side of the island ran a deep gut or passage with a small rocky islet beyond. Here Leyte ended in a rather steep cliff down to the ocean a natural place for the Army to construct their latrines and multiple Chic Sales seats. With the thoroughness of Army routine at a certain time every morning, here were seated, said the Admiral, a long line of G.I/s whose peristaltic routine was thereby expedited.

At that precise time a Navy Destroyer Escort, barely able to negotiate the narrow passage, came high-balling through at absolute top speed. Swoosh and she was through, but her wake was tremendous and the unfortunate soldiers, concentrating on nature's oldest problem, found themselves in water up to their armpits. The Navy men called it "The Navy Douche'' and held it to be both sanitary and timely.

When I reported to Secretary Forrestal on my visit to Admiral Nimitz, I told him the verbal messages entrusted to me. I then said, "The favorite joke in the P.O.A. (Pacific Ocean Area) is the Leyte one." I fear I laughed several times in the telling. Not so Secretary Forrestal. He called for his aide, Captain John Gingrich. "Take an order to CINCPOA (Commander in Chief Pacific Ocean Area) Stop repeat stop Navy insult to Army comrades at Leyte so-called Navy Douche. Report when order executed”.

When discussing gas warfare, there's always the question raised, why wasn't it used in World War II? Doesn't the fact that neither side employed it prove that where two warring nations have a powerful weapon in equal strength, then neither will use it? Doesn't it have a parallel in the present nuclear bomb stalemate where both the USSR and the USA can destroy each other, so neither will?

Gas was withheld neither because of humanitarian reasons or because we feared retaliation. Let's dismiss the argument that gas was not employed because it was too inhumane and horrible. The fact is, the sole business of war is to kill, slaughter, maim and incapacitate human beings. Once war is declared, to reason is treason. Start killing and a soldier who kills twenty-eight Germans is rewarded twenty-eight fold over the soldier who kills only one. And, oddly enough, gas war fare need not kill your enemy. It may be far smarter to use a gas that bewilders him so that, for an hour or more, he simply can't think. Perhaps best of all would be to employ a gas which completely although temporarily removes the thin veneer of civilization which overlays the troglodyte in all of us. For the first time since Cain killed Abel this would make warfare highly amusing. Khrushchev and his shoe-banging would be trivial compared to what most private soldiers would do to their officer corps.

We knew the Germans had large stores of Gas Blau, the nerve gas that reacts with cholinesterase to disrupt bodily nerve messages. Symptoms proceed from vomiting to convulsions and death. Why didn't Hitler use it at the Normandy landings, June 6, 1944?

At the time of the War Trials at Nuremberg, General Donovan was asked to submit questions to the German leaders, although the O.S.S. no longer existed. Gen. Donovan asked me if I had any ideas. I suggested "Why no nerve gas at Normandy?'' and directed it to Marshal Goering. The transcript of the interview, which was made, I believe, two days before he crunched the cyanide capsule that ended his fantastic life, can be paraphrased as follows:

Q. We know you had Gas Blau which would have stopped the Normandy invasion. Why didn't you use it?

A. Die Pferde (the horses) .

Q. What have horses to do with it?

A. Everything. A horse lies down in the shafts or between the thills as soon as his breathing is restricted. We never have had a gas mask a horse would tolerate.

Q. What has that to do with Normandy?

A. We did not have enough gasoline to adequately supply the German Air Force and the Panzer Divisions, so we used horse transport in all operations. You must have known that the first thing we did in Poland, France, everywhere, was to seize the horses. All our materiel was horse-drawn. Had we used gas you would have retaliated and you would have instantly immobilized us.

Q. Was it that serious, Marshal?

A. I tell you, you would have won the war years ago if you had used gas not on our soldiers, but on our transportation system. Your intelligence men are asses!

SCHEMES THAT FAILED TO WORK

It was my policy to consider any method whatever that might aid the war, however unorthodox or untried. In the very nature of such thinking it became obvious that we would have failures. It also was obvious that the orthodox military mind would likely be opposed to any idea not taught at West Point or Annapolis.

The basic philosophy behind the O.S.S. attitude was that one subtle, deceptive plan, if successful, was worth a hundred routine military decisions. American wits and inventiveness were applied to both implementing the resistance groups in all occupied countries and, hopefully, to make a decisive stroke beyond the purview or technique of standard warfare.

Some problems of great importance, where the solution would have had inestimable value, could not be answered. Such a problem was named "Simultaneous Events” Every underground organization from Norway to Italy asked for it. The idea was to produce a switch or other means of activating a charge of high explosives, which would be unaffected by any outside source except an air raid.

With such a device the operator in, say, a German city could secretly plant his charge of explosives at any worthwhile site, such as a German-controlled communication center, a power plant, a dam or an ammunition dump. The operator's safety would be insured, as nothing would happen until an Allied air raid took place. At that time the target would blow up and the blast would be blamed on the airplane bombings. This would furnish an ideal alibi for the underground operator, as he never could be associated in any way with enemy raids. Also, he could pinpoint the damage to the installations where it would hurt the Germans the most.

I put the finest brains of the O.S.R.D. on this project. We approached it from two angles; one was the ground shock of a raid, the other a chorded radio signal to be sent from one of the bombers. If the ground tremor could be made to activate the planted explosion, it would be the simpler solution, as the radio signal necessitated an antenna which would be difficult to conceal.

Nothing we invented ever passed our user tests and trials. The ground shock devices would detonate prematurely from a falling wall or a passing heavy truck. The radio signal de pended on dry cell batteries for reception, as well as an objectionable antenna. When Germany surrendered we were still working on "Simultaneous Events."

In wartime, every change in the world scene presents to a group of secret warriors like ours in the O.S.S. a chance to reexamine and reappraise the situation. We asked, "what new points of vulnerability are now exposed? What avenues of attack are newly opened, what old ones must be instantly abandoned?"

I had repeatedly pointed out in O.S.S. staff meetings the often-forgotten fact that the great advantage a democracy possessed over any dictatorship was the government's relative invulnerability, as opposed to the terrific risks inherent in any one-man rule. I said, "Lop off the head and the body falls."

With Hitler and Mussolini dead it would be safe to predict chaos or, at the very least, a murderous scramble for their empty chairs. A democracy, on the other hand, has its succession legally established and usually functions about as well when its titular head is dead or incapacitated. The United States did not collapse after the assassination of Lincoln or Garfield or McKinley. It is a result, I hold, of a stable two- party system.

Contrast this with Alexander's empire after his death, the turmoil in Rome after Caesar's assassination or France after Napoleon. Another way of comparing the two types of society is to say that a democracy is a pyramid structure with its broad, solid base in the grass-roots. Dictatorship is an inverted pyramid, teetering on its apex and thus unstable, temporary and vulnerable.

One day we learned from agents that Hitler and Mussolini were to have a war conference at the Brenner Pass. Here was a tremendous exposure of the vulnerable apex. At an O.S.S. meeting, the S.O. (Subversive Operations) group suggested, "Let us parachute a cadre of our toughest men into the area and shoot up the bastards! Sure, it'll be a suicide operation, but that's what we're organized to carry out"

When it came my turn, General Donovan asked, "How would Professor Moriarty capitalize on this situation?" I said, "I propose an attack which they cannot anticipate. They'll meet in the conference room of an inn or a hotel. If we can have one operator for five minutes or less in that room, just before they gather there, that is really all we need”

There were many murmurs of none-too-polite skepticism, but General Donovan said, "Gentlemen, hear Professor Moriarty out, if you please. Now what do you propose to have your one man do in this conference room?"

I said, "I suggest that he bring a vase filled with cut flowers in water, and that he place it on the conference table or nearby."

"So what?" said a general on the O.S.S. staff. He was a West Pointer and they hadn't taught dirty tricks at his trade school.

"In this janitor's hand is a capsule containing liquid nitrogen-mustard gas. It's a new chemical derivative which has no odor whatever, is colorless and floats on water. I have it available at my laboratory.

"As our man places the big bouquet on the conference table, he crushes the capsule and drops it in between the flowers. An invisible, oily film spreads over the water in the dish and starts vaporizing. Our man is safely out and I think he should disappear into Switzerland if possible."

"Forget our agent," said the general. "What happens to the men at the conference?"

"Well, if they are in that room for twenty minutes, the Invisible gas will have the peculiar property of affecting their bodies through the naked eyeballs. Everyone in that room will be permanently blinded. The optic nerve will be atrophied and never function again. A blind leader can't continue the war at least I don't believe he can."

Three or four people started talking at once. I said,. "There's a big pay-off possible, if it is done”

'What's that, Professor?"

"Let's be completely bold in capitalizing on the event If the Pope in Rome would issue a Papal Bull or whatever is appropriate, it might read something like this:

'My children, God in His 1 infinite wisdom has stricken your leaders blind. His sixth Commandment is Thou Shalt Not Kill. This blindness of your leaders is a warning that you should lay down your arms and return to the ways of peace."

1 turned to General Donovan and asked, "General, this may appear to be a suggestion of hypocrisy that the Pope is asked to practice, but a great number of the German and Italian fighting forces are Roman Catholics. They will heed Pius XII. If he can use his high office to stop this killing, isn't he advancing the cause of Christianity more than any man on earth?"

General Donovan said, "Hm" and looked out the window in that way he had of weighing a sensitive issue.

"I'll see my friend about that idea, Professor Moriarty," he said, mentioning the name of a high church official.

He turned to the group with the same sort of anticipatory smile Groucho Marx has when he is about to launch a wise crack.

"You see, Gentlemen," he said, "why we have so depraved an idea man as Professor Moriarty on the staff! If he had been born a German I wouldn't give ten cents for Franklin Roosevelt's life."

I couldn't resist it. "But General," I said, "I was born a Cape Cod Republican."

"You see?" said Wild Bill. "A villain, a scientific thug with a sense of humor. He knows that I'm a Republican, too, so it's a double-edged pleasantry”

The Brenner Pass idea deserves only a few more words. I can say that the German security service showed again that clever (too clever) thinking which so many times saved the life of der Fiihrer. With all preparations made for the conference as and when publicized, the two leaders, Hitler and Mussolini, met elsewhere. At the very last minute they changed the date as well. I was told they met in Hitler's private railroad car with a ring of S.S. troops thrown tightly around it.

The nitrogen mustard gas capsule was never crushed, and the CXS.S. had this time failed to change the course of history. But we had tried and that thinking, by itself, was a new way for America to wage a war. I submit it as more intelligent by far than killing a man in the enemy's uniform, a man unknown to you, set on killing you only because he is so ordered, but without power or responsibility. You win the game much faster if you checkmate the King and treat the pawns as the relatively unimportant nuisances they are. They always surrender when told to do so.

My favorite attack on Adolf Hitler was a glandular approach. America's top diagnosticians and gland experts agreed with me that he was definitely close to the male-female line. His poor emotional control, his violent passions, his selection of companions like Roehm, all led me to feel that a push to the female side might do wonders. The hope was that his moustache would fall off and his voice become soprano.

Hitler was a vegetarian. At Berchtesgaden, the vegetable garden that supplied his melodramatic Eagle's Nest on the rocky peak had to have gardeners. A plan to get a man there, or an anti-Nazi workman, was approved. I supplied female sex hormones and, just for variety's sake, now and then a carbamate or other quietus medication, all to be injected into der Fuhrer's carrots, beets or whatever went up to his larder.

Since he survived, I can only assume that the gardener took our money and threw the syringes and medications into the nearest thicket. Either that or Hitler had a big turnover in his "tasters

I explored with specialists the theory that Hitler was an epileptic the petit mal type. The stories of his biting rugs might mean a catalepsis or epileptoid condition. Dr. Elmer Bartels, a famous authority on the ductless glands and a keen student of medical history, holds that Hitler, Napoleon, Julius Caesar and probably Alexander the Great were all epileptics. What is it about that disease that leads its victims to world conquest? We made a study of how to accelerate the disease or, conversely, overcome it and hopefully get Herr Schickel- gruber down to normalcy. Nothing came of it, but again we tried.

Another plan that failed was the brain child of Lieuten ant (j.g.) John M. Shaheen, later a Navy Captain. Shaheen was a fertile source of unorthodox ideas. His project was called "Campbell." It comprised a small boat operated by remote control and television. He took a Hacker craft, had it loaded with five tons of high explosive and equipped with triggers in the bow and contact firing devices around the gun wales.

This thirty-seven foot bomb was then disguised as a fishing; boat, like the hundreds of Japanese fishermen going into Japanese harbors each nightfall with their day's catch. John Shaheen was no man to stop with only the idea. A craft which duplicated Copenhagen fishing boats was built. The dummy fisherman at the tiller moved realistically. A condemned freighter, the S.S. San Pablo, was the target ship. Guided by the remote control operator., Shaheen's "Campbell" maneuvered around buoys and hit the San Pablo amidships. She sank by the stern and was under water in one minute and a half.

Armed with a fine moving picture of the whole operation Lt. Shaheen 7 Colonel Edward Bigelow of O.S.S. and myself made our presentation before Navy officers on Plans and Operations. It was obvious the Navy would have to carry the explosive craft to its enemy harbor entrance. At the end of a most convincing session, one veteran Admiral spoke up.

"It's ingenious but we won't buy it. It's certainly too dangerous as a deck load on any of our vessels, and we aren't going to risk a submarine to carry it. You get it to Tokyo harbor and our men will handle the remote controls from a Navy plane. Let us know when you have it off on its mission”

Colonel Bigelow said, "Johnny, all you have is a can of film and a big idea” And that was the end of "Campbell."

On one of his flying visits to Washington, Admiral Mil ton Miles came to see me. With him was Dr. Cecil Coggins, a Navy Captain, who was returning with "Mary" Miles to Chungking to teach in the Chinese School of Assassination and Sabotage under General Tai Li.

They wanted to furnish some poison or toxin to Chinese prostitutes, which these girls could employ against the high- ranking Japanese officers with whom they consorted in Peking, Shanghai and many other occupied Chinese cities. It was delicately explained to me that the poison had to be in a very clever form, almost invisible, as these Chinese girls, in the nature of their work, had little chance to conceal anything whatsoever.

We decided on botulinus toxin, that is, the inert poison developed by the botulinus bacterium. This was selected be cause it is a natural toxin, often found in vegetables, sausages and other foodstuffs which are inadequately cooked. It is so deadly that housewives tasting string beans put up by the cold pack methods have been instantly killed by eating a single bean. Botulism would be likely to divert suspicion from the Chinese hostesses.

Our bacteriological consultants suggested the virulent toxin be encased in a gelatin capsule. The lethal dose was so infinitesimally small that gelatin coating and all, it was less than the size of the head of a common pin.

Instructions were to wet the minute speck and stick it back of the ear or in the hair of the head. When needed, it was to be detached and dropped into a drink or a serving of soft food, leaving no evidence of unnatural additives or tampering.

We supplied these deadly specks to Admiral Miles through Dr. Coggins. Admiral Miles had arranged with me that, if the operations' were successful, I would be advised by radio that the "tea gardens were in bloom” If it failed, then the tea gardens were not flowering.

Some time later the radio message was received by me and, "no flowers at all” I assumed that the botulinus toxin had somehow lost its potency, so I abandoned the project forthwith. Only much later did I get the true story. The Navy detail at Chungking took nothing for granted, so they administered the little gelatin pills to donkeys. Nothing happened, consequently they reasoned that the toxin was harmless. They didn't know that donkeys are one of the few living creatures immune to botulism. Poor Lotus Blossom.

HYPNOTISM

In the O.S.S. we were anxious to know if we could use posthypnotic suggestion as one of our stratagems. Would it work? I asked two of the most famous psychiatrists in the country about it and had them come to O.S.S. headquarters for a thorough discussion of the subject

If we could repeatedly hypnotize a German prisoner of war, learn that his loved ones were being persecuted by Heydrich or the Gestapo and then through hypnotism stimulate and activate that sore spot, something might be accomplished. On my favorite thesis that, if you cut off the head, the body falls, we hoped to so indoctrinate such a German, post-hypnotically, that, if we smuggled him into Berlin or Berchtes-garden, he would assassinate Hitler in that posthypnotic state, being under a compulsion that might not be denied.

Both the Doctor brothers Karl and William Menninger and Doctor Lawrence S. Kubie, to whom I referred the scheme, hedged on it.

"There is no evidence” the Menningers said, "that supports posthypnotic acts, especially where the individual's mores or morals produce the slightest conflict within him. A man to whom murder is repugnant and immoral cannot be made to override that personal tabu."

Dr. Kubie said, "If your German prisoner-of-war has adequate and logical reasons to kill Hitler, Heydrich or any one else you don't need hypnotism to incite or motivate him. If he hasn't, I am skeptical that it will accomplish anything”

Thus advised by our best experts, I was understandably a bit cynical when Colonel Buxton invited me to meet a hypnotist in his office one who alleged he was a master of post- hypnotic suggestion.

I encountered a gentleman from South Carolina, whom I will call Mr. Yancey. He told us, "I have two soldiers at a nearby camp whom I have hypnotized frequently and know are fine subjects. Let me bring them to your office, Colonel Buxton, and I'll prove I can produce posthypnotic action."

So we met the next day. The two G.I.s were something out of Li'l Abner, I thought, right off some impoverished South Carolina farm. I suspected their Army issue shoes might be the first ones they ever wore.

Mr. Yancey went into his act. He mesmerized the two soldiers to whom hypnotic sleep seemed to be but a small step away from their normal state. Once under the influence, Yancey told them, "It is now ten o'clock. At precisely eleven o'clock you will come again to this room. You will sit down and suddenly you'll have a terrible itch on the soles of both feet. You will take off your shoes and your socks because you just have to scratch that itch."

They were then dismissed, presumably to get in an hour with some cans of beer. At exactly eleven o'clock the hypnotist and cretins appeared. As an extra fillip Colonel Buxton had General John Magruder in his office. With a rather silly smirk the two G.Ls sat down. They looked at the office clock. It showed exactly eleven. Both young privates began to unlace their shoes and pull off their heavy wool socks. A certain aroma wafted its fetid way through the office.

Slowly, each now scratched and massaged his bony and scabrous feet. Both seemed to me to be pedal exhibitionists they obviously enjoyed waving these ugly, loathsome calloused monstrosities' about. It was the most necessary itch of all time.

"Here, here” admonished Colonel Buxton, "don't you see there's a General here? What's the matter with your feet?”

"Gotta scratch 'em-itch like hell."

"Oh," said hypnotist Yancey. "Put your socks and shoes back on and wait out in the hallway."

"Well, how about that!" Yancey asked when they had left.

"Horsefeathers," I observed none too scientifically. "What private in the whole U.S. Army wouldn't enjoy taking off his shoes and socks before a general when he knew in advance he couldn't be disciplined for so doing? It's a wonder they kept their pants on."

I have wanted very much to identify and to validate the story that circulated in O.S.S. after the Tehran conference, where Roosevelt and Churchill were at their ministries at one end of the city and the meetings with Stalin were held at the other end of town.

The agent whom I knew only as C-12 made an admirable showing during his training period. He passed the bridge test with high marks. A group of men were left beside a stream. A pile of lumber was situated there, and the problem was to fit the timbers together without anyone going to the other bank. No one piece of wood was long enough to span the water. When the exhibitionists had been quieted by their failure, C-12 calmly took charge. He ordered the planks sorted out as to size and finally got the job done. He scored 100 on the leadership test.

C-12 tore Baltimore apart on his final examination in January of 1943. He was left outside the city with no identification whatever, only a ten-dollar bill on his person. The problem was to bring back evidence that he had secured employment in a factory engaged in war work of a highly classified nature. To make the assignment doubly impossible the local police, the FBI and Army Intelligence were all told by anonymous phone calls that a German spy fitting his description would be at the Emerson Hotel at 9: 30 A.M.

He lost the inevitable "tail" by ducking across the street into the Equitable Building but, instead of the sure-to-be- caught technique of riding the elevators, C-12 ran down a stairway into the basement, through the boiler-room and out into an alley. He whipped through a basement and up into what proved to be the Western Union office on St. Paul Street. There he was given directions to the addresses he had checked off in the Baltimore Sun classified advertising section.

At the American Radiator Standard Sanitary plant, he filled out the forms; he was given a job on amphibious jeeps, to begin the next day. He promised to have his birth certificate mailed to the company in a few days.

It had been so easy for a potential saboteur to walk in off the street and, with a glib tongue and an honest face, stroll out with credentials of employment, that C-12 took on the Lever Brothers factory. The guard at the gate told him they made nitro-glycerin. When C-12 said to the personnel manager that he had worked for years for Procter and Gamble in California, the latter agreed to put him on the payroll as a roving operator in production. Left alone in the office (it was Saturday afternoon) , C-12 went on a tour of the entire plant. He stole an employment card to help pass his exam at the O.S.S. training camp.

By three that afternoon he had two jobs and seven hours to kill until he was to be picked up at the Emerson Hotel. He decided to manufacture some impressive credentials for himself. He had a passport photograph taken; he telephoned the Public Relations office of Army Intelligence in Washington and an obliging girl gave him the address of the Baltimore branch with the name of the Commanding Officer.

At the Third Service Command he hung up his coat and hat and told a junior officer he was the G-2 Inspector from Fort Banks. Explaining he had to type a most confidential letter, he was given some letterhead stationery and the use of a typewriter by a corporal. He went out to a store, bought a cheap identification card case, returned to the office and typed out and stapled his own identification card. He countersigned it (probably with the name of G-2 chief Major General George V. Strong) and took a taxi to Holabird Arsenal.

The faked paper was never questioned and he had a fine dinner at the Officer's Club. As he left he picked up an impressive looking briefcase and made his ten P.M. appointment just in time. C-12 passed his examination all too brilliantly. The papers in the briefcase he had lifted were classified "Secret” The two employment cards caused the unemployment of some personnel managers. The FBI, the Baltimore police and Washington's Army Intelligence were seething.

With sound reason they held that they had been grossly misused by this bunch of amateur spies, and that it was particularly galling to receive bogus tips on spies in training. C-12 went a bit too far or was a bit too brilliant, perhaps.

The story of what he did in the Middle East must be written by me with the reservation that I will make at the end. He was sent to Baghdad as an intelligence agent, I was told. Orders came for him to be parachuted into DohuL Speaking Kurdish was a great asset to C-12, but so was penicillin, streptomycin, and such simple anti-febriles as aspirin and codeine.

His life with the Kurdish tribesmen in the Zagros mountains is lost in obscurity, but it's easy to imagine, in the tradition of spy romances, his curing the chieftain's daughter of her fever or relieving the old boy himself of the arthritic pains in his joints.

One day and I follow the only story I was told word came that a small group of men had fallen from the sky into a valley a kilometer or so away. At the head of a Kurdish group, C-12 and the group rode over on ponies to meet them. Their German was an open book to him, but he used only a few French words by means of which he became their interpreter.

It was evident they planned to go to Tehran to assassinate Roosevelt and Churchill. They knew that these two men would have to drive the length of the town daily to meet at the Russian Ministry with Joseph Stalin. A heavy load they were carrying was identified by C-12 as trinitrotoluol, although the Germans called it paraffine de petrole.

When they said, in halting French, that they wanted a guide to take them to Sulaimaniya and Tehran, C-12 volunteered, but only for a fat fee in rials and dinars. It was the late autumn of 1943 and the mountainous trip was an ordeal. At last they came into the city. C-12 spoke Farsi and had no trouble renting a single-story house on Ferdousi Avenue, the road Roosevelt and Churchill had to travel each day to their conferences.

In the cellar they dug a tunnel under the street. In the center they placed their whole lot of T.N.T. - enough to blow up the entire area and Roosevelt and Churchill with it. Now everything was exactly as the German saboteurs had planned it, but where were the detonators: with which the high explosive had to be set off? C-12 knew where they were, as he had hidden them securely. A frantic search was made while C-12 slipped away.

Our O.S.S. operator reported at the U.S. Ministry at the north end of town beyond the Ferdousi statue and proved to the officials there that his flea-infested, billowy pants and tas- seled turban covered an authentic Colonel, AUS. A cadre of U.S. troops quietly surrounded the house with its tunnel under the street and removed the T.N.T. Roosevelt and Churchill were summarily moved across Tehran to the Russian headquarters. The Germans were shot. In a borrowed uniform, C-12, smart as all get-out, was given an appointment with the President, whose life he had surely saved. Dreams of the Congressional Medal of Honor went 'round in his head. A Presidential aide later told the story.

Instead of thanks or praise for a daring and successful rescue of two invaluable lives, he was verbally castigated. Why had he risked the life of his Commander-in-Chief, when the German assassins might have been arrested and executed the instant they crossed the Iranian frontier? "But on what grounds?" C-12 asked. "I had to wait until evidence was clearly established. Germany is not at war with Iran and I couldn't expose anything until the tunnel was dug and the explosives' placed in it."

A furious, unreasoned tirade followed. C-12 was abruptly ordered to return to Baghdad and to stay there. This was the tale as C-12 told it after the war was over.

Recently I located C-i2 under his present name, some thousands of miles away from my Boston home. I asked for permission to use his amazing and brave experience with or without the use of his real or "cover" name anyway, so long as this O.S.S. performance could be saved from the oblivion which often overtakes so many noble deeds.

He wrote me, "I was never in Kurdistan in my life. I was in Tehran months after the Roosevelt-Churchill-Stalin Conference. A German plot to assassinate someone? Never heard of it! You knew so many of our O.S.S. saboteurs and agents, Lovell. Think hard it was someone else, not I."

I have "thought hard" but I cannot deny what my ears have heard or reports my eyes have scanned. But why? What possible pressure from what conceivable source would induce a man, twenty years after the event, to deny a great act of courage? Did he report a fabrication which he now dares not have resurrected? Has he had a physical malaise that might explain his denying it? Yes, he has had a "shock" and perhaps the part of the brain in which memory is stored was badly affected.

Whatever the reason, my tale has no more confirmation than Horatio at the Bridge or Theseus and the Minotaur but I choose to regard it as one of the outstanding exploits in the history of O.S.S.

CHARACTERS

You would expect an agency such as the Office of Strategic Services to attract many unorthodox and rugged individuals and you would be absolutely right.

I never discovered a common denominator that distinguished O.S.S. personnel Love of high adventure would perhaps approach it, yet, on the other hand, many a timid man or woman, motivated by a deep patriotism or an equally deep hatred of the enemy, outperformed the boys of derring- do.

Our operators were picked to be either spies, gathering and transmitting intelligence, or they were selected as saboteurs, trained to weaken the enemy by deeds of violence. No person could be both. The spy or intelligence agent had to have a "cover “ story, a fictional life, so intimately a part of him by long practice and indoctrination that it became more true to him than the reality of his existence before he joined the O.S.S.

You will realize that a spy, infiltrated into an enemy country with a clandestine radio, adequate papers, ration cards, business letters, clothing, money and all other accessories needed to make him authentically the person he purported to be such a valuable agent could never risk or endanger his established status by any act of violence. His whole objective was information and no sabotage, however tempting or apparently safe, could be hazarded.

Quite different was the role played by the Subversive Operations people. Their training was in weapons, from simple incendiaries' to what steel members of a bridge would best cause its collapse if blown out. It was they who worked with the secret underground in Europe and Asia. It was their aim to bring to the subjugated peoples both leadership and our best technology. Perhaps of equal importance, it was these men who proved to all resistance groups that Uncle Sam, a continent away, had not abandoned them to the Nazis and the Japanese.

In both groups were hundreds of people, each of whom would supply the material for a story or a character study. Even though it now is two decades ago, I will limit myself to a few I knew. To publicize others might be a great disservice to them and to our country, as their value may not be at an end.

Those I mention and describe are no longer sensitive.

As the Office of Strategic Services expanded its activities in its unrehearsed and often unplanned way, it took into its ranks the zealots and the con men Colonel Ned Buxton had warned me about, but these were not difficult to identify and, where possible, to isolate. - Impossible to classify by any standards whatever were men, some in uniform, some civilians, who conformed to no pattern and each of whom made his own rules as he went along.

A big strapping Irishman named Sean O'Feeney was outstandingly original, daring and utterly undisciplined. You would recognize him more readily under his Hollywood name of John Ford, the great motion picture director. He was just under fifty years old, a Lieutenant Commander in the Navy. General Donovan recruited him to make moving pictures of O.S.S. projects and, knowing our director, Ford probably was told to do whatever his great talent in pictorial presentation indicated as needing to be done. He certainly carried out that broad instruction in the true Hollywood manner.

The first thing I knew, Ford had installed a complete, continuous motion picture film developing, printing and duplicating machine in the Department of Agriculture building. I believe it cost about a half-million dollars.

Proud of his Maine heritage, he made much of my Cape Cod origins as causing us to be almost neighbors. Independent as a hog on ice, he would disappear for periods of time and our 9 A.M. morning staff meetings would see him no more. After one long absence he was welcomed back as a hero.

General Donovan told us, "Commander Ford has a story to tell and some film to prove it" Ford took us to his projection room.

"I was flying to the China-Burma-India theater”. he said, "and the plane put down at Midway to re-fuel. Midway is a mere dot on the goddam Pacific Ocean, and we had a hell of a time finding it, what with our gas running low. I was bushed and took my cameras to some quarters assigned me for a nap. I barely made it when all hell broke loose a major Jap air raid on the island.

"All I thought of was getting some films, so I took every thing in sight from the Jap planes peeling off from formation to the big gasoline reserve tanks going up in a burst of fire. I kept the camera running until the raid was over. Here's what I got and an unbelievable film of a murderous assault from the air came on the screen, leaving us breathless.

The only way anyone could concentrate on picture-taking in that inferno was if he imagined it to be a Hollywood set instead of the real thing. Superb personal courage sub lime disregard of self one of the greatest films ever recorded, where life surpassed art.

Several weeks later I noticed that Ford again was missing at staff meetings. I mentioned it to Colonel Ned Buxton and asked, "Is he off on another trip?"

"No. He's over at his office in the Agriculture building like Achilles, sulking in his tent."

A few days later Ned said, "Stan, would you be willing to call on John Ford and see what's eating him? General Donovan asked me if you'd find out”.

Couldn't the Director find out? "Hasn't 109 (The General) ordered him to report at staff meetings?"

"Yes, but he ignores the order. Get over and see if you can straighten him out."

I went over and had a rather unhappy time with the "Great Director." "Those staff meetings are just crap and I've too much to do to waste time at them."

"Are you sure, John?" I asked, "it isn't because you haven't been cited for the Congressional Medal or some other ribbon to wear on your coat? That's Browning, you Peake's Island egotist”. and I stormed out.

I didn't see Ford again until the summer of 1944. There he was, beaming on one and all with another hero's introduction from General Donovan. Here is his story ? and I'm sure every word is true.

"I was ordered to photograph the Normandy landings and had my cameras in the bow of the ship I was assigned to. The morning I set them up there was just mist and fog ahead nothing to put on film. Then I looked behind us and there was the whole goddam invasion fleet. The bastards at Admiral Ramsay's office had put me in the lead ship the one that would bump every mine and beach obstacle the Nazis had planted.

"We got through by luck and here are the films” They were magnificent, an historical document of Operation Over lord, from the first soldier who landed to a secured beachhead. You'd forgive that insubordinate Hollywood director of any thing, everything.

He went on ? "I got to London pretty well pooped and remembered that my friend Alexander Korda had told me to bunk in with him any time in his London flat. Korda was out somewhere in the country, but his houseman put me up in the apartment. Along one whole side against the windows were hung the most magnificent stained glass windows- priceless early primitives Korda had bought in Spain before their Civil War could destroy them.

"Wham! The first of the V-1’s (buzz bombs) exploded a block away. I got the houseman to help and by working all night we managed to get those invaluable windows off their hangings and flat on the floor with all of Korda's oriental rugs and blankets wrapped around them.

"The next morning I was in the toilet at the far end of the apartment when a buzz-bomb hit in the mews outside the bathroom window. I went sailing the length of the flat and my face was cut in a dozen places. I slapped toilet paper on the injuries to stop the bleeding and went to an O.S.S. address to get it dressed.

"You can't fool us the receptionist said, 'that's no disguise. You're John Ford/ Toilet paper!

"I went down country to Korda's estate and with great pride told him, Tour flat's a mess, a V bomb hit the back alley, but you can thank me that I got those priceless stained glass windows all packed flat on the floor and they're safe and uninjured/

‘You damned fool, Ford! I had them insured against bomb damage for four times what I paid for them. Why did you think I left them hanging by the windows?' "

The last I knew of John Ford's O.S.S. activities was through a yarn that, in Cairo, I think it was Cairo, he saw a rather plump General, back-to, gray hair and General Donovan for sure. Whether a bit high I know not, but on impulse, the story went, John Ford let him have it with the full force of his boot, square in the stern. The General who picked him self up wasn't Donovan. Back to Hollywood, but a Navy Captain's retirement rank as a sop to a non-conforming genius.

The pleasantest, nicest man in the whole group of experts forming the Documentation Branch was a quiet little fellow whose last name I never knew. His first name was Jim, short for "Jim the Penman” Jim was a superb craftsman in his highly specialized field. His one mistake had been to forge the name of certain Treasury officials on engraved papers having a reasonable resemblance to U.S. Government bonds.

I will not deny that Jim was on leave from a Federal penitentiary, but I will say without equivocation that he was the foremost signature duplicator who ever has lived. On a ruled pad of paper he would dare you to write your name, "just the way you would on a check”. he'd say. He would study it a few minutes. In front of him were perhaps twenty pens in their holders; stub pens, coarse pens, even a quill. Next to the instruments was an imposing array of ink bottles, from a squat India Ink to every color and shade. At last he would dip the selected pen in the ink of his choice and dash off a signature one each on all the ruled lines above and be low the one you had written.

"How about five dollars? No, too much, well one dollar then that you can't pick out your own handwriting."

No one ever could do so and Jim would pocket the bill with a big infectious grin. "There's a fortune in just writing people's names” he would say.

The names Jim wrote were famous, in Germany and France, that is, but his nerve had to equal his art. The un signed document we had made would be a Directoire Generale de la Police Nationals of the Vichy Government or a Kemlcarte, Deutsches Reich or an Organization Todt Dienst- buch for "den Frontarbeiter" or an engraved letter of Der Staafssefcretar Im Reichsministeriurn fur Volksatrfldarung und Propaganda.

With a copy of the proper signature before him, Jim would write in the correct names with gusto. Any hesitation or retracing of the work would be fatal. Goebbels, Himmler, Hitler, Mussolini, Petain, Laval, Heydrich and Canaris were familiar jobs for Jim the Penman. I never recall one of his works of art that was questioned.

The more illegible the signature to be duplicated, the more accurately he seemed to forge it. "No two times exactly alike," he explained to me as he was writing Heinrich Him- mler's name on thirty or forty S.S. identification papers. "Any body making a photographic duplication is foolish” he said. "I have to feel I'm the person I'm impersonating, so to speak," and he chuckled as he dashed off the signatures, one after another. Somehow I couldn't imagine this mild man standing in for the head of the Gestapo.

I had warned all my group to always refer to Jim's artistry as "duplication" and never as "forgery." Jim was a very sensitive artist, and I knew he was bursting with pride to find an outlet for his great talent that did not entail a Secret Service man breathing down his neck.

I wish I knew what happened to Jim when the O.S.S. was suddenly disbanded. I had tried to induce the proper officials to have his patriotic illegality recognized in some way, but I never had a response. I was away when he left but there was a note of farewell I swear it was in my own hand writing with "thanks to an understanding boss."

I never heard from him again, but of course I never knew his right name.

One of the most intriguing and mysterious characters in General Donovan's whole war agency had the lilting Irish name of James St. Lawrence O'Toole. It fitted him so perfectly that the whole name had to be used, I felt, and never contracted to J. S. O’Toole. It had an appropriate rhythm like "King of the Mountain Range" or "Girl of the Golden West" one of those happily balanced phrases that come trip ping off the tongue.

And James St. Lawrence O’Toole came tripping into the O.S.S. to occupy a position no one else could possibly fill.

A rather slight, black-haired Irishman with a deceptively soft voice and bland manner; he had been born in an Irish castle. His brogue was as thick as the fog over Adair. From his earliest memories he had been surrounded with great works of such artists as Rembrandt, Van Dyck, Veraieer, Goya, Velas quez, Holbein and Constable.

Whether it was paternal indolence or good Irish whiskey or a run of unlucky horses or whatever, one by one the master pieces had to go to raise cash to maintain the indolence or whiskey or horses. As the last ones were taken down from the ancient walls and sent to Sir Joseph Duveen for auction, young James St. Lawrence OToole felt that he, too, should go. He surprised Duveen with his knowledge of art and was straightaway hired as a salesman. "After all”. he told me, "I saw them all from my crib and I never knew what bad art was until I went to London."

One night he told me, "I was in the Paris salon of Duveen's when I learned what was going to happen to the Mona Lisa. A rascal from the Left Bank it was, and he knowing what a fine copy had been made. They gave it to the oxygen to crack it a bit and the canvas was one of da Vinci's time with its unimportant oil painting removed by long soaking in the solvents you'd know so well as a chemist.

"So the deal to sell the original was made, they told me, for a sum that would stagger the whole world and then they stole it, as you know. What they delivered to their customer was the copy, of course, and why anyone would buy the world's most famous portrait he could never show, I'll never know. I suppose multimillionaires have their eccentricities.

"Months or was it a year later, the original pops up in a Paris art store, and everybody's happy except the fallen guy”

"You mean the fall guy?" I interjected.

" Tis all the same, Lovell Now down to business. I have my legitimate Irish passport and a fine Vatican passport which a Cardinal obtained for me. General Donovan also wants me to have an American and a French passport, as I may need them all wherever I'm going."

James St. Lawrence OToole was to be an S.I. man, I gathered, and Secret Intelligence men often disappeared from my sight with only a chance rumor of their assignment or duty coming back to my ears.

I never saw this charming, fascinating operator again, but I was told that during the war he was frequently inside Germany and the occupied countries. The James St. Lawrence O’Toole story grew almost beyond the bounds of credulity. He entered Germany, it was said, as an Irish sympathizer of the Nazi regime and an Anglophobe. The next installment said he had a commission from Marshal Hermann Goering to find great art works wherever hidden by the Dutch, Belgians and French. My following bit of the saga was that he bought them from the over-run nationals on threat of seizure, which would have meant no pay at all, and then had them delivered wherever Goering specified. He was sent scouting all over Europe for more to add to the Marshal's collection.

This may be all poppycock the extravagant extrapolation that often gives heroic casts to a relatively unimpressive tale but this I know, of all the O.S.S. operators I met, James St. Lawrence O'Toole was the one man I would deem capable of exactly that. God bless him for whatever intelligence he got back to the O.S.S., and the back of me hand to his enemies.

Beyond any doubt the toughest, deadliest hombre in the whole O.S.S. menagerie was Colonel Carl Eifler.

An enormous mass of a man with a temper as big as his hulk, he could fly an airplane, box better than most pros, and few marksmen with pistol or carbine ever have matched his record.

On the Mexican Border Patrol it was said he discouraged "wet backs" swimming the Rio Grande for illegal entry into the United States by shooting a perfect circle of live bullet splashes around a man's head.

The O.S.S. recruited him when he was captain of an infantry company. He in turn recruited John Coughlin and Ray Peers, both regular army officers. Carl Eifler organized the famous Detachment 101 whose exploits in Burma with the Kachin tribesmen have passed into legend.

Eifler started with twenty men. By the time Japan sur rendered, the Kachin Raiders (the outgrowth of Detachment 101) were officially credited with 5,447 Japanese troops killed and an estimated 10,000 wounded. The Kachin natives, in accomplishing this result, lost 70 lives and the O.S.S. fifteen men.

This gives no credit for the rescue of 217 airmen shot down behind enemy lines, nor the invaluable intelligence they constantly sent out by radio. Even "Vinegar Joe 77 Stilwell, who had little good to say of anyone, wrote, "Services rendered by 101 were of great value”

Coughlin and Peers were more responsible, by far, than Carl Eifler for their amazing success but, after all, Eifler picked them to do the job and he knew in his heart, I think, that he was an impresario, a one-man act and, like his Director, no great shakes as an organizer.

In August of 1943 General Donovan told me he was leaving to visit Detachment 101 behind the enemy lines in Burma. He said, "We'll fly to Calcutta and go from there in a Piper Cub two-seater." "We?" I asked. "Yes, Colonel Eifler and I he's a pilot you know."

When General Donovan returned, he told us in staff meeting that they flew at almost tree-top level to avoid Japanese fighter planes and anti-aircraft installations. Somehow in landing near the secret headquarters of Colonels Peers and Coughlin, something went awry and they sheared off their landing gear. From this pancake landing I can imagine the two stout men climbing out to meet the O.S.S. and Kachin reception committee as cool as if it were the National Airport in Washington, and not an obscure, dangerous hideout in an enemy jungle.

The repairs to the little plane were sketchy at best, but after an inspection of Detachment 101 they somehow took off and made it safely back to Calcutta. I think General Donovan enjoyed adventures with Carl Eifler largely because in him he found a fellow spirit who dared throw heavy hazards into the teeth of Fate and who, like himself, was completely devoid of fear.

The bravery that comprises knowing danger, feeling its clammy touch on your brow, yet by some inner compunction, forcing yourself to walk into it, to face it, is quite a different quality than the actual courting of thrills and hazards. I'm certain that these two men, General Donovan and Colonel Eifler, enjoyed personal risks. They would have easily made two of the Three Musketeers, but Carl Eifler was an uninhibited extrovert, whereas Wild Bill Donovan was the calm, relatively unemotional type to whom danger was only delectable when blended with duty.

There was nothing of the braggart or show-off in William J. Donovan. Somewhat less than that has to be said for Carl Eifler.

I had Colonel Eifler talk before my group. Never, even in the movies or on TV where shots are faked, have I seen such a demonstration of marksmanship. After hitting every bull's eye set up on the firing range, he brought down with a single shot a passing seagull as a sort of postscript, and I swear his head didn't move one inch to sight on the unfortunate migrant.

Such a flamboyant, virile person as Carl Eifler should be leading desperate charges in Viet Nam or the Casbah. I was told recently that he had taken holy orders and was training to be a minister or a priest. I hereby warn his future congregations to heed the admonitions from his pulpit, or I would expect a dum dum to zing down among the communicants. "The devil a monk would be”

The finances of the Office of Strategic Services were, like so much of its activity, shrouded in secrecy. Like all other O.S.S. branch chiefs, I had to submit an estimate of the needs of the department I supervised for each coming fiscal year. I then underwent an inquiry by our Inspector General to justify it in every detail. As soon as all estimates were approved by him, they were assembled and the total went over to the Bureau of the Budget, where, General Donovan told me, only the Director of the Budget ever saw it. The amount, when finally accepted, was never exposed to Congressional appropriation committees or to any other person whatever, as it was absorbed and blended into the many and various military figures.

All our military personnel, which constituted about one- half of the complement, received the regular pay set for their rank. The civilians were paid the established Civil Service remuneration fixed for their civil service ratings. This left two areas of compensation to be resolved, and both became big problems, indeed. One was expense accounts, those out-of-pocket spendings beyond travel orders. The type of person found in O.S.S. was inclined to be a bit casual, to say the least, in keeping track of his or her expenses, and many of the personal bills submitted had to be disallowed for lack of adequate supporting data and receipts.

Most important and most dangerous was the matter of U.V.F. unvouchered funds. Here, cash in great quantity had to be paid out for often sinister and always secret ends. To whom it was paid could never be made a matter of record. Even those who disbursed it were not revealed. U.V.F. was dollar dynamite. Always haunting us was the specter of some postwar Congressional investigating committee, which might well be empowered by the Congress to ignore all wartime secrecy and which, assuming a hostile attitude, might make a Teapot Dome type of thing out of these large sums, for which no accounting whatever existed.

Faced with this ever-present danger, General Donovan and Colonel Buxton put the whole responsibility for U.V.F. into the hands of men of known probity and of immense per sonal wealth. As chief of all unvouchered funds he appointed Junius S. Morgan. It was a brave and patriotic thing for Morgan to assume this duty, which he could have so easily avoided. Here he was, intimately responsible for cash outlays running into millions of dollars and paid out to God knows who, for all sorts of skullduggery, every conceivable venal act (in peacetime, that is) from stealing to assassination. All credit to Junius S. Morgan, who risked his worldwide reputation and his status as head of our greatest banking family in his country's behalf. His famous brother, Henry S. Morgan, did a splendid job in O.S.S., but in a less sensitive field of activity.

Serving under J. S. Morgan was Robert H. Ives Goddard of Providence, Rhode Island and, while his fame as a financier was perhaps more local than Morgan's, the same tribute to his patriotism and courage is strongly due. Ives Goddard was a man of immense wealth a meticulous custodian and care taker who carefully ferreted out the rascals who reached into this rich, sugar-plum fund. Ives was tall, thin as a fence-rail and, on first knowing, quite unimpressive, so self-effacing and modest was he. He approached his delicate job of monitoring these cash expenditures with such hesitancy and apparent timidity that you would consider him the last man alive to be a financial wizard of the very first rank. Everyone concerned, however, soon learned that you simply could not bluff or fool this stately Rhode Islander.

The third guardian of this "easy money” was Colonel W. Lane Rehm, who, before the war, had been the financial genius of one of the country's great investment trusts. Between them, these three men of unquestioned integrity and financial acumen held the U.V.F. money, so susceptible to abuse, in amazing control. All three confessed to me, at one time or another, that the job was bringing their gray hairs in sorrow to the grave, but without these services to their country, at an age in life when they had to do nothing to still be respected without them this vast unvouchered fund of many millions would have been a Donnybrook Fair for the boys on the make.

THE MCGREGORS ARE COMING

Take a Chicago press agent for Frank Knox, add a famous Notre Dame fullback, an heir to the Ringling circus, a CBS radio announcer and an Italian-American from New York City, and what do you get? An O.S.S. team on a secret mission, of course. Only the owl and the pussycat were less logical mates. Because no Scottish connection whatever existed, this oddly assorted group was named The McGregor Project. A skilled radio operator was needed, so they added one Carolos Conti to their team, he having escaped by the skin of his teeth from the Falangista in the Spanish Civil War.

Captain Edward A. Hayes of the Navy became liaison officer for this slightly mad O.S.S. cadre, with Captain Ellis Zacharias and Colonel William C. Eddy helping to get theater commander approval for their madcap scheme.

It was during the critical Battle of Italy in the early summer of 1943. Our McGregor Project had no less ambitious an objective than the winning of the entire Italian Navy away from the Germans and over to the Allies, plus the securing of all secret Italian weapons. We in the O.S.S. knew that the greatest naval weapon the Nazis possessed was the SIC torpedo, which they had commandeered from Italy. Those initials stood for Silvrifici Italiano Calosi. It was a magnetic- activated torpedo, conceived and invented by Professor Carlo Calosi at the University of Bologna. The professor was now an Italian Naval Captain at the torpedo works at Baia. The Germans had ordered 12,000 of these torpedos, which were so made that they never had to hit a target ship at all, but only to pass under it. When the steel magnetic signature of the vessel was at its peak, this SIC torpedo exploded. Water is incompressible, so the shock of the explosion broke the keel of the ship in two. This weapon explains the terrible toll of transports on the Murmansk run, which we had erroneously blamed on faulty shipbuilding.

Chief of the mission was John M. Shaheen, a mere Lieutenant (j.g.) , mentioned earlier as the Operation Campbell originator. Young Johnny Shaheen impressed you at once as a dark-haired, eye-flashing bundle of enthusiasm and drive. Slight of build, dark-skinned, quick as a cat, he is a born enthusiast. John M. Shaheen convinced everybody he met, from Secretary Knox to General Donovan, that his plan merited complete support. He even convinced me, although I had felt that the proverbial snowball in hell had a somewhat better chance of survival. His team-mates were John Ringling North, Ensign E. M. Burke, football hero Jumping Joe Savoldi, Peter Tompkins of CBS, Carolos Conti and the indispensable New Yorker, Marcello Girosi.

No one but General Donovan would have bet ten cents on so quixotic a venture. But Donovan was subtle. Before the war began, he had formed a deep friendship with General Badoglio, who had become wartime Prime Minister of Italy.

From this old friend he learned, by means not yet possible to disclose, that Italy was on the verge of capitulation, so this gave the wild scheme less of a madcap quality than any of the participants knew.

Marcello Girosi of New York City's Upper East Side was the brother of Rear Admiral Massimo Girosi of the Italian Joint Chiefs of Staff (Commando Supremo) , so the first move of the group was to try to get an impassioned letter from Marcello to Massimo, using a messenger who was an escaped, anti-Fascist soldier. Basing their operation on Sicily, their emissary was finally landed on the beach at Calabria at the tip of the Italian boot. An earlier attempt to land him at Terra-cina had run into a whole squadron of enemy MAS (torpedo) boats on patrol, and our little mission escaped capture and probably shooting by a miracle.

The messenger delivered the letter but the agreed upon rendezvous two weeks later was never kept, so none of our men knew what had transpired. Months later we learned that Admiral Massimo Girosi presented the letter to the entire Joint Chiefs of Staff, but his associates knew that Marshal Badoglio was already conferring with General Eisenhower and General Donovan, and so they deferred any action. Our little group, of course knew nothing of these moves in high places and so continued to attempt a direct contact with Admiral Girosi.

They all landed on the mole at Salerno and tried to penetrate the German line. They reported that, had they had Mussolini himself as their chauffeur, it would have been impossible. They high-balled it out of Salerno in a hailstorm of 88 mm. shells. At this point, the grandiose scheme of bringing the Italian Navy over to our side was set aside in favor of importing to America the great Italian scientist and inventor, Carlo Calosi and his deadly SIC torpedo.

Unknown to me, I had been designated as the host or chaperone for Dr. Calosi, when and if he reached Washing ton. Equally unknown to me, the Italian Secretary of the Navy, Raffaele de Courten, had ordered Vice Admiral Eu-genio Minisini, chief of their torpedo works, to cooperate fully with the O.S.S. and to make himself available for the difficult job of reconstructing the SIC torpedo. As so often happens in wartime, no one thought to brief me on any of this background.

At Baia, Fusaro and Naples: our O.S.S. group salvaged all they could of the SIC torpedos and their parts. The all- important inventor, Dr. Calosi, was hiding from the Germans. He was at last located, under the very noses of the Nazis, in a Roman convent. On December 24, 1943 he was asked to slip out secretly to Viterbo and told if he then went to the seashore, south of Orbetello, he would be taken out of Italy. For eight long nights he stood on the beach and flashed a green light, that being the prearranged signal for the O.S.S. team to pick him up. Nothing happened. At last, as he was sure the whole affair was hopeless, on January 3, 1944, the PT boat slid up onto the sand and he was carried to Bastia on the island of Corsica. There, by the merest chance, O.S.S. agent David Crockett* was momentarily located, acquiring some French francs. Then Ajaccio and finally Algiers, where Colonel Serge Obolensky of the O.S.S., one of New York's famous hosts, was appropriately his receptionist.

On January 24th, Dr. Calosi and his party, consisting of Admiral and Signora Minisini and twelve technicians, landed in Washington and into the lap of my ignorance. How often in the exigencies of war, someone has to "run with the ball" with not a scintilla of knowledge as to the team play or even the objective. At that time, everyone had forgotten to tell me anything.

Dr. Carlo Calosi proved to be a tall, thin man of perhaps forty. Understanding not a word of the English language, he was naturally nervous at being in an enemy land where his anti-Fascist political feelings and his motives might well be misunderstood. Because of his rank of Captain, I should have sensed that Vice Admiral Minisini was his superior officer, without whose approval he could not make a move. This sixty-five-year-old man, in turn, seemed to be under orders from his wife at least, it so impressed all of us.

We housed the group in a Washington hotel until arrangements could be made to best use the vital knowledge they had bravely visited us to give. All were understandably apprehensive and uncertain. To make matters worse, General Donovan was off on other matters and no one could, or would, fill in the background for me. I felt it was of first importance to know for certain if this rather ascetic, somewhat dour Dr. Calosi really was an outstanding scientist in the field of electro-magnetism or were we all being misled. I had Marcello Girosi take him to see Dr. I. I. Rabi, head of the Radiation Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where a three-day scientific inquisition took place. Dr. Rabi reported to me that Dr. Calosi was undoubtedly one of the world's two or three best qualified experts in his field.

Armed with this report, I visited Admiral F. C. Home, Vice Chief of Naval Operations, to whom I told the whole story and to whom I recommended that Dr. Calosi, the Admiral and spouse and all their party of twelve be invited to the Newport, Rhode Island Torpedo Station to reconstruct the famous SIC torpedo and, God willing, work out a counter- measure for it. He agreed at once, and the whole group found themselves in a tourist hotel in Newport, some distance from the torpedo station. At this point, the baffling, frustrating, often juvenile incidents began.

The commanding officer of the station appeared to regard this invasion of Italian torpedo experts as a distasteful criticism of his own torpedo, rather than as a glorious chance to obtain the enemy's best undersea weapon. Rumors of duds made at Newport were rife, especially of one American submarine which dared to enter Tokyo harbor and fire her whole complement of torpedos at the rich prizes there, only to have not one of them detonate. This had left Newport sensitive and "touchy” to say the least.

I pleaded with the C.O. to capitalize upon, for our Navy, every little scrap of technical information we could possibly extract from our expert Italian guests. The result was, at most, a half-hearted tolerance. For example, Doctor Calosi and his technicians needed a standard bench vice to disassemble the parts of the Italian SIC torpedo so expensively and daringly brought to us from the ruins of Baia. The Navy delivered to Dr. Calosf s workshop a vise, all right. It came in a mammoth truck and was a four-ton monster with jaws three feet wide.

At this point, the Office of Naval Intelligence personnel detailed to the station, who previously had endured months of monotony, found the Calosi-Minisini group of enemy aliens a gift from the gods, and proceeded to have a field day.

Apparently, Washington headquarters of O.N.I, had neglected to take Newport into its confidence. All telephones were tapped and monitored, all mail intercepted and read. All scraps of paper in waste baskets were carefully saved and pasted together. If the Admiral's wife went to her clothes closet to select a dress, there hiding behind her wardrobe would be an O.N.L man. Screams! Near-fainting. "Take me back to Italy!" It would have been something out of a French farce had the stakes for the United States not been so all-important. Viewed after twenty years, the affair has a burlesque quality but at the time, I could only think of the drowned American sailors in those cold north seas, lives which this Italian volunteer mission might save.

About this time, Admiral Minisini resigned and Dr. Calosi, perforce, did likewise. The squad of skilled technicians resigned, and Marcello Girosi exploded with some picturesque Italian oaths. I couldn't blame any of them. Girosi then showed his great skill at directing a company that was, postwar, to make him a famous figure in Italian movie productions. While he quieted the injured temperaments all about him, I had another conference with Admiral Home in Washington. Shocked at the whole situation, he at once straightened it out. The Newport personnel overnight became as cooperative as they had previously been antagonistic. Such is the power of military discipline when reasons are explained rather than assumed to be understood.

The SIC torpedos were at last reconstructed, their mechanism demonstrated to our Navy, the remarkable devices tested and approved. Dr. Calosi then proceeded at his own suggestion to develop an effective counter-measure which would make his own torpedo harmless if used against a ship so equipped. When he felt he had this safeguarding device perfected, he went all alone on an abandoned and condemned hulk out in Narragansett Bay. He installed his protective sys tem on it, but would allow no one else to be aboard. He stayed there while live SIC torpedos were fired point-blank at him and the vessel. Every one exploded offside. His counter-measure was a success, and we were humble at his sublime personal courage.

Today he is the Vice-President, Europe, for the Raytheon Company, one of our largest electronic manufacturers. The madcap McGregor Project had come a long way from the imaginative dream of (now) Captain John M. Shaheen, USNR.

THE NIGHT CHURCHILL ALMOST GAVE UP THE WAR

One of General Donovan's most delightful customs was to use me as a substitute for him if he had to break an engagement. I will never forget March 18, 1943 when he asked me, in his stead, to keep a date in a private room at the Washington Hotel.

It proved to be an intimate birthday luncheon for Sir John G. DiH 7 K.C.B., C.M.G., D.S.O., Chief of the British Imperial General Staff. There were six of us present, as I recall it. He was a graying, quiet man, modest and a bit embarrassed at the birthday toasts.

After liqueurs, someone said, "Sir John, I think you owe us a story. What has been the most unforgettable day of your distinguished career?"

"That is easy to select” he said. "I'm an Ulsterman and that means an army life for us. The Boer War, Indian and African service, but my career appeared ended when I publicly opposed the remilitarization of the Rhineland and Chamberlain's appeasement at Munich. Then, in May 1940, Winston Churchill came to power and picked me to head up our armed forces.

"Barely three weeks later he phoned me to fly to France with him and General Ismay. We knew things were in poor shape over there. In Paris we met with Marshal Petain, General Weygand and Premier Paul Reynaud. They threw the bad news at us.

"Churchill asked, 'Aren't you going to resist in the South of France?'

" No. It's impossible”

"But you'll keep the African colonies and fight from there, won't you?”

"'No. We surrender them”

" But the fleet. Darlan will put to sea and deliver it to us that will be saved?”

" No. It's complete surrender to Hitler. After the way you British abandoned us by running home at Dunkirk, you left us no other choice”

" So France is deserting us completely!” Churchill exclaimed.

" Just as you did to us” answered Petain.

The Prime Minister rose. We were driven to our Flamingo and flown back to London. Not a single word was spoken on the return flight, and I was too deeply upset to care much if our escort of Hurricanes showed up or not.

"I’m all alone tonight, Sir John” he said. “Come keep me company at 10 Downing Street” It was late and we washed a sandwich down with some brandy and soda.

" Sir John” he said as he walked about the room, 'I have no choice but to address Parliament in the morning. I'll have to tell them and the nation that France has gone over to Hitler lock, stock and barrel. You and I know it's impossible to defend this island against the full force of that Austrian bastard. It's Napoleon all over again, but Napoleon never had the German air force, and we have few guns and less ammunition. This may be the last night of the British Empire- it may be”

I could have wept for him and for Britain. At last he said, 'There are two things we can do, Sir John. Write the speech that will actually ask Hitler for terms of surrender or go to bed and sleep on it. I propose to sleep. Goodnight, Sir John. My man will show you to your bedroom. See you at breakfast”

"He may have slept he took a part bottle of brandy with him but I know I didn't the end of the British Empire was coming tomorrow!”

"At breakfast perhaps our last as a free people I was sober and glum. Winston Churchill ate everything set before him. Finally, he pushed his chair away at an angle and said, 'Sir John, I have to tell Parliament the bad news I can't avoid that, but I do not have to suggest negotiating with those Nazi madmen. Yes, France has fallen, the United States is pacifist and won't help us, but, all alone, by God, we'll fight 'em on the beaches, we'll fight 'em at the hedge rows, we'll fight 'em on our village greens!' He paused. 'By heaven, that's damned good, Sir John”

"He pulled a pad of paper out of his breakfast jacket pocket and started writing down the greatest speech since your Gettysburg address. That, gentlemen, was my most unforgettable day”

An unforgettable day for myself was this sixty-second birthday party for Sir John Dill. He had told us of a day on which the freedom of mankind had balanced on one man's courage.

THE BOMBING OF PEENEMUNDE

It was in 1943 that a series of coincidences took place which are, for a scientist, hard to explain. As a special aide to Dr. Bush of O.S.R.D. I had worked with Colonel W. A. Consodine, Colonel John Lansdale, Jr. and Colonel R. R. Furman, who were the three security officers under Lieutenant General Leslie R. Groves charged with the secrecy and protection of the work done on the Manhattan Project. General Groves had established liaison with the O.S.S., and I had been kept reasonably informed of progress in their atomic research.

This is the first coincidence. One morning, my secretary, Mrs. Norman Cooley, told me that for one excuse or another, all my appointments of the forenoon had been cancelled.

Coincidence number two. On my desk were tissue paper carbons of the messages O.S.S. had received by radio during the past period of twenty-four hours. I thumbed through them, noting they had been stacked up following a code number designating the importance of each. Thus the top one was a report from one of our spies in Germany detailing troop movements from somewhere to somewhere in Russia. And so on down in order of significance.

Near the bottom of the pile I read one from #110 (that was Allen Dulles in Switzerland) . It said, "One of my men got dry clothes and a breakfast for a French ouvrier who swam the Rhine to Rehen last night. Told following improbable story. Said he was forced labor guard for casks of water from Rjukan in Norway to island of Peenemiinde in Baltic Sea”

I tossed that into the wooden tray along with the others and then, suddenly, snatched it back.

Coincidence number three. A week before I had at tended a discussion by scientists involved in nuclear fission studies in which someone had said, "I think graphite would be a more efficient neutron arrester than heavy water."

So I'm a simple French workman escaping into Switzer land from German-infested France. So I have to justify my self with a story. If I'm clever and want to be believed, I have been guarding gold, munitions, food anything but water.

But I tell the O.S.S. man I have been guarding water. Ergo, I am a simple French peasant-worker not smart or shrewd, but it was water, so I say water. The only water in the world worth guarding is deuterium, "heavy water”

I rush to the maps and the O.S.S. encyclopedias. What is Rjukan? The biggest hydro-electric development in Europe and perhaps the only location where "heavy water" could be produced. I obtained air photos of Usedom, the water-en circled land mass where Peenemiinde sat on the landward tip. Dairy farms, thatched farmhouses a peaceful, bucolic spectacle if ever I saw one.

I didn't believe it. Instead I barged into General Donovan's office with scant courtesy. I said, "Bill, this may be vitally important”

He was closeted with God-knows-who but he dismissed the fellow with a "See you later”.

"Bill”. I said, "this radio message from Al Dulles may be the most important message O.S.S. will ever receive. What do you know about the developments on an atom bomb?"

"Stanley, I don't know what you're talking about" and he didn't. So tight was General Leslie Groves' security that my Director had never heard a whisper about it.

Intelligence should now and then be intelligent. I told him straightaway all I knew, which was about as much as any one not actually in the project then knew.

I said, "This little French workman has told us where the German heavy water comes from, but vastly more important, where the German physicists are working to make a bomb employing nuclear fission. It all adds up perfectly."

"Adds up to what?" he asked.

"To a catastrophic Nazi victory. This explains the 'ski' sites. Don't leave. Ill be back in a minute."

I ran to my nearby office and returned with a secret map of the ski sites on the French coast. Let me explain that they were so called because from the air they looked like a ski laid on edge a long passage perhaps forty feet with a curved, closed twist at the unopened end.

Beginning at Hazebrouck, west of Boulogne, there were seventy-odd such structures sweeping down to Valognes, about 40 kilometers south of Cherbourg (a mystery that had completely baffled the British Secret Intelligence Service and those of us they had told about it) .

Part of the greatness of William J. Donovan was his honest self-appraisal. "Lovell, I'm a lawyer and you're a scientist. If you say this is 'hot' I'll believe it, although it sounds like Jules Verne to me."

"General, remember Hitler said, 'We will have a weapon to which there is no answer' remember? The whole thing falls into place. Every ski site is pointed directly at London, Bristol, Birmingham and Liverpool. They must be launching sites for unmanned missiles containing enough nuclear fission bombs to utterly destroy each of those cities. Britain can't resist if they're obliterated. If we bomb the very hell out of Peenemunde, we stop it cold before it has a chance to start."

No lawyer trusts a scientist without corroborative evidence. Only when Doctors Vannevar Bush and James B. Conant became equally excited did the Director really believe me. That I was flown instantly to London was evidence in deed. There I told my story to Colonel David K. E. Bruce the same man whose sapient counsel had prevented my resignation. He was now Chief of O.S.S. in London. He believed me because in a small way, I was his protege. He at once met with Lord Portals of the R.A.F. and General "Tooey" Spaatz of our 8th Air Force and by persuasion and that diplomacy of which he is America's greatest example, got the Peenemunde air raid "laid on”

In August of 1943 the R.A.F. staged a heavy raid at Peenemunde that killed more than a thousand people and inflicted heavy damage on this "rural" island.

Dr. Martin Schilling, chief of the Test Section at Peenemunde, recalls that the raid was terrifying. He- says that it delayed the use of V-1's and V-2's until after the Normandy landings in June, 1944. He believes that, had those rockets landed on England prior to that date, the invasion of France would have been materially delayed. When the Vergeltung (vengeance) rockets were finally fired, they could not be targeted on the invading troops, and thus fell only on British civilians.

But what of the heavy water that was being shipped to Peenemunde for atomic energy research?

The French ouvrier, whose message caught my eye, was right, so far as he knew. Dr. Schilling was informed by the chief of the Rjukan facility that, for reasons of security, the guards and crew were told that the heavy water shipments were headed for Peenemunde. Actually, the ships skirted within a mile or so of Peenemunde, and then slipped into Wolgast. From there the load was sent by rail to the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute and other destinations where nuclear research was being carried on.

Production of the heavy water at Rjukan approached the substantial amount of 5,000 tons. The first objective of the German research physicists was to build an atomic power plant for a fleet of U-Boats, but an atomic bomb would certainly be developed from this activity.

And so, the strangest coincidence of all. The O.S.S. message was incorrect, yet its interpretation helped (the British themselves were suspicious of Peenemunde's pastoral scene) implement the decision to bomb the headquarters of German rocket research. The development of a terrible new weapon was delayed until its primary target was beyond its reach.

CAPRICIOUS

Like Alice in Wonderland, nothing in wartime Washington appeared too strange to be taken in stride.

One day, I was invited to the Academy of Science building where I met four distinguished men Dr. George Merck, President of Merck and Company, Dr. Edwin B. Fred, later President of the University of Wisconsin, Admiral Rollo Dyer and John P. Marquand, the great satiric novelist. Thereupon I was admitted to the inner circle on bacteriological warfare. Dr. William Searles and Lord Stamp joined us and we visited the bacteriological laboratories at Frederick, Maryland.

John P. Marquand proved to be a scholarly bacteriologist and virologist. He named the laboratories where virulent organisms were cultured, "The Health Farm” By this time I had ceased to be surprised at the versatility of men, all over military age, who from so many varying angles were helping in the war, I would not have been surprised to have found a big league baseball catcher studying language, so he could pose as an etymologist behind enemy lines in occupied France. A good thing, too, because Red Sox hero Moe Berg did just that for the O.S.S.

In my many sessions with John Marquand we discussed much besides pestilence and pandemic organisms.

He called Shakespeare "that Punk from Stratford never taught his three daughters to read or write of course he wasn't the real author” He told me that when he went through Harvard on a high school fellowship, no Fly or Por-cellian Club looked at him, and he was not on the invitation lists of the Back Bay cotillions.

I accused him of harboring, perhaps quite subconsciously, a deep resentment of those undergraduate days, when social recognition was denied him and no one recognized in him a worthwhile talent.

"John," I said, "your frustration so long submerged and your rapier so long kept in the scabbard found expression in The Late George Apley."

He said, "Stanley, you're right, but I don't like to have it laid in front of me. You'll pay for that nasty crack, old boy!"

What he did was to bisect me. In Point of No Return, Lawrence Lovell who "thought himself too good for Clyde" and Francis Stanley "the sordid business man" made a riposte that only I could appreciate.

Two Canadian bacteriologists from McGill University, Professor E. G. D. Murray and Doctor Reed, called on me and offered their skills and services whenever needed.

In the autumn of 1940, Mussolini's army dominated North Africa. General Wavell with a handful of men faced a half million Italian soldiers. The British fleet sank or routed the Italian navy at Taranto, and the Italian army invaded Greece where the Evzones cut them to shreds.

General Wavell then moved westward from Alexandria and by February 1941 had defeated the Italians from Sidi Barrani and Tobruk to Benghazi. Now Hitler and the Nazis took over from a routed Fascisti and General Erwin Rommel was put in charge. Many considered him to be the one great military genius of World War II. In ten days of April 1941, Rommel had recovered for the Axis almost all of North Africa which the Italians had lost.

Backing and filling, the German advance was stopped at the famous battle of El Alamein. Then, in November 1942, Operation Torch began. It got its name from itsob jective, which was to apply a torch to the tail of the famed Desert Fox Rommel. Many miles away, the American force landed at Casablanca, Oran and Algiers. From Casablanca a long, ancient single-track railroad ran eastward through the foothills of the Atlas Mountains to Oran, Algiers and Tunis. It was the tenuous lifeline of supplies for the whole venture. The idea was to catch Rommel between this invading force to his west and the British in Egypt to his east.

I knew that everyone from President Roosevelt down was violently opposed to the Merck Committee and its activity in studying germ warfare. Dr. Vannevar Bush became profane when it was mentioned, and General Donovan despised it, as most heroes who had withstood shot and shell were prone to do.

I held no brief for its study or use in orthodox warfare, but I saw in it just the subtle, covert weapon that might be ideal in some anti-personnel problem.

The Canadian allies, Professors "Jberg" Murray and Reed held no reservations about it. While we Americans tended either to belittle or loathe bacteriological weapon research, they were actually producing a range of viable organisms.

I read the Marine Corps Bayonet Instructions and I decided that to expose an enemy to a lethal or an incapacitating organism was infinitely less barbarous than to stab him in the viscera, twist the bayonet to contaminate the wound thoroughly and leave him to die from the horrors of general septicemia.

Shortly after these contacts with bacteriologists had been made, there occurred the Battle of the Kasserine Pass.

Erwin Rommel's Afrika Korps was far from conquered. By a powerful surprise thrust, he moved westward from Faid Pass. The American soldiers, mainly untrained and new to battle, tried to hold the Kasserine Pass.

I saw the German movie of that battle, the film of which one of our men later "liberated" from a Nazi cameraman. The camera gave a panoramic sweep of the desolate brown terrain. The German voice said, "See our Tiger tanks on either side, row on row, waiting for the enemies of the Third Reich to walk into our trap." With another swing over the pass at a higher level the voice said, "See our machine guns, our anti-tank cannon ready to send a rain of German steel on the Americans."

Then the American Army advance troops marched into the picture. Silence. More and more Americans, and we in the Pentagon projection room wanted to shout, to warn these boys so lately interviewed by their local draft boards. The film ended by showing a drab earth-colored pass in which the khaki-covered bodies were barely distinguishable from the African land.

Five thousand American boys were killed, wounded or missing when the defeat at Kasserine Pass was complete. To add to the total dejection and shame of it all, a squadron or two of Flying Fortresses, ordered to bomb the Germans in the Pass, dropped all their bombs one hundred miles away on the town of Souk el Arba, killing and wounding a number of Arabs.

I never quite understood General Eisenhower, himself untried in battle, for writing in his report that, although the American troops were green and insufficiently trained, the Kasserine Pass made veterans of the American Army! I assume he meant those who were lucky enough to survive.

Little detail of this disastrous action appeared in news papers in the United States. The United States Joint Chiefs of Staff could not know in this dark hour that in three months the German forces would be cut in two by Anderson, Montgomery and the American Second Corps.

To our High Command in Washington, it looked like the prelude to a disaster beyond description. To appreciate it, you must realize that fourteen German U-boats were in a ring outside the Straits: of Gibraltar and even a rowboat couldn't pass into the Mediterranean Sea to supply the Allied troops.

Marshall Herman Goering made a radio speech in which he promised a greater defeat than Dunkirk to the American and British troops in North Africa. If Hitler had said it, I think the Pentagon pundits would have given it less weight; but Herman Goering commanded a certain respect throughout the conflict, and his boast added nothing to the American peace of mind.

O.S.S. agents in Tangier and Melilla, in Morocco, suddenly flooded us with reports that significant numbers of German troops were concentrating there. This was a totally unexpected development. We feared they were engineers, expert in railway demolition. The reports suggested they were largely detachments of the Schutz-Staffel.

At this precise time, Francisco Franco's Foreign Minister General Jordana, was being feted in Berlin and it seemed likely that Spain would follow Italy into the Axis.

The United States Joint Chiefs of Staff, who had top responsibility for the conduct of this theater, were able to come to only one conclusion. To summarize the factors involved, they had the defeat at the Kasserine Pass, with its evidence from Eisenhower himself, that our soldiers were no match for Rommel's veterans, and the concomitant fear that Eisenhower was no match for Rommel; the only way support could reach Eisenhower was the ancient single-track railroad from Casablanca to Algiers; the dramatic news that Germany's war-hardened veterans were piling into Spanish Morocco (obviously with Franco's consent and cooperation) for the purpose of cutting the one fragile lifeline and making Goering's prophecy of an American defeat to be no idle boast. It would slice the jugular vein in the exposed neck of Operation Torch.

I was called to the Pentagon. After the desperate plight of our expeditionary force in Africa was reviewed, I was ordered to take whatever steps I could contrive that would eliminate Spanish Morocco. This was clearly "out of channels” and I said so. In no uncertain terms I was told that this was not to be discussed or disclosed to General Donovan or anyone else, except the very highly placed person talking to me.

I knew why the secrecy was necessary. "Whatever steps” meant any and every means to destroy the threat to our forces. I made a suggestion to the person and he nodded his head.

With Doctors Murray and Reed I evolved a simulated goat dung. Spanish Morocco was reported to have more goats than people. Goat dung, therefore, would be everywhere.

This goat dung was very special. It contained an attractant for house flies so powerful it would call that insect out of hibernation. It also had an assortment of bacteria from tularemia and psittacosis to all the pests known to the Fourth Horseman of the Apocalypse. It was summer, and flies were everywhere in Spanish Morocco.

A fly has the nasty habit of regurgitating whatever he has eaten when more attractive food comes his way. Thus, the Moroccan house fly was to be the vector to incapacitate all of Spanish Morocco.

To be sure, this goat dung had to be delivered by air planes. Most of the houses in that country have flat roofs. I was asked how could one explain goat excrement on the roofs, whereas everyone knew goats couldn't fly. My only answer was, "The orders are to take out Spanish Morocco when ordered to do so, and if we do there'll be mighty few people inspecting rooftops”

We were well along on our project (which I named "Capri-cious") when, happily, our agents radioed that all Germans were leaving en masse and being thrown into Hitler's obsession the Battle of Stalingrad. No one was more relieved than I, and Doctors Murray and Reed. General Donovan would have been even more relieved if he had known about it!

AN INTERVIEW WITH OSWALD SPENGLER

John P. Marquand was a master of "flash back" writing, the technique by which he would take the reader back in time to some incident or setting, which rationalized or explained the present.

In that spirit, let me revert to why I so eagerly acted on Dr. Karl T. Compton's invitation to abandon a hard-earned position in the chemical industry and throw my future into the wartime lottery.

I had read Oswald Spengler's Decline of the West when it was published in America in the late 1920 *8. I wrote the author about an apparent contradiction the glorification of war in one volume, the vituperation of war in the next vol ume. He answered by inviting me to visit him in Munich, and I finally did on June 30, 1934.

Oddly, that was the day of Hitler's great purge, when military motorcycles screeched through the streets, calling families to their doorways and killing them in cold blood. More than six hundred were so assassinated, and all the time I was in Dr. Spengler's enormous apartment on the bank of the Green Isar river. I asked a thousand questions and made furious notes of his answers. He invited me to stay through the day and evening until almost midnight. It was no charm of mine, I'm sure, but more likely the possible protection an American guest might afford if the wailing motor cycle murderers came to his door.

My notes were published September 18, 1934 in Walter Lippmann's column in all of his syndicated newspapers. They constitute an amazing historical prophecy. Note that, seven years before the event, there is the foreshadowing of Pearl Harbor. Forgive him his acceptance of Hitler. I have never believed that he died of a heart attack in May of 1936. More likely he was assassinated by Nazi ruffians when he disagreed with Dr. Alfred Rosenberg, the Hitler historian and stooge.

SPENGLER WARNS U.S.

By Stanley P. Lovell (North American Newspaper Alliance)

(Dr. Oswald Spengler, celebrated German philosopher, whose "Decline of the West" has been the subject of world discussion, warns Americans of a day of reckoning and presents his views in a talk with Stanley P. Lovell, a Boston manufacturer, chemist and patent lawyer, who returned recently from Germany.)

All of one day a few weeks ago I talked with that great German savant, Dr. Oswald Spengler, at his home in Munich. For me it was as if I had turned back the pages of history and were spending a day with Voltaire.

Dr. Spengler, a short, stocky man, with a great bullet- shaped head, wearing a rather loud brown golf suit, and in appearance anything but a great pontiff of historical analysis, was vastly inquisitive about America.

Dr. Spengler feels America is done with democracy as such. It may, he says, keep the empty forms of Government perhaps for 100 years and an outworn Congress lacking in significance, but the German philosopher believes that democracy, whether the American people like it or not, is done.

"Indications/" he said, "are the great concentration of power converging in a President-dominated bureaucracy in Washington; the steady growth of lawlessness, bringing a clamor for a national military police unhindered by state boundaries; the persistence of the strike as the preferred weapon of labor and disappearance of the lockout as a weapon of management”

I asked Dr. Spengler if he thought Franklin Roosevelt was the first American dictator,

"Either he is your first Caesar” was the reply, "or quite unconsciously he is a sort of St. John the Baptist who comes to make ready the way for the ruler.

"Previous Presidents, from Washington to Hoover, generally have represented wealth and the wealthy classes, which are the American aristocracy," the German went on. "Always, in history, the only aristocracy that a democracy can have is the aristocracy of money. Now the United States has in power a President who does not represent this element, but the great masses.

"Once this change has come the course must never be retraced, and in the future always the President must represent the great American masses and in policy oppose wealth and capital, even seizing and confiscating it when necessary.

"America will have anarchy if a movement arises which puts in the White House a President who represents the wealthy classes as McKinley or Coolidge did.

"This is the historical course of a dictator rising out of a democracy., and it is significant that Julius Caesar in ancient Rome was hated by the wealthy Senate because he first appealed to the Roman masses." * * *

Dr. Spengler sees in the United States a dangerous dogma, injected into political thought by the present Administration; namely; that the average American now is led to believe the government not only owes him an orderly nation in which he may or may not make his living, but owes him also adequate food, shelter and clothing.

This, Spengler says, is the complete breakdown of the spirit of the early settlers, who never looked to their government for maintenance, but only for order within and respect from without.

"An early American” Dr. Spengler said, "would have scoffed at the idea the government owed him maintenance. That was distinctly up to him as an individual and in no way a function of his government.

"Now the education of the American people to the easily-accepted theory that, by some magic, the government is to support its citizens, leads inevitably to the extension of government credit beyond the normal things a government has been called upon for, and, as long as this philosophy endures, there will be an unbalanced budget. America will live on its credit rather than on its income.

"Inexhaustible as this credit may seem now, it exists solely as an intangible something in the minds of the American people. Just as, during the dark closing days of the Hoover Administration, the American people lost confidence in their banks, so there will come a day when they will lose confidence in the credit of America as an inexhaustible treasure house. Then will occur the flight from the dollar, and people will want things instead of money. "Inflation in America will be, in a way, different from the European method. It will not be called inflation, but will appear as baby bonds, non-interest bearing; as a con trolled commodity dollar, or as some other American expression. But it will come inexorably and inevitably unless the philosophy of a government supporting its people is reversed, and of that reversal there now seems little hope” * * *

Dr. Spengler believes the position of the United States as regards Japan is vital and significant.

I asked this author of Decline of the West about the Philippines.

"The United States must not become weary” he observed. "The only respect Japan will have is toward a nation virile and strong like herself.

"I believe Hawaii is America's Heligoland and, from that point, to avoid war in Asia, America must maintain an attitude of calm and assured force, almost aggressive but never actually being aggressive.

"If America becomes weary, Japan will seize the moment to overcome her, since Japan is in the full flush of her conscious strength as a nation. If America shows no indication of age and makes no overtures of friendliness, Japan will leave her strictly alone”.

I stated that most Americans, I thought, were now isolationists, relying on tremendous ocean frontiers to separate them from European or Asiatic conflict.

"That is not possible; Americans cannot be isolationists any longer” said Dr. Spengler. "Once having entered he arena of world politics, they can never return to their comfortable seat in the audience”

* * *

"It is not a matter of what America thinks, but rather what America has done, that dictates without option her future course. As a nation, she has remade the map of Europe. Having assumed so much (and the devil himself could not have traced out a map more certain to provide future wars than did President Wilson), it is impossible historically for America to withdraw from that world, and it is silly and childish reasoning if her people think they live in another world.

"Everything of major importance that happens in the world profoundly affects America now. It is one of America's mistakes that, while other nations devote their best brains to world politics, America is intent only on inner problems, domestic difficulties of elections and drought and unemployment”

Germany, Dr. Spengler feels, is far better off under Hitler than under a president. Not only the German people, but the whole world, exclusive of England, he says, has reached a point where it is natural to look to a leader more or less on a pedestal, and this feeling is concentrated in Germany.

# # #

What I did not dare to include in the above account was Spengler's timetable. He was, at one and the same time, the head of the Department of Mathematics and of History at the University of Munich. His theory was that it required so many years for a culture to harden into a civilization and then to progress to its decline and extinction. Toward its later years there were always, he said, three world wars. In the Egyptian culture, that of the Upper and the Lower Nile; in China that of the Five Contending States; in the Classical Age the three Punic wars between Rome and Carthage. In our day, he said, we will have the three wars also. The first two would settle no issues.

"What are the issues, Dr. Spengler?"

Only one always the same. Will government be based on the mass of the people, or, alternatively, will it be imposed from above. Democracy versus Dictatorship.

This, please, was in 1934*

"And how can one arrive at a timetable in so delicate, and yet a world-wide matter?'' I asked.

"That is easy to answer, Herr Lovell No one generation of men can successfully fight two wars. It is only when men who have never seen war firsthand are available that another world conflict can start. Here we are in 1934. World War I was in 1914. A generation is twenty-five years, so World War II will begin in 1939. It will settle nothing, of course as it historically awaits the Third War and only in that one will the issues be resolved”

"And this Third World War will be in 1964?"

"Precisely. Always they will say conditions have changed; new weapons are available; it will never take place, but it will; I remind you of your Cato: 'Ceterium censeo Cartliaginem esse delendam/ Government from below or imposed on man kind from dictators, above, will only be settled after 1964."

Now when Dr. Compton suggested I become active in World War II, I laid awake at night recalling Dr. Spengler's Hawaiian prophecy, now the stark reality of Pearl Harbor. In Europe it had begun in 1939, just as he had said. It was the ghost of this great German savant telling me our beloved country must not lose this war or there would be no World War III, but rather a dictator-dominated world in which we could not survive to win the ultimate, the final victory, when ever that last war might come.

These were lonely and disturbing thoughts when I volunteered for service. I wonder now if the third war he prophesied will come to pass.

THE NAZI AGENT WHO BECAME A BRITISH KNIGHT

The greatest intelligence system in the world is the British Secret Intelligence Service, called "Broadway'' from its headquarters in London. It was founded by Sir Francis Walsingham, one of the first Queen Elizabeth's courtiers in 1567. History credits him with serving Elizabeth and Cecil (Lord Burghley) as Secretary of State and, at various times, Ambassador to France, the Netherlands and Scotland. He foiled the Spanish Ridolfi Plot and the famous Babington Plot, the latter leading to the execution of Mary, Queen of Scots.

What the histories do not record, but what S.LS. holds to be true, is that Walsingham employed many hundreds of spies all over Central Europe. From them he learned, about 1586, that Philip II of Spain was recruiting shipwrights and sailmakers from Sweden to Italy. To an expert like Sir Francis, this was a golden opportunity.

In droves the workmen, now all in the pay of Walsingham, traveled to Spain and reported for duty on the great fleet King Philip was building. All received Britain's pay in addition to the Spanish wages, with Walsingham's deputies telling them what to do and they, in turn, advising Britain of the fleet's progress.

Treenails, having only a token head driven in their passages instead of going through to tie the planks together they would be shallow plugs only; stems with sawcuts halfway through and filled with putty and sawdust; ribs insecurely fastened to the keel in short a magnificent sabotage designed to produce the faulty construction of over 130 Spanish fighting ships. They informed me at S.LS. that Drake, Hawkins and Frobisher repulsed this Spanish Armada with stout British courage and seamanship, but the first real weather it met, off the Irish coast, reduced the fleet to kindling wood. That was Walsingham's victory.

For almost 400 years Walsingham's Secret Intelligence Service has had an unbroken existence. Not Charles I or Cromwell, not Labor or Austerity dared to abandon or curtail it as a vital arm of the British Government.

It was very much on the job as the war clouds darkened in 1939. This was by no means the first war S.LS. had faced. One day before Hitler invaded Poland on September 1st, this ancient service swooped down on the German spy ring head quarters in London. They arrested the head of that organization and all of his staff. I was told by General Gubbins that all but one of the group were imprisoned in a special little bastille in London. Perhaps it was one not far from St. Paul's Cathedral, in that area where the Nazi bombers reduced everything to rubble.

All but one. The man S.LS. held out of prison was the clandestine radio operator. He was a man with a peasant back ground and a stubborn, indoctrinated Nazi to whom no bribe appealed nor threat intimidated. He let drop that his grandmother "was almost nobility" and that remark disclosed his Achilles' heel to the S.I.S. They promised him British Knighthood if he would desert the Nazis and work for them with an English name to be knighted under as Saxe-Coburg became Windsor and Battenburg became Mountbatten. One story I heard was that the King himself visited the man and gave him his regal promise.

It could well be true, because from obscurity the radio operator had suddenly become the most important captive of the war. At any rate, to help win his coveted title of nobility, he agreed to transmit over his clandestine radio what ever messages the S.I.S. gave him, and to carry on with his radio mate in Berlin just as if nothing had happened in London just as if his: boss, the German chief spy, were not in prison.

It has been demonstrated, time and time again, that a pair of radio operators a sender and a receiver who have lived and trained together, simply cannot be deceived by the employment of a substitute. No one but the authentic German sender could touch the key as he did, or know the little personal messages to exchange with his fellow trainee, now his Berlin receiver. No one alive could fool that receiver for a single message.

Now began the dangerous game, the daring exploit of sending what the British Secret Intelligence Service wanted the Nazis to receive. The German High Command must have felt that its London spy ring was the greatest in the world.

With lightning rapidity came the German breakthrough, May 15, 1940, the retreat to Dunkirk and the miracle salvage of 225,000 British and 112,000 French soldiers, soldiers but no arms or ammunition.

From the London spy radio, "Britain is swarming with troops. All landing sites are defended by new flame throwers and secret weapons Fm working to discover. No invasion can possibly succeed at this time. Result of continental victories is concentration of all British and Colonial forces' here, well equipped. Estimate it will take force impossible now for us to assemble to establish and hold adequate beach-heads”

A message sent July 17, 1940 to Admiral Canaris read, "Whole foreign press and, in particular, British press comments that a major German attack is expected. Thousands of barges and vessels are standing by attack is expected in Dover area, albeit defenses here are the strongest. Heavy air attacks lasting several days are expected to precede a landing."

Two days later the S.I.S. message was, "English defense measures are first coastal defense by the army, based on mobility and concentration of terrific fire power. No fixed defense line. Task of the British Fleet and the R.A.F. will be to render impossible the landing of armored units or surprise landing by troops anywhere. The R.A.F. is so organized that strong units can be quickly concentrated at any danger point and also to attack the new German bases in Northern France and Holland and to search out all indications of German activity, such as the assembly of ships and barges”

On September 17, 1940, the supposed Nazi spy in London radioed, "Despite German air attacks, the R.A.F. is by no means defeated on the contrary, it shows increased activity. Weather reports do not permit us to expect any period of calm”

The last authentic message I have of this critical period is dated September 19, 1940. It reads, "Our preparations for landing on the Channel coast are all known here and more countermeasures are being taken. Symptoms are British air attacks over German operational harbors, the frequent appearance of British destroyers in Dover Straits and Franco-Belgian coast. Main units of home fleet are being held in readiness to repel any landing. All my information indicates that the British Naval Forces are solely occupied with this theater of operations”.

By the spring of 1941 the German invasion plans were shelved. They abandoned all idea of invading England in January 1942. While Hitler used the conquest of Russia as his excuse, these false messages and hundreds of others which will never be available to us for one reason or another, had a great deal to do with saving England during those months after Dunkirk, when she was an apple ripe for Hitler's extended hand.

Colonel Harold Morgan showed me how easy the picking would have been. He was in command of all the East Anglia Home Guard. Their insignia was a crown and Georgus Rex around it.

With rather pathetic British humor, even for those dark days, Colonel Morgan always referred to his command as "gorgeous wrecks," and many of them were human wrecks, indeed, with their courage the one gorgeous attribute they possessed.

Colonel Morgan took me along the beaches and showed me the heavy wooden cases, spaced perhaps a thousand feet apart, extending as far as the eye could see. They were pad locked. Inside were stones and nothing else.

"Our men believe they are cases of guns and ammunition put here so our patrols can get at them when the command unlocks them if the Nazis come. One day, at dawn, a green fog or mist started to roll in from the east. The guards wakened me. 'Gas!' they cried, and we with no gas masks whatever!"

"What did you do?" I asked.

"Stood our ground, of course. There was nothing else to do. Actually it was some kind of atmospheric inversion, they tell me, and it rolled over the Wash and Norfolk with no harm done. Rather frightening when it was all over, you know!"

The first Commando raid hit the island of Guernsey and was a poor show. The natives thought the British raiders were Germans and refused any information. The landing dinghies swamped in the surf and nothing useful was accomplished.

The Lofoten raid on the fishery installations was another matter, however. Our secret radio had told Berlin that these islands would be attacked about March 6, 1941. The Commandos landed there March 4th. The islands produced large quantities of cod liver oil and other fish oils. Contrary to popular belief the oils were not valuable to the Germans as baby foods, but were most important as a raw material for nitrogenous explosives.

The Lofoten raid was all over when the German ships and airplanes, which were feverishly sent to the scene, arrived, to find only smoking ruins and a jolly British sign stuck up on the beach, "Well smoke your fish for you!"

Nine months later the Commandos hit Vaagsoy in Norway. This was a more deadly affair and, while the controlled German radio in London had designated another Norwegian town as the target, Vaagsoy was much better defended than the British had expected.

Three months after that, March 27, 1942, the raid on St. Nazaire was put on. In this case, the S.I.S. controlled spy radio sent over its accurate, but retarded information after the expedition had reported on March 28, 1942 that the destroyer Campbelltown loaded with high explosive and a delayed fuse had entered the River Loire and was crashing into the gates of the St. Nazaire drydock. This was the only drydock along the coast big enough to take a Nazi U-boat for overhauling and repair.

After St. Nazaire Hitler issued the order, "From now on, Commando missions are to be slaughtered to the last man”

British morale was sagging and a great raid on the German-occupied French coast was planned not only as a lift to the spirit, but as a poignard thrust into Nazi military forces with high hopes of capturing important documents and personnel. Dieppe was selected as the target city, barely one hundred miles across the Channel from Portsmouth. A gallant band of trained Commandos Anzacs, Canadians, de Gaulle Free French and Poles all were rehearsed in central England with models of the shoreline, the streets and the fortifications, until they knew Dieppe as well as their home towns.

This great raid was so important that it was put under the personal command of Lord Louis Mountbatten. At the appointed time the little invasion fleet made its rendezvous off the English coast in the fog.

The S.I.S., we can be sure, knew all about it. After an agreed upon waiting period, the German radio operator was given a message to flash to Berlin.

"A great Commando raid is laid on, destination Dieppe.

Biggest operation since Dunkirk evacuation. Scheduled for Dieppe. Time: Tuesday at dawn”

The actual timing was quite otherwise. The invasion fleet was to be ready Sunday when Lord Mountbatten was due to arrive and to sail Sunday night, striking Dieppe at dawn Monday. The message was to be sent late Monday evening and thus be another accurate but "just too late" bit of intelligence.

In the fog Sunday, the invasion boats waited and waited. Lord Louis Mountbatten had not arrived and the second in command did not, could not, go ahead without him. No way to tell London of the delay as they had strict orders not to break radio silence and thereby bring on the Focke-Wulf bombers.

So Sunday and all day Monday, Broadway (S.I.S.) had no way to receive news of the delay and naturally proceeded on the timetable they had been given. Late Monday evening the message went over the air to Berlin. At last Mount- batten arrived, and Monday night the little fleet was: also on its way to attack at dawn Tuesday; not Monday as agreed.

I saw and heard that masterpiece of Nazi propaganda film taken on the Dieppe raid. "Let us show you how all attacks on Festung Europa will be repulsed for a thousand years” the voice cried. Then, through the thick fog the cam era showed the Commando boats nosing silently toward the sandy shore. The camera swung to show the German machine gun nests placed to enfilade the entire landing area, others poking their tubes of death out of every window, on every roof and porch.

The film ended at sunset with the golden orb sinking be low the slow swells of the Atlantic Ocean, then with a panorama of sheer horror the camera swept down to the water-line. There, turning in the soft breakers, as far as the eye could see were the bodies of Mountbatten's Commandos. As each body turned, the shoulder patch identification was caught and held for a moment in the camera's cold eye Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Poland, Free France.

I could have killed the exulting German voice who ended the awful film with a shriek worthy of Hitler himself, "So we will treat all enemies of the Third Reich swine for the fish to eat Heil Hitler!"

The dangerous game of maintaining a supposed London spy ring information service to the Germans had by mischance and delay at a rendezvous caused the death of perhaps 2,000 brave Commandos.

We can imagine the bitter soul-searching that followed at Broadway and in the British Cabinet meeting. An S.O.,E. official told me that the whole process and scheme of further fooling the German Intelligence was decided as being too hazardous, when some one quoted Lincoln's Gettysburg Address the part, "that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain." By the thinnest of margins and the bitterest of head-shakings, S.LS. was permitted to carry on.

And now we come to the famous secret ski sites. These mysteries had been noted from the air for some time. They were so called because, looking down on them from an air plane, all one saw was a narrow building perhaps thirty or more feet long with a curled end, exactly like a ski on its edge. Bombing them was utterly ineffective they were too small and, anyway, a lucky direct hit found them easily replaced a few days later.

There were seventy or eighty of these inexplicable things, the northernmost in a great group about St. Omer and Hazebrouck, swinging in an arc south as far as Bacqueville and Tougouse; then no more until there was a cluster of eight around Valognes, south of Cherbourg.

It was a mystery that frightened both British and Americans as only the unknown can. The gayest cocktail party was stilled if someone blurted out, "What can they be ? these ski sites?" It was always referred to as "Crossbow" a sort of bolt aimed at England's heart.

One thing we all knew. Laid out on a map, a straight line from each ski ran plumb into London or Bristol or Birmingham or Manchester or Liverpool. Those at Cherbourg ranged precisely on Portsmouth and Southhampton.

In this tense time the German radio operator was sending over his messages every day. After Dieppe there was, there could be, no question whatever of his authenticity. Two thousand Commando bodies turning in the surf were compelling proof of the fact that the Nazi spy ring was marvelously on the job in Great Britain. The messages, while accurate, were of less importance during this time: "Fury of the British Navy that two U-boats had refuelled and provisioned at an Irish port. An unbelievable number of American motor trucks and jeeps at Cheltenham. Don't bomb Isle of Man our prisoners of war are all there. A Dr. Henderson, Director of Porton Bacteriological Laboratories, has new powerful spore developed for invasion. Will try to get name for you”.

As the calendar progressed that spring, the messages be came ever more excited: "American troops pouring into Great Britain! Landing operations being practiced in Scotland! Enormous quantity of pipe and big pumps being collected!

Suggest they intend to pump gasoline to Calais when invasion is made!"

Finally the messages reached a feverish pitch: "They plan to land early July, but great difference of opinion as to where. One powerful group advocates Schleswig-Holstein, another strong for the Dutch beaches”

The final culminating message was" a long and detailed one:

Allied War Council in twenty-hour bitter debate on where to land. Each proponent had good arguments, but Churchill kept saying "Ski sites, ski sites." Our mystery in stallations on the Pas de Calais, Dunkirk to Dieppe have won the decision. The Supreme Allied Command is unable or unwilling to effect an invasion landing anywhere else and leave these unknown objects on its flank. Churchill thinks they can be pivoted to devastate in any direction.

Final orders are to invade Europe, Calais to fifty miles south. This is most vital message I have sent at any time and fate of Dritte Reich depends on your action thereon. Glorious repulse if you mass all defenses there.

At Broadway the tension became almost a tangible thing. Would Himmler and the German High Command fall for this deception? Would the deathly fiasco of Dieppe be redeemed and the courage of maintaining the mechanism of deceit be now justified? Would all Nazi forces concentrate on the Pas de Calais?

And there they did mass! Only a recuperation battalion or two were quite by accident opposed to Allied forces behind the Normandy beaches. But the two thousand killed at Dieppe did not die in vain; there was a new birth of freedom and many a soldier who landed on Omaha Beach with no knowledge of the machinations at work, owed his: life to the gallant Commandos of Dieppe.

The surrender of Germany ended the usefulness of the German radio operator but not the promise of Britain. A subsequent New Year's brought the King's list of elevations to knighthood. Don't look for his name on the list. It may have been Sir Hubert Throckmorton or Sir William Beacham or Sir Harry Hawkins. I know he was there, but when I asked for the name, I received a bland British smile. If any man ever deserved knighthood, he did, whoever he is.

LONDON

I had never observed a city under air attack before. As I stood by London's St. Pad's Cathedral, as far as my eye could view there was nothing but rubble. St. Paul's was unharmed be cause its dome could be seen far away on moonlit nights and those Luftwaffe raiders who were not yet expert at navigation wanted it spared as a guide and beacon.

It was a shocking sight to see and I wondered if any American metropolis, so devastated, could maintain its fight and courage. Could we in the States find things to joke about amid such terrific destruction? Yet, the story circulating with relish in London Town concerned four "fish-and-chips" girls those women whose little stalls with a greasy melange of immature minnows and potato chips had been a London fix ture. The story went that supplies were running short, so one put up a sign, "Because of Hitler my servings will be littler”. Similarly, short on materials, the second posted, "Account of Hess I'm serving less” But the little fish and the chips were now unobtainable, so a lady down the street made a sign reading, "Because of Goering am forced to return to my previous means' of livelihood” The last fish-and-chips girl announced to the world, "Because of Himmler I'm doing sim-ler."

I was billeted in Claridge's Hotel on Brook Street. Regulations gave a visitor one week's occupancy of a hotel room and the authorities enforced that rule with asperity. I was far too occupied to look elsewhere. One morning as I was rushing for a waiting military car, the manager stopped me. He was obviously French and wore a modified cutaway coat and striped trousers. He was abrupt, to the point of incivility.

"Out you go tonight, Mr. Lovell. Your week is up. No exceptions. Your things will be packed by our man, and your luggage will be in the check room."

The car was honking. With a heavy heart I left for Porton, angry at his rude approach, angry at myself for not attending to the matter as I should have.

It was after ten that night when I returned. An air raid was on and the anti-aircraft guns in Hyde Park were filling the night with sound and shells. I worked my way through the blackout barriers and up the broad stairs to the Claridge's lobby. Where to lay my weary head? How to locate a room so late at night?

At the top of the stairway the same manager awaited me. I frowned at him, but to my surprise he was all smiles and obsequiousness.

"I waited for you to return, sir, to beg you to forget the gauche remarks I made to you this morning. Will you accept my profound apologies and consider yourself a guest of Clar- idge's as long as you care to stay?"

Dumbfounded, I murmured my thanks and went to the reception desk. With my room key, the clerk handed me a great sheaf of notices.

“Mr. Anthony Eden phoned. Save lunch tomorrow for him."

"Air Chief Marshall Sir Charles Portals must see you without fail at earliest."

"The Prime Minister's secretary telephoned to ask that you be sure to pay him a visit while here.”

I asked the desk clerk if I might see the names of the guests who had registered during the day. I added casually, "I'm expecting a most important personage”

There was the registration card of Robert A. Lovett, America's Assistant Secretary of War for Air. He had written it in a hurry, I suppose, because the double "t" was a pair of loops and the cross mark far out to the right. So, of course, it was read as Lovell, and in the confusion his notices were put in my box.

I stayed as the guest of Claridge's for my full duty in Britain, When he realized his mistake, the French manager glared fiercely at me, but I smiled sweetly. Hadn't he told me to be their guest as long as I cared to stay?

In addition to the Rjukan-Peenemunde Intelligence, I was charged with several other matters, among them the task of arranging, if possible, for the U.S. Navy to use a one-man submarine. The target was the great German warship, the von Tirpitz, hiding in its Norwegian fjord.

This meant clearing the matter with Admiral Harold Stark, our CominCh, U.S. Navy in European waters, universally known as "Betty" Stark. We met at Dorchester House for lunch, with notable Englishmen such as Honorable Mr. Brackett, Honorable Mr. Penfield and Wing Commander Boyle. After the lunch Admiral Stark led me to a far corner of the deserted lobby. It was an enormous room panelled in walnut, and we took chairs perhaps fifty or seventy feet away from everyone.

I told the Admiral that the O.S.S. one-man submarine had successfully passed the most rigorous tests at sea and that it and two trained operators were at his disposal He thanked me and was very pleased that O.S.S. agents did not attempt to put on the operation themselves, but were giving it to the U.S. Navy with no strings attached.

We parted at the door of Dorchester House and I re turned to O.S.S. headquarters in Grosvenor Square. David Bruce was waiting for me with a face that betokened bad news, indeed.

"Stan," he said, "British Security Police just telephoned me that you have completely broken security and that I must order you to leave for Washington immediately, otherwise you will be arrested."

"In God's name, what is the charge?"

"I don't know, but come in my office and I’ll attempt to find out."

After a somewhat heated phone conversation he hung up and said, "All they'd say was it had something to do with the von Tirpitz does that help?"

It surely did. I told him of my private talk with Admiral Stark. I pleaded that if I had broken security, the Admiral had, also, and we should both be sent home together.

A telephone call from Colonel Bruce to Admiral Stark, another from the Admiral to British Security Office with, I was later told, plenty of salty oaths, and finally a call to me at O.S.S. headquarters from the Chief London Security officer.

"Awfully sorry about the whole matter. You see, Dr. Lovell, you never once mentioned the name of the person to whom you were talking, so it might have been a German agent. The high-ranking naval person whom we verified by calling him has validated your story and everything's quite all right.

"By the way, Sir, this is a bit of an object lesson to you that quite regardless of how isolated you may seem to be, such highly confidential matters should never be mentioned in public places. Our electronic conversation pick-ups are very sensitive, you know."

"Thank you. I understand. Big Brother is listening”

Quite.

THE GREAT FEUD

None of the classic feuds of history or fiction exceeded the clan warfare between William J. Donovan and George Veazey Strong that is, between the Office of Strategic Services and the U.S. Army Intelligence (G-2) . The Montagues and the Capulets, the Guelphs and the Ghibbelines, and the Hatfields and McCoys had their counterpart in this brawl between two fine war agencies.

It started with the violent upset of orderly law enforcement in Baltimore, where the O.S.S. trainees made a shambles of that city's military security.

There was Operator C-12 whose story is told elsewhere in this narrative. There was John Toulmin, who posed as a Marine Corps colonel on sick leave and walked out of a most critical defense plant with the entire set of blueprints for a revolutionary new gun that was about to be manufactured.

Both Generals, Donovan and Strong, were far beyond military age when World War II started, and each was sixty or thereabouts when the rivalry and antagonism began. It is easy to appreciate the point of view of both men, unfortunately, as it would be more satisfying if blame could be squarely placed on one man or the other.

George Veazey Strong graduated from West Point in 1904, then from Northwestern University in 1916. There followed the War College and the General Staff School in 1924. He rose through the military commissions in the Cavalry Division to become a Brigadier General in 1938. In 1941, the year of Pearl Harbor, he was made a Major General and the following year our first of the war he was appointed the Chief of Military Intelligence.

A great student of languages, he wrote the invaluable Japanese-English Military Dictionary and a masterful syllabus of Chinese-Japanese characters and symbols.

A professional soldier to his fingertips, ambitious to make his Military Intelligence an outstanding contributor to an American victory, he at once set out to build a fine collection and appraisal system of all information to be had on our enemies, east and west. It was his duty to advise the President and the Joint Chiefs of Staff of his evaluation of these facts and his forecasts of the enemies' actions.

And now into this ambitious, orthodox machine, President Roosevelt threw the monkey wrench of a newborn amateur agency, the O.S.S. To make matters more irritating, its Director was no West Point graduate who had won his way up from a lieutenancy but a World War I hero who could boast no military training whatever. A brilliant war record, surpassing almost any West Pointer, but no school tie, no ring, and an alma mater (Columbia) that was on the wrong bank of the Hudson River.

Both men had one thing in common, the ear of President Roosevelt; General Strong because of his official status in the American war apparatus, General Donovan because he had proven to be a true prophet in his appraisal of Great Britain's ability to withstand the Nazi blitz.

I think Roosevelt considered Donovan to be more knowledgeable in the sensitive field of world politics, with Strong better posted on the facts and implications of battle and troop intelligence. Thus, the President might reason that no duplication or overlap of activity would take place, but that each could smoothly function to the advantage of all.

It was probably some minor and insignificant indiscretion at a cocktail party, perhaps which irritated General Strong. Instead of facing General Donovan with it so that disciplinary action might be taken against the "flannel-mouth," he went to one of the top men of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, with the evidence. The latter, in turn, went to the President with, by now, a vividly-painted version of the verbal slip.

Inevitably, these actions were relayed back to General Donovan, losing nothing, you can be sure, in the re-telling, and the feud was on. It is said that the start of the Hatfield- McCoy business occurred when a member of one family or the other, while out hunting, saw a movement in the woods and fired to get a deer. The McCoy or Hatfield slightly wounded, identified the hunter as a deliberate assailant and so the long line of murders began in error.

Uncorrected, such trivial origins soon become lost in the venom they create, so it no longer matters what started it all, only that it is spontaneously maintained. It permeated both fine organizations and hit at random, viciously, impartially, quite irrationally. For example, in August of 1943 a Captain in General Strong's office preferred charges against me, stating I had "broken security in a flagrant manner”. I was flabbergasted and profoundly disturbed. My value to General Donovan and to the O.S.S. would be zero if such a charge were to be validated. But, like some Gestapo proceeding, to whom do you appeal? How do you face your accusers?

Colonel Buxton was deeply upset over this accusation of my infidelity. "Search your memory, Stanley”. he said, "and tell me of any possible indiscretion”. I did, and so help me, I hadn't! Two weeks or so after the blanket accusation from Strong's office did I, somewhat by force and somewhat less by persuasion, catch the Captain alone and literally force from him the nature of my awful sin. It seemed that a Colonel close to General Strong originated the insecurity charge, and the Captain, God help him, was merely "carrying out orders”.

By the time I met the Colonel I had a big enough dossier on the gentleman to satisfy a most vengeful person. We met and his letter which I brought out with me, had such adjectives as "unsupported” and "apologetic” but I couldn't get "vindictive” into it. Almost, but not quite! At any rate, the charges evaporated in a single-paged letter and I was re established on Donovan's staff and completely exonerated of an utterly false charge I should never have been forced to defend.

As I told the Colonel, we had enough of a problem fighting the Germans and the Japanese at one and the same time without trumping up mendacious charges against each other.

Another Colonel on General George Strong's staff happened to be a pre-war friend of my wife and mine. He was George Lusk who, before the war, had been a textbook publisher in Boston. It was Colonel Lusk who convinced me that General Strong was not a jealous monster, but a sincere patriot. Colonel Lusk thus became a channel of common sense and sanity in a situation that was rapidly becoming, to all of us in O.S.S., an intolerable war in itself.

One of my biggest personal problems at the time was whether or not to go into uniform. Almost everyone in O.S.S. was doing so. It would be rather nice to be Colonel or perhaps Brigadier General after the war, but I knew that I had not given up my business position merely to get an officer's commission.

At this point, please forgive a sentimental journey into the past. I had been an orphan since childhood just me and a sister six years older and there was a real paucity of money. Convinced by her that only in the United States could a poor boy with no family backing get a fine education, that became my all-possessing goal. Naturally, realizing that I had such a glorious opportunity led to a deep appreciation of the kind of a country to which I was fortunate enough to belong that and a keen sense of indebtedness to it. Now in O.S.S. I was happily making some payment on that debt.

In all this intelligence agency bitterness, the Navy's O.N.I, held a neutral, if not cooperative, attitude toward die O.S.S. Admiral Forrest Sherman, whom I had first met at Pearl Harbor on the Lethbridge matter, when he threw his great weight to the side of approval, was a bulwark of help. Some of us will always wonder if his untimely death in a public hotel in Genoa, Italy was due to natural causes. Genoa was a hotbed of Communists, and Admiral Sherman had just concluded some vital conferences with Franco on air bases in Spain.

The antagonism which Army Intelligence held toward O.S.S. was at such a point that Major General George Veazey Strong and William J. Donovan were no longer on speaking terms.

Colonel Ned Buxton asked me to see if I could soften or in any way help the distressing situation. I had an appointment with General Strong and found him bristling with resentment before I was barely introduced as one of Donovan's staff.

He let go with real anger at the silly upsets to his men that our training stunts were causing. He said, "Lovell, go back to Wildman Donovan and tell him that his amateur gang is going to be thrown out of the war effort entirely. I'm seeing the President on it and Edgar Hoover is going with me. Good-bye."

I said, "General Strong, I believe you are a consecrated man. I think you would give your life for our country. I know Bill Donovan would, he has proved it many times in World War I. God help America if two great soldiers put their personal egos ahead of their country”.

"Get out." I did. Just as I closed the door of his office he shouted, "Come back here”. I did so, without a word.

"If you were in uniform, Lovell, I'd prefer charges against you for talking to me like that. Being a civilian I can't do it”. Then in a calmer tone, "So you think that two over grown egos are at fault?"

"Egotism, jealousy and the usual superior attitude a professional assumes toward an amateur. All I ask is that you give the O.S.S. a chance to prove its mettle”.

"I'll think about it,” he said, but in a normal tone and almost absent-mindedly he extended his hand for a farewell shake.

Before General Bissell succeeded him, I saw him on any potential cause of friction or clash between the two intelligence agencies and proudly numbered him among my friends.

General Donovan and General Strong softened to the point of nodding and smiling at one another at various functions, but both used me as liaison rather than risk a personal visit with its probable explosion.

Later, General Donovan asked me, when I returned from General Strong's office with a letter of approval on a touchy matter, "Stanley, how do you do it?"

"That's easy, Bill. I'm a civilian, that's why”

"Well, then” he said, "no commission or uniform for you."

THE GREAT OPPORTUNIST

The great intelligence agent of our time is Franz von Papen. He was born in 1880, a proud descendant in a direct line from Wilhelm von Papen who died in 1494. At the age of eleven, he was a cadet and at seventeen a page in the Emperor's Court. A year later he was commissioned a Second Lieutenant in a regiment of Uhlans. When he was twenty- five he married a girl of French descent. The War Academy graduated him and by 1913 he was appointed to the German Army General Staff. That same year he was sent as Military Attache to both the United States and Mexico. In Mexico he met a Lieutenant Canaris of the German Navy, a contact that was later to become most important in von Papen's career, when Admiral Canaris became the chief of Hitler's Abwehr, the Nazi foreign intelligence agency and spy ring.

In his memoirs, published in 1953, von Papen assured us that the Kaiser did not want war, but had to order it when Russia made Germany's position untenable. In Washington he became the center of German intrigue and sabotage. He admits having fake passports made, ordering the Welland Ship Canal blown up and blocked, and hiring thugs like von Rintelen, who probably executed the "Black Tom" Disaster. Von Papen denies any complicity in this violent act against a nation not at war. The Austrian Ambassador, Herr Dumba, reported in detail to Vienna on von Papen's spying and sabo tage in our neutral country and somehow the British S.I.S. intercepted the Dumba report and published it. This famous report was called the "Albert Papers” Von Papen, in his memoirs, called this "an unfortunate occurrence”.

In 1915 he managed to sail to England and was arrested at Falmouth. The British would have been wise to intern him for the duration of the war, but in those days a diplomatic passport was still a paper to be honored by the meticulous British, so they searched him and then allowed him to proceed to Rotterdam and thereafter, home. He was sent to the front in Turkey to fight against Allenby and Lawrence of Arabia. When the Fatherland surrendered, he came home.

Of the postwar period, he said the philosophy of the Weimar Constitution was detestable because it held that "all power derives from the people” "The Versailles Treaty” he wrote, "was founded in hysteria” He entered politics largely to represent the old idea of German aristocracy and hoped that the Hohenzollerns would be restored to power.

He became Chancellor of Germany but not for long. He held that the rising Nazi Party under Adolph Hitler must be represented in the government. Despite the sanctimonious protestations of Christian piety he did, in effect, turn Germany over to the Nazi rabble. Then came the Great Purge in Munich and Berlin, and we find von Papen as Vice Chancellor under house arrest. He pleaded with Hitler that his diplomatic standing would expedite a union with Austria so, once again, he escaped a violent end and became Ambassador at Vienna.

He writes that he fully expected to be arrested for treason after the Anschluss or union with that little country, but by 1939 he got himself appointed Ambassador to Turkey. Perhaps he sincerely felt war could be avoided, yet, so shrewd a man surely could have seen little hope in the Nazi regime he had helped to power. When war started he told his secretary, "This is the worst crime and greatest madness that Hitler and his clique have ever committed. Germany can never win this war. Nothing will be left but ruins."

He contemplated becoming a refugee, but decided he could limit the conflict if he remained in Ankara. One wonders if the "Great Opportunist 7 ' didn't really hope to return to power by some future machination. Throughout the war he operated German intelligence in Turkey with a gusto that fitted poorly with his pious Christian attitude. "I found it possible to exercise normal instincts and refuse to obey un principled orders” he wrote. While serving Hitler and Ribbentrop in March of 1945, he contacted ex-Governor Earle of Pennsylvania as an intermediary to President Franklin Roosevelt. Von Papen's argument was much like that of Rudolph Hess in his historic flight to England stop our fighting with each other or Russia will be the great victor of this war. He quotes Mr. Earle from a Philadelphia Inquirer interview of January 30, 1949 as, in turn, quoting President Roosevelt "that Russia, made up of so many peoples, speaking so many languages need not be worried about and would, in fact, fall apart after the war”

Von Papen painted himself as the apostle of peace during all the war years. Not a word of plotting or spy activity, except the famous "Operation Cicero," which had doubtless received so much publicity it could not be ignored. Even here, the typical von Papen touch. It has been established that "D," the Albanian informer was paid off by von Papen in counterfeit, worthless British pound notes. Not a sentence of this in the memoirs!

One significant gap in the autobiography is found between August 5, 1944 and April 9, 1945 eight months culminating in his arrest by American troops. He had praise for "gallant Goering," he was shocked at the disclosures of concentration camp atrocities; his old associates (barring Goering) he called Spiessburgers insincere Philistines. But it's all the fault of the United States and Great Britain! Locarno and Lausanne both ignored the necessity of building a strong Germany.

He favored Hitler, he says, only to avoid civil war. "I am under no illusion as to the reputation I enjoy, but the whole German disaster is clearly due to the bad treatment vanquished Germany received after World War I."

Franz von Papen can only be compared to Liza, crossing the ice in Uncle Tom's Cabin. As the ice cake of Kaiser Wilhelm started to sink, he jumped to the Weimar Republic cake. As that began to fail, he leapt to the Nazi support. There was yet another ice cake to jump to. It was the O.S.S.

His excoriation of Adolph Hitler, when der Fuhrer was safely dead, came a little late from the man who told the Austrian Chancellor von Schuschnigg in 1938, "You can trust Adolph Hitler's immaculate word of honor”

The O.S.S. realized that this brilliant, devout Catholic layman, this worshipper of the vanished Kaiserliclie regime, was a stark realist and a ruthless and clever opportunist.

In March of 1943, General Donovan had me meet our chief O.S.S. operator for the Near East, who had that day flown in from Ankara, Turkey. I knew him only as "Mac”. Like almost all intelligence operators, Mac exchanged information with enemy spies', but he was a very special case, indeed, as his contact was direct with Franz von Papen.

Here, it seemed to me, was a fine chance to use bacteriological "medication” My Canadian friends supplied us with viable staphylococcus aureus in crushable glass ampules. It was considered to be a powerful but non-lethal organism. I gave it to Mac and told him to introduce it into food preferably custard when he called on von Papen. I told Mac to take it himself, also, and assured him it would cause discomfort, but would never kill him or von Papen. The O.S.S. gave Mac some very hot information to relate to von Papen, but it was so timed that its receipt in Berlin would be just a little too late to be valuable or allow any countermeasures.

I was told that the whole idea worked even better than we had hoped. At dinner in the German Embassy in Ankara, Mac managed to get the yellow powder both into his food and the Ambassador's'. After dinner they sat before a fireplace in the study and Mac gave von Papen his true, but just-too- late information. Shortly after, they were both seized with cramps so severe that the German physician put them to bed in the same room, upstairs. The doctor blamed the attack on the custard. Convalescence was slow. Had the toilet been ten feet further away, it would have been of no use. What took place with these two men lying side by side can best be deduced from what happened to von Papen thereafter.

This man, who had switched his loyalty from the Kaiser to the Weimar Republic to von Hindenburg to Adolph Hitler, who had avoided the great Munich purge of June 30, 1934 by being appointed Papal Legate the week before-this man was an expert at shifting gears and joining the side he felt would win. Mac undoubtedly convinced him that the Nazis would lose the war. At any rate, it is a fact that he and Schacht were the only Nazi leaders exonerated at the war trials in Nuremberg. No one seemed to notice that, immediately after the breakthrough at the Remagen Bridge, von Papen was in his castle in Bavaria. If he was in Ankara the day before, only the U.S. Air Force could have made the flight possible. My guess is that Mac promised von Papen immunity from any trial if he would come over to our side and that we kept our promise to him, and he to us. The mutual convalescence from the Canadian bacteriological ingestion paid off handsomely.

WJ.D., AN INTIMATE APPRAISAL

On April 17, 1951 I was in William J. Donovan's law office at 2 Wall Street, New York City. He was, as always, interested in the successor organization to O.S.S., the Central Intelligence Agency.

He said, "Stanley, Beetle Smith is out as head of C.I.A. Ulcers, you know. The other day, Allen Dulles came in here and said that President Truman had offered him the job and what did I advise? I told him, “Allen, you were a great performer as a lone operator. You did a wonderful intelligence job in Switzerland during the war but, Al, this C.I.A. job needs an expert organizer, and you're no good whatever at that. Tell the President you're flattered that he thought of you, but the answer has to be "no." You're the best man we ever had at collecting intelligence but you know nothing about sabotage or any violent operation. Admit it, Al, the job isn't for you”

"He left damned upset with me, but God help America if he heads up C.I.A. It's like making a marvelous telegraph operator the head of Western Union."

The point of starting an appraisal of William J. Donovan with this account is that all who knew him and worked under him recognized that Donovan was the worst organizer of all. A great agency grew up under him because he didn't really try to organize it he just authorized it. I'm sure the C.IA under Allen Dulles was far better organized than the O.S.S. ever was. That its contribution seems less is partly due to its being a peacetime agency and partly because it has to "clear" so much with the State Department, the Army, Navy and Air Force, and, I sometimes feel, the Home Owners Loan Agency and the Better Business Bureau. But most of all, because it never had William J. Donovan as its Director.

No one who knew him intimately can ever appraise Donovan in any simple or glib manner, because there were so many facets to his personality. The mild blue eyes needing no glasses in his seventh decade; the rather dumpy, corpulent figure; the soft, almost restrained voice; the gray hair and the none-too-well fitting clothes were in no way indicative of the man inside that exterior. -

Born in Buffalo, New York on New Year's Day, 1883, he received his A.B. degree from Columbia when he was twenty-two and his law degree two years later. He started at once to practice law in his hometown. Mrs. Judge Carroll Hincks of Cheshire, Connecticut was a debutante in Buffalo at that time. She says that Bill Donovan was the most eligible and popular bachelor of the city. Every unmarried girl dreamed of becoming his wife, and, I suspect, some married ones did, too. He withstood the feminine assaults until he was thirty- one when, shortly before Europe burst into the flames of World War I, he married Ruth Rumsey. She was the belle of the Delaware Avenue set. Her family had wealth. She was a Protestant, he a Roman Catholic.

Their honeymoon was barely over before he started raising a company of soldiers' because he felt Wilson's promise to keep America out of war was either insincere or impossible to keep. He was a captain in the New York State National Guard when the American Expeditionary Force was organized. Thus, at the age of thirty-four, he made his first success at anticipating world events.

Soon he had risen to be Assistant Chief of Staff of the 2yth Division. Promoted to be a major in the proud old 6th New York Infantry Regiment, he won his colonel's eagles by spot promotions on the battlefields of France. His name be came a legend for daring, bravery and total disregard of personal danger. A baseball hero of those days was called "Wild Bill" Donovan, and his troops nicely appropriated that nick name for their leader. He was wounded three times.

The second battle of the Marne in July, 1918 is called by Captain Basil Liddell Hart "the turning of the tide of World War I! “ Here, the Allies captured the initiative and the Germans never regained it. The River Ourocq protected the German army under Ludendorff, which had so far met no reversals. Colonel Donovan led his troops across the Ourocq. For this, and his bravery in the Baccarat sector, he was given the Distinguished Service Medal. In the famous Meuse-Ar- gonne offensive in October, 1918, he received the Congressional Medal of Honor for his action near Londres and St. Georges.

Colonel Ned Buxton always maintained, in his joking way, that Bill Donovan should have been court-martialed for the very action that won him the Congressional Medal of Honor. Colonel Buxton's command was alongside Donovan's and whether told as fact or a joke, Buxton straight-facedly averred that orders came to both men to withdraw one kilometer and consolidate their positions. To Buxton's amazement, Donovan advanced on the double, so there was no choice but to do the same or expose the whole Donovan regiment to encirclement by the Germans.

Ned Buxton who had a Lincolnesque way with a story, ended the anecdote, "I asked Wild Bill what the hell he meant by disobeying orders."

"What orders?" he blandly asked.

At the end of World War I he returned to Buffalo, the most decorated man in American military history. He was made commander of the Legion of Honor, the Order of the British Empire, the Croci di Guerra, the Order of Leopold, the Cross Polonia Restituta and a special Croix de Guerre with palm and Silver Star. At the age of thirty-five, this Buffalonian who had not made his mark in the law, was the country's hero.

The most exclusive clubs welcomed him and political appointments were many. In 1922 he was U.S. District Attorney for Western New York. During Prohibition, his exclusive Buffalo club served any alcoholic drink desired to its members of which William J. Donovan was one a prominent one.

He had the place raided and many a socialite member found his name on the police blotter with a whacking fine for the club. I can only speculate that Donovan's oath to enforce the Federal law compelled him to do it, but Buffalo was splattered with speakeasies, so why raid his own select group of important friends? Whatever the motive, lofty or merely a determination to use his new-found power, it cost him dear in 1932.

He opened a law office in New York City in 1929 and his clients were such potent names as the Standard Oil Company of New Jersey and some of the biggest New York City banks. He told me that he had advised the oil company to withdraw from its extensive investment in China, which they did in the nick of time. His law practice became more and more involved in international politics, and his advice proved to be amazingly accurate.

In 1932 he ran for Governor of New York State as a Re publican. A bitter Buffalo group, remembering his Prohibition raids, threw its upstate weight to Herbert Lehman, and pulled every connection to defeat Donovan, and a decisive defeat it was. If he was hurt, he never showed it.

During the next six years he made vital contacts in Great Britain. Sir Charles Hambro of Hambro's Bank, Winston Churchill and men of that stripe, in or out of office, used him more and more as their agent and advisor on matters legal and political in the United States. Franklin D. Roosevelt had been at Columbia Law School at the same time as Donovan.

He travelled almost continually. General Pietro Badoglio of Italy was a warm friend. He became an unofficial observer for Roosevelt when the latter became President. His greatest decision was when he returned from London during the crucial Battle of Britain. He knew about the British invention of radar. After the crushing defeat of Dunkirk in 1940, all of the President's advisors assured the White House that Great Britain had no choice but to surrender to the Nazis all except Wild Bill Donovan. Army Intelligence gave the Royal Air Force only a week or two to survive.

Colonel Donovan was almost offensively confident and buoyant in a Washington that had Britain dead and buried. The most that the professional intelligence agencies would concede was that a second-rate resistance might be maintained against Hitler in Canada, Australia and New Zealand.

Colonel Donovan told President Roosevelt that Great Britain would win over the Nazis in the air and on the sea. As the months rolled by, it became ever clearer that Donovan was a true prophet and every other advisor surrounding the President, military and civilian, was his inferior.

When it was assured that, standing all alone, Great Britain was able to withstand the terror and might of the Nazi war machine; or, put in another way, that the Hitler gang had missed the great moment to invade England and win the war, Colonel Donovan told President Roosevelt the thrilling story of British Secret Intelligence and its twin, Special Operations, Executive. In July 1941, five months before isolationist America was changed overnight at Pearl Harbor, these two men planned a parallel intelligence-sabotage agency, and who better to head it than the man who had so correctly evaluated the indomitable stamina of Britain?

On one of his travels as Special Representative for the President, he had his baggage and all his papers and reports stolen. I recall it as happening in Cairo or perhaps, Baghdad. I recall, too, thinking how much better it would have been not to report and publicize the loss which was bound to make him appear rather naive and not a little stupid.

But what would have ruined the career of anyone else somehow turned into an asset for him. The press picked up the story, calling him "Colonel Donovan, America's Secret Agent." Overnight, he became the kind of person who is the hero of all the spy stories ever written.

A man of mystery, about whom legends are born. Re member, our country was largely indifferent to the travail of Europe, something to be avoided at all costs. Yet hearts were warmed to realize that we had someone meeting with kings and presidents and probably with conspirators in dark alleys, and advising Washington on the "inside facts”

And so, six months before the Japanese attack, these two men, Republican and Democrat, Catholic and Protestant, instituted a new idea in our government, a wartime agency for espionage and subversion.

That sort of activity had never been attempted in the U.S.A. It was given the vague and meaningless name of Coordinator of Information one could hardly cavil at that. After the Japanese attack, it was changed to a "Service" to include the development and supplying of unorthodox weapons, and anything else that was wanted, to resistance groups every where. "Strategic" implied planning and advising such groups, so Office of Strategic Services was decided upon as' a correct name that did not reveal the business of the agency.

Here was the activity and the duty for which he was born. How can any man's work be judged, except by balancing the good and the bad? Right from the start, to name a bad quality, Bill Donovan drove his security officers Weston Howland and Archibald van Beuren to the brink of despair. Bill Donovan would talk about the most secret affairs at a cocktail party or a dinner, according to our Chief of Security, and be furious if he were criticized for it I recall being in his private automobile with his chaffeur, we two on the rear seat with no interior barrier (as in a limousine) , when he began talking to me of the exact date and place of the landings at Marseilles.

I mutely pointed to the driver in the seat ahead. For some reason General Donovan didn't take offense.

"Oh, Harry's all right, aren't you, Harry?"

"If you say so, Boss, then I sure am!" Harry said.

I cannot rationalize his often flagrant breaching of security and secrecy. Certainly, we on his staff were held to the most rigid and meticulous standards. As in my own case, when an extremely sensitive matter, like the Lethbridge Report, was discussed, he would remind me, "Stanley, not one word to anyone for twenty years!"

William J. Donovan made a fetish of acquiring distinguished college professors. In his mind they outranked scientists, I'm sure, and, I think, even lawyers and bankers. Perhaps, highest in his regard was William L. Langer, Coolidge Professor of History at Harvard, James L. McConnaughy, President of Wesleyan University and later Governor of Connecticut, Edward S. Mason, James Phinney Baxter, President of Williams College, Sherman Kent, and W. S. Lewis of Yale, Maurice Halperin of Oklahoma, Congers Read of the University of Pennsylvania, and a host of others of whom, I, being a simple chemist, never knew the scholastic stature. The group of scholars and educators' was called the Research and Analysis Branch.

Under Dr. Langer, they assembled an incredible mass of information about practically every nation in the world: its history, geography, political and economic structure, its ethnology, ecology and other ologies too numerous to mention.

Those of us in applied sciences, working with tangible tools to meet the subtle demands of the resistance forces in Europe and Asia were, I think, inclined to belittle the work of this academic group. How wrong we were. It was intelligence at its best, and it had never been done before until Bill Donovan created it. After the war was over, I was told by Army, Navy and Air Force friends that a request for data on the most obscure seashore or inland location produced instantly an encyclopedia on that very place.

When the professors returned to their classrooms, they must have had a rich pride in their wartime service, one which no faculty members in earlier American wars could have made for their country.

On the other hand I was told that Professor Halperin advocated the smuggling of two banished leaders back into their homeland, so they might better organize the resistance to the Nazis. The men were, as I recall it, in Mexico and in South America, and Halperin sold his associates on the idea. One of the refugees he had O.S.S. smuggle into France was Maurice Thorez; into Italy Palmiro Togliatti. Each later became head of the Communist Party in his country.

After the dissolution of the O.S.S., this same Professor Halperin joined the faculty of Boston University. When Senator Joseph McCarthy swooped into Boston academic circles, looking for witches among the teachers of our youth, he struck pay dirt in Professor Maurice Halperin. Put on the witness stand under oath, Halperin resorted to that refuge of equivo cation, the Fifth Amendment. He was held over to the next day for further questioning, but he never again could be asked which side he was on. He fled to Mexico. In 1958 he went to Moscow where, I am told, he writes vitriolic anti-American articles and lectures to Russian youth on the depravity of the American way of life.

Communist groups were constantly functioning inside the O.S.S. Early in January, 1943, Carroll Wilson, then Secretary to Doctor Bush, asked us to make a color motion picture for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, which for the first time disclosed the wonderful new aid to navigation which Donald Fink had invented. It was called "Loran" and was a Top Secret classification. By its use, a navigator could pinpoint his location in air, in fog, on sea, on land.

Two reels were delivered to Dr. Bush. By sheer coincidence I discovered that a third print had been made. I charged in on the O.S.S. photographic crew. They denied any holdout I got an armed guard and threatened them with everything in the book. As a last bluff I said I knew the Russian Embassy was sending a man down for the secret print. My bluff worked and it was produced out of a clothes locker.

After the war, some of this group was tried for spying for the U.S.S.R. I reported the shocking story, of course, to General Donovan. He told me later that he had mentioned it to President Roosevelt and that the President had said, "Bill, you must treat the Russians with the same trust you do the British. They're killing Germans every day, you know”

Hindsight is so simple. In one staff meeting General Donovan said, "I saw the President yesterday. He again said to treat the Russians as we would treat the British. A delegation of Russians is coming soon to inspect Professor Moriarty's bag of tricks”

Perhaps, because I am of British descent, albeit the break with the mother country came three hundred years ago, I quoted Shakespeare to my group and we honored General Donovan's order more in the breach than in the observance. The stolid, dead-pan Russian colonels' came. I served them pure ethyl alcohol and water which I called vodka. I said "Tovarich," and we showed them only the simplest device's we had, booby traps and the like. Our silent, flashless gun had been so altered that when fired in a dark room, it was both deafening and blinding. They mumbled some Russian equivalent of a most derogatory nature, I'm sure. They carried the quart bottle of synthetic vodka with them when they left, but that's all they took away of any value to the U.S.S.R.

I'm not particularly proud of failing to carry out General Donovan's orders, but the incident illustrates the loose rein with which he drove the office. Parenthetically, I can't imagine the C.I.A. having a branch chief do such a thing.

One thing I never could understand about him. In a group of say, ten to fifty men, he was a dynamic speaker, forceful and utterly captivating, yet on the platform before a hallfull an audience of hundreds or a thousand or so he was ineffectual. His conversational voice became flat and his message which would have read well became lost in his poor delivery. He was far too smart not to have realized his inability to hold an audience, yet he never refused an invitation to talk from a rostrum.

Little personal matters endeared him to me. At the low point of our African invasion, when we knew the U-boats had closed the Strait of Gibraltar, and the defeat at the Kasserine Pass had us all in the depths of despair, Bill Donovan started every morning staff meeting by reading aloud a chapter from a history of the War of 1812. "They haven't burned the White House yet," he said, as he closed the book. "You know, boys, no one in their senses would have bet a dollar that the United States would survive. England had every facility to destroy us completely, yet here we are. Our country, I believe, has a destiny and a meaning in human history that no nation has ever before possessed. Nothing can ever stop us, but the will of God”.

A revealing sidelight on this remarkable man appeared when I noticed a language primer on his desk.

"I'm studying Italian” he said, noting my glance. "It may be we'll split Italy out of the Axis and I'll have to move headquarters to Rome."

"Andiamo alia tavola," I said, for I had been to Berlitz. He came back at me with an avalanche of Italian beyond my grasp, so I said, "Si," and smiled. "Wrong answer” he said, "I told you Americans were interested only in their almighty dollar."

A quality that General Donovan lacked so completely that I never ceased to marvel at it, was fear, of which he literally had none. On our explosives proving range at the Congressional Country Club in Washington, my branch put on a demonstration for the Pentagon top brass. General George Marshall was there and shoulder stars were in abundance. Colonel John Jefferies 1 demonstrated our Aunt Jemima camouflaged explosive. He wet it with water and made it into a dough. He inserted a short time delay into the moist mass. Some Army Ordnance General asked him to lay a piece of armor plate over it or near it, which he did with obvious reluctance.

He asked the audience to move back a considerable distance, which they didn't all do. When it exploded, a chunk of steel went a few feet away from General Donovan's head and buried itself into a tree behind him. I was near enough and scared enough to notice everything, being responsible for the whole performance. General Donovan had not flickered an eyelash, while I was trembling like an aspen leaf. He turned to me and asked in a soft, calm voice, "What's next on the program?”

As we left, we found that the biggest piece of the armor plate had gone right through the shatterproof windshield of General Marshall's automobile, but fortunately there was no one in it.

No word picture of General Donovan would be complete without mention of a peculiar and valuable asset he had, whether or not he knew he had it. The man had a "presence." I have repeatedly seen him walk into a crowded room, filled with military personnel or a mixed group as at a reception. The instant he appeared, conversation died down and all eyes turned toward him. The first time it happened, I explained it to myself by thinking the host or hostess had tipped off the guests that the mysterious General Donovan was arriving. No such explanation could rationalize the many times it happened thereafter.

EPILOGUE

It may disturb some readers to depart abruptly from the narrative I have related and for me to lay before them the conclusions and course of action which these experiences indicate to me.

If this change from reporting events to deducing a policy from them is distasteful, please consider the book as ending on the previous page.

I feel that our whole concept of war is obsolete and outmoded, and thus irrational. Always, after the death and misery of a war, a peace treaty is the orthodox climax. About this time a strange thing begins to happen. We discover that the enemy we fought is actually our friend, and some of the allies we had are real or potential enemies. For example, Germany, Italy and Japan become trustworthy compatriots and Russia is an implacable enemy.

Our concept, which is to avoid war as long as possible, leads but to an unworkable peace. What other alternatives are there? There is neutrality, or non-involvement in the outside world; in short, isolation. Many Americans still wistfully hold to this as an ideal state and quote George Washington's Fare well Address. But Pearl Harbor proved the impossibility of a rich nation being safe from attack by the hungry and the ambitious. With nations like Russia bent on world domination, insulation would become our prison.

Another concept is "to play it by ear” which implies a skill at opportunism which we have seldom shown. The Marshall Plan and NATO come under this sort of a concept. They buy valuable time, to be sure, but time for what? As we arm beyond the point of total world destruction, is there any step left but to use the armaments, be the results what they may? This idea really concludes that Armageddon is ultimately preferable to continued, intolerable suspense and tension.

The different point of view which I propose is based on the fact that all wars start in ignorance, ignorance of the other country's intentions and its power to resist or to strike. "Had we only known," is the wail of all world political leaders. Had England known the depth of feeling for independence among her thirteen colonies. Had Hitler known the truth about England after Dunkirk. Had we known Japanese intentions and potential.

We can know. Iron curtains and Bamboo curtains are only impenetrable to those who will not open their eyes. We have the Central Intelligence Agency whose business it is to know but whose record is not as good as it should be. Part of its inadequate performance is due to the belief of many Americans that it is somehow un-American to know the plans and the power of another nation. Spying is a dirty word. The extroverted, good-fellow approach is natural to us and snooping or penetrating secrets is held to be a tawdry, ignoble business.

Despite this national distaste, my plea is for an American intelligence service so effective that we may know and assess the plans of all other nations and correctly evaluate their ability and their timing. This means a far more expert organization than we now have. It means diverting perhaps a quarter of our military budget to this end alone. It means that our intelligence people hold important positions in every critical government abroad and that knowing the facts of world politics becomes a prime business of our Federal Government.

The concept of war was really changed in 1946 when it became vital to the USSR to know how to make the nuclear fission bomb, if she were to achieve world equality with us. With this massive demonstration of what secret intelligence can accomplish for a nation, it should be apparent that the Cold War is actually this new concept of conflict. The use of accurate information, however acquired, and at whatever expense, has won more victories for Russia than their armies won in World War II. At the very time Russia made intelligence her prime concern, our own OSS was being dissolved by Executive Order.

We cannot bring back the fabulous team of Donovan and Buxton, yet, though their great organization was dissolved, an even superior one can be built. It can be, provided the United States wakes up to its peril and to an awareness of how war fare is now to be fought.

Ignorance may have been an affluent bliss in the past, but it is henceforth national suicide not to be wise.

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