>> From the Library of Congress in Washington DC.
[ Silence ]
>> Well, good afternoon and welcome to the Library of Congress.
I'm John Cole.
I'm the director of the Library Center for the Book
which is its reading promotion arm.
And we promote books and reading throughout and literacy
and libraries throughout the country,
largely through two networks.
We have affiliated centers in every state
and also national reading promotion partners which consists
of organizations which are interested, we hope,
in promoting books and reading.
Here at the Library of Congress, we're deeply involved
in the National Book Festival which is an annual event.
The center not only works on author program
that we sponsor basically something called the Pavilion of the States,
if you've not been to the book festival.
If you have then you know what the Pavilion of the States is.
It's the largest Pavilion where all the states are here--
our state centers are here and state libraries and they have tables
and they talk about how they promote authors and writing and books
in their states and it's a very, very busy Pavilion.
We also sponsor talks such as this one.
The books and beyond series focuses largely, well almost entirely,
on books that have some kind of special connection
with the Library of Congress.
Either through the collections which our speaker will mention today,
he relied heavily on the libraries' collections,
particularly the manuscript collections,
but also of books coming out of special projects
that the libraries involved in.
So we're pleased to you here and there are couple of--
some seats in the middle up here,
so we're gonna be just about right I think.
All of the books and beyond programs are video taped for our website
and today is no exception.
That means I like to ask you to turn off all things electronic.
Our format is roughly about 40-minute talk
from our speaker then time for questions and answers.
And books signings are very much a part of the books and beyond series
and the signing of-- Doug will be signing the books
out in the foier just beyond the-- on the other side.
As I said many of our-- most
of our Books & Beyond talks are now available on our website.
There also is a Books & Beyond Club Facebook where we keep track
of our speakers and encourage you to sign on and learn what's coming up
and make comments about talks that you have seen.

I would like to say that we are specially privileged today
to have an author whose book has been so well reviewed.
It's also a topic in which there's widespread interest.
He and I were chatting a little earlier about the run that he's on.
Not only with talks around the Washington area
but the wonderful run of good reviews this book is receiving
and it had a front page review, if I'm not mistaken
at the New York Times book review a week before last.
And he tells me that even yesterday he was on the road talking
to employees at the CIA, so you can see that this is a topic that is
of great interest to all of us.
Our speaker is Doug Waller, Douglas Waller,
a former veteran correspond for Newsweek and Time.
And he has-- And he reported on the CIA for 6 years.
He also covered the Pentagon, the State Department,
the White House and the Congress.
Before reporting for Newsweek and Time he served 8 years
as a legislative assistant on the staffs
of Representative Edward Markey and Senator William Proxmire.
He is the author of the best sellers the "Commandos: The Inside Story
of America's Secret Soldiers"
which chronicled US special operations forces with the lineage
of tracing back to the OSS, our topic-- one of our topics today.
And also the author of Big Red, the 3-month voyage
of a trident nuclear submarine.
He is the author of "A Question of Loyalty: General Billy Mitchell
and the Court-Marshal that Gripped the Nation," another of his books
that depended heavily on the Library of Congress
in particular the Mitchell papers in the Manuscript Division.
And it was a critically acclaimed biography
of the World War II general.
I will leave it to our author Douglas Waller
to begin telling us all about his book
and the central character Wild Bill Donovan.
I'm pleased to introduce Doug Waller.
Doug?   [ Applause ]

[ Pause ]   >> Thanks John.

It's really nice to be here.
It's kinda old home week for me being back
at the Library of Congress.
Because during the research for the Donovan book, for one year,
I spent every Saturday, every single Saturday
in a Manuscript Division room going through--
I think it was something like 15 sets of papers.
[Inaudible] who's an imminent historian here at the Library
of Congress was my mentor.
One of the things you discover if you're doing histories
or biographies is you need to have an archivist helping you
out in the collections, otherwise you can get totally lost
and Don is a bulldog when it comes to the collections
and the Manuscript Division room.
When I wasn't in the manuscript room I was in the main reading room
over in the Jefferson building, although I have to admit,
I don't know if other historians had meet this either.
I had a hard time paying attention in there because I kept on looking
up at the beautiful artwork all the time.
Never saw any hawks up there or birds or eagles or whatever.
Never any wildlife up there but the view is just spectacular.
Wild Bill Donovan, it's a book really with three stories in it.
The first is a very compelling biography
of a truly heroic figure whose life met a lot of personal strategies.
It's also a spy story, the tale of some very daring operations
that occurred during World War II and it's a tale
of Washington political intrigue at the highest levels of government.
That was the part of it, I guess, being a journalist
that interested me the most.   Start with the personal story.

For Donovan, it's a very, very rich one.
In fact, I've always said I would have loved
to have been a reporter back then in the 1940s covering him.
And interestingly I probably would have covered him.
Donovan liked reporters.   He leak to them all the time.

They work on his staff, spies and propagandas.
Before he formed the OSS, he would go overseas
on informal intelligence collection missions,
and sometimes worked part-time as a correspondent
for different newspapers, earned a little money on the side.
He was not a particularly tall person, only about 5 foot 9'.
Mary-- Elizabeth McIntosh, one of his female agents thought he--
when he headed up the OSS, he looked kinda penguin-shaped.
In fact, he told her that one time.   He didn't really appreciate it.

Mary Bancroft, another one
of his agents said he looked like a Kewpie doll.
Don't anybody ask me what a Kewpie doll looks like.
I never looked it up.
He slept five hours or less at night.
He could speed read, at least, three books a week.
He was an excellent ballroom dancer.   He loved to sing Irish songs.

He would go to New York and collect all the latest sheet music
from Broadway so he can learn the words.
He didn't smoked, rarely drank.
He'd enjoyed fine dining which unfortunately put on the pounds
for him in his later years.
He spent lavishly with no concept for a dollar.
In fact, when he was out on trips or in a field,
his aides always carried money 'cause he was always mooching
quarters and dollars off of them.
He was witty but he never laughed out loud,
rarely ever told a dirty joke.
He never showed anger instead let it boil inside him.
He was rakishly handsome, particularly as a young man.
He had bright blue eyes that women found absolutely captivating.
But his life also was filled with tragedy.
His daughter, his granddaughter, one of his granddaughters
and his daughter-in-law all died at early ages.
He was born New Year's day, 1883 in Buffalo,
New York's poor Irish First Ward.
First, he thought he'd become a priest.
Of course, in most Irish families, it was always assumed that one
of the sons would become a priest.
And Donovan thought that would be him.
It turned out he wasn't really cutout for the clothes.
So he instead he went to Columbia University,
was quarterback the football at the Columbia senior year,
went to Columbia law school.
Franklin Roosevelt was a classmate of his.
Roosevelt later liked to say that they knew each other
at the Columbia law school.
But Donovan said that was a bunch of baloney.
Roosevelt was at a much higher social strata
than Donovan was at law school.
He returned to Buffalo, married into protestant wealth,
married one of the most wealthy women in Buffalo.
During World War I, he commanded a battalion first
in the 69th Irish regiment which is a very famous New York regiment.
Later, he became the brigades--
I'm sorry, the regiments executive officer and its on-ground commander.
He was absolutely fearless in combat.
>> The chaplain of the 69th regimen,
Father Francis Duffy said Donovan was the only guy I'd ever met
who really enjoyed combat.
He won the Medal of Honor in World War I.
That's where he also got his nickname "Wild Bill."
Before they went to war and they were still training in France,
Donovan was really a brutal commander, very, very tough.
He would have boxing matches with the gloves off
for his men just to toughen him up.
And after one particular-- 'cause he knew they were going to be,
you know, experiencing just horrific combat in this attrition warfare
that you saw on World War I.
But after one particular grueling exercise where he had run them up
and down hills and through obstacle courses they all collapsed
on the ground just exhausted and panting and he stood up there
and he said "You know, what the heck is the matter with you?
I'm 35 years old carrying the same pack as you
and you don't see me out of breath."
Far behind the battalion somebody shouted out.
He never figured out who it was "But we're not as wild as you are Bill."
From that day on Wild Bill stuck.
He claimed that he didn't like the nickname because it ran counter
to the spy, cool, collected, quite, professional image
that he wanted to project.
But his wife Ruth knew that he really did like.
He enjoyed being called Wild Bill.   He returned in New York a hero.

He became Assistant Attorney General
in the Coolidge Administration during the roaring 20's.
His goal was to become Attorney General over the United States.
He wanted that position.   He really wanted them.

And he though Herbert Hoover, who followed Coolidge,
had promised him the Attorney Generalship.
And in fact Hoover had but Hoover reneged on the promise.
The Ku Klux Klan, a very,
very powerful political party back then plus democrats
in the senate Donovan was a prominent Republican vow
to block his nomination.
So, Hoover instead backed off reneged on a promised,
disappointed Donovan greatly.
He never forgave Herbert Hoover for that.
He moved to New York City, formed a very prominent law firm,
The Donovan Leisure Law Firm
which would came eventually earned a million a Wall Street lawyer.
Then in 1932 he ran for governor of New York again as a Republican.
He was a conservative, Republican anti-New Dealer.
He thought the New Deal was a communist plot
to takeover the US government.
His ultimate goal was to be the nation's first Irish Catholic
president, okay.
And New York was the ideal stepping stone
for as it was Franklin Roosevelt was running of course in 1932.
And had been Governor of New York, Donovan was running
against Roosevelt's Lieutenant Governor,
a guy named Herbert Layman.
He ended up running as much against Roosevelt
as he did Layman during the campaign.
He said some pretty nasty things about Roosevelt.
At one point he accused him of being "Crafty."
Okay, now back then those were fight.
That was pretty [inaudible].
Or one time he said Roosevelt was a Hyde Park faker
because Roosevelt claimed that he was a simple gentleman farmer
from Hyde Park and Donovan thought that was a bunch of baloney.
Donovan lost the election, got trounced in it.
Just like Herbert Hoover did in 1932.
It turned out he was a horrible campaigner, okay.
If he was in this room talking to you he would hold--
he would captivate your attention particularly
with those bright blue eyes.
He had a magnetic, charismatic personality.
You get really turned on the Irish charm.
In front of a large audience
on the stomp he was even more wooden than Al Gore.
I mean, he was just-- he was terrible.
In fact his-- the guy running with him is a Lieutenant Governor,
his running mate Trubee Davison thought he was
such a lousy campaigner that Davison though he should had been running
for governor and they shouldn't--
make Donovan the Lieutenant gubernatorial candidate and out
of the away so he was never in front of the public.
It's amazing that Roosevelt eventually picked Donovan
as his top spy master.
Considering the two disagreeing strongly on domestic issues
and they fought each other in New York politics.
But we're talking now 1940-'41.
Roosevelt's building up the country, preparing the country
for the war he sees looming over the horizon, Donovan was one
of the few-- well not on the few, but he was part
of the internationalist wing of the Republican Party.
He believed that the country needed to prepare for war,
needed to mobilize his defense.
In fact he wanted to get into the fight too.
He wanted to command an infantry division.
At one time he sent a memo to Roosevelt
and said "What we should do is to recruit older men for the war.
Guys may age.
You know, in their late 50s 'cause we've were more seasoned
and we can fight better.   Roosevelt that was a silly idea.

But Donovan and Roosevelt saw each other as having a common cause here
with preparing the country for war.
Roosevelt sent Donovan on two diplomatic missions in 1940 and '41.
The first one in 1940 was to England
to assess whether Britain could survive the Nazi onslaught.
You know, was Britain gonna come out of this alive?
Donovan got access to top British officials,
top military officials collected literally hundreds of pounds
of documents from London, met with Roosevelt,
met with some of the spy people at that point,
came back with it all the Washington and concluded, yes,
Britain could survive the war
but it would need US material aide in order to survive.
The second trip he took for Roosevelt was
in late 1940, early 1941.
He spent more time with the Churchill this time.
Churchill started to realize that this Irish-American
which at first he didn't-- he didn't know--
yeah, was kind of suspicious of was actually or could be a close ally.
So Churchill arranged for Donovan to tour the Balkans
in Eastern Europe and the Middle East.
In fact, he went on a British plane.
He had British escorts taking him around.
They paid all the bills.
Ian Flemming, you know James Bond, was one of his escorts
and would file reports back to London
on what exactly Donovan was doing in these--
at these different countries.
What he was doing was telling Balkan leaders and Middle East leaders
that Franklin Roosevelt did not intend to let Britain lose this war.
So you better decide which side you're on
and it better be the winning side which is the ally side.
Roosevelt was just delighted with this message going
out throughout the Middle East and the Balkans, so as Churchill too,
and Churchill actually more so.
The state department was a little miffed over it.
In fact, at one point, they debated internally whether Donovan should be
prosecuted for violating the Logan Act which makes it a crime
for a private US citizen to negotiate on behalf
of the US government overseas.   Franklin Roosevelt, however,

was absolutely delighted with Donovan's trip.
Just keep in mind, we're talking 1940-'41,
Roosevelt has no foreign intelligence service to speak of,
telling him what's happening overseas.
The army and the navy had very,
very small intelligence collection units overseas and mainly,
they were dumping grounds for poor performing officers.
The state department had practically no intelligence-collecting
capability among its embassies overseas.
So, Roosevelt was going into major foreign policy decisions
in '40 and '41.
Things like lend lease, how much to supply the British, how he's going
to get around US laws that constricted that supply forbade it.
And he was facing reelection.
He was going up for an unprecedented third term.
He is making these major foreign policy decisions overseas,
practically blind to what lay ahead for him overseas
or what was really happening overseas.
And in fact, it worried Roosevelt so much that he would
at times become physically ill over it.
When Donovan comes back from the two missions to Europe,
that's when our spy story begins.
In July 1941, Roosevelt signs a one-page executive order setting
up the coordinator of information, with a very bland-sounding name,
was a very vague document.
It just said that Colonel Donovan, he had been a colonel
in World War I, he still retained that title.
Colonel Donovan is going to collect information for me
of national importance and he's gonna do other unspecified things.
In fact, the document was so vague that the rest
of Roosevelt's cabinet starts scratching their head like,
you know, what the heck does this guy up to?
What are they doing?
Roosevelt had to send out followup memos
to explain exactly what he wanted Donovan to do?
Donovan's spy organization, the coordinator of information
which later became-- was renamed of the Office of Strategic Services,
the OSS as we know it, started out with one person, Wild Bill Donovan.
He liked to tell friends that he started
out with minus zero and it really was.
In the beginning, he was kind of like a player
in a pickup basketball game looking for agents and operations
and programs, really anywhere he could find it.
So for example, the Philips Lamp Company, they may be still
on business for all I know, but back then, they had salesman
that sold lamps overseas all over the world.
>> Donovan privately contracted with them
so that the Philips' lamp salesmen when they were making calls,
sales calls for example on occupied countries, the Axis occupied,
they'd also collect information that would be useful
for Donovan's organization, military intelligence information perhaps
that they saw.
The Eastman Kodak Company, you know, in my day it was
with the Brownie cameras and now I think they have the
disposable cameras.
Back then they have thousands of camera clubs
around the United States.
Donovan arranged for Eastman Kodak to send him photos,
tourists have taken from the camera clubs
of militarily important sights overseas
so his people could start analyzing 'em.
Pan American Airways, you know, Pan-Am, he arranged secret contracts
with Pan-Am ticket agents in Africa to monitor the movements
of Nazis in that continent.   The project was code named Cigar.

Donovan went for practical any wild idea anybody could ever think of
and he thought of a lot of wild ideas himself.
His code number was 109 which was actually--
and that was the number you'd see on the secret OSS documents,
109 always, that was actually the room number for his office in--
which was located in the headquarters on Navy Hill
which is next to what is now the State Department.
His secretaries actually had another code name for him.
They called him Sea Biscuit because like the race horse,
he always seemed to be running around every which way
and they could never keep track of him.
He kept 2,000 dollars in his desk drawer at all times to pay sources
of information around Washington and he'd always be darting off
to different parts of Washington for secret meetings with these sources.
He had a Research and Development Chief, a guy named Stanley Lovell
who was a very famous New England inventor of his time.
Donovan called him his "Professor Moriarty"
after the Sherlock Holmes character.
And Lovell invented all the gadgets for the OSS, pistols with silencers,
the miniature cameras, you know, tiny pencil-like explosive devices.
One of the experiments Donovan was very,
very interested in was truth drugs.
He really got into that and so did Stanley Lovell.
One time they decided to test the truth drugs
on an unwitting Mafia thug, okay, a guy named Little Augie, okay.
An OSS officer had worked as a New York City cop invited Little Augie
up to his apartment for some smokes and a chat, okay?
Laced within the cigarettes were the truth drugs.
And so, Little Augie's puffing away on these cigarettes.
He finally gets a silly grin on his face, starts chuckling and talking
about all of the mob hits he's carried out and work
with Lucky Luciano and how he's bribed this congressman
or that congressman.
Fortunately for Little Augie, his secrets were safe
with Donovan 'cause they'd never brought him trial 'cause
that would expose the truth drug.   He had other kinds of wild ideas.

For example, he proposed one time to Franklin Roosevelt
that he'd have a button on his desk that he could push it anytime
and instantly communicate with every radio in America to alert them
if the Japanese were attacking Los Angeles
or the Germans were attacking New York.
Roosevelt ignored the idea.
But Roosevelt was open to all these ideas.
He considered Donovan kind of a spark plug
for thinking out of the box.
I mean he had George Marshall, Admiral King,
Hap Arnold of the Air Force, that was Roosevelt's inner circle
of advisers, his inner war council.
Donovan was never part of that inner circle but he was kind
of the guy outside thinking off-the-wall ideas
and Roosevelt loved him.
He was kind of-- Roosevelt was kind of a spy buff himself.
He'd been ever since he was a young boy.
So he was intrigued by espionage and intelligence operations.
So for example one of the ideas
that Stanley Lovell's men tested was feeding bats, you know,
bats that fly in the eaves of buildings with incendiary devices
and what they were gonna do is they're gonna drop these bats
from a plane over Tokyo, the bats would fly into the eaves
of the wooden and paper houses in Tokyo and burn down all the homes.
Terrific idea!   Eleanor Roosevelt had been told--

there's a friend that told her this just might work
and Eleanor passed it on to Franklin
and Franklin thought it was kinda cool, and passed it on to Donovan.
So Stanley Lovell went out to some desert.
They flew a plane over that.
They'd fitted these bats with these incendiary devices,
dropped them out of the plane.
Unfortunately, they all sank like a stone.
It didn't work.
[Laughter] But Donovan thought, you know, that was the kind of ideas
that he would test out and he was totally unfazed by the failures.
In addition to being also the Father of Modern American Espionage,
Donovan was also the Father of Information Warfare
and by information warfare,
we're talking about psychological operations.
You'd see him today, that's in cyber warfare,
things that psyche out the enemy.
In Donovan's day, the technology for this was fairly crude.
It basically consisted of rumors, leaflets, radios, and newspapers.
So for example he would have his agents plant rumors
in the New York Times, the associated press
and overseas papers, that the top Nazi leaders were fleeing
to South America leaving the Germans to high and dry.
Marlena Dietrich, very sultry German singer,
sang for propaganda broadcast
that Donovan being then to German soldiers.
There were also the league of lonely women leaflets
and these were dropped over German soldiers.
And what this told was that their wives
and girlfriends back home belong the league of lonely women
and they were having sex with their comrades
that were coming back on leave.
Nobody care to figure out what kind of effect that had.
Another thing they-- Another thing they couldn't figure out,
what the effect was, they dropped mail bags over Germany,
inside of them were stuffed with poison pen letters
that OSS officers had written in German with addresses they gotten
from German directories, telephone directories, in them hoping
that German people would pick up the mail bags and give them
to the post officer, figuring they have been lost.
And the mail would get delivered.
Again, they never really figured out whether
that was gonna work or did work or not.
Stanley Lovell had an idea at one point.
He concocted hormones that they figured
if there is some way they get injected into Hitler's vegetables,
they didn't know where the vegetables were
but if they get injected into Hitler's vegetables,
it would make his mustache fall off and he would speak
in a falsetto voice which definitely had been a bummer
for the Fuhrer, right?
Donovan turned out to be a horrible manager, a horrible organizer.
In the 4 years he run the OSS,
he violated practically every rule you learn in Harvard Business School
or public administration school.
And it would drive his senior people nuts.
And in fact, at one point, about a half dozen
of his inner circle staged what was called later the palace revolt.
It was basically a coup, they tried to oust him.
What they wanna do is move him up and out as a broad overseer
and they would run the OSS organization because he seemed
to be constantly on the move.
He was constantly traveling all the time and never
at his desk doing his paper work.
In fact, there was a saying in the OSS that if they had a private
out front raising the flag up and down every time Donovan was in
and out, he had to be there on 24 hour duty
because he was always in and out.
Donovan who had launched enough coups by this point could smell one
that was being launched against himself
and he squashed it like a bug.   And the palace revolt went away.

Even so, he was a very charismatic leader with his own agents overseas
and he was overseas most of the time.
They revered him.
He rarely ever issued a command overseas.
He usually just asked and they would follow him loyally.
And eventually, Donovan built up an organization
of over 10,000 espionage agents, special operations commandos,
research analyst, administration personnel
in stations all over the world.
Again, a fairly remarkable achievement again because he started
out with just one guy which was Wild Bill Donovan.
They mounted covert operations, for example, before the invasion
of North Africa in November 1942, provided a lot of good information
for Eisenhower's forces on beach conditions
that the forces would face when they landed at North Africa.
A lot of information on, you know,
different factions within North Africa.
They failed though to organize the Vichy French in North Africa
so that they would accept Eisenhower's forces in.
And so, in the first couple of weeks, you know,
there are some ferocious battles with Vichy French.
He had operations at Sicily in Italy.
His Italian operations had a lot of failures.
He had a lot of problems in Italy.
But keep in mind Mark Clark's Brit army had a lot
of problems in Italy too.
I mean that was a slow attritional warfare that was at wage there.
He mounted extensive operations
in the Balkans organizing the resistance and supplying resistance
against Hitler's occupation army particularly
in Yugoslavia and in Greece.
In Asia, he-- his men operated in Burma
and China against the Japanese.
Douglas MacArthur would never let him in his theater,
the Southwest Pacific Theater and neither with Chester Nimitz.
Both of them didn't think they had any use
for Donovan's people over there.
So they basically only accepted maybe a few propagandas
and few [inaudible] and that was it.
For Normandy, though Donovan had extensive operations as a research
and analysis people, who originally started here in the Library
of Congress by the way, produced a lot of valuable information
on beach conditions of the Normandy coast.
>> Their target analysis, people did a lot of work
for Hap Arnold's Air Force identifying targets
in Germany and occupied France.   And Donovan dropped in hundreds

of commandos operational group commandos, they call them,
OGs or Jed Bird commandos after the training sight in Scotland
where they trained, who landed behind the lines before the invasion
even afterwards to organize French resistance
against the-- against the Germans.
Incidentally, Donovan also loved to go
in on the landings, the allied landings.
He went into the ones in Sicily, Italy and also in Normandy.
Much to the chagrin of his own staff who thought that was no place
for America's top spy master to be right at the front, you know,
with the fire coming overhead.
In fact George Marshal thought he had Donovan banned
from the Normandy landing so did Eisenhower.
But Donovan managed to talk his way aboard a navy cruiser and land
at Utah beach the day after the initial wave.
He had a grand time.
Mescher Smitz [phonetic] came over and strafed his jeep and he had
to roll over and escape to that.
He got pinned down by a German machine gun nest.
But it was, you know, quite a lark for him.
The-- It took almost 2 years for Donovan's OSS to really build itself
up into a professional organization and really get into the fight.
It may seem like a long time but keep
in mind it also took the US army quite awhile to build itself
up as a professional organization in World War II
and get itself really into the fight.
And Donovan also had his intelligence share
of intelligence failures like we see with the CIA today.
One of the most spectacular failures we had was the Vessel case.
He thought he had the silver-bullet agent planted in the Vatican,
code-named Vessel, who is giving him transcripts, verbatim transcripts
of private sensitive diplomatic conversations
that Pope Pius was having with other on voice with his own
on voice station in Japan and with Japanese on voice.
Turned out Vessel though was a Italian pornographer who had a very,
very vivid imagination and a talent for inventing dialogue.
But he snookered Donovan in his organization, you know, just--
they bought 'em for client sinker.
Not unlike what you see today for example in the lead
up to the Iraq war with the silver-bullet agent
that the CIA thought they had which was Curveball
who was giving them what they thought was ironclad information
on biological weapons capability.
In fact there was an interview in the British newspaper just recently
where Curveball in fact admitted
that he made it all up, he was a fabricator.
So history really does repeat itself.
But again as I say as the US army improved,
Donovan's organization improved.
But this is also a story of political intrigue, okay.
Donovan liked to say he had enemies in Washington as fierce
as Adolf Hitler in Europe.
He had ferocious fights with J. Edgar Hoover.
Hoover thought he-- Donovan's organization was the biggest
collection of amateurs you ever seen.
And in fact in the beginning it was the biggest collection
of amateurs anybody that were seen.
It took awhile for it to professionalize.
Hoover mounted spy operations against the OSS and at senior people
and against Donovan literally until the day he died.
He was constantly snooping on-- Donovan was--
had moles in Hoover's FBI that were feeding him information
on what-- what Hoover was doing.
The pentagon at first bitterly fought the formation of the OSS
and eventually the army intelligence set
up it's own secret spy unit they nicknamed it The Pond
which spied behind Donovan's back not only spied against the Axis
but spied against Donovan, his men,
even his men's wives they spied against.
In fact they-- if you look in The Pond's documents,
they use to call the OSS the Dons.   I don't know what that meant.

But you know their always constantly monitoring what the Dons were doing
around the world.
Nelson Rockefeller, okay, governor of New York, vice president
of the United States at one point, back in the--
in Roosevelt's administration he was the coordinator
of Latin-American affairs in charge of propaganda in Latin America.
A job and a mission that Donovan thought his OSS should be in charge
of its propaganda operation should be in charge of.
He had fierce fights with Nelson Rockefeller over turf
in Latin-America in fact at one point they gotten
to such an argument at the State Department that Donovan threatened
to throw Rockefeller out the window.   I think they're on the second floor.

In any given war, generals
and admirals fight among themselves all the time
and that was certainly the case in World War II.
Eisenhower had a fierce battles with, you know, top commanders
under him, fierce battles with the British.
The battles though that Donovan had with the War Department
and army generals and navy admirals were particularly fierce
because they just didn't understand what this guy was all about.
I mean when went to them and he started talking
about espionage operations and covert warfare,
league of lonely women, and everything,
they just really can figure him out,
and they found him genuinely disturbing to their operations.
Donovan also had a pension for not taking no for an answer,
so when a commander would block something, he was going to do--
he usually made and run around the commander to his superior officer
to try and get it reversed
which doesn't win you many friends in the Pentagon.
So for example, he would go to the commander of the navy--
of the admiral in charge of the navy and say I need more officers
from the navy for my unit and the admiral would say no.
So Frank Knox-- I mean Donovan would go to Frank Knox who is a secretary
of the Navy, an old Republican pal, and Frank Knox would call
up the admiral to try and pressure him to give up the officers.
Again, that doesn't win you friends among the sea service.
One time he was at a cocktail party in Washington talking to an admiral
and he had his agents burglarized the admiral's office,
steal documents off his desk, and the agents brought it back
to Donovan, so Donovan can show the admiral
and show off what his agents could do.
I never was able to determine what the reaction was of the admiral.
But I got a feeling.
He may have been not [inaudible] by it.
Donovan would also show up at Pentagon meetings.
He'd always usually show up.
He was a senior officer who's very often late.
He would come in his uniform, would be immaculately tailored
from Wetsel's in New York.
Very often he would only wear his Congressional Medal of Honor
which he won in World War II, that ribbon on his uniform,
just as a not so subtle reminder to the admirals and the generals
in the room with their rose of ribbon and all that fruit salad
up there that he had the only medal that counted.
When he was in the field, however,
he could be as one agent called encourageably civilian, okay.
He would all at his fatigues or always be very, very rumpled.
One-- Several times you catch him in the field
and he would be wearing paisley ascot with his fatigues.
I don't think they let generals do
that nowadays, but he did it back then.
And it was-- again, a not so subtle reminder to anybody else
in the field that he was an unconventional warrior.
And this group he was commanding was an unconventional group.
For the allies, the British played an integral role in setting
up the OSS for Donovan, helping him set it up.
In fact, Donovan's relationship with the British
in many respects was even closer than it was with--
then with his own War Department.
Even so he had fierce battles with the British, British intelligence,
special operations, and Winston Churchill over turf, you know,
who would spy, where, around the world
and who would conduct the operations,
and what parts of the world.
Donovan, at one point, even mounted spy operations against the British
to find out what Churchill was doing.
Churchill's men, if you go to the archives in London,
had a very vigorous spy operation monitoring Donovan to figure
out what he was up to around the world.
Our other ally, Chiang Kai-Shek in China, Donovan enlisted the help
of a guy Cornelius V. Starr who was a big publisher back then
and Starr set up a newspaper and Chiang [inaudible] for him
that Donovan bankrolled half a million dollars to put into it,
and broaden his OSS officers to pose as reporters and they filed stories
for the newspaper, but they also collected intelligence on the side
and filed it on what the Japanese were doing in China,
and more importantly, what Chiang Kai Shek was doing in China, too,
the Soviets and other ally of ours.
At one point, Finnish intelligence offered Donovan 1,500 NKGB
and Soviet military documents that had NKGB codes in them
and Donovan eventually bought the codes for 62,500 dollars.
When the State Department learned of that, they were up in arms over it
because the Soviets were our allies
and they got Franklin Roosevelt ordered Donovan
to return the codes to the Soviets.
And so Donovan had them all packed up in boxes,
had one of his aides take it to the Washington Embassy here.
Andrei Gromyko was the ambassador then and he looked on this,
the bunch of boxes, very, very skeptically with kind of a look
on his face that said you expect me to believe
that you haven't copied these and looked at them all over.
>> And Donovan said, no, I assure you, you know, we haven't proceeded
and believe that cock-a-bull story.
And it turned-- And the Soviets, of course,
immediately changed their codes
when they learned the Fins had them and were selling them.
That's a good thing that they did
because the enterprising Fins also sold the codes
to the Japanese for 70,000 dollars.
The free market was always alive and well during World War II.
Donovan, however, eventually couldn't overcome his
political enemies.
He had drafted a postwar central intelligence plan,
a plan to set up a CIA after the war and he wanted to lead it.
Walter Trohan who was a reporter for the Washington Times Herald
which was owned by the McCormick-Patterson chain,
that was Colonel Robert McCormick in Chicago and Susie Patterson
in Washington was a very anti-Roosevelt,
despise Roosevelt, and Roosevelt the chain.
Trohan had been slipped a copy
of Donovan's highly secret postwar CIA plan and he published it
in the Chicago Tribune,
the Washington Times Herald among two papers and wrote a very,
very inflammatory story, accused Donovan of setting
up "American Gestapo" that was going
to spy not only people overseas but Americans at home.
Now, if you called anybody or any organization a Gestapo back then,
that was a pretty incendiary word.
So it pretty much sank Donovan's plan with Roosevelt
and particularly with Marshall.   He also had a problem.

Hoover spread a particularly nasty rumor with Harry Truman's staff.
Hoover had an agent spread the rumor with Harry Truman's staff
that Donovan was sleeping with his daughter-in-law.
There was no truth to it that I could determine.
I researched it quite heavily.   Donovan's daughter-in-law he treated

as a daughter and only as a daughter.
In fact, she became a surrogate daughter to him
when his first daughter died.
But Donovan did have a number of affairs and a number of mistresses
which was a common knowledge in Washington and in Buffalo,
and other parts, and even military intelligence knew about it.
So it was given some credence by people back then.
In addition, The Pond-- remember where that's the Pentagon spy unit.
They managed to arrange for a 59-page report to be placed
on Truman's desk that had been written ostensibly
by an army colonel on the White House staff,
there actually was written by The Pond,
which accused Donovan's organization of all kinds of misdeeds
and blown operation, and corruption that even accused him
of staging a sex orgy in India at one point.
You also had the problem here that Truman
and Donovan just really didn't like each other.
Typically, Truman really didn't like Donovan.
There was bad chemistry between the two guys.
On the one hand, you had a millionaire Wall Street Republican
lawyer, and one the other hand you had a failed Missouri haberdasher
who was a staunch Democrat, okay.   They just weren't gonna get along.

So eventually, Truman shutdown the OSS in September 1945 and parceled
out its functions to the State Department and the White House.
Truman eventually formed the CIA as everybody knows, in 1947,
modeled largely after Donovan's vision of what
that organization should look like.   Donovan wanted to head up the CIA.

In fact, he had surrogates privately lobby Truman to see
if he could become CIA director, but Truman wasn't gonna hear,
you know, ever consider that.
In fact, Donovan had said some nasty things about Truman
on the presidential campaign trail, so that wouldn't gonna happen.
When Eisenhower became president,
Donovan thought he had his best chance to become CIA director and,
again, he had surrogates lobby Ike to make him head of the CIA,
but Donovan still didn't have a chance in that case
because John Foster Dulles
who was gonna be Eisenhower's president was pushing
to have his brother Allan Dulles head up the CIA
and Dulles slipped right in to be a CIA chief.
Donovan was deeply disappointed over that.
He thought Dulles who had worked for him, headed up a station in Bern,
Switzerland and done some amazing operations.
He still thought Dulles was a poor administrator
and it was gonna be a disaster at the CIA.
Why don't I'll leave it-- we'll stop right there.
Answer any questions you have.
We can talk about what Donovan did after the war, his legacy,
what it meant for the agency today 'cause it's still heavily debated
by historians.
They still argue over, you know, whether what he
and his agency did were really worthwhile in World War II, so.
[ Applause ]
>> Any questions?   Yeah.


>> I'm interested [inaudible] find the names
of those [inaudible] the latest in the area, Yugoslavia, that meets
or those people and before, particularly from Yugoslavia.
I tell you why, because that was the time before coup
which [inaudible] the federations between Yugoslavia
and Hitler's Germany which produced the occupation of [inaudible].
>> Well, in Bulgaria first--
>> Repeat the question just quickly [inaudible].
>> Oh, okay.
This was the relations with Bulgaria, the operations there
and also Yugoslavia, Donovan and the OSS or in his--
when he visited, I think, Bulgaria too.
>> And Yugoslavia.   >> And Yugoslavia also.

In the case of Bulgaria, when Donovan visited there,
he visited with King Boris of Bulgaria.
He found King Boris to be a fairly frightened creature.
Well, understandably because King Boris had German divisions
from Romania poised at his boarder ready to invade.
Boris thought Donovan was a knuckle-head,
thought he was very naive about, you know, the Balkan situation.
And the Balkan, as you probably know,
is a cauldron of different types of competing politics
and Boris thought Donovan was entering
into a place he really didn't know much about.
And the reason I found out about that was 'cause Boris told
that to the German ambassador after Donovan left that this guy,
you know, is clueless and he had a little opinion of him.
In Yugoslavia, again, it was a cauldron
of different competing factions you had.
You know, the Croatian, the faction supporting the Nazis,
you had Tito's Partisans, you had the Chetniks or Mihailovich.
And Donovan, basically the British were in there first.
In fact, they were very upset that Donovan was barging his way
into their-- with his operatives.
Churchill was moving aide from Mihailovich to Tito's Partisans
and Donovan basically wanted-- have spies planted with all the camps.
He had some very fierce fights with Churchill and with Roosevelt
over trying to get his men in there.
Eventually, everything shifted to Tito's Partisans.
Churchill insisted on it
and Roosevelt would not fight him on that issue.
One point, Donovan proposed to have himself parachute into Yugoslavia.
He never actually really did.
Churchill thought that was a horrible idea
and told Roosevelt that, basically took him to the woodshed on it.
And Churchill-- I mean Roosevelt backed off.
And in the end Tito's Partisan basically kicked everybody
out as the Soviets moved in.   [ Inaudible Remark ]

>> World War II.   Oh, he was.

[ Inaudible Remark ]   >> Yes, he did.

He did. In fact and talked with the senior air force general,
I don't have his name in my head, and it was just after that.
Yes, [inaudible], right.
It was just after that then Hitler invaded Yugoslavia.
Garbo's claim that the reason Hitler invaded was because Donovan went
in there and filled [inaudible] ears
and the rebel Yugoslav military leaders with all these promises
that Franklin Roosevelt was gonna come
to their aide was just stirring things up.
It was a bunch of baloney.
He didn't-- when you read the transcripts
of what he actually said he was very, very careful and stuck
to his talking points that the US
and the British ambassador had drafted for him.
Even so the conservative press in the United States,
conservative magazines bought the German line
and criticized Donovan heavily for being the instigator of the Soviet--
I mean the German invasion of Yugoslavia.
So, it became kind of a messy affair for him.
Yeah.
>> Sorry. But I'm incredibly interested in the truth drug.
Whatever happened with that?
Did they end up using it very widely?
>> Good question.
They had a problem particularly with little Oggie cigarettes, okay.
They couldn't figure out because what the ultimate goal
and the army was very,
very interested in, they helped fund it too.
Because what they wanted to do was use it, for example,
if they had somebody who might be a mole or whatever,
they wanted to have way to give it to someone unwittingly.