Disciples: The World War II Missions of the CIA Directors Who Fought for Wild Bill Donovan - Hardcover

Waller, Douglas

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1451693729 ISBN 13: 9781451693720

Publisher: Simon & Schuster, 2015

Synopsis

“A fantastic book, one of the very finest accounts of wartime spookery...a hell of a good tale.” —The Wall Street Journal

The author of the critically acclaimed bestseller Wild Bill Donovan, tells the story of four OSS warriors of World War II. All four later led the CIA.

They are the most famous and controversial directors the CIA has ever had—Allen Dulles, Richard Helms, William Colby, and William Casey. Disciples is the story of these dynamic agents and their daring espionage and sabotage in wartime Europe under OSS Director Bill Donovan.

Allen Dulles ran the OSS’s most successful spy operation against the Axis. Bill Casey organized dangerous missions to penetrate Nazi Germany. Bill Colby led OSS commando raids behind the lines in occupied France and Norway. Richard Helms mounted risky intelligence programs against the Russians in the ruin of Berlin after the German surrender.

Four very different men, they later led (or misled) the successor CIA. Dulles launched the calamitous operation to land CIA-trained, anti-Castro guerrillas at Cuba’s Bay of Pigs. Helms was convicted of lying to Congress about the CIA’s effort to oust Chile’s president. Colby would become a pariah for releasing to Congress what became known as the “Family Jewels” report on CIA misdeeds during the 1950s, sixties and early seventies. Casey would nearly bring down the CIA—and Ronald Reagan’s presidency—from a scheme to secretly supply Nicaragua’s contras with money raked off from the sale of arms to Iran for American hostages in Beirut.

Mining thousands of once-secret World War II documents and interviewing scores of family members and CIA colleagues, Waller has written a brilliant successor to Wild Bill Donovan.

About this title

About the Author

Douglas Waller is a former correspondent for Newsweek and Time, where he covered the CIA, Pentagon, State Department, White House, and Congress. He is the author of the bestsellers Wild Bill Donovan, Big Red, and The Commandos, as well as critically acclaimed works such as Disciples, the story of four CIA directors who fought for Donovan in World War II, and A Question of Loyalty, a biography of General Billy Mitchell. He lives in Raleigh, North Carolina.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Disciples PROLOGUE

The Cathedral of St. Matthew the Apostle on Rhode Island Avenue was among the capital’s most impressive churches, shaped in the form of a Latin cross, its interior walls covered with shimmering Italian Renaissance–styled murals, its large copper dome in the center atop an eight-sided lantern rising two hundred feet. Appropriate for Washington, D.C., Matthew was the patron saint of civil servants. Funeral masses for Catholics who had risen to the highest levels of the U.S. government had been celebrated inside its nave, which could seat about one thousand. On this Wednesday morning, February 11, 1959, as light from the chilly day outside streamed through translucent alabaster windows, nearly every space in the pews was filled with veterans of the two world wars, captains of New York finance, lawyers with Washington’s power firms, barons from publishing, high clergy from the archdiocese, Georgetown and Virginia horse country matrons, senior officers from the Pentagon, representatives from the White House—and spies. Many spies.

The body of General William “Wild Bill” Donovan rested in the flag-draped coffin before the white marble table of the Eucharist in the sanctuary. The funeral home had dressed him in his tailored Army uniform with his rows of combat ribbons pinned to it. Donovan’s had been the life of “medieval legend,” an editorialist wrote: an Irish kid who escaped the poverty of Buffalo’s First Ward, who quarterbacked his college football team, graduated from Columbia Law School with Franklin Roosevelt, was awarded the Medal of Honor for heroism in World War I, and who made millions as a Wall Street attorney. At the dawn of America’s entry into World War II, Roosevelt had made him his spymaster—the director of what became known as the Office of Strategic Services. Donovan, who had earned his nickname “Wild Bill” as a hard-driving commander in the First World War, assembled for the Second a force of more than ten thousand espionage agents, paramilitary commandos, propagandists, and research analysts, who waged battle in the shadows against the Axis from stations all over the world—a remarkable achievement considering he began his intelligence organization with just one person. Wild Bill.

When the choir from Catholic University had finished singing and the rustling in the congregation had quieted, Monsignor John Cartwright climbed the steps to the ambo to deliver the eulogy.

“The citizen and soldier of whom we are taking leave today filled an exceptional role in the lives of multitudes of people,” he began in a booming voice that echoed through the nave. “This gathering testifies both by number and character how great a role that was . . .”

Allen Dulles sat near the front on the left side with a contingent of his clandestine officers in the pews around him. The CIA director’s secretive nature, even with the obvious, could be maddening to outsiders—“you ask him if it was raining outside, he’d laugh at you,” said one—but his agents revered him. Dulles had a talent for getting men and women to risk their careers and lives for him. He had become an international celebrity by 1959, his Central Intelligence Agency popular among Americans and a formidable instrument of foreign policy. Dulles could pick up the phone and call leaders and secret service chiefs all over the world, many of whom he had known personally for years. (Although, technologically inept, he always struggled with the switch on the handle of his scrambler phone, which had to be pushed to talk and released to listen.) Dulles understood power, how to play power games, and he loved to play them. An adoring CIA analyst penned a clumsily written poem about the director:

So Mr. D.

Went by land, air, and sea

Round the length and breadth of the world

The craft he was in

Ranged from choppers at Hua-bin

To a yacht that had its spinnaker unfurled

Mr. D. worked all day

While others would play

Yet he seldom let loose his thunder.

He’s a man that his troupe

All felt as a group

Mighty glad and proud to be under.

To friends, Mister D looked like the headmaster of an upper-class English boarding school, dressed usually in bow tie and tweed sport coat, his wiry gray hair slightly mussed, his mustache carefully trimmed, a pipe almost always clenched between his teeth (sometimes more for effect, they suspected, than for smoking), gray-blue eyes that sparkled with interest behind steel-rimmed glasses, and a soft voice that invited people to pour their hearts out to him. The laugh. It seemed to be with him always—occasionally hearty when he was genuinely amused, but more often a mirthless “ho-ho” he turned on when trying to ingratiate himself with a stranger or deflect a question he did not want to answer. Colleagues could see that the country gentleman routine also masked a fierce competitor not willing to give up a single point on the tennis court, “a back alley fighter” as one put it, a devious man who sized up other men and women based solely on whether they could be useful to him, an introvert at heart whose true agenda could be unfathomable behind the veneer he erected.

Dulles, who had been Donovan’s station chief in Switzerland during World War II, had had—as many men did—a complicated relationship with the general. That Donovan was a skilled intelligence officer Dulles would never publicly deny. Donovan after the war had hailed Dulles as his top spy, which was the case. But Donovan always suspected that Dulles thought he could have better managed the OSS and that he wanted his job, which was also the case. Yet for all his private disdain of Donovan’s leadership, Dulles now ran the CIA much as Donovan would have. Like Donovan, Dulles believed gentlemen behind closed doors could undertake unsavory missions and violate ethical strictures for a higher cause. He had recruited for his CIA, as Donovan had for his OSS, America’s brightest, most idealistic, most adventuresome minds—self-assured men and women sent out to the world, with broad latitude from headquarters, to secretly battle communists in the Cold War as Donovan had fought the Nazis in World War II. Like Donovan, Dulles loved to swap stories with his spies in the field, to micromanage the covert operations that interested him, and largely ignore the ones that didn’t. Like Donovan, Dulles was willing to undertake clandestine missions others would shrink from as reckless and be unfazed if he met with failure. “If one stops gathering intelligence because some day something should be a little out of place,” Dulles once rationalized, “you wouldn’t be doing anything.” Donovan would have said the same. Dulles looked back on World War II as his best years. Although he never explicitly stated it, his OSS experience shaped his character for life.

“General Donovan bore an illustrious part in the two great wars that have filled so much of our century. No less illustrious were the services he rendered in our years of anxious and troubled peace . . .”

Sitting with the CIA contingent was Richard Helms, an officer nearing middle age whose rise in the agency had been respectable yet blocked at times by other men Dulles valued as more daring. Helms instead stood out for his administrative skills, an attribute Dulles considered “useful” (always his favorite adjective for Helms) yet boring. As he had been in Donovan’s OSS, Helms in the CIA was a purist of the trade, far more interested in quietly collecting and keeping secrets on an enemy than in actually fighting him in the shadows. Unlike Donovan and Dulles, he distrusted covert operations that presidents could deny, believing that if anything could go wrong with them it would. The seamier aspects of clandestine warfare—such as assassination—gave him pause, not for moral reasons but because he thought them crude tools and often ineffective.

Helms was the consummate spy with his Mona Lisa–like smile, hair always slicked back neatly, and an aloof personality. He did not make friends easily and when he did he remained deliberate in his friendships, always restrained, rarely letting down his inhibitions. “An open mouth gathers no information,” he liked to tell his children. There were plenty of stories circulating in the CIA on its colorful characters. No one could think of a good anecdote about Helms. The consummate intelligence operative, he left no trail behind. Men had to strain to come up with something to say about him because he made so little impression on them. Women thought him tall and handsome, which he was, but little else came to mind. He detested drawing attention to himself, grew furious with relatives who revealed even innocuous details about his job. At parties he was a good dancer and a charming conversationalist, but he rarely drank more than one martini so his head remained clear and was the first to leave early so he’d be fresh for the office the next day. Or, if the gathering was at his house, he would shoo out guests when his bedtime neared.

Yet family members could detect a twinkle in his eye. He took teasing well from them and enjoyed the ironies of life. He was attentive to his children when they became adults and they could converse with him on his level. He grew sentimental and teary-eyed delivering family toasts. He always sent handwritten thank-you notes and expected them in return. He had a prodigious memory, an obsession with accumulating the tiniest details in his head (who at a party had crowns in his teeth, who bit his nails), was fluent in French and German, and could be fanatical about proper spelling and punctuation in reports he read. He loved to play a who-leaked-it game with his wife when he read a revealing story in The Washington Post on intelligence. He enjoyed spy novels except for John le Carré’s, which he found too darkly cynical about his profession.

He also had his distinctive features if you looked hard. He smoked two packs of Chesterfields a day for most of his life. Though otherwise a tightwad, he was always immaculately tailored—his expensive suits bought from Lewis & Thomas Saltz in Washington, his shoes specially made for his small, high-arched feet at $700 a pair from Peal & Co. in London. He wore his belt with the buckle on the side of his waist instead of at the front. He never left home without a tiepin at the bottom of his tie and a white handkerchief tucked neatly into his jacket pocket. And he strutted out to the tennis court always in long white trousers.

As he did with everything, Helms viewed his service in the OSS as a young Navy lieutenant with clinical cool dispassion, never with nostalgia. Donovan’s “league of gentlemen,” as the general had called them, contained its share of social register misfits and bored Wall Street businessmen looking for action, Helms knew, many of them now hangers-on in the CIA. Helms thought the OSS had only had a minimal effect on World War II’s outcome. “The war would have been won without the OSS,” he once said. But Donovan deserved credit for being a visionary, if somewhat chaotic, leader, Helms thought. The general had introduced the Pentagon and Americans to unconventional warfare practiced on a global scale. And the OSS had taught Helms how to be a spy.

“His record of achievement and honor has been much reviewed since the day of his death and will always be remembered in the pages of our history. But his life of combat and of leadership, of service and example is ended now . . .”

In the back of the cathedral with the focal mosaic of St. Matthew’s looking down on him, Bill Casey sat numbed by grief, as a son would be over the loss of a father. Donovan had been not just a boss but also a mentor to Casey, who served as his secret intelligence chief for all of Europe during the war when he was only thirty-one years old. The two shared similar backgrounds—descendants of poor Irish Catholic immigrants who had worked their way through law school—and since the war Casey had set out to follow Donovan’s path to power, climbing the ladder of Republican Party politics and bankrolling his love of international affairs with a fortune earned on Wall Street. In the fourteen years after the war, Casey was now, as Donovan had been, a multimillionaire. He worshipped everything about the general—his charisma, his drive, his intellect. He kept a miniature bronze statue and photos of Donovan in the study of his Long Island mansion. The two had kept in close touch after the war, dining out frequently, exchanging letters on foreign policy issues, and sharing a love of books. Donovan would send Casey volumes he had read with notations on the pages. Casey reciprocated with his favorite books, except he rarely ever wrote in the margins.

Casey did not have the patience for notating. He once wrote a lengthy article on how to consume a nonfiction book “and save a lot of time.” Casey usually read back to front, starting with the index and source notes to select what he thought he needed to know and to bypass the rest. With a photographic memory, he could retain passages almost verbatim of journal articles he seemed to be just flipping through; he would become incensed with subordinates who wasted his time in meetings repeating what they had written to him in lengthy memos many months earlier.

He had always made a bad first impression on others, even more so in middle age—tall and lumpy, with a jowly face, thick lips, eyes bulging, wisps of graying hair on his balding head, an expensive suit always rumpled, his tie often stained from what he had eaten for lunch, and frequently mumbling when he spoke as if he had marbles stuffed in his mouth. The acquaintances he made usually ended up being either lifelong friends who worshipped him or skeptics who could not escape an uneasy feeling that he was a devious operator working business or political deals they would rather know nothing about.

The slovenly appearance, however, covered a body constantly on the go, incapable of sitting down for a long talk over drinks. His mind was insatiably curious. On family vacations in Europe he would vacuum the timetable brochures at train stations and study them in his hotel room at night to recite from memory itineraries for his companions the next morning: “If you’re travelling from Nice to Avignon on a Tuesday at 2 p.m. and miss your train, you’d have to wait for three hours for the next one to arrive at the station.” Little did not interest him. On subjects remote from his daily life he would ask hundreds of questions. James Jolis, the son of a family friend, recalled Casey showing up out of the blue at a nightclub where his rock band was playing; after listening for a set, he walked backstage to interrogate him. “How does this band work?” Jolis recounted him asking. “How do you get paid? How do you store your equipment? In five minutes he had ascertained how to run a rock band better than I could.”

As with Donovan, making millions in New York would never be as exciting or fulfilling for Casey as his war years with the OSS. Never again would he know such responsibility at such a young age, commanding scores of espionage agents sent to penetrate the Third Reich. His most cherished friendships had been formed in the general’s organization. His proudest moments had been with the OSS. It was the high point of his life.

“He has gone from the scene of his success to meet his final judgment, his final reward, his final destiny . . .”

February 8, the day Donovan died and the first day of the Vietnamese celebration of the Tet New Year, William Colby stepped out of the Pan Am Stratocruiser into a blast furnace of heat at Saigon’s Tan Son Nhut Airport. ...

About this edition

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Publication date: 2015
• ISBN 10: 1451693729
• ISBN 13: 9781451693720
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 592