Ike's Spies (52 page)

As Hunt summed up, “The last years of Allen Dulles' life were very sad and unrewarding ones, although he and his wife maintained their beautiful Georgetown home in their customary style, with gracious hospitality. But he was at the end, a very tragic, sad, and unfulfilled figure of a man.”
²

HE HAD BEEN IKE'S CHIEF SPY FOR EIGHT YEARS
. More than any other individual, he had shaped and molded the
CIA
. For better or for worse, it was his agency. He gave it a sense of importance and a sense of mission. The
CIA
under Allen Dulles fought on the front lines of the Cold War, its purpose nothing less than to save the world from the Communists. Morale was consistently high inside the agency, as was its reputation on the outside.

Two decades later, former agents looked back on the fifties with strong feelings of nostalgia. Gone were the greats—Frank Wisner, Richard Bissell, Tracey Barnes—and Allen Dulles. Nearly to a man, veterans felt that never again did the
CIA
have a leader to match Dulles. His motives were pure, his loyalty to his subordinates
complete, his cause inspiring, his methods brilliant—or so at least it seemed to the ex-agents, in retrospect.

To the outside world, he seemed more difficult to assess. To some commentators, he appeared to be a rather bumbling imitation of the British master spy, a man who used the twist of a knife here, or a well-staged riot there, to gain and hold an empire. A somewhat contrary view regarded Allen Dulles as the evil genius who was at the center of the capitalist conspiracy to rule the world for the benefit of American corporations, the epitome of the immoral imperialist. Others saw him as a man who could be relied upon to protect American interests around the world, by whatever means were necessary.

Dulles was a leader who made some mistakes, enjoyed many triumphs. Nothing says more about Ike's view of Dulles than the fact that the President kept him on the job for eight years, a job that was crucial to the success of the Eisenhower administration, and a job that was clearly the most sensitive in the government. Ike decided he would rather have Allen Dulles as his chief spy, even with his limitations, than anyone else he knew. By itself, that was a powerful endorsement and recommendation.

INTERVIEWING IKE ABOUT HIS SPIES
in his Gettysburg office, when he was in his mid-seventies, it was obvious that he enjoyed dwelling on the war years more than on the years with the
CIA
. Like many old men, he could remember events of thirty years past more vivdly than those of ten years past. When thinking about the war, he would grin and laugh as he recalled how the Allies won a victory, grimace and redden as he remembered something that had gone wrong.

Talking about Operation
FORTITUDE
, he would point out where Patton had created a dummy tank corps, or how the strategic bombing pattern convinced the Germans that the Allies would land at the Pas de Calais rather than Normandy. In the middle of discussing one or another of the myriad of elements that went into
FORTITUDE
, he would look skyward, frown, then smile, turn toward me with that wonderful grin, slap his hand down on his thigh, and exclaim, “By God, we really fooled them, didn't we!”

And he would laugh that big gusty Eisenhower laugh, and still get a kick out of remembering it, after all those years and all those rememberings. “By God, we really fooled them, didn't we!” You
would have thought he was Tom Sawyer, pulling off a fast one on Aunt Polly.

And indeed Ike's spies did fool the Germans, generally throughout the war but especially so in the crucial
OVERLORD
battle. Make no mistake about it.
OVERLORD
was no sure thing. It was about as even a battle, taking all things into consideration, as ever happens. Either side could have won, without the victory being a fluke or the result of some piece of sheer luck. If intelligence and subterfuge did not win the war for the Allies, as might be argued, it is clear that without the edge in intelligence and subterfuge that they achieved and maintained, the Allies might not have won the war.

“WE REALLY FOOLED THEM.”
With Ike, the emphasis was always on the “we,” even though he of all men in the Allied world had the right to claim, “I really fooled them.” Partly that “we” was due to native modesty, but mainly it was a recognition of fact. Ike headed a team. He was not a professional intelligence officer, never had been. But through the war he learned how to command an intelligence effort, as he progressed from Robert Murphy and Mark Clark to Mockler-Ferryman and finally to Kenneth Strong.

Strong and his people let their boss down only once, at the Bulge. Otherwise,
SHAEF
G-2 compiled an enviable record. Strong could brag, with justice, that he knew the German order of battle better than the German High Command did from mid-August to the end of the war (even in December 1944), which was a feat unmatched by any other intelligence operation in this or any other war.

The “we” who helped fool them included all those nameless people associated with Bletchley Park and
ULTRA
. Churchill said of the
RAF
pilots in the Battle of Britain that never had so many owed so much to so few. It could be said with equal or more truth of the men and women of
BP
. Without them, the war could not have been won, or at least as quickly as it was.

Another part of the “we” was the French Resistance, which Ike guided and steered primarily through his adroit handling of General de Gaulle, partly through his judicious distribution of arms and supplies to the Maquis. The Resistance not only helped fool the Germans, it also delayed by force of arms the passage of major
German divisions to the Normandy battlefield, which was always the aim of
FORTITUDE
—delay the German reinforcements.

Success in
FORTITUDE
owed much to General Patton and his acting abilities. He made the wholly fictional
FUSAG
seem real, was helped by stagehands who could create, out of nothing but cardboard and plywood and some glue and nails, oil depots and tank divisions and barracks and whatever else one might want. He was also aided by those overage British and American officers, spread about Scotland and the east coast, constantly signaling to each other on the radio to hurry up with the ski bindings or get ready for General Patton's inspection or send more maps of the Pas de Calais coastline. A boring task, but one of those dull jobs that, had there been one slipup over the radio, could have led to disaster.

There could have been no
FORTITUDE
without the British Secret Service and the Double-Cross System. Garbo's message of June 5, warning his German controller that
OVERLORD
was coming, and his message of June 9, in which he argued that the real invasion would come later at the Pas de Calais, may have been the two most important messages of the war.

Obviously, Ike had no personal contact with Garbo or Brutus or any of the other turned spies, or with the radio officers in Scotland, or with the people of
BP
, although he commended them all.

But he was grateful to them all, just as he was to those who were intimately involved with
SHAEF
, or those he saw on a daily or weekly basis—such men as Bedell Smith and Kenneth Strong and Omar Bradley, and of course Monty.

Of all those who were part of the “we,” Winston Churchill surely stood tall. He had cooperated handsomely on the Diplomatic Ban, with such distasteful tasks as moving British citizens out of their homes, and in countless other ways, but his real contribution was the unfailing support he gave to
BP
, to the Double-Cross System, and to all the other ranks in the Battle of Wits.

OVERLORD
pitted the best Germany had to offer against the best the United States and the United Kingdom had to offer. It was Churchill and Roosevelt vs. Hitler, Eisenhower vs. Rundstedt, Bradley vs. Rommel, American sergeants and British privates vs. their German counterparts. In a sense,
OVERLORD
pitted the German educational system against the democratic educational system.

The Allies won. They won most of all because of the success of
FORTITUDE
and
OVERLORD
, which in turn depended on a culture, a political system, a tradition, a belief, an understanding of what democracy is and what it means. That kind of understanding and commitment come only when the threat to democracy is real and perceived, but when it does come, it is an awesome thing.

FORTITUDE
required trust among the participants, up and down the line, a kind of trust that simply did not exist in Nazi Germany. Nearly every general in the Wehrmacht knew of the various plots to kill Hitler, while dozens of the generals were actively involved. Not a single one of them went to Hitler with the information. Such a situation in the Allied world is unimaginable.

People who do not trust each other, or believe in the cause they are fighting for, cannot equal the effort made by the people in Bletchley Park, at Strong's G-2, among the French Resistance and the British Secret Service, and throughout Ike's command.

FORTITUDE
and
OVERLORD
were triumphs for Western democracy. I think that is what Ike had in his mind when he would grin that wonderful grin and slap his thigh and exclaim, “By God, we really fooled them, didn't we!”

If such a test of Western democracy ever comes again, it is that spirit that we can and will draw upon to defend ourselves.

1.
The whole secret war is magnificently described in R. V. Jones,
The Wizard War
.

2.
Ibid., p. 215.

3.
Anthony Cave Brown,
Bodyguard of Lies
, and Ronald Lewin,
Ultra Goes to War: The Secret Story
, are basic sources on
ULTRA
.

4.
Brown,
Bodyguard
, p. 22.

5.
Lewin,
Ultra
, p. 248.

6.
Interview with Filby.

7.
Jones,
Wizard War
, pp. 139, 204.

8.
Lewin,
Ultra
, p. 281.

9.
Adolph G. Rosengarten, Jr., “With Ultra from Omaha Beach to Weimar, Germany—a Personal View,”
Military Affairs
, vol. XLII (October 1978), p. 129.

10.
Patrick Beesly,
Very Special Intelligence: The Story of the Admiralty's Intelligence Centre, 1939–1945
, p. 69.

11.
F. W. Winterbotham,
The Ultra Secret
, p. 135.

12.
Lewin,
Ultra
, p. 19.

1.
Alfred D. Chandler, ed.,
The Papers of Dwight D. Eisenhower: The War Years
, p. 545. Hereinafter cited as Eisenhower Papers.

2.
Robert Murphy,
Diplomat Among Warriors
, pp. 102–3; Harry Butcher,
My Three Years with Eisenhower
, pp. 105–10; Stephen E. Ambrose,
The Supreme Commander: The War Years of Dwight D. Eisenhower
, pp. 98–99; Dwight D. Eisenhower,
Crusade in Europe
, pp. 86–87; Arthur Funk,
The Politics of Torch
, pp. 106–9.

3.
Eisenhower Papers, pp. 253–54.

4.
Anthony Cave Brown, ed.,
The Secret War Report of the OSS
, pp. 42–62.

5.
Butcher,
My Three Years
, pp. 98–99.

6.
Eisenhower Papers, p. 448.

7.
Eisenhower Papers, pp. 562–63; Funk,
Politics of Torch
, p. 107; Murphy,
Diplomat Among Warriors
, p. 106.

8.
Eisenhower Papers, p. 699.

9.
Butcher,
My Three Years
, p. 106.

10.
Ray Cline,
Secrets, Spies and Soldiers
, pp. 44–45.

11.
Funk,
Politics of Torch
, p. 18.

12.
Brown,
Secret War Report of the OSS
, p. 135.

13.
Murphy,
Diplomat Among Warriors
, p. 117.

14.
The
OSS
reports on Dubreuil are in a Military Attaché Report of July 13, 1944, from Madrid, Record Group No. 3020, in Modern Military Records, National Archives; and in report No. MFT 3.3., June 19, 1944, Record Group No. 3700, in ibid., and in Richard Harris Smith,
OSS: The Secret History of America's First Central Intelligence Agency
, p. 40; see also Murphy,
Diplomat Among Warriors
, p. 116.

15.
Funk,
Politics of Torch
, p. 89; Smith,
OSS
, p. 51.

16.
Smith,
OSS
, pp. 42–43; Murphy,
Diplomat Among Warriors
, p. 92.

17.
Smith,
OSS
, pp. 43–44.

18.
Eisenhower Papers, pp. 469–71.

19.
Brown,
Secret War Report of the OSS
, p. 134.

20.
Ibid., pp. 140–42.

21.
Smith,
OSS
, p. 57.

22.
Eisenhower Papers, p. 590.

23.
Butcher,
My Three Years
, pp. 106–7.

24.
Funk,
Politics of Torch
, pp. 106–7; Murphy,
Diplomat Among Warriors
, p. 104; Butcher,
My Three Years
, pp. 108–9.

25.
The document is in Record Group No. 226, OSS, Entry 5, cables, Modern Military Records, National Archives.

26.
Winston Churchill,
The Hinge of Fate
, p. 630.

27.
Funk,
Politics of Torch
, p. 21.

28.
Butcher,
My Three Years
, p. 110; Murphy,
Diplomat Among Warriors
, p. 105; Ambrose,
The Supreme Commander
, pp. 100–1.