Joseph E. Persico (36 page)

Putzi continued to dredge his memory of Hitler's inner circle for tidbits that might earn him better treatment and keep him from being shipped back to the POW camp in Canada. The President enjoyed Hanfstaengl's tittle-tattle as much as the man's strategic concepts. One of Putzi's more prurient reports described the extracurricular services that Heinrich Hoffmann, the Führer's personal photographer, provided for Hitler. After coming to power, Hitler had gone to great cost to have Hoffmann recover pornographic drawings he had made as a starving artist in Vienna, Hanfstaengl said. Hoffmann also served as Hitler's
maître de plaisirs,
his chief procurer. Among his deliveries was the daughter of a Munich professor, a slender, shapely, blue-eyed blonde who worked in Hoffmann's photography shop. Her name was Eva Braun, known as Effi, and, according to Hanfstaengl, Hitler had bought Effi a house on the Chiemsee, halfway between Munich and Berchtesgaden, where he trysted with her in assured secrecy.

Of more substance was a report that Carter relayed to FDR from Hanfstaengl entitled “Probable Mode of Exit of Adolph Hitler from the Stage of History.” The statement began: “Hitler is familiar enough with ancient history to know that especially the Romans, affected by the Stoic doctrine, recognized many legitimate reasons for suicide . . . in the course of 1923 [the year of Hitler's failed putsch] Hitler told [me] that he would not hesitate to commit suicide if, having lost his freedom of action, he felt that his opponents were exploiting that fact. . . . In such a case, he said, ‘I would not hesitate a moment to make an end of it.'”

*

In January 1943 another FDR chum was about to enter the President's espionage orbit. George Howard Earle 3d was the scion of a rich, rock-ribbed Republican Philadelphia Main Line family that had made its bundle in the sugar trade. The adventure-loving Earle had dropped out of Harvard and in 1916 joined General Pershing's army trying to hunt down Pancho Villa in Mexico, where the Philadelphian won a second lieutenant's commission. When America entered World War I, Earle joined the Navy, skippered a submarine chaser, and was awarded the Navy Cross. After the war he amused himself playing polo, flying his own plane, and chasing women.

He startled his family by supporting Roosevelt for president in 1932, and surprised FDR by being elected governor of Pennsylvania as a Democrat in 1934, launching his “Little New Deal.” Roosevelt was drawn to men of Earle's stripe, adventurers of the kind that he himself could no longer be. In 1940, before the United States entered the war, FDR had sent this gruff charmer to Bulgaria as American minister because he knew Earle was a vocal anti-Nazi. Earle quickly confirmed the President's appraisal. On one occasion, the burly envoy beat a confession out of a suspected Nazi spy caught in the embassy. Earle became a familiar figure on the Sofia nightclub circuit. At one dance hall, he listened impatiently as the band played a request for the “Horst Wessel Lied,” the Nazi anthem honoring a Berlin pimp. As soon as the last note ended, Earle jumped up and demanded that the orchestra play the British World War I favorite, “Tipperary.” An empty whiskey bottle flew through the crowded club from a table of Germans and crashed among Earle and three pals. A Pier Six brawl ensued, with the club's furniture the chief loser. Earle's escapade got back to the President, who delighted in regaling visitors with the story of what he called “The Battle of the Bottles in the Balkans.” State Department careerists were less amused by the unorthodox minister the White House had foisted on them. After Bulgaria joined the Axis powers and Earle returned to America, State blackballed him for any further diplomatic posting. Secretary Hull made clear he wanted this loose cannon spiked. Earle, however, pestered the President endlessly to send him abroad again. FDR, still fond of his rambunctious friend, found a solution to satisfy Earle without angering State. Neutral Turkey was a hive of espionage and a haven for anti-Nazi Germans. Roosevelt had Earle commissioned a lieutenant commander in the Naval Reserve and sent him off to Istanbul as assistant naval attaché. FDR told him to report to him personally, short-circuiting formal channels. Earle set off for his new post with his tarnished star replated. The old capital of the Ottoman Empire, where the exotic and the clandestine intertwined, would mesh perfectly with his character.

When the President went to Casablanca in January 1943 to meet with Churchill after the success of Operation Torch, he included Earle, then en route to Istanbul, in his entourage. Earle was thus privy to most of the secrets exchanged between the two Allied leaders, including a decision to invade Sicily that summer. During this summit FDR also divulged the surprise he had been secretly mulling over. On January 24, the final day of the Casablanca meeting, Roosevelt and Churchill held a press conference. FDR spoke first. After saluting American and British unity, he began, in his storytelling fashion, “[W]e had a General called U. S. Grant. His name was Ulysses Simpson Grant, but in my, and the Prime Minister's, early days he was called ‘Unconditional Surrender' Grant. The elimination of German, Japanese, and Italian war power means the unconditional surrender by Germany, Italy, or Japan.” Churchill was aghast. He later complained to Robert E. Sherwood, “I heard the words ‘Unconditional Surrender' for the first time from the President's lips at the Conference. . . . I would not myself have used these words, but I immediately stood by the President.” Churchill's statement was not literally true. Unconditional surrender had been tossed about between the two leaders before, along with other alternatives for ending the war, but never agreed upon. Nor had the State Department been informed of what FDR intended. Secretary of State Hull, on hearing FDR call for unconditional surrender, was dumbstruck.

Churchill further confided his dismay in a secret message to Anthony Eden: “We certainly do not want, if we can help it, to get [the enemy] fused together in a solid desperate block,” he said. Any crack in Axis unity was all to the good. “A gradual break-up in Germany must mean a weakening of their resistance and consequently the saving of hundreds of thousands of British and American lives.” General Eisenhower put “unconditional surrender” in blunt terms that any soldier could understand: “If you were given two choices—one to mount the scaffold and the other to charge twenty bayonets—you might as well charge twenty bayonets.”

Roosevelt's later explanation for his solitary decision seemed almost flippant. “[S]uddenly the press conference was on, and Winston and I had had no time to prepare for it, and the thought popped into my mind that they had called Grant ‘Old Unconditional Surrender' and the next thing I knew I had said it.” Franklin Roosevelt rarely made an uncalculated utterance in his life. The most plausible explanation for his raising unconditional surrender, since he never left a fuller explanation, lay with Joseph Stalin. Ever in the forepart of the President's mind was the awareness that the Russians were suffering and inflicting the highest casualties. At their recent February 1943 victory at Stalingrad, the Red Army had dealt the Wehrmacht over 237,000 casualties, including twenty-four generals captured, but had lost over a million men killed, wounded, or missing, punishment dwarfing American and British losses. FDR had two fears: first, that Stalin might sign a separate peace with Hitler, and then it would be American and British boys taking the fearful casualties; second, that the ever-suspicious Stalin might fear that the Western Allies were considering a separate peace with Hitler and lose his incentive to fight on. A policy of uncompromising total surrender should put both fears to rest. One intimate was aware that FDR had known exactly what he meant to say at Casablanca. The night before, Roosevelt had confided to Harry Hopkins, “Of course, it's just the thing for the Russians. They couldn't want anything better. Unconditional surrender. Uncle Joe [Stalin] might have made it up himself.” But if FDR expected gratitude from Stalin, he had misread the Soviet dictator. Stalin believed that leaving the Germans no hope could serve only to weld them into a desperate unity. As for U.S. domestic consumption, the President still liked “unconditional surrender.” It had a crusading ring. The President was not risking American lives to achieve a brokered deal with the devil, but to destroy him.

*

George Earle had left Casablanca the day before FDR delivered his press conference shocker. Upon checking into Istanbul's luxurious Park Hotel on January 23, he sent a telegram to an old flame in Budapest, Adrienne Molnar, described in Gestapo files as “a Jewish cabaret dancer.” Apparently feeling lonely with his wife, Huberta, and their four sons, far off in America, he wanted the beautiful Hungarian to join him in Istanbul. He signed the telegram with Adrienne's pet name for him, Hefty.

Louis Matzhold, an Austrian journalist and his wife, Asta, also living in Budapest, were good friends of Adrienne's. The former chorus girl went to Asta for sisterly advice on how to respond to Earle's invitation, since the Matzholds had known the man in Washington. Journalism now served as a cover for Louis Matzhold's true function, spying for the Abwehr, the Sicherheitsdinst, and Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop's intelligence service. Matzhold was well aware of Earle's personal connection to the American President, and Earle was now asking Adrienne Molnar to join him. Here was an espionage bonanza waiting to be mined. Ten days after Earle checked into the Park Hotel, Matzhold boarded a German courier plane bound for Istanbul and was in Earle's suite that evening. He was acting, he explained, as Adrienne's guardian, looking out for her interests in case she should take up Earle's offer. Given the woman's past, chaperoning hardly seemed necessary. Matzhold also claimed to be a covert anti-Nazi who had managed to penetrate the German intelligence services. He was privy, he said, to the Reich's innermost secrets, which he was willing to reveal to Earle. Sensing their use to each other, the two men began to talk more freely. Earle ordered wine sent up to his suite. He boasted to Matzhold that he had been with Roosevelt at Casablanca and then, incredibly, revealed that, when the Germans were driven from North Africa, the Allies would make their first incursion into Europe by invading Sicily.

Earle let the Matzhold encounter percolate in his mind for a few days, then fired off a coded message for the President, sent through Harry Hopkins. Its content made clear that Earle was hardly the naïve, loose-tongued womanizer that he had played for Matzhold's benefit. He described Matzhold as “unquestionably a Nazi agent [who] flew directly from Budapest to Istanbul to see me . . . on a plane used only by German officials.” Matzhold had told him, Earle reported, that “Russian communism was a hundred fold greater menace to the democracies than National Socialism . . . that Germany was sick of bloodshed and would like peace on fair terms . . .” and they would go down in history as the men who set in motion the talks to end this horrible carnage. His cable went on: “I told Matzhold that if I had anything to do with negotiating any peace except unconditional surrender, I would go down in German history but I would hate to see what American history would say about me.” Still, Matzhold was coming back to see him in a few days, and Earle asked for instructions in exploiting the contact: “What shall I say, if anything, when he returns?” Hopkins answered Earle regarding Matzhold's offer to mediate: “There is no comment on his request here and believe you should also have no comment.” At the same time Hopkins sent a wire for the eyes only of the latest U.S. ambassador to Turkey, Laurence Steinhardt, asking his opinion of the President's pleasure-loving pal. To Hopkins's relief Steinhardt cabled back, “Earle is cooperating and relations are excellent.”

Each time Earle met Matzhold, he fed him new intelligence as to where the Allies intended to return to the Continent. In the course of these confidences, he divulged thirty-four places where the Allies were going to invade, including Spain and the Balkans, with Sicily lost in this fog of disinformation. When the Allied troops did invade the island, it was with surprise equal to that of their invasion of North Africa eight months before.

One day FDR received a large envelope from Earle stamped “Abwehr.” Handwritten across the front it read, “Property of Louis A. Matzhold, for the Mister President of the United States.” FDR emptied the contents with unconcealed delight. Out slid stamps recently issued by countries now under German occupation, editions largely unattainable outside Hitler's Europe. Earle knew of the President's love of stamps and thought that by forwarding Matzhold's gift to the White House, the Austrian could be made to believe that he really had entrée to the President.

For his part, Matzhold felt jubilant that what had started as a long shot had produced a triumph. His reports to Joachim von Ribbentrop convinced the foreign minister that through the Matzhold-Earle connection Germany had a line into the Oval Office. Ribbentrop instructed Matzhold to use this link to persuade the President that assisting the Soviets was like providing rope to one's hangman. America's aid would only help the Communists rule the world—a world, as the foreign minister put it, where “there would be no place left for millionaires like Roosevelt and Earle.”

Adrienne Molnar did come to Istanbul, but by the time she arrived George Earle's roving eye had fixed on a Belgian beauty. Still, the ex-lovers had use for each other. Adrienne, believed to be the mistress of President Roosevelt's man in Istanbul, found herself showered with attention from practically every espionage service in the city, each thinking that, through a Hungarian chorus girl, it had a pipeline into the White House. Among the gifts pressed on her was a six-carat diamond ring. Whatever she heard she relayed to Earle, enabling him to establish the identities of scores of Axis agents operating in Turkey.

Chapter XVII

Leakage from the Top

GENERAL MARSHALL, bred in the cool, methodical school of warfare, well recognized the superiority of intercepted enemy transmissions over the more romantic intrigues of spies. Yet, he had trouble persuading his commander in chief, who was still drawn to the adventures of secret agents like George Earle, and from the ever-burgeoning Donovan organization and John Franklin Carter's ring. At one point, Marshall reproached the President, “I have learned that you seldom see the Army summaries of ‘Magic' material.” But one decrypt coming into the President's hands had to make clear the pricelessness of broken enemy codes. On April 14, 1943, Navy listening posts snatched from the air and Army cryptographers broke a Japanese message reading “C in C [Commander in Chief] combined fleet will visit RYZ and RXP in accordance with the following schedule. . . .” The officer would depart Rabaul on New Britain Island, the chief Japanese naval base in the South Pacific. He would fly in a medium bomber escorted by six fighters scheduled to arrive at the islands of Ballale and Buin in the northern Solomons. There he would make a tour of inspection and “will visit the sick and wounded. . . .” The commander in chief in question was the highest-ranking figure in the Japanese navy, Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, Harvard-educated and a principal architect of early Japanese Pacific victories, beginning with Pearl Harbor. Yamamoto's trip was intended to encourage high morale by awarding medals and personally congratulating the men who had achieved these triumphs.

But from the moment the admiral began his journey, American fighter pilots, in effect, had him in their crosshairs. The messages broken by Magic revealing Yamamoto's schedule, route, and mode of travel were relayed to the U.S. naval commander in the Pacific, Admiral Chester Nimitz. Nimitz's operations officers immediately began to construct a trap to ambush the Japanese leader. In the early morning hours of April 18, eighteen Army Air Corps P-38 Lightning fighters equipped with special long-range fuel tanks took off from Henderson Field on Guadalcanal, flying low to evade enemy radar. At the tip of southern Bougainville, five hundred miles later, Yamamoto's plane appeared, like clockwork, and the Lightnings shot it out of the sky. The Americans had taken a gamble, weighing the possible revelation of their codebreaking success by the pinpoint reception given Yamamoto against robbing Japan of likely its greatest military thinker. So regarded was Yamamoto by Japan's Axis partner, that after his death, the Germans struck a posthumous medal honoring him.

The American codebreakers' luck held. While the Battle of Midway had been noisily trumpeted in American newspapers as a victory for cryptanalysis and while scuttlebutt swirled around U.S. Pacific bases that the same codebreaking had done in Yamamoto, the Japanese still failed to change their codes. Yamamoto was a figure of such stature that his assassination might have had political repercussions. It has been speculated that Nimitz sought FDR's permission before ordering the lethal strike. No documents exist, however, establishing that Roosevelt's approval was sought, though the decision did go up to Navy secretary Frank Knox. Whether FDR blessed the mission or learned of it after the fact, the demise of the mastermind of Pearl Harbor at last stimulated in the President, as General Marshall had hoped, a keener appreciation for Magic.

The intercepted Japanese communiqués provided an advantage extending beyond the strategic edge they offered in the Pacific. The messages encoded in Purple, the enemy's diplomatic cipher, and broken at Arlington Hall, opened a window of astonishing breadth, revealing what was being said, done, and planned not only by Japan, but by its Nazi ally on the other side of the world. The principal and unwitting betrayer of the Reich's topmost secrets was Hiroshi Oshima, an army general in his mid-fifties, from a prominent Japanese family, and since 1938 Japan's ambassador to Berlin. Oshima, short, stocky, strong-jawed, strutting, something of an oriental Prussian, had become a familiar figure around the Reich's Chancellery. The ambassador loved Germany, spoke its language fluently, and was enamored of Hitler. The American journalist-historian William L. Shirer wrote: “Oshima often impressed this observer as more Nazi than the Nazis.”

The ambassador was practically a member of Hitler's inner circle. He became a social companion and confidant of Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop, who supplied him daily with the foreign office's intelligence summary. The Führer himself comfortably discussed with the Japanese his most closely guarded war plans and arranged guided tours for Oshima of the Russian front and the Atlantic Wall, the coastal defenses in France erected to block an invasion. After each such confidence, Oshima radioed what the Nazis shared with him to his superiors in Tokyo, his reports encoded in Purple. His relaying of Germany's secrets to the home office was only marginally different from transmitting them directly to the White House, since Purple had long become captive to Magic, and the choicest intercepts were delivered to the Map Room for the President's reading.

A sampling of intercepted traffic suggests the value of Magic. In the summer of 1943, British aircraft, equipped with radar, and ships using “Huff Duff”—high frequency direction finders—began targeting German U-boats to deadly effect. Oshima met with Admiral Karl Doenitz, architect of the U-boat wolf pack strategy that had previously proved devastatingly successful in sinking Allied shipping. Oshima later cabled Tokyo: “I took occasion to ask him with regard to this matter, to which the Admiral replied that because the enemy has begun to use a new direction finder and because they have attached auxiliary aircraft carriers to their convoys, the losses in German submarines have become very great, so that we have to stop the use of submarine wolfpacks.” FDR, leafing through Magic decrypts as Dr. McIntire massaged his shrunken legs in the dispensary next to the Map Room, knew that the Battle of the Atlantic was essentially over. He had it from Admiral Doenitz's lips.

On July 25, Shinrokuro Hidaka, the Japanese ambassador in Rome, had a private audience with Italian dictator Benito Mussolini, who berated Hitler for the stalled, costly Russian campaign. Mussolini lamented to the ambassador, “Why does Germany have to take areas where no Germans live? My God! She has been able to do practically nothing since she took those areas. . . . I don't see any reason why Germany can't use sense and retire to the 1939 line.” During this discussion Mussolini divulged an intelligence gem. “Enemy bombers have played hell with our industries,” Il Duce told Hidaka. “Our synthetic petroleum plant at Livorno was bombed and it will take four months to get it back in shape. We have one single synthetic rubber factory at Bologna. It is working overtime and if they hit that, it will be a terrific blow.”

Decoded by Magic cryptanalysts, Mussolini's observations both exposed a crack in Axis unity and provided more precise target intelligence than photo reconnaissance by air. Coincidentally, on the very day of Mussolini's revelations to Hidaka, his own sun set. Before the day was out, Italy's King Victor Emmanuel announced that Mussolini's long reign as Italy's strongman was over.

That July, with Sicily almost conquered and with Mussolini fallen, Hitler revealed to Ambassador Oshima his fallback strategy. “Before long, as things now look, they are going to be on the Italian mainland. When they land I certainly am not going to be fool enough to fight them down at the tip of the boot. There are plenty of fine encampments north of Rome. There, in natural fortifications, I shall form three lines over the Apennines, along the River Po and the Alps.” FDR now had in hand the plan that Hitler essentially would follow; except that the fighting in Italy continued harsh and bloody all the way up the Italian boot to the Führer's designated lines.

Oshima's communiqués to Tokyo enabled FDR, sitting in his study, to know what only a handful of Germans knew of the Reich's military output. On August 17, 1943, 315 American bombers struck aircraft plants in Schweinfurt and Regensburg, both inflicting and suffering heavy damage, with sixty U.S. planes shot down. That day, Field Marshal Erhard Milch, Hermann Göring's chief Luftwaffe deputy, admitted to Oshima, “Well, it is quite true that these bombings are fierce. . . . Speaking man to man, the German air force has its back to the wall.” Milch then cautioned Oshima, “Please keep this number absolutely secret,” and revealed to him, “Our present output is a monthly number of about 2,700 first line planes, but in about 15 months, we plan to double this figure. . . . So if we keep up with our plans, we will leave [the Allies] behind.”

Tokyo received intimations of what Japan could expect from American air raids through Oshima's reports of the experience of Japanese diplomats living in Berlin. In one summary, the ambassador reported that the Berlin homes of seventy-nine of his staff members had been “burned and utterly destroyed.” Sounding gamely optimistic, Oshima closed noting that light and heat had been restored to his embassy, and that he expected telephone service to resume soon. A Magic decrypt provided a firsthand account of the effect of Allied raids on another key German city. After massive British and American strikes on Hamburg, the Japanese envoy there, Doctor Kuroda, reported to Tokyo, “Local municipal authorities told me that up to August 12th, 22,000 bodies had been recovered. In addition to this, there are no doubt from thirty thousand to forty thousand bodies in the shelters. . . . It is very difficult and dangerous to recover the bodies from underground shelters. . . . The authorities are using prisoners in this work. Public utilities, including gas, electricity and water, have been completely destroyed. . . . In a word, Germany's proud second city received a fatal blow. . . . The restoration of the city will take fifty years.”

The day and night pounding of German cities by Allied bombers was driving the Luftwaffe to consider suicide missions. A decrypted directive from the inspector general of the German air force bemoaned the failure of anti-aircraft batteries and fighters to shoot down more Allied planes. “The main reason is failure to close to shortest ranges,” the inspector general noted. “There has been set up therefore a Pursuit Assault Force whose task will be to break up enemy formations using more heavily armored pursuit planes in all-out attacks in close formation from the closest range and pushing the attack home even to the extent of ramming without regard to losses. . . . Volunteers for these storm units are being obtained on a secret basis.” The Luftwaffe, it appeared, had anticipated Japanese kamikazes by well over a year, though the scheme for employing German suicide pilots never went beyond the planning stage.

Forever searching for a silver lining in the rubble of Berlin, Ambassador Oshima, in an intercept dated September 14, 1943, reported sagging morale among Allied fliers: “. . . [T]he prisoners tell us . . . for example, it is a fact the orders have been issued to pilots setting off from a given base that they shall land at different bases so that they will not know which of their comrades have been killed.” In this dispatch, Oshima also revealed the effect of Allied raids on the progress of German secret weapons development. After a conversation with Hitler, the ambassador quoted the Führer telling him of the V-1 and V-2 programs, “. . . [W]e have not been able to get ready because the enemy has been bombing us too effectively, for example, at Peenemünde and Friedrichshafen.” Hitler cautioned Oshima, “Please keep the names of these places utterly and absolutely secret,” and concluded, “So we are having to postpone [use of the secret weapons] more or less. But my guess is that by winter we may be able to start.” Because of the continued bombing, Hitler's projection proved premature by nearly eight crucial months.

In another broken Purple message, classified “Absolutely and Strictly Secret,” yet available to Roosevelt within days, Oshima revealed the cold-blooded calculus that ruled Hitler's thinking on the war in Russia. On September 25, Oshima cabled Tokyo: “When I talked with Chancellor Hitler not so long ago, he said that if there are five liters of blood and it is all spilled, death ensues immediately; and that if a liter and a half or two liters are spilled, as long as the enemy cannot restore it, in time, exhaustion sets in of itself; and that this is the kind of strategy Germany has adopted.”

On October 4, Oshima cabled the foreign ministry on the progress of Hitler's bloodletting strategy but also reported an admission by the Führer that likely sent a chill through Tokyo. After inventorying the staggering losses the Germans had inflicted on the Russians—Hitler claimed 3.5 million Red Army men lost, 7,500 planes and 18,500 tanks destroyed—he told the Japanese envoy, “Well, this is the very first time since the war began that we Germans had to take the defensive . . . we are going to have many difficulties as a consequence.” Hitler, however, did not want Oshima to leave the Chancellery with the wrong impression. “I want you to know that I am not worried at all about the way the war is going,” he told the departing Japanese ambassador.

Another Magic decrypt illustrated the growing brutality on all sides as the war ground on. On December 15 the Japanese foreign office sent a circular message, Number 467, to its major embassies abroad. It reported, “Japanese hospital ship
Buenos Aires Maru
was attacked by a United States aircraft, Consolidated B24. Vessel was hit by a bomb on port side and sunk in about forty minutes.” Survivors—wounded soldiers, doctors, and a large contingent of nurses going home on leave—then crowded into eighteen lifeboats. The message went on to report that though red sheets forming a red cross had been held aloft, an American plane, coming in at an altitude of only about three hundred feet, machine-gunned the lifeboats. The attack on the
Buenos Aires Maru
was not an isolated incident. The communiqué reported that ten other clearly marked hospital ships had been attacked by American aircraft. Message Number 467 was not among those delivered to FDR.