Ike's Spies: Eisenhower and the Espionage Establishment Read online

  Stephen E. Ambrose

  Ike’s Spies

  Stephen E. Ambrose wrote twenty books on military affairs and foreign policy. Early in his career he was an associate editor of The Eisenhower Papers, and he later went on to publish the definitive, three-part biography of Eisenhower, as well as many bestselling books of military history, including Band of Brothers and Undaunted Courage. He died in 2002.

  Also by Stephen E. Ambrose

  Halleck: Lincoln’s Chief of Staff (1962)

  Upton and the Army (1964)

  Duty, Honor, Country: A History of West Point (1966)

  Eisenhower and Berlin, 1945: The Decision to Halt at the Elbe (1967)

  The Supreme Commander:

  The War Years of General Dwight D. Eisenhower (1970)

  Crazy Horse and Custer: The Parallel Lives of Two American Warriors (1975)

  Pegasus Bridge: June 6, 1944 (1985)

  Nixon, Vol. 1: The Education of a Politician, 1913–1962 (1987)

  Nixon, Vol. 2: The Triumph of a Politician, 1962–1972 (1989)

  Eisenhower: Soldier and President (1990)

  Nixon, Vol. 3: Ruin and Recovery, 1973–1990 (1991)

  Band of Brothers: E Company, 506th Regiment, 101st Airborne from Normandy to Hitler’s Eagle’s Nest (1992)

  D-Day: June 6, 1944—The Climactic Battle of World War II (1994)

  Undaunted Courage: Meriwether Lewis, Thomas Jefferson, and the Opening of the American West (1996)

  Citizen Soldiers: The U.S. Army from the Normandy Beaches to the Bulge to the Surrender of Germany—June 7, 1944–May 7, 1945 (1997)

  Americans at War (1997)

  The Victors: Eisenhower and His Boys: The Men of World War II (1998)

  Comrades: Brothers, Fathers, Heroes, Sons, Pals (1999)

  Nothing Like It in the World: The Men Who Built the Transcontinental

  Railroad, 1863–1869 (2000)

  The Wild Blue: The Men and Boys Who Flew the B-24s Over Germany (2001)

  To America: Personal Reflections of an Historian (2002)

  This Vast Land: A Young Man’s Journal of the Lewis and Clark Expedition (2003)

  FIRST ANCHOR BOOKS EDITION, JANUARY 2012

  Copyright © 1981 by Stephen E. Ambrose

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Anchor Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Doubleday Inc., New York, in 1981.

  Anchor Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  The Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file at the Library of Congress.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-94661-4

  www.anchorbooks.com

  Cover photo: Geroge Tames/The New York Times/Redux. Cover design by Base Art Co.

  v3.1

  For William B. Hesseltine, 1902-1964 and

  T. Harry Williams, 1909-1979 great teachers, both

  Preface

  Between World War I and World War II, the U.S. Government did almost no spying on anyone. Spying was not a gentleman’s profession, it was thought, and anyway an isolationist America had no need for spies. Harry Truman reverted to this position immediately after World War II.

  But during the war, the United States was forced to use spies. The success of the British Secret Service had impressed Dwight Eisenhower. As Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces in Europe, Ike was the beneficiary of information obtained by the cream of British society, academia, and the arts. He was also at the center of a successful deception program that fooled the Germans time after time, while simultaneously he commanded a series of covert operations that played a crucial role in the final victory.

  So, when Eisenhower became President, he encouraged the growth of the CIA, which under his direction and orders grew in size, expanding the scope of its activities and becoming one of America’s chief weapons in the Cold War. It helped to overthrow governments in the Middle East and Latin America, tried to do so in Central and Eastern Europe, flew spy flights over the Soviet Union and other countries, and hatched assassination plots against foreign leaders. To its critics, it was a rogue elephant, totally out of control; to its defenders, it was a vital instrument in the fight to keep the Free World free. To Ike, it was necessary.

  1981

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Author

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Preface

  Part One: World War II 1942-45

  Chapter 1 Churchill Introduces Ike to the ULTRA Secret

  Chapter 2 Preparing TORCH

  Chapter 3 Lighting the TORCH

  Chapter 4 Who Murdered the Admiral?

  Chapter 5 Ike and ULTRA in Africa, Sicily, and Italy

  Chapter 6 The Secret Side of OVERLORD

  Chapter 7 D-Day and the French Resistance

  Chapter 8 The Battle of Mortain—ULTRA’s Greatest Triumph

  Chapter 9 Ike, Strong, Monty, and the Bridge Too Far

  Chapter 10 Ike’s Intelligence Failure at the Bulge

  Interlude: 1945-53

  Chapter 11 Eisenhower Between SHAEF and the Presidency

  Chapter 12 The Birth and Early Years of the CIA, 1945-53

  Part Two: The Presidency

  Chapter 13 President Eisenhower and the Communist Menace

  Chapter 14 Iran: The Preparation

  Chapter 15 Iran: The Act

  Chapter 16 Guatemala

  Chapter 17 Hungary, Vietnam, and Indonesia

  Chapter 18 The National Intelligence Estimates

  Chapter 19 The U-2 and Ike’s Defense Policy

  Chapter 20 Francis Gary Powers and the Summit That Never Was

  Chapter 21 Ike and the CIA’s Assassination Plots

  Chapter 22 Ike and the Bay of Pigs

  Chapter 23 Ike and His Spies

  Notes

  Glossary

  An Essay on the Sources by Richard H. Immerman

  Bibliography

  Acknowledgments

  Part One

  WORLD WAR II 1942-45

  CHAPTER ONE

  Churchill Introduces Ike to the ULTRA Secret

  LATE JUNE, 1942. One of those beginning-of-summer days in Britain when it seems that twilight will last forever. At Chequers, the Prime Minister’s official weekend retreat, the butler informs Winston Churchill that the car with the American general in it has just arrived. Churchill goes to the front door to personally greet his overnight guest. The Prime Minister watches as the general emerges from his car and reaches for his bags.

  STUDYING THE OFFICER, Churchill may well have thought of how little he knew about this man to whom he was about to tell so much. Churchill had seen him in action at high-level staff conferences, knew that he was thorough, well-prepared, thoughtful, and respected by his peers. Churchill had also been told that he was immensely popular with his associates, who called him “Ike” as a mark of their affection.

  Churchill realized that this Ike had Chief of Staff George C. Marshall’s unlimited confidence, so much so that Marshall had just made General Dwight D. Eisenhower the commander of the American military forces in Great Britain. Marshall had indicated that he felt there was no job too big for Ike. Churchill had also been impressed when told that Eisenhower had spent five years writing speeches for Marshall’s predecessor, General Douglas MacArthur, whose standards for clarity of expression and thought in written English were nearly as high as Churchill’s own.

  Most of all, Churchill realized th
at the Supreme Commander for the Anglo-American counteroffensive against Hitler would have to be an American. That was inevitably one of the prices Britain would have to pay to keep America from turning her back on the European war and concentrating instead on Japan. Knowing that President Franklin Roosevelt stood almost in awe of General Marshall, and would certainly not buck him on a purely military assignment, and knowing Marshall’s attitude toward Eisenhower, Churchill realized that this general walking toward him, suitcase in one hand, briefcase in the other, would be in command of the first Anglo-American amphibious assault since the French and Indian War.

  Churchill had called Ike to him because the time had come to introduce the future Supreme Commander to the wizard war, that silent backstage battle between the British intelligentsia and the German intelligentsia that was as critical as it was unknown. This big, hearty, raw-boned, grinning Yank was a professional soldier, fifty-two years old, with nearly thirty years of active duty, but he knew almost nothing about codes or code breaking, about new weapons, or about spies, counterspies, covert actions, or any other aspect of the dark arts. His ignorance came about because the U. S. Army and the nation it defended had virtually no intelligence arm. In 1929, Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson had abolished the small code-breaking apparatus of the Army on the grounds that “gentlemen don’t read each other’s mail.” The intelligence branch of the Army was so small, unimportant, in fact despised, that it was widely assumed that no officer of ability ever went into it.

  The man approaching the front door at Chequers was truly an innocent abroad. Waiting for him with a cigar in one hand, some documents in the other, and a smile on his face, was Churchill, who delighted in the task of introducing this naïve Yank to the labyrinth of the British Secret Service. Over in the New World they might be saying that Britain was finished, that her day was done, and Churchill knew painfully well that the British could never by themselves produce the guns or divisions in sufficient number to overcome the Germans, but—by God!—in this war of brains, the British were the best in the world, and Churchill was justifiably proud of that fact.

  Ike put down his bags and in his warm, friendly, casual American fashion stuck out his hand. Churchill shook hands heartily, meanwhile looking Ike up and down. As Eisenhower removed his hat, two features stood out—his full grin, and his large, prominent forehead. Both the grin and the bald pate seemed as wide, broad, and sunny as the Kansas prairie.

  He had no middle-aged sag, either under his eyes or around his belly. Instead, he had the broad shoulders and powerful build of a star athlete (which he had been), and he carried himself lightly, almost catlike. His hands were large, his handshake firm. He looked Churchill right in the eye, not trying to avoid either his gaze or his first questions. Overall, he gave the impression of straightforwardness, strength, boundless energy, and great determination. Churchill liked him at once.

  For his part, Ike was meeting Churchill privately for the first time. Churchill had the appearance and manners of a British aristocrat, while Ike was only a year or two away from having been an obscure colonel in a minuscule army. Despite the difference in their backgrounds, prestige, power, and reputation, Ike was not awestruck. He was curious about this great man who had rallied the British people to stand alone for a year against Hitler and his Nazis, and he was anxious to get along with Churchill. Together with Roosevelt, Stalin, and Hitler, the Prime Minister was one of the four best-known and most powerful men in the world. Everyone in America had seen his picture, cigar clamped between his teeth, standing over the ruins of bombed-out London, holding his first two fingers apart, high in the air, in the V-for-Victory signal. Plump, almost cherubic in the face, he could resemble a bulldog when he was determined to have his way (which was nearly all the time). His face would become a violent red when he was angry or crossed. He too had boundless energy and had therefore stuck his finger into every pie in Britain, most of all the war of wits with the Germans, which excited his imagination and limitless curiosity.

  Through cocktails, through dinner, through the brandy, coffee, and more brandy, on into the early hours of the morning, Ike listened enthralled as the P.M. briefed him on the secret war. He explained radar, its shortcomings and its promise, how it was being used in the Battle of Britain, what the British hoped it could do in the future. Churchill fairly glowed as he described the Battle of the Beams. German night-bombers were finding their targets over blacked-out London by flying along radio beams sent by transmitters located on the French coast. Crossbeams, sent from another spot on the coast, intersected the beam over the target, letting the German bombers know the precise moment to drop their bombs. A young British scientist, R. V. Jones, had figured out how the system worked, which gave the British an opportunity to jam the signals, or misdirect the Germans, or mislead them into dropping their bombs over open countryside.1

  With a chuckle, Churchill described some of the wilder ideas British scientists had produced, such as suspending time bombs by parachute in the path of approaching German bomber formations, or the search for “death rays” for both humans and engines. An idea Churchill liked and intended to follow up was to take masses of seaweed, mix them with huge quantities of dry ice, and thereby create an unsinkable aircraft carrier that could be towed up and down the coast of Europe.

  Ike was never tempted to laugh, however absurd some ideas seemed, because he knew that it was this same Churchill who had, in 1914, found private funds to support the research for and development of a new weapon of war that all the generals laughed at. That weapon became the tank, and in 1917 Ike had been one of the first officers of the U. S. Army to recognize its potential. He took command of the “Tank Corps” and trained it at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. In late 1918, within a week of his receiving orders to take his unit to France to enter the battle, the armistice came. Ike had therefore never held a combat command, but his appreciation of the tank—and his respect for Churchill for his key role in its creation—remained undiminished.

  Churchill told Ike of some of the fears his scientists had with respect to what the Germans were developing in the way of new weapons. The German Navy was making rapid progress with its diesel submarines, while the Luftwaffe was thought to be experimenting with some sort of jet-propelled aircraft. Rocket research was also going forward. It was thought that the Germans might have an operational pilotless aircraft, or even a true rocket, within a year or two. Another innovation was a bomb with eyes—the Germans were experimenting with a ballistic bomb which would be steered from the launching aircraft on the receipt of pictures “televised” back by the bomb.

  More cheerful news was that German atomic research seemed to be misdirected. Churchill and Roosevelt, meanwhile, had agreed to pool their resources, and British physicists—along with some of the best European physicists, who had fled Hitler’s Europe to work at their specialties—were now participating fully in the Manhattan Project in America.

  As for spies, Churchill was pleased to report that the British had managed to maintain contact with the Polish and French secret services through MI-6 of the British Secret Service, headed by Brigadier Stewart Menzies. The Special Operations Executive (SOE), a branch of Menzies’ Secret Service, was establishing contacts with the French underground forces. Best of all, Menzies believed that the British had managed to identify and then either execute or “turn” every German spy in the United Kingdom, which if true meant that the British Secret Service controlled every piece of information the Germans received from their spies. There was rich potential in such a situation.

  (Churchill would not have been quite so pleased with MI-6 if he had known that the Germans had done the same to his MI-6 agents in Holland. The British had parachuted sabotage agents into that country, but the Germans had caught the first one and forced him to send back suitable messages to London. The Germans then knew where subsequent agents were to be dropped, as MI-6 sent radio messages to their agents to be ready for them. The Nazis captured every one of them, at the same time se
nding messages back to London that led MI-6 to believe that the agents were at large and operating a successful campaign.2)

  Finally, triumphantly, Churchill turned to what he called ULTRA. Before explaining the term, however, he rather dramatically made Ike swear that he would never expose himself to capture during the remainder of the war, which meant explicitly that he was never to go into a war zone or fly over one. Everyone who knew about ULTRA had to make that promise, Churchill explained, because this was the most valuable secret of the war, and the Germans had their own ways of making captured men talk.

  ULTRA, Churchill then declared, was the term the British used for their systematic breaking of the German code. By itself, difficult though the feat may have been (and was, in fact), breaking an enemy’s code was not a decisive factor, primarily because the enemy changed his code at regular intervals, and when he did, the code breakers had to start all over at point zero. But in this case, a delighted Churchill declared, the Germans believed they had an absolutely safe encoding machine, which was called Enigma. It consisted of two machines somewhat like electric typewriters, which were attached to three rotating drums, which in turn were interconnected by an intricate set of electric wires. An operator would type a plain text on one typewriter; the drums would rotate according to a predetermined setting, and the other typewriter would rap out the encoded message, which was then sent over the airwaves. At the receiving end, all the operator needed to do was put the machine on the proper setting, feed in the encoded message, and take out the plain text.

  The Germans believed the system to be foolproof because even if the enemy had an Enigma machine, it would do him no good without the settings. The possible variations were numbered in the tens of thousands and a code breaker would go crazy before cracking even one of them. Enigma could produce an almost infinite number of cipher alphabets merely by changing the keying procedure.