Donovan himself only learned of the attack on Pearl Harbor several hours after it had taken place when James Roosevelt, the President's son, telephoned him from the White House. The attack was a lightning bolt for American intelligence. "We were betrayed by the complete failure of our intelligence services", wrote David Bruce later, "any intelligence service worthy of the name should have foretold this event."0 His view was shared by the President, by Donovan, by Congress, by the press, and by the military. Intelligence was so far down the appreciation index that even though accurate judgements had been made, it could not effect appropriate action at the highest level. This situation was a legacy of U.S. isolation. Now there was a genuine determination that there should be an effective intelligence set up so that United States should not be caught by surprise again.
Accordingly, the outbreak of war immediately created problems for COI in that it sparked off another round of bureaucratic wrangling about intelligence. The State Department pressed for control of propaganda, while Hoover and the FBI were incensed when COI agents tried to burgle the Spanish embassy in Washington: Hoover regarded operating inside the United States as the prerogative of the FBI. So when he heard that COI agents were inside the embassy, he ordered FBI cars to sound their horns outside, thus alerting the embassy security guards and forcing the COI men to flee. The military urged Roosevelt to allocate the various components of COI between the military services. Yet it was with the military that Donovan decided to seek a tactical alliance during the war, arguing that COI should be retained as a complete organisation under the control of the newly-created Joint Chiefs of Staff. He saw in the JCS a new concentration of power seeking to enlarge its powers, and he sought to ally with it.
Donovan's decision was spot-on and had far-reaching consequences for the agency. During the war, Donovan had reasoned, intelligence would necessarily be geared towards military interests and he had no doubt that the military would come to see it as a vital part of their operations. After the war, the support of the military, strengthened politically by numbers and victory (he had no doubt that the United States would win the war), would be valuable in ensuring the post-war survival of centralised intelligence.1
Seeking an alliance with the military in order to ensure the future of the agency was due in part to Donovan's awareness that his relationship with Roosevelt had changed. Eleanor Roosevelt once said of her husband that he used those who suited his purposes; when they no longer fulfilled that purpose they were ruthlessly discarded, however close the previous relationship. Nobody was indispensable. This was the cold manipulative side of the famous Roosevelt charm.2
The first pay-off for siding with the military came in the new allocation of intelligence responsibilities. COI lost its foreign information service (collecting news from around the world) - it was a small sacrifice: it could now concentrate on intelligence - but Roosevelt made clear to Hoover and the State Department that he was against any further break-up of COI functions, and he endorsed its amalgamation with the military. On 13 June 1942 he signed a presidential military order establishing the Office of Strategic Services under the jurisdiction of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Donovan was director with the rank of major general.
THE OFFICE OF STRATEGIC SERVICES
The functions of the OSS were the same of the COI, with the exception of the foreign information service which was transferred to the Office of War Information. Temperamentally, Donovan much preferred the excitement of commando and guerrilla operations, and being part of the military enabled him to give vent to this element. He put the emphasis on improvisation and a can-do, try-anything outlook which strongly influenced the OSS and later the CIA. And while being part of the U.S. military, with uniforms and ranks, Donovan saw to it that the OSS remained civilian-minded at all times: for him, the long-term battle was to ensure that the U.S. would have a peacetime, civilian, centralised agency. In Yugoslavia an OSS lieutenant in the American mission to Tito was asked by a U.S. army colonel in the same mission to encode a message. The lieutenant said it could wait for a day. "I'll admit it's not much fun coding," said the colonel, gently making his point, "but that's true of lots of things in the army. Orders, after all, are orders in the army." "Army?" the lieutenant asked. "Did you say army? Hell, man, we're not in the army. We're in the OSS."3 A constant stream of ideas poured from Donovan's hospitable imagination. Some were brilliant, some doubtful, others half-baked. For example, working on the (unproven) theory that the Japanese were terrified of bats, he and Roosevelt once concocted an elaborate scheme to parachute hundreds of bats onto the Japanese mainland. Unfortunately, the bats froze to death at high altitudes and the experiment had to be abandoned.4 In 1945, at the end of the war in Europe, Donovan organised Operation Paperclip which succdessfully brought Wernher von Braun and his team of German rocket specialists to the United States.
Donovan was also stimulated by the intellectual problems of research and analysis and it was in this field that he was to bequeath one of his most signal achievements to the postwar CIA. His assistant, James Murphy, said that in Donovan's opinion "if you used your talents and research facilities properly, you could outsmart the enemy simply by the use of brainpower."5 He thought that too much emphasis on secret intelligence gathering, such as signals and code-breaking, produced lazy analysis. Collection should never be an end in itself, argued Donovan, it was less than useless without proper analysis. It was his "unique selling proposition" as they say in marketing, and was, by inference, suggesting that OSS would outdo military intelligence. This argument became an article of faith for the CIA. Thirty years later when Stansfield Turner became President Carter's DCI, he put the emphasis firmly on technical collection - using satellite and communications' intelligence -and as a result met great resistance and anger from people within the agency and outside who felt that skilled analysis - "quality" - was being replaced by volumes of facts - "quantity". Turner was saying, in effect, that everyone has pet sources and ideas, and to counter this the maximum of intelligence should be collected. His was a salutary challenge to CIA preconceptions.
The importance which Donovan attached to tying in the backroom work of research and analysis to operations was entirely justified. It proved to be one of the most successful and effective areas of OSS activity during the war, and was an American innovation in intelligence. The highly trained scholars and analysts of R&A were the first to appreciate the mass of valuable information which could be systematically extracted from ordinary academic books, journals, newspapers, magazines, and from the files of American companies on their overseas operations. Such sources enabled R&A to predict accurately that manpower and not food production would be the critical problem for the German war effort. R&A also accurately estimated German U-boat and battle casualties by scrutinising casualty lists in German newspapers. It seemed so simple and so obvious but to the military, who had not troubled to hide their scorn for the ivory-tower 'eggheads', the value of R&A's information was an eye-opener. After the war, the discovery by the strategic bombing survey team that allied bombing had actually helped to increase German military production at the expense of civilian consumption, gave far more authority to the analytical side of intelligence. It showed that accurate and powerful imagination could have a central role in determining strategy.
To Donovan, intelligence research and analysis was not just about German war pr
