A Brief History of the Spy Read Online Free PDF Page A

the Panama Canal Zone, the Philippines and major Army reservations.
    Despite the shutdown of the Cipher Bureau, code-breaking had continued to form a major part of the intelligence work of the US forces, and a debate continues to this day about how much was known by President Roosevelt about the impending attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941. It seems probable that the president was not aware of the danger, but what is absolutely certain is that the men in charge in Hawaiiwere not up to speed with everything that Washington knew and didn’t take the appropriate action. The code-breakers would redeem the reputation of their profession by breaking the Japanese code known as JN25, which prevented the invasion of Northern Australia and gave US Fleet Admiral Nimitz a vital edge before the Battle of Midway.
    Five months before Pearl Harbor, President Roosevelt appointed William ‘Wild Bill’ Donovan, a successful Wall Street lawyer and Medal of Honor winner, as Coordinator of Intelligence (COI). Donovan had spent the previous year liaising with William Stephenson, the Scottish-Canadian millionaire who became an unofficial channel for British influence in the States following the outbreak of war in Europe. Donovan became convinced that a central coordinated American intelligence agency was required, and his appointment as COI, consulting with the heads of the existing agencies and reporting directly to the president, was a major stepping-stone towards that.
    The declaration of war with Japan and Germany in December 1941 led to a division of the COI’s responsibilities, with its propaganda work transferred to the Office of War Information, and the rest incorporated into the new Office of Strategic Services (the OSS). Donovan remained in charge of this new organization, but instead of reporting to the president as formerly, he now answered to the military Joint Chiefs of Staff.
    The OSS was split into three divisions: the Special Intelligence division gathered intelligence from open sources, and from agents in the field. Allen Dulles was in charge of a crucial station in Bern, Switzerland, which supplied a lot of vital information regarding the Nazi rocket programme, and the German atomic bomb project. The Special Operations group was an equivalent to the British Special Operations Executive, and carried out many of the same functions, sometimes in tandem with the British, but on other occasions, as inYugoslavia, working with different groups opposing the Nazis. The Morale Operations division used the radio station
Soldat Ensender
as a propaganda weapon against the German army. Many senior figures in American intelligence circles after the Second World War were OSS agents, including future CIA chiefs Allen Dulles and William Colby.
    Although the FBI were involved with what might be termed traditional activities during the war years – dealing with potential saboteurs and other threats to national security – they did operate their own Special Intelligence Service (confusingly referred to as the SIS by the Bureau) in Latin America. According to the FBI’s own history its role ‘was to provide information on Axis activities in South America and to destroy its intelligence and propaganda networks. Several hundred thousand Germans or German descendants and numerous Japanese lived in South America. They provided pro-Axis pressure and cover for Axis communications facilities. Nevertheless, in every South American country, the SIS was instrumental in bringing about a situation in which, by 1944, continued support for the Nazis became intolerable or impractical.’
    At much the same time as the heads of British Intelligence were contemplating what would happen once the Axis was defeated, William Donovan was considering the future for American Intelligence. In a memorandum to President Roosevelt on 18 November 1944 he wrote:
    Once our enemies are defeated, the demand will be equally pressing for information that will aid us in