Spycraft - Melton [15]
There were also some experiments with truth drugs and hypnosis but these never progressed very far.51 The idea of a truth serum was not new. Law enforcement had been searching for such a magic elixir for years with little success. Nevertheless, Lovell budgeted a modest $5,000 for the project but it turned up nothing substantial. “As was to be expected, the project was considered fantastic by the realists, unethical by the moralists, and downright ludicrous by the physicians,” Lovell wrote in a preliminary report. 52
In May 1943, after less than a year on the job, Lovell visited David Bruce, the OSS chief of station in London, where the New England chemist captured Bruce’s attention. The day after the meeting, Bruce wrote to General Donovan: “Stanley Lovell arrived yesterday, and he and I have just had a long talk at lunch, in the course of which he made my hair stand on end with his tales of the new scientific developments on which he has been working.” Clearly taken by Lovell’s ideas, Bruce continued: “His [Lovell’s] arrival has been anxiously awaited and I have put him in touch immediately with various people [at SOE] who are engaged in similar work.”53
One of the most forward thinking projects undertaken by Lovell’s team was Javaman, a remote-controlled weapon consisting of a boat packed with four tons of explosives. Using early television technology, a camera mounted on the boat’s bow broadcast images to a plane circling fifty miles away where a crew member watching a monitor guided the boat to its destination, then triggered the explosives by remote control. Despite encouraging tests, the project was eventually dropped.54 According to Lovell, the Navy abandoned the idea because it judged the explosive load as too dangerous to carry either by ship or submarine.55
By the summer of 1944, with bases of operations established throughout the world, OSS printed a Sears and Roebuck-style catalog of espionage and sabotage devices, listing the specifications of each piece of equipment along with pictures.56 Station chiefs could peruse the catalog and choose whatever device they required. At war’s end in 1945, OSS had produced—in less than thirty-six months after its creation—more than twenty-five special weapons and dozens of sabotage devices, along with scores of other gadgets, including concealments, radios, and escape and evasion tools. 57
Mirroring the accelerated wartime production schedules that turned out ships, canteens, boots, and bombs in record time, it was a remarkable achievement. With initial guidance from the British, the OSS progressed in two years from offering a handful of basic tools of the spy trade to the design, manufacture, and deployment of an astonishing array of devices. The OSS officer corps developed at a similar frenetic pace, establishing intelligence networks throughout Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. Yet, in the autumn of 1945, the fruits of America’s dramatic entry into the international spy game were nearly lost in the wake of America’s rapid military demobilization.
CHAPTER 2
We Must Be Ruthless
We cannot afford methods less ruthless than those of our opposition.
—John Le Carré, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold
With the end of the war growing near, Donovan remembered the lessons of Pearl Harbor and the value of intelligence in occupied Europe and other theaters of war. At the behest of President Roosevelt, he prepared a detailed memorandum calling for the creation of a permanent postwar agency to act as a central clearinghouse for intelligence. In the covering letter of this 1944 memo, Donovan wrote: “When our enemies are defeated, the demand will be equally pressing for information that will aid us in solving the problems of peace . . .”1
However, Washington