The Secret History of MI6 - Keith Jeffery [267]
In his memoirs Godfrey recalled that he had a very difficult time trying to penetrate the Washington bureaucracy, and had not realised how bad relations were between the United States army and navy. He consulted Stephenson who in turn sought advice from, of all people, Sir William Wiseman, who engineered Godfrey an invitation to the White House.13 On 12 June Godfrey wired Menzies and the Admiralty, stating that the previous evening he had dined with ‘Flywheel’ (the codename for Roosevelt) and afterwards had had an hour’s interview alone during which he was ‘cross-examined closely about co-ordination of intelligence and Allied question’. Godfrey was careful not to mention Donovan by name, but there was clearly only one man for the job and Stephenson signalled on 19 June that Roosevelt had appointed Donovan to be co-ordinator of all forms of intelligence (including special operations). ‘You can imagine’, he wrote, ‘how relieved I am after three months of battle and jockeying for position at Washington that “our man” is in a position of such importance to our efforts.’ Donovan’s position as Co-ordinator of Information (COI) was the precursor to his appointment to head the new Office of Strategic Services (OSS) in June 1942. With both the COI organisation as it evolved and the OSS, Donovan presided over a combined intelligence and special operations organisation which more closely resembled Stephenson’s BSC than Menzies’s SIS. Claude Dansey, neatly bracketing the two ‘Bills’ together with his underlying antipathy to special operations, complained in April 1942 that ‘there was not much in Donovan for S.I.S.’. He was ‘completely sold on publicity and this he can find in S.O.E. operations. Further, that 48000 [Stephenson] is urging him on down these noisy paths.’
The rapid growth of OSS into a large and formidable agency, which owed much to the help and advice provided by Stephenson and his people, and its impact on SIS, reflected the positive, as well as the ambivalent and difficult, sides of the Anglo-American ‘special relationship’ during the Second World War and after. Within the undoubtedly close, productive and mutually trustful intimacy of the partnership, there were inevitable zones of competition and conflict, underscored by the fierce enthusiasm and apparently unlimited resources which the Americans poured into the Allied war effort after the Pearl Harbor attack of December 1941. And while the Anglo-American wartime alliance was as close as any alliance had ever been (and perhaps would ever be), neither party was ever completely going to abandon its own national sovereignty. Beyond the very extensive common endeavour to defeat the Axis powers, each country retained its own essential interests, not least in that most private and jealously protected state function of intelligence. ‘My duty’, wrote William Phillips, the OSS head of station in London, was to serve Donovan’s goal of a global American intelligence service, ‘by developing independent American sources of information’ and ‘resisting all efforts of the British Secret Information [sic] to gobble us up’.14 Indeed, it was testimony to the perceived power and efficiency of SIS that American intelligence officers should see the situation in such potentially adversarial terms.
The nature of the apparent challenge posed by OSS as a comprehensive (or substantially so) covert agency, running propaganda and special operations along with pure intelligence, went to the heart of what intelligence work might be and what an intelligence agency might legitimately