Double Crossed by Matthew Avery Sutton

Author:Matthew Avery Sutton
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3, mobi
Publisher: Basic Books
Published: 2019-09-23T16:00:00+00:00

THIRTEEN

“The Thorough Beating They So Richly Deserve”

IT DID NOT TAKE LONG FOR STEWART HERMAN TO IMPRESS THE STAFF at OSS headquarters in Washington. Just a few months after joining the agency in late 1943, Donovan promoted Herman and dispatched the minister to London. At the time, William Eddy was contemplating new orders from the State Department, John Birch was deep in enemy territory in China, and Stephen Penrose was on his way back to Cairo to take charge of Secret Intelligence for the OSS across the Middle East, Greece, the Balkans, and beyond.

Donovan directed Herman to report to the Western European Special Operations desk at the London Branch. The voyage by ship over to the United Kingdom in March 1944 went smoothly. Herman did not tell his bunkmates, all soldiers, about his ministerial past. He described the GIs as “very masculine and profane. Strange how men together feel they must be ‘he-men.’” The soldiers eventually saw the picture of Herman at Princeton in an old issue of Life, where he had attended the Federal Council of Churches’ Roundtable on International Affairs, and realized that he was a clergyman. They toned down their profanity. Herman had not wanted to “lose a good opportunity to see how the uninhibited army acts.” There were also a few members of the Women’s Army Corps onboard the ship. Herman noted in his diary that they had little freedom, “which seemed rather pointless because the vast majority were selected (apparently) for their homeliness.”1

Shortly after arriving in London, Herman lost his OSS identification card. Not an auspicious start for a secret operative. He moved into a good flat on the eighth floor of the Mayfair Hotel overlooking Hyde Park. During the little free time he had, he wandered the park. He watched British soldiers struggle to understand the rules of the softball games that the American GIs were playing, and he enjoyed listening to the orators who had made the park famous.

The UK station was playing an ever-growing role in the OSS and in the wider war as the military began planning in earnest for the invasion of France. During the first years of the war, OSS leaders working in Europe had focused primarily on infiltrating neutral countries and, to a lesser extent, occupied nations where they knew they might find sympathetic allies on the ground. American and British intelligence services could drop agents into occupied France or the Netherlands, for example, and count on local sympathizers to assist them. Not so in Germany. Without substantial planning and perfectly executed plans, a foreign agent dropped into the Third Reich was certain to end up dead.

The United States mostly had to rely on code breaking, or signals intelligence rather than human intelligence, to anticipate Germany’s next moves. The Germans had created a very complex machine called the Enigma for encoding secret messages. The British, led by mathematician Alan Turing, eventually broke the code after they built their own duplicate machine with the help of Polish agents. They shared the information they received with the OSS.

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