The First World War is coming to an end and an American soldier named William J. Donovan
is struck by shrapnel in the leg in France and is almost blinded by toxic gas.
During the war he will lead dangerous rescues of soldiers and will also head campaigns against
the enemy in which scores of his fellow men will die.
He will battle on, refusing to follow orders or take off his medals while fighting.
He doesn’t care if those medals make him a target for enemy snipers.
“They can't hit me and they won't hit you!” he will say to his men.
But he will get hit again, this time in the knee.
He refuses to be evacuated though and keeps giving orders.
Donavan seems fearless, and that’s one of the reasons he left World War I with the nickname,
“Wild Bill.”
After that first of the world wars ended Donavan had been awarded the Medal of Honor, the Distinguished
Service Cross, the Distinguished Service Medal, the Silver Star, and more awards from other
nations.
He received the Silver Star and the Purple Heart on top of that for what he’d endured
in battle.
You’d be hard pushed to find an American soldier who was more decorated for his efforts
in the war.
But today he’s renowned more not for what he did on the battlefield, but for being considered
the founding father of U.S. Intelligence.
He’s regarded as the man that kicked-off what would become the Central Intelligence
Agency, and that’s why if you visit the agency’s headquarters in Langley today you’ll
see a statue of him.
How all this evolved is a fascinating story, but let’s first go back to the beginning
of this man’s life.
Bill was born on New Year’s Day in the year of 1883.
His place of birth was Buffalo, New York, and his parents were both born to parents
who had made the trip from Ireland to the USA in search of a better life.
His father was tough and emphasized to young Bill the importance of duty and keeping one’s
honor, while his mother inculcated in him the importance of beauty and art.
His parents were strict Catholics and whilst growing up Bill played with the idea of becoming
a priest, but as time went by Catholic Dogma didn’t sit well with him.
Instead, he focused on his education and became a successful student at Columbia University.
He later attended Columbia Law School where he would share a classroom at times with the
President-to-be, one Franklin D. Roosevelt.
They didn’t know it then, but these two would become main characters in the story
of the USA, and they’d also share the same plotline at times.
While working in law he helped create something called the New York National Guard, and this
is when he devoted much of his time to military strategy.
Bill might become one hell of a brave soldier, but his military mind was what would lead
to him becoming an apex kind of leader.
He became entrenched in military matters, leading efforts on the U.S.-Mexican border
in the fight against the Mexican revolutionary by the name of Francisco “Pancho” Villa.
At this time the first world war was already claiming countless lives in Europe, and soon
Bill would become literally entrenched in that.
In 1917, he was a major and led the 1st battalion of the 165th Infantry of the 42d Division.
He might have been on the older side compared to the young men that fought with him, but
his endurance and fearlessness would become legendary.
He fought in many battles and witnessed utter carnage, while he suffered grave injuries
himself.
It was all those losses of men and pools of blood that played a part in the evolution
of Bill’s thinking.
He realized that to win wars you need to outsmart the enemy and military intelligence is key
to that.
In the ensuing years he would be awarded the Medal of Honor for his heroic actions during
that war, and on receiving the award more than 4000 veterans turned up to the ceremony.
We can’t state enough how much respect Bill had from those that had served with him or
heard about him.
He then surprised everyone and said he didn’t want the medal.
In his own words he said it belonged “to the boys who are not here, the boys who are
resting under the white crosses in France or in the cemeteries of New York, also to
the boys who were lucky enough to come through.”
In the 1920s Bill became the U.S. Attorney for the Western District of New York.
He might have been popular among soldiers, but when Bill took very seriously his part
in the War on Alcohol, he gained quite a few detractors.
This was the era of Prohibition in the USA and he made sure the law was strictly enforced.
He also fell out with some people belonging to the New York’s rich, because he raided
their clubs too.
Many of the wealthy during that time thought they were immune to the law, but that wasn’t
the case when Bill was attorney.
He was seen by the working people as at least fair, and gained a reputation for fighting
corruption.
This got him a position in the Department of Justice after a lot of officials had been
found to be corrupt and involved in a scandal.
There he decided it was time to hire more women and he let it be known that he didn’t
much like staff that didn’t question authority.
About this time he became embroiled in a fight against the Bureau of Investigation’s director,
one J. Edgar Hoover.
Bill was macho, handsome, clever and well-liked, while Hoover was full of insecurities and
was we might say a strange and petty man at times.
Hoover didn’t like seeing the rise of Bill and the two butted heads frequently.
This relationship would get worse and as Bill moved into intelligence and Hoover himself
was spying on anyone who he took a dislike to, a small internal war broke out between
the two men.
Hoover vs. Donovan would become the fight of the century in the realms of government.
But first the second world war had to happen and on the lead up to that Bill had been hired
to visit parts of Europe and collect intelligence there.
He started to make close relationships with British spies and high-ups in the government
there.
He visited Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy and travelled extensively, meeting heads of government
in other countries.
His opinion after his travels was that war was inevitable, and of course he was right.
He soon became an important adviser to President Franklin D. Roosevelt, even though the two
men had been on opposite sides of the political spectrum.
When Nazi Germany at the start of the war just blitzed anyone who stood in its way,
both Roosevelt and British leader Winston Churchill were agreed on one thing, and that
was that Germany was more powerful than anyone had expected.
Germany’s Blitzkrieg tactics and very effective propaganda was without question a force to
be reckoned with, so who did Roosevelt send to Britain to talk to Churchill about that?
Yes, it was Bill Donovan.
Bill met with the leader, he talked with British Intelligence, and even had a bite to eat with
King George VI. Churchill of course with his military background and love of legend got
along very well with Wild Bill, and he granted Bill access to top secret information.
Bill went back to the U.S. and told the President that Britain had what it took to fight the
Germans but the USA needed to get in on the act.
He also told Roosevelt that the U.S. needed an agency much like Britain's intelligence
services.
Long before the CIA there was the British Secret Service Bureau and the branches we
know as MI5 and MI6.
In fact, British intelligence really goes back centuries, but the modern bureau impressed
Wild Bill.
It was during this time that he spent a lot of time working with these secretive British
agencies and with some spies who belonged to them.
He spent hours looking over British intelligence reports, charts, and being trained by various
personnel and spies.
Bill had one thing on his mind, and that was to create an American version of what the
British had, and that’s exactly what he did.
One British agent who helped Bill write the blueprint for his agency was none other than
Commander Ian Fleming, the writer of the James Bond novels.
The two men would also go on to work with each other on certain sabotage operations.
Make no mistake, the U.S. Army, Navy, FBI, as well as the State Department, all had their
own intelligence units.
They had their own charts.
Spies skulked around for them, but it wasn’t organized.
Bill knew one organization had to be bigger and better.
Roosevelt knew that, too, and in 1941 he made Bill Donovan the head of the Coordinator of
Information, or COI.
This would soon get a name change and become the Office of Strategic Services, or the OSS
for short.
Not everyone in the U.S. was happy about this, though, with some heads of other branches
of the military and government agencies seeing this new outfit as a threat to them.
They didn’t think there was any need for an entity that was in some ways above them.
What happened was a kind of turf war.
But the OSS went from strength to strength and soon Bill was training new recruits.
He devised all kinds of strategies to spy and to attack, based on a new kind of warfare.
He hired folks from all walks of life, from intellectuals to creatives to criminals.
He got on board businessmen, even actors and poets who could sway the minds of the public.
He had famous psychiatrists working for him who analyzed enemies and he had some of the
USA’s wealthiest people working in certain ways for the OSS.
It was a force unto itself and like nothing else the U.S. had seen.
This rising power did meet with some difficulties, though.
Soon British Intelligence became weary of it, as Bill’s team mounted espionage and
sabotage operations all over the world.
The British didn’t much like the style of the OSS at times and even once said it was
playing, “cowboys and red Indians.”
The Brits thought their intelligence was, er, more intelligent.
The OSS of course now had a presence in various parts of the British Empire and MI6 wasn’t
keen on having U.S. secret agents performing chess moves on its own turf.
Inside the U.S., some critics in the media said the OSS was an “American Gestapo”,
and there were fears that ordinary American citizens would suffer.
They believed Nazi-style propaganda would pervade the USA.
Parts of the military feared that a “super spy agency” might get out of control and
have too much power.
Then there’s the famous spat with the FBI director, Hoover, who had his own dossier
of information pertaining to the wrongdoings of Wild Bill.
That dossier contained information about Bill’s womanizing and some sketchy ties to British
Intelligence.
Wild Bill was reckless, according to Hoover.
At the same time, the OSS had its own dossier on Hoover, which included information about
his alleged sexual orientation.
Hoover sent what were called “poison-pen memos” to Roosevelt about shady methods
employed by Bill, and he wanted nothing more than to bring him down.
Hoover painted Bill as a villain, but it didn’t do anything to impress Roosevelt who always
believed in Bill.
As time went by in the early 1940s this fear of the American Gestapo grew, some of it flamed
by Hoover.
The OSS had its successes, but it also had its failures, some of which were leaked to
the press.
Then in 1945, Bill penned a secret proposal to approve an even bigger spy agency and it
sounded a bit like a secret police.
That secret letter got leaked, and this caused some amount of damage to the image of Bill
and the OSS.
Hoover had even embedded a female mole to spy on Wild Bill, and she relayed a lot of
information back to Hoover.
Bill would always blame Hoover for the leak and he believed Hoover tried for many years
to destroy him, after all, Hoover wanted to be America’s top spy czar.
The thing is, though, in Bill’s own attempt to become one of the most powerful men in
America he had fallen out with a lot of people.
He lost a lot of powerful friends, and then when his most powerful ally died he found
himself in trouble.
That ally of course was Roosevelt.
When the next President, Harry S. Truman, came to power the OSS was still suffering
from negative criticism due to some people still saying it was a Gestapo-like operation
but in the USA.
The renowned army general and later a president himself, David Dwight Eisenhower, called the
OSS “vital”, but this didn’t stop its downfall.
Others said it was way too close to British Intelligence and so basically allowed British
spies some control in the USA.
So, was that the end of Wild Bill?
No, not at all.
He played a big part in the Nuremberg trials and helped bring war criminals to justice.
But then in 1945 when Bill asked Truman to create an updated, postwar intelligence agency,
he was snubbed and the OSS was officially made defunct.
Not long after that, Truman realized the need for a Central Intelligence agency and you
can guess who wanted to be head of that?
Yes, Wild Bill of course.
Many members of the former OSS would become part of this agency, but Bill would never
sit in the big seat.
He might have written the book in one sense for a certain kind of super agency, but he
wouldn’t lead it as the Cold War escalated.
Bill was always there behind the scenes and he thought he might be made head of the CIA
when Eisenhower came to power, but it didn’t happen.
In 1953, he took the position of Ambassador to Thailand.
You might wonder why, and the reason is because Thailand was next to Vietnam and the spread
of communism in South East Asia was feared by the U.S.
The CIA would play a big part in shaping Thailand’s destiny, which is not taught in school text
books in Thailand today.
The CIA secretly helped orchestrate many events that happened in South East Asia over the
years, and the fight against communism would be a bloody one.
The greater good of course would sometimes mean supporting oppressive dictators who took
a zero-tolerance approach to activism, and this is why Wild Bill’s legacy will always
have its critics.
In 1957, while in hospital in Thailand, Bill’s dementia got the better of him.
Vanity Fair wrote that his last days were sad and his mental state was not good at all.
That report said about the Wild Bill with dementia, “He imagined he saw the Red Army
coming over the 59th Street bridge, into Manhattan, and in one memorable last mission, fled the
hospital, wandering down the street in his pajamas.”
Wild Bill Donovan passed away on February 8, 1959.
He was 76.
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