But he had not expected they would return with Colonel Donovan aboard.
Still, Canidy and Whittaker being Canidy and Whittaker..
And the truth was that what they’d done was a good thing. It had provided a more secret mode of travel than one of the courier flights from Casablanca, There was no question in Colonel Stevens’s mind that the Abwehr had a 90 percent accurate passenger manifest of VIP courier flights.
And besides, Donovan was human, and there had to be some jolt of pleasure derived from traveling aboard “his own” aircraft, flown by two of “his own” pilots.
On receipt of the Air Corps message that “Colonel Wihiams” would be aboard a B-25 aircraft, Stevens had been so confident that “Wihiams” was Donovan that he had gone to East Grinstead with two cars.
Donovan would be carried to Whitbey House in the long, black Austin Princess limousine assigned to the Chief of Station, while Canidy, Whittaker, and Ellis would go in a 1941 Ford staff car driven by Captain Stanley S. Fine.
Stevens had with him a thick sheaf of Top Secret messages that Donovan would want to deal with right away. Canidy and the others had no “need to know.” Thus, separate cars.
When the B-25 landed, a checkerboard-painted “Fohow Me” truck led it away from Base Operations to a remote corner of the field where the Princess and the Ford sedan were waiting.
Donovan was first off the airplane. He was wearing a simple olive-drab woolen uniform, with the silver eagles of a colonel and the crossed flintlocks of infantry. On his head was a soft “overseas” hat.
Technic’xy, Donovan was assigned to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and probably should be wearing the insignia of a General Staff Corps Officer and not the flintlocks. It was interesting to wonder why he wore infantryman’s rifles, Perhaps he simply wanted to–and was confident no one would call him on improper insignia. In Europe, he was answerable only to Eisenhower, and Ike had much too much on his mind to notice the insignia Donovan wore.
But Stevens knew that as open-faced and disingenuous as Donovan appeared, there was more than a little subtlety in him, Donovan was a longtime mandarin in the political establishment and an old buddy of Franklin Roosevelt. Without these credentials he would never have been pegged by Roosevelt to create out of practically nothing America’s first true spy network. But he was doing this in a country at war, and he was doing it officially as a soldier. Which meant working as much with the military establishment as the political one.
Which meant that all other things being equal, Donovan would have been treated like an amateur by the military establishment (an amateur being defined as anyone who had not been on active duty prior to 1958).
Which meant that America’s young spy organization would have had about as much chance of getting off the ground as a balloon in a needle factory.
Thus the infantry rifles, Any one who has commanded an infantry regiment in combat is, Q. E. D. , not a military amateur. And Donovan had not only commanded a regiment (in War I with the “Fighting 69th” Infantry) but he’d won the Medal of Honor doing it.
The crossed flintlocks would subtly remind the senior officers with whom he dealt (including Eisenhower, who had spent War I at Camp Colt, New York) that he had seen more than his share of combat, which meant that he was not just a civilian politician in uniform who could be ignored because he’ just doesn’t understand what the Army is all about.
” And the Army establishment was not half of the stone wall Donovan had had to break through before he could even begin to worry about the enemy. Long, long ago (that is to say, a few weeks earlier) during the hectic seventy-two hours between Colonel Stevens’s orders to report to active duty and his departure by plane to London, Donovan half jokingly, half bitterly had looked at Stevens and sighed. “You know, Ed,” he told Stevens,
“I consider it a good day if I can devote fifty-one percent of my time to the armed enemy.” There was no doubt whom he meant by the “unarmed” enemy, a number of people, ranging downward from J. Edgar Hoover, who loathe William J. Donovan. The authority granted to Donovan by the President (which came with virtually unlimited access to non accountable funds) had turned him into a very real threat to long-established government fiefdoms.