William Donovan: The Godfather of the CIA

The intellectual father of the CIA traced his roots to Skibbereen in West Cork and rose from Buffalo lawyer to wartime spymaster. As director of the Office of Strategic Services, he oversaw sabotage and resistance operations across Europe and helped establish the institutional framework that later evolved into America’s intelligence service.

The CIA is inextricably bound to American soft and hard power. Revered and reviled in equal measure by Hollywood, the agency has a close-knit relationship with American cinema, intervening to assist in the production of numerous blockbuster films. More nefariously, however, it has been used to advance the United States’ foreign interests, bankrolling the overthrow of governments in the Middle East and Latin America since its inception.

The CIA is instantly recognisable today, but its foundation story is less well known. What if I told you that the intellectual godfather of the agency was the descendant of famine emigrants from West Cork? That’s right – in this essay, I will discuss William Donovan, founder of a World War 2 predecessor organisation, and a man who did more than anyone to bring the agency into existence.

An accomplished lawyer who eschewed his Catholic identity to ingratiate himself with the United States’ east coast Protestant elite, Donovan established contacts with the key American figures of the age, including Franklin D. Roosevelt and Dwight D. Eisenhower. A charming man, Donovan headed a ragtag cadre of spies to help defeat the Axis powers. He would also establish a sprawling institution, a deep state unto itself, which has been used for both good and evil. Let’s tell his story.

Born in Buffalo, New York, in 1883, Donovan was marked out for success from a young age. The grandson of famine migrants from Skibbereen in County Cork, he excelled academically and attended Columbia Law School after earning his Bachelor of Arts degree, where he was a classmate of future U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

After graduating from law school, Donovan returned to Buffalo in 1909 and joined a prestigious law firm. Though he was a Catholic, he refused to live in the city’s Irish-American “First Ward”, instead choosing to befriend members of the city’s Protestant elite. Unusually for a Catholic, most of whom supported the Democratic Party during this period, Donovan was, like his father, a Republican, then the party of Protestant liberals and business owners.

Widely regarded as a model American citizen, Donovan was popular within upper-class Protestant circles. He married the daughter of Buffalo’s richest man in 1914. A committed patriot, he was drawn to military service, briefly leading a cavalry troop that unsuccessfully attempted to capture the Mexican revolutionary leader Pancho Villa in 1916.

The following year, Donovan was commissioned as a major in New York City’s 69^th Infantry Regiment, following the United States’ entry into the First World War. The regiment, composed almost exclusively of Irish Catholics, was sent to France, where it overcame a superior German force during the Second Battle of the Marne.

A charismatic leader, Donovan received the Medal of Honour, the highest award in the US military, after the war. His men marvelled at his bravery, christening him “Wild Bill” after he escaped German gunfire, even after being shot in his right leg. His exploits were much publicised in American newspapers, and his regiment returned to a hero’s welcome in New York.

After the war, Donovan returned to Buffalo to practice law but quickly grew bored with it. Well-known in New York state by his time, he snagged a position as U.S. attorney in the city, arresting friends who had violated Prohibition laws. By 1924, however, he was forced to leave Buffalo by his former colleagues, and he took a position as an assistant attorney general at the Department of Justice in Washington, D.C.

He supplemented his government salary by establishing a private law practice in New York, which ultimately made him a millionaire. However, his true calling lay in government service, as he ran unsuccessfully for the Governorship of New York in 1932. Though he was an accomplished campaigner, his wealth and Protestant sympathies alienated Irish voters in the city. Undeterred, Donovan was drawn towards a new phenomenon in geopolitics – international espionage.

Spying on foreign adversaries by governments dates back almost 3,000 years, to the Persian Empire, but it was difficult to do for most of human history. Several small-scale spy agencies were established in the United States prior to the 20th century, but the communications technology of the time was not sufficiently advanced to support a single, nationwide entity.

While prosecuting the Revolutionary War, George Washington recruited Native Americans and double agents to spy on the British Army. During the American Civil War, both the Union and the Confederacy employed spies – indeed, John Wilkes Booth, the man who assassinated Abraham Lincoln, worked as a spy for the latter.

Transnational espionage became significantly easier in the early 20th century, as the invention of the radio facilitated the interception of messages from enemy forces. In 1909, the United Kingdom established the Secret Service Bureau (later known as MI6) to spy on the German Empire. However, officials in the United States were more hostile to foreign espionage and refused to set up an American equivalent.

Protected by two oceans, it was difficult to invade, which, in the eyes of many, made intelligence gathering less necessary. Moreover, after the First World War, most American politicians did not wish to be dragged into another overseas conflict. Nevertheless, Donovan rejected their assertions – he travelled to Europe regularly to meet with clients during the inter-war period, and he did not like what he saw.

Donovan’s clients, many of whom were Jewish, told him about the persecution that they were subjected to in Germany. He also visited a military barracks in Italian-occupied Ethiopia in 1935, witnessing the savagery of fascism firsthand.

He even met the Spanish dictator, General Francisco Franco, fresh from his victory in the Spanish Civil War. With the assistance of Hitler and Mussolini, the Generalissimo had decimated his Republican opponents, subjecting them to indiscriminate bombings and mass killings. The fog of war was descending rapidly on Europe, and Donovan feared that the United States was woefully unprepared.

In September 1939, the United Kingdom declared war on Nazi Germany after the Third Reich invaded Poland. Officials in the Secret Service Bureau identified Donovan as an ally, on the recommendation of high-level American diplomats, and were impressed by his determination to defeat fascism. He met Winston Churchill, with whom he got on very well, and had lunch with the King. Just as significantly, Donovan was reunited with his former Columbia classmate, Franklin D. Roosevelt, who by this point was the President. The two men struck up a cordial relationship, with Roosevelt frequently leaning on the Buffalo native for advice.

Insistent that the United States needed to intervene on the side of the Allies, Donovan lobbied the President to assist the war effort. Though most Americans opposed entry into the war, Roosevelt trusted Donovan and pledged to fight the Nazis indirectly. The President shipped arms to the United Kingdom and France and introduced a peacetime draft. On December 8^th, 1941, following the bombing of Pearl Harbour, the United States officially entered the war. Donovan was primed to shine.

After the attack, Roosevelt established the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) to collect foreign intelligence and named Donovan as its director. With assistance from his contacts in the British Secret Service, Donovan established a clandestine spy agency. The OSS was tasked with carrying out sabotage behind enemy lines and supporting resistance fighters in Europe and the Asia-Pacific. He recruited an eclectic cast of characters to staff his agency, giving jobs to, amongst others, Eve Curie, the daughter of the two famous scientists, the film director John Ford and the psychologist Carl Jung.

Occupying the rank of two-star general, Donovan rarely slept, continually flying abroad on foreign missions. His team collected intelligence for the British and Americans in the Balkans, Western Europe, and Southeast Asia, sent feelers to anti-fascists in Berlin with the aim of establishing a democratic post-war German state, and encouraged cooperation with the Soviet Union.

They also trialled less conventional schemes which were later abandoned, such as a plan to inject Adolf Hitler’s food with female sex hormones, and a plot to drop bats holding exploding devices over Japanese cities. Despite these eccentric experiments, the OSS was effective, especially in France, where it gathered intelligence in the south of the country ahead of the August 1944 Allied landing on the French Riviera.

Allied military leaders had mixed feelings about the OSS. Donovan got on well with Generals Dwight D. Eisenhower and George Patton, but others felt that he was undermining their power. Although they admired his bravery, the UK government prevented the agency from conducting covert operations on British soil.

General Douglas MacArthur barred the OSS from the Philippines, believing that espionage should be carried out by someone residing in the country.  Moreover, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover saw Donovan as a competitor, even arresting OSS agents to embarrass him, and successfully lobbied Roosevelt to prevent the OSS from expanding into Latin America.

By the end of the war, Donovan was stationed in London, taking charge of a command centre that took up an entire floor of Claridge’s Hotel in Mayfair. Donovan suggested that the OSS be allowed to continue its intelligence gathering missions to prosecute Nazi war criminals and to beat back Soviet expansion into central and eastern Europe.

However, his plans were rebuffed by the new President, Harry S Truman, with whom he had a tense relationship. Truman, a loyal Democrat who was less willing to work with Republicans, officially disbanded the OSS in September 1945 after the Empire of Japan surrendered to the Americans.

After leaving the OSS, Donovan returned to civilian life, setting up a new law practice and beginning research on a book detailing the history of American espionage, which he would never finish. He was recruited by the State Department to testify at the Nuremberg trials, working as a special assistant to the American chief counsel, Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson. He interrogated Hermann Goering, Albert Speer, and Rudolf Hess, but later fell out with Jackson, accusing him of being too lenient with disgraced Nazi officials.

The idea of a foreign intelligence agency was resurrected shortly after Donovan returned to the United States. Though the OSS had been abolished, the need to create a similar organisation to conduct an arms race with the Soviets quickly became apparent to President Truman. In September 1947, he signed the National Security Act into law, birthing the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).

The new agency, modelled explicitly on the OSS, was tasked with gathering foreign intelligence and supplying it to the executive branch. Although one-third of the CIA’s initial staff were OSS veterans, Donovan was not asked to lead it; instead, Truman chose Admiral Roscoe Hillenkoetter to be its first director.  

In 1953, Dwight D. Eisenhower was elected President. Despite their wartime relationship, however, Eisenhower neglected to nominate Donovan as the head of the CIA, instead choosing Allen Dulles, a former OSS spy. He was instead named ambassador of Thailand, a country with which he was vaguely familiar from wartime, but was forced to resign in 1957, after he displayed signs of dementia. He was moved to a townhouse in Manhattan, where he died in February 1959. He was buried in Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia, next to his son, a Navy veteran who served during the Second World War, and grandson, a Vietnam War veteran.   

Donovan acknowledged that foreign espionage was an immoral but politically necessary business, writing in a secret document, “Espionage is not a nice thing, nor are the methods employed exemplary … [but] We face an enemy who believes one of his chief weapons is none but he will employ terror. But we will turn terror against him – or we will cease to exist”. He also believed that the collection of intelligence must be “global and totalitarian” during wartime and called for the recruitment of “young men of disciplined daring who are calculatingly reckless”.

The organisation’s present-day ethos reflects his emphasis on pragmatism – a 2021 press statement asserted that the CIA is “the Nation’s first line of defence. We accomplish what others cannot accomplish and go where others cannot go.”

In this essay, I have presented an account of William Donovan, the godfather of the CIA. A Catholic who could mingle and mix in WASP American society, he was the architect of an institution that has impacted the lives of millions worldwide. The significance of his work has undoubtedly been acknowledged by the agency – after his death, it cabled a message to each of his offices, stating that he was “The man more responsible than any other for the existence of the Central Intelligence Agency”. Today, his statue stands in the CIA’s headquarters, a fitting tribute to a ruthless but patriotic American. Not bad for the grandchild of famine emigrants.

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