Berkeley Square
London, England
0910 30 May 1943
“Yes, Mr. Ambassador, I said I understand,” Colonel David Kirkpatrick Este Bruce, chief of the Office of Strategic Services London Station, said into the telephone, struggling to keep his tone civil. “I’ll see what I can do. Good-bye.”
Bruce—who had intense eyes set in a chiseled face, his dark hair starting to gray at the edges—was a distinguished-looking forty-five-year-old lawyer from a prestigious Virginia family. He had made his own fortune before marrying one of the world’s wealthiest women and—like his father-in-law, Andrew Mellon—had been a high-level diplomat.
“Damn him!” Bruce said as he slammed down the receiver.
An attractive brunette in her thirties suddenly appeared in the open doorway.
“Sir?” Captain Helene Dancy, Women’s Army Corps, said, the concern in her voice apparent. “Anything that I can do?”
Without looking up at his administrative assistant, Bruce barked, “Get Ed Stevens in here! And now!”
Dancy’s eyes went wide.
“Yes, sir!” she said, and spun on her heels to leave.
Her reaction wasn’t lost on Bruce, and he called out, “Helene?”
She stopped and turned. “Yes?”
“I’m sorry about snapping. Please accept my apology.”
She forced a smile, and turned again to leave. “Of course. It’s quite all right.”
Bruce added, “And bring some coffee, please. We are going to need a fresh pot.”
“Right away,” Bruce heard her call back as he turned in his high-back leather chair to look out the window at the gray day. He thought over the conversation just now that had triggered his uncharacteristic outburst.
I don’t know what aggravates me more—his arrogance, or me letting his arrogance get under my skin.
There was the sound of knuckles rapping on the wooden doorframe. David Bruce spun his chair back around.
A tall, thin, silver-haired forty-four-year-old wearing a perfectly tailored worsted uniform of a U.S. Army officer stood in the doorway.
“Helene said you wanted to see me a week ago yesterday?” Lieutenant Colonel Edmund T. Stevens, deputy chief of OSS London Station, said. “What’s going on, David?”
Unlike Bruce, Stevens was not a diplomat with an assimilated military rank. He was a graduate of West Point, and had been personally recruited by the head of the OSS, William “Wild Bill” Donovan.
Before the war, Stevens had resigned his commission so that he could live with his family in England and help his wife run her wholesale food and wine import-export business. Part of Stevens’s duties had been to serve as the face of the business when dealing with the difficult upper-crust English businessmen. When Donovan had seen that Stevens handled them with remarkable ease, he decided those skills would well serve the OSS. Having military experience was icing on the cake.
Bruce waved for his deputy to come in, motioning for
him to take one of the wooden armchairs in front of his desk.
He glanced at the phone and said, “I just got off the line with Winant.”
There had been no love lost between David Bruce and the Honorable John Gilbert Winant. Bruce held himself to the highest standards—some suggested impossibly high standards—and had no patience for those who did not meet the same. He considered Winant, the ambassador extraordinary and plenipotentiary to the Court of Saint James’s, to be a weakling of the first order, which he believed was the absolute last thing they needed during wartime. But Winant was the personal representative of the President of the United States of America—the embassy at One Grosvenor Square was a few blocks from OSS London Station’s Berkeley Square headquarters—as well as one of FDR’s buddies, and accordingly had long enjoyed FDR’s generosity.
Bruce realized that what really annoyed him about Winant was the fact that having an ineffectual envoy in such a high-profile position—especially after FDR essentially had called home Winant’s immediate predecessor, Joseph P. Kennedy, for being a defeatist—reflected poorly not only on America but also on its other representatives.
David K. E. Bruce, for example.
Bruce believed that America had a long history of fine ministers to the Court of Saint James’s—beginning in 1785 with its first, John Adams, who would become President of the United States—and it needed another strong one. And needed it now.