he planned to get the uraninite ore from the Belgian Congo would have to come from the total time Roosevelt was able to give him. He would have much preferred to spend this talking about other things.
But Franklin Delano Roosevelt was the Commander in Chief, he reminded himself, and could not therefore be told to stop wasting time with unimportant questions.
“You remember the young man who came to dinner with Jim Whittaker?” he asked.
“Canidy? Something like that?”
“Richard Canidy,” Donovan said. “Ex-Flying Tiger, and more important now, an MIT-trained aeronautical engineer.”
“I’m a little confused. Isn’t he the chap you sent to North Africa after the mining engineer and Admiral Whatsisname?”
“That, too,” Donovan said, impressed but not really surprised that Roosevelt had called that detail from his memory. “At the moment, he’s at Chesly’s house on the Jersey shore, trying to keep the admiral happy and away from newspaper reporters. But he’s also working on this.”
“How is he working on this?”
“He has been provided with the details—weight and distance, I mean, not what has to be hauled or where the stuff is. And he has been told to recommend a way—in absolute secrecy—to move that much weight that far. He’s been getting a lot of help from Pan American Airways.”
“Why not the Air Corps?”
Donovan was very much aware that he had just walked out on thin ice. Pan American Airways beyond question had greater experience in long-distance transoceanic flight than anyone else—including the Army Air Corps. But their greatest expert in this area was Colonel Charles A. Lindbergh, “Lucky Lindy,” the first man to fly the Atlantic solo, the great American hero who had not long before enraged Roosevelt and a large number of other important people by announcing that in his professional judgment the German Luftwaffe looked invincible. Lindbergh had then rubbed salt in the wound by involving himself deeply in the America First movement, throwing his enormous prestige behind the notion that America should stay out of Europe’s wars.
Immediately after Pearl Harbor, Lindbergh, who was a colonel in the Air Corps Reserve, had volunteered for active duty. Roosevelt, predictably, had had no intention of letting that happen. Franklin Roosevelt would allow Lindbergh to serve in uniform over his dead body.
Donovan and Lindbergh, however, were friends. And Lindbergh had proved eager to help when Donovan asked for flight-planning advice. When Donovan had told Roosevelt that Canidy was getting a lot of help from Pan American, he meant help from Charles A. Lindbergh personally.
“Because Pan American knows more about this sort of thing than the Air Corps,” Donovan said.
Roosevelt grunted, but accepted that. If he had asked if Lindbergh were involved, Donovan would not have lied to him. But he hadn’t asked, which was just as well as far as Donovan was concerned.
“And you think it can be done?” Roosevelt asked.
“Canidy tells me it can,” Donovan said.
“You seem to place a good deal of trust in him, Bill,” the President said. “He seems possessed of a number of interesting secrets.”
“There are two schools of thought about multiple secrets, Mr. President,” Donovan said. “If people are limited to one secret at a time, you wind up with a lot of people who have to be watched. On the other hand, if one man has a number of secrets, we only have to worry about security for him. And, right now at least, I don’t intend to send Canidy himself to the Congo. He’s just setting the operation up. In the end, I think it will turn out that we’ll use an Air Corps crew.”
Roosevelt thought that over a moment.
“They would like that, I think,” he said, grinning. “They have the responsibility, you know, of dealing with airplanes.”
“Yes, I know,” Donovan said, just as sarcastically, “and as I understand things, I’m supposed to be dealing with intelligence. You will doubtless be surprised to learn that sometimes, despite our best efforts, that puts me and the Air Corps in conflict.”
“Is that just a general philosophical observation, Bill? Or do you have something specific in mind?”
“German fighter aircraft propelled by jet engines,” Donovan said after a pause.
The President smiled very broadly, his cigarette holder cocked high between his teeth. He was enj oying the exchange.
“You will doubtless be surprised, Bill,” he said, “when I tell you that when I mentioned those aircraft to George Marshall, he told me that the Air Corps was not very concerned about them. In fact, they had—with great tact, of course— asked if such aircraft weren’t really a tactical concern of