110. The Man Behind The CIA: Charming Mussolini and Stealing From MI6 (Ep 1)

15:10Gordon:nickname but wasn't there a rumor that he was it was named wild bill after a new york yankees pitcher who maybe actually was the manager was the manager during the first world war who was very he threw the ball very fast, but he didn't throw it very accurately. So there's all kinds of, I like the war story better though. That's better than just being named after a random pitcher.

15:31David:Yeah. And the thing is, he does live up to the name in war because he's a really demanding leader, but he leads by example and from the front. And this is the kind of one of the facets of his character. He's totally fearless. I mean, some people think he really actually enjoys combat. so July 1918 he gets awarded the Distinguished Service Cross for Valour during the Marne campaign and according to the citation he leads his battalion in advance of the division for four days all the while under shell and machine gun fire the enemy are on three sides of him he's repeatedly and persistently counter-attacked and is wounded twice and the Irish regiment loses nearly half his men.

16:11David:A few months later, his reputation for near-suicidal bravery is cemented at L 'Andre et Saint-Georges, which is a big battle, which is actually something of a military defeat, which is interesting.

16:26Gordon:Your French has gotten a lot better on the podcast, Gordon. I've been practicing. I don't want to be humiliated by you. I was going to say, your French has gotten...

16:33David:After our early Rainbow Warrior episodes. But anyway, here at this battle of L 'Andre at Saint-Georges. Donovan personally leads an assaulting wave against a heavily fortified German position. And his unit is full of nervous new recruits. And then in this act, which is very him, of theatrical leadership, he ignores the custom of covering or stripping off his own insignia or rank in case he's targeted by enemy snipers. And he goes forward wearing his medals, wearing his rank, making himself a target to inspire his men. And he's reportedly heard shouting, they can't hit me and they won't hit you.

17:11David:And during this battle, he gets shot into his leg, refuses to be evacuated, continues with his unit, reorganizing positions, leading them for five hours. By the end, he's groggy and barely conscious, but he survives.

17:27Gordon:Well, yet another overlap with Mansfield coming is serious leg problems. Mansfield coming in that car wreck had apparently, well, according to the legend, cut off his own leg to extract himself

17:41David:from the car wreck.

17:43Gordon:And now here we have Wild Bill being machine gunned in a leg during the First World War. So yet another spooky overlap between our transatlantic spymaster founders.

17:54David:And what's interesting, he's a bit of a rule breaker. And Douglas MacArthur, who's in command there, thinks Donovan pushes his units too far forward and is, quote, running wild. But he finishes the war as one of the most highly decorated soldiers in World War and possibly the most highly decorated American in World War I. This is kind of serious bravery. He's got multiple medals, multiple citations. And so this legend is born of a daring, kind of brilliant, theatrical, rule-breaking, reckless leader and soldier who doesn't shy from the fight and wants to be where the action is, which I guess is the model which is going to be created for OSS.

18:39Gordon:I guess another theme emerging here in his struggles against MacArthur is going to be, and maybe it's just another feature of him relishing conflict, because Wild Bill seems to get along with nobody else inside the DC establishment and inside the Pentagon. But maybe there, Gordon, with Wild Bill emerging from the trenches of World War I hero. Let's take a break and when we come back, we will see how he begins to found the modern OSS.

19:26David:Whether you're living abroad, paying someone overseas, or just trying to manage your money across borders, you want a fair exchange rate, an easy transfer, and no surprises along the way. WISE keeps things simple. WISE is a smart way to move the currencies you need around the globe. It works in more than 160 countries and with over 40 currencies. Most transfers arrive instantly. WISE uses the mid-market exchange rate, like the one you see on Google, with no markups or hidden fees. So when money needs to move, you can see the rate, know the fee and get on with it. Join millions saving billions on hidden fees by downloading the Wise app today.

20:06David:Be smart, get wise, T's and C's apply. Did you know about one in three people with plaque psoriasis may also develop psoriatic arthritis, which causes joint pain, stiffness and swelling? Does this sound like you? Listen to what it sounds like to be a million miles away. Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh.

20:31David:Trimphia, Gucelcomab, taken by injection, is a prescription medicine for adults with moderate to severe plaque psoriasis who may benefit from taking injections or pills or phototherapy, and for adults with active psoriatic arthritis. Serious allergic reactions and increased risk of infections and liver problems may occur. Before treatment, your doctor should check you for infections and tuberculosis. Tell your doctor if you have an infection, flu-like symptoms, or if you need a vaccine. Imagine being a million miles away. Explore what's possible. Ask your doctor about Trimphaya. Tap this ad to learn more about Trimphaya, including important safety information.

21:13Gordon:Well, welcome back. Wild Bill Donovan has returned from trench warfare in Europe, I guess to the corporate or sort of business equivalent of trench warfare, which is being a lawyer. And he is now lawyering, but starting, I guess, Gordon, to do some work on the side for his old Columbia Law School pal, FDR.

21:37David:Yeah, it's very interesting because he starts a kind of double life because he's obviously got this great reputation, hasn't he, as a war hero. And straight away, 1919, he goes on a combined vacation and business trip to Japan, China, and Korea with his wife, with Ruth. But then almost immediately he gets asked by, I think, an American ambassador, would you mind going to Siberia for a little bit of extra work? And he ditches Ruth straight away. I mean, he's only just finished the war and he's - He's back at it. Yeah, he's back into action. And so he's asked to go on a mission to evaluate the state of forces in the Russian civil war and also what Japan is up to in what's now the Soviet Union.

22:21David:So poor old Ruth, she heads back to the US alone and I guess a little bit bitter.

22:27Gordon:I promised listeners that there would be entries from Ruth Donovan's diary. And here's one from this era, and it actually appears several times. Bill out, bed early. This was a very common entry in Ruth's diary in this time period after the war. So he's just gone constantly and she goes to bed early.

22:51David:So he's doing his lawyering, but then he gets appointed to some interesting positions. From 1922 to 1924, he serves as the US attorney for the Western District of New York, and he becomes a big crime buster, going after gangs, making lots of enemies. But of course, this is also that bizarre period of American life called Prohibition, David, which seems impossible to understand for any foreigner when alcohol was banned. Well, it's a drug, Gordon. It's a drug. It's not good for you. Yeah, that's why it never passes your lips. So Donovan is here kind of enforcing that. Amongst other things, he does a big raid on something called the Saturn Club in Buffalo, which is where the city elite drinks.

23:38David:But unfortunately, he is also a member of the Saturn Club and his wife's family are very influential in the Saturn Club. I mean, I guess he's putting his duties first, but I don't think they entirely ever forgive him for raiding their speakeasy club.

23:54Gordon:See, this makes the behavior on the battlefield, I think, make even more sense because he actually just loves fighting. But I guess then after his stint as the U.S. attorney for the Western District of New York, he is brought back to Washington.

24:10David:Yeah, President Calvin Coolidge, who's a Republican, appoints him Assistant Attorney General. First, the Criminal Division, later Antitrust Division. Now here, the kind of bureaucratic warfare really begins because he's going to meet the man who will become his nemesis, his arch rival. None other than J. Edgar Hoover. Hoover, of course, is made first Director of the Bureau of Investigation in 1924, which then gets renamed the FBI in 1935. This is the origin of the Thebes, isn't it, David? Well, they're not quite your nemesis, but your rivals, I guess.

24:46Gordon:We've established in recent episodes, perhaps, that my nemesis is the Defense Intelligence Agency. But on any given day, my bureaucratic bugaboos could be shifting to all manner of other institutions that are not the central intelligence agency. But yes, go on.

25:03David:And Donovan is actually Hoover's boss in Washington at first. And of course, he starts intervening and then he starts clashing with Hoover. And then I love the fact they both basically start keeping dirt on each other. It's like, welcome to Washington. They're basically going to start files on each other and kind of maneuvering against each other. It's the start of a pretty bitter feud right from, you know, kind of the mid-20s onwards for a good 20 years, if not 30 years, I guess.

25:28Gordon:Well, and I guess Donovan is sort of dabbling in politics at this time, right? I mean, he runs unsuccessfully to be the lieutenant governor of New York. Later, he's a Republican candidate to succeed FDR as governor in 1932. But I guess this will also be a theme of Bill Donovan is that he's not a great campaigner. I would say he's actually terrible at politics, as we'll see from the number of conflicts that he has with everybody that he interacts with in Washington. He's also poorly organized, I would say. So he's not maybe your ideal politician. He's not the front guy.

26:08David:Yeah, it's interesting, isn't it? Because I think he thought, and a lot of people around him thought, he would end up president. He's working up the Republican Party, but he never quite makes it as an elected politician. So in parallel, he's going to found a big Wall Street law firm, particularly because he hoped to be made attorney general in 1929. He doesn't get the nod. But then it's interesting because he's a Republican. FDR is now president. Donovan is quite critical, I think, of FDR and the New Deal and does interviews, having a go at it. And yet there's a kind of back-channel friendship relationship between those two men, which I think is really interesting.

26:45David:because FDR has always admired Donovan because of his sportsmanship back when they were university students. And also, I think that kind of, you get the feeling they're both internationalists, and that's going to play a big role in the coming year, as Donovan takes on this interesting role because he's going to travel the world as a lawyer, but also kind of keep in contact with people in Washington, including FDR, about what he's seeing. And this is partly, I guess, a result, David, which seems strange that the US didn't have an intelligence service collecting foreign intelligence at that time, did it?

27:21Gordon:No. And I mean, there's a great line in Tim Weiner's book on the CIA, which is called Legacy of Ashes. And in this kind of early period, before you actually have a central intelligence agency, Tim Weiner says that most of what the US government knew about the world could fit into a couple filing cabinets inside the Department of State, right? So there wasn't an official intelligence presence abroad. And as a result, I guess, guys like Bill Donovan, who are traveling extensively and have a deep kind of bench of international contacts, end up becoming kind of the unofficial intelligence service that FDR, that the American president will use to understand what's going on in the world, because there just aren't CIA stations around the world.

28:09Gordon:And frankly, there's a lot of capitals where the US doesn't even have an embassy or an ambassador. So our ability to just collect information was so limited, which is almost impossible to imagine today.

28:18David:Yeah. And so it's interesting because Donovan goes primarily as a lawyer and as a businessman on all these trips representing clients. But for instance, he goes to Rome and Mussolini has just taken power, the kind of fascist leader in Rome. And because Donovan is this war hero and this kind of famous guy, doors are open for him. Mussolini meets him and as a result Donovan is able to say I'd quite like to visit you know Ethiopia which Italy has just invaded and Mussolini kind of goes yeah sure because it's Donovan and so he gets this kind of access to people because of his reputation which is really interesting and gets to go to places and go to countries which other people can't and then report back and he also goes he goes to Spain study the Spanish Civil War and he meets Franco there leader of the nationalist side.

29:07David:And he goes to Germany, goes to Berlin to observe German military manoeuvres and exercises, technically there to do work for clients. But it means he's got this feel for what's happening in Europe, which I think very few other people would have had at the time. And he's able to then report back to people in Washington. And that's going to reach his friend FDR as well, who are going to be interested in what's his view of what's happening on the ground.

29:34Gordon:And I guess just as the Second World War is breaking out, this is when Donovan begins traveling and actually gets sent to Britain at the behest of the Secretary of the Navy, a guy named Frank Knox. And Gordon, you're in debt to Frank Knox. Is that right?

29:52David:I am. So this is very interesting. So 1940s, he's been doing these missions, but this is his first informal but most significant mission donovan actually hoped at the 1940 to be made secretary of war but he doesn't get it and but frank knox who is a republican another republican sends donovan on a mission to britain now this is where there are many close parallels between me and wild bill donovan reckless bravery brilliant sportsmanship but we've both both me and wild Bill, being sent on transatlantic missions supported by Frank Knox. Because in 1940, Frank Knox sends Donovan to Britain. But after his death, Frank Knox's family bequeathed a load of money to set up something called the Frank Knox Fellowship to improve transatlantic relations.

30:42David:And I was a Frank Knox Fellow. So I was supported by the Frank Knox Fellowship to go to the United States. So a kind of parallel mission to build relationships between the two countries, which I like to think was, as we'll see, of equal importance to Frank Knox's July 1940 mission to Britain. But we both owe a debt to Frank Knox in that sense.

31:04Gordon:I'm glad to see that there continues to be a pot of money used to enable British influence operations against the United States of America, which I did not know until this podcast.

31:15David:This is an American influence operation. There's money left by an American to send poor impressionable Brits like me over to the US. And I have to say, it was quite generous because I'd been an undergraduate living on baked beans. And then I was suddenly like a graduate student living on this Frank Knox fellowship. And it felt pretty good. Oh, true. It's actually the reverse.

31:34Gordon:We're enabling the reverse. It's the reverse. Yeah. Years after Bill Donovan goes over and is brainwashed by the UK establishment, you were funded by Frank Knox money to come over here and be brainwashed by the Washington establishment.

31:49David:Exactly. Another bizarre parallel between me and Bill Donovan. But Frank Knox is going to send Donovan on this mission, back to him, July 1940. And this is absolutely crucial, this mission, because July 1940, France has fallen, the low countries have fallen to the Nazis as the kind of German war machine has crushed most of Western Europe. And Britain is standing alone, famously. And the big question people are asking in Washington is, can Britain survive or is it too going to fall? And interestingly enough, the US ambassador in London is sceptical. He's quite a defeatist, arguably a bit of an appeaser.

32:31David:And who is that? None other than Joseph Kennedy, father of JFK. So Joe Kennedy is there in London as ambassador to the court of St. James, as the American ambassador is called. And it's kind of like a negative influence when it comes to British-American relationships. And that's why Donovan's mission, I think, is so important.

32:52Gordon:And this is where the influence operation comes in, right, Gordon? Because you haven't had any luck influencing the actual ambassador, Joseph B. Kennedy. And now you've got this emissary who's sent over to, I guess, put together kind of a perspective on whether Britain is going to be able to hold out. And it's very important that Bill Donovan return to Washington with an affirmative, but also reporting back, I guess, on the need for American assistance to stand up, for the UK to stand up to Germany, right? So there's a very clear message that the Brits need to deliver to Bill Donovan during his mission.

33:39David:And boy, do they turn on the charm. I mean, this is something which I find really interesting because they know how important Donovan's visit is in July 1940. And they just, I mean, the access he gets is astonishing because he's still technically a private citizen, even though everyone knows he's the kind of emissary of the US administration. So seven people are assigned to answer his questions because he's briefed on the industry, the economies taken to military facilities. He is going to meet the MI5 officers. He's going to meet the new head of MI6. He's going to meet the king and queen. Now, this again is making modern parallels.

34:20David:Occasionally, as we saw recently with your current president, the royal family is deployed to turn on the charm for visiting Americans. You know, it's a very deliberate act. Let's bring the royals out and have them meet the American visitor to kind of turn on the full kind of British thing. And they do that. And he's going to meet like kind of London socialites. I'm sure he enjoys meeting the women folk and I think they enjoy meeting him and he's quite famous for that. So it's a kind of full court press by the Brits to basically give him absolutely all the access he could possibly want.

34:56Gordon:Is it going too far, Gordon, to say that SIS, MI6, they actually had an agent that they used to get close to Bill Donovan? There was a Canadian businessman named William Stevenson, codename Intrepid. So he actually had a codename who was a self-made millionaire, former lightweight boxing champion. So you can see how Donovan would get along well with him because they both love fighting. Stevenson had been a very decorated World War I hero, and they get very close to each other, become great friends. And this guy is on the SIS sort of payroll. So I mean, there's a straight line from the creation of the CIA straight back to all of this sort of British shenanigans, Gordon.

35:43Gordon:What say you?

35:44David:Yeah, national survival. I think that is exactly what they're doing. They recognise Bill Donovan is a man to impress, and they know how to impress him. They do it. They feed him talking points. They feed him talking points. They feed him talking points. I mean, look, this is wartime survival. This is what you do. Dare I say, I think this still occasionally happens with visiting Americans. As I said, with presidents, but also with CIA directors and everyone else. You know, the Brits turn on the charm for them. They do their best. They know they've got to win them over. You're not trying to recruit them as an agent.

36:18David:You're trying to win them over to your side. And it works, we should say. And it works. It works.

36:23Gordon:It works big time because Walter Lippman, who's probably one of the most prominent American political columnists of the day, says that Donovan, who returns from his sort of glamorous trip to the UK, now fully on board, I think, with the war mission. Littman says that Donovan's assessment, quote, almost single-handedly overcame the unmitigated defeatism, which was paralyzing Washington. That report, Gordon, ended up being a crucial factor in securing US aid and the Lend-Lease program that would save your fair isles from the Nazi war machine.

37:01David:Yeah. Donovan's going to brief his old friend Roosevelt personally on a train ride and say that they can win if we support them. That's the message. And then he comes back for another visit, December 1940. Interestingly enough, this visit is paid for by the Brits, I was reading, which seems amazing. He spends some time with Churchill. They get on well because obviously two men who like the military. Although I think I read somewhere that Donovan finds when Churchill goes off on one of his monologues, kind of gets a little bit tired of it. And obviously it doesn't show that. But here's what's really interesting.

37:32David:MI6 then offered to take Donovan on a tour of the kind of hot spots of the conflict. so they're like do you want to go out there into the field and of course this is Donovan so he's like sure and so New Year's Day Donovan which is also of course his birthday Donovan is aboard an RAF plane skirting German fighters over France en route to Gibraltar and dining I love this detail on a picnic provided by Lord Mountbatten which is three bottles of Moselle a flask of hot turtle soup, fresh lobster, cold pheasant, and Stilton cheese served by an orderly in a white jacket and white gloves. That is how the Brits turn on the charm for their visiting Americans.

38:16David:That's how you do it, David. Whenever you come over, that's what I offer you, isn't it? That's right.

38:20Gordon:Whenever I come over, Gordon always is waiting with a flask of turtle soup at Heathrow for my arrival. And he's wearing his sort of velvet smoking jacket that he has on right now. I've always, I have been confused. I'll admit, I probably answered this question just by Googling it, but I'm going to ask you, Gordon, because you're a sophisticated Brit who knows the answer. What parts of the turtle are in the turtle soup?

38:47David:I don't know. I'm going to confess. This is going to show my limited social status. I'm more of a kind of, you know, wild Bill Aravest rather than a proper posh bloke because I've never had turtle soup. You've never had turtle soup. I just think you boil the turtle. I don't know. And then.

39:03Gordon:okay look look becky becky our intrepid producer uh becky has said it's meat from the legs neck tail and belly often with the bones for stock so there you go okay that i guess that makes sense

39:16David:always making that yeah um so here let's go back to donovan and he's so this trip around europe is is crazy because at the same time he's going around the whole of the mediterranean and north Africa, the German ad there are also tracking him across Europe because they know he's influential in trouble. And at one point he's in a nightclub in Bulgaria with a British spy and the Germans break into his room and steal his bag, which has a list of his kind of intelligence questions, his intelligence requirements, which he wants answered, which is actually quite, you know, it's quite bad to lose that to the Germans.

39:52David:They also put out the story of he was drunk in the club.

39:54Gordon:The worst possible thing you could do is you lose all of your intelligence questions to the Germans.

39:59David:Go to a nightclub with a British spy, get drunk, and have your stuff stolen by the advert. I mean, but this is a kind of crazy bit of Donovan, isn't it? He kind of just gets away with it. That's what he is.

40:10Gordon:There is going to be a theme here, and it sort of breaks my heart to say this, which is that, as we'll see when we get kind of into the creation of the OSS and the things the OSS gets up to, a lot of this stuff doesn't go very well. Let's just put it that way. There's a lot of crazy operations that when you look back, you think it sounds daring, but then you look at it more kind of clear-eyed and you're like, well, a lot of this was disastrous. A lot of this did not go very well. Getting drunk and having your documents stolen will just be one story among many.

40:40David:But the Brits are also going to do more than just influence him to be supportive. They're also going to give him an idea. And this is the idea of having a single or centralized intelligence agency. and they are kind of feeding him this pan. Now, interestingly enough, Donovan is introduced to Admiral John Godfrey, who is the Royal Navy's Director of Intelligence, and Godfrey is accompanied by his aide, Commander Ian Fleming, the future creator of James Bond. And Fleming and Donovan, again, maybe unsurprisingly, get on. And Fleming is going to plant the idea in Donovan's head about the need for a kind of single integrated intelligence service.

41:23David:And the two men are going to travel. Fleming takes Donovan around Gibraltar during this kind of famous tour. And eventually, Ian Fleming is going to draft a memorandum to Donovan, which lays out the structure for an American intelligence agency. And as a token of his appreciation, Donovan gives Fleming a Colt 38 revolver, symbolically inscribed for special services. I love that. And Fleming would boast that this gun was his reward for writing the blueprint of the CIA.

41:56Gordon:See, British hands all over this. I mean, here's another one from Bill Stevenson, codenamed Intrepid, MI6 agent, who had been tasked with getting close to Donovan. He actually cables C back at head office at London and writes, quote, Donovan accuses me of having intrigued and driven him into the appointment. you can imagine how relieved I am after months of battle and jockeying for position in Washington that our man is in a position of such importance to our efforts. Of course, writing after Donovan will take over OSS. But I guess the point here with all of this talk of what would the blueprint be, what would a central intelligence agency or even just a kind of more formalized U.S.

42:37Gordon:intelligence agency even look like, is that when Donovan returns to DC in March, it's just a bureaucratic mess, isn't it? Because there's a bunch of different intelligence services tucked into pockets of different federal agencies around Washington. And it's not at all clear, from the American perspective, what that blueprint would be.

42:58David:I mean, it's crazy, isn't it? You've got army intelligence, you've got an office of naval intelligence you've got hoover at the fbi you know fdr is clearly a bit frustrated by this piecemeal and stovepiped intelligence system he's got so he's going to take up this idea and initially create uh something called the office of the coordinator of information which is going to be created in july 1941 and he's going to put donovan in charge of it so that is that is donovan's first job. It's not quite the OSS because technically this is just a kind of person whose job it is to be a presidential advisor, I guess, and corral the information from different places.

43:38David:And, you know, Roosevelt says publicly this office won't supersede or duplicate other departments, which is, I think, clearly a bit of a fiction because it is clearly the genesis of a new thing. It's like the proto-DNI, isn't it?

43:53Gordon:Yeah. Yeah.

43:53David:Director of National Intelligence. Exactly. But of course, you know, immediately, who's back is that going to put up? It's Hoover and the FBI, because Hoover is such a kind of wily operator, isn't he? And he really did think that the FBI had the potential to be not just a domestic investigative service, but actually the worldwide intelligence gathering service, you know, to be much broader than we think of it.

44:19Gordon:That was his vision and what he was trying to achieve. Well, I guess Hoover, I mean, he's got a massive counter espionage service within the FBI that's got millions of records and files. Of course, he doesn't want to give that up. I mean, he's even got, which I guess is not really surprising given what we know about J. Edgar Hoover, but he's got a dossier on Donovan himself, right? He's looking at Donovan's extramarital affairs. So Hoover's tracking all of this as dirt, kind of hold it as potential dirt on Donovan.

44:48David:I mean, Hoover is even tracking the kind of travels of Donovan around Europe, because he's kind of going, who's out there? What's he up to? He's kind of trying to understand who's influencing him. He's building that kind of dossier on Donovan. And also, you've got the military who are not very happy with Donovan suddenly appearing on the scene and giving up their intelligence outfit. But I guess FDR, the way he managed intelligence, and what managed all this kind of, the whole way he ran his government was he liked to kind of have different power centres, play people off, not have it very structured.

45:19David:And I think you can see that he kind of views Donovan as very useful in this role. Initially, it's more like a personal emissary. as a kind of an intelligence advisor.

45:29Gordon:And maybe it also helps that Donovan is so bad at the politics. He's just kind of a guy that Roosevelt can use to collect interesting information and who Donovan himself is not going to be capable of creating, knitting together all of these different agencies into one, and which potentially, I guess, could be threatening to Roosevelt himself, right? So Donovan is kind of, he's useful also because his source of legitimacy and power Donovan's is his relationship to FDR. And there's really nothing else in the system that allows Donovan to carry weight.

46:05David:Yeah. And so initially, it's just this one office. And I guess the pivotal moment, which will shift things again, will be Pearl Harbor in December 1941, when America is attacked by Japan.

46:18Gordon:Gordon, I did not know this. Donovan's at a football game that day. He's at the Polo Grounds in New York on Sunday, December 7th, 1941. 55 ,000 fans there are watching the New York Giants play the Brooklyn Dodgers. And I have to admit, Gordon, when I read this in your outline, I thought that you had mistaken the Dodgers, which are, of course, a very legendary baseball franchise, with a football team. And upon my further researches, and I hope to entrap you with baseball trivia, I discovered that, no, in fact, the Brooklyn Dodgers were a football team between the early 30s and 1943. So there we go.

46:54Gordon:And Donovan is summoned over the loudspeaker at this game.

46:58David:But during the games, and it's big games going on, 55 ,000 people, a voice comes on the loudspeaker and it goes, attention, please. Here's an urgent message. Will Colonel William J. Donovan call operator 19 in Washington immediately? You know, dramatic message. And it sends him to a phone booth under the bleachers to actually make the call. And then he hears that Japan's hit Pearl Harbor, and that means he's needed in Washington.

47:27Gordon:Oh, Gordon, that's a good cliffhanger. So maybe there with William Donovan making the phone call of his life. Let's end the episode when we come back next time on Christmas Eve, no less. We will see how William Donovan creates the Office of Strategic Services, America's first intelligence agency.

47:48David:But if you can't wait, if you can't wait till Christmas Eve, if your Christmas Eve is busy with wrapping presents and you want to listen now, you can. Put on your smoking jacket, join the Declassified Club at therestisclassified.com and you can get early access. And of course, you can get access to tickets for our live show. Don't forget that, 31st of January at the South

48:09Gordon:Bank here in London. That's right. Oh, and also, maybe follow us on Instagram, Gordon, as a little holiday treat for yourself. You can follow us at the handle at rest is classified. But happy holidays. And we'll see you on Christmas Eve. See you then.

48:35Gordon:In intelligence, information is only as reliable as the source behind it. It can sound convincing, but the real test is whether it holds up under scrutiny.

48:43David:And for brands, the same principle holds. It may not be called tradecraft in a media plan, but a message is only as credible as the channel it moves through.

48:53Gordon:The rest is classified as part of Goalhanger, the independent UK podcast network behind the rest is politics, the rest is history, and more.

49:00David:Across the network, there are over 65 million full episode streams every month.

49:06Gordon:The average listen time is over 40 minutes, and 68 % of Goalhanger listeners say they've taken action after hearing an ad that's nearly double the industry average. For brands and agencies, that means attention earned through trust. A Goalhanger partnership can extend across YouTube and social, where audiences already watch, listen to, and follow the shows.

49:28David:So to find out more, email partnerships at goalhanger.com.

49:33Gordon:There's a new way to sweet green. Meet Wraps. Handheld, hearty, and made for life on the move. With bold, chef-crafted flavors, fresh ingredients, and over 40 grams of protein, they're built to satisfy without slowing you down. Try wraps today in the app or at order.sweetgreen.com. Available at all participating locations.