Page from Waller Booth manuscript about his career in the OSS.

But, after taking a wrong turn, he ended up in front of an unmarked building that, despite few signs of activity and no familiar markings, fit the description of his destination, the Office of the U.S. Military Attaché in Lisbon. 

He rang the doorbell. The door clicked open. No signs of life in the foyer. He climbed the stairs to the first floor as he had been advised by U.S. diplomats. All the doors were closed and unmarked. 

Suddenly, the door to his left opened. 

Intent on meeting his case officer, grandfather entered the room and immediately found himself ringed by six men. He heard the door close behind him, and, as grandfather describes it, a seventh man, of husky build with his hand in his pocket, likely cradling a gun, leaned against the closed door. Grandfather felt a drop of cold sweat trickle between his shoulder blades. With the six men standing motionless and staring at him with expressionless faces, grandfather stammered in English, “What place is this?”

“Der Cherman Embassy,” came the answer.

“I think I must have made a mistake,” grandfather replied. 

“Ve tink you haf,” came the reply. 

Grandfather turned to extract himself. To his great relief, the husky man leaning against the door yielded. Suppressing a desire to run, grandfather walked through the door and down the stairs. The front door opened with a click, and, as grandfather recalls, he “stepped out on Cloud 9.”

Retracing his steps, he eventually made it to the Office of the U.S. Military Attaché after taking an alternate turn. The front door was open, and the U.S. flag was flying – a far different reception. When he told his case officer about his strange experience just a few blocks away, his case officer gasped, “Good God Almighty. You were in there!”

“Yes, it was a spooky sort of place,” grandfather added. 

“My friend,” replied the case officer, “that is the headquarters of the Gestapo. Occasionally, one of our collaborators goes in there, but not voluntarily, and those that go in don’t come out – at least not in recognizable form.” 

Evidently, the Gestapo had let grandfather out because it never occurred to them that an allied agent could be so careless as to walk into their HQ. 

***

Waller Booth had had good reasons to stay out of World War II. As a manager for the Raymond and Whitcomb Travel Company in London, he was the provider for his wife Dorothy and two daughters, Lee, ten years old, and Sally (my mother), eight years old. Secondly, at 38, he was no longer as nimble or fast as he was when he played football at Princeton in the 1920s.  

Puerto Rico, December 1941, Booth family Christmas card. Back row, l to r: Waller Booth, Dorothy Booth. Front row, l to r: Sally Booth, Dorothy Lee Booth.

And finally, he was hard of hearing, so hard of hearing that he would fail U.S. Army physicals on account of his weak auditory skills. 

But Waller Booth, who was born in 1903 in Owensboro, Kentucky, and referred to himself as a “little Kentucky country boy,” had a hankering for adventure. As he witnessed the war close in on England in the late 1930s, he sensed another career path opening.

Shortly after England and France declared war on Germany in September 1939, he evacuated his family back to the U.S. With a family friend, he purchased a bottling company in Puerto Rico and moved there with his family. But believing that the European war would eventually draw in the U.S., in November 1941 he volunteered for the Office of Coordinator of Information (OCI), America’s nascent intelligence gathering and propaganda organization. He joined the OCI in December.  

Fortunately, they didn’t require him to pass a hearing test.

Having no experience in intelligence operations, grandfather felt unqualified to be a spy. But as a French and Spanish-speaking corporate manager who had traveled around the world, he fit the bill. Grandfather likened those first days working in the OCI as “teaching babies to swim by throwing them into deep water.” 

His first job was at OCI’s headquarters in Washington, DC, where he helped his boss David K. E. Bruce reorganize intelligence gathering for the U.S. government. OCI had a huge task: putting in place a single intelligence-gathering organization in place of the eight separate espionage outfits that existed at the time, each housed in different military, law enforcement, diplomatic and economic governmental institutions. 

As part of his job, grandfather read resumes and supporting letters for scholars, linguists, diplomats and corporate managers hoping to join the war effort. Then he and Bruce, as the only two employees of OCI’s Special Intelligence (SI) Division, selected applicants who showed the most promise for conversion into spies and intelligence analysts. 

You could say that grandfather was present at the creation of the American spy business. 

In mid-1942, in large part because of America’s entry into WWII after Pearl Harbor in December 1941, OCI’s intelligence gathering branch was renamed the Office of Strategic Services or OSS. The OSS would serve as America’s first centralized intelligence agency, fighting a largely invisible war against Germany and Japan between 1942 and 1945. During that period, the OSS grew to 13,000 employees.

But grandfather yearned to be on the front lines, conducting clandestine warfare and carrying out covert intelligence gathering. He soon got his wish. In early 1942, Donovan personally dispatched him to Spain to monitor Allied fuel sales to the economically hobbled government of Spain, a neutral country in the war but which had strong historic and political ties to Germany and Italy. The key to keeping Spain neutral – Donovan reasoned — was to make it dependent on U.S. oil. But that also meant making sure no U.S. oil shipments ended up in Germany or Italy. That required monitoring ships at Spanish ports to make sure no diversions were underway to the Axis powers. That’s where grandfather came in. 

In preparation for the mission, grandfather learned to write coded messages, took a crash course in measuring petroleum stocks, polished his Spanish, and had one-on-one tutoring with an experienced spymaster. The veteran spy brought grandfather stacks of books on World War I espionage to read. Years later, grandfather learned that his anonymous tutor was none other than William Stephenson, the Canadian spy master of ENIGMA fame, whose role in breaking Germany’s Ultra code would be made famous in the book “A Man Called Intrepid.” 

Work on the Iberian Peninsula, where grandfather encountered the Gestapo on his first day on the job, kept grandfather busy for a year. Then it was on to North Africa where for a year he gathered intelligence on German forces in Algeria and Morocco. 

In May 1944, grandfather found himself in London. As a veteran of the OSS, he had connections in OSS Headquarters in London, but none more important than his old boss David Bruce, who was now running all OSS operations in mainland Europe. When asked what kind of work he was looking for, grandfather replied: “I want the toughest, meanest job you’ve got – something nobody else would willingly take.”

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