Walter Bedell Smith

• 1. Introduction

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  Walter Bedell Smith signed the Italian armistice beneath an olive tree at Cassibile, Sicily, on the 3rd of September 1943. The ceremony was simple. Smith represented the Allied coalition. Across the table sat Generale di Brigata Giuseppe Castellano, signing Italy out of a war it was losing. Smith had not arrived at that moment through battlefield glory. He had spent his career managing information, staffing enormous headquarters, and solving the problems that no general wanted to touch. His childhood nickname was "Beetle," earned growing up in Indianapolis. Among those who served under him, he was known as Eisenhower's "hatchet man." What drove a man who could be so abrasive, and yet so indispensable, is what this documentary sets out to explore. He enlisted as a private in Company D of the 2nd Indiana Infantry in 1911, at the age of sixteen. He would not make captain for another eighteen years.

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• 2. The Command Behind the Battles

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  After the Battle of Kasserine Pass, Eisenhower sent Smith forward to assess the American II Corps. Smith recommended relieving its commander, Major General Lloyd Fredendall. Generals Harold Alexander, Omar Bradley, and Lucian Truscott agreed. Eisenhower replaced Fredendall with Major General George S. Patton Jr.

  The defeat at Kasserine also triggered an argument about airpower between Allied commanders. British Air Marshal Arthur Coningham publicly questioned the competence of American troops. Eisenhower drafted a letter to Marshall calling for Coningham's relief. Smith persuaded him not to send it. Air Chief Marshal Arthur Tedder and Major General Carl Spaatz visited Patton's headquarters instead. A German air raid during that meeting made the point more convincingly than any memo could have. Coningham withdrew his written criticisms and apologized.

  When Eisenhower was named Supreme Allied Commander for Operation Overlord in December 1943, Churchill wanted Smith to remain in the Mediterranean. The prime minister envisioned him as deputy supreme commander at AFHQ. Churchill gave way only at Eisenhower's insistence. On New Year's Eve 1943, Smith met with General Alan Brooke to arrange the transfer of British staff officers to SHAEF. Brooke refused to release Brigadier Kenneth Strong. A heated exchange followed, and Brooke later complained to Eisenhower. It was the only occasion when a senior British officer ever complained openly about Smith.

  Smith became a lieutenant general in January 1944. On the 18th of January, he departed for London. His personal baggage, weighing two and a half tons, filled a pair of Boeing B-17 Flying Fortresses.

  The Ardennes Offensive of December 1944 produced Smith's most charged command decision. Brigadier Kenneth Strong and Brigadier John Whiteley proposed transferring control of Allied armies north of the Ardennes from Bradley to Montgomery. Smith fired them on the spot and told them to return to Britain. The next morning, he apologized. He recognized both the military logic and the political weight of the suggestion. Since such a recommendation had to come from an American officer, he presented it to Eisenhower as his own. Eisenhower ordered the transfer on the 20th of December.

  Heavy casualties since the start of Operation Overlord had created a critical shortage of infantry replacements even before the Ardennes crisis. The responses to that shortage forced an argument about race within the Allied command.

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• 3. Race and Command

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  The liberation of Paris in August 1944 produced an awkward command problem. The Allied High Command pressed the Free French Forces leading the march to use all-white units. Most of those forces were more than two-thirds African. Smith wrote a confidential memo stating that it was "more desirable that the division mentioned above consist of white personnel."

  During the winter crisis in the Ardennes, Lieutenant General John C. H. Lee commanded the Communications Zone. He persuaded Eisenhower to allow soldiers to volunteer for combat service without regard to race or color. Smith wrote a detailed memo to Eisenhower laying out the dangers he saw.

  In the memo, Smith acknowledged he was not current on War Department policy. He warned that Black organizations, pressure groups, and newspapers would draw a pointed conclusion. The Army, they would say, would mix Black and white soldiers in combat when desperate, but not otherwise. He had called similar language "the most dangerous thing that I had ever seen in regard to Negro relations."

  In the 12th Army Group, colored soldiers served in provisional platoons attached to white regiments. In the 6th Army Group, those platoons were gathered into companies attached to divisions. Units working with the 12th Army Group arrangement gave those provisional platoons higher ratings.

  On the 5th of May 1945, German forces in the Netherlands surrendered to the First Canadian Army. Smith had negotiated that capitulation the previous week.

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• 4. Three Negotiations

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  In August 1943, Smith and Brigadier Kenneth Strong flew from Gibraltar to Lisbon in civilian clothes. They met at the British embassy with an Italian general who hoped to bring Italy over to the Allied side. Smith was authorized to draw up armistice terms but could not negotiate political matters. The formal armistice followed in early September.

  On the 30th of April 1945, Smith met Arthur Seyss-Inquart, the Nazi governor of the Netherlands, in the Dutch village of Achterveld. Major General Ivan Susloparov attended on behalf of the Soviet Union. Prince Bernhard of Lippe-Biesterfeld represented the Dutch government. Major General Sir Francis de Guingand came from 21st Army Group. Seyss-Inquart had opened contact by offering to allow food and coal into Amsterdam. Smith threatened him with prosecution for war crimes. The Dutch civilian population in the western cities received their food.

  In Reims, France, on the 7th of May 1945, Smith met Colonel General Alfred Jodl and General-Admiral Hans-Georg von Friedeburg. The two men represented the German High Command. Brigadier Kenneth Strong served as interpreter. Smith pressed hard. He threatened to seal the Western Front if the Germans refused terms, leaving their forces to face the Red Army. He made some concessions on the timing of a ceasefire. Smith and Soviet General Susloparov cosigned the surrender document representing the Allies. Jodl signed for Germany. Major General François Sevez of France signed as a witness.

  After the German surrender, Eisenhower nominated Smith as his successor in command of U.S. Forces in Europe. Smith was passed over in favor of General Joseph McNarney. Truman then asked him to serve as the United States Ambassador to the Soviet Union.

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• 5. My Three Years in Moscow

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  Smith took up the post of United States Ambassador to the Soviet Union in 1946. To allow him to retain his permanent military rank of major general, Truman asked the Senate for special legislation, which it passed. In Moscow, Smith found a relationship between the two countries deteriorating by the month.

  Smith came to see the Soviet Union as secretive, totalitarian, and antagonistic. His 1950 memoir, My Three Years in Moscow, was explicit about his conclusions. "We dare not allow ourselves any false sense of security," he wrote. Americans, he argued, must cultivate "firmness and patience to a degree we have never before required."

  Smith returned to the United States in March 1949. Truman offered him the post of Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs, which Smith declined. He was appointed commander of the First Army at Fort Jay in New York, his first operational command since 1918.

  Throughout the war, Smith had been troubled by a recurring stomach ulcer. By 1949 the problem had become severe, and he could no longer eat a normal diet. Surgeons at Walter Reed Army Hospital removed most of his stomach. The operation cured the ulcer but left Smith permanently malnourished and thin.

  In May 1950, Truman decided that Smith was the man he needed for the Central Intelligence Agency.

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• 6. Forging the CIA

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  Smith became Director of Central Intelligence on the 7th of October 1950. Three directors had preceded him; none had wanted the position. Before he could assume the post, the North Korean invasion of South Korea in June 1950 had exposed a major intelligence failure. The administration had been taken entirely by surprise.

  An internal review called the Dulles-Jackson-Correa Report had found the CIA failing at both coordinating and producing intelligence. Smith moved to implement its recommendations. He recruited William Harding Jackson, one of the report's authors, as his deputy director. Jackson accepted on three conditions, one of which was "no bawlings out."

  Smith created the Office of National Estimates to produce coordinated intelligence assessments. He placed it under William L. Langer, a Harvard historian who had led the Research and Analysis branch of the wartime Office of Strategic Services. Langer's staff built procedures for intelligence analysis that shaped the agency for two decades.

  The CIA's covert action program had operated semi-independently under Frank Wisner's Office of Policy Coordination. Smith moved to bring it under the Director's control. In early January 1951, he appointed Allen Dulles as the first deputy director for plans. Dulles now oversaw both the OPC and the CIA's separate espionage arm, the Office of Special Operations. Wisner succeeded Dulles as deputy director in August 1951. By August 1952, the two organizations had been merged into a single directorate.

  Smith left the CIA on the 9th of February 1953 to become Under Secretary of State under the new Eisenhower administration. In 1953, Guatemala's president Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán threatened to nationalize land belonging to the United Fruit Company. Smith ordered the American ambassador in Guatemala to activate a CIA coup plan. The plan succeeded in 1954. Smith then left the State Department on the 1st of October 1954 and joined the United Fruit Company. He also held positions at the Associated Missile Products Company, AMF Atomics Incorporated, and as a director of RCA and Corning Incorporated.

  In 1955, Smith appeared in the film To Hell and Back, based on the autobiography of Audie Murphy. Dressed in his old service uniform, he performed the voice-over and referred throughout to "the foot soldier." He died on the 9th of August 1961 at his home in Washington. His widow arranged his burial in Section 7 of Arlington National Cemetery, near the grave of George C. Marshall.

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