Proceed to Peshawar. George J. Hill
said to be the society wedding of the season. In contrast to Zimmermann’s second-generation roots, his wife’s went back to the fleets of William Penn and John Winthrop. After a grand honeymoon, they settled in a new home, Cotswold Corners, in Haverford. He joined the usual golf and country clubs of the Philadelphia gentry, who lived along the Main Line: the Philadelphia Country Club; Merion Cricket Club; Fourth Street Club; and a men’s singing group, the Orpheus Club. With his interest in textiles, he formed a wool brokerage in partnership with another Orpheus Club member. Financially, he was very comfortable, but not ostentatious; he was a shrewd observer, but he kept his mouth shut about what he saw. When he was in the Navy, he wrote to his wife that she need not worry about spending money. He assured her that they were wealthy, although he would never have said it aloud.22
One of his friends before the war was a naval reservist named Jack Kane, who was the district intelligence officer for the Third Naval District, headquartered at the Philadelphia Navy Yard. AZ’s wife’s best friend was Kane’s wife, Amelie. It may have been Kane who encouraged him to take pictures of the German Bund in Philadelphia, when the Bund turned out in uniforms with swastika armbands for the wedding of one of the Zimmermanns’ household employees. AZ sent these photos to the FBI, and they were AZ’s first contact with the federal intelligence service.23
After the war broke out in Europe in 1939, AZ’s friends began making plans for what they would do when the United States entered the war. Some, like AZ’s father-in-law, who had been a major, were too old to serve again, but they encouraged others to prepare. Some decided to join the reserves, or to reactivate their previous commissions. AZ was a bit too old to be a fighter, and he was color-blind, so some areas of service were closed to him. Intelligence was a consideration. Army G-2 was a possibility, but he had no connections with Army intelligence. Kane encouraged him to join the ONI. AZ also knew Captain Tom Thornton, a naval intelligence officer in the Third Naval District, and he, too, was encouraging. His good friend Joseph Freeman Lincoln and his next-door neighbor Clarence Lewis joined the OSS. But the OSS did not even exist until 13 June 1942 (it had previously been known as the coordinator of information, or COI), and AZ was already talking with the Navy by then.24
AZ also had a couple of other door openers for the ONI. The head of ONI in the First Naval District (New York) was Commander (later Captain) Vincent Astor, who led “the Room,” a secret intelligence operation in New York City. Astor had been secretly named by FDR to vet candidates for the ONI, and AZ had at least two connections with this group. His good friend John “Jack” Thayer Jr. had survived the sinking of Titanic as a young man; Jack’s father and Vincent Astor’s father had gone down together on the ship. And AZ’s friend Malcolm Aldrich, who he called “Mac,” had been a member of Skull and Bones at Yale. He was a cousin of the banker, Winthrop Aldrich, who was also a member of the Room.25
By September 1942 AZ had decided on Navy intelligence. He tidied up his personal affairs, got a waiver for color-blindness, and on 21 September he took the oath of office as a lieutenant, I-V(P), USNR—the “P” standing for probationary. His appointment was backdated to 1 August 1942, and his appointment was effective on 8 September. He went to basic training as an officer at the Washington Navy Yard from 18 October to 14 November. He then reported to the ten-week intelligence indoctrination course at Dartmouth from 18 November to 28 January 1943. While he was at Dartmouth, the new naval intelligence officers developed a sense of camaraderie, and it was not all work: AZ noted that a singer named Paul Robeson performed there on Colgate weekend, in late November. They treated with suitable respect the director of naval intelligence (DNI), Rear Admiral Harold C. Train, and his ambitious deputy, Captain Ellis Zacharias—later called “The Man Who Wanted to Be DNI.”26 Admiral Train and Captain Zacharias both spoke at their graduation from the school. How much the students knew about the conflict between these two men is unknown, but they were smart fellows, and it was probably a good introduction to the arcane and back-biting world of intelligence. A classmate there, in another platoon, was another Philadelphia socialite, and brother of his friend in the Orpheus Club, Jim Winsor. The brother, Curtin Winsor, a somewhat younger man, went to Washington in the Far East desk of ONI. Curt Winsor later became AZ’s desk officer, or handler.27
AZ began French language school in Washington, DC, in preparation to go to Dakar, Senegal, French West Africa, as a naval observer. He enjoyed the course in French and was doing well, but his orders were canceled after two months, and he was instead sent to the Advanced Operational Intelligence School in New York City. He began the course at the Henry Hudson Hotel on 19 April and completed it on 28 May 1943. He was then assigned to the NLO, Karachi. He would spend nearly two years there. It would be a challenging and sometimes trying experience, but the most interesting adventure of his life.
AZ’s trip to Karachi would be familiar to anyone who lived through World War II, but it seems exotic to others. After saying good-bye for what would be at least a year, and perhaps eternity, on 23 June 1943, AZ boarded a commercial airline flight from Washington, DC, for New York. From there, he flew to Botwood, Newfoundland, and on to Foynes, near Limerick, in what had recently been the Irish Free State. All his letters passed the censor, and in the next two years only a few words—the names of some of the places on commercial postcards on his route to Karachi—were ever redacted by the censor. He touched down in Port Lyautey and Casablanca, Morocco; Oran and Algiers, Algeria; Constantine and Sousse, Tunisia; Tripoli and Benghasi, Libya, and arrived in Cairo on 1 July to get in line to continue on to the east.
He stayed in Cairo in relative comfort at the famous Shepheard’s Hotel, and—as was the custom with expats and intelligence officers—he made good use of the time. He saw the Sphinx and the pyramids, and visited Philadelphia physicians who were at Army General Hospital 38. They started to receive casualties from the invasion of Sicily, which began while he was in Cairo. While there, he met Edgar Snow and Tom Treanor, who were also staying at Shepheard’s. They were war correspondents who had been in India and China and were on their way to cover the invasion of Sicily. Treanor gave AZ an earful of the struggle that was going on in India. Treanor wrote that Gandhi and Nehru wanted the British to leave India so the Hindus could rule it; on the other hand, there was Jinnah, who refused to bargain with the British, and intended to put three-fourths of the Muslims of India into a new country, Pakistan. All three men postured for their political constituencies, and none was willing to compromise. (AZ would see that this was also the British perception of Gandhi, Nehru, and Jinnah, and would transmit this in an intelligence report in 1944.) And “despite protestations and promises of the British that India one day is to get her independence, no apparent step is being made in this direction.”28
On 4 July AZ took movies of a baseball game with Quentin Reynolds at bat and General Strong umpiring. Reynolds was a well-known war correspondent and Strong was doubtless the Army chief of intelligence (G-2) who detested General William Donovan of the OSS. AZ’s host on several days was a naval reservist from Philadelphia, Captain Thomas Anthony “Tom” Thornton, who was now with the U.S. Forces-Cairo. He had seen Lieutenant Commander Jack Kane only the previous week. Thornton planned to take AZ and Commander Gene Markey to Alexandria to pass the time while he and Markey were waiting for a flight out of Cairo, but AZ could not make the trip because he was placed on standby for his flight to the east. On one of his last nights in Cairo, he dined with Henry Hotchkiss, the assistant naval attaché, and several other old friends from Philadelphia. He finally flew out on a Royal Air Force (RAF) B-24 Liberator bomber on 16 July via Habanniah, Iraq, and another unnamed remote airfield. He commented to his wife in a letter that “I didn’t need the parachute so I didn’t find out whether it worked or not. They say you can always get another if it doesn’t.” He arrived in Karachi at 5:00 a.m., Monday 19 July 1943.29
The NLO in Karachi was a spacious two-story stucco-on-stone residence at 254 Ingle Road, on a frontage of about one hundred yards, and equally deep—a typical American square block. It was surrounded on three sides by a five-foot wall, and was enclosed at the rear by the houses of the twenty or so household servants and their families. In the real estate market in India it was called a bungalow, but this hardly expresses its size and beauty. The first floor of the house had twenty-five-foot ceilings, and the table in the dining room seated eighteen people with ease, and could be expanded to hold more. The first floor was for offices for the leading petty