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"The Phantom" - The American Marine The Nazis Could Not Kill · Conversations: Special Guests with Preston Scott

• 0:06
  Speaker 1: So good to have you with us this morning. It
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  Speaker 1: is show 5693, The Morning Show with Preston Scott. I'm Preston.
• 0:12
  Speaker 1: He's Jared. And I am really geeked to have our
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  Speaker 1: guest back on the program. It's been a few years
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  Speaker 1: since we had Bob Drury with us. He and his
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  Speaker 1: buddy Tom Clavin have co-authored yet another book, The Untold
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  Speaker 1: Story of the American Marine the Nazis Could Not Kill,
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  Speaker 1: otherwise known as The Phantom. And I, my friends, have
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  Speaker 1: in my hands... an advanced reader copy. That means I'm
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  Speaker 1: an advanced reader. Bob, how are you, buddy?
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  Speaker 2: How well, Preston, my old friend. How are you?
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  Speaker 1: I am doing... Tallahassee.
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  Speaker 2: I tell you this every time. Could be my favorite
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  Speaker 2: state capital. Really? Tallahassee. I think it might be a
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  Speaker 2: tie between Cheyenne, Wyoming. I got a soft spot for Cheyenne,
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  Speaker 2: but I love Tallahassee.
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  Speaker 1: It is a charming community. And And we're fighting the
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  Speaker 1: socialist movement, but we're working at it.
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  Speaker 2: Hey, before we even get into this, I have to say,
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  Speaker 2: I've been listening to you. I had no idea that
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  Speaker 2: a nickel costs 13 cents to make. Right. But I'm
• 1:16
  Speaker 2: on the same page with you about the movie, Dave.
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  Speaker 2: Charles Grodin comes in and they start chopping and cutting,
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  Speaker 2: and I am just rolling at that scene. So we
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  Speaker 2: have a similar taste when it comes to movies, I guess. Absolutely.
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  Speaker 1: That thing still makes me laugh as I think about it.
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  Speaker 2: All right.
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  Speaker 1: Set up for our listeners, because before we get into
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  Speaker 1: this story, how did two people work on one project
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  Speaker 1: like this? How do you and Tom coordinate this?
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  Speaker 2: Well, you know, of course, Preston, we just write every
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  Speaker 2: other word. He writes one, I write one. Sure you do.
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  Speaker 2: Tom and I have a good assembly line kind of
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  Speaker 2: process going on. He is– you could throw me into
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  Speaker 2: the Library of Congress, the National Archives, and I'd probably
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  Speaker 2: find what I'm looking for. But you might have to
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  Speaker 2: send a search party in for me. Whereas Tom is
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  Speaker 2: so at home in the Marine Corps Museum, which we
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  Speaker 2: spent a lot of time in for this book, for instance,
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  Speaker 2: that he– and I guess we split the research. It's
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  Speaker 2: probably 70 percent him, 30 percent me. And then, of course,
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  Speaker 2: I was joking about writing every other word. You more
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  Speaker 2: or less have to have one voice, so I do
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  Speaker 2: the writing. And then as I write a few chapters,
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  Speaker 2: I send them off to Tom, and he's also a
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  Speaker 2: wonderful editor. So we have a pretty good Henry Ford-type
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  Speaker 2: deal going there. And it works for us, and it's
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  Speaker 2: worked for us for, I think this might be our
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  Speaker 2: tenth book together.
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  Speaker 1: Yeah, it's been a few. So how then does the
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  Speaker 1: story of the Phantom come across? Who saw it, and
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  Speaker 1: how did you come to find it?
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  Speaker 2: This guy, I mean, the fact that this guy, that
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  Speaker 2: we stumbled across this story of Peter Ortiz, a Marine
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  Speaker 2: who was co-opted by the OSS, which of course was
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  Speaker 2: the precursor to today's CIA, and then dropped behind Nazi lines,
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  Speaker 2: first in North Africa... And then in France several times.
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  Speaker 2: We couldn't believe that we found this story. I mean,
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  Speaker 2: this guy should be as famous as, I don't know,
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  Speaker 2: Sergeant York or Audie Murphy. And the fact that nobody's
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  Speaker 2: ever written about this guy. What happened was, I'll try
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  Speaker 2: to keep this short, there's a Eisenhower kind of, he wasn't,
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  Speaker 2: he had read T.S. Lawrence, Lawrence of Arabia, and he
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  Speaker 2: knew that partisans on the ground were going to help
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  Speaker 2: during the D-Day invasion. But he wasn't real all that
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  Speaker 2: hot on using civilians. But he was finally convinced, we
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  Speaker 2: need the French resistance. So Tom and I started looking
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  Speaker 2: into these Jedburgh teams. They were named that because that's
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  Speaker 2: where they trained in Scotland. That was the name of
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  Speaker 2: the town. And it turns out that everywhere these teams went,
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  Speaker 2: Peter Ortiz was there first. He had already been in there.
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  Speaker 2: And we're like looking at each other saying, A, who
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  Speaker 2: is this guy? And B, Marines are so associated during
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  Speaker 2: World War II with the Pacific theater of war, Who
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  Speaker 2: ever heard of Marines in the European theater of war?
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  Speaker 2: So we started looking at Pete's background, and it was
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  Speaker 2: just unbelievable. The guy, I mean, before the war even began,
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  Speaker 2: he was kind of a wild child. And he was
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  Speaker 2: born in New York City, raised in San Diego, but
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  Speaker 2: his father, his parents thought he needed a European education.
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  Speaker 2: But he just, he was a great rugby player, but
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  Speaker 2: he just kept running away. And finally, when he was 18,
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  Speaker 2: he ran away from college, joined the French Foreign Legion,
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  Speaker 2: put for six years with the French Foreign Legion in
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  Speaker 2: North Africa. And finally, World War II breaks out, and
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  Speaker 2: he enlists in the Marines. He's 29 years old. He's
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  Speaker 2: 10 years older than most of the kids in boot camp.
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  Speaker 2: Yet he is the first one to finish the long marches,
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  Speaker 2: the full-pack marches. And when he is assigned to Naval Intelligence,
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  Speaker 2: it was just serendipity from our point of view that
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  Speaker 2: President Roosevelt at the time said, you know what, this
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  Speaker 2: country needs a a national it in an international intelligence
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  Speaker 2: organization we haven't had one since george washington spy ring
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  Speaker 2: we don't do that we'd be you know what the
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  Speaker 2: europeans do their saboteur spy stuff we don't do that
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  Speaker 2: but finally he was convinced we need something like this
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  Speaker 2: he hired his old law school buddy uh... william donovan
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  Speaker 2: while bill donovan who won the medal of honor in
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  Speaker 2: world war one to set up intelligence outfit and while
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  Speaker 2: bill was crazy He had all these crazy ideas. He
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  Speaker 2: wanted to put frogmen in the Rhine River. He wanted
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  Speaker 2: to inundate, somehow inundate Adolf Hitler with pornography to see
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  Speaker 2: if it would drive him crazy. He had this one idea.
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  Speaker 2: He wanted to put a million bats on submarines, attach
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  Speaker 2: little incendiary devices to them, and then let them go
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  Speaker 2: off the coast of Japan so they would fly into
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  Speaker 2: the wooden structures of Tokyo and burn down the city.
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  Speaker 2: And somebody finally had to tell him, Yes, how are
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  Speaker 2: we going to get a million bats on a submarine?
• 6:28
  Speaker 1: Back with Bob Drury. The book, The Untold Story of
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  Speaker 1: the American Marine, The Nazis Could Not Kill the Phantom.
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  Speaker 1: So how do these two remarkable forces end up in
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  Speaker 1: the same atmosphere?
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  Speaker 2: Well, Donovan's cast a wide net. He's for this new agency,
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  Speaker 2: standing of this intelligence agency, the OSS. He's hiring Hollywood directors.
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  Speaker 2: He's hiring telephone linemen. He is hiring stuntmen. He is
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  Speaker 2: hiring a lot of academics. He raised the, I think,
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  Speaker 2: one of the OSS, the services, hated the fact that
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  Speaker 2: they did not, they were no longer leading in intelligence.
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  Speaker 2: And they used to call, oh, so silly, OSS. pale
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  Speaker 2: male in Yale because Donovan went after so many Ivy
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  Speaker 2: League academics because he wanted to start a research library.
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  Speaker 2: But he also had his eye on the Marines. And so,
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  Speaker 2: believe it or not, there were 300 Marines who fought,
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  Speaker 2: who worked for the OSS in Europe, including people we know. Preston,
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  Speaker 2: you know Julia Child, the cookbook author? Yeah. She started
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  Speaker 2: in the OSS steno room. She was a typist. But
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  Speaker 2: she was a great swimmer, and she worked herself up
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  Speaker 2: to becoming the head of the ocean rescue team. Do
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  Speaker 2: you remember Sergeant McCluskey from The Godfather, the dirty cop? Sure.
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  Speaker 2: Cappuccino killed. Sterling Hayden, the actor, he started in the
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  Speaker 2: OSS running guns to Tito's partisans in Yugoslavia. So Donovan
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  Speaker 2: hears about this Marine who speaks six languages, by the way.
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  Speaker 2: Fluent French, fluent German, fluent Arabic, Russian, Spanish. And he says,
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  Speaker 2: I want this guy. The Marines, of course, didn't want
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  Speaker 2: to give him up. But Donovan goes to Roosevelt. President
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  Speaker 2: Roosevelt puts some pressure on the Marine Corps commandant. Next
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  Speaker 2: thing you know, he's parachuting Pete Ortiz behind the lines
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  Speaker 2: into Nazi Germany. Now, Pete wore his uniform. He didn't
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  Speaker 2: dress like a Frenchman. He was organizing the French resistance,
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  Speaker 2: blowing up trains, hitting munitions depots, I can't tell you
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  Speaker 2: the amount of downed Allied airmen he helped escape to
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  Speaker 2: allegedly neutral Spain. And it was so much that the
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  Speaker 2: Gestapo were so angry. Who was this guy strutting around
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  Speaker 2: in his Marine herringbone uniform that they put a bounty
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  Speaker 2: on his head of 500,000 francs? But they couldn't catch him.
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  Speaker 2: And that's where we got our title from, because the
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  Speaker 2: Gestapo started calling this guy, he's Das Phantom. He's the ghost.
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  Speaker 2: We can't find him. And so, as it turns out,
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  Speaker 2: several times he's dropped behind the lines in France to
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  Speaker 2: prepare for the D-Day invasion. And each time he just,
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  Speaker 2: he's more and more outrageous. What he would do when
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  Speaker 2: he wasn't wearing his Marine uniform, he would don this
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  Speaker 2: flamboyant cape and ascot and a black suit, and he
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  Speaker 2: would mingle with German officers in different bistros and bars
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  Speaker 2: in French cities.
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  Speaker 1: That's right out of the Dirty Dozen.
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  Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly. And it was just such an extraordinary story.
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  Speaker 2: And Tom and I, the more we researched this and
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  Speaker 2: the more outlandish and outrageous the Peter Ortiz stories became,
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  Speaker 2: we just kept looking at each other saying, how come
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  Speaker 2: nobody ever wrote about this guy before? So we kind
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  Speaker 2: of got lucky. We kind of got lucky there. And
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  Speaker 2: I don't know, the rest you're holding in your hands.
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  Speaker 2: I don't know what else to say. So I appreciate
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  Speaker 2: you having me on. It's awful nice of you. And
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  Speaker 2: it's awful nice of you to say such fine words
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  Speaker 2: about the Phantom and me. I appreciate that, too, Preston.
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  Speaker 2: Thank you.
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  Speaker 1: You guys are brilliant in how you collaborate and the
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  Speaker 1: work that you've done. It's always a delight to have you, Bob,
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  Speaker 1: on the program, and your partner, Tom, has been a
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  Speaker 1: regular guest over the years. Thanks for the time this morning.
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  Speaker 1: I appreciate it. Best of success.
• 10:31
  Speaker 2: Preston, and be careful of the hurricane, the crazy-named hurricane.
• 10:35
  Speaker 2: Be careful of that.
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  Speaker 1: Tell me about it. Thanks very much, sir. Bob Drury,
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  Speaker 1: and the book is The Phantom, the untold story of
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  Speaker 1: the American Marine the Nazis could not kill. If that
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  Speaker 1: doesn't whet your appetite, that is a book that is,
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  Speaker 1: I'm going to say it, perfect for Christmas for the historian,
• 10:54
  Speaker 1: the military buff in the family that loves, I mean,
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  Speaker 1: this is why I don't do fiction books on this show.
• 11:03
  Speaker 1: I do nonfiction for this reason, because these stories are better.
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  Speaker 1: They're better than fiction. Great stuff. Bob Drury, my guest
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  Speaker 1: on The Morning Show with Preston Scott.