18. “A Perfectly Wild Idea But Is Worth Looking Into“
Within weeks after the attack on Pearl Harbor, Adams had drawn up plans for his bat bombs. On January 12th, 1942, he wrote up a proposal and sent it to the White House. There, the idea would probably have been laughed off and dismissed out of hand, if not for the fact that Lytle Adams was a personal friend of First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt.
With help from the president’s wife, the proposal made it to Franklin D. Roosevelt’s desk, and thence to the country’s top military brass. FDR thought it was “a perfectly wild idea but is worth looking into“. So he sent Adams to see William J. Donovan, Roosevelt’s chief intelligence adviser and eventual head of the Office of Strategic Services, the CIA’s predecessor, with a note advising him that “This man is not a nut!”