J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and the Secrets (41 page)
Read J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and the Secrets Online
Authors: Curt Gentry
Tags: #General, #Biography & Autobiography, #United States, #Political Science, #Law Enforcement, #History, #Fiction, #Historical, #20th Century, #American Government
An even greater sin, as far as Hoover was concerned, was Donovan’s attitude toward Communists. He’d hire anyone, he often said, if he’d help get the job done. Time and again, when Hoover informed him that an applicant was a known or suspected party member, Donovan hired him anyway.
Although he saw to it that his adverse recommendations were on record, Hoover did not publicize these incidents. He saved them for later.
Hoover’s attempts to discredit Donovan placed the BSC in an almost untenable position. As the BSC official Donald Downes observed, “The no-man’s land between the FBI and OSS was dangerous territory.”
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Adolf Berle, Hoover’s closest ally in the State Department, was opposed to the BSC. He confided in his diary, “No one has given us any effective reason why there should be a British espionage system in the United States.” In an attempt to sever the link between the OSS and the BSC, Berle proposed that the BSC deal exclusively with the FBI. Learning of this, British intelligence assigned an agent named Paine to “get the dirt” on Berle. Alerted to the plot, Ed Tamm warned the assistant secretary of state. Hoover and Tamm also called on Stephenson and told him they wanted Paine out of the country by six o’clock “or else.” Professing “surprise and horror that any of his men should do such a thing,” Stephenson had Paine on a plane to Montreal that same night.
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Nor was Berle the FBI director’s only ally. Hoover also secretly backed a bill by his one-time enemy Senator Kenneth McKellar which would have greatly restricted the operation of foreign agents—friendly or otherwise—in the United States. Moreover, it would have transferred the monitoring of their activities from the State Department to the Department of Justice, and made them open all their records to the FBI. Donovan, acting on behalf of Stephenson, went directly to FDR and persuaded him to veto the bill. An amended version, which the president later signed, exempted the BSC.
Roosevelt had no intention of hampering either the OSS or the BSC. They were far too useful. He utilized both to conduct a number of secret operations which he either did not wish to entrust to Hoover or which he felt the FBI director might refuse. Stephenson, for example, was the moving force behind a
campaign to discredit the isolationist Burton K. Wheeler, BSC agents having collected information which revealed that one of the senator’s aides had used the congressional franking privilege to disseminate Nazi propaganda.
Unable to outlaw the BSC, Hoover now extended it only token cooperation. British visitors to FBI headquarters were given a chilly, though formally correct, reception, as Commander Ian Fleming discovered when he and the director of British naval intelligence visited the FBI director. Fleming found Hoover to be “a chunky enigmatic man with slow eyes and a trap of a mouth who received us graciously, listening with close attention (and a witness) to our exposé of certain security problems, and expressed himself firmly but politely as being uninterested in our mission.”
“Hoover’s negative response was soft as a cat’s paw,” Fleming recalled after the war. “With the air of doing us a favor, he had us piloted through the FBI Laboratory and Record Department and down to the basement shooting range. Even now I can hear the shattering roar of the Thompsons in the big dark cellar as the instructor demonstrated on the trick targets. Then, with a firm, dry handclasp we were shown the door.”
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The British agent Dusko Popov, the man said to be the model for Ian Fleming’s James Bond, received an even less cordial reception—with tragic consequences to the United States.
The playboy son of a wealthy Yugoslav family, Popov had in early 1940 been approached by the Abwehr, the German high command’s espionage service, and asked to become a spy. He immediately reported the overture to British counterintelligence, MI-6. Following intensive training by both the Germans and the British—his German code name was Ivan and his British Tricycle—Popov became one of Britain’s most successful double agents, the misleading information he fed the Nazis resulting in a number of major intelligence victories.
In the summer of 1941 the Abwehr arranged for Popov to go to the United States. Supplied with the Abwehr’s latest paraphernalia, including the “microdot”—a process whereby a page of text was photographically reduced to the size of a period or comma, then inserted into an innocuous communication—Popov was given two assignments. He was to set up a large-scale espionage ring; and he was to carry out a very important mission for the Japanese. The latter, Popov had been told, was “of the highest priority.”
Before leaving for the United States, Popov reported to MI-6. His British handlers were especially interested in the Japanese questionnaire, which was one of the microdot documents he’d been given.
J. C. Masterman, chief of the British XX (Double Cross) Committee, received a copy of the questionnaire on August 16, 1941. Carefully examining it, Masterman noted that one-third of the questions dealt with Hawaii and, particularly, Pearl Harbor. He also observed that whereas all the other questions were general or statistical, those regarding Pearl Harbor were specific. For example, the questionnaire asked for “Details about naval ammunition and
mine depot on Isle of Kushua [Pearl Harbor]. If possible sketch…Where is the station for mine search formations? How far has the dredger work progressed at the entrance and in the east and southeast lock? Depths of water? …Exact details and sketch about the situation of the state wharf, of the pier installations, workshops, petrol installations, situation of dry dock No. 1 and of the new dry dock which is being built.” The questionnaire also asked for sketches showing the exact locations of installations at “Wickam” (Hickam), Wheeler, Luke, and “Kaneche” (Kaneohe) airfields.
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Masterman concluded, “It is therefore surely a fair deduction that the questionnaire indicated very clearly that in the event of the United States being at war, Pearl Harbor would be the first point to be attacked, and that plans for this attack had reached an advanced state by August 1941.”
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Popov, and the British, also had other information which not only supported this conclusion but indicated
how
the attack might be carried out. Another double agent, a friend of Popov’s, accompanied by the German air attaché in Tokyo, had recently escorted a group of Japanese naval officials to Taranto, Italy. Their primary interest, Popov had been told, was in determining exactly how, in one sneak attack, using torpedo planes launched from an aircraft carrier, the British had nearly obliterated the Italian fleet.
On his arrival in the United States, Popov was met by Percy Foxworth of the FBI’s New York office, to whom he explained the secret of the microdot and turned over the Japanese questionnaire and other materials.
Popov then waited for FBI permission to set up his bogus espionage network. It was a long wait. In the meantime he resumed his playboy life-style. Using money supplied by the Germans, he rented a penthouse on the corner of Park Avenue and Sixty-first Street, where he resumed a long-standing affair with the French actress Simone Simon. When she returned to Hollywood, Popov wasn’t lonely. A former SA assigned to the New York field office said, “As I recall—and I recall it quite clearly—Popov was partial to twins, but, lacking a matched pair, often made do with a couple other accommodating ladies.”
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Little they did escaped the attention of the FBI. Popov complained to another British agent, “If I bend over to smell a bowl of flowers, I scratch my nose on a microphone.”
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“Mr. Hoover is a very virtuous man,” Foxworth warned Popov, in preparation for his long-delayed meeting with the director. Foxworth could have added, but didn’t, that the director was also not pleased that the double agent frequented
his
favorite haunt, the Stork Club, where his munificent tips earned him and his female companions entry to the Cub Room.
The meeting was brief. The FBI didn’t need the help of foreign spies, the director told him: “I can catch spies without your or anyone else’s help.” He also accused Popov of being “like all double agents. You’re begging for information to sell to your German friends so that you can make a lot of money and be a playboy.”
There was no mention of the Japanese questionnaire or of the microdot, the
discovery of which Hoover believed so important that on September 3, 1941, within days after Popov’s arrival, he’d sent a “strictly confidential” report on it to the White House.
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And, following the war, the microdot was the subject of one of his many ghost-written
Reader’s Digest
articles, called “The Enemy’s Masterpiece of Deception.”
The article itself was something of a masterpiece in deception. It made no mention of Popov; gave full credit for the discovery to an anonymous technician in the FBI Lab; and stated that the initial microdot had been found “on the front of [an] envelope,” apparently in an attempt to disguise the fact that the FBI was
opening
mail, both foreign and domestic, under a special program which, with only brief interruptions, continued until as late as July 1966.
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But Hoover wasn’t exaggerating the importance of the microdot. One of the first microdot messages the FBI obtained from the British censors in Bermuda included questions about the American atomic energy program.
Unknown to Popov, the FBI already had other evidence indicating Japan was especially interested in Hawaii. In the spring of 1941 the British had intercepted a report from a German agent codenamed Konrad to a “Mr. Smith of China,” which included exact details of the defense of the Hawaiian Islands, plus maps and photographs, notably of Pearl Harbor. Konrad wrote, “This will be of interest mostly to our yellow allies.”
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Coupled with the Konrad report, Popov’s Japanese questionnaire—and his instructions that it was of the highest priority—should have set off warning bells at FBI headquarters, but apparently it didn’t. Although the FBI was able to determine that “Mr. Smith of China” was a mail route used by German agents, it was initially unable to determine the identity of Konrad.
However, on the evening of March 18, 1941, a man crossing Broadway at Times Square, in New York City, was knocked down by a taxi, then run over by a second vehicle. Never regaining consciousness, he died in the hospital the next day.
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On a tip from the manager of the Taft Hotel, where the man had been staying, the FBI confiscated his luggage, which contained letters and other evidence indicating that he had been a Nazi agent. Helped by the British, but thanks mostly to the hard work of its own agents, the FBI was able to round up a whole Abwehr network, probably the largest then operating in the United States. The FBI also learned that the accident victim was one Ulrich von der Osten, a captain in German intelligence. Spy master of the ring, von der Osten used several codenames, including Konrad.
Considering the dates, it’s possible the Abwehr gave Popov the Japanese
assignment after Konrad’s intercepted report on Hawaii failed to arrive. It’s also possible that the espionage network Popov was to establish was meant to replace von der Osten’s, which, after his death and the subsequent arrests, the Abwehr knew had been “blown.”
J. Edgar Hoover did not see it this way. He distrusted double agents. Although he sometimes authorized their use,
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he did so reluctantly. Who could be sure that, having turned once, they wouldn’t turn again?
He also strongly disapproved of Popov’s sybaritic life-style. If it was ever revealed that Popov had been working for the FBI, the potential for “embarrassing the Bureau” would be tremendous.
From distrusting Popov, it was apparently only a small step to distrusting the intelligence he carried, although it was supported by other information the Bureau already possessed. That the British believed Popov’s intelligence to be authentic was not, for J. Edgar Hoover, a convincing argument.
Also, the FBI probably received hundreds of reports on enemy intentions, many of them contradictory, inaccurate, or simply bogus.
Still, it is difficult to explain what Hoover then did. He did nothing. He didn’t warn the president that two German agents had been ordered to study the defenses of Pearl Harbor for the Japanese, and that the last had been told it was “of the highest priority,” indicating that a time factor was involved. Nor did he inform Roosevelt of the Japanese naval inspection tour.
He did send him—as one of several enclosures to his September 3, 1941, letter in which he claimed credit for the discovery of the microdot—a
partial
translation of the Japanese questionnaire; but he omitted in its entirety the section on Hawaii, including all the specific inquiries regarding Pearl Harbor.
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As far as Dusko Popov was concerned, his mission to the United States was a near-disaster. Not only did the FBI fail to utilize his unique situation and talents—Popov believed, perhaps rightly, that had he been able to set up his phony network, the FBI would have been able to control and direct all German espionage in the United States for the duration of the war—the Bureau also withheld the funds Popov received from the Abwehr, nearly arrested his German contact (which would have exposed his double role to the Germans and ended his usefulness to the British), and threatened to charge him with violating the Mann Act after he took an unmarried female to Florida.
At Hoover’s insistence, the British yanked Dusko Popov. He wasn’t unhappy about leaving. The trip had, he felt, been a waste of time. With one extraordinarily important exception.
When the Japanese launched their “surprise” attack on Pearl Harbor, Popov knew, the United States would be ready and waiting.
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Yet Attorney General Biddle approved a November 1941 request to wiretap the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce, even though he noted the organization had “no record of espionage at this time.”
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The Smith Act, named after Representative Howard W. Smith of Virginia, required the registration and fingerprinting of aliens and made it unlawful to belong to any organization advocating the overthrow of the U.S. government. The first federal law to sanction guilt by association, it passed with little publicity or floor debate, since most thought it concerned only the fingerprinting of aliens.
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Although the Bridges case went to the U.S. Supreme Court twice, the Court both times deciding in his favor, not until 1955 did the Justice Department announce that it had given up its long fight to deport Bridges, and this came only after a federal district judge ruled that the government had failed to prove that Bridges was a Communist or that he had concealed that fact when he was naturalized. Another three years passed, however, before Bridges was granted a U.S. passport. Even then Hoover didn’t give up. FBI agents were still monitoring Bridges’s activities, and reporting them to the director, as late as 1972, the year Hoover died.
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Technically, this was a “bug” rather than a “tap,” since the agents hadn’t tapped the phone lines but had planted a microphone in the telephone box in Bridges’s room. The distinction was rather important since, hypothetically, a wiretap would have required the attorney general’s permission and Biddle hadn’t given it.
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Many years later, one of the two agents, Evelle Younger, was elected attorney general of the state of California. During his campaign, Younger, the Republican candidate, often referred to his five years of distinguished service with the FBI, greatly amusing the retired ILWU president, who, though he shared the joke with his friends, did not publicize it, since he was by then himself a registered Republican.
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On June 24, 1940—in an attempt to end the bureaucratic infighting between the FBI, MID, ONI, and State Department—President Roosevelt had issued a directive assigning all foreign-intelligence responsibilities in the Western Hemisphere to a newly created unit, the Special Intelligence Service (SIS) of the FBI.
MID, ONI, and State were more or less given the rest of the world. All were expected to share their intelligence findings, but often didn’t.
The SIS for the most part consisted of the 150 agents Hoover mentioned hiring in his November 1939 appearance before the House Appropriations Subcommittee. Picked for their linguistic abilities and other skills, this elite cadre was specially trained and then sent to Mexico, Central America, South America, the Caribbean, and Canada, where it established close liaisons with the intelligence officials of those countries.
After the war a number of these agents resigned from the Bureau and became “Hoover’s spies” in the CIA.
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This is borne out by a December 22, 1941, memo to the president from Attorney General Francis Biddle, in which he suggests he “confirm officially an informal agreement” between the FBI and the British, Canadian, and Mexican intelligence organizations.
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According to William Sullivan, who had to deal with his prejudices, “Hoover didn’t like the British, didn’t care for the French, hated the Dutch, and couldn’t stand the Australians.”
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Stanley Lovell observed, “Bill Donovan drove his security officers Weston Howland and Archbold van Beuren to the brink of despair. Bill Donovan would talk about the most secret affairs at a cocktail party or a dinner, according to our Chief of Security, and be furious if he were criticized for it.”
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According to the Dulles family biographer Leonard Mosley, the man “stayed in the Agency until the end of World War II,” while “he and Eleanor Dulles continued their thrice-weekly rendezvous for another fourteen years.” Although Allen Dulles learned of the affair from Donovan, he never told his sister that he knew about it. Nor, Mosley added, did he mention it to his brother Foster.
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Berle was also convinced that the BSC was tapping his phones. Ernest Cuneo, who was acting as liaison between the British and the White House, tried to persuade him otherwise, to which Berle responded, with a wry smile, “Would you like to hear the playback?”
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More than one account has implied that the death was not accidental. William Stevenson, in his book
A Man Called Intrepid,
states outright that the spy was “removed from circulation” by the BSC. According to Stevenson, the “BSC had its own disposal squads to handle such disagreeable duties. The normal formula was that the victim ‘has departed for Canada,’ a fate more final than it seemed when written on a police blotter.” Ernest Cuneo doubts there were any such murders. Had there been, he says, and had he, Hoover, or Roosevelt learned of them, the British would have been on the next ship home.
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Although most double-agent proposals were vetoed by Hoover, who much preferred the use of informants, one of the FBI’s most publicized cases involved the use of a double agent, William Sebold. Threatened with the death of his relatives in Germany, Sebold, a naturalized U.S. citizen, agreed to spy for the Germans, but instead went to the FBI. Setting up a shortwave radio station on Long Island, agents impersonating Sebold sent false information to Germany, while Sebold himself was used as bait to entrap other agents. The case became the basis for the movie
The House on 92nd Street.
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One wonders what the “Naval person”—Churchill’s code name for Roosevelt, a former assistant secretary of the Navy—would have concluded had he seen the full text of the Japanese questionnaire.
