J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and the Secrets (48 page)

On January 29 Hoover briefed the president on the results of his investigation. The personnel on the presidential trains were specially chosen, their backgrounds and associations carefully checked, Hoover said. Besides, they had no reason to lie. The allegation that “Mr. Welles had propositioned a number of the train crew to have immoral relations with them” was, Hoover told FDR,
apparently true. Hoover also informed the president that it was his friend William Bullitt who was spreading the story and that he had told it to his enemy Senator Burton K. Wheeler, among others.”

The president did not ask the FBI director’s advice as to what he should do, nor did Hoover offer it. Although Welles had committed a felony, as the law then read, there was never any question of prosecuting him, according to Tamm. His agents had taken “statements” from the porters, not “signed affidavits,” as they would have had they been preparing a case for court. But there was concern, great concern, that Welles’s activities might make him susceptible to blackmail.
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Having heard the story from Bullitt, Secretary of State Hull called on the president and demanded that Welles be fired. But Eleanor intervened, saying that she was afraid that if he was dismissed, Welles might commit suicide. Attorney General Biddle also tried to discuss the matter with the president, but Roosevelt treated it rather lightly, remarking, “Well, he’s not doing it on government time, is he?”
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Apparently Roosevelt felt if he ignored the scandal, it would go away. But, when several months passed with no action, Bullitt forced the issue, himself calling on the president with a copy of the porter’s affidavit in hand. Roosevelt scanned it and admitted, “There is truth in the allegations.” But it wouldn’t happen again, the president assured Bullitt, for Welles now had a guardian who, posing as a bodyguard, was watching him night and day.

This didn’t satisfy Bullitt. He wanted Welles out immediately. His continued presence was ruining morale in the State Department. And what about the war effort? How would the fighting men feel if they learned that the number two man in the State Department was a criminal and sexual deviate? Ever arrogant, Bullitt then delivered his ultimatum: unless Welles was dismissed, he would under no circumstances consider taking another position in the State Department or the Foreign Service.
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This was apparently too much for FDR. Pleading illness, he signaled Pa Watson to usher Bullitt out and canceled his appointments for the rest of the day. Roosevelt later told Steve Early, “Poor Sumner may have been poisoned but he was not, like Bill, a poisoner.”
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To quiet Bullitt, however, Roosevelt sent him on a mission to Cairo, but on his return Bullitt tried to peddle the story to three of FDR’s arch-enemies: Eleanor “Cissy” Patterson, her brother Joseph Medill Patterson, and their cousin Colonel Robert R. McCormick, publishers, respectively, of the
Washington Times Herald,
the
New York Daily News,
and the
Chicago Tribune.
But much as they hated “that cripple in the White House,” as Cissy Patterson often referred to FDR, even they wouldn’t touch it.

On October 24, 1942, more than two years after the incident on the train, Secretary of State Hull arranged a secret meeting with J. Edgar Hoover in his suite at the Wardman Park Hotel. Stating that he knew the FBI had conducted an investigation of the Welles allegations, Hull asked to see the report. Although confirming that there was such a report, Hoover said he couldn’t show
it to him without presidential consent, which was not forthcoming. Hoover, of course, reported the meeting to the president.

Perhaps the timing was coincidental, but that same day Hoover also sent the president a memorandum on another secret meeting, this one of several top American Communist leaders at the New York home of Frederick Vanderbilt Field, during which Sumner Welles was discussed. According to Hoover’s informant, who reportedly was present, “Browder allegedly spoke disparagingly concerning Mr. Welles. He described Welles as inferior in intelligence to Party leaders and said that he could make a fool out of him at any time.”
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Did the Communists know of Welles’s homosexuality? There was no reference to it in the informant’s report, yet Browder’s odd remark raised that disquieting possibility. William Bullitt, for one, suspected that they did and that Welles was already a pawn of the Russians.

Having failed to convince the president that he should fire Welles, Hull and Bullitt now took the story to Senator Owen Brewster, Republican of Maine, hoping he could persuade the Truman committee, of which he was a member, to conduct an investigation. Brewster also approached Hoover, asking to see the report, but received the same refusal. Later, in discussing the Welles situation with Attorney General Biddle, Hoover noted that in both reported instances Welles had been intoxicated, and wondered aloud if a person could be so drunk he’d commit such an act, then completely obliterate it from his memory. Welles’s problem, Hoover told Biddle, was obviously a lack of self-control. It was an interesting observation.

Faced with the possibility of a congressional investigation on the eve of the 1944 election, Roosevelt finally realized that, much as he needed Welles, he would have to let him go. In August 1943, after a cover-up of nearly three years, the president requested and received Sumner Welles’s resignation; and J. Edgar Hoover added another fat folder to his Official/Confidential file.
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Under Secretary of State Sumner Welles hadn’t been fired when he’d exposed him, Hoover later told his aides, because “that old biddy Eleanor Roosevelt protected him.” And she’d protected him, the FBI director added, “because his softness toward Russia served the interests of the Communist party.”
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In addition to Wallace and Welles, the president also asked Hoover to investigate the wife of his most trusted adviser.

During his last years in office, Roosevelt became increasingly concerned
with press leaks. He was particularly incensed when personal White House conversations were quoted almost verbatim in Eleanor “Cissy” Patterson’s
Washington Times Herald.
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Obsessed with finding the source of the leaks, he had Hoover place Harry Hopkins’s wife under surveillance.

In 1942 Hopkins had married for the third time, taking as his wife Louise Macy, a former Paris editor of
Harper’s Bazaar.
For a time FDR seemed rather smitten with the new Mrs. Hopkins, who was not only quite beautiful but also had something of a reputation,
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and, much to Eleanor’s displeasure, he even persuaded the newlyweds to move into the White House. By 1944, however, Roosevelt’s appreciation had diminished, and, suspecting that it was Mrs. Hopkins who was leaking White House gossip to her friend Cissy Patterson, the president—with Harry Hopkins’s approval—asked Hoover to place her under both physical and technical surveillance.

Although the surveillance, which continued off and on through 1944 and the early part of 1945, failed to confirm Roosevelt’s suspicions, Hoover apparently felt the information worth keeping. Although ordered by the White House to destroy all copies of the surveillance reports, he saved one set, which he placed in two manila envelopes in Harry Hopkins’s own OC file.
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Although Hoover was fighting enemies on a dozen different fronts, his major adversary remained William “Wild Bill” Donovan.

In December 1943 the OSS chief—apparently without prior authorization from the White House, the State Department, or the Joint Chiefs of Staff—negotiated a secret agreement with Vyacheslav Molotov, Russia’s commissar of foreign affairs. Ostensibly to coordinate activities against the Germans, the OSS and the NKVD, the Soviet secret police, would exchange teams of agents, the OSS setting up a liaison office in Moscow and the NKVD one in Washington, D.C.

Although it took Hoover two months to learn of the plan—from “confidential but reliable” sources in the State Department, the Pentagon, and, undoubtedly, the OSS itself—once informed he moved quickly. On February 10, 1944, he fired off a “Dear Harry” letter, warning Hopkins that Donovan proposed to let Soviet spies roam freely in the United States. England had done much the same thing, he pointed out, and as a result “the history of the NKVD in Great Britain clearly showed that the fundamental purpose of its operations there was to surreptitiously obtain the official secrets of the British Government.”
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In a separate memo to Biddle, he brought the warning closer to home. Secret
agents of the NKVD were already operating in the United States, he reminded the attorney general, “attempting to obtain highly confidential information concerning War Department secrets.”
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As Biddle knew, Hoover was referring to the recent attempts of the American Communist Steve Nelson and NKVD agents to obtain classified information regarding the development of the atomic bomb, a plot which the FBI had discovered through wiretaps and other surveillances.

Alerted by Hoover, Admiral William Leahy and other members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff also protested to the president, and Roosevelt, who was growing more than a little disenchanged with Donovan’s tendency to act first and ask permission later, tabled the proposed OSS-NKVD exchange. It appeared J. Edgar Hoover had won yet another battle against his arch-rival.

Unknown to the FBI director, had he pursued the matter further, he would have uncovered information so damaging that Roosevelt might well have fired Donovan. For Wild Bill had jumped the gun. Long after Donovan’s death, the intelligence historian Anthony Cave Brown was given access to the former OSS chief’s private papers. There he learned that Donovan hadn’t waited for FDR’s approval. “Documents, special equipment, secret intelligence—all began to flow in considerable quantities from the OSS to the NKVD. Few categories of intelligence or equipment were withheld, and the United States sent expensive equipment such as miniature cameras, miniature microdotmanufacturing systems, and microfilming cameras and projectors—all of which were of use in the large-scale NKVD espionage operations then going on in the United States.”
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Thus far Hoover’s confrontations with Donovan were all skirmishes. The most important battle lay ahead. At stake was the control of U.S. intelligence.

Unlike the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Office of Naval Intelligence, and the Military Intelligence Division, the Office of Strategic Services was a temporary agency, set up for the duration of the war. In the fall of 1944, as the conflict in Europe appeared to be nearing its end, Donovan began pressuring the president for a directive establishing a postwar, worldwide intelligence organization. Had such an organization been in operation in 1941, Donovan argued, the United States would never have suffered the ignominious surprise attack on Pearl Harbor.

Coming just after a series of hearings on that debacle, which put most of the blame on the failures of military intelligence, Donovan’s idea found a receptive audience, and on October 31 Roosevelt asked the OSS chief to put his proposal in writing. Two weeks later, and one week after the president’s reelection, Donovan submitted his plan.

It went far beyond merely making his present organization permanent. Donovan envisioned a super, centralized intelligence agency, operating under the direct control of the president, with the Joint Chiefs of Staff—who now had oversight of the OSS—reduced to an advisory capacity. The head of the new organization—and there was no question who Donovan had in mind for this
position—would have unlimited access to the resources, files, and reports of all the other U.S. intelligence agencies, both military and civilian, but would be answerable only to the president.

Roosevelt sent the Joint Chiefs of Staff a copy of the memo for comment. The JCS, in turn, after classifying the report top secret, had fifteen numbered copies made and one sent to each of the U.S. intelligence agencies, including the FBI.

Opposition to the plan was led by Hoover’s frequent ally General George Veazey Strong, the former head of G-2, who was now in postwar planning. If possible, Strong hated Donovan almost as much as Hoover did. Just a year earlier Strong had nearly succeeded in persuading Roosevelt to remove Donovan and put the OSS under his command, and it was due largely to Strong’s objections that the OSS was denied access to most of the deciphered enemy message traffic obtained from the cryptographic breakthroughs of Ultra and Magic.

The military’s distrust of Donovan went back a long way. As early as April 1941 General Sherman Miles, Strong’s predecessor as head of G-2, had warned Army Chief of Staff George C. Marshall, “There is considerable reason to believe there is a movement on foot, fostered by Col. Donovan, to establish a super agency controlling
all
intelligence. This would mean that such an agency would collect, collate and possibly even evaluate all military intelligence which we now gather from foreign countries. From the point of view of the War Department, such a move would appear to be very disadvantageous, if not calamitous.”
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Miles’s suspicions had now proven to be prophecy, and his successors united to oppose Donovan’s plan. Appearing before the Joint Chiefs of Staff in late December, General Clayton Bissell, then head of G-2, warned that if the plan was adopted, Donovan, and Donovan alone, would decide what intelligence was shown to the president. “Such power in one man is not in the best interests of a democratic government,” Bissell told the JCS. “I think it is in the best interests of a dictatorship. I think it would be excellent for Germany, but I don’t think it fits in with the democratic set-up we have in this country, where you run things by checks and balances.”
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As was often true, Hoover did most of his fighting behind the scenes—in this instance supplying much of the ammunition Strong and the others used. He also continued to send the president, through Harry Hopkins, memo after memo citing OSS blunders. As Secretary of War Henry Stimson confided to his diary, Hoover “goes to the White House…and poisons the mind of the President.”
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