A Man Called Intrepid

by William Stevenson

  Churchill broke in. “We must make an exception with Mr Roosevelt. To him, and to him alone, the truth should be confided. . . . Our daily intelligence summaries should be delivered to him through the FBI.”

  The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation, however, had not been in alliance with the regular British Secret Intelligence Service since the outbreak of war in Europe. The links were cut when politicians and the State Department became aware of them. If the news of restored British-FBI links should ever leak out, America’s neutrality would look distinctly bent, and every isolationist in that country would join a campaign blaming Roosevelt. Foreign intelligence in those days was a sinister concept to most Americans. The thought of being caught hand in glove with the British SIS would shake the diplomats, none more so than Ambassador Kennedy. Yet it was Kennedy’s Embassy that provided Stephenson with another argument for renewed covert American co-operation.

  Kennedy had just revisited the United States on a vacation that the British Foreign Office thought might be in preparation for a campaign to win the presidency from Roosevelt. The platform on which Kennedy would fight, the British suspected, would include a policy of staying out of the war. Kennedy had used his visit to tell his fellow Americans, in public statements, that Hitler would win the war against the British and that the conflict involved no moral issues. He was back now in London, conscious of British disapproval and a new instruction from the Foreign Office to all government departments warning them to confide nothing to the American Ambassador. This reversed the previous policy of giving senior Embassy staff confidential information in an effort to show good faith.

  On the day Stephenson left for his secret rendezvous with the President, Scotland Yard took the first reluctant step in an investigation into pro-Nazi activities by someone in the United States Embassy in London.

  Stephenson flew on a Canadian passport in a military aircraft by the hazardous northern route through Labrador to Montreal. This was the fastest passage, avoiding fuel stops near enemy observation points. He bypassed the usual formalities, escorted by agents of Canada’s MI-2, a branch of Military Intelligence, and plain-clothes men of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. He was in Washington within twenty-four hours of leaving London.

  What Stephenson had to say to the President was so confidential, so shattering in its implications, that nothing could be placed on the record without the risk of political chain reaction.

  The British government had examined the claim that the fission of uranium atoms had been achieved in Berlin by Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann. German interest in Norway’s heavy-water supplies was proof that Nazi funds must be supporting research into all the possible approaches to the control of a nuclear chain reaction. And in March 1940, the so-called Frisch-Peierls paper informed British defense chiefs that it was possible to construct an atomic bomb using the isotope U-235.

  Stephenson communicated British conclusions, based on independent investigations, to Roosevelt, who had been prepared for such news by men like Albert Einstein, who had written confidentially to the President six months earlier that “extremely powerful bombs of a new type” could be constructed. Einstein suggested that the President should appoint a personal aide to keep in touch with physicists working on chain reactions.

  That contact, Stephenson made it clear, would have to be extended to Britain, where atomic research was proceeding in London, Oxford, Cambridge, and Liverpool. If Nazi Germany captured these centers, Nazi progress toward a bomb might take a giant leap forward. British work in the field was thought to be well ahead of any competition, and there was no provision as yet for routine Anglo-American co-operation. The real danger, instead, was that Germany might reap the deadly harvest.

  This was the first bombshell. Stephenson had others. He told the President of the progress at Bletchley toward breaking the German code system. He laid bare the complexities of Britain’s wartime secret intelligence, the Baker Street Irregulars, the determination to wage war against Nazism no matter what deals might be considered by appeasement-minded Britons. Churchill was the leader of these men and women who would resist Hitler and muster secret armies in Europe, even within a Nazi-occupied Britain. The chief weapons were their resources of secret intelligence and guerrilla-warfare techniques.

  “Guerrillas?” asked the President.

  “They will get us back into Europe,” said Stephenson.

  “How?”

  Stephenson picked up an orange. “If I were a worm and wanted to get into this orange, I would go on walking around it until I found a hole. I might have to walk around it until the orange went rotten and a hole appeared. But I would get into this orange in the end—provided I did not starve first.”

  In that moment of inspiration, Stephenson hit upon a description of British strategy that Churchill would later use in reminding Americans that supplies were the key to that strategy. “If we do not starve first . . . we shall get back into Europe.”

  Roosevelt grasped the point at once on that day in early spring of 1940. The supplies, at that date, were required by British intelligence irregulars who were not yet sure who their leader would be, but who took their lead from Churchill.

  Within hours, a meeting had been arranged for Stephenson with John Edgar Hoover, the Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. With him, Stephenson discussed the investigation of the U.S. Embassy. This vexing matter would be solved discreetly, but it illustrated the need to re-establish British secret-intelligence liaison. Hoover said he could not sanction British employment of agents in the United States, if that was what Stephenson had in mind. The State Department, for one thing, insisted that any form of collaboration would infringe U.S. neutrality. “I cannot contravene this policy without direct presidential sanction.”

  “And if I get it?” asked Stephenson.

  The face hardened into the mold familiar to newspaper readers. “Then we’ll do business directly. Just myself and you. Nobody else gets in the act. Not State, not anyone.”

  Hoover was then forty-five years of age, a year older than Stephenson. It was the beginning of a long and stormy relationship. Hoover knew he was dealing with his equal when Stephenson told him: “You will be getting presidential sanction.”

  The President’s instructions followed hard on Stephenson’s words. In London, Stephenson reported to Churchill: “The President has laid down the secret ruling for the closest possible marriage between the FBI and British Intelligence. The fact that this cooperation was agreed upon is striking evidence of President Roosevelt’s clarity of vision. The fact that it has to be kept secret even from the State Department is a measure of the strength of American neutrality. It is an essential first step toward combatting enemy operations but it is insufficient to meet the demands of the situation. The Nazis in America are already well organized and well entrenched. They realise the extent of British dependence on American material aid, and so direct their subversive propaganda toward buttressing the wall of traditional isolationism by which the President is encompassed.”

  On Monday, May 20, 1940, Special Branch detectives took the grave decision to enter the Gloucester Place apartment of a twenty-eight-year-old diplomat of the U.S. Embassy, a cipher clerk named Tyler Gatewood Kent. Copies of 1,500 pieces of correspondence labeled “top secret” and cabled between Whitehall and the White House were recovered. They included the coded messages between Naval Person and POTUS, the gist of which had been in Hitler’s hands within days of transmission. When confronted, Kent claimed he wanted to thwart President Roosevelt’s “secret and unconstitutional plot with Churchill to sneak the United States into the war.”

  The case was broken with Roosevelt’s prior knowledge. He now had to wait for the results of the investigation. Ambassador Kennedy’s behavior had raised such serious doubts that Roosevelt felt he could with full justification now authorize “the closest possible marriage between the FBI and the British Secret Intelligence Service.” This, of course, had much wider implications, including the
contribution of German radio transmissions intercepted by U.S. monitors. Although these messages were in code, they greatly increased the volume of material put before Bletchley’s cryptanalysts, giving them more opportunities to detect recurrent names, call signs, and technical jargon from which deductions could be made. In this way the full range of Enigma codes might be uncovered. In return, it was understood that the British would share their findings with their American partner. The shotgun wedding brought the United States and Britain closer in the waging of secret warfare. But how had Joseph P. Kennedy landed in a web of suspicion?

  13

  German diplomatic dispatches had been intercepted and read by the small team in the British Government Code and Cipher School even before it moved to Bletchley. Among these dispatches were those of the German Ambassador to Italy. He seemed to be reporting matters that passed between the British Admiralty’s First Lord, Churchill, and President Roosevelt.

  So far as the eavesdroppers knew, Churchill and Roosevelt were strangers. It seemed that the German Ambassador must be faking inside knowledge, inventing spies and informers for whom he could claim expenses.

  The intercepts went to the British Foreign Office with other routine material. Nobody who saw the reports was aware of the Churchill-Roosevelt exchanges in the names of Naval Person and POTUS. They agreed that the resourceful gentleman in Rome was writing lucrative fiction.

  Then Stephenson saw the Rome reports while reading “recoveries” from low-grade German communications in codes already broken by the British. He checked them, hoping to find fresh clues to the Enigma system. He recognized the Rome intercepts to be fair summaries of what Churchill was confiding to Roosevelt. How could the German Ambassador in Italy possibly know?

  Stephenson launched an investigation as the snows of winter melted into the spring of 1940. The Rome intercepts seemed a bit remote to other security men in London, overburdened with crises at home. Stephenson persisted. Glancing over the record of United States Embassy activities, he saw that Churchill relied more and more on it for the transmission in State Department code of his messages to the President.

  Ambassador Kennedy seemed an odd go-between. He had been appointed to the plum London job in 1937. Ever since, he had drifted closer to Neville Chamberlain, and to notorious appeasers and members of the British aristocracy with pro-Nazi views. After Chamberlain’s surrender at Munich, Kennedy had even claimed “credit” for saving the peace by influencing Chamberlain to trust Hitler.

  In the last year of peace, Kennedy had announced that war was inevitable. Britain would inevitably suffer defeat. Churchill had tried to undo any harm caused by such statements. One way was to direct his correspondence with Roosevelt through the Embassy, in the hope that Kennedy might read and be thereby instructed. Another way was to talk with as many influential American visitors as possible, usually at private dinner parties where Churchill took the chair.

  Stephenson had been at one such affair when Walter Lippmann was the target.

  “Suppose Ambassador Kennedy is correct in his tragic utterances?” Churchill demanded. “I for one would lay down my life in combat rather than, in fear of defeat, surrender to the menace of these most sinister men. It will be for you, for the Americans, to preserve and to maintain the great heritage of the English-speaking peoples. It will be for you to think imperially, which means to think of something higher and more vast than one’s own national interests. . . .”

  Kennedy never could believe that such idealism was genuine. He later said to Churchill: “O for Christ’s sake, stop trying to make this a holy war—you’re fighting for your life as an Empire.” He had consistently explained away Germany’s step-by-step conquest of Europe. His conversations with the German Ambassador in London were reported almost verbatim back to Berlin. These dispatches, too, had been intercepted and decoded by the British, who learned with growing anger that he was telling the Germans how anxious Chamberlain was to reach a settlement, encouraging Hitler to ask for more. On June 15, 1938, the German Ambassador had telegraphed this version of Kennedy’s views on the subject of the Jews: “He said Germany was hurting her own cause, not so much because we want to get rid of the Jews but rather by the way we set out to accomplish this purpose with such a lot of noise. At home in Boston, for instance, Kennedy said there were clubs to which no Jews had been admitted in fifty years . . . people simply avoided making a fuss about it. He himself understood our policy on Jews completely.”

  The misgivings about Kennedy could not be conveyed safely to Prime Minister Chamberlain, who was impressed by reports of German invincibility. The Ambassador had even brought Charles Lindbergh to London with frightening stories of Germany’s overwhelming superiority in air power. Chamberlain listened. The Czech Minister in London, Jan Masaryk, recorded that Kennedy assured him there was no question of his country being “cut up or sold out,” just before German tanks moved into the rest of Czechoslovakia in March 1939. The New York Post reported that Kennedy was identified with “the Germanophile clique” and sprinkled his conversations with anti-Roosevelt, defeatist, and profascist comments. The Post reprinted an article by the London writer Claud Cockburn: “Kennedy goes so far as to insinuate that the democratic policy of the United States is a Jewish production.”

  Kennedy’s performance seemed incredible. Yet much of what he saw and heard in England led him to suppose that the leadership was sympathetic to German aspirations. Even Japan’s incursions into China were treated understandingly. The London Times ran a letter on its editorial page explaining a Japanese raid on a Shanghai suburb: “Such loss of life as has occurred among the Chinese civilian population (many of whom were soldiers in disguise) has been unavoidable or accidental, and, we are convinced, is regretted by no one more than the Japanese.”

  Kennedy had domestic political reasons, too, for taking the line he did. “He owes his position to the fact that he represents a Catholic, Irish, anti-English group in America which must not be offended if President Roosevelt is to be re-elected in November,” Stephenson noted. “Mr Kennedy therefore must exhibit the attitudes of the East Coast Irish, and isolationist groups loosely termed America Firsters.”

  America Firsters refused to be dragged into Europe’s wars by the perfidious British. The Chicago Tribune raised an old specter when it cautioned Kennedy against “playing the role of office-boy of empire” and reminded its readers of Walter Hines Page, the American Ambassador in London during World War I, accused by his enemies of betraying his country because he had helped the British to bring the United States into the conflict. “To do a Walter Hines Page” had become synonymous with being suckered by the British, and Ambassador Kennedy was very much aware of the danger to his own political ambitions of seeming to fall into that trap.

  A few days after the British declared war in September 1939, Kennedy had given a farewell dinner for his nine children before packing them off home. He toasted the Germans, who “would badly thrash the British.” Evidently someone who was there made a report, for it began a series of wartime accounts in the Foreign Office file labeled “Kennediana,” not to be opened for another thirty-five years. The file alleged that he was, in his utterances at least, a danger to Britain and a boost to Nazi morale. He joined his children in Boston the following Christmas and he seemed to go out of his way to predict disaster. When he returned to London in March 1940 he was linked with the appeasers, including the British Chancellor of the Exchequer, John Simon, who told Kennedy that he and his confreres would advocate peace but would be yelled down “by those warmongers around Churchill.” So long as men like Simon were in and Churchill was out, little could be done to change Kennedy’s defeatist influence.

  When Stephenson made his first secret journey to Washington, he could at first tell the President only that the communications with London were not secure. There was some kind of leak inside the United States Embassy. Beyond that, he could say nothing.

  “But in May 1940, Hitler forced the struggle between Churchill�
��s men and the appeasers into the open,” Stephenson noted later. “The Nazis launched sudden and savage attacks on Belgium and the Netherlands, making an end run around the French, who were still gazing placidly across the Rhine from the Maginot Line. The bulk of British fighting strength was in danger of being trapped in continental Europe. The support of the people for Churchill rose in a great swell of anger.”

  The nation turned to Churchill. He was the rebel whose political ambitions were curiously restrained. His wife, when asked before the war if he might become prime minister, had said: “Only if some great disaster were to sweep the country and no one could wish for that.”

  Stephenson continued: “It was the socialists who sensed disaster and put him in. The Labour Party Executive was prepared to join a coalition government, the traditional response to danger, but only if Churchill led it. Oddly enough, he continued to be mistaken for a diehard reactionary. Even dear Eleanor Roosevelt wrote that ‘he knows the day of traditional class leadership is over, but the old feeling ties him to the old way and down at the bottom he is fighting for that with courage and the best qualities that the old order produced.’ But Churchill knew well enough that the old order was changing and sought to use its best qualities to fight new dangers. The dictators fought with unfamiliar weapons; and not the least dangerous of these was their exploitation of democracy’s weaknesses, including a kind of innocent good will.”

  In Britain, the rebels against complacency swept aside those who were guilty of this innocent good will.

  “We got rid of the Better-Notters,” wrote Hugh Dalton, given his head as Minister of Economic Warfare. “We hired the War-Wagers just in time.”