Roosevelt’s intelligence priority had been set before the United States entered World War I. German saboteurs were suspected of blowing up the National Storage Plant on Black Tom Island in Jersey City, New Jersey, on July 30, 1916, a blast that killed seven men, injured thirty-five more, and destroyed millions of dollars’ worth of munitions intended for the Allies. FDR became obsessed by the threat of internal subversion, a concern that was to dominate his intelligence thinking for years. No rumor was too wild to enlist his attention. One ONI informant reported that a German-American colony in New Hampshire was plotting to acquire a plane to bomb the Navy yard at Portsmouth. Roosevelt sent out investigators. In October 1917 a friend returned from a visit to Block Island with a possible explanation as to why the battleship Texas had run aground there. Visibility at the time was an ample six hundred yards, his friend told FDR. A sailor who had earlier lived on Block Island with Germans suspected of spying had been the forward lookout on the Texas when she struck the beach. FDR ordered another investigation. ONI personnel, quickly grasping the boss’s prejudices, began feeding him what he wanted to hear. A typical report to the assistant secretary on the Krantz Manufacturing Company of Brooklyn noted, “The employees are almost German to a man. Every official has a German appearance … and [they] always converse in German.” With FDR’s fervent support, ONI hired hundreds of new investigators, the rapid expansion justified by threats, fanciful or hypothetical, against Navy installations.
The spy thriller atmosphere pleased Roosevelt to the point of apparently producing spy fiction. FDR later liked to tell how “the Secret Service found a document in the safe of the German consul in New York entitled: To Be Eliminated.” The first name on the list was Frank Polk, intelligence coordinator at the State Department. “Mine was the second,” Roosevelt would inform rapt listeners. The Secret Service, he maintained, then provided him with a revolver and holster. He wore the gun for only a few days, Roosevelt claimed, then left it in his desk drawer. No evidence supports any part of this story.
On July 9, 1918, the assistant secretary boarded the USS Dyer, the Navy’s newest destroyer, to witness the war in Europe. Upon his arrival in England, FDR met his first grownups in the espionage game and was suitably dazzled. He spent two hours in London with Admiral Sir Reginald Hall, director of Britain’s Naval Intelligence, known as Blinker for the rapid batting of his eyes, especially when he was excited. Blinker Hall had already influenced American history. It was Hall who created Room 40, the Royal Navy’s codebreaking arm, and it was Room 40 that decoded the Zimmerman telegram, which revealed a German plot to induce Mexico and Japan to go to war against the United States. Hall had leaked the telegram to Washington, significantly affecting President Wilson’s decision to enter the war. Dr. Walter Page, America’s ambassador to Great Britain, said of Hall: “Neither in fiction or fact can you find any such man to match him… . The man is a genius—a clear case of genius.”
Blinker Hall, in a wing-tipped collar, his head haloed in a ring of frizzy white hair, his eyes batting with anticipation, warmly admitted Roosevelt into the inner sanctum of British espionage. He had been describing German troop movements to his guest when he suddenly broke off and pointed across the room. “I am going to ask that youngster at the other end of the room to come over here,” Hall said. “I will not introduce him by name. I want you to ask him where he was twenty-four hours ago.” The officer approached, and Roosevelt put the question to him. He had been on enemy soil, inside Germany, “[I]n Kiel, sir,” he replied to an astonished FDR. Blinker Hall brushed the feat aside. He had spies passing back and forth between the German-Danish border and England practically every night, he said.
The young agent’s tale of derring-do was a charade concocted by Hall precisely to impress Roosevelt. Hall’s fiction was the first time, but not the last, in which British intelligence would employ ruses and outright fabrications to bend FDR to its ends—and succeed. In a journal FDR kept, he wrote of this encounter: “Their Intelligence Department is far more developed than ours and this is because it is a much more integral part of their Office of Operations.” This failing in U.S. naval intelligence, he added, “will be eliminated.” Indeed, by the end of the war, the ONI, led by Roosevelt, could boast an intelligence network spread across Europe, Latin America, and the Far East, employing hundreds of agents and informants.
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Vincent Astor had reentered Roosevelt’s life as a result of the disaster that struck in 1921, FDR’s crippling attack of polio. With Franklin rendered near helpless by the disease, his brother, James, went to Astor for a favor. Swimming had become part of Franklin’s long, painful, largely unsuccessful rehabilitation. Ferncliff, the thousand-acre Astor estate near Hyde Park, had an indoor heated pool. Vincent readily agreed to let Franklin use it. Astor now saw an FDR cruelly reduced from the suave charmer, the tall, confidently striding naval official, the avid golfer, and skilled sailor who had raced boats off Campobello Island. As Roosevelt began using the Astor pool, what previously had been mere acquaintance with Vincent ripened into deep friendship. After FDR had made a partial recovery from the near death of body and soul, and reentered politics, Astor came even more closely into his life. While the political views of the liberal Demo-crat and the multimillionaire real estate magnate, publisher, and sportsman were not always in alignment, Astor nevertheless generously backed FDR’s successful bids for governor of New York in 1928 and 1930 and made a then substantial $25,000 contribution to FDR’s 1932 presidential campaign.
The affection between the two men deepened. Franklin sent Vincent a pair of engraved cufflinks and called Astor “a dear and perfect host” after one Nourmahal voyage. Vincent sent Franklin a Chris Craft catalogue and asked him to pick the yacht he wanted. It would be Astor’s gift. After Roosevelt became president, Astor observed a decorum that FDR much appreciated. Whenever the President entered a room, Vincent always rose. Only when they were alone did he address FDR as “Franklin.” Otherwise, it was “Mr. President,” with “Sir” tacked on to his comments. Doubtless the friendship also worked because, like FDR, Astor was not consumed wholly by the pleasures of his class. Along with his yacht, plane, clubs, and café society pursuits, the man had a social conscience. Astor backed reform movements, underwrote scientific explorations, and stayed atop world affairs. It was this last passion of Astor’s that was to shape Roosevelt’s early involvement in espionage in the years before World War II.
As far back as 1927, Astor and a circle of friends had rented a nondescript apartment at 34 East Sixty-second Street in New York where they set up a mail drop and installed an unlisted telephone. The group met monthly in secret and traded gossip and informal intelligence. They had a name for their tight little society, The Room. Astor’s fellow members included Theodore Roosevelt’s son Kermit; Winthrop W. Aldrich, banker; David K. E. Bruce, sometime diplomat; Nelson Doubleday, publisher; William Rhinelander Stewart, philanthropist; Marshall Field, journalist; and fewer than a dozen other eminences.
Astor, a man with a large, square, roughly handsome head, his resemblance to an aging pug relieved only by his upper-class speech, presided over The Room. On returning from their frequent globe-trotting, over dinner, members reported the world leaders they had met with and what they had learned that was not to be found in newspapers. Distinguished figures were invited to speak to them, the polar explorer Commander Richard E. Byrd on one occasion, Somerset Maugham on another, not so much for his prominence as a novelist and playwright, but because Maugham had been a secret agent in World War I, a role for which The Room members felt a keen affinity. With their love of secrecy, shared confidences, and clandestine trappings, The Room might easily be dismissed as dilettante amateurs, grown men enjoying boys’ games of secret codes and invisible inks. To an extent this impression was accurate. Yet, their elevated professional and social positions did place valuable intelligence at their fingertips.
With the inauguration of FDR as president on March 4, 1933, The Room now had a friend
at the top and an eager consumer for its insider information. While Roosevelt was never formally a member of The Room, he knew them all through the Groton, Harvard, society, and professional fraternity. They were his people. For as much as FDR, in his public life, associated with the crusty, the earthy, the humbly born—political cronies like a Louis Howe, a Jim Farley, or an Ed Flynn—when the moment was purely social, he chose to spend it with his fellow patricians. Intelligent, trusted, patriotic friends like Vincent Astor could straddle both spheres, hence the dispatching of the Nourmahal on a secret mission to the Pacific.
By the mid-thirties, Japan’s belligerence was beginning to alarm FDR. In 1937, Japanese planes had sunk the American gunboat Panay in Chinese waters. Within a year, a militarist regime, led by Prince Fumimaro Konoye, took power. Japan, as it had since 1932, continued biting off pieces of China. By the end of 1938, the Japanese would occupy Nanking, Canton, and Hankow. Japan would quit the League of Nations and warn the United States to recognize its “New Order” in East Asia.
Though FDR had carried his keenness for espionage into the White House, a nation sunk in the slough of the Depression had scant resources to invest in spy games. Since money was short, overseas intelligence assignments tended to go to officers of independent means serving as military attachés. Dwight Eisenhower, then an Army lieutenant colonel, described the attachés as “… estimable, socially acceptable gentlemen; few knew the essentials of intelligence work. Results were almost completely negative and the situation was not helped by the custom of making long service as a military attaché, rather than ability, the essential qualification for appointment as head of the Intelligence Division in the War Department.” Since the military had few sources to obtain the information that Roosevelt wanted on Japan’s movements in the Pacific, he had turned to the loyal, resourceful, well-connected Vincent Astor.
On that morning of May 12, 1938, as FDR dictated his reply to Astor’s report from the Nourmahal, domestic problems were uppermost in his mind. He was trying to get a twenty-five-cent-an-hour minimum wage bill through Congress, fighting conservatives who opposed more money for public works, and hoping the Supreme Court would not strike down his latest bill to support farm prices, as it had the last one. Dealing with Astor’s spy mission offered a welcome diversion from the crushing, if more prosaic, burdens of his office.
Earlier in the year, FDR had written to Astor giving him his confidential instructions. While sailing the Nourmahal in the Pacific, the yachtsman was to seek out signs of a military buildup—any bases, ports, airfields, or fueling facilities in the Marshall Islands, then ruled by Japan under a League of Nations mandate. Astor’s cover story was to be that he and Kermit Roosevelt were conducting an oceanic expedition. Astor had written back assuring FDR that his instructions “could not be more clear.” Prior to Astor’s departure, FDR smoothed the mission’s way at his old haunt, the Navy Department. ONI loaned Astor a transmitter and receiver that could communicate on frequencies not available on the Nourmahal’s radio. In return, Astor would use the vessel’s sophisticated direction-finding apparatus to ferret out the location of Japanese radio stations for the Navy. Astor wrote to FDR that he preferred not to follow the President’s precaution that the Navy “keep a security watch on me,” which would only arouse suspicion. Besides, he had used his connections to obtain letters of introduction from Prince Konoye to remove any questions about his presence in the Marshalls. Nevertheless, Astor did arrange a contingency in the event that he needed help. A message to his New York office reading, “Many happy returns of the day,” meant that the Navy should start tracking the Nourmahal by radio. “My deportment in the Marshalls,” he assured the President, “will be perfect. When and if, however, there is something that deserves taking a chance—or if I notice increasing suspicion or resentment, I would like to be able to send a ‘standby’ message to Samoa and Hawaii.” The radioed word “automobile” would signal an emergency. Astor assured the President he would never sound this alarm “unless completely up against it.” He ended confidently, “I may be able to do a job in a way that the regular service never could.” On the eve of his departure, Astor wrote FDR once more, “I don’t want to make you jealous, but aren’t you a bit envious of my trip?” The mission was indeed right up FDR’s alley, skipping formal channels, employing his own agents, using secret signals, making it completely his baby, much the way he ran the administration.
Now, months later, the mission completed, Roosevelt finished dictating his reply to Astor’s report. Missy LeHand had to concentrate intently. The President spoke quickly, rarely at a loss for what he wanted to say. He complimented Astor on completing his assignment and concluded, “I will not say more until I see you.” FDR rarely committed anything to paper that he could handle face-to-face.
In truth, Astor’s report had proved a disappointment. Despite the promise from Prince Konoye, the Japanese had suddenly retracted permission for the yachtsman to visit the Marshall Islands. After that, despite his claim that he would not be afraid to take chances, Astor had not pushed hard. British intelligence agents in the Pacific had told him that their two attempts to penetrate the Marshalls had been thwarted. Astor meekly reported to FDR that had he tried where the British failed, he would have achieved only “a 100% probability of making serious trouble for you and the State and Navy Departments.”
He had subsequently reduced his mission to cruising the nearby Gilbert and Ellice Islands, where he did manage to intercept messages revealing Japanese actions in the Marshalls and pick up secondhand intelligence from the British. He learned that Eniwetok appeared to be the principal Japanese naval base in these islands and Bikini the secondary position. An airfield was under construction on Wotje and six submarines had been spotted in a nearby lagoon. It was, on the whole, thin stuff. The most encouraging personal intelligence Astor reported was that FDR’s worrisome distant cousin Kermit, a heavy drinker, had sipped “only beer and sherry” on the voyage “and is in the best shape in years.” Roosevelt had gratefully observed the change when Kermit had shown up at the White House to deliver Astor’s report.
While the Astor mission had provided the minutest of triumphs, FDR still nourished a preference for private channels and personal friends as his eyes and ears rather than technical codebreaking. Intelligence from the latter source was becoming available, thanks largely to a cryptanalyst who had entered the field from an unlikely start. William F. Friedman was a Cornell graduate in genetics who as a young man had been employed by a rich eccentric to apply analytic techniques to determine if Francis Bacon had written the dramas attributed to William Shakespeare. Literary puzzles led to code cracking, and the intense, bespectacled Friedman was hired by the Army, eventually heading the Signal Intelligence Service during the 1930s. A small but zealous Friedman team, led by Frank Rowlett, had for years been attacking the Japanese diplomatic cipher, designated Red, and by 1936, had broken the code. This breakthrough meant that Roosevelt had a foreign power’s secret diplomatic cables delivered directly to his desk. It meant that the President knew what Japanese ambassadors were reporting to Tokyo from Berlin, Rome, Moscow, and Washington at roughly the same time the Japanese foreign minister did. It meant that Roosevelt knew that Germany, Italy, and Japan were sealing their Axis partnership six months before the State Department picked up this intelligence from its sources.
At about the time that Astor completed his mission to the Marshalls, the Japanese began phasing out the Red code and using a new cipher, one the American cryptanalysts designated Purple. FDR could no longer read the emperor’s mail. Friedman’s codebreakers, however, were already mounting as vigorous an attack on Purple as they could, given their niggardly peacetime resources.
While the President cast an uneasy eye over the Pacific, he found the situation in Europe more immediately troubling. With the horrors of the last war only twenty years behind, Britain and France hoped against hope to perpetuate a tenuous peace. Unknown to the World War I Allies, Adolf Hitler, by 1937
, had already declared his intentions to his inner circle. At a secret Berlin meeting held on November 5, he had gathered the Nazi leadership, led by his heir apparent, Hermann Göring, to proclaim Germany’s destiny. Deutschland represented Europe’s purest folk, Hitler claimed. Yet its present borders were insufficient to provide the country’s eighty-five million people with the living standard they deserved. “The German future,” Hitler stated, was “therefore dependent exclusively on the solution of the need for living space.” And since Germany’s neighbors were unlikely to give up their soil willingly, Germany must take it. Within a year of this pronouncement, Hitler had annexed his native Austria, seized one slice of Czechoslovakia, and by March 1938, had swallowed the rest. Whatever public noises Hitler might make to appease Britain and France, Europe’s great states appeared to be on a collision course.
The Nazi military buildup had already thrown the arms restrictions imposed on Germany at Versailles after the last war onto the trash heap. The expansion included an increased espionage campaign against America, particularly to obtain its technology. The mission proved surprisingly simple, and in most cases, spies were not even necessary. American salesmen, throughout most of the thirties, pressed their “Made in the USA” products onto eager German customers—automatic pilots, gyro compasses, even control systems for anti-aircraft guns. Du Pont sold information on explosives to German munitions makers. Sperry Gyroscope licensed a German company to manufacture instruments enabling aircraft to fly blind. Pratt & Whitney sold the Germans aircraft engines. U.S. industry was willingly helping to bring the Wehrmacht and Luftwaffe to a state of readiness, making the efforts of German agents almost redundant.
Still, the President could presume that one of the most prized secrets in America’s aerial arsenal would remain inviolable. A plant located at 80 Lafayette Street in Manhattan produced a bombsight, the product of the genius of Carl L. Norden, believed to be the most accurate such instrument in the world. The boast among Army fliers was that the Norden sight could guide a bomb from a plane into a pickle barrel. Working at the plant as an inspector was a thirty-five-year-old German immigrant, Hermann W. Lang, blond, with a broad, pleasant face and a quiet, agreeable manner. On a Sunday afternoon in the fall of 1937, Lang met, at the home of a friend, forty-year-old Nikolaus Ritter, a major in the Abwehr, German military intelligence, posted to America. Lang’s loyalty to his homeland proved stronger than his affection for his adopted land. He unhesitatingly told Ritter about his work, how he had access to blueprints for an extraordinary bombing device. He was supposed to return the plans to a safe at the end of the day, but instead took them home. After his wife went to sleep, he set the blueprints on the kitchen table and traced them. Lang volunteered to give a copy to Ritter. When Ritter offered to pay, Lang looked hurt. “I want to do something for the Fatherland,” he said. “I want Germany to have this bombsight. If you gave me money I would throw it away. It would be dirty money.” Ritter was overjoyed. He had been in the United States less than two weeks and had scored an espionage coup. On November 30 a steward from the Hamburg-Amerika Line’s Reliance, who doubled as an Abwehr courier, limped aboard the ship, leaning on a furled umbrella. Rolled inside the umbrella were Lang’s partial plans for the Norden bombsight. Over succeeding months, Lang continued to supply the rest of the copied blueprints, smuggled aboard planes and ships between the pages of newspapers. Piece by piece the tracings found their way into the hands of Luftwaffe engineers, who constructed their own version of America’s air war secret.
Joseph E. Persico Page 3