Joseph E. Persico

by Roosevelt's Secret War: FDR;World War II Espionage

  Sam E. Woods was something of a good-time Charley assigned to the U.S. embassy in Berlin in 1940 as the commercial attaché. His job was to help American firms conduct business efficiently and profitably in Germany. William L. Shirer, in Berlin as a correspondent at the time, noted that Woods “seems to those of us who knew him and liked him the last man in the American Embassy in Berlin likely to have come by such crucial intelligence.” Genial Sam Woods, however, had a German friend with connections in government ministries, the Reichsbank, and the Nazi Party. His friend was a covert anti-Nazi, eager to pass along to the attaché intelligence about the regime he reluctantly served. They had worked out a system. Woods would reserve two seats at a movie theater and send one ticket to his friend, who would meet him there and pass along his latest secrets as they sat in the dark. In early August 1940, as the Germans were preparing to smash Britain from the air, as Operation Sea Lion was being organized for the invasion of England, when it was rumored that Hitler might invade Spain, with the Führer and Stalin joined in a peace pact that left Britain to fight Germany alone, Woods’s source passed along a scribbled note pointing in the opposite direction: Hitler and his generals were plotting the invasion of their presumed ally, the Soviet Union.

  Woods was no political seer. As Shirer put it, his “grasp of world politics and history was not striking.” Yet, he was sufficiently respectful of what he was learning to keep a file of the movie theater gleanings over the next five months. Then his informant gave him a Christmas present—precise details from a directive, dated December 18, describing Operation Barbarossa, Hitler’s plan for invading Russia. Woods concluded it was time to act.

  In early January 1941 the State Department informed the President that it had received a startling report from its Berlin embassy. The disbelieving secretary of state, Cordell Hull, had already asked J. Edgar Hoover to evaluate the information provided by Sam Woods. FBI agents checked the names Woods had mentioned in various German ministries and on the General Staff. They were, the bureau reported back, men in a position to know what was going on, and some were believed to be anti-Nazi. Woods’s intelligence appeared authentic.

  Roosevelt’s quandary now was how best to handle this information vis-à-vis the Soviet Union. FDR chose to be direct. He would simply have the American ambassador in Moscow, Laurence Steinhardt, inform Stalin. However, Steinhardt advised against this course. He was well aware that Stalin distrusted Churchill and Roosevelt. Britain and the United States had both sent troops to Russia in 1918–19, after the revolution, to try to strangle the Bolshevik regime in its cradle. The Soviet dictator was convinced that the capitalists would spread any canard to drive a wedge between him and his new ally, Germany. This partnership, he believed, would keep his country safe from attack while Hitler went about swallowing up the rest of Europe.

  Finally, on March 1, nearly two months after FDR had first seen Woods’s report, Sumner Welles was dispatched to sound the alarm to the Soviet ambassador in Washington, Konstantin Oumansky. An encounter with Oumansky was not something looked forward to with pleasure. The Russian’s background was in Soviet police work and capitalist-baiting journalism. His manner was universally characterized as boorish. Still, Welles did his duty and reported the impending danger to the Soviet Union. In describing the meeting he recalled, “Mr. Oumansky turned very white. He was silent for a moment and then merely said: ‘My government will be grateful for your confidence and I will inform it immediately of our conversation.’” What Oumansky actually did was to follow the Stalin line. He called Hans Thomsen, the chargé d’affaires at the Germany embassy, and told him that the Americans were spreading vicious rumors to undermine the friendship between their two countries.

  Reports of a German invasion, however, began to reach Moscow in a crescendo. Even before Welles’s warning, on February 18, Sir Stafford Cripps, Britain’s ambassador to Moscow, had held a press conference and declared that Germany would attack Russia before the end of June. On April 3, Churchill asked Cripps to deliver his personal note to Stalin warning of a German troop buildup in the East, information based on intercepted codes, the source, however, not revealed to Stalin. From Tokyo, the Soviets’ legendary spy, the German Richard Sorge, pinpointed the invasion date. The hard-drinking, womanizing Sorge, working undercover as a journalist, had the run of the German embassy, where he was treated like a fellow staff member and made privy to the choicest secrets. On May 15, Sorge cabled his Moscow controllers that the invasion would begin on June 22. The Soviets’ best source in Switzerland, a well-connected publisher, Rudolf Roessler, code-named Lucy, confirmed that date and, in addition, provided the Wehrmacht’s order of battle.

  On May 16, FDR had in hand a memorandum on the letterhead of “John Franklin Carter, 1210 National Press Building,” relaying a report from a Swedish member of parliament “who has a record of being 60% right … on all developments since Munich.” The Swede reported that millions of German troops were massing on the Soviet border, and “maps of Russia [were] being printed in huge quantities.” Carter’s source also predicted the invasion toward the end of June. “The Germans are reported confident that they can beat Russia in one or two months,” the source added. Secretary of War Stimson’s outlook was even bleaker. He predicted that Russia would surrender even before being attacked.

  The Soviet Union was the beating heart of world communism, as feared by most Americans as it was loathed by Churchill. Yet, the Prime Minister knew where Britain’s advantage lay. As the rumored invasion date approached, he told his dinner guests at Chequers—Anthony Eden, John Colville, his private secretary, and John Winant, the American ambassador who had replaced Joe Kennedy—what he intended. “Hitler was counting on enlisting capitalist and Right Wing sympathizers in this country and the U.S.A.,” Churchill said. But Hitler was wrong. If the anticipated attack did occur, “We should go all out to help Russia.” Winant now felt free to reveal earlier guidance he had received from FDR: Roosevelt would support “any statement Churchill might make welcoming Soviet Russia as an ally.” After dinner, with the other guests gone, Colville tweaked Churchill about the arch anti-Communist making favorable noises about the Soviet Union. It was on this occasion that Churchill made his memorable response: “Not at all. I have only one purpose, the destruction of Hitler, and my life is much simplified thereby. If Hitler invaded Hell I would make at least a favorable reference to the Devil in the House of Commons.”

  Over a hundred warnings of the pending invasion are estimated to have reached the Kremlin. Operation Barbarossa had become the worst-kept secret of the war. Why, when it appeared that every Moscow factory worker had heard of the threat, was it disregarded by Stalin? Whatever else he may have been, the Soviet leader was no naïf. As late as May 1941, Stalin addressed graduates of the Soviet military academies in the Kremlin. Almost certainly, he told them, there would be war with Germany by 1942, even possibly with the Soviet Union taking the initiative, since “Nazi Germany as the dominant power in Europe is not normal,” he warned. But the Red Army currently was not strong enough either to repel or launch an attack. Therefore, Russia had to try by diplomacy to stall German aggression. Besides, Stalin did not believe that Hitler was mad enough to start fighting Russia before he had defeated England and thus saddle himself with a two-front war. He did not deny that German armies were massing on his border. But that was only Hitler’s way of pressuring him to give in to Germany’s economic demands. All these reports that Hitler planned to invade, loot his country, enslave his people, and crush communism were capitalist provocations designed to goad him into a conflict against Germany while Russia was still unprepared. Then the British would make peace with Germany, and he would be left to fight the Nazis alone.

  On the night of June 21, a German soldier deserted to the Russian army and told his interrogators that an attack would take place at 3 A.M. the next morning. Within three hours Stalin had the report, but rejected it and supposedly ordered the bearer of the news shot. The invasion that FDR had kno
wn about for over five months began when the deserter said it would. Like the husband who is the last to know that his wife is faithless, Stalin was stunned by the invasion. As the depth of Hitler’s deceit and his country’s debacle sank in, Stalin went into a depression approaching a nervous breakdown. For several days, at the moment of its greatest peril, Russia was leaderless.

  *

  FDR had been the first major world leader to learn of the pending Nazi attack on Russia from the serendipitous source of Sam Woods in Berlin. At the same time, a much more systematic enterprise was extracting secrets for him from the other side of the globe. Until the spring of 1938, FDR had been able to read Japan’s diplomatic traffic between Tokyo and its embassies worldwide after American cryptanalysts broke the Japanese Red code. Then Japan switched to a new, thus far impenetrable code, labeled Purple. Deliveries to the White House stopped.

  On the afternoon of September 20, 1940, customary quiet prevailed at Arlington Hall, a former girls’ school in the northern Virginia suburbs where the Army had quartered its codebreaking Signal Intelligence Service. Frank B. Rowlett, a usually reserved, scholarly former schoolteacher, now working for SIS, suddenly let out a war whoop. “That’s it!” Rowlett shouted, jumping up and down. His two assistants, Robert O. Ferner and Albert W. Small, joined in the shouting and began dancing around the office. The elation among men who ordinarily spent their days in gnomelike absorption in their work was occasioned by the fact that, after eighteen months, they had broken Purple. The team celebrated this landmark in American espionage by sending out for bottles of Coca-Cola, which they downed, and then went back to their offices. Their superior, Major General Joseph Mauborgne, the Army’s chief signals officer, started referring to Rowlett and his team as “magicians” and the Japanese traffic they decrypted as “Magic.” Magic meant, once again, that the Tokyo foreign office might as well have placed FDR on its distribution list, since he could read what Japanese diplomats were telling each other almost as soon as they could.

  Rivalry between American Army and Navy cryptanalysts, however, was to produce a bizarre system for delivering Japan’s diplomatic secrets to the President. The flood of messages intercepted daily was too great to be handled by the Army alone. Thus, the naval codebreaking unit, OP-20-G, shared the workload. Each service had its own officer who decided which intercepts were sufficiently significant to be seen by the nation’s leaders. This judgment was made for the Army by Colonel Rufus S. Bratton of G-2 and for ONI by Lieutenant Commander Alwin D. Kramer. Distribution was limited to the President, the secretaries of state, war, and navy, the Army Chief of Staff, the director of military intelligence, the director of naval intelligence, and the chiefs of naval operations and war plans. Messages selected were delivered in locked pouches to these officials, each of whom had his own key. But who should deliver the pouch containing the cream of decrypts to the President, a task that would reflect prestige and credit on the service chosen? After protracted wrangling, the Army and Navy came up with a solution. In odd-numbered months, such as January, March, and May, his military aide would deliver Magic to the President, and in even-numbered months his naval aide would do so. No provision was made in this jerry rig for delivering Magic to the President in the evening or on Sundays. Intelligence that could determine war or peace was handled as a nine-to-five job.

  The inanity increased in July 1941 when Colonel Bratton noticed a copy of a Magic decrypt that the President’s aide Pa Watson had thrown into his wastebasket. Watson was a big, florid-faced, good-natured Virginian who had come to the White House as the President’s military aide. He now held one of the most difficult jobs in the administration, presidential secretary in charge of appointments. He determined who got to see FDR. Pa Watson was liked by all and underrated by some as a simple soul. He was, in fact, unusually astute and not above allowing others to underestimate him, since they would then lower their guard to his advantage. When Colonel Bratton informed the Army intelligence chief, General Sherman Miles, of Watson’s carelessness with the decrypt, Miles decided that Magic could no longer be entrusted to the White House. Throughout June, Roosevelt continued to receive Magic decrypts from his current naval aide, Captain John R. Beardall. But in July, an Army month, no decrypts appeared. FDR asked Beardall what had happened. Fearing to contradict General Miles’s order, the Navy thereafter worked out an arrangement under which Beardall could read the decrypts during an Army month and then summarize them for FDR; but he could not show the actual messages to the President of the United States.

  In spite of this triumph of red tape over sanity, the Magic channel began proving its worth. Decryption was analogous to seeing one’s opponent’s hand in a card game, rather than guessing at it. It was the equivalent of listening in on a telephone conversation, as contrasted to a hearsay report of it. Signal intelligence delivered exactly what an adversary was saying, unfiltered by any third party. A spy’s reporting could be twisted by prejudice or hidden agendas, or deliberately distorted by a double agent. Yet, signal intelligence had its limitations as well. The thousands of intercepted and decrypted messages yielded raw information, often unanalyzed and lacking context. But a spy’s report, at its best, could present intelligence filtered through analysis and placed in context. The recipients of the broken code or the spy’s report, however, could never be sure that they were receiving the virtues of one or the failings of the other.

  FDR retained his penchant for the melodramatic, for spies over electronic espionage. At roughly the same time that Rowlett and his crew were breaking Purple, Captain James Roosevelt, the President’s eldest son, who had entered the Marine Corps in 1940, was called to the White House. As he later described the occasion, “[F]ather summoned me for a secret mission.” Jimmy was to accompany an Army major, Gerald Thomas, on a trip through the Philippines, China, Burma, India, Iraq, Egypt, Crete, Palestine, and Africa. As far as Major Thomas knew, their mission was to report any military buildup and gauge the adequacy of U.S. supply lines to these places. But FDR had another assignment for Jimmy. Behind closed doors in his private study he told his son, “This must be completely confidential. The Congress, the press and the public would never approve my message, but I consider it critical to the morale of countries we must support.” Jimmy was to give ceremonial gifts to the leaders of the nations he visited, then take these people aside and deliver a confidential message from the President. They were to be told that while the United States was still officially neutral, Roosevelt “would do everything he could to help those who were at war” fighting the fascists. Jimmy was also to convey a pledge that would certainly have rattled isolationist Americans. He was to confide to his hosts FDR’s belief “that we might well be at war before long and that we then would pitch in with both hands to help them.” In effect, Jimmy was to tell these leaders, “Hang on until we get in.”

  The President had a final warning before his son’s departure: “If you speak publicly of it, I’ll deny it and disown you. If you get in any trouble, you’ll have to get out of it on your own. There will be times when you will leave Major Thomas and go off on your own to see who I want you to see. I can’t provide you government planes or anything like that … you’ll have to make your own arrangements as you go along. We can’t take the chance of having you communicate with me formally while you’re gone, but report to me the moment you return.” Codes snatched from the air were all well and good; but this was what FDR enjoyed masterminding, with Vincent Astor, John Franklin Carter, and now his son, secret capers sidestepping government channels.

  Secretary of War Stimson, now a convert to codebreaking, worried that the President failed to appreciate Magic adequately. On January 2, 1941, he asked Pa Watson for an appointment with FDR. He found Roosevelt still in bed at 10:30 A.M., working his way through a basket of pending business. He wanted the President to understand, he said, that Magic offered a window not only on what the Japanese were up to, but also on what was happening inside Germany. The Japanese ambassador to Berlin, Gen
eral Hiroshi Oshima, was close to Hitler, and proudly and thoroughly reported his conversations with the Führer to his superiors in the Tokyo foreign office through the Purple code. Of this conversation with FDR, Stimson later wrote: “First, I told him that he should read certain of the important reports which had come in from Berlin giving the summary which the Japanese ambassador there had made of the situation and others like it. He hadn’t read them.”

  FDR began giving greater attention to the Magic intercepts, and through them glimpsed the gulf between what Japan said publicly and what it was doing secretly. Five months after Purple had been broken, on February 14, 1941, Roosevelt welcomed the new Japanese ambassador to Washington, Admiral Kichisaburo Nomura, whom he had known since World War I. As old friends, the two men agreed that they should speak candidly to avert a collision between their nations. But when FDR read the intercepted instructions sent to Nomura by the Japanese foreign minister, Yosuke Matsuoka, he wondered how any honest exchange was possible. He described Matsuoka’s messages as “the product of a mind which is deeply disturbed… .”

  The Japanese had reason to believe that their code had been broken. Dr. Hans Thomsen, the German chargé d’affaires in Washington who had tried to fix the 1940 election, had a line into the State Department’s code room. According to the Magic rules, only the secretary, Cordell Hull, was to receive intercepts at State. Hull, however, shared this intelligence with at least six of his top subordinates. One of them, in turn, allowed four more officials in the Far Eastern Division to see the intercepts. With so many recipients, multiple copies had to be run off on a mimeograph machine in the code room. The room’s chief was Joseph P. Dugan, an isolationist. What Dugan saw of the Magic intercepts he discussed, even showed, to a like-minded friend. This friend, unknown to Dugan, was in Thomsen’s pay. Thus the German diplomat was able to cable Berlin, “As communicated to me by an absolutely reliable source, the State Department is in possession of the key to the Japanese coding system and is, therefore, able to decipher telegrams from Tokyo to Ambassador Nomura… .”