Joseph E. Persico

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

  That FDR tolerated what in retrospect seems such patent nonsense requires an understanding of the President’s own occasionally overheated imagination. In January, FDR received a letter from Lytle S. Adams of Irwin, Pennsylvania. Mr. Adams, of unspecified credentials, claimed that the Japanese had a phobic fear of bats. He urged the President to launch a surprise attack, dropping large numbers of bats over Japan, thus “frightening, demoralizing and exciting the prejudices of the people of the Japanese Empire.” The President sent Adams’s letter to Donovan with a note reading, “This man is not a nut. It sounds like a perfectly wild idea but is worth looking into.” Donovan seized upon the scheme, enlisting the participation of the curator of mammals at the American Museum of Natural History as well as the Army Air Corps. The bat mission was seriously pursued and given up only after the bats, in test flights, froze to death in the high altitudes required.

  John Ford, the movie director Donovan had recruited, described his new chief as “the sort of guy who thought nothing of parachuting into France, blowing up a bridge, pissing in Luftwaffe gas tanks, then dancing on the roof of the St. Regis hotel with a German spy.” The description would have tickled FDR. Chairbound himself, he loved vicarious flights of derring-do, stories of missions potent with danger and mystery. There was in Bill Donovan something of himself. If you are knocked down, if your schemes fall flat, if you are dead wrong, you get up, dust yourself off, and storm the next barricade.

  FDR’s initial admiration for Donovan and the adulation of the colonel by his subordinates did not extend to intelligence competitors, MID and ONI. Ever on guard against the man’s naked ambition, they managed to freeze Donovan out of the best intelligence. Wild Bill was not permitted to see Magic or Ultra.

  In the post–Pearl Harbor fear of fifth column subversion, Donovan reported to FDR that German saboteurs were about to descend on America’s shores, supported by U.S. bands of Nazi-style storm troopers. The President received a further warning from Donovan that Japanese soldiers disguised as civilians were mobilizing to move against San Diego. Both reports were taken seriously at a time when an underground shelter with a thick bombproof roof was being dug under the White House’s East Wing with room enough to accommodate a hundred officials, a time when the White House roof bristled with guns. Donovan next warned of an imminent Japanese air strike against Los Angeles. To strengthen the report’s credibility, he pointed out that the intelligence had come through the President’s son Jimmy, Donovan’s liaison with the Marine Corps. Jimmy had informed Donovan of a warning received from a COI agent traveling aboard a ship from Havana to Germany. On Pearl Harbor day, the agent had radioed a message, to his wife, reading, “Get out of Los Angeles and go back home.” “I interpreted this to mean,” Donovan told FDR, “that there would be an air attack on Los Angeles.” He had shared this information with General John L. DeWitt, chief of the Army’s West Coast command, and “General DeWitt placed the same interpretation on it.”

  Donovan also contributed to the mixed messages FDR was receiving about what to do with Japanese living on the West Coast, both the Nisei, American-born citizens of Japanese parentage, and the Issei, immigrants from Japan. On December 15, Donovan advised the President, “[T]here was no reason so far to suspect the loyalty of Japanese-American citizens.” The President received the same advice from John Franklin Carter. Months before Pearl Harbor, Carter’s man, Curtis B. Munson, had concluded that the Japanese in America “are more in danger from the whites than the other way around.” Munson, however, gave himself some cover. As for Hawaiians of Japanese descent, he reported, if the enemy fleet appeared off Hawaii, “doubtless great numbers of them would forget their American loyalties and shout ‘Banzai!’”

  After Pearl Harbor, the perception of disloyalty among Japanese Americans, if not the reality, grew rapidly. While Donovan and Carter were essentially reporting the loyalty of this group, Navy secretary Knox made a statement on December 15, carried by the major news services, that offered his version of the disaster of December 7: “I think the most effective fifth column work of the entire war was done in Hawaii… .” Pressure on FDR to do something to eliminate the perceived danger of the Japanese living on the West Coast and in Hawaii began to mount. California’s governor, Culbert Olson, the state’s attorney general, Earl Warren, later to be a liberal chief justice of the United States, and the West Coast Army chief, General DeWitt, urged the President to intern the Japanese. Supposed proof of Japanese sabotage included reports “that ground glass had been found in shrimp canned by Japanese workers and that Japanese saboteurs had sprayed overdoses of arsenic poison on vegetables … a beautiful field of flowers on the property of a Jap farmer near Ventura, California, had been plowed up because it seems the Jap was a fifth columnist and had grown his flowers in a way that when viewed from a plane formed an arrow pointing in the direction of the airport.” Where no evidence of sabotage surfaced, a perverse logic provided it anyway. General DeWitt concluded, “The very fact that no sabotage has taken place to date is a disturbing and confirming indication that such action will be taken.”

  Yet even FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, no civil libertarian or lover of minorities, saw through the calls for rounding up the Japanese. “The necessity for mass evacuation is based primarily upon public and political pressure rather than on factual data.” Hoover concluded, “Public hysteria and, in some instances, the comments of the press and radio announcers have resulted in a tremendous amount of pressure being brought to bear on Governor Olson and Earl Warren.” As late as February, Donovan forwarded to the President the opinion of General Ralph Van Deman, respected chief of military intelligence during World War I, that mass evacuation of the Japanese was unnecessary and “about the craziest proposition that I have heard of yet.”

  However, continuing bleak news from the Pacific did nothing to elevate tolerance for the Japanese in America. Before the first month of the war ended, Manila had surrendered to the enemy, American and Filipino troops were being driven down the Bataan peninsula, and the American garrison on Wake Island had been overcome. The President, with intelligence from his three major sources, Donovan, Hoover, and Carter, telling him that Japanese residents posed no credible threat, nevertheless ordered their internment. Reaching back to the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, he issued Executive Order 9066 on February 19, 1942, “to apprehend, restrain, secure and remove” presumably dangerous persons. As a consequence, over 114,000 men, women, and children of Japanese ancestry were uprooted and kept under armed guard in remote, barren locations that FDR himself described as “concentration camps.”

  Why? Partly, the answer lay in the President’s sincere and ingrained fear of internal subversion, however unfounded. Eleanor Roosevelt once observed to the writer John Gunther: “The President never ‘thinks’! He decides.” Francis Biddle, the attorney general, uncomfortable himself about internment, sensed how the President had made his decision. The two men had first known each other at Groton when Biddle had been a new boy and Roosevelt a sixth-former. The younger student had looked upon the older as a “magnificent but distant deity, whose splendor added to my shyness.” Over the years, Biddle had gained some insight into FDR’s singular thought processes. “I do not think he was much concerned with the gravity or implications of this step,” Biddle observed of the internment. “He was never theoretical about things. What must be done to defend the country must be done.” FDR was a politician before he was a statesman, who recognized that survival in the former role had to precede elevation to the latter. The near-irresistible public pressure on him, in a bruised and uncertain post–Pearl Harbor America, was to round up the Japanese, however unstatesman-like future historians might judge that act.

  The indiscriminate imprisonment of thousands of Japanese Americans was not lost on the enemy. A message intercepted from General Oshima, the Japanese ambassador in Berlin, to Foreign Minister Togo laid out a propaganda line to exploit the internment issue. “In the present great war,” Oshima noted, “the Uni
ted States has maltreated Japanese citizens, including American citizens of Japanese ancestry… . It is indeed evident that this war [for America] is not merely to annihilate Hitlerism but it is for the purpose of maintaining superiority of the white race… . In other words, it is a vast struggle between the white and colored races.”

  Only recently recognized, after more than half a century, is the treatment of two other ethnic targets of the Alien Enemies Act. Over 11,000 American residents of German ancestry were held in custody or moved inland during the war. Over 11,600 alien Italian and Italian Americans spent part of the war interned or relocated. However, a sharp difference distinguished the Germans and Italians from the Japanese. In the case of the former, some basis in law, however flimsy, was employed to declare an individual potentially dangerous. But the Japanese, including American citizens, were relocated en masse for a reason having nothing to do with their loyalty, but only for the color of their skin.

  The paranoia reached beyond U.S. borders. In one well-suppressed episode the President allowed the American military, abetted by the State and Justice Departments, to pressure sixteen Central and South American countries to round up Germans, Japanese, and Italians residing in their lands. The rationale was to “preserve the integrity and solidarity of the American continent” from “subversive activities.” Many of these people had lived in their adopted homelands for decades, often settling in the hinterlands. One German farmer, upon being arrested, inquired about the kaiser, who had been in power when he emigrated thirty years before. If the host countries were reluctant to hold these people in custody themselves, the United States intended to do the job for them. Some 2,800 Germans and 1,000 Japanese from Peru alone were among over 5,000 men, women, and children living in Latin America who were deported to two dozen camps in the United States.

  While catching any dangerous aliens or spies in these dragnets was purely accidental, the people detained did serve one purpose. As an Army directive put it, “These interned nationals are to be used for exchange with interned American civilian nationals,” tourists and businesspeople who had been trapped on enemy soil when the war broke out. Hundreds of interned Germans and Japanese were taken aboard ships, like the SS Gripsholm, to be, in effect, bartered for stranded Americans. Six such exchanges were conducted with Germany and two with Japan. Most of the internees were exchanged against their will. Among the Germans apprehended in Latin America, some bore names like Rosenbaum, Feldmann, Rothenthal, Stein, Goldmann, and Isenberg, Jews who were deported to Germany to an unknown fate.

  Chapter XII

  Intramural Spy Wars

  ON FEBRUARY 19, the day that FDR signed the executive order to intern Japanese on the West Coast, events on the East Coast seemed to justify his preoccupation with fifth column subversion. The French luxury liner Normandie, being refitted as a troop carrier, caught fire and capsized at a pier in New York Harbor. Robert Sherwood observed at the time, “[T]he long arm of the German saboteur had reached West 49th Street.” If the Normandie was, in fact, sabotaged, the disaster fell into Vincent Astor’s province. At the news that the ship was afire, the friend FDR had made his intelligence controller for the New York area sped to the Normandie. As Astor later reported to Roosevelt, “I do know the facts for I arrived aboard within ten minutes of the outbreak of the fire and remained there or in the immediate vicinity for most of the period up to the time she capsized twelve hours later.” Astor maintained that he had the solution to the Normandie’s destruction. Not saboteurs, but careless workmen cutting metal with acetylene torches had set the ship afire.

  The Normandie would prove to be Astor’s last assignment for FDR. A week later his cover was blown. Grace Tully told the President, “Vincent Astor telephoned me yesterday to say that the Journal American carried a story about his duties. He has no idea where they got their information but he said it had enough truth in it to be dangerous or harmful. He got hold of someone and had the story killed in the next editions.” That Astor could kill a story in a major New York daily with a phone call demonstrated his influence, but he was not immune to the machinations of rivals in the intelligence game. Who had leaked the damaging story to the Journal American? John Franklin Carter was a prime suspect. Four days after Pearl Harbor, Carter had complained to FDR that Astor failed to cooperate with him since “he does not know what I am supposed to be doing.” Further, Carter charged that Astor was wasting money and manpower by duplicating his work. Carter was a smart competitor. And while no proof exists that he leaked the story to the newspaper, whoever did so commenced the decline and fall of Vincent Astor. The grueling pressure, the constant conflict with the FBI, jealous Navy officers, and Carter began to tell. Astor was hospitalized and came out an exhausted man. He accepted his defeat in the intelligence realm, noting, “[T]he President gave his approval to my discontinuing this activity.” The gentleman-yachtsman amateur had been knocked out of the ring by tougher, shrewder players. Astor’s duties shifted to chartering fishing vessels for the Navy.

  By now, FDR was using Carter to pry into everything from the loyalty of high-ranking federal officials to the feasibility of jet engines. But Carter’s cover as a Washington columnist had created a dilemma for him. His desire for secrecy conflicted with his need to be recognized by government agencies with which he expected to deal. An encounter with Vannevar Bush, director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development and FDR’s chief science advisor, illustrated Carter’s quandary. In one of his casually tossed-off ideas, the President had asked Carter to evaluate a secret internal combustion engine being considered for the Navy. Carter had gone to Bush, whom he knew was heavily involved in the project. Instead of enlightening Carter, Bush had stiffed him. He told Carter, “I have no corresponding instruction from the President to enter into this matter now being considered by other organizations than my own. Will you kindly let me have a copy of your direction from the President?” Carter thereafter asked FDR to provide him with proof of his legitimacy. He drafted a “Dear Jack” letter to himself and asked Roosevelt to sign it. The letter read: “In order to facilitate the execution of your assigned duties and to assure you and your representatives the friendly cooperation of the other government services, you should establish contact with the heads of the Federal Bureaus, Departments and Agencies and with other intelligence services.” Carter told FDR that he needed this proof of his bona fides to “avoid embarrassment” in carrying out his intelligence role.

  The President told Grace Tully to inform Carter that the answer was no. “I think it is better for him to give his men credentials,” FDR advised. The rejection did not mean that Roosevelt was unhappy with the Carter operation, and the following January he agreed to raise Carter’s secret budget. But the President’s visceral resistance to committing anything to paper had again come into play. By refusing to sign the letter allowing Carter to snoop at will, FDR was merely saying, let someone else leave the fingerprints.

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  Early in 1942, Congress began debating H.R. 6296, a bill sponsored originally in the Senate by Kenneth McKellar, Democrat from Tennessee, which upon a casual reading seemed innocuous enough. Agents of foreign governments working in the United States were henceforth to register with the Justice Department rather than the State Department. However, the fine print in this legislation contained a requirement that was to ignite the hottest fight thus far in America’s secret warfare, not with an enemy but with an ally. Along with registering, foreign agents had to disclose the activities they were conducting in the United States, who was carrying them out, and how much was being spent for these purposes. The bill drew no distinction between friendly and unfriendly foreign powers. Bill Stephenson, as head of the New York–based intelligence front British Security Coordination, was aghast. As soon as he read the bill’s requirement that “all records, accounts, and propaganda material used by foreign agents would be liable to inspection by U.S. government authorities at any time,” he sped to Bill Donovan’s office. If the McKellar bill bec
ame law, he said, he was out of business and Donovan would be too, so close was their dependence on each other.

  Adolf Berle, given by FDR the job of coordinating the actions of all federal agencies with intelligence duties, took the opposite tack. He vigorously urged the President to approve the bill. Berle particularly resented the freewheeling Stephenson and his BSC operations in America. Knowing the President’s desire for close cooperation between U.S. and British intelligence operations, Berle had warily gone along with the deal allowing Stephenson’s people to use the FBI’s shortwave radio facilities for transmitting messages between the United States and London. In one month, August 1941, nearly seven hundred such messages had been sent. What galled Berle was that the British refused to give the FBI either the code or decoded versions of what they sent over an American circuit. To the FBI’s repeated requests for this information, Stephenson had replied piously that this circuit was also used for communications between the President, Churchill, and other high officials in England. Consequently, he could not possibly give “the code to anyone without first being sure it would meet with the approval of the President.”

  Berle suspected that Stephenson had Donovan in his back pocket. On one occasion he noted, “Though it is not possible to say so, Bill Donovan gets a good many of his ideas from the British.” He told his boss, Sumner Welles, “[T]he really active head of the intelligence section in Donovan’s group is Mr. Elliot, who was assistant to Mr. Stevenson [sic], the head of British intelligence here. In other words, Stevenson’s assistant in the British Intelligence is running Donovan’s Intelligence Service.”