by Tim Weiner
Back in Moscow, he became the chief of Soviet intelligence operations against the United States.
A successful interrogation and prosecution of Ovakimian would have changed history. Not until the end of the decade did the FBI understand that he had served as the Soviet spy chief in New York and a leader of Soviet intelligence in North America since 1933; that he had established American espionage networks of safe houses, recruiters, and couriers; that his rings ran throughout the United States, Mexico, and Canada. Though Stalin’s purges had torn Soviet intelligence apart in the 1930s, Ovakimian had endured.
Nor was this the only lost chance to trace and trap the leaders of Soviet espionage in America. Shortly before his arrest, the FBI had trailed Ovakimian to a meeting with Jacob Golos, a middle-aged travel agent who promoted trips to Russia in the 1930s. Golos had been convicted of passport fraud and a foreign-registration act violation only fourteen months before; he had received a $500 fine and a suspended sentence. The FBI did not know, and would not know for years, that Golos was among the highest-ranking members of the Communist Party in America and a linchpin connecting Soviet intelligence to the American Communist underground.
Before he returned to Moscow, Ovakimian had been handing off control of his networks of American agents and couriers. Their names would be world-famous one day.
On May 5, 1941, the same day that the FBI arrested Ovakimian, the Japanese ambassador in Washington, Kichisaburo Nomura, an old friend of President Roosevelt’s, received a bulletin from the Foreign Ministry in Tokyo: “It appears almost certain that the United States government is reading your code messages.”
This startling intelligence came from the Germans. For six months, the army and the navy had been deciphering and decoding Japanese diplomatic cable traffic encrypted in a system called Purple. The intelligence derived from the decryptions was code-named Magic.
On May 20, the Japanese ambassador replied that he had discovered that the United States was indeed reading “some of our codes.” But he did not know which ones. Incautiously, and inexplicably, Japan continued to use the Purple system. The Magic decryptions went on. They made bone-chilling reading—for the very few Americans authorized to read them. Among those cleared for Magic were the president, the secretaries of war and state, and the chiefs of army and navy intelligence. Those not cleared included Rear Admiral Husband J. Kimmel, the commander of the Pacific Fleet; Lieutenant General Walter J. Short, the army commander in Hawaii; and J. Edgar Hoover.
The failure to analyze Magic and turn its secret information into a plan of action would prove fatal. Collecting intelligence was one thing. Coordinating it—connecting the dots—was quite another. The army did not tell the navy what it knew. The navy did not tell the army. Neither told Hoover.
FDR had said that he wanted the field of intelligence divided. It was, and so it would remain for many years.
By May 1941, Magic had revealed that the Japanese had started to create an elaborate intelligence network in the Western Hemisphere in anticipation of a global war. Orders from Tokyo to Washington commanded a nationwide effort to gather political, economic, and military intelligence using “U.S. citizens of foreign extraction (other than Japanese), aliens (other than Japanese), communists, Negroes, labor union members, and anti-Semites” with access to American government, scientific, manufacturing, and transportation centers.
“In the event of U.S. participation in the war, our intelligence set-up will be moved to Mexico, making that country the nerve center of our intelligence net,” the orders continued. “In anticipation of such an eventuality, set up facilities for a U.S.-Mexico international intelligence net … which will cover Brazil, Argentina, Chile, and Peru.” Reports flowing back to Tokyo from Japanese spies and secret agents in America during May 1941 covered the movement of American ships and planes over the Pacific, plans to infiltrate military manufacturing plants, and attempts to make spies out of second-generation Japanese Americans who served in the United States Army. By summer’s end, Tokyo was seeking intelligence on the correlation of American forces in the Pacific, including the location of American warships and aircraft carriers based at Pearl Harbor.
The FBI, the army, and the navy each possessed bits and pieces of this intelligence puzzle. No one put the pieces together. None of them foresaw an attack against American bases in the Pacific. Their eyes were fixed in the opposite direction.
On May 27, 1941, President Roosevelt declared an “unlimited national emergency,” based in great part on the threat of a Nazi attack on the Americas. He spoke from the White House, surrounded by ambassadors and ministers from throughout the Western Hemisphere.
“What we face is cold, hard fact,” the president said.
“The first and fundamental fact is that what started as a European war has developed, as the Nazis always intended it should develop, into a world war for world domination,” FDR continued. “It is unmistakably apparent to all of us that, unless the advance of Hitlerism is forcibly checked now, the Western Hemisphere will be within range of the Nazi weapons of destruction.” Nazi torpedoes were sinking merchant ships throughout the Atlantic Ocean. “Control or occupation by Nazi forces of any of the islands of the Atlantic,” FDR said, threatened “the ultimate safety of the continental United States itself.”
The president warned that Hitler could soon control “the island outposts of the New World—the Azores and Cape Verde Islands.” The Cape Verde islands were “seven hours’ distance from Brazil by bomber or troop-carrying planes,” and they lay along key shipping routes across the South Atlantic. “The war is approaching the brink of the Western Hemisphere itself,” he said. “It is coming very close to home.… The safety of American homes even in the center of this our own country has a very definite relationship to the continued safety of homes in Nova Scotia or Trinidad or Brazil.”
FDR could not have been more blunt: “I merely repeat what is already in the Nazi book of world conquest. They plan to treat the Latin American nations as they are now treating the Balkans. They plan then to strangle the United States of America.”
Hoover knew that a Nazi network was alive and well somewhere in Latin America, and that it could penetrate the United States unless the SIS succeeded in its mission. The need for intelligence on the Axis in the Western Hemisphere had never been more urgent. But success seemed unlikely for the men of the SIS.
Hoover’s agents abroad reported little except “rumors, etc.,” the secret history recounts. Those rumors came from “professional informants” who “could earn money by furnishing information of an intelligence nature. Their information was never investigated or checked for accuracy.” The con artists found the SIS men easy pickings: “Ordinarily they were shrewd enough to realize quite early in the game that they could increase their earnings and the sale price of their information, the more startling its nature.”
They became “so enthusiastic with regard to the money to be made from this sort of thing that they engaged in seeking out Americans and British on a somewhat wholesale basis, always striving to enlist new clients and new customers for their thriving trade.” It took months, sometimes years, to sort out fact from fiction, for “the information furnished by the sources was, of course, not always fictitious,” the secret history explains with the wisdom of hindsight. “As a matter of fact, the information was frequently based upon considerable truth. It was also upon occasion manufactured out of whole cloth and all kinds of forgeries, fraudulent enemy codes, etc., were being foisted off not only on Bureau representatives, but also on United States Military Attachés, United States Naval Attachés and other allied intelligence representatives in Latin America, including the British, in return for substantial payments of money.”
“I’LL WIRE MY RESIGNATION TONIGHT”
A similar scam heralded the arrival of William J. “Wild Bill” Donovan as America’s new intelligence majordomo.
They didn’t call him Wild Bill for nothing. Donovan had a hundred ideas a day, of whic
h ten might be brilliant. The president liked his derring-do. Like Roosevelt, he was an aficionado of foreign intelligence, enamored by espionage. He had wandered into the field of spying after a failed career in politics, and he was largely self-taught. But he thought himself an expert, and by American standards, he was.
He had been pushing the president hard to establish his own spy service. On June 10, 1941, Donovan had proposed that he take charge of a “central enemy intelligence organization” overseeing the FBI, army intelligence, and navy intelligence. He would mesh the machinery of American intelligence, get it humming, unify its work, synthesize its secrets, and report the results directly to the president.
FDR had sent him twice to London as an emissary. He had met with Prime Minister Churchill, British intelligence chief Stuart Menzies, and the British navy’s intelligence director, Rear Admiral John Godfrey. The British enthralled him (and they paid for his second trip). He sent a four-page report to his close friend and fellow Republican warhorse, the new secretary of the navy, Frank Knox, describing the British intelligence system, much as Hoover had done one month before, but in far more glowing words. Hoover had his own relationships with the British intelligence service, but he kept them at arm’s length. Donovan, by contrast, was being recruited by experts.
Donovan had reworked his intelligence plans at his home in New York, with strong and constant encouragement from William Stephenson, the British intelligence officer who ran American operations from an office in Rockefeller Center. Two British acquaintances looked over Donovan’s shoulder, making helpful suggestions: Admiral Godfrey and his aide, Commander Ian Fleming, later the creator of the most famous fictional spy of his generation, James Bond.
Donovan’s ambitions had the unusual effect of uniting the FBI, army intelligence, and navy intelligence: Hoover and his military counterparts stood foursquare against him. They signed a formal statement to the War Department calling Donovan’s idea a serious detriment to national security. They said “the resultant super-Intelligence Agency would be far too cumbersome and complicated.”
On July 5, 1941, Hoover’s rage over Donovan’s rise was recorded in a telephone conversation with Vincent Astor. Astor was still playing his role as “coordinator of intelligence” in New York and underwriting the undercover work of the SIS. He had criticized Hoover’s work in Latin America, having heard the scuttlebutt from South America.
Hoover thought Astor and Donovan wanted to overthrow him. He taped the call:
HOOVER: About this idea of having a new Director come into the Bureau … I think as you probably know this job doesn’t mean that much to me anyway.
ASTOR: Why, sure it does, Edgar. You’ve got as good a job as there is—
HOOVER: And it’s a terrible headache and if anybody wants it … they can have it merely for the asking because I am not very keen about it anyway.
ASTOR: Well, Edgar, I don’t think you should talk about giving up your job just at a time—the situation of—the country is in now—
HOOVER: Right. That’s the only thing that has held me … If they want Colonel Donovan to come in or they want you to come in … Hell, I’ll wire my resignation tonight if that’s the way the President feels about it.… It doesn’t make one damn bit of difference to me.… The job doesn’t mean enough to me.
Hoover had been in genuine fear for his job for months. He had made enemies in high places.
The first lady, Eleanor Roosevelt, was outraged when the FBI began checking the political background of her social secretary, Edith Helm. She wrote a personal letter to Hoover: “This type of investigation seems to me to smack too much of the Gestapo methods.”
Members of Roosevelt’s cabinet were unnerved after the FBI ruined Undersecretary of State Sumner Welles, FDR’s favorite foreign-policy man and a leading architect of his Latin America strategies. The Bureau had conducted a lengthy investigation into his homosexuality, revealed in full when Welles, intoxicated, tried to fellate a Pullman porter on a passenger train.
Hoover’s reputation was founded in great part on the power of his secret surveillance. People respected him, but some simply feared him, and a fair number despised him. Hoover knew it.
Hoover told his right-hand man at the FBI, Clyde Tolson, that there was “a movement to remove me as Director.” He was right: Donovan was a force behind it. Donovan and Hoover had hated one another heartily since 1924, when Donovan briefly served as Hoover’s superior at the Justice Department. Hoover had fought him at Justice, successfully opposed Donovan’s subsequent bid to become attorney general, and decried the idea of any secret intelligence service under Donovan’s command.
Hoover believed that Donovan was a dishonest and dangerous man, and he spread rumors that Donovan was a Communist sympathizer. Donovan believed that Hoover was a failure at foreign intelligence, and he spread rumors that Hoover was a secret homosexual.
Hoover had been the subject of those rumors since at least 1937—the year that the Bureau began its long-running efforts to root out homosexuals in government. The innuendo is probably the most famous aspect of Hoover’s life today.
The one thing everyone seems to know about Hoover is that he had sexual relations with his constant companion Clyde Tolson. The idea was imprinted in the public mind long ago, in a book by a British journalist that included indelible descriptions of Hoover in drag. It would be fascinating if it were true. But it is almost surely false. The allegation rests on third-hand hearsay from highly unreliable sources. Not a shred of evidence supports the notion that Hoover ever had sex with Tolson or with any other human being. They were personally and professionally inseparable, Hoover left Tolson his worldly possessions in his will, and there are photographs of the two men together that can be read as revealing human feelings deeper than fondness. One of Hoover’s biographers called their relationship a sexless marriage, and perhaps that was close to the truth. But no one who knew Hoover personally or professionally believed anything beyond that.
“He abhorred homosexuality,” said Cartha “Deke” DeLoach, a loyal Hoover lieutenant for many years. “That’s why so many homosexuals were dismissed by the Bureau.” If Hoover was himself a repressed homosexual whose secret frustrations soured into fury against his enemies, his inner rages were known to no one.
“I HAVE IN MY POSSESSION A SECRET MAP”
Hoover did not lose his job, nor did he lose his nerve to fight Donovan. But on July 11, 1941, the president named Wild Bill the national “Coordinator of Information,” giving him “authority to collect and analyze” any and all intelligence bearing on national security. Having divided the field of American intelligence, FDR now fragmented it.
The British intelligence officer William Stephenson cabled London: “You can imagine how relieved I am after months of battle and jockeying in Washington that our man is in position.” His choice of words bears attention. British intelligence did regard Donovan as their man, and it used him in pursuit of its highest goal in the desperate months of 1941: to get the United States into the war.
“I have in my possession a secret map made in Germany by Hitler’s government—by the planners of the new world order,” the president announced in a nationally broadcast speech on October 27, 1941. “It is a map of South America and a part of Central America, as Hitler proposes to reorganize it. Today in this area there are fourteen separate countries. The geographical experts of Berlin, however, have ruthlessly obliterated all existing boundary lines; and have divided South America into five vassal states, bringing the whole continent under their domination. And they have also so arranged it that the territory of one of these new puppet states includes the Republic of Panama and our great life line—the Panama Canal.”
“That is his plan,” FDR said. “This map makes clear the Nazi design not only against South America but against the United States itself.”
The president got the secret map from Wild Bill Donovan. Donovan got it from his good friend Bill Stephenson, the British station chief in New Yor
k. And what was the source of the secret map? One of Stephenson’s top lieutenants, H. Montgomery Hyde, claimed it had been purloined by British intelligence from a courier of the German embassy in Rio de Janeiro. “The President was greatly impressed,” Hyde wrote. “The discovery of the map was convincing proof of Germany’s intentions in Latin America and came as a considerable shock to all good citizens of the United States.” But it was a fake, manufactured by British intelligence. The ploy, calculated to help draw the United States into the war in Europe, remained a secret for decades.
The President had fractured the field of intelligence. One result was a false map of the world. Another was surprise attack.
13
LAW OF WAR
WHEN JAPAN ATTACKED the United States at Pearl Harbor on Sunday, December 7, 1941, Hoover had his war plans ready. His agents had been gathering intelligence on political suspects in America for months.
The new attorney general, Francis Biddle, started signing orders for the detention of 3,846 German, Italian, and Japanese aliens. Hoover and his men already had started rounding up hundreds of people deemed most dangerous, warrants be damned. They had identified the suspects by any means necessary, including black-bag jobs. FBI agent Morton Chiles had broken into the apartment of a suspected German sympathizer, stolen his address book, and then fled in a hurry when the suspect returned home. Chiles dropped it into a mailbox; the post office turned it over to the FBI the next day.