by Tim Weiner
2. “We certainly picked some fine lemons”: Hoover’s notation on FBI radiogram, undated, attached to History of the SIS.
3. “the names of agents that he knew of”: Dallas Johnson interview, FBI Oral History Project (FBI/FBIOH).
4. “to be in a position”: Hoover to Watson, March 5 and 6, 1941, FDRL.
5. “the Bureau is marking time”: Hoover to Jackson, April 4, 1941.
6. “It appears almost certain”: This message and the following Japanese cables intercepted by Magic are reprinted in CI Reader, op. cit.
7. “central enemy intelligence organization”: Thomas F. Troy, Donovan and the CIA: A History of the Establishment of the Central Intelligence Agency (Frederick, Md.: University Publications of America, 1984), p. 59.
8. “the resultant super-Intelligence Agency”: Hoover, General Miles, and Admiral Kirk signed this “Report on Coordination of the Three Intelligence Services,” dated May 29, 1941, but transmitted to the War Department on June 5, 1941.
9. He taped the call: Transcript of telephone call, July 5, 1941, FBI, Nichols file, reprinted in From the Secret Files of J. Edgar Hoover, edited with commentary by Athan Theoharis (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1993), pp. 332–334. The call came after the president asked Astor to handle a very sensitive personal matter: FDR’s dissolute cousin Kermit, who was Astor’s close friend and President Teddy Roosevelt’s son, was on an alcoholic bender and had disappeared with a masseuse named Herta Peters; there was an off chance that the woman was a German spy. Astor handed this hot potato to the FBI.
10. “a movement to remove me”: Do Not File memo, Hoover to Tolson and Tamm, Sept. 23, 1941, From the Secret Files of J. Edgar Hoover, p. 339.
11. “He abhorred homosexuality”: DeLoach oral history, FBI/FBIOH.
12. “authority to collect and analyze”: Troy, Donovan and the CIA, pp. 419–423.
13. “You can imagine how relieved”: H. Montgomery Hyde, Room 3603: The Story of the British Intelligence Center in New York During World War II (New York: Farrar Straus, 1963), pp. 169ff.
14. “The President was greatly impressed”: Ibid.
13. LAW OF WAR
1. “It was illegal. It was burglary”: Chiles oral history, FBI/FBIOH.
2. “Nothing was said”: Francis Biddle, In Brief Authority (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1962), pp. 328ff.
3. In the fall of 1942: Details of the investigation were declassified by the National Archives and analyzed by Norman J. W. Goda of the Archives interagency working group on Nazi records. See Goda’s “Banking on Hitler: Chase National Bank and the Rückwanderer Mark Scheme,” in U.S. Intelligence and the Nazis, published by the National Archives Trust Fund Board.
4. “I do strongly recommend” and “I am most anxious and willing”: Hoover to Strong, Sept. 10, 1942; Administrative Files of the SIS.
5. “You must remember”: John Walsh oral history, FBI/FBIOH.
6. The civilians of the Radio Intelligence Division: George E. Sterling, “The U.S. Hunt for Axis Agent Radios.” Sterling’s work was printed in Studies in Intelligence, the Central Intelligence Agency’s in-house publication, vol. 4 (spring 1960); declassified circa 2007.
The heart of the FCC’s Radio Intelligence Division (RID) was made up of hundreds of civilians who ran a network built around twelve main monitoring stations, sixty smaller outposts, and ninety mobile units in the United States. Their job was to police the airwaves. The routine beat for the patrolman of the ether was to cruise the radio spectrum, checking the regular landmarks of transmissions, searching for strange signals, and alerting headquarters in Washington to hunt down enemy stations.
The RID had been picking up and tracking down the radio signals of the clandestine networks of German espionage in Latin America and the Caribbean since the spring of 1941. Over the next eight months, the division listened as the network spread to six nations, with three major stations in Brazil and a fourth in Chile, all in direct communication with the Abwehr in Hamburg. The targets of the German espionage were British and American troops, military aircraft and ships, and the establishment of agent networks throughout the United States. German U-boats were sinking British and American ships all over the Atlantic. British intelligence formed a close liaison with the RID and started schooling the Americans in German codes and ciphers.
On Jan. 15, 1942, five weeks after Pearl Harbor, the RID sent its best people to Brazil, Chile, Mexico, Paraguay, Cuba, and Martinique. They carried suitcase-sized mobile detection units for hunting down clandestine transmitters, whose locations had been fixed to within a few hundred yards by the radio police in the United States. The RID also sent squads to Colombia, Venezuela, Ecuador, Peru, Uruguay, and Haiti to work with the governments of those nations to establish monitoring networks.
On Feb. 11, 1942, RID monitoring stations in Miami, Pittsburgh, and Albuquerque picked up signals from Portugal: SAID THERE IS TO BE DISEMBARKMENT ENGLISH AMERICAN TROOPS DAKAR NEXT FIFTEEN DAYS. WHY NO REPORTS MOST URGENT. The Americans fixed the location of the transmitter outside Lisbon. British commandos took out the Portuguese station and its operators. In Chile, five months of hot pursuit by the radio detectives cleaned out the German spy ring and its transmitters. With the exception of Argentina, whose pro-German government stiff-armed the Americans, so it went throughout most of Latin America.
The Brazilian investigation was the crowning achievement.
When the RID detected a Nazi radio network in Brazil, “they had their monitoring equipment and they would find these clandestine radio signals,” the FBI’s John Walsh remembered. “Through triangulation they would locate where they were and they could keep moving in until they came close to it. At that point then the Bureau would make arrangements with the local authorities to have these people arrested.”
A case in point: an RID monitor in Laredo, Texas, picked up a coded message from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. It was a simple cipher and quickly broken: QUEEN MARY REPORTED OFF RECIFE BY STEAMSHIP CAMPEIRO AT 18:00 MIDDLE EUROPEAN TIME. The Queen Mary was carrying 10,000 American and Canadian troops to war. The Germans in Brazil were tracking her movement for their masters in Hamburg, who would relay her position to U-boats trying to sink her in the Atlantic.
In pursuit of the ship, the German Navy began unrestricted warfare within Brazil’s coastal waters. The RID’s chief in Brazil, felicitously named Robert Linx, already had mapped the Nazi network. He had fixed the locations of six Nazi radios in Rio, tracking them down with his portable directional finder, monitoring their broadcasts. Linx reported to the U.S. ambassador in Brazil. Hours before German U-boats started hunting the Queen Mary as she left the dock in Rio and headed for her home port on a newly altered route, the Brazilian police wrapped up the Axis spy ring, arresting 200 suspects and crushing the German intelligence effort.
7. “An Agent could not be expected”: History of the SIS, vol. 1, pp. 14ff.
14. THE MACHINE OF DETECTION
1. “a very likely source of information”: Hoover to Attorney General, Feb. 14, 1943, FBI, cited in Katherine A. S. Sibley, Red Spies in America: Stolen Secrets and the Dawn of the Cold War (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2004). Sibley’s book is the single best source, bar none, on the origins of Soviet espionage in America.
2. “It was obvious”: The transcript of the wiretap and the FBI’s summary of the conversation are reproduced and reliably reconstructed from fragments of declassified FBI documents cited in Red Spies in America and John Earl Haynes, Harvey Klehr, and Alexander Vassilev, Spies: The Rise and Fall of the KGB in America (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2009).
3. “like children lost in the woods”: Duggan’s quote comes from a 1940 KGB file cited in Haynes, Klehr, and Vassilev, Spies, p. 239.
4. “a human side of Edgar Hoover”: Biddle, In Brief Authority, pp. 258–259.
5. “a ‘custodial detention’ list of citizens”: Biddle to Assistant Attorney General Hugh Cox and Hoover, July 6, 1943, DOJ, cited in “The Scope of FBI Counterintelli
gence,” CI Reader, National Counterintelligence Executive, Director of National Intelligence, pp. 178–181.
6. “where revolutionary preachings are given”: Memo for the Director, Aug. 19, 1940, FBI, CI Reader, “Scope of FBI Domestic Intelligence.”
7. “opposed to the American way of life”: Hoover to M. F. McGuire, Assistant to the Attorney General, Aug. 21, 1940, FBI, CI Reader, “Scope of FBI Domestic Intelligence.”
8. “who may be dangerous”: Hoover to FBI Field Offices, “Dangerousness Classification,” Aug. 14, 1943, FBI/FOIA.
9. “key figures”: Security Index cards were supposed to be prepared “only on those individuals of the greatest importance to the Communist movement”; as of early 1946, after the list was cut back, there were 10,763 Security Index cards on “communists and members of the Nationalist Party of Puerto Rico.” D. M. Ladd to Hoover, Feb. 27, 1946, FBI, CI Reader, “The Custodial Detention Program.”
15. ORGANIZING THE WORLD
1. “the system that has worked so successfully”: Donovan to Clark, Aug. 29, 1945, FBI, collected in FRUS Intelligence, pp. 24–26.
2. “He was in possession”: Donald Shannon, oral history interview, Sept. 4, 2003, FBI/FBIOH.
3. “to be in a position”: Hoover to Watson, March 5, 1941, FDRL.
PART III • Cold War
16. NO GESTAPO
1. “the right to guide”: Churchill quoted in Raymond A. Callahan, Churchill: Retreat from Empire (Wilmington, Del.: SR Books, 1984), p. 185.
2. “The joint chiefs of staff”: The military was widely opposed to Donovan. The United States had three different and opposing teams of spies and secret agents out in the world as the Allies fought to deliver a death blow to Nazi Germany. One was Hoover’s. One was Donovan’s. And one belonged to the army intelligence chief, General George Veazey Strong.
The general’s service was code-named The Pond. Strong had created it shortly after taking his post as chief of army intelligence in the fall of 1942. Its orders were to uncover spying and subversion against the United States by its wartime allies, the British and the Soviets. “Its existence was not known,” Brigadier General Hayes Kroner said in secret postwar testimony at a closed congressional hearing; only a very few men, including “the President himself, who had to know by virtue of his approving certain operations, knew it existed.” The generals had put a highly unusual army officer, John “Frenchy” Grombach, in charge of The Pond. His orders were impressive: “He would not only institute a secret intelligence service, looking to the current war effort, but he would lay the foundation for a perpetual, a far-seeing, a far-distant, continuing secret intelligence service,” General Kroner testified. “That was the birth of high-level intelligence, secret intelligence operations in our government.”
The FBI knew Frenchy Grombach well. “As you know,” read a report circulated among Hoover’s top national security aides, “Colonel Grombach for the past five years has been handling ultra secret intelligence work for the Army and the White House.” The colonel long served as an FBI source on Communist influence inside American intelligence.
3. “their use as a secret intelligence agency”: Park Report, Rose A. Conway files, OSS/Donovan folder, HSTL; “drastic action”: Colonel Richard Park, Jr., Memorandum for the President, April 13, 1945, FBI/FOIA.
4. “I said, ‘What the hell is this?’ ”: Vaughan interview, in Ovid Demaris, The Director: An Oral Biography of J. Edgar Hoover (New York: Harper’s Magazine Press, 1975), p. 109.
5. “future communications along that line”: Vaughan to Hoover, April 23, 1945, HSTL.
6. “building up a Gestapo”: FRUS Intelligence, p. 4 (HST conversation with White House budget director Harold D. Smith, May 4, 1945).
7. “a dumb son of a bitch”: HST oral history quoted in Merle Miller, Plain Speaking: An Oral Biography of Harry S. Truman (New York: Berkley, 1974), p. 226.
8. Hoover had renewed his power: See Athan Theoharis, The FBI and American Democracy: A Brief Critical History (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2004). We know much of what we know about FBI wiretapping thanks to tireless work over three decades by Theoharis.
A Truman Library oral history given by Attorney General Tom Clark’s executive assistant H. Graham Morison—fascinating but unfortunately unverifiable—suggests that at least some wiretap authorizations were rejected during 1946 and 1947:
MORISON: … One of my most difficult tasks was those little slips—about just like this, not much larger than that—which would come in from J. Edgar Hoover for authority to wiretap.
Q: Requests from J. Edgar Hoover for wiretapping?
MORISON: Yes. I accumulated those damn things in my desk drawer until I had about fifty and then Edgar called the Attorney General and said, “I want to know why some fifty requests for wiretaps were not acted upon.”
He said, “Well, I guess Graham Morison has them. It is his job to first review them.”
So, he called and asked about them. I said, “Tom, you revere our Constitution; I know you do, I’ve talked to you about it. There is no authority in law and it is in contradiction of the civil rights of a free people to permit this invasion of their privacy.…” And he said, “Well, Edgar’s coming up. You have to carry the ball.”
I said, “I’ll be delighted to.”
So he came up and the Attorney General asked me to state my position to Hoover.… I said, “Mr. Hoover, about the requested wiretaps. You studied law, as I did. I have a great reverence for our Constitution, and as a lawyer, I am persuaded that you know and I know that we have absolutely no authority—however you may feel about it and despite your desire to know about the actions of citizens—to invade their privacy in peacetime. It makes a mockery out of our Constitution and as far as I’m concerned, I will not let you do it.”
And he said, “Well, Mr. Attorney General, what about you?”
Tom Clark replied, “Well, whatever he says, Edgar, I will follow.” … It’s a strange thing, but after this incident Tom said, “My God, I thought I would never see the day when somebody would ‘buck’ Edgar! He has walked over every Attorney General since Attorney General Stone.…”
And I said, “Well, blame it on me.”
He said, “That’s what I intend to do.” We never had any repercussions, but it ended the matter while I was there.
Q: Did you block those wiretaps?
MORISON: Every one of them.
Q: Were there no wiretaps by the FBI during the Truman administration?
MORISON: None that required the approval of the Attorney General were authorized while I was Executive Assistant in ’46 or ’47. There may have been some after I left that post.
9. “to confine the FBI”: FRUS Intelligence, p. 4 (HST conversations with White House budget director Smith, July 6 and Sept. 5, 1945).
10. “The future welfare of the United States”: Hoover to Clark, Aug. 29, 1945, FRUS Intelligence, pp. 24–26.
11. “Donovan’s plans”: Hoover to Clark, Sept. 6, 1945, FRUS Intelligence, pp. 31–32.
12. “FBI Plan for United States Secret World-Wide Intelligence Coverage”: undated but prepared on Sept. 21, 1945, FBI/FOIA. “The FBI plan provides for the joint operation in every country of the world of the Office of Military Intelligence, the Office of Naval Intelligence, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation,” Hoover’s presentation read. “Foreign and domestic intelligence are inseparable and constitute one field of operation,” he argued. “The Communist movement originated in Russia but operates in the United States. To follow these organizations access must be had to their origin and headquarters in foreign countries as well as to their activities in the United States.” Hoover’s intelligence reports for the White House in the summer of 1945 covered the subversive activities of Soviets, Germans, Japanese, Chinese, Filipinos, French, Italian, Koreans, Poles, Spaniards, Yugoslavs, and Puerto Ricans in the United States.
13. “I visited President Truman”: Chiles to Hoover, Oct. 2, 1945, FBI, FRUS Intelligence, pp.
55–56. In 1990, forty-five years after Hoover sent him to see Truman at the White House, Morton Chiles recorded a home video recounting the conversation: “Mr. Hoover sent me over to see President Truman … because it was very urgent that someone get to Mr. Truman before he signed an executive order [which would] put Wild Bill Donovan in charge of world-wide intelligence … [Truman] was very grateful that I had come over to brief him on this because he knew nothing of it. He said that Roosevelt never told him anything.” Chiles memoir, FBI/FBIOH.
14. “the President had stated flatly”: Minutes of the 168th Meeting of the Secretary of State’s Staff Committee, Nov. 20, 1945, FRUS Intelligence, pp. 118–120.
15. “The Americans are currently investigating”: “Bob” to Moscow Center, Nov. 20, 1945, KGB file obtained by Alexander Vassilev and reproduced in Haynes, Klehr, and Vassilev, Spies: The Rise and Fall of the KGB in America, p. 519.
16. “President Truman was not a man”: DeLoach oral history, FBI/FBIOH.
17. SHOWDOWN
1. “Completely unworkable”: Hoover to Attorney General, Jan. 15, 1946, FBI/FOIA; The attorney general objected to his blunt language: Ladd to Hoover, Subject: “Worldwide Intelligence,” Jan. 18, 1946, FBI/FOIA. President Truman’s aides deplored FDR’s decision to divide the world among the FBI, the army, and the navy. At the White House on Jan. 9, they warned him that the nation was “approaching the subject of intelligence in a most unintelligent fashion.” They proposed a new triad of power—the secretaries of war, state, and navy would be served by a new director of Central Intelligence. He would unify military intelligence and have dominion over the FBI. The Bureau would be demoted in the pantheon of American power. Harold D. Smith, “White House conference on intelligence activities,” Jan. 9, 1946, FRUS Intelligence, pp. 170–171.