by Master of Deceit: J. Edgar Hoover;America in the Age of Lies
As Hoover wanted the story to be told, the next few days showed his FBI at its best. Apparently George Dasch, leader of the Nazi crew, and his partner Ernest Berger got cold feet. The FBI Story says that “in their hearts they knew they were hunted men. They were well aware that death was the usual penalty for wartime espionage. . . . Their courage was oozing away.” To this day, the official FBI history website proposes that Dasch may have feared that the project would fail and wanted to confess before someone else did and he got caught. But Dasch himself later claimed that he had never intended to go through with the plot, that he was on America’s side all along. In the Hoover version, the closing noose of the ever-vigilant G-men scared an enemy into confessing. According to Dasch, he kept trying to turn himself in, and the FBI turned him away.
When Dasch called the New York office of the FBI and said he was a Nazi spy, the officer figured he was just another nut job wasting the Bureau’s time and answered, “Yesterday Napoleon called.” Dasch grabbed a suitcase crammed with packets of dollar bills and boarded the next train to Washington. If he could not get the New York office to take him seriously, he was going to find Hoover himself. But headquarters was no more receptive to a strange man claiming to be a spy than was New York. The leader of the German plot was shunted from one office to another until he was finally face-to-face with D. M. Ladd, the man who was leading the nationwide manhunt for the spy team. Alas, not even Ladd could believe Dasch’s wild story. Desperate to convince these thickheaded bureaucrats that he was who he said he was, Dasch “seized the suitcase that had been lying on the floor, tore its snaps, and dumped the contents on the desk.” Some eighty-four thousand dollars in cash cascaded over the wooden top and onto the floor.
The spy-who-never-wanted-to-be-a-spy finally managed to convince the agency-that-didn’t-want-to-listen that the most wanted man in America was sitting right in front of them. Over the next eight days, Dasch talked and talked and talked. Not only did he lead the FBI to another team of four Germans who had landed successfully in Florida; he also described the entire Nazi sabotage plot in great detail.
The eight Nazis who landed on Long Island. Dasch and Burger turned themselves in and were returned to Germany after the war.
By June 27, a headline in the New York Daily News broadcast the great news: “FBI Captures 8 German Agents Landed by Subs.” According to Hoover, and later accounts approved by him, teamwork, diligence, and science had triumphed. Dasch’s relentless determination to turn himself in was carefully erased — just as the story of Melvin Purvis, superagent, had disappeared from the record. Indeed, when the Germans were tried in a secret military court, they were all sentenced to death. Inexplicably, Dasch and Berger had their sentences reduced to thirty years’ hard labor. Only after the war, and against Hoover’s objections, did Dasch’s story come to light. In 1948, he was deported to Germany. He was a free man but was still treated as a spy, not a hero, by the American government.
Even though the story of the invincible FBI swooping in on the Nazi saboteurs was not true, it served a good purpose during the war. The rapid capture of the two submarine teams may well have convinced the Nazis to cancel their sabotage campaign. According to Dasch, they had planned to land terrorists by submarine every six weeks. But after the first failure, the Germans dropped the idea. As ever, Hoover won as much through the public image he created as by the actual accomplishments of his men.
Hoover believed in one basic strategy for dealing with threats: identify people who might be dangerous; detain them; project peace, calm, and control to the public at large. National security counted more than personal freedom — as long as that judgment was made on a case-by-case basis by a careful, informed, professional such as J. Edgar Hoover. Hoover asked his key officers to compile lists of Americans with “German, Italian, and Communist sympathies.” At a word, these citizens were to be swept into “custodial detention”— jailed on the authority of the FBI. Hoover decided who might be a threat — which meant that the FBI began to secretly investigate moderate black civil rights organizations such as the NAACP.
The detention list made perfect sense to Hoover: know your enemy and control him. But it was not legal. In 1943, a new attorney general (and thus technically his boss), Francis Biddle, explicitly told Hoover that. But the director was sure he was right. So while he ordered all his agents to drop the idea of custodial detention, he also instructed them to maintain the very same lists, now called the Security Index. Just like his Do Not File file, the Security Index was “strictly confidential.” The attorney general would see that Hoover had obeyed his order to get rid of lists of people to round up. He would not know that custodial detention had been replaced by an identical, though hidden, scheme under a different name.
The key to Hoover’s plan was information — like the file cards he had started back in 1919. But the very fact that he trusted his superior knowledge made him oppose the most infamous World War II detention program: the internment of Japanese Americans. “I thought the army was getting a bit hysterical,” he complained to the head of his San Francisco office. He believed there could be only “one efficient method of processing the Japanese for loyalty, which consists of individual, not mass, consideration.” Hoover wanted files with names, dates, and concrete allegations. Identifying, plucking out, and neutralizing specific individuals reflected the wisdom and efficiency of the FBI. Mass arrests were clumsy — that was the lesson of the Palmer raids. Hoover was ruthless, devious, and power hungry. He was not clumsy.
Hoover’s FBI was ahead of its time in crafting clear, readable graphs and charts that showed the challenges it faced and its striking record of success. As ever, Hoover was a master of impeccable presentation — here detailing the Bureau’s wartime work against Nazis in South America.
Hoover’s war was his career in miniature: he had real successes, propaganda successes, and illegal plots he hid from his superiors. He was always fighting on two fronts: to defeat real enemies and to shape how others saw the battle. “We must clean up democracy at home while watching for threats to it from abroad,” he warned. The country needed to toughen up because, he was sure, there was a secret danger looming: “the Communist virus.” Only a strong nation firm in its values could guard against the infection of evil. When the fighting war ended, Hoover would begin the real conflict — against his mirror image: the ruthless, devious, and power-hungry Communists.
FACT: On April 12, 1945, President Roosevelt, recently elected for an unprecedented fourth term, died. Two months earlier, even as his body was failing, he had met with Stalin and Prime Minister Winston Churchill of England to map out the borderlines of the postwar world. FDR’s death left Harry Truman as president, and those who had long mistrusted the Communists and despised FDR saw their opportunity.
FACT: From 1938 on, a congressional committee, the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC), held hearings attempting to show Communist influences in government, in Hollywood, and in the State Department. After the war ended and several former spies (including “Carl,” whose real name was Whittaker Chambers) confessed, HUAC hearings became a media circus and drew national attention.
THE INSIDE STORY: President Truman did not trust HUAC or the House Republicans who kept bringing up the “Reds in Washington” story. He believed they were trying to whip up fear in order to attack FDR’s legacy and as a cynical tool to win elections. But by 1947, he realized that he was on the wrong side of a popular issue. Truman announced that everyone who worked for the government would have to prove their loyalty by swearing an oath that they were not, and had never been, members of the Communist Party. It was legal to belong to the Communist Party, but if you did, the oath put you in a bind. Admit you were a Communist, and you might well be fired. Hide your past or your beliefs, and if Hoover or HUAC or anyone else found out, you would be prosecuted for lying.
An American atomic bomb being exploded on Bikini Island, in the Pacific, on July 25, 1946. Tests such as this were designed to s
how the power of the nations that had atomic weapons, but they also spread the mood of fear. The mushroom cloud the blasts produced became a symbol of the destruction human beings could now unleash.
Whittaker Chambers, at the microphone, was the former Communist code-named Carl who tried to turn himself in to both FDR’s key assistant and the FBI. In 1948, he publicly accused Alger Hiss, one of the planners of the United Nations and an honored public official during the New Deal, of having been a fellow Communist and even a fellow spy. Hiss was ultimately convicted of perjury, but for generations Americans continued to take sides for and against him. The photo shows Chambers testifying to the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC), whose hearings split the nation: were the Democrats protecting Communists, or were the Republicans trying to attack FDR’s record by linking him to Stalin’s Russia?
On August 29, 1949, the Soviet Union exploded its first atomic bomb. How could that be? Atomic science was America’s secret, created with the cooperation of England and Canada, our partners in freedom. We had beaten the Nazis to the bomb. But now the Soviets were our main threat. How had this genie gotten out of the bottle? Hoover was certain that spies had stolen key information. But who were they? The Soviets first learned that America was trying to create an atomic bomb in 1941. They immediately created a mission, code-named Enormous, to learn over the Americans’ shoulders. “Enormous” referred, of course, to the power of the bomb, but it also signaled the scale of the Soviet effort; they were desperate to know what the Americans were doing. Now Hoover needed to untangle the web of spies the Soviets had spun.
The FBI’s best agents scrambled to solve “the crime of the century.” The Bureau found one hint in a captured Nazi file, another in the confession of a captured Soviet agent. The trail pointed to Klaus Fuchs, a German atomic scientist living in England. Fuchs was first questioned in January of 1950, and by February he broke. Tracing his connections soon yielded a cluster of American atomic spies: Harry Gold, who had gathered information from Fuchs and given it to the Russians; David Greenglass, a skilled machinist who worked at a base where the American bomb was first tested; and Greenglass’s brother-in-law, Julius Rosenberg.
In the 1950s, radio was a key tool used to communicate across borders. The American government used Radio Free Europe to undermine the Soviets. Yet in America, young people were listening, late at night, to rock ’n’ roll, which made them question the segregated daylight world.
Rosenberg was a committed Communist who had eagerly passed on whatever information he could to the Soviets. He was married to David Greenglass’s sister, Ethel. In 1944, as luck would have it, Greenglass was assigned to the secret testing ground at Los Alamos, New Mexico. Julius and Ethel sat down with David’s wife, Ruth, and had an earnest conversation. Julius asked “how she felt about the Soviet Union and how deep in general did her Communist convictions go.” She “replied without hesitation that to her Socialism was the only hope of the world and the Soviet Union commanded her deepest admiration.”
There are two ways to see that most private conversation. Looking at the world in 1944 through Communist eyes, you saw Russians sacrificing untold millions of their citizens to defeat Hitler. You believed that only by joining the workers of the world together, by uniting the common people, could the hell of war lead to a better future. You saw an America whose own armies were racially segregated, that interned Japanese-American citizens; an England that clung to its empire and denied people of color in India, Africa, and the Caribbean the right to their own nations; and you saw these two nations developing a weapon of unimaginable power. You would believe it was your duty as a humanist, as a world citizen, to share what you knew with the Soviet Union, the nation devoted to the rights and dreams of the working people. Indeed, after the war, many of the scientists who developed the bomb argued that the technology was so dangerous, it should be controlled by an international body; it could not belong to any one nation. Julius and Ethel, Ruth and David, could all feel that they were merely ensuring that the capitalists, the imperialists, would not rule the earth. In their minds, they were idealists, not traitors.
If you looked at precisely that same kitchen-table conversation another way, you saw that the Soviets were the most heartless liars. They murdered millions of their own people, and used dreamers like Ruth as pawns. They wanted the bomb solely to shore up their own power. If the Rosenbergs and Greenglasses were idealists, they were also foolish. And they were citizens not of some vague world union of working people but of the United States. At best they were completely misguided. At worst they were vile traitors.
In June 1950, the FBI arrested Julius and Ethel. The national mood about their forthcoming trial was influenced by events outside America, where the shadows of evil seemed to be growing ever longer.
In October 1949, homegrown Communists completed their takeover of China. Earlier in the century, American missionaries had been hopeful that China would soon turn Christian. Now it had gone in completely the opposite direction — to atheistic Marxism. The very next year, war broke out in Korea. Communists in the north, supported by the Soviets, invaded the south, and America was taken by surprise. Why was Asia slipping away? Why was America, the winner of World War II, stumbling, facing new threats everywhere? The Rosenberg case suggested one clear answer: spies had infiltrated the government and were secretly handing this country over to their masters. The House Committee on Un-American Activities, it seemed to many, was not a political organ out to undermine Democrats. Rather, the Democrats were trying to cover up their blunders in being “soft” on Communism.
As ever, Hoover wanted information. If he could get Julius to talk, it would allow the FBI to “proceed against other individuals.” But Julius was not cooperating, so Hoover suggested a way to get him to open up. “Proceedings against his wife might serve as a lever in this matter.” To Hoover, the question was not whether Ethel was guilty but whether threatening her might get Julius to confess and name other conspirators. The tactic failed.
Both of the Rosenbergs insisted that they were innocent, which also meant they refused to answer questions about other spies. Their defiance turned the question of how to judge them into the most public debate. Should they be seen as idealists or traitors? As foolish or heartless? Were they equally guilty, or was Julius the spy and Ethel merely his silent and accommodating wife? What price should they pay for passing on information that may have been useful to the Soviets?
Just as the Hiss-Chambers confrontations split the public, so did the Rosenberg trial. Were they master-spy traitors whose crimes showed the need for ever more government vigilance or victims of anti-Semitic selective prosecution whose execution was a dangerous sign of the rise of American fascism?
The Rosenbergs were convicted of spying. As Judge Irving Kaufman debated what sentence to hand down, he asked for Hoover’s opinion. The director was oddly protective of Ethel. She was the mother of two small children, someone the public would rally around and seek to protect. But Judge Kaufman was determined to send the clearest and most absolute message. He ruled that the Rosenbergs had committed a crime “worse than murder.” “Millions more of innocent people,” he warned, “may pay the price of your treason.” And so he decided that they both must be executed, in the electric chair.
Hoover was right about one side of the public’s reaction to the death sentence. Artists, intellectuals, and leftists throughout the world protested for the Rosenbergs, for their young sons, and against the judge’s decision. But to another sector of the American public, the lineup of liberal defenders only made the Rosenbergs more suspect.
The Rosenbergs were slated to be executed on June 18, 1953. That night, as the defense tried its last appeals, hundreds of supporters kept vigil outside the White House. They were hoping to pressure President Eisenhower to let the Rosenbergs live. Just across Pennsylvania Avenue, “a tremendous crowd gathered, smelling blood. They booed and screamed at us.” At the moment when the Rosenbergs were to die, those siding
with the Rosenbergs put down their signs and “silently faced the White House. The crowd across the street shrieked with joy.”
Protesters gathering before traveling to the White House to urge President Eisenhower to stop the execution of the Rosenbergs. While it is not clear in this distant shot, the crowd was interracial. The conflict over the Rosenberg case — in which they were probably both guilty — was also a clash over what it meant to be an American.
Why would a crowd “shriek with joy” at the news that a couple has died? Ethel was accused of being a bad mother, because she had a job. Communists were often said to have loose sexual lives. They were seen as perverts, out to corrupt children. To fearful Americans in the early 1950s, Communism represented everything that endangered a simple, happy American way of life. Americans were scared of the Soviets and the Red Chinese, scared of the atomic bomb and what seemed like the real possibility of World War III, scared of the spies who seemed to have infiltrated Washington; some were scared of their own pasts, when they had marched in Communist parades or even condemned their neighbors for not supporting Communist causes.