by Larry Loftis
BUTTERFLIES AND CARNAGE
The man escorted Dusko off the ship and hustled him to a nearby beach house. His name was Colonel Walter Wren, head of the MI6 Trinidad station. He had been advised of Dusko’s coming, he said, and wanted to get a recap of Popov’s activities in Rio, particularly the operations of ALFREDO. Over lunch and drinks, Dusko recounted his entire agenda and the colonel saw him back to the ship.
When the Uruguay weighed anchor a few hours later, it did so with fewer persons on board than had been there upon arrival.
Several crew members disappeared on the stopover.
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As Dusko sat for dinner that night, he stared at a familiar site: butterflies. The Uruguay menu had an art deco design featuring prominently in the foreground two butterflies. Not long thereafter, he noticed a passenger carrying a butterfly serving tray. A unique souvenir, the item was spectacular: Set within an inlaid hardwood frame and beneath protective glass, hundreds of delicate butterfly wings were arranged in intricate, iridescent designs. Not long after that he saw a crew member with a similar tray. And then another.
Sleep would be fleeting, but his insomnia was just beginning.
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On December 7, Dusko remembered, the ship captain called everyone to the first-class lounge and announced that the Japanese had attacked Pearl Harbor. Dusko was elated. With the advance notice he had given the FBI, the Americans surely had vanquished the enemy. “I was very, very proud,” he later wrote, “that I had been able to give warning to the Americans four months in advance.” For once he had accomplished something totally unselfish, something unmotivated by business or lifestyle.
Cover of the dinner menu on 1941’s S.S. Uruguay.
Larry Loftis collection
Then came the reports that Pearl Harbor had been annihilated. Dusko was stunned. How was this possible? The Americans knew the Japanese were coming. They knew how they were coming—like Taranto—dive and torpedo bombers. Exactly as Jebsen’s investigation with von Gronau had suggested. Word then came that battleships had been sunk. Dusko was sick.
By the time it was over, the Japanese attack had killed 2,388 persons—roughly half sailors and marines aboard the Arizona—with another 1,178 wounded. Almost 400 sailors perished in an iron coffin when the Oklahoma capsized. Eighteen warships were put out of action: battleships, cruisers, destroyers, and auxiliary craft sunk or damaged beyond repair. Seventy-two fighter aircraft, forty-three bombers, and forty-six patrol planes were demolished. Airfields and installations—the very ones highlighted in Dusko’s questionnaire—crippled.
It was Taranto times ten.
The disaster devastated Dusko, miring him in a deep depression. All his efforts in the U.S. had been for naught, it seemed. Hell, all his efforts in espionage had been for naught. Thousands of American lives had been lost, needlessly. Naval superiority in the Pacific had shifted from America to Japan in a matter of hours. What had he done wrong? His questionnaire had to have been turned over to military intelligence. President Roosevelt had to have seen the information.
But FDR did not see Dusko’s information, at least not the part pertaining to Pearl Harbor. The true story would be buried for decades, entombed in boxes of secret files and obscured by shallow investigations. Soon after the disclosure of Dusko’s questionnaire by Masterman in 1972, Popov’s memoirs in 1974, and the declassification of Hoover’s September 3, 1941, letter to the President in 1975, however, scholars began to dig.
Pulitzer Prize–winning historian John Toland wrote to the FBI in 1978, he stated, requesting all information regarding potential foreknowledge of the Pearl Harbor attack. Receiving nothing, Toland wrote again on October 11, 1979, requesting documents pertaining to Hoover’s dealings with Popov. On January 10, 1980, he received from the FBI “750 pages of useless material.” A week later Toland wrote again. The FBI’s David Flanders responded February 4, Toland recalled, stating that the agency was still searching. Hearing no reply, Toland requested again on June 6. Nothing.
On January 25, 1981, Toland wrote to Flanders yet again. A Thomas Bresson of the FBI responded on February 4, stating that due to the volume of materials, more time was needed. On April 22 the FBI requested that Toland pay for copies, which he did, and the FBI sent him “yet another pile of almost useless material.” On March 11, 1982, when Toland’s book on Pearl Harbor was already printed and about to be published, he stated, “the FBI sent me 228 pages, which contained not one word of what I wanted.”
Finally, on March 17, 1983, five years after his initial request, the FBI contacted Toland, requested further payment for copies, and sent an additional 324 pages. Only one document in the batch, Toland wrote, revealed anything about the FBI’s handling of the Popov questionnaire—“a 4-page ‘laboratory report’ dated September 3, 1941, telling of the microdots and giving a translation of their contents. Most of the rest were denunciations by the FBI of Popov’s claims that he had warned the FBI of an imminent Japanese attack.”
As the FBI was sandbagging Toland, two Michigan State professors—John F. Bratzel and Leslie B. Rout, Jr.—were having similar problems. In a 1982 article for American Historical Review, they detailed their findings. Roger S. Young, FBI Assistant Director in Charge,* Bratzel and Rout wrote, communicated on November 13, 1981, that the only information the FBI sent to army and naval intelligence was a duplicate of that sent to the President. If this was true, the admission was monumental. Since what FDR received had all portions referring to Pearl Harbor deleted, the Military Intelligence Division and the Office of Naval Intelligence would have had no reason to link Hawaii with the questionnaire or microdots. Bratzel and Rout further stated that “neither the Naval Historical Center nor the military records section of the National Archives has been able to locate the letter of September 3 with its edited questionnaire. The full text of Popov’s [original] questionnaire still rests in the files of the FBI, where it has been for over forty years.”
On March 30, 1983, Roger Young sent to the American Historical Review what he claimed to be an FBI rebuttal to the Bratzel-Rout article. Notwithstanding his November 13 statement to the professors, Young wrote: “The FBI had sent similar communications to the assistant secretary of war and the undersecretary of the navy” and had been “in contact with both the military and naval intelligence offices concerning the substantive messages in the questionnaire.” As documentary evidence, Young included a memorandum dated September 30, 1941, from R. G. Fletcher to Charles Lanman, Dusko’s case officer, stating that the “questionnaire . . . had been paraphrased and furnished to the representatives of ONI and G-2 [MID] by Special Agent Thurston.”
The professors countered that the information “paraphrased and furnished” by Thurston, supposedly documented in an October 1, 1941, internal memo, was the special agent’s statement that he had met with Colonel J. T. Bissell of MID and “requested detailed information of the type indicated in the attached questionnaire.” [emphasis added] The attachment was not Popov’s questionnaire, Bratzel and Rout wrote, but a paraphrased and abbreviated version which dealt “solely with army matters, and only the first four of twenty lines refer to Hawaii, specifically the dispositions at ‘Wicham [sic] Field and Wheeler Field.’”
Young had provided a second document, the professors acknowledged—another file memo—as additional evidence. On October 20, 1941, over two months after Popov’s warning and delivery of his questionnaire, R. G. Fletcher had sent a memo to Mr. D. M. Ladd informing him that Special Agent Thurston “rephrased and discussed . . . the entire questionnaire furnished [by] Popov concerning Naval matters” with the ONI. The attachment was a shortened, paraphrased version of the questionnaire, “half of which deals with naval installations in Hawaii, including Pearl Harbor,” the professors admitted.
After reviewing the material, however, Bratzel and Rout concluded that Young’s argument and documents only solidified their point—“that J. Edgar Hoo
ver, Special Agent Thurston, and the other agents involved in handling Popov did not conclude from the contents of the double agent’s questionnaire that the Germans were showing an extraordinary interest in Hawaii and its defenses. . . . Instead of providing ONI and MID with the original questionnaire, the FBI contented itself with two paraphrases, one of which (that sent to NID) seriously obscured the document’s particular interest in Hawaii and Pearl Harbor. To our mind, not even the paraphrase sent to ONI carries the full force and impact of the orginal document with its repeated requests for information on and, if possible, sketches showing the ‘exact’ location of specific facilities at Pearl Harbor and in Hawaii.”
The Bratzel-Rout conclusion is bolstered by a number of looming questions. Why did J. Edgar Hoover conceal the Pearl Harbor references in what he sent to the President on September 3, 1941? Why did the FBI wait so long to begin communication with other agencies when the subject matter involved imminent national security? Further, the documents involved reveal significant delays running across the agency, from Hoover himself down to mid-level staffers. Dusko gave the questionnaire and his warning to Connelley and Lanman on August 18, 1941. Why did J. Edgar Hoover wait over two weeks before sending anything to FDR? Why did two months pass before FBI agents sent partial information to the ONI and the MID? Why did no one in the FBI send anyone the full questionnaire? Why did neither Popov’s personal warning nor Jebsen’s testimony regarding von Gronau and the Taranto investigation grace any memoranda or letters of the FBI? Why did Hoover lie about Popov and the “discovery” of the microdots in his Reader’s Digest article? Why do the FBI’s Popov files in the National Archives not contain a sample of the April 1946 Reader’s Digest or even a copy of Hoover’s article? Why the unrelenting FBI objection to releasing documents to Toland, Bratzel, and Rout?
To date, the FBI has addressed none of these questions.
Perhaps realizing the fragility of his refutation of Bratzel and Rout, Roger Young attempted to redirect the intelligence failure to the military: “It should also be pointed out,” he wrote, “that the report of the commission to investigate the Pearl Harbor disaster, headed by Associate Justice Owen J. Roberts, contains a wealth of detailed information on Japanese interest in Pearl Harbor available to military and naval officials well before December 7, 1941.”
It remains unclear whether Bratzel and Rout pointed out to Agent Young that the wealth of information contained in the Roberts Commission report did not include a single reference to Dusko Popov or the German questionnaire requesting information on Pearl Harbor.
The professors did point out, however, that it took the FBI eighteen months to produce the two memoranda cited.
Rear Admiral Edwin T. Layton, Pacific Fleet intelligence officer at the time of the Pearl Harbor attack, summarized the intelligence breakdown:
Hoover was to drop the ball completely when the British sent over to the United States their double agent known as Tricycle. . . . Hoover and his aides . . . failed to see any special significance in the [questionnaire] document. They were more concerned with claiming credit for uncovering the microdot technique. . . . Hoover did not communicate the entire Popov microdot document to either naval or army intelligence, despite a 1940 agreement by which the FBI pledged to cooperate with the military intelligence to counter Axis espionage. His failure represented another American fumble on the road to Pearl Harbor.
While Layton, like the FBI’s Young, had a vested interest in pointing blame elsewhere, former CIA Director William Casey had no dog in the fight. As a young OSS agent working with William Donovan in Washington during the war, and later as director of American intelligence, he was as close to the classified information as one could be without personal involvement. “Hoover had shown his total incompetence for sophisticated war-time intelligence activity early on,” Casey wrote in The Secret War Against Hitler. “His handling of the ‘Popov Affair’ might well have been a tip-off for his future legendary secretiveness and over-simplified way of thinking. Popov was a Yugoslav who . . . would prove one of the best and most effective double agents of the war. . . . Even when the Yugoslav gave Hoover a list of questions the Germans had asked him to answer, the FBI director did not react, although one of the questions asked for detailed information about installations and defenses at Pearl Harbor. Hoover failed to find this line inquiry important enough to pass on to the Army and Navy.”
J. Edgar Hoover’s December 15, 1941, memorandum regarding butterfly trays aboard the S.S. Uruguay.
National Archives and Records Administration
On December 15, 1941, the S.S. Uruguay steamed into the Port of New York. When the ship temporarily moored at quarantine, Charles Lanman boarded and began secretly shadowing Popov. Charlie watched from a distance, but before the ship docked at Pier 32 on North (Hudson) River, Dusko spotted him. Discreetly, he made his way over and whispered to Lanman that there were a number of butterfly trays aboard the ship, and that Charlie should not let them off. He would explain later, Dusko said.
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Butterfly tray from Rio’s Atelier Elizabeth (manufactured early 1940s). Workers in the German Embassy were removing the back panels and believed to be inserting secret messages.
Larry Loftis collection
Unknown to Popov, there was another FBI agent aboard the ship, H. G. Foster. Charlie slipped away and told Foster, who raced to Customs before the passengers disembarked. Per arrangement with Gregory O’Keefe, port collector of Customs, the FBI confiscated all trays found on the ship. The FBI men rushed the items to Rockefeller Center, where Sam Foxworth sent ten samples to Washington for inspection by the lab. Within hours, at 5:48 p.m., J. Edgar Hoover fired off a memo to not one, but three assistant directors, advising them that: “Mr. Popov told Mr. Foxworth that in the headquarters of German Intelligence in Brazil they are making Butterfly Trays, and Mr. Foxworth has some of them in his office studying them.”
The FBI, it turned out, had been tipped off in September on the possibility of secret messages being sent within butterfly trays, but inspection of four samples had revealed nothing; the Bureau had no leads or details as to which ship, which manufacturer, which trays, who was involved, or why. What Popov had seen in the Rio embassy—men disassembling the trays—confirmed that the Germans were apparently inserting coded messages inside the back panel, or within the butterflies themselves. Unknown to Dusko or the FBI, MI6 had removed the selected crew members in Trinidad for interrogation.
FBI Agent Lanman’s notation of the tray retailer—Atelier Elizabeth—from his December 24, 1941, memo.
National Archives and Records Administration
Atelier Elizabeth seal from the tray shown on page 130.
Larry Loftis collection.
In his report on Popov’s activities on December 24, 1941, Charles Lanman described the lab’s findings: All of the trays were purchased from the same business—Industria Brasileira Atelier Elizabeth, R. D. Gerardo, 44-1°, Rio de Janeiro.
The next day or so Dusko met with Foxworth to give him a rundown on Rio. Hearing of Popov’s discussion with Engels, Sam didn’t attach importance to the German questions about uranium, but expressed significant interest in the microdot apparatus and the Portuguese captain who would be shipping it to Canada. Since MI6 had instructed Dusko not to mention the Portuguese captain to the FBI, Dusko played dumb. Sitting back, he wrote in his memoirs, he suddenly changed the topic and asked Sam what had happened with Pearl Harbor. Foxworth feigned ignorance, but Dusko pressed: “Did everyone have a lapse of memory? A convenient lapse of memory? I brought you the warning four months ago. It would appear that nothing was done about it.”
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Foxworth glared at him as one who had crossed the line. “You had better learn,” he said, “to walk in step with us.”
Dusko returned a steely stare and the G-man glared back, unflinching.
After several moments, Foxworth fin
ally smiled. “Forget all that, Dusko. Searching for truth beyond your reach may be dangerous. It may stir up an idea in Mr. Hoover’s head.”
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BLOWN
Popov languished in his role as a quarantined leper. The FBI wouldn’t allow him to establish a network of double agents, which, after Pearl Harbor, was his primary mission. They didn’t want him dating Terry Richardson, or anyone else for that matter. His sole duty now was to sit in his apartment as flypaper to catch German spies. Anything else, it seemed, and he might “stir up an idea” in Hoover’s head.
Dusko brooded over Pearl Harbor and itched to get back in the game, yet he was stuck in unfamiliar territory—idleness. After seeing Sonja Henie in Sun Valley Serenade, he decided that if the Bureau wouldn’t let him do his job, he’d at least clear his mind on the German nickel. He booked a flight to snow-drenched Idaho.
Under the vision of Count Felix Schaffgotsch and industrialist Averell Harriman, the Sun Valley Resort had opened with great fanfare in 1936. Harriman spared no expense on the amenities, and Schaffgotsch brought in six world-class Austrian skiers to offer America’s first ski school. The resort also was the first to utilize a new invention—the chairlift. Within a year it was the favorite winter getaway for celebrities like Bing Crosby, Clark Gable, Errol Flynn, Lucille Ball, and Ernest Hemingway, who worked on For Whom the Bell Tolls at the lodge in 1939.
The distraction was helpful, but not the philosopher’s stone for which Dusko had hoped. He skied by day and partied by night, yet, amid glistening snow and giddy girls, his heart was in turmoil. “My family was in occupied territory,” he wrote, “my friends were under the bombs in London, Johnny’s neck was in the noose of an Abwehr uniform, and I could only rust in America at the whim of a despotic bureaucrat.” He knew he had to get back. He was having the time of his life, on and off the slopes, but the lives of his loved ones were hanging by a thin Nazi thread.