J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and the Secrets

by Curt Gentry

  The article itself was something of a masterpiece in deception. It made no mention of Popov; gave full credit for the discovery to an anonymous technician in the FBI Lab; and stated that the initial microdot had been found “on the front of [an] envelope,” apparently in an attempt to disguise the fact that the FBI was opening mail, both foreign and domestic, under a special program which, with only brief interruptions, continued until as late as July 1966.45

  But Hoover wasn’t exaggerating the importance of the microdot. One of the first microdot messages the FBI obtained from the British censors in Bermuda included questions about the American atomic energy program.

  Unknown to Popov, the FBI already had other evidence indicating Japan was especially interested in Hawaii. In the spring of 1941 the British had intercepted a report from a German agent codenamed Konrad to a “Mr. Smith of China,” which included exact details of the defense of the Hawaiian Islands, plus maps and photographs, notably of Pearl Harbor. Konrad wrote, “This will be of interest mostly to our yellow allies.”46

  Coupled with the Konrad report, Popov’s Japanese questionnaire—and his instructions that it was of the highest priority—should have set off warning bells at FBI headquarters, but apparently it didn’t. Although the FBI was able to determine that “Mr. Smith of China” was a mail route used by German agents, it was initially unable to determine the identity of Konrad.

  However, on the evening of March 18, 1941, a man crossing Broadway at Times Square, in New York City, was knocked down by a taxi, then run over by a second vehicle. Never regaining consciousness, he died in the hospital the next day.* On a tip from the manager of the Taft Hotel, where the man had been staying, the FBI confiscated his luggage, which contained letters and other evidence indicating that he had been a Nazi agent. Helped by the British, but thanks mostly to the hard work of its own agents, the FBI was able to round up a whole Abwehr network, probably the largest then operating in the United States. The FBI also learned that the accident victim was one Ulrich von der Osten, a captain in German intelligence. Spy master of the ring, von der Osten used several codenames, including Konrad.

  Considering the dates, it’s possible the Abwehr gave Popov the Japanese assignment after Konrad’s intercepted report on Hawaii failed to arrive. It’s also possible that the espionage network Popov was to establish was meant to replace von der Osten’s, which, after his death and the subsequent arrests, the Abwehr knew had been “blown.”

  J. Edgar Hoover did not see it this way. He distrusted double agents. Although he sometimes authorized their use,* he did so reluctantly. Who could be sure that, having turned once, they wouldn’t turn again?

  He also strongly disapproved of Popov’s sybaritic life-style. If it was ever revealed that Popov had been working for the FBI, the potential for “embarrassing the Bureau” would be tremendous.

  From distrusting Popov, it was apparently only a small step to distrusting the intelligence he carried, although it was supported by other information the Bureau already possessed. That the British believed Popov’s intelligence to be authentic was not, for J. Edgar Hoover, a convincing argument.

  Also, the FBI probably received hundreds of reports on enemy intentions, many of them contradictory, inaccurate, or simply bogus.

  Still, it is difficult to explain what Hoover then did. He did nothing. He didn’t warn the president that two German agents had been ordered to study the defenses of Pearl Harbor for the Japanese, and that the last had been told it was “of the highest priority,” indicating that a time factor was involved. Nor did he inform Roosevelt of the Japanese naval inspection tour.

  He did send him—as one of several enclosures to his September 3, 1941, letter in which he claimed credit for the discovery of the microdot—a partial translation of the Japanese questionnaire; but he omitted in its entirety the section on Hawaii, including all the specific inquiries regarding Pearl Harbor.†

  As far as Dusko Popov was concerned, his mission to the United States was a near-disaster. Not only did the FBI fail to utilize his unique situation and talents—Popov believed, perhaps rightly, that had he been able to set up his phony network, the FBI would have been able to control and direct all German espionage in the United States for the duration of the war—the Bureau also withheld the funds Popov received from the Abwehr, nearly arrested his German contact (which would have exposed his double role to the Germans and ended his usefulness to the British), and threatened to charge him with violating the Mann Act after he took an unmarried female to Florida.

  At Hoover’s insistence, the British yanked Dusko Popov. He wasn’t unhappy about leaving. The trip had, he felt, been a waste of time. With one extraordinarily important exception.

  When the Japanese launched their “surprise” attack on Pearl Harbor, Popov knew, the United States would be ready and waiting.

  * * *

  *Yet Attorney General Biddle approved a November 1941 request to wiretap the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce, even though he noted the organization had “no record of espionage at this time.”17

  *The Smith Act, named after Representative Howard W. Smith of Virginia, required the registration and fingerprinting of aliens and made it unlawful to belong to any organization advocating the overthrow of the U.S. government. The first federal law to sanction guilt by association, it passed with little publicity or floor debate, since most thought it concerned only the fingerprinting of aliens.

  †Although the Bridges case went to the U.S. Supreme Court twice, the Court both times deciding in his favor, not until 1955 did the Justice Department announce that it had given up its long fight to deport Bridges, and this came only after a federal district judge ruled that the government had failed to prove that Bridges was a Communist or that he had concealed that fact when he was naturalized. Another three years passed, however, before Bridges was granted a U.S. passport. Even then Hoover didn’t give up. FBI agents were still monitoring Bridges’s activities, and reporting them to the director, as late as 1972, the year Hoover died.

  *Technically, this was a “bug” rather than a “tap,” since the agents hadn’t tapped the phone lines but had planted a microphone in the telephone box in Bridges’s room. The distinction was rather important since, hypothetically, a wiretap would have required the attorney general’s permission and Biddle hadn’t given it.

  †Many years later, one of the two agents, Evelle Younger, was elected attorney general of the state of California. During his campaign, Younger, the Republican candidate, often referred to his five years of distinguished service with the FBI, greatly amusing the retired ILWU president, who, though he shared the joke with his friends, did not publicize it, since he was by then himself a registered Republican.

  *On June 24, 1940—in an attempt to end the bureaucratic infighting between the FBI, MID, ONI, and State Department—President Roosevelt had issued a directive assigning all foreign-intelligence responsibilities in the Western Hemisphere to a newly created unit, the Special Intelligence Service (SIS) of the FBI.

  MID, ONI, and State were more or less given the rest of the world. All were expected to share their intelligence findings, but often didn’t.

  The SIS for the most part consisted of the 150 agents Hoover mentioned hiring in his November 1939 appearance before the House Appropriations Subcommittee. Picked for their linguistic abilities and other skills, this elite cadre was specially trained and then sent to Mexico, Central America, South America, the Caribbean, and Canada, where it established close liaisons with the intelligence officials of those countries.

  After the war a number of these agents resigned from the Bureau and became “Hoover’s spies” in the CIA.

  *This is borne out by a December 22, 1941, memo to the president from Attorney General Francis Biddle, in which he suggests he “confirm officially an informal agreement” between the FBI and the British, Canadian, and Mexican intelligence organizations.26

  †According to William Sullivan, who had to deal with his prejudic
es, “Hoover didn’t like the British, didn’t care for the French, hated the Dutch, and couldn’t stand the Australians.”27

  *Stanley Lovell observed, “Bill Donovan drove his security officers Weston Howland and Archbold van Beuren to the brink of despair. Bill Donovan would talk about the most secret affairs at a cocktail party or a dinner, according to our Chief of Security, and be furious if he were criticized for it.”32

  †According to the Dulles family biographer Leonard Mosley, the man “stayed in the Agency until the end of World War II,” while “he and Eleanor Dulles continued their thrice-weekly rendezvous for another fourteen years.” Although Allen Dulles learned of the affair from Donovan, he never told his sister that he knew about it. Nor, Mosley added, did he mention it to his brother Foster.34

  *Berle was also convinced that the BSC was tapping his phones. Ernest Cuneo, who was acting as liaison between the British and the White House, tried to persuade him otherwise, to which Berle responded, with a wry smile, “Would you like to hear the playback?”38

  *More than one account has implied that the death was not accidental. William Stevenson, in his book A Man Called Intrepid, states outright that the spy was “removed from circulation” by the BSC. According to Stevenson, the “BSC had its own disposal squads to handle such disagreeable duties. The normal formula was that the victim ‘has departed for Canada,’ a fate more final than it seemed when written on a police blotter.” Ernest Cuneo doubts there were any such murders. Had there been, he says, and had he, Hoover, or Roosevelt learned of them, the British would have been on the next ship home.47

  *Although most double-agent proposals were vetoed by Hoover, who much preferred the use of informants, one of the FBI’s most publicized cases involved the use of a double agent, William Sebold. Threatened with the death of his relatives in Germany, Sebold, a naturalized U.S. citizen, agreed to spy for the Germans, but instead went to the FBI. Setting up a shortwave radio station on Long Island, agents impersonating Sebold sent false information to Germany, while Sebold himself was used as bait to entrap other agents. The case became the basis for the movie The House on 92nd Street.

  †One wonders what the “Naval person”—Churchill’s code name for Roosevelt, a former assistant secretary of the Navy—would have concluded had he seen the full text of the Japanese questionnaire.

  BOOK SIX

  The Secret War

  MR. CANNON: “Mr. Hoover, many great commanders have been developed in this war, and they have returned to receive national acclaim. But I do not think that any of them did the job as well as you have done yours. I doubt whether any of them rendered more real service in the war program than you, and I want to congratulate you on the magnificent work you have done. However, I hope you will return as much money as possible to the Treasury.”

  —Senator Howard Cannon

  (Democrat of Nevada),

  Senate Appropriations Subcommittee,

  October 2, 1945

  20

  “Listen!”

  Sunday, December 7, 1941.

  Together with several other FBI officials, Assistant to the Director Ed Tamm had taken Sunday afternoon off—his first in over two months—to watch the Washington Redskins play the Philadelphia Eagles. It was a home game, at Griffith Stadium, and it was already under way when, at about two-thirty, the loudspeaker paged, “Edward A. Tamm—”

  Told to call headquarters, Tamm reached the FBI switchboard in time to be patched into a shortwave link between the Honolulu SAC Robert Shivers and the FBI director, who was weekending in New York.

  “The Japanese are bombing Pearl Harbor,” Shivers told Hoover and Tamm. “There is no doubt about it—those planes are Japanese. It’s war.” Then, holding the telephone toward an open window, Shivers said, “Listen!”1

  Though it was a poor connection, and the line was full of static, the sounds the two men heard were unmistakable. They were of bombs exploding—as they hit the battleships, cruisers, destroyers, and other U.S. Navy vessels in the harbor.

  All over the District of Columbia, FBI employees, listening to the radio broadcast of the pro-football game, heard the Tamm page and, without waiting to be called, converged on headquarters. Hoover and Tolson were among the last to arrive, having had to charter a flight from La Guardia.

  There was some confusion, Robert Hendon recalled, but mostly there was frustration. For months the FBI had been prepared for just such an eventuality, having compiled lists of those aliens who were believed likely to prove dangerous in the event of war. But, though ready to make arrests, the FBI couldn’t do so without written authorization from the attorney general, and he was en route from Detroit.

  While waiting, Tamm notified the field offices that all Japanese on the A, B, and C lists were to be placed under surveillance. They were not to be detained until orders came through from headquarters; on the other hand, they shouldn’t be allowed to escape either.

  When Biddle arrived in the capital, however, it was discovered that he couldn’t sign the proper authorizations until the president issued an emergency proclamation, so it was late that evening before the first arrests could be made. When Germany and Japan declared war the following day, the FBI had the warrants ready. Within seventy-two hours after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the FBI took into custody a total of 3,846 Japanese, German, and Italian aliens. Once arrested, they were turned over to the Immigration and Naturalization Service for custodial detention until such time as hearings could be held. In contrast to the roundups of the First World War, these were accomplished with little violence and only a few cases of mistaken identity.*

  In addition to his many other duties, on December 8 President Roosevelt asked J. Edgar Hoover “to take charge of all censorship arrangements.” Though it was a temporary appointment, to be effective only until a director of censorship could be picked and a new agency established, Hoover took his duties seriously. In charge just a few hours, he succeeded in killing a New York Times headline which characterized the Pearl Harbor attack the worst naval defeat in U.S. history (though it obviously was), and he “persuaded” Drew Pearson and Robert Allen to edit a “Washington Merry-Go-Round” column which gave exact details of the losses in Hawaii.

  Hoover, according to a memo he sent to the presidential press secretary Steve Early, informed Pearson that if he and Allen “continued to print such inaccurate and such unpatriotic statements the Government would be compelled to appeal to their subscribers direct and to bar them from all privileges that go with the relationship between the press and the Government.”2

  Pearson had a different recollection of their conversation. He wrote in his diary, “I got a call from J. Edgar Hoover…in effect threatening to put me in jail unless we killed the story giving the real truth on Pearl Harbor. I told Edgar that he was nuts, that there was no law by which he could put me in jail, and that he was not the man to interpret the law. He admitted all this, said that Steve Early at the White House had called up and asked him to throw the fear of God in me.”3

  As usual, Hoover managed to have it both ways, retaining his close ties with Pearson and Early alike.

  The president’s decision to put the FBI director in charge of all censorship matters was not capricious. Foreseeing its need months earlier, Hoover had instructed his aides to set up a model plan for an independent organization, headed by a civilian and answerable only to the president, which would operate on the principle of voluntary self-censorship by the press and radio. When the first director of censorship was appointed on December 18, he took over an already established bureaucratic structure which, with only a few modifications, continued to operate throughout the war.

  Months earlier, Hoover, realizing that there would be a critical need for trained linguists if war ever came, had had his staff establish an FBI language school. During the war it turned out hundreds of much needed translators.

  Also before America’s entry into the war, Hoover had set up a “plant protection system” in defense plants and ot
her key industries. Whenever a suspicious accident occurred, volunteer informants reported it to the FBI.* It was largely due to this program that Hoover could boast, at war’s end, that the FBI had kept American industry sabotage free.

  Although it appeared that Hoover had thought of everything, there was one problem the FBI director hadn’t foreseen: a mass defection of his agents.

  Inundated with requests for leaves of absence, Hoover quickly spread the word that anyone who felt being a soldier or a sailor was more important or patriotic than being a special agent of the Federal Bureau of Investigation needn’t apply for reinstatement. Some quit and enlisted anyway, but most withdrew their requests.

  An even greater threat was the draft. With the backing of the president and the attorney general, Hoover was able to overcome the opposition of the War Department, Treasury, and several other envious agencies and obtain draft exemption for “those Bureau personnel whose services were deemed vital to the FBI.”5 The favored many included Lieutenant Colonel J. Edgar Hoover and Commander Clyde Tolson, who resigned their reserve commissions in the Army and the Navy; all of the special agents; and most of the lab technicians, fingerprint searchers, and other clerical personnel.†

  But Hoover wasn’t content with maintaining the status quo. With the lure of draft-exempt status, and the lowering of recruitment standards—there was no longer even the pretense that all applicants must have either law or accountancy degrees—Hoover was quickly able to nearly double the size of the Bureau. During the first two years of the war, the number of FBI employees rose from 7,420 to 13,317, while the number of special agents increased from 2,602 to 5,702.