J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and the Secrets

by Curt Gentry

  Acting on the president’s orders, on June 6, 1945, the FBI conducted a series of simultaneous raids, seizing some eight hundred documents and arresting two of Amerasia’s editors and four other suspects on charges of violating the Espionage Act.

  In an attempt to shore up his case, McInerney then reversed the usual procedure and presented his evidence to a federal grand jury after the arrests had taken place. That body was so unimpressed that it refused to indict three of the six—the editor Kate Mitchell, the writer Mark Gayn, and the foreignservice officer John Stewart Service—and reduced the charges against the remaining three—the senior editor Philip Jaffe, ONI Lieutenant Andrew Roth, and the State Department employee Emmanuel Larsen—from espionage to unlawful possession of government documents.

  But the case had actually fallen apart much earlier, at the time of the arrests, because of an indiscretion on the part of one of the arresting agents. When Larsen was arrested, in his apartment, he overheard one agent tell another where to look for certain documents. Realizing the FBI had been there before, Larsen eventually got his super to admit that he had let the agents in on two or three prior occasions. With this proof of surreptitious entry, on September 28, 1945, Larsen’s attorney filed a motion to squash the indictment against his client.

  Coincidentally, that same day Albert Arent, the attorney for Philip Jaffe, was meeting with Justice Department prosecutors in an attempt to reach a plea bargain for his client. To forestall his learning of Larsen’s motion, the JD attorneys tried to persuade the clerk of the court to temporarily keep the filing secret. Failing in that, they immediately switched to their fallback plan, engaging Arent in four hours of noninterrupted negotiations. Arent emerged from the meeting convinced he had won an excellent deal for his client—a guilty plea to the charge of unauthorized possession of government documents, in return for a substantial fine of $2,500. His satisfaction was short-lived; in court the next day he denounced the JD attorneys as “sons-of-bitches.”3

  The Amerasia case not only brought to an end the brief Truman-Hoover alliance; it marked a turning point in Attorney General Tom Clark’s amiable relations with the FBI director. On learning about the Amerasia break-ins for the first time when the Larsen motion was filed, Clark recalled, “I told Hoover that I thought this was wrong, that we would have to dismiss the charges. He was furious. That probably started the deterioration of our relationship.”4

  There is no mention of the Amerasia case in the Bureau’s authorized history, Don Whitehead’s The FBI Story. Hoover himself later explained the lack of convictions in the case as being due to the taint of the OSS break-in, conveniently forgetting that it was the FBI which got caught.*

  Having been caught, the FBI didn’t change its practices—it continued to bug, burglarize, and tap—but Hoover learned at least one lesson from the affair: not to tell the Justice Department exactly how evidence was obtained.

  He also began, about this same time, to look for other ways to punish those whom he believed to be guilty, ways which circumvented judges, juries, and the legal restrictions of the courts.

  The third-most-important woman in J. Edgar Hoover’s life—after his mother and Emma Goldman—walked into the New Haven, Connecticut, field office in late August of 1945 and told the SAs who interviewed her that for some half a dozen years she had worked as a courier for a Soviet spy ring operating in Washington, D.C.

  Although the press later dubbed Elizabeth Bentley the “blond spy queen,” she was no Mata Hari. She was blond; she was also thirty-seven, but she looked much older, was overweight to the point of dowdiness, and was quite obviously very neurotic.

  The agents were apparently so unimpressed with her, or her tale, that eleven weeks passed before the New York field office held a follow-up interview.

  Even this might not have taken place, had not another incident occurred in the interim. On the evening of September 5, Igor Gouzenko, a cipher clerk in the Soviet embassy in Ottawa, Canada, gathered up his pregnant wife, his young son, and more than a hundred secret documents and attempted to defect to the Canadians. He first tried the Ottawa Journal, then the Justice Ministry and two other government agencies, but no one wanted to risk offending the Soviets.* Only the efforts of a sympathetic neighbor and, reluctantly, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police saved the Gouzenkos from being seized by the NKVD.

  Although no one wanted to hear it, Gouzenko informed the Mounties that all during the war, while Canada, Great Britain, and the United States were making sacrifices to help their Soviet ally, that ally had been operating espionage networks in all three countries, their highest priority being to obtain information on the processes used in the development and manufacture of the atomic bomb.

  As a cipher clerk, Gouzenko dealt mostly with code names. However, using the documents, together with his recollections of conversations he’d heard, plus other leads, the intelligence officers were able to identify several dozen persons—including a member of the Canadian Parliament—as Soviet agents, the most important being a British nuclear physicist, Allan Nunn May.† Not only had May supplied the Soviets with many of the technical details of the bomb’s construction, and a list of most of the Anglo-American scientists working on the Manhattan Project; he’d even given them samples of enriched uranium 235 and 233.

  Hoover’s two representatives arrived in Ottawa on September 10 and were briefed by their Canadian and British counterparts, including Sir William Stephenson, “Intrepid” of the BSC. Not until October, however, were they allowed to question Gouzenko himself. Although the cipher clerk could supply few positive identities, he did provide one especially tantalizing clue. He stated “that he had been informed by Lieutenant Kulakov in the office of the Soviet military attaché that the Soviets had an agent in the United States in May 1945 who was an assistant to the then secretary of state, Edward R. Stettinius.”9

  The FBI suddenly became very interested in Elizabeth Bentley. When she was finally located and interviewed, on November 7, 1945, she told quite a tale. A New England-born Vassar graduate, Bentley had gone to Italy for postgraduate study; had witnessed and been appalled by the rise of fascism; and, convinced the Communists were the only ones fighting it, had on her return to the United States joined the American Communist party. After proving herself, she had in about 1938 been instructed to go underground and was assigned to Jacob Golos, an NKVD agent who, as a front, ran a New York travel agency called World Tourists. Acting as Golos’s courier—he also became her lover—Bentley made biweekly trips to Washington, where her main contact was Nathan Gregory Silvermaster, an economist with the Farm Security Administration. According to Bentley, Silvermaster headed a large Soviet espionage ring, with contacts in almost every major agency in the government, who supplied him with “thousands” of official reports. He then photographed them—he had a darkroom in the basement of his home, she said—and gave her the rolls of exposed but undeveloped film for transmission to Golos.

  Following Golos’s death in 1943 of a heart attack, Bentley had several other handlers, including a man who was later identified as Anatoli Gromov, the first secretary of the Soviet embassy, and she was, briefly, given courier duty with another network, this one operating under the control of Victor Perlo, an economist with the War Production Board. In addition, she collected information on her own, mostly from acquaintances in New York City.

  Not having seen any of the original documents or photographs, Bentley did not know what they contained. Nor had she met most of the people in the two networks. But she had learned some of their names, and these she now supplied to the agents.

  Initially, Bentley apparently provided fourteen names. In subsequent interviews the number grew to forty-three, and by the time she “surfaced” before HUAC, in 1948, it passed a hundred, leading some to suspect that Bentley was naming everyone she’d ever met, heard of, or had suggested to her.

  Following her lover’s death, Bentley had become disillusioned with communism, she said, and had broken with the party; hence h
er August visit to the New Haven office.

  It was obviously not a clean break, however, for on October 17, 1945—three months after her New Haven appearance and just three weeks before her first detailed interrogation by the FBI—Bentley had met Gromov and received $2,000.*

  This was not the only discrepancy in Bentley’s account, but apparently it worried Hoover less than the realization that for the whole duration of the war two major Communist spy rings had operated right under his nose and he had known nothing about them.

  It compounded this oversight that the FBI already knew about Golos—in 1940 he’d been indicted for failing to register as a foreign agent, pled guilty, been fined $500, and given a suspended sentence—but had somehow overlooked Miss Bentley, who not only was his lover but had become the vice-president and secretary of the new travel agency he’d formed after World Tourists’s Soviet links were exposed.

  There were other problems with Bentley’s story. First and foremost, it was entirely uncorroborated. There was no evidence, documentary or otherwise, to support her claims. Then too, she was an obvious hysteric and, if called upon to testify, would make a poor witness. But probably overriding such doubts was the knowledge that the information she had supplied would deliver an extremely damaging blow to two of the FBI director’s most hated enemies.

  Hoover wasted no time. On November 8, the day after Bentley’s interview, he sent a top-secret, by-messenger-only memorandum to the president, via Harry Vaughan. It began:

  “As a result of the Bureau’s investigative operations, information has been recently developed from a highly confidential source indicating that a number of persons employed by the Government of the United States have been furnishing data and information to persons outside the Federal Government, who are in turn transmitting this information to espionage agents of the Soviet Government.”

  Hoover had to admit, however, “At the present time it is impossible to determine exactly how many of these people had actual knowledge of the disposition being made of the information they were transmitting,” but he assured the president, “I am continuing vigorous investigation for the purpose of establishing the degree and nature of the complicity of these people in this espionage ring.”10

  He then listed the names Bentley had provided. Of the fourteen, six had served with the Office of Strategic Services, while one, Duncan Lee, had been general counsel of the OSS and was a former law partner of William J. Donovan.* Of the remainder, several had, at one time or another, worked in the Treasury Department. Of these, the most prominent was Harry Dexter White, Henry Morgenthau’s right-hand man.

  Other memos followed, as Bentley’s interrogation continued. On November 27 Hoover sent Truman, again via Vaughan, a seventy-one-page report entitled “Soviet Espionage in the United States.” The president having failed to respond to his November 8 memorandum, Hoover made sure this one wouldn’t be ignored, by sending copies to Secretary of State James Byrnes, Attorney General Tom Clark, and the heads of several other agencies. The November 27 report contained additional information about White and numerous others Bentley had named, as well as the Gouzenko disclosures. It also mentioned, for the first time, the name Alger Hiss.

  The names Hiss and White were not new to the FBI.

  On September 2, 1939, one day after the German invasion of Poland and less than two weeks after the signing of the Nazi-Soviet pact, a disillusioned former Communist named Whittaker Chambers told Assistant Secretary of State Adolf Berle and the writer Isaac Don Levine that the two Hiss brothers, Donald and Alger—both of whom were employed by the State Department—were secret Communists.* Chambers mentioned the Hisses at the end of a long list of people who he said either belonged to or were in sympathy with the party. He said nothing about espionage, however, and he made no mention of Harry Dexter White. This was an intentional omission, Chambers would later claim: he didn’t name White, he said, because at the time he thought he’d persuaded White to break with the party and only later found that he hadn’t done so.

  Although it seemed unimportant at the time, Chambers also told Berle that he had left the party in 1935.

  White’s name did surface two years later, however. According to Ernest Cuneo, who served as liaison between the British Security Coordination and the White House, one weekend in 1941 Lord Edward Halifax, the British ambassador to the United States, asked to see President Roosevelt on “a most urgent matter.” Roosevelt made time. “Mr. President,” Halifax told him, “there is a highly-placed Russian agent in your organization.”

  “Who?” FDR asked.

  “Harry Dexter White,” Halifax responded.

  “Why,” Roosevelt replied, “I’ve known Harry White for a long time. He’s impossible. Now, what did you want to see me about?”

  Cuneo, who was informed of the conversation by the British, presumed that Roosevelt passed this information on to J. Edgar Hoover. If he did, nothing was done about it.13

  In October 1941 Congressman Dies of the House Un-American Activities Committee sent Attorney General Biddle a list of 1,124 alleged Communists, fellow travelers, and Communist sympathizers. Both Alger Hiss and his brother Donald were mentioned as being members of a radical group called the Washington Committee for Democratic Action. However, as often happened with HUAC, the information was in error: it was their wives who had belonged. This did lead, however, to Alger Hiss’s first interview with the FBI, in February 1942, at which time he told the agents that he was not and had never been a Communist.

  That May it was Whittaker Chambers’s turn—by now at least one other ex-Communist had named him as being a party member—and, although he repeated most of the allegations he’d made to Berle three years earlier, there was still no mention of espionage activities or of White, while the references to Alger Hiss took up only three sentences in the eight-page report on the interview that the New York office sent to the FBI director.

  Chambers told the agents that he had left the party in early 1937.

  Hoover was unimpressed with Chambers’s tale, observing that “most of his information is either history, hypothesis, or deduction,” and that December the case was closed.14

  Not until three years later was Chambers again interviewed, and this time the interview was conducted by Raymond Murphy of the State Department security office, to whom Hoover had sent the earlier interview reports. In March 1945 Alger Hiss had been named temporary secretary general of the United Nations—he would preside over its organizing conference in San Francisco—and the name apparently set off warning bells in the FBI, Hoover himself being both opposed to the new organization and suspicious of anyone connected with it.

  By the time of the Murphy interview, Alger Hiss was no longer at the tail end of the long list of secret Communists named by Chambers. “The top three leaders of the underground,” Murphy quoted Chambers as saying, “were 1. Harold Ware.* 2. Lee Pressman. 3. Alger Hiss. In the order of their importance.”

  This time Chambers did mention White, whom he described as “a member at large but very timid.” His main role, Chambers said, had been finding underground members jobs in the Treasury Department. (Bentley later expanded on this, saying White’s assignment had been to infiltrate the entire government with Communist spies.) Chambers did not identify White as an active espionage agent: this revelation he saved until 1948, after White was dead. Chambers told Murphy that he had left the party at “the end of 1937.”16

  By now Hoover had begun to take Chambers’s allegations seriously, and on May 10 FBI agents interviewed him for eight hours, resulting in a twenty-two-page report.*

  In September, Gouzenko defected. In October he told the FBI about the mysterious Soviet agent who, that May, had been an assistant to Secretary of State Stettinius. On learning this, Hoover almost immediately presumed that Gouzenko was referring to Alger Hiss. There were several problems with this presumption. Hiss was not and had never been one of Stettinius’s assistants, though the secretary thought highly of him. He was director of the o
ffice of special political affairs, and in May 1945 he had been in San Francisco presiding over the founding of the U.N.

  In November the FBI interviewed Elizabeth Bentley, who recalled hearing from one of her sources about “a man named Hiss, who was employed in the Department of State,” who was active in a network different from the ones she serviced. She’d later learned from one of her Russian contacts, she said, that “the Hiss in question was an advisor to Dean Acheson of the Department of State named Eugene Hiss.”17

  There was no Eugene Hiss in the State Department. State Department officials assumed Bentley had the first name wrong and was referring to Donald Hiss, who had worked under Acheson. Hoover was sure, however, that the individual referred to was Alger.

  With Attorney General Clark’s authorization, Hoover wiretapped Alger and Priscilla Hiss’s home phone. He also placed both under surveillance, put on a mail cover, conducted an extensive background investigation of each (as well as of Donald Hiss and his wife), and even developed their maid as an informant, while State Department security monitored Alger’s activities at work. Similar tactics were employed against numerous others Chambers and Bentley had named, including White and others in the Treasury Department.

  The Bureau also did a bag job on Nathan Silvermaster’s home, finding that there was indeed a darkroom in the basement. But this was the only tangible evidence supporting Bentley’s story, and it was, of course, legally inadmissible.

  Nor were the taps and surveillances much help. All they proved was that a number of the people knew each other, which was never in dispute. The tap on Hiss would remain in place for twenty-one months, from December 1945 to September 1947, but, as the FBI later admitted, reluctantly, in a confidential report, “no espionage activities by Hiss were developed from this source.”18