Official and Confidential (23 page)

According to
The FBI Story
, the history of the Bureau as authorized by Edgar, Fly was still resisting when Pearl Harbor was attacked. The implication was that, had it not been for
Fly's obstinacy, the disaster could have been averted. Fly offered a very different account.

‘The Radio Intelligence Division of FCC,' he said, ‘did monitor foreign and potential enemy traffic, particularly the enciphered messages on the Tokyo/Berlin circuit … We did not have cryptologists. The RID picked up the pre-Pearl Harbor traffic and funneled it to the FBI, Army and Navy intelligence and the State Department. Finally Hoover requested that we discontinue this service for the stated reason of the FBI's inability to break the code. But the FCC at my instructions continued to send the traffic to the FBI. In this line of monitoring, the RID picked up the crucial coded “winds” messages. These messages were on the desks of the Federal Bureau of Investigation on Sunday, December 7, when Hoover was in New York for the weekend. And the fleet went down.'

The ‘winds' messages were the basis of a Japanese contingency plan, sent to diplomatic missions on November 19, advising them that in the event of normal communications being severed, the order to burn their codes would be transmitted in the guise of a broadcast weather report. ‘
Higashi no kaze ame
,' ‘East Wind Rain,' would indicate an impending break with the United States. Such a message was picked up by U.S. monitors on December 4, but the commanders in Hawaii were not informed. Documents on the subject were subsequently concealed from the official boards of inquiry.

The record shows that the FCC did monitor Japan's traffic, did intercept a key ‘wind' message on December 4 and did pass it on to Naval Intelligence within twenty-four hours. There is no reason to doubt Fly's claim that the information also went to the FBI well before the raid.

Dusko Popov heard the first confused news of the attack aboard ship in the Caribbean, on his way back to New York. ‘The seriousness of the moment,' he recalled, ‘could be read on everyone's face. Except mine. It was the news I had been
awaiting … I was sure the American fleet had scored a great victory … I was very, very proud that I had been able to give the warning to the Americans four months in advance … Then the news started trickling in … The Japanese had scored a surprise attack … I couldn't believe what I was hearing … We knew they were coming … Somewhere, somehow, there had to be an explanation.'

Back in New York, Popov asked his FBI contacts what had gone wrong. Had his warning been ignored? Agent in Charge Foxworth told him not to ask questions, to ‘walk in step.' ‘Searching for the truth beyond your reach,' Popov recalled Foxworth saying, ‘may be dangerous. It may stir up an idea in Mr Hoover's head … Mr Hoover is a very virtuous man.'

Two of the British officers involved, Ewen Montagu and Montgomery Hyde, saw Popov at this time. ‘I could see,' Hyde recalled, ‘how angry he was with the FBI, who he was convinced had never taken any action on his earlier warning about the Japanese and Pearl Harbor.'

Popov's relations with the Bureau eventually collapsed altogether. The FBI refused to let him know what information it was transmitting to Germany – over a ‘clandestine' radio – purporting to come from Popov. ‘From the German point of view,' recalled Montagu, ‘he had suddenly changed. He had provided them with no information of any value. He had not built a spy network. Most dangerous of all, he could not hope to provide answers to the really intensive questioning about the radio traffic that had been transmitted in his name …'

In the summer of 1942, in spite of the mortal risk that he would be unmasked as an Allied agent, Popov returned to his work in Portugal. He managed to regain the Germans' confidence, then played a key role in feeding them phony plans for the Allied invasion of occupied Europe.

Popov's friend Johann Jebsen, who had warned of a surprise attack on the United States and who continued to filter vital information to the Allies, did not survive. He was taken by the Gestapo, questioned under torture and shot.
³

In the safety of Washington, meanwhile, Edgar is said to have extended his insinuations about Pearl Harbor to include President Roosevelt himself. In February or March 1942, according to former U.S. Air Force Colonel Carlton Ketchum, Edgar joined a group of politically like-minded associates, including Republican Congressman George Bender, former Assistant Attorney General Joseph Keenan and Senate Majority Secretary Leslie Biffle, at a private dinner at the Army-Navy Club. What Edgar was to tell the gathering, guests were admonished, was strictly off the record.

‘Mr Hoover said,' Ketchum recalled, ‘that he had had warnings from repeated sources from early fall 1941 to just a few days before the Pearl Harbor attack … and that these warnings became more specific from one time to another … He said that, much more important, the President had had warnings during all of that time … Hoover was told by the President not to mention to anyone any of this information, but to be handled [
sic
] in the judgment of the President, and not to pass them on within the FBI … There was discussion in the group at this point, that the Army and Navy commanders could have been warned well in advance … so that the casualties would have been minimized. There were some rather bitter things said about the President's conduct.'
⁴

Recent research indicates the possibility that, in line with his expressed desire to ‘drag' the United States into the war, Winston Churchill may have withheld last-minute intelligence warning of the Pearl Harbor attack. Most scholars, however, find it unthinkable that Roosevelt shared such foreknowledge and permitted the destruction of Pearl Harbor. Had he had advance warning, he would surely have seen to it that the Navy was ready for battle, perhaps at sea. Any aggression against American territory by Japan, even successfully defended, would have triggered a declaration of war.

Yet Ketchum's story cannot be dismissed. Research confirms that Edgar was on intimate terms with the politicians named as the audience for his charge that the President
suppressed vital Pearl Harbor intelligence. If the account is accurate, Edgar was among the first to make the allegation.

In the summer of 1942, six months after Pearl Harbor, a team of American secret agents took on a highly sensitive mission. Contrary to all international rules, they were to steal the secret codes used by the embassies of neutral countries that favored Germany. This involved breaking in at dead of night, cracking safes, photographing code-books and escaping without getting caught.

Working under Edgar's rival William Donovan, the team pulled off this feat several times. Late one night, however, when the agents were inside the Spanish embassy in Washington, two FBI cars screeched to a halt outside and very deliberately turned on their sirens and flashing lights. Donovan's men had to abort the operation, and several of them were arrested. Donovan had no doubt that Edgar was personally responsible.

It had not been enough for Edgar to have control of intelligence operations throughout Latin and Central America. He had been enraged because Donovan, now a general, had been appointed head of the wartime intelligence body, the Office of Strategic Services, and he was obstructing him at every opportunity. ‘The Abwehr,' Donovan commented, ‘gets better treatment from the FBI than we do.' Donovan's Spanish embassy operation cut across existing FBI surveillance, so Edgar simply sabotaged it. On the eve of the landings in North Africa, his action came close to exposing vital Allied operations.

The agent who led the break-in, Donald Downes, later recalled how Donovan protested to the White House – to little avail. ‘No President,' one of his aides commented, ‘dare touch John Edgar Hoover. They are all scared pink of him.' ‘We had taken all imaginable precautions,' Downes lamented, ‘all except one – the possibility of betrayal by someone high enough in the American government to know what we were doing.'

Edgar's relations with William Stephenson, a staunch Donovan supporter, had sunk to an all-time low. Edgar sent an aide to whisper in the ear of Assistant Secretary of State Adolf Berle, a man with little affection for the British, that one of Stephenson's men was using smear tactics to try to force his removal from office.

Former MI-6 official A. M. Ross-Smith, the controller of the accused agent, said decades later that Edgar's allegation had been ‘completely untrue – absolute balls. It originated with a paid informant, a German-American who made up the story just to please his FBI paymasters. Hoover was just using it to further his own ambitions.'

False or not, the episode mushroomed into a high-level international row. The British ambassador, Lord Halifax, was summoned to a meeting with Berle and Attorney General Biddle. Edgar was not satisfied even when the ‘offending' English official hastily left the country. It was impossible, he insisted, to continue working with the British. ‘Does J. Edgar,' sighed William Stephenson around this time, ‘think he's fighting on Bunker Hill against us Redcoats? Or has he heard of Pearl Harbor?'

For all their differences, circumstances forced the intelligence warlords to coexist. Donovan turned the OSS into a brilliant success, especially in Europe, and Stephenson labored on in New York.
⁵
With internal security and Latin American intelligence to handle, Edgar had more than enough on his plate. According to one qualified source, however, he found time to dream of a different kind of glory.

J. Edgar Nichols, son of Edgar's close aide Lou Nichols, was to recall his father reminiscing about a fantastic scheme. ‘Mr Hoover, my father and a third man whose name I don't know developed a plan to go behind German lines and assassinate Hitler. They actually presented this plan to the White House, and it got bucked to the State Department, and they got taken to task by Secretary of State Hull. What they had in mind was a three-man assassination team, and my father
talked as though he and Mr Hoover somehow hoped to take part themselves. My understanding is that this was no joke – they really did hope something would come of it.'

If Edgar was yearning for a new chance to play center stage, he got it. Suddenly, at the height of his squabbles with Donovan and the British, fate delivered a spectacular burst of favorable publicity. At midnight on June 13, 1942, a German submarine surfaced off Amagansett, at the eastern end of Long Island. It disgorged four men laden with arms, explosives and cash – German saboteurs with orders to cause havoc in factories vital to the war effort, and panic in the population. The team might have succeeded had its leader not betrayed the operation almost at once. That inconvenient truth, which would have made nonsense of Edgar's propaganda, was suppressed.

The leader of the commandos, thirty-nine-year-old George Dasch, had lived in the United States for many years before the war. On his return to Germany, it seems, he quickly lost faith in the Nazi regime. During training for the American mission, he seemed less than zealous and oddly disinterested in sabotage techniques. He saw his role, he was to say in a memoir after the war, as ensuring that the mission misfired.

That nearly happened without his help. The Germans ran into a lone Coast Guardsman on the beach, then let him go after thrusting money into his hand to keep quiet. By the time he raised the alarm, however, the Germans had vanished, leaving equipment and explosives behind in a poorly concealed cache.

The FBI joined the search for the saboteurs within hours, and Edgar rushed to see Attorney General Francis Biddle. ‘His eyes were bright,' Biddle recalled, ‘his jaw set, excitement flickering around the edge of his nostrils.' The rest was a great FBI success story – or so it appeared to the public.

Two weeks later, Edgar called a victorious press conference to announce that eight would-be saboteurs, including a second group seized in Florida, had been caught. He appeared
regularly at the military tribunal that followed. Lloyd Cutler, a member of the prosecution team and long afterwards counsel to President Jimmy Carter, thought Edgar carried himself ‘like a general, very much in control of his troops, the agents. We were handed the case prepared by the FBI, and Hoover kept us at arm's length from his men.'

All the commandos were sentenced to death, and six of them went to the electric chair. Edgar recommended the sentences be carried out, and personally organized the executions. Only two of the Germans, George Dasch and a comrade named Ernst Burger, had their sentences commuted to long jail terms.

Thirty years later, Edgar would still be talking of the case as one of his ‘most important accomplishments.' As late as 1979, a bronze marker commemorating the capture was placed in a Justice Department hallway. In fact, as Edgar well knew, the FBI's role had been negligible.

Far from being tracked down by intrepid Bureau agents, Dasch had deliberately betrayed his fellow saboteurs. He began by phoning the FBI in New York and identifying himself as ‘Franz Daniel Pastorius,' the German code name for the operation. He said he had just arrived from Germany, would shortly have valuable information to deliver to J. Edgar Hoover and asked that Washington be informed.

Even then, the Bureau nearly blew it. The agent who took Dasch's call responded by exclaiming, ‘Yesterday, Napoleon called!' and slamming down the telephone. No one passed the word to Washington as Dasch had requested.

He did, however, give himself up to the FBI in Washington, and provided the Bureau with all the information necessary to locate his fellow saboteurs. He was acting, he explained, with the full knowledge of his comrade Ernst Burger. Later, he recalled, FBI agents asked him to plead guilty but keep quiet about his dealings with the Bureau, on the assurance of a presidential pardon within months. Instead, he languished in jail for five years, and was deported after the war.

U.S. Army Intelligence, meanwhile, believed Edgar's arrest of the saboteurs had been premature and had wrecked plans to intercept other raiders expected to land a few weeks later. ‘Secretary of War Stimson was absolutely furious,' recalled Lloyd Cutler. ‘Hoover grabbed all the glory. He just wanted headlines.'