Enemies: A History of the FBI (19 page)

Hoover thought Astor and Donovan wanted to overthrow him.
He taped the call:

HOOVER:
About this idea of having a new Director come into the Bureau … I think as you probably know this job doesn’t mean that much to me anyway.

ASTOR:
Why, sure it does, Edgar. You’ve got as good a job as there is—

HOOVER:
And it’s a terrible headache and if anybody wants it … they can have it merely for the asking because I am not very keen about it anyway.

ASTOR:
Well, Edgar, I don’t think you should talk about giving up your job just at a time—the situation of—the country is in now—

HOOVER:
Right. That’s the only thing that has held me … If they want Colonel Donovan to come in or they want you to come in … Hell, I’ll wire my resignation tonight if that’s the way the President feels about it.… It doesn’t make one damn bit of difference to me.… The job doesn’t mean enough to me.

Hoover had been in genuine fear for his job for months. He had made enemies in high places.

The first lady, Eleanor Roosevelt, was outraged when the FBI began checking the political background of her social secretary, Edith Helm. She wrote a personal letter to Hoover: “This type of investigation seems to me to smack too much of the Gestapo methods.”

Members of Roosevelt’s cabinet were unnerved after the FBI ruined Undersecretary of State Sumner Welles, FDR’s favorite foreign-policy man and a leading architect of his Latin America strategies. The Bureau had conducted a lengthy investigation into his homosexuality, revealed in full when Welles, intoxicated, tried to fellate a Pullman porter on a passenger train.

Hoover’s reputation was founded in great part on the power of his secret surveillance. People respected him, but some simply feared him, and a fair number despised him. Hoover knew it.

Hoover told his right-hand man at the FBI, Clyde Tolson, that there was “
a movement to remove me as Director.” He was right: Donovan was a force behind it. Donovan and Hoover had hated one another heartily since 1924, when Donovan briefly served as Hoover’s superior at the Justice Department. Hoover had fought him at Justice, successfully opposed Donovan’s subsequent bid to become attorney general, and decried the idea of any secret intelligence service under Donovan’s command.

Hoover believed that Donovan was a dishonest and dangerous man, and he spread rumors that Donovan was a Communist sympathizer. Donovan believed that Hoover was a failure at foreign intelligence, and he spread rumors that Hoover was a secret homosexual.

Hoover had been the subject of those rumors since at least 1937—the year that the Bureau began its long-running efforts to root out homosexuals in government. The innuendo is probably the most famous aspect of Hoover’s life today.

The one thing everyone seems to know about Hoover is that he had sexual relations with his constant companion Clyde Tolson. The idea was imprinted in the public mind long ago, in a book by a British journalist that
included indelible descriptions of Hoover in drag. It would be fascinating if it were true. But it is almost surely false. The allegation rests on third-hand hearsay from highly unreliable sources. Not a shred of evidence supports the notion that Hoover ever had sex with Tolson or with any other human being. They were personally and professionally inseparable, Hoover left Tolson his worldly possessions in his will, and there are photographs of the two men together that can be read as revealing human feelings deeper than fondness. One of Hoover’s biographers called their relationship a sexless marriage, and perhaps that was close to the truth. But no one who knew Hoover personally or professionally believed anything beyond that.

“
He abhorred homosexuality,” said Cartha “Deke” DeLoach, a loyal Hoover lieutenant for many years. “That’s why so many homosexuals were dismissed by the Bureau.” If Hoover was himself a repressed homosexual whose secret frustrations soured into fury against his enemies, his inner rages were known to no one.

“I
HAVE IN MY POSSESSION A SECRET MAP
”

Hoover did not lose his job, nor did he lose his nerve to fight Donovan. But on July 11, 1941, the president named Wild Bill the national “Coordinator of Information,” giving him “
authority to collect and analyze” any and all intelligence bearing on national security. Having divided the field of American intelligence, FDR now fragmented it.

The British intelligence officer William Stephenson cabled London: “
You can imagine how relieved I am after months of battle and jockeying in Washington that our man is in position.” His choice of words bears attention. British intelligence did regard Donovan as their man, and it used him in pursuit of its highest goal in the desperate months of 1941: to get the United States into the war.

“I have in my possession a secret map made in Germany by Hitler’s government—by the planners of the new world order,” the president announced in a nationally broadcast speech on October 27, 1941. “It is a map of South America and a part of Central America, as Hitler proposes to reorganize it. Today in this area there are fourteen separate countries. The geographical experts of Berlin, however, have ruthlessly obliterated all existing boundary lines; and have divided South America into five vassal states, bringing the whole continent under their domination. And they
have also so arranged it that the territory of one of these new puppet states includes the Republic of Panama and our great life line—the Panama Canal.”

“That is his plan,” FDR said. “This map makes clear the Nazi design not only against South America but against the United States itself.”

The president got the secret map from Wild Bill Donovan. Donovan got it from his good friend Bill Stephenson, the British station chief in New York. And what was the source of the secret map? One of Stephenson’s top lieutenants, H. Montgomery Hyde, claimed it had been purloined by British intelligence from a courier of the German embassy in Rio de Janeiro. “
The President was greatly impressed,” Hyde wrote. “The discovery of the map was convincing proof of Germany’s intentions in Latin America and came as a considerable shock to all good citizens of the United States.” But it was a fake, manufactured by British intelligence. The ploy, calculated to help draw the United States into the war in Europe, remained a secret for decades.

The President had fractured the field of intelligence. One result was a false map of the world. Another was surprise attack.

13

LAW OF WAR

W
HEN
J
APAN ATTACKED
the United States at Pearl Harbor on Sunday, December 7, 1941, Hoover had his war plans ready. His agents had been gathering intelligence on political suspects in America for months.

The new attorney general, Francis Biddle, started signing orders for the detention of 3,846 German, Italian, and Japanese aliens. Hoover and his men already had started rounding up hundreds of people deemed most dangerous, warrants be damned. They had identified the suspects by any means necessary, including black-bag jobs. FBI agent Morton Chiles had broken into the apartment of a suspected German sympathizer, stolen his address book, and then fled in a hurry when the suspect returned home. Chiles dropped it into a mailbox; the post office turned it over to the FBI the next day.

“
It was illegal. It was burglary,” Chiles said. But “I put 114 people in a concentration camp” based on the names in that book.

Hoover did not endorse the president’s orders for the incarceration of the 112,000 Japanese and Japanese Americans who were carted off to camps after Pearl Harbor. He did not want people imprisoned on the basis of race. He wanted them investigated and, if necessary, jailed for their allegiances.

The president expanded Hoover’s powers in wartime. Hoover took the responsibility of conducting background investigations into the reputations of every applicant for a government job. He began to work with the passport and immigration authorities to control America’s borders, airports, and railway stations. He had to secure hundreds of factories making war materiel. He was charged with censorship of the American press. Hoover and his men started opening first-class mail in New York and Washington, as well as the telegrams and cables sent by Western Union, the
International Telephone and Telegraph Company, and the Radio Corporation of America.

In the first months of the war, as American soldiers, sailors, and airmen began to fight and die in North Africa, Western Europe, and the South Pacific, the FBI battled at home and abroad against the threat of spies and saboteurs.

Two German submarines left their base in Lorient, France, in the last days of May 1942. The first sub, carrying four Nazi saboteurs dressed in the uniforms of the German marines, landed on the beach at Amagansett, Long Island, on the night of June 13. The second, carrying four more Nazi agents, had set its bearings for Jacksonville, Florida.

The eight infiltrators, all Germans, had lived for years in the United States. They were recruited for their ability to speak unaccented English, their knowledge of American cities, and their stated willingness to blow up bridges, tunnels, railway stations, department stores, and military plants. They were equipped with waterproof cases containing high explosives, bombs molded and shaped to resemble lumps of coal, primers, fuses, detonators, forged Social Security cards, and roughly $180,000 in cash. They were under the control of an Abwehr lieutenant named Walter Kappe, who had lived and worked in the United States from 1925 to 1937. He had been the chief of propaganda at the German-American Bund, the premier organization of American fascists and Nazi sympathizers. Returning to Germany, he served Hitler by organizing international spy rings.

George Dasch was the team leader in the sub that landed on Long Island. Dasch had fought in the German army during World War I as a fourteen-year-old child soldier. He first came to the United States as a stowaway on a ship at the age of nineteen. He had served a year as a private in the United States Army, married an American woman, and worked as a waiter in and around New York. His loyalties were divided. He had applied for American citizenship, but he did not complete his application nor swear allegiance to the United States.

Dasch and his fellow saboteurs landed on the beach around midnight, and they were instantly spotted by a United States Coast Guard patrol. Guardsman John Cullen saw four men struggling with a raft and he heard them speaking German. One of the men was carrying a gun. Cullen retreated, returning at daybreak with a Coast Guard team. They quickly dug up a buried cache including bombs, cigarettes, and brandy, and they called the police, who called the FBI. Meanwhile, the German team caught the
6:00
A.M.
train into New York, where Dasch and his partner, Ernest Burger, checked into a midtown hotel. Burger was a naturalized American citizen. He had lived in Detroit and Milwaukee, where he had worked as a machinist from 1927 to 1933. Returning to Germany in 1933, he had loyally served as a Nazi propagandist until he was arrested by the Gestapo in 1940 during a political purge. He served seventeen months in a concentration camp before he was recruited by the Abwehr as a saboteur.

Dasch and Burger had a long talk in their hotel. They had grave doubts about the mission. Their loyalties to the Third Reich were wavering. The suitcase full of cash was tempting. Burger wanted to take the money and run. Dasch said he had a better idea. He called the New York field office of the FBI.

The agent who answered the phone thought Dasch was crazy. The New York office had a three-drawer file cabinet, called the nut box, filled with the records from years of conversations with drunks and cranks. The FBI man made a note of the call, and then he tossed it in the box.

On June 18, Dasch became desperate. He took a train to Washington, went to FBI headquarters, and demanded to see J. Edgar Hoover. As Dasch told his story, he had to open his suitcase and toss $82,350 in cash on the table before anyone took him seriously. Dasch talked for the next eight days. He gave the FBI all the information it needed to immediately arrest the three remaining Germans in New York, and he knew enough to help the Bureau round up the second unit, which had landed in Florida. By June 27, 1942, all eight of the German saboteurs were under arrest.

“H
IGH TREASON
”

Hoover shaped the story of the Nazi saboteurs. The way he told it to the president and, eventually, the press, Dasch never defected, Dasch never walked into FBI headquarters, Dasch never told all. Writing to Roosevelt, Hoover claimed that Dasch had been apprehended by the FBI on June 22, which was four days after he turned himself in.

“
Nothing was said about Dasch’s long, minute, rambling confession,” Attorney General Biddle wrote twenty years later, “and it was generally concluded that a particularly brilliant FBI agent, probably attending the school in sabotage where the eight had been trained, had been able to be on the inside, and made regular reports to America.”