Enemies: A History of the FBI (23 page)

Fifteen copies of Donovan’s plan had circulated at the highest levels of the government; one copy went to the FBI. The likeliest source of the leak was the officer who ran the White House Map Room, FDR’s intelligence center: Colonel Richard Park, Jr. The colonel had compiled a devastating report to the president on Donovan and the OSS. He had left FDR’s side at Yalta and traveled throughout Europe and North Africa, interviewing army generals and intelligence officers in the field. Colonel Park owed his career to the chief of army intelligence, the imperious and devious General George Veazey Strong, who respected Hoover and despised Donovan. The leak likely came at the general’s direction. Only one other person could have authorized it, and that was the president.

On April 4, 1945, FDR sent his last word on the future of American intelligence. Writing from Warm Springs, Georgia, where he had gone to rest his
weary body and soul, he ordered Donovan to convene his allies and enemies, and achieve an agreement. Eight days later, a cerebral hemorrhage killed him at the age of sixty-six. Victory in Europe was four weeks away.

The word that the president was gone began reaching Washington at about five o’clock on a beautiful spring afternoon. It spread quickly by telephone through the highest levels of the government.

When the phones started ringing, Attorney General Biddle was deep in conversation with Secretary of State Edward R. Stettinius, Jr., and Navy Secretary James V. Forrestal. They were about to weigh the merits of having J. Edgar Hoover run a new national intelligence service.

When Hoover got the word about the president, he immediately called for the FBI’s files on Harry S. Truman.

The vice president had rushed to the White House from his traditional five o’clock bourbon with his friends in an unmarked hideaway at the Capitol. After a long search for a Bible, Chief Justice Harlan Fiske Stone swore him in as the new commander in chief of the most powerful nation on earth. It was a moment of overwhelming sadness and fear. Truman said he felt like the moon and the stars and the planets had fallen upon him. He had served only eighty-two days as vice president; he had been a cog in the Kansas City political machine before arriving in Washington as a senator from Missouri. Truman came to the White House with a good deal of common sense, a fair dose of courage, and a capacity for making gut decisions, including saying
no
. But he knew none of the secrets of the American government.

Friday the thirteenth of April 1945 was his first full day in office. He spent the morning in the Oval Office with Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson and Secretary of State Stettinius, his top military chiefs, and FDR’s military aide, Admiral Leahy, learning his first lessons in the command and control of presidential power. Truman then went to the Map Room, where Colonel Park handed over his report on the wartime performance of Wild Bill Donovan. It was a dagger, honed by Hoover and the army. It said that the officers of the OSS had done serious damage to the national security of the United States; their incompetence made “
their use as a secret intelligence agency in the postwar world inconceivable.” In a cover letter to Truman marked
TOP SECRET
—a copy somehow found its way into Hoover’s files—Colonel Park advised the new president to take “drastic action” against the OSS—“abolishing it altogether and transferring its better personnel where
they will do some good.” It concluded: “General Donovan should be replaced, above all.”

The initiation of Harry Truman into the world of secret weapons, secret intelligence, and the secret operations of the United States began that day, a journey from innocence to experience.

“T
HIS MUST STOP
”

Ten days passed before Hoover first saw Truman, in a short meeting at the White House on April 23. He made a bad impression on the president.

Hoover began to try to tell Truman about the secret world of the FBI. The president still did not know about the atomic bomb, much less the Soviet espionage plot to steal it. Nor did he yet know about the political warfare FDR had authorized with his imprimatur for Hoover’s warrantless wiretapping, or about the FBI’s operations overseas, or about Hoover’s plans to expand them worldwide.

Truman quickly called Harry Vaughan into the meeting. Vaughan was one of his closest friends, going back to their service together in World War I. The president had picked Vaughan as his personal military aide and made him a brigadier general.

Truman said that in the future, when Hoover had something to tell the White House, he should say it to Harry Vaughan, and he left the two men alone.

Hoover got along fine with Vaughan, a back-slapping, bourbon-sipping, barnyard-joking political fixer. The director shared his intimate knowledge of the personal lives of Roosevelt’s inner circle. He offered to conduct a “White House Security Survey” to see who was loyal to Truman and who was not. He gave Vaughan transcripts of conversations among the movers and shakers of Washington.

“
I said, ‘What the hell is this?’ and they said, ‘This is a wiretap on so-and-so,’ ” Vaughan recounted.

“Harry told me, ‘What the hell is that crap?’

“I said, ‘That’s a wiretap.’

“He said, ‘Cut all of them off. Tell the FBI we haven’t got any time for that kind of shit.’ ”

But President Truman found the time. Hoover’s reports gave him cause
to wonder if the White House was a nest of vipers. Would FDR’s aides be loyal to him? Could Truman trust them?

Hoover had a fresh file on a White House aide suspected of leaking to the newspapers: Edward Prichard, once a law clerk for Hoover’s old nemesis, Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter, a founding father of the American Civil Liberties Union. Vaughan quickly told Hoover that the president had read the report on Prichard with great interest and wanted “
future communications along that line … whenever, in your opinion, they are necessary.”

Hoover put a wiretap on Prichard. The tap quickly produced transcripts of his conversations with Justice Frankfurter—the first of twelve justices of the Supreme Court overheard or mentioned on FBI wiretaps. The investigation of Prichard’s loyalties led to taps on the influential Washington newspaper columnist Drew Pearson and a politically wired Washington lawyer, Tommy Corcoran. All four men were sources of scathing scuttlebutt on the new president. A second Truman aide—another Kansas City crony, Ed McKim—reported back to the FBI that the president was duly impressed. All this happened within seven weeks after Truman took office. All of it was done in the president’s name, for the purpose of plugging leaks and overhearing political gossip.

Vaughan let Hoover know that if the FBI got caught breaking the law, it was on its own. The White House would deny all knowledge of the illegal taps.

Truman may have savored this first taste of political intelligence, but he placed no faith in Hoover. On May 4, 1945, he told the White House budget director, Harold D. Smith, that he feared Hoover was “
building up a Gestapo.” The president returned time and again to that theme. The word had a certain resonance in the week that Adolf Hitler committed suicide in his bunker and the Third Reich collapsed. “We want no Gestapo or Secret Police,” President Truman wrote in his diary on May 12. “FBI is tending in that direction. They are dabbling in sex-life scandals and plain blackmail … 
This must stop
.”

It did not stop. Two weeks later, the president, racked by suspicion, decided that he could not trust Attorney General Francis Biddle. He summarily dismissed him. It was one of the poorer decisions of his presidency. Biddle went on to serve with great distinction prosecuting Nazi war criminals at the international military tribunal convened at Nuremberg. Truman
replaced him with a political hack, Tom Clark—a professional oil lobbyist from Texas who had joined the Justice Department as an antitrust lawyer and worked his way up to chief of the Criminal Division. Truman concluded many years later that Clark was not a bad man, just “
a dumb son of a bitch.”

Hoover sensed this from the start. After Tom Clark took office on July 1, Hoover immediately prepared a letter for the new attorney general to send to the president. The letter said that FDR had given Hoover the power to wiretap without warrants. But Hoover omitted a key fact: Roosevelt also had ordered him to keep the taps to a minimum and to limit them, insofar as possible, to aliens. Clark rubber-stamped this letter and sent it to President Truman over his own name after the July 4 holiday. Truman gave his approval. Two months into the new administration,
Hoover had renewed his power to wiretap at will. The attorney general henceforth chose a course of willful ignorance when it came to wiretaps, bugs, and break-ins by the FBI. He did not want to know what Hoover was doing beyond the boundaries of the law.

That week the president turned again to the subject of the FBI’s powers. He approved six more months of secret White House funds for the FBI’s Special Intelligence Service, but with evident distaste. He told his budget director, Harold Smith, that he wanted “
to confine the FBI to the United States” and that “the FBI should be cut back as soon as possible.” Truman trusted Smith. The president relied on him to find out what was really going on in the government. The budget director knew all about the secret White House funds with which FDR had financed the covert operations of the United States during World War II. The Congress in which Truman had served knew nothing about the money—even though, under the Constitution, the president cannot spend a penny without congressional authorization. Smith knew precisely what FDR had siphoned out of the Treasury—tens of millions of dollars a year for espionage, two billion for the Manhattan Project to build the atomic bomb.

“A
NEW WEAPON OF UNUSUALLY DESTRUCTIVE FORCE
”

Truman set off on the cruiser
Augusta
on July 7, 1945, his first trip to Europe since World War I. He was met eight days later in Antwerp by General
Dwight D. Eisenhower, the supreme Allied commander. They traveled overland to Brussels and flew to Berlin, once the fourth-largest city in the world. American and British warplanes had bombed most of Berlin to rubble and the Soviets had crushed what remained. On July 16, a motorcade took Truman through the city. The ruins stank of death. Corpses rotted in the rubble and wild dogs scavenged their bones. A civilization lay in a state of collapse. “I thought of Carthage, Baalbek, Jerusalem …,” Truman wrote in his diary. “I hope for some sort of peace—but I fear that machines are ahead of morals by some centuries and when morals catch up there’ll be no reason for any of it.” It was afternoon in Berlin, morning in America. Above the desert near Alamogordo, New Mexico, came a blinding flash brighter than the rising sun.

Truman met Churchill and Stalin at Potsdam, east of Berlin, in terrain held by the conquering Red Army. They convened at the Cecilienhof Palace, once the summer residence of Crown Prince Wilhelm of Prussia. Truman was unsure of how to use the immense power in his hands. Churchill seemed elderly and exhausted; he was voted out of office as prime minister that week. Stalin was stone-faced, impossible to read. Truman wrote in his diary that “Uncle Joe looked tired and drawn and the P.M. seemed lost.” The next day, the president got the word from New Mexico. He arrived at Stalin’s banquet that night looking supremely happy.

The seventeen-day Potsdam conference settled one big issue: the bomb would fall on Japan. Truman and Churchill met with their military chiefs at 11:30
A.M.
on July 24. Truman took Stalin aside late that afternoon. “I casually mentioned to Stalin that we had a new weapon of unusually destructive force,” Truman wrote in his memoirs. “The Russian Premier showed no special interest. All he said was that he was glad to hear it and hoped we would ‘make good use of it against the Japanese.’ ”

Thanks to the efforts of Soviet intelligence, Stalin already knew about the bomb.

In two weeks, the secret weapon was no secret. Two atomic bombs had killed perhaps two hundred thousand Japanese, almost all of them civilians, at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. While the second bomb was on its way, the
Augusta
tied up in Virginia. Harry Truman returned to the White House, a million Soviet troops invaded Manchuria, and the Emperor Hirohito gathered his war council in the Imperial Library in Tokyo to decide how to bear the unbearable. The word of Japan’s surrender reached Washington on August 14, 1945.

“S
ECRET
W
ORLD
-W
IDE
I
NTELLIGENCE
”

President Truman now knew how little he knew of what was going on in the world. He did not know how to gain that knowledge. Hoover promised to deliver what the president desired. He wanted power in return.

“
The future welfare of the United States necessitates and demands the operation of an efficient world-wide intelligence service,” Hoover wrote to the attorney general on August 29. The FBI was “well qualified to operate such a service,” Hoover maintained. “It is a fact, as you well know, that the SIS program operated by the Bureau in the Western Hemisphere has been completely successful.”

On September 6, Hoover hammered harder on the president’s door, in a note with two Freudian-slip misspellings that betrayed his anger. Railing at “
Donovan’s plans for the perpetration of his dynasty” and “Donovan’s deadly died-in-the-wool secrets,” he demanded a decision.

He got one. Truman fired Donovan on September 20. He broke up the Office of Strategic Services. The end of the summer of 1945 found the United States without an intelligence service.

The next day, Hoover personally pressed his blueprint into the attorney general’s hands and urged him to send it to the president at once. It was entitled “
FBI Plan for United States Secret World-Wide Intelligence Coverage.” It made Hoover the unquestioned overseer of American national security.