Enemies: A History of the FBI (79 page)

14.
“undoubtedly sound”:
Franklin D. Roosevelt, Confidential Memorandum for the Attorney General, May 21, 1940, FDRL. Roosevelt’s next attorney general, Francis D. Biddle, later wrote: “The memorandum was evidently prepared in a hurry by the President personally, without consultation, probably after he had talked to Bob [Attorney General Jackson]. It opened the door pretty wide to wiretapping of anyone suspected of subversive activities. Bob didn’t like it, and, not liking it, turned it over to Edgar Hoover without himself passing on each case.” Francis Biddle,
In Brief Authority
(Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1967), p. 167.

15.
at least 6,769 warrantless wiretaps:
Attorney General Edward H. Levi testimony, Nov. 6, 1975, Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities (hereinafter “Church Committee”).

16.
“The Federal Bureau of Investigation”:
Attorney General Jackson to Justice Department heads, undated.

17.
“the difference between ‘investigative’ activity and ‘intelligence’ activity”:
Hoover to Jackson, April 1, 1941; reprinted in
From the Secret Files of J. Edgar Hoover
, edited with commentary by Athan Theoharis (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1993), pp. 184–193.

18.
“The President thought”:
Early to Hoover, May 21, 1940, FDR Library. FDR’s thirst for political intelligence on his domestic enemies, and his correspondence with Hoover about that intelligence, is detailed in Douglas M. Charles,
J. Edgar Hoover and the Anti-Interventionists: FBI Political Surveillance and the Rise of the Domestic Security States
,
1939–1945
(Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2007).

19.
“all telephone conversations”:
Hoover to Watson, Sept. 28, 1940, FDR Library.

11.
S
ECRET INTELLIGENCE

  
1.
The question for the FBI:
The Bureau’s handling of the Sebold case was detailed for the first time by Raymond J. Batvinis in his 2007 monograph, “The Origins of FBI Counterintelligence.” Batvinis was to my knowledge the first author to review the Sebold case file; my account follows his. American intelligence files say that “the FBI previously had been advised of Sebold’s expected arrival, his mission, and his intentions to assist them in identifying German agents in the United States.” During one of his four attempts to flee Germany during his forced conscription and training by the Abwehr, Sebold gave a detailed statement to the American vice consul in Cologne.

  
2.
“a long meeting on coordinated intelligence”:
Beatrice B. Berle and Travis B. Jacobs, eds.,
Navigating the Rapids, 1918–1971: From the Papers of Adolf Berle
(New York: Harcourt, 1973), p. 321.

12.
“T
O STRANGLE THE
U
NITED
S
TATES
”

  
1.
Very little was written about it:
The
History of the SIS
is dated May 22, 1947, unsigned, in five volumes, declassified and released under the Freedom of Information Act in 2007. Volume 1, running 42 pages, is a remarkable document, despite some key deletions in the name of national security. It contains a frank discussion of the FBI’s failures, and it evidently was not intended for an outsider’s eyes. The administrative files of the SIS are also eye-opening; they are available at the National Archives, in Record Group 65. Quotes from the SIS history are cited herein as
History of the SIS
.

  
2.
“We certainly picked some fine lemons”:
Hoover’s notation on FBI radiogram, undated, attached to
History of the SIS
.

  
3.
“the names of agents that he knew of”:
Dallas Johnson interview, FBI Oral History Project (FBI/FBIOH).

  
4.
“to be in a position”:
Hoover to Watson, March 5 and 6, 1941, FDRL.

  
5.
“the Bureau is marking time”:
Hoover to Jackson, April 4, 1941.

  
6.
“It appears almost certain”:
This message and the following Japanese cables intercepted by Magic are reprinted in
CI Reader
, op. cit.

  
7.
“central enemy intelligence organization”:
Thomas F. Troy,
Donovan and the CIA: A History of the Establishment of the Central Intelligence Agency
(Frederick, Md.: University Publications of America, 1984), p. 59.

  
8.
“the resultant super-Intelligence Agency”:
Hoover, General Miles, and Admiral Kirk signed this “Report on Coordination of the Three Intelligence Services,” dated May 29, 1941, but transmitted to the War Department on June 5, 1941.

  
9.
He taped the call:
Transcript of telephone call, July 5, 1941, FBI, Nichols file, reprinted in
From the Secret Files of J. Edgar Hoover
, edited with commentary by Athan Theoharis (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1993), pp. 332–334. The call came after the president asked Astor to handle a very sensitive personal matter: FDR’s dissolute cousin Kermit, who was Astor’s close friend and President Teddy Roosevelt’s son, was on an alcoholic bender and had disappeared with a masseuse named Herta Peters; there was an off chance that the woman was a German spy. Astor handed this hot potato to the FBI.

10.
“a movement to remove me”:
Do Not File memo, Hoover to Tolson and Tamm, Sept. 23, 1941,
From the Secret Files of J. Edgar Hoover
, p. 339.

11.
“He abhorred homosexuality”:
DeLoach oral history, FBI/FBIOH.

12.
“authority to collect and analyze”:
Troy,
Donovan and the CIA
, pp. 419–423.

13.
“You can imagine how relieved”:
H. Montgomery Hyde,
Room 3603: The Story of the British Intelligence Center in New York During World War II
(New York: Farrar Straus, 1963), pp. 169ff.

14.
“The President was greatly impressed”:
Ibid.

13.
L
AW OF
W
AR

  
1.
“It was illegal. It was burglary”:
Chiles oral history, FBI/FBIOH.

  
2.
“Nothing was said”:
Francis Biddle,
In Brief Authority
(Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1962), pp. 328ff.

  
3.
In the fall of 1942:
Details of the investigation were declassified by the National Archives and analyzed by Norman J. W. Goda of the Archives interagency working group on Nazi records. See Goda’s “Banking on Hitler: Chase National Bank and the Rückwanderer Mark Scheme,” in
U.S. Intelligence and the Nazis
, published by the National Archives Trust Fund Board.

  
4.
“I do strongly recommend”
and
“I am most anxious and willing”:
Hoover to Strong, Sept. 10, 1942; Administrative Files of the SIS.

  
5.
“You must remember”:
John Walsh oral history, FBI/FBIOH.

  
6.
The civilians of the Radio Intelligence Division:
George E. Sterling, “The U.S. Hunt for Axis Agent Radios.” Sterling’s work was printed in
Studies in Intelligence
, the Central Intelligence Agency’s in-house publication, vol. 4 (spring 1960); declassified circa 2007.
   The heart of the FCC’s Radio Intelligence Division (RID) was made up of hundreds of civilians who ran a network built around twelve main monitoring stations, sixty smaller outposts, and ninety mobile units in the United States. Their job was to police the airwaves. The routine beat for the patrolman of the ether was to cruise the radio spectrum, checking the regular landmarks of transmissions, searching for strange signals, and alerting headquarters in Washington to hunt down enemy stations.
   The RID had been picking up and tracking down the radio signals of the clandestine networks of German espionage in Latin America and the Caribbean since the spring of 1941. Over the next eight months, the division listened as the network spread to six nations, with three major stations in Brazil and a fourth in Chile, all in direct communication with the Abwehr in Hamburg. The targets of the German espionage were British and American troops, military aircraft and ships, and the establishment of agent networks throughout the United States. German U-boats were sinking British and American ships all over the Atlantic. British intelligence formed a close liaison with the RID and started schooling the Americans in German codes and ciphers.
   On Jan. 15, 1942, five weeks after Pearl Harbor, the RID sent its best people to Brazil, Chile, Mexico, Paraguay, Cuba, and Martinique. They carried suitcase-sized mobile detection units for hunting down clandestine transmitters, whose locations had been fixed to within a few hundred yards by the radio police in the United States. The RID also sent squads to Colombia, Venezuela, Ecuador, Peru, Uruguay, and Haiti to work with the governments of those nations to establish monitoring networks.
   On Feb. 11, 1942, RID monitoring stations in Miami, Pittsburgh, and Albuquerque picked up signals from Portugal:
SAID THERE IS TO BE DISEMBARKMENT ENGLISH AMERICAN TROOPS DAKAR NEXT FIFTEEN DAYS. WHY NO REPORTS MOST URGENT
. The Americans fixed the location of the transmitter outside Lisbon. British commandos took out the Portuguese station and its operators. In Chile, five months of hot pursuit by the radio detectives cleaned out the German spy ring and its transmitters. With the exception of Argentina, whose pro-German government stiff-armed the Americans, so it went throughout most of Latin America.
   The Brazilian investigation was the crowning achievement.
   When the RID detected a Nazi radio network in Brazil, “they had their monitoring equipment and they would find these clandestine radio signals,” the FBI’s John Walsh remembered. “Through triangulation they would locate where they were and they could keep moving in until they came close to it. At that point then the Bureau would make arrangements with the local authorities to have these people arrested.”
   A case in point: an RID monitor in Laredo, Texas, picked up a coded message from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. It was a simple cipher and quickly broken:
QUEEN MARY REPORTED OFF RECIFE BY STEAMSHIP CAMPEIRO AT
18:00
MIDDLE EUROPEAN TIME
. The
Queen Mary
was carrying 10,000 American and Canadian troops to war. The Germans in Brazil were tracking her movement for their masters in Hamburg, who would relay her position to U-boats trying to sink her in the Atlantic.
   In pursuit of the ship, the German Navy began unrestricted warfare within Brazil’s coastal waters. The RID’s chief in Brazil, felicitously named Robert Linx, already had mapped the Nazi network. He had fixed the locations of six Nazi radios in Rio, tracking them down with his portable directional finder, monitoring their broadcasts. Linx reported to the U.S. ambassador in Brazil. Hours before German U-boats started hunting the
Queen Mary
as she left the dock in Rio and headed for her home port on a newly altered route, the Brazilian police wrapped up the Axis spy ring, arresting 200 suspects and crushing the German intelligence effort.