SEVENTEEN
As background in Section Seven, there wasn't much. Some counterespionage and intelligence gathering had been done in Europe, Wheeler said, but Cochrane himself had done the best of it and had a working knowledge of the rest. Bill Cochrane nodded and a flood of images came back to him, from Theresia dead on her bed to Engle carefully taking the order for a set of Swiss passports.
As for German espionage within the forty-eight United States, Wheeler continued academically, as his pipe smoldered in the ashtray, it had all been haphazard at best—at least as far as they knew. Cochrane nodded again.
"We've dropped down hard on a ring of sympathizers here and there, gotten the local police to hassle a few others. But there's no war, so there's no law being broken. A saboteur with some bombs is something else. He gets priority. Roosevelt is as angry as a wet cat." Wheeler sipped. "If we were just out to run down pro-Hitler groups, we'd be arresting half the Republicans in the Senate, William Randolph Hearst, Charles Lindbergh, and probably eighty percent of the Daughters of the American Revolution."
Cochrane mustered an uneasy grin.
"So you see, we're in a swampy area. Very few real rules. The laws we have to enforce are the usual civil and criminal laws. And many of them are state laws, so we don't have jurisdiction. Added to that, we have a peacetime espionage situation. Confusing?"
"No."
"Good." Wheeler drew a breath. "Because that leads us to the radio emissions. And the 'Bluebirds."
"The
who?
"
Wheeler finished his bourbon and poured himself a refill. He tossed Cochrane a sly smile. "So glad you asked," he said.
The Bluebirds' official name was Monitoring Division and they had been formed in the queasy days of 1937 upon a suggestion by William Donovan. On an evening in Washington, Roosevelt had casually mentioned a marked increase in mysterious radio emissions from the northeastern United States. Triangulation detectors had traced many of them to Newark and Manhattan, particularly Yorkville, in the East Eighties, and Little Hungary, in the East Seventies.
"I can't see that there's too much question what these emissions are," Roosevelt said.
"Why not listen to them?" Donovan asked. "Monitor them. Record them. Then decipher them."
Donovan explained how a skeletal monitoring station could be set up by the F.B.I. on the sixth floor of the Justice Department. FDR signaled to an aide to take notes. Then the notes were typed and organized.
"Have Mr. Hoover do something about this," FDR said to the aide.
Hoover assembled a division called Monitoring under the shadowy umbrella of Section Seven. Those who worked in Monitoring quickly self-administered the nickname of the “Bluebirds.” They were a number of men and women, usually somewhere between twenty- five and thirty in number who spent their time in the hastily constructed plywood stalls of the largest room in the east wing of the sixth floor. These were the foot soldiers of Section Seven.
Day after day, but mostly night after night, they turned dials on an endless succession of shortwave radios. Each man or woman, fluent in the international Morse code, monitored no fewer than three frequencies each, or read a book if nothing was coming across. Anything mysterious was recorded, particularly in the evening when emissions to Europe could be at optimum strength.
Each Bluebird worked a four-hour shift, and most, particularly those who finished between four and eight in the morning, acquired the sunken, narcoleptic look of the truly deranged. But each also emerged with a sheaf of papers, a scramble of notes, and notations of precise time, along with too many spools of wire recordings.
"Everything gets passed along to Deciphering and Cryptology," Wheeler said. "That's one unit, next door to the Bluebirds, on this floor also. I'll give you a look."
Wheeler set aside his bourbon. They rose and went a few paces down the hall. Cochrane was admitted to a large chamber where seven Bluebirds were at work, Saturday morning being a slow time to bounce signals around the clouds. Everyone in the room looked sleepy. No one had much to say, even to Wheeler, and Cochrane and Wheeler were gone from the room in ten minutes.
The next door down was another large room, this one cramped with wall-to-wall files and several large tables at its center. There was no activity whatsoever, because this was the CAR Division, as Wheeler described it. He pronounced it as if it had something to do with automobiles, and explained that the letters stood for Central Alien Registry.
"Everyone here still has weekends off," Wheeler said. "But not for much longer."
Central Alien Registry was a nightmare. Stuffed into the files in varying degrees of order were alien registration forms dating back through the waves of immigration that flooded Boston, New York, and Philadelphia in the 1920s.
"If someone came into this country legally, he's in these files," said Wheeler, motioning. "If he came in illegally," he added with a grimace, "he might be here, also."
Two hundred and sixty thousand names were crammed into the files of the CAR Division, along with any criminal reports or F.B.I. dossiers which might be pertinent. The files were divided into Asian and European—European being vastly larger—and there were cross-references of points of origin, many designated FRIENDLY, such as Britain or Canada or Australia, and others designated as UNFRIENDLY, such as Germany or Hungary.
"Where's Spain?" Cochrane inquired. "Or the Soviet Union?"
"Somewhere in the murky middle," answered Wheeler. "Maybe by the end of 1940 we'll have it all straight."
Cochrane opened a file drawer and fingered a few cards to familiarize himself with the format. Then they were out into the hall again, nearing a right-angle turn in the endless corridor, strolling deeper into the belly of Section Seven, when Wheeler sniffed the air and stopped in his tracks. His feet shuffled, almost in the manner of an Ozark brown bear pawing the ground.
"Who the hell is smoking a cigarette on this floor?" he bellowed. "Standing orders. No cigarette smoking in any section I have anything to do with!" He continued down the corridor and around the corner. "Who
is
the malefactor?"
The culprit was no less a personage than tiny Mr. Hay himself, who was discovered stuffing a smoldering butt into a potted hallway plant.
"Mr. Hay, you little gnome!" Wheeler roared, not half as angrily or aggressively as he might have. "Are you trying to asphyxiate us?"
"No, sir."
"Then why don't you scramble back upstairs before the cat catches you!"
"Yes, sir," said Mr. Hay, who drew a nasty bead on Cochrane, then returned a terrified defensive gaze to Wheeler. "Right away, sir. Just delivering files for the CAR Division, sir."
"Go!" ordered Wheeler. "Vanish!"
The dwarf scurried back to the elevators.
"But you're smoking," Cochrane said softly to Wheeler.
"I'm smoking a pipe. Pipes, yes. Cigarettes and cigars, no, on my floors. Power is wielded arbitrarily and unfairly in this Bureau."
They arrived at another door. Wheeler pushed it open without knocking. "This is Deciphering and Cryptology," said Wheeler, leading Cochrane into a large room that was a messy warren of desks and small plywood partitions. "Also known as our history and Romance-language department."
Present today were perhaps a dozen loyal workers, most of whom glanced up when Wheeler passed. All were obsessed with various forms of code evaluation, mostly from sequential series of intercepted dots and dashes passed on to them by the pilfering Bluebirds. Many worked with wire recorders, playing back the unidentified blips, and others worked with pens, pencils, papers, notebooks, or improbable-looking little black and gray slide rules.
Among the drones of the D&C Chamber were one civil engineer, two math instructors, one high school history teacher, two housewives who were said to be good at solving mathematical puzzles, and a bespectacled, adenoidal eighteen-year-old chess grand master from Brooklyn, New York, named Lanny Slotkin. The latter was currently pursuing his doctoral studies in chemistry at George Washington University.
"I'm a genius," Lanny said to Cochrane upon introduction, simultaneously munching a cream cheese sandwich. Then he went back to his work.
"I love little Lanny," Wheeler said evenly, moving away from him, "almost as much as I love going to the dentist. But he is smart, the little bugger."
Then they came to a Chinese-American woman named Hope See Ming, who smiled very politely, offered Cochrane a dead fish of a handshake, and interrupted her work on an abacus to answer a question in perfectly textured English. Out of her earshot, Wheeler said she was the most able person in the room.
"Hope See Ming is our own little China doll," mused' Wheeler, holding the door open for Cochrane as they departed. "Lanny is our pet Jew. Adam Hay is our pet squirrel. Don’t feed any of them without permission. They have special diets.”
He closed the door and they were back in the corridor.
"But you know what?" Wheeler continued. "They're smart as whips, all of them. Never met a dumb Jew in my life, if you want to know the truth, Bill. Anyway, none of them wouldn't be here if they weren't sharp as tacks. Imagine what we could do if we could trade information with other intelligence services. British and Canadian are formidable, but we can't even admit we're in the same line of work."
"Don't you think they might soon figure it out?"
"So what if they do?" Wheeler shrugged. "We still have to lie. Neither Hoover nor Roosevelt are ready to go to the great unwashed American public and admit that we're running a spy service. That's just politics, William."
Wheeler led Cochrane onward, introducing him first to Roddy Schwarzkopf and Elizabeth Pfeifer, known as Hansel and Gretel in Section Seven, and who abruptly stopped talking when they saw Wheeler. Hansel and Gretel were an infiltration team that Hoover and Wheeler were getting ready for something but no one knew what. Wheeler motioned down the corridor to a private office.
Therein was Bobby Charles Martin, a fingerprint expert formerly of the Ohio State Police, whose hobby was cartography, and who now merrily spent his days assessing recent European maps and navigational charts. "Just in case we have to send a few lucky souls abroad again," Wheeler said as he handled the introduction.
Dora McNeil, the secretary of the D&C Division, looked up as they approached and gave Wheeler a sweet complacent smile. Then she stared at Cochrane, and fixed her posture. Dora, Wheeler explained much later, was the house floozy whom no one had the heart to fire. This month she was a strawberry blonde. She was a more than competent secretary, blessed with an ample bosom, good legs, and a pair of buttocks which, when snugly nestled into a form-fitting skirt, had just the proper air of provocation. Dora, in Bureau parlance, was that good time who'd been had by all. Her blouse never seemed to be buttoned quite properly and at least once a week her eyeliner would be slightly off or a speck of lipstick would spend several hours on a front tooth.
But no one complained.
So Dora McNeil flounced around Section Seven at will, occasionally typing a letter or reheating coffee. J. Edgar Hoover did not know about her, and Lanny Slotkin was in deep, unrequited love with her. To him, at age twenty-five, she was a classy older woman.
"Hi," Bill Cochrane said to her as they passed.
"Hi," Dora returned with an eager smile and a twinkle in her green eyes.
"Introductions later, Dora," Wheeler grumbled with sudden curtness. Dora answered
Wheeler with a downward turn of her smile.
"That's something else," Wheeler brooded. "The Bureau rule book, again. This city is filled with young secretaries who can't keep their knees together after six in the evening. But do your prowling somewhere else. No dirtying sheets with another employee, hear?"
"I understand."
“Do you?”
“Maybe.”
Then a smile emerged and Wheeler became the backslapping, beer-guzzling good ole boy again. "Heck, Bill, I wouldn't mind if little Dora back there gave me a few tumbles. But we all got a directive two months ago over J.E.H.'s signature. One of the field agents from Chicago-Racketeering was in town for a month, just long enough to impregnate one of the file clerks from Central Recordkeeping."
"These things happen," said Cochrane generously.
"She happened to be the daughter of a big shot over at Senate Budget and Appropriations," Wheeler said. "Frank Lerrick got a call asking us what kind of orgy we were running over here. J.E.H. went through the roof and made us all monks and nuns. The man hates hetero hanky-panky, you know. Well, anyway. That's the entire show. I guess you can see how this all works."
Cochrane said he did, but Wheeler recapitulated anyway.
Bluebirds were the thieves who plucked the signals out of the airwaves. Then they sent them to Deciphering and Cryptology where people like Lanny Slotkin and Hope See Ming tried to find a pattern. "Letters, numbers, hieroglyphics, cuneiform, anything," Wheeler said. "There's only one principle involved. If a man can think up a code, another man can pull it apart."
They were toward the end of the corridor and Wheeler held out his fist and knuckles just above a door as a prelude to knocking. He turned and dropped his voice to a whisper.
"I'm going to introduce you to the 'Virgin Mary,”he said. Then he rapped. An agreeable female voice from within a final chamber gave them entry.
The Virgin Mary was Mary Ryan, an eighty-one years old, a graduate of Vassar, 1882, and the only current employee of the Bureau who had spent half of her life in the previous century. Mary came and went as she pleased, Wheeler explained, and did astonishing things with numbers, sequential series, probability, factorials, logarithms, and the other numerical complexities of cryptology. She had earned an office of her own.
Mary was an elfin white-haired woman with a small impish face, dazzling deep-green Irish eyes, and ruddy red cheeks. She wore her hair pinned back into a loose bun, and despite Cochrane's protestations, she stood when they entered the room and remained standing as they spoke.