Joseph E. Persico (6 page)

Still, the President could presume that one of the most prized secrets in America's aerial arsenal would remain inviolable. A plant located at 80 Lafayette Street in Manhattan produced a bombsight, the product of the genius of Carl L. Norden, believed to be the most accurate such instrument in the world. The boast among Army fliers was that the Norden sight could guide a bomb from a plane into a pickle barrel. Working at the plant as an inspector was a thirty-five-year-old German immigrant, Hermann W. Lang, blond, with a broad, pleasant face and a quiet, agreeable manner. On a Sunday afternoon in the fall of 1937, Lang met, at the home of a friend, forty-year-old Nikolaus Ritter, a major in the Abwehr, German military intelligence, posted to America. Lang's loyalty to his homeland proved stronger than his affection for his adopted land. He unhesitatingly told Ritter about his work, how he had access to blueprints for an extraordinary bombing device. He was supposed to return the plans to a safe at the end of the day, but instead took them home. After his wife went to sleep, he set the blueprints on the kitchen table and traced them. Lang volunteered to give a copy to Ritter. When Ritter offered to pay, Lang looked hurt. “I want to do something for the Fatherland,” he said. “I want Germany to have this bombsight. If you gave me money I would throw it away. It would be dirty money.” Ritter was overjoyed. He had been in the United States less than two weeks and had scored an espionage coup. On November 30 a steward from the Hamburg-Amerika Line's
Reliance,
who doubled as an Abwehr courier, limped aboard the ship, leaning on a furled umbrella. Rolled inside the umbrella were Lang's partial plans for the Norden bombsight. Over succeeding months, Lang continued to supply the rest of the copied blueprints, smuggled aboard planes and ships between the pages of newspapers. Piece by piece the tracings found their way into the hands of Luftwaffe engineers, who constructed their own version of America's air war secret.

Paradoxically, British prime minister Neville Chamberlain was to ask Roosevelt, just days before war broke out in Europe, for the plans for the Norden bombsight for use by the Royal Air Force. Roosevelt, not wanting to give American isolationists an issue with which to attack him, turned down the request from a likely ally for a weapon that had already been stolen by a likely enemy. The British were not to obtain the Norden bombsight until well into the war.

Roosevelt would soon have reason to regret American industry's eager commerce with Germany and the poor security afforded military secrets. At 2:50
A.M.
on September 1, 1939, he was wakened by a call from a close associate whom he had named ambassador to France, William C. Bullitt. Bill Bullitt was FDR's kind of guy—rich, ebullient, charming, bursting with energy and ideas. He had been Roosevelt's choice in 1933 as the first American ambassador to the Soviet Union. FDR had then shifted the bald, blue-eyed dynamo to Paris in 1936 where, for his lavish parties, Bullitt became known as the “Champagne Ambassador.” It was a somber Bullitt who interrupted the President's sleep this night to tell FDR that he had just talked to the U.S. ambassador in Warsaw, Anthony Drexel Biddle Jr. The German army, Biddle had reported, was attacking Poland with a force building to sixty divisions and over a thousand aircraft. “Then it's happened,” Roosevelt told Bullitt. Within days, Europe's major powers were again at war.

The outbreak of hostilities brought Vincent Astor and The Room more closely into FDR's orbit. Astor's Pacific mission may have been a letdown, and The Room, whose members had now reconstituted themselves as The Club, still behaved somewhat as adventure-seeking dilettantes. Despite the sophomoric antics, however, their powerful positions in the American establishment continued to offer ideal listening posts. In the fall of 1939, Astor wrote FDR, “Tomorrow I am starting to work on the banks, using the Chase as a guinea pig. . . . Espionage and sabotage need money, and that has to pass through banks at one stage or another.” Club member Winthrop Aldrich, who directed the Chase National, New York's leading bank, proved Astor's point. He informed Roosevelt that Amtorg, the Soviet Union's trading corporation in America, was spending over $2 million a week, much of it in its role as an espionage front.

Astor himself was a director of the Western Union Cable Company. Snooping into international cables was a federal crime, but Astor happily ran the risk. He was able to apprise FDR of intercepted telegrams revealing foreign agents operating out of Mexico and spying on the United States. Cables to and from Spanish embassies in the Americas exposed Spain's increasing ties to Nazi Germany. FDR further learned that a Brazilian naval mission buying arms in America was a gang of grafters. The President actively promoted this eavesdropping. On October 20, 1939, Astor reported that he had arranged to listen in on foreign radio transmissions, “in accordance with your wishes. . . .”

While the activities of The Club provided peripheral excitement, what Astor hankered for was to become FDR's chief of a future American intelligence service. With Europe at war, and given Astor's connections in Britain, especially through the English branch of his family, the opportunity might well be on the horizon. Undeniably, an intelligence vacuum had to be filled. Even before the war, FDR had expressed his exasperation to his secretary of state, Cordell Hull. The Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Army's Military Intelligence Division, and the Office of Naval Intelligence were “constantly crossing each other's tracks,” he complained to Hull. This duplication was wasteful, expensive, and inefficient, the President charged. He wanted the activities of the three agencies sensibly coordinated.

This sudden passion for administrative efficiency must have come as a shock to Hull, for a hallmark of the Roosevelt administration was bureaucratic anarchy. FDR disdained organization charts, created competing offices without warning those running the old offices, and blithely broke the chain of command to deal with whomever he pleased. Responsibilities he assigned were vague and the authority to fulfill them murky. As an observer put it, the President handed one job to several men and several jobs to one man. Textbook administrative concepts such as a manageable “span of control” meant nothing to Roosevelt. At one point, nearly one hundred associates could bypass his secretaries and phone the President directly. Few, however, abused this privilege more than once. The shrewder of his associates did not see FDR's style as the mark of a poor administrator, but as a deliberate device for keeping everyone else off balance while he alone maintained control. In a rare burst of poetic imagery, Secretary of War Henry Stimson once observed, “His mind does not easily follow a consecutive chain of thought but he is full of stories and incidents and hops about in his discussions from suggestion to suggestion and it is very much like chasing a vagrant beam of moonshine around a vacant room.” By forcing people who often held contrary views to work together, FDR ran the short-term risk of causing conflict, confusion, and injured feelings. But over the long term his dispersal of authority acted as a brake against the commission of major blunders. If FDR's leadership was chaotic, it was inspired chaos.

Nevertheless, the President was genuinely displeased with the disjointed, overlapping, shotgun conduct of intelligence. On June 26, 1939, two months before the war erupted in Europe, he had ordered the heads of the FBI, MID, and ONI to start synchronizing their actions. He handed responsibility for this thankless task to the assistant secretary of state for administration, George S. Messersmith. Roosevelt, at this stage, had no thought of creating a central intelligence service. He was not yet ready, nor was the country. As
The New York Times
editorialized: “No secret police is needed or wanted here.” He simply needed someone to knock heads together. Messersmith was wise enough to recognize the rivalries and jealousies among federal fiefdoms, particularly endemic among those trafficking in secrets. He thus sought to put a civilized tone on his first attempt to bring together the competing agencies by inviting their chiefs to his Georgetown home for dinner. Afterward, over port and cigars, they could figure out a way to stop stepping on each other's toes. The dinner was hardly a success. The figure then with the major counterespionage role was FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, and Hoover did not deign to show up at Georgetown. He attended Messersmith's next meeting only when ordered directly to do so by the President.

Espionage involves peeking at the other fellow's hand, marking the cards, cooking the books, poisoning the well, breaking the rules, hitting below the belt, cheating, lying, deceiving, defaming, snooping, eavesdropping, prying, stealing, bribing, suborning, burglarizing, forging, misleading, conducting dirty tricks, dirty pool, skulduggery, blackmail, seduction, everything not sporting, not kosher, not cricket. In short, espionage stands virtue on its head and elevates vice in its stead. As Europe went to war and America clung to the slope of a slippery peace, the country essentially lacked the back alleys, the counterfeiters, the potions, all the implements of deceit necessary to conduct what has aptly been called the game of the foxes. All FDR had, at this point, was a clique of gentleman amateurs, equally amateurish military attachés abroad, an underfunded codebreaking service, and an empty intelligence center with rivals messily competing around the edges for supremacy.

Chapter II

Spies, Saboteurs, and Traitors

ON A gray London morning, May 20, 1940, four men approached a flat at 47 Gloucester Place. Behind the door, a young man, clean-cut and studious-looking, sat amid the remains of his breakfast. He did not respond to the knocking even when a booming voice shouted, “Police!” Instead he bolted the door and called out coolly, “No, you can't come in.” A Scotland Yard detective rammed his shoulder against the door and it burst open. The others filed in, a second detective, an officer from MI5, the British domestic military intelligence service, and the second secretary of the American embassy. The man they had broken in on was Tyler Kent, a code clerk also attached to the embassy. One of the detectives produced a search warrant, and Kent stood by, unruffled, as his visitors rummaged through his apartment. They found 1,929 U.S. embassy documents, including secret correspondence between Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill. The content of these messages was such that their exposure to the public could harm the President and the Prime Minister, and jeopardize America's presumed neutrality in the European war. What they revealed could also influence the upcoming U.S. presidential election.

Though they had been corresponding for months, Roosevelt and Churchill had met only once twenty-one years before, an unsatisfactory encounter from FDR's viewpoint. Roosevelt confided to Joseph P. Kennedy, his ambassador to Britain, his initial reaction to Churchill: “I have always disliked him since the time I went to England in 1918. He acted like a stinker at a dinner I attended, lording it all over us.” Roosevelt was not alone in his distaste. The novelist-physicist C. P. Snow observed that Churchill was “widely and deeply disliked,” and had been so for most of his life. During the thirties, Churchill was viewed as brilliant, but a burnt-out case, a has-been who sought refuge in drink. The American undersecretary of state, Sumner Welles, in recalling a visit to Churchill's office, noted, “Mr. Churchill was sitting in front of the fire smoking a 24-inch cigar, and drinking whiskey and soda. It was quite obvious that he had consumed a good many whiskies before I arrived.” Yet, Felix Frankfurter, appointed to the Supreme Court by Roosevelt, who also visited Churchill just before the war, came away glowing. Meeting the man, Frankfurter wrote, “was one of the most exhilarating experiences I had in England—it made me feel more secure about the future.” A Frankfurter opinion counted with FDR. And so, when Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain took Churchill into his government as First Lord of the Admiralty, FDR made a risky overture for the head of a presumably neutral nation toward the naval chief of a belligerent country. Eight days after war was declared, FDR instituted a secret correspondence recalling their common naval experience. “It is because you and I occupied similar positions in the World War that I want you to know how glad I am that you are back again in the Admiralty,” Roosevelt began. He went on, “What I want you and the Prime Minister to know is that I shall at all times welcome it, if you will keep me in touch personally with anything you want me to know about. You can always send sealed letters through your pouch or my pouch.” He later explained to Joe Kennedy as his reason for initiating the contact, “. . . [T]here is a strong possibility that he [Churchill] will become the prime minister and I want to get my hand in now.” FDR's expectation had been borne out on May 10, 1940, when Churchill moved into 10 Downing Street, replacing Chamberlain. The day before, Hitler had declared, “The decisive hour has come for the fight today decides the fate of the German nation for the next 1000 years.” He then unleashed the Luftwaffe, the Wehrmacht, all of Germany's might against Holland, Luxembourg, Belgium, and France, simultaneously and with stunning effect. Roosevelt was relaxing in his upstairs study in his favorite red leather Jefferson chair, when he learned that eight months of not-quite-war yet not-quite-peace—the “phony war”—had been shattered. His envoy to Belgium, John Cudahy, telephoned him to describe the German Blitzkrieg under way. Hitler had earlier seized Denmark and Norway. Within the next five days the Low Countries and Luxembourg were defeated and France was reeling.

From Paris, Bill Bullitt sent a message to Washington stamped
PERSONAL AND SECRET FOR THE PRESIDENT.
Bullitt judged Britain's situation hopeless, and he proposed a desperate strategy. “I should like to speak what follows into your most private ear at the White House and to have no record of it,” Bullitt's cable began. France, he predicted, “will be crushed utterly.” More alarming, “The British may install a government of Oswald Mosley and the union of British fascists which would cooperate fully with Hitler. That would mean the British navy would be against us.” In case the war went that badly, he urged that “the British fleet would base itself in Canada in defense of that dominion which might become the refuge for the British crown.” FDR, however, was not yet ready to write off the British navy in its home waters or the king in Buckingham Palace. He ignored Bullitt's proposal.

One American vigorously disapproved of the collusive nature of the secret correspondence passing between FDR and Churchill, the code clerk Tyler Kent, who had access to these messages. The reserved twenty-nine-year-old lone wolf was a deeply discontented man. Kent believed that he was working well below his station. He possessed all the WASP credentials favoring a successful diplomatic career. Tyler Gatewood Kent descended from an old Virginia family that dated to the 1600s. His father, William Patton Kent, had been a career officer in the U.S. Consular Service. Tyler had been born during his father's posting to Manchuria and thereafter traveled with the family to subsequent assignments in China, Germany, Switzerland, England, and Bermuda. He had received a first-class education, St. Albans, Princeton, the Sorbonne, and spoke French, Greek, German, Russian, Italian, and Spanish. Still, Kent had been hired by the State Department in 1934 not as a fledgling diplomat but as a clerk. He had come to London in October 1939 after serving at the American embassy in Moscow, where he had been assigned to the code room. His political ideas had begun to take shape at that time, characterized by a visceral hatred of communism.

A code clerk was essentially a technician, and Kent's fellow clerks encoded and decoded messages that were shaping history with the indifference with which bank tellers handle bundles of money. Kent, on the contrary, read, reread, and thought deeply about the secrets that passed through his hands. For him, the FDR-Churchill exchanges had taken on an alarming turn from the very first. In a dispatch dated October 5, 1939, Churchill, then First Lord of the Admiralty, asked FDR to have American warships alert the British navy to any German ship movements in the Atlantic. “The more American ships cruising along the South American coast the better,” Churchill observed, “as you, sir, would no doubt hear what they saw or did not see.” He began signing his dispatches “Naval Person,” chummily underlining his present and FDR's former navy affiliation. Roosevelt readily complied with Churchill's request. Admiral John Godfrey, director of British Naval Intelligence, reported on February 26, 1940: “. . . [T]heir [U.S.] patrols in the Gulf of Mexico give us information, and recently they have been thoroughly unneutral in reporting the position of the SS
Columbus,
” a German merchant vessel subsequently captured by the British.

Another secret exchange further punctured the thin membrane of neutrality. American shipowners complained bitterly to the President that the Royal Navy was forcing their vessels into British ports to be searched. The British, seeking to maintain a blockade against shipments that might aid their enemies, believed themselves within their rights in detaining any vessels, including American. Roosevelt told Churchill of the American shipowners' discontent. Churchill made a swift exception. He responded, “I gave orders last night that no American ship under any circumstances be diverted into the combat zone around the British Isles declared by you. I trust this will be satisfactory.”

Roosevelt's breaches of neutrality drove Tyler Kent to a desperate act. The American people, he was convinced, did not want to be enmeshed in Europe's fight. A Roper public opinion poll taken immediately after the war began indicated that less than 3 percent of Americans wanted their country to enter the war on the Allied side. The largest percentage, 37.5 percent, preferred to “Take no sides and stay out of the war entirely.” Yet, here was an American president, in Kent's view, conniving with the British, risking America's entanglement in a conflict his people decidedly did not want. There could be little doubt of what Churchill wanted; as the Prime Minister put it to an Admiralty official, “Our objective is to get the Americans into the war. . . . We can then best settle how to fight it afterwards.”

In another message to Roosevelt, Churchill dangled tempting bait before the President. FDR had earlier turned down Prime Minister Chamberlain's request for the Norden bombsight. Now Churchill offered a quid pro quo: “We should be quite ready to tell you about our ASDIC methods whenever you feel they would be of use to the United States Navy” and added that FDR could be “. . . sure the secret will go no further.” Churchill was offering a new sound wave technique able to detect submerged submarines, later called, in the American version, sonar. The British would trade ASDIC for the Norden bombsight. Roosevelt responded that he would consider the deal, and it was consummated while the United States was still technically neutral.

Tyler Kent, as he brooded in the airless silence of the code room translating messages into the State Department's Gray code, fretted that FDR was “secretly and unconstitutionally plotting with Churchill to sneak the United States into the war.” He had developed a corollary obsession: “All wars are inspired, fomented, and promoted by the great international bankers and banking combines which are largely controlled by the Jews.” He had, he later admitted, “anti-Semitic tendencies for many years.” Kent finally decided where his duty lay. He had to gather evidence that he could place into the hands of the U.S. Senate and the American press to expose Roosevelt's duplicity and keep the United States out of the war. Roosevelt, Kent believed, had to be stopped, especially since, it was rumored, he might run for an unprecedented third term. And so Kent began to steal and copy documents from the code room which he hid in his flat in a brown leather bag, a crate, and in the cupboard. He also managed to secure duplicate keys to the code room so that he could conduct his pilfering anytime day or night.

Early in 1940, Kent had met thirty-seven-year-old Anna Wolkoff, not particularly attractive, but vivacious, witty, and worldly, the daughter of czarist émigrés. Her father had been an admiral in the czar's navy and an attaché assigned to London at the time of the 1917 Russian Revolution. Anna's mother had served as a maid of honor to the czarina. The revolution was the Wolkoffs' undoing. The admiral and his wife had fled to London and now ran the Russian Tea Room, renowned for serving the best caviar in town. Anna owned a fashionable dress shop. She had a simple explanation for the Wolkoffs' social dethronement, the gang of Communists, Jews, and Freemasons who had instigated the revolution. Tyler Kent had found a soul mate.

Anna took her new friend to Onslow Square to meet a man who immediately impressed Kent. Captain A.H.M. Ramsay was a Sandhurst graduate, a wounded and decorated soldier in the First World War, a Tory member of Parliament, and a distant relative of the royal family. Further, he was a man convinced that his country was being taken over by a vast Jewish conspiracy. Ramsay had fought back by founding the Right Club, whose members blamed the world's woes on Wolkoff's villainous trio of Bolsheviks, Jews, and Masons.

Though recognizing a kindred spirit, Kent found the old soldier politically naïve. The embassy clerk determined to enlighten Ramsay. He took him to his flat and spread before him a feast of classified documents. Ramsay was dazzled to be reading in a London bed-sitting room secret exchanges between Roosevelt and Churchill. Kent explained their underlying meaning, Churchill's desire to draw America into this “Jew's War” and Roosevelt's obvious connivance in the scheme.

On a visit to Kent's room in March 1940, Anna Wolkoff asked him if she might borrow some of the purloined documents. Kent, knowing of Captain Ramsay's interest, assumed she wanted to show them to the Englishman again, and agreed. Instead, she took the papers to a photographer friend of her father, who copied them. Wolkoff, of the aristocratic past, then gave the photos to a fellow patrician, Don Francesco Maringliano, duke of Del Monte, a lieutenant colonel in the Italian army posted to his country's London embassy. The duke knew that what Churchill and the supposedly neutral FDR were secretly telling each other could prove invaluable to Italy and its Axis partner, Germany. The stolen information that he relayed to Rome was about to be intercepted itself by means the duke could not have predicted.

Bletchley Park had been built nearly seventy years before by Sir Herbert Leon, a Victorian businessman. Sir Herbert evidently possessed more commercial acumen than aesthetic judgment. One architect described his estate as “. . . a maudlin and monstrous pile probably unsurpassed . . . in the architectural gaucherie of the mid-Victorian era . . . altogether inchoate, unfocused and incomprehensible.” Bletchley Park's sole redeeming virtue was its location roughly midway between Oxford and Cambridge. This position attracted the Government Code and Cypher School, Britain's codebreaking agency, which moved to Bletchley Park just before the war started. There a clutch of mathematicians, linguists, academics, and eccentrics, recruited largely from universities, labored over foreign codes with considerable success, though the cryptographers were having a deuce of a time with one seemingly unbreakable German cipher encrypted on a machine called the Enigma.