That August, Leon Goodelman, a reporter for the New York newspaper PM, received a call from the secretary of the Citizens’ Committee for Harry Bridges. Bridges, he was told, was currently staying at the Edison Hotel on West Forty-seventh Street. He had discovered his telephone was being tapped, and invited the reporter to come and see for himself.
Goodelman found he had a scoop on his hands. Bridges explained he had been staying at the Edison intermittently since early July. He was accustomed to being surveilled by the FBI and became suspicious when, even though he asked for different accommodation, the hotel persisted in giving him one particular room, number 1027. Then, down in the hotel lobby, Bridges spotted an FBI agent who had attended one of his deportation hearings. After identifying two more agents, Bridges decided to experiment. Using the telephone in his room, he called a union colleague to make an appointment at a nearby drugstore. Sure enough, one of the FBI agents turned up at the rendezvous. If they knew about his appointment, Bridges reasoned, then they were listening to his calls.
‘I went back to the hotel,’ he recalled, ‘went in my door very fast and dove over to the connecting door, lay down and looked under it into the next room. Two pairs of feet went by my eye and I could see some bunched-up telephone wire on the floor … After tipping off my friends that I was being tapped, I sort of settled down to have some fun with the FBI. I left the room very quietly, and ducked out of the hotel.’
Soon, armed with a pair of binoculars, Bridges was watching his room, and the room next door to it, from the roof garden of the hotel across the street. ‘There were the two guys,’ he said, ‘stretched out on the twin beds with their earphones on, thinking I was still in the room.’ First with colleagues, then with reporter Goodelman and a photographer, the union leader watched his watchers for days. Whenever Bridges left his room, the journalists noticed, one of the agents next door would sit down to work at a typewriter. He was also seen pasting little pieces of paper together – scraps from Bridges’ wastebasket.
Then Goodelman used a nail file to pry open the telephone connector box in Bridges’ room, revealing a hidden radio induction microphone, a dual-function bug capable of transmitting both speech on the telephone and conversation in the room. The police were called, and the agent on duty next door had to flee via the fire escape. He left behind wires leading through the wall to Bridges’ phone, abandoned wiring and a piece of carbon paper. The carbon bore the telltale words ‘Evelle J. Younger, Special Agent.’
The FBI had been caught red-handed. Francis Biddle, who took over as Attorney General that month, faced awkward questions from the Senate Judiciary Committee. ‘When all this came out in the newspapers,’ he said, ‘I could not resist suggesting to Hoover that he tell the story of the unfortunate tap directly to the President. We went over to the White House together. FDR was delighted; and, with one of his great grins, intent on every word, slapped Hoover on the back when he had finished. “By God, Edgar, that’s the first time you’ve been caught with your pants down.”’
Roosevelt might not have laughed so hard had he known what Edgar was saying behind his back. ‘Hoover stated quite frankly,’ Assistant Attorney General Norman Littell wrote in his journal, ‘that, if he were put on the stand as a result of the reopening of the Bridges case, he would frankly state that he was authorized to tap the wires by the President himself.’ Hoover, Littell observed, ‘knows no loyalty to the commander-in-chief. He would just let the chief take the rap for authorizing an illegal act …’
Roosevelt himself had few qualms about the use of wiretaps by the executive. He reportedly used Edgar to tap one of his own former advisers, Tommy ‘the Cork’ Corcoran, and even requested coverage of a serving Cabinet member, Postmaster General Jim Farley. Edgar is said to have balked at that, but passed on Farley’s conversations when they were picked up on an FBI bug of someone else. During the run-up to the 1944 election, he would reportedly supply the White House with the results of wiretaps on Republican politicians – an alleged Watergate three decades before the scandal that would topple Richard Nixon.
According to Nixon, Edgar told him ‘every president since Roosevelt’ had given him bugging assignments. As the Senate Intelligence Committee would discover in 1975, Presidents Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson – and Nixon – all used the Bureau to conduct wiretaps and surveillance for purposes that had nothing to do with national security or crime, and which can only be described as political. By ignoring ethics, and on occasion the law, and by using the FBI to do it, they all made themselves beholden to Edgar.
Against that background, it is hardly surprising that Edgar would feel free to deceive Congress on the subject. ‘In Chicago,’ veteran FBI surveillance specialist Wesley Swearingen was to recall, ‘we’d get a call from headquarters a couple of days before Hoover was due to appear before the House Appropriations Committee. They’d tell us he was going to tell the Congressmen we had such and such a number of wiretaps going right now – always a real low figure. We’d have dozens on in our city alone, but this call from the Bureau would instruct us that for now we were to reduce them to only one – say, on Communist Party headquarters. So we’d get in touch with the phone company and say, “As of midnight Tuesday until midnight Wednesday, that’s the only wiretap we want working in Chicago.” Hoover would march in, make his speech, give some low figure that was accurate that day, and the Congressmen would be impressed. Then, Wednesday night, they turned them all back on again.’
We shall probably never know how much wiretapping was done solely on the authority of senior FBI officials, without the approval of attorneys general. Records of such taps were maintained by designated assistant directors, but in 1953 Edgar ordered that assistant directors’ office files be destroyed every six months. The only such file that survives, that of Lou Nichols, contains substantial information on wiretaps – including a series of reports on John Monroe, a Washington influence peddler who held Edgar’s attention not least because he reportedly claimed the Director was ‘a fairy.’
The FBI’s surveillance index, started in 1941, contains 13,500 entries. While the identity of the individuals tapped is withheld on privacy grounds, the index establishes that Edgar’s FBI tapped or bugged thirteen labor unions, eighty-five radical political groups and twenty-two civil rights organizations.
In 1940, secure in his relationship with President Roosevelt, emboldened by his new and formidable powers, Edgar prepared for World War II.
12
‘Hoover was a megalomaniac, an egomaniac, and a prude of the first order. He was a thorn in our side.’
A. M. Ross-Smith, wartime British Intelligence official in the U.S.
For Edgar, the war really began nearly two years before Pearl Harbor, with a letter from a retired boxer. Gene Tunney, the undefeated world heavyweight champion of the twenties, had often met Edgar and Clyde on their frequent visits to Yankee Stadium. Now, in early 1940, he found himself passing on a discreet message from a man he had first met at military boxing events in his youth, a man who had since become a toplevel British secret agent.
This was William Stephenson, known to millions today as the protagonist of A Man Called Intrepid, the bestselling book about his achievements in World War II. Stephenson, a Canadian the same age as Edgar, was an extraordinary figure – World War I flying ace and prison camp escapee, radio and television pioneer, and hugely successful businessman. His mission, when he asked Tunney to make contact with Edgar, was under the personal command of Winston Churchill.
Churchill, the First Lord of the Admiralty, had been engaged in secret correspondence with President Roosevelt for months. The President fervently wanted to save Europe from the Nazis, but was not yet free to help openly. Powerful forces in the United States were opposed to involvement in the war, and a presidential election was looming. At this critical time, Churchill picked Stephenson as his personal representative in the United States.
In April 1940, in Room 39 at the Admiralty, the two men discussed a
momentous secret. With invasion threatening, Britain’s military was in utter disarray. The country was virtually broke. But Britain had obtained the captured Enigma machine, the key to decoding German military communications – and potentially the key to victory. Churchill decided that, for now, President Roosevelt should be the one foreigner to know Britain had Enigma. ‘To him, and to him alone,’ he told Stephenson, ‘the truth should be confided … Our daily intelligence summaries should be delivered to him through the FBI.’
Edgar himself was not to be privy to the intelligence from Enigma,1 but his cooperation was vital; and, if the relationship was not to be hamstrung by American neutrality, it had to be a closely held secret. That was why their mutual friend, Gene Tunney, was used to deliver Stephenson’s first, informal letter. Its contents remain unknown, but Edgar was persuaded. He telephoned Tunney to say, yes, he would see Churchill’s man.
The two men met that April at Edgar’s new home on Thirtieth Place, N.W., a house he had bought half-built for $25,000, before his mother died. Annie had not liked the place, but now, two years after her death, he had moved in alone. Before getting down to business, Stephenson reflected on what the house might tell him about the Director of the FBI. He noticed the meticulously ordered clutter of ornaments, the myriad photographs of Edgar himself. He noted, especially, the profusion of male nudes.
‘There were,’ Stephenson would recall, ‘nude figurines, nudes on the stairway, pictures of rather suggestive male nudes, all over the place.’ He would soon meet Edgar in the company of Clyde, and recognize them as a homosexual couple. Many years later, Stephenson would refer darkly to having gained some sort of grip on Edgar, something that on occasion made it possible to pressure the Director into cooperating. Roosevelt’s adviser Ernest Cuneo, who was also privy to the secret Anglo-American diplomacy, put it more bluntly. He spoke of Stephenson ‘ruthlessly blackmailing’ Edgar.
At that first meeting, Edgar listened to Stephenson’s plea for cooperation on intelligence matters. Then he said he could do nothing without a specific order from the President. Stephenson returned briefly to London, only to hurry back to Washington in May, when Churchill had become Prime Minister.
In England that month, as Churchill stood in his bedroom shaving, his son Randolph told his father he did not see how Britain could possibly beat the Germans. Churchill’s response was to swing around and retort that he would ‘drag the United States in.’
Soon afterward in Washington, following a meeting between Stephenson and Roosevelt at the White House, the President ordered ‘the closest possible marriage between the FBI and British Intelligence.’2
Roosevelt was running a great risk, perhaps even of impeachment, by ordering such cooperation with a foreign nation while America remained at peace. Edgar may have shared the risk to some degree. While he was to insist, years later, that he received an instruction from the President in writing, no such document can be traced. Edgar insisted the liaison be kept secret from the State Department. Had it been discovered in 1940 – and had the President failed to come to his rescue – Edgar would have faced ferocious attacks by those determined to keep the United States neutral.
The official British history of Stephenson’s operation acknowledged that Edgar’s initial involvement required ‘courage and foresight,’ but included acerbic comments on his character. This was a ‘prima donna’ who tolerated no rivals and was ‘not overscrupulous either in his methods of removing them …’ The price of Edgar’s cooperation, the British realized, ‘was always conditioned by his overwhelming ambition for the FBI.’3
It is hard to tell quite where Edgar’s private sympathies lay, in an administration still not immune to pro-German sentiment, during the long build up to war. He had received one of Himmler’s senior aides in 1938, long after the nature of the Hitler regime had become clear, and he corresponded amiably with Nazi police officials until well into 1939. He made tentative plans, later canceled, to attend an international police convention in Berlin that year.
Critics point out that the FBI finally severed law enforcement contact with Germany only three days before Pearl Harbor. All this, however, may signify little. There was no point, during peacetime, in cutting off contacts that might provide useful information. Certainly, once America was committed to the confrontation with Germany, Edgar responded with enthusiasm.
When war became a real possibility, Edgar made sure that Clyde Tolson, still in his thirties, would not see combat. Should hostilities begin, he told the Navy, Clyde could not be spared for service. In late 1940, when the FBI was preparing to send two high officials to England, Clyde volunteered. Edgar said he appreciated his ‘fine spirit,’ then sent someone else to face the rigors of London at war. All the same, Edgar liked to refer to Clyde as ‘Commander,’ his rank in the Naval Reserve. Edgar himself, now forty-five, had for years now been a Lieutenant Colonel in the Military Intelligence Reserve. Some military men addressed him by that rank, and he did not object.
As an armchair warrior, Edgar at first impressed the British. He provided the transmitter that gave Stephenson direct communication with his people in London, and the FBI helped prevent sabotage of British ships in American ports. Failing any official power of censorship in peacetime, Edgar came to the rescue when Stephenson needed to intercept letters in the U.S. Mail – FBI agents simply purloined the correspondence from post offices. The Bureau also passed on documents captured from German spies, without informing U.S. military intelligence, which at this stage still opposed liaison with the British.
The liaison, however, was a two-way street. The FBI soon found that its British friends were experts in the ungentlemanly art of opening other people’s mail without leaving a trace – and Bureau agents flew to the British colony of Bermuda to learn how.
Stephenson shared with Edgar much of the information flooding in from his agents, not least those in Latin America. A year after cooperation began, no fewer than 100,000 reports had been sent to the FBI from the British base in Rockefeller Center.
Working with the British let Edgar feel he was himself part of the derring-do, an agent in the field. In August 1940, when the Nazis tried to intercept a consignment of scientific data held by a British official at Washington’s Shoreham Hotel, it was Edgar who drove across town to secure the material.
Mindful of Edgar’s vanity, Stephenson saw to it that the Director got the credit when British work achieved a breakthrough against Nazi spies. ‘He lived by publicity,’ recalled Herbert Rowland, one of the British team. ‘Stephenson avoided publicity at all costs. Inevitably the FBI got the credit. We never minded this.’
While Europe burned, American intelligence chiefs indulged in empire-building and chicanery – Edgar as much as his military colleagues. As early as 1939, when the president got tired of interagency bickering, Assistant Secretary of State George Messersmith had been asked to get the heads of the squabbling agencies together. When he invited them to dinner at his Georgetown house, all appeared except Edgar. He did show up at the next meeting, but only after a call from the President threatening him with the sack.
General Ralph Van Deman, who knew Edgar well, warned army intelligence that Edgar was a man ‘catapulted into a job about which he knows practically nothing …’ Secretary for War Henry Stimson thought he ‘poisons the mind of the President … more like a spoiled child than a responsible officer.’
There was no pleasing the feuding officials, least of all when Roosevelt began considering Colonel William Donovan for the job of overall intelligence chief. Donovan, fifty-eight in 1941, was a decorated World War I hero, a prominent lawyer and a political force in his own right. Although a Republican, he was vastly respected by Roosevelt, who thought he had the makings of a President himself.
As an Assistant Attorney General, in 1924, Donovan had recommended that Edgar be confirmed as Director of the Bureau. Long since, however, he had regretted doing so. Should the Republicans return to office, he said, he would do all he could to get Edga
r fired. Edgar’s agents had told him all this. It was thus all the more galling to learn that Donovan was at the center of plans to establish a new intelligence agency.
Donovan and William Stephenson, by contrast, had been forging a partnership of trust. Churchill’s agent was swiftly becoming disillusioned with Edgar. From the British viewpoint, he was making poor use of the information supplied to him, and, as one official put it, he ‘only knew how to think like a cop.’
Stephenson needed someone with an instinct for intelligence work, and Donovan had it. Soon ‘Wild Bill,’ as the press dubbed him, was flying off to Europe with ‘Little Bill’ Stephenson for a crash course in the ways of British intelligence. The British had vastly more experience in the field than their U.S. counterparts – a fact of life that Donovan appreciated. Edgar, however, burned with resentment.
Britain’s Director of Naval Intelligence, Rear Admiral Godfrey, and Commander Ian Fleming – later to become famous as the creator of James Bond – arrived in America in May 1941 to recommend intelligence integration under Donovan and Edgar. Edgar, Fleming recalled, ‘expressed himself firmly but politely uninterested in our mission … Hoover’s negative response was soft as a cat’s paw. With the air of doing us a favor he had us piloted through the FBI laboratory and record department and down to the basement shooting range … Then, with a firm, dry handclasp, we were shown the door.’
In June 1941, Donovan was indeed named to the new post of Coordinator of Information – to the delight of William Stephenson and the rage of the military intelligence chiefs and Edgar, who called the appointment ‘Roosevelt’s folly.’ The British records show that, well knowing the extent of Donovan’s involvement with Stephenson’s team, Edgar began to treat the foreigners with ‘ill-concealed hostility.’ This developed into real enmity in late 1941, shortly before Pearl Harbor, with results that may have contributed to that national tragedy.