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‘Hoover had shown his total incompetence for sophisticated wartime intelligence early on. His handling of the “Popov Affair” might well have been a tip-off for his future legendary secretiveness and over-simplified way of thinking.’
William Casey, CIA Director
Edgar was in New York for the weekend when the Japanese airplanes came screaming out of the skies over Hawaii. It was 1:25 P.M., East Coast time, 7:55 A.M. at Pearl Harbor. Intelligence chief William Donovan was also in the city, watching the Brooklyn Dodgers play the New York Giants.1
Four and a half thousand miles away, at the FBI office in Honolulu, a young radio technician named Duane Eskridge was testing equipment. Eskridge, the Bureau’s first such expert, had been hired four months earlier to set up a new Bureau communications system. His first weeks on the job, in Washington, had been spent attending to the headquarters radio – call sign WFBI – which then consisted of only FBI1, Edgar’s limousine, and one other car. Eskridge had to be on duty early in the morning to respond when Edgar announced ‘FBI1 in service’ on his way to work. There were no other messages, so Eskridge simply sat around all day waiting for Edgar to call in again on his way home at night. On December 7, in Hawaii, such foolishness was abruptly forgotten.
‘I was making test transmissions when the Jap planes came in,’ Eskridge recalled. ‘I went up on the roof to see what was going on, and I could see them flying overhead. They were real low, you could see the pilots with their helmets on. In fact I went and got a .45 automatic from the vault and started shooting at them. It didn’t do any good, of course, but that was my reaction.’
Eskridge remembered he was a radio operator, not a sharpshooter, and hurried back to his transmitter to begin sending what he believes may have been the first news of the attack. ‘I sent the news in Morse code, in clear text, to San Diego,’ said Eskridge. ‘The operator there thought I was kidding, and I had to repeat it. Then he immediately called his Agent in Charge, who called the weekend duty supervisor in Washington. I have always assumed he called Hoover, and that Hoover called the White House. No one could have got through much faster.’
In fact the first news of the catastrophe reached the President within half an hour, through the Navy communications network. For all Eskridge’s efforts, it was nearly an hour before headquarters staff patched a call through to Edgar, from the Agent in Charge in Honolulu, Robert Shivers. Then Edgar moved quickly. Long before the final toll was in – 2,400 dead, 1,300 wounded, eleven ships sunk and 118 planes destroyed – he was on his way by air to Washington.
Back at headquarters, Edgar issued a torrent of orders. Guards were placed on Japanese diplomatic missions, ports and airports closed to Japanese travelers, mail and telephone links severed. Warrants were issued for the arrest of hundreds of suspect Japanese.2 Edgar reported to the White House that night that all these measures, planned in advance on a contingency basis, had been efficiently carried out.
For a week or so after America’s declaration of war, Edgar acted as government censor. The White House asked him to intervene on December 12, when it learned that columnist Drew Pearson was about to publish details of the scale of the naval disaster. ‘I got a phone call from J. Edgar Hoover during dinner,’ Pearson recalled, ‘in effect threatening to put me in jail unless we killed the story giving the real story on Pearl Harbor. I told Edgar that he was nuts, that there was no law by which he could put me in jail, and that he was not the man to interpret the law. He admitted all this, said that Steve Early at the White House had called him up and asked him to throw the fear of God into me.’
That story was killed, and Pearson soon had cause to ponder the extent of Edgar’s penetration of the media. On the orders of the Chief of Staff, two generals visited NBC to ask that both Pearson and Walter Winchell be taken off the air. The odd thing, Pearson recalled, was that Edgar later revealed in a phone conversation that he had a ‘transcript of what happened at the meeting.’ This could mean only that the NBC office had been bugged.
What the ‘real’ Pearl Harbor story was, of course, remains the subject of fierce debate. Only two things are certain. American intelligence failed because of an inability to extract what really mattered from a mountain of incoming data and draw the correct conclusion. Then, after the disaster, there was a rush to cover up and to pass the buck. Yet, while much has emerged to discredit the military, few have questioned the performance of the FBI.
Immediately after the attack, Edgar began trying to lay the blame on others – anyone other than the FBI. In a report to the President, five days later, he claimed that the Army in Hawaii had previously been sent warning of the ‘entire plan’ and timing of the Japanese attack by intelligence colleagues in Washington. There is no evidence that the military received any such warning, and the rest of Edgar’s outburst was packed with inaccuracies. Fortunately for him, the memorandum remained hidden in the Roosevelt papers until after his death.
In the same report, Edgar told how – some thirty-six hours before the attack – the FBI had intercepted a telephone call between Mrs Mori, a dentist’s wife on Hawaii, and a caller in Japan. Their conversation, which lasted forty minutes at a cost of $200, had included discussion about weather, searchlights, and what type of flowers were presently in bloom. Agent in Charge Shivers, said Edgar, had decided the conversation was suspect the moment he saw the transcript on Saturday afternoon. He at once informed the Navy and the Army, but the military response had been woefully inadequate.
It is true that General Short, the Commanding General in Hawaii, failed to give the Mori call the attention it deserved. But new research raises a question as to how well the FBI itself performed after intercepting the mysterious conversation. A check of the record and with surviving witnesses reveals a discrepancy in dating. Edgar told the White House the intercept was made on the afternoon of December 5, translated and transcribed, and passed to the Navy and the military on the evening of Saturday, December 6, the eve of the attack. Agent in Charge Robert Shivers also said the call came in on the fifth.
The official transcript, however, dates the call as having taken place on Wednesday, December 3. Two of four surviving FBI staffers interviewed in 1990 were sure the intercept was made as early as Wednesday. A third thought Thursday, and only one agreed with Edgar and Shivers, that the call came in as late as Friday. One of the witnesses, former agent George Allen, was the ‘sound man’ who installed the tap that picked up the Mori call. He said in 1990 he was certain the call came in on Wednesday evening, and that the transcript went to Washington the next morning. ‘I’m as clear as a bell on that,’ he recalled. ‘We worked on it Wednesday night, and finished it up Thursday morning.’
Did the Mori call, then, come in earlier than the official inquiries were told? Though its meaning remains obscure to this day, scholars agree the call was a coded conversation with a Japanese spy. If the call was known to FBI headquarters four days before the attack, was it passed as promptly as it could have been to the military authorities? Given more time, intelligence officers might have found a way to follow through – perhaps with a fruitful interrogation of Mrs Mori.
Another clue suggests that, before the Mori call, the FBI possessed some specific intelligence – something indicating where and when the Japanese onslaught would occur – that was not acted upon. The head of the Honolulu Police Espionage Bureau, John Burns, never forgot a visit he received from Shivers a week before the raid. Evidently upset, the FBI man told Burns to close his office door, then confided, ‘I’m not telling my men this but I’m telling you … We’re going to be attacked before the week is out.’ He was so upset, Burns recalled, that there were tears in his eyes. Burns got the impression Shivers’ information had come from headquarters in Washington. Shivers had served with the FBI since 1920, was close to Edgar and in direct touch with him at the time.
A month after Pearl Harbor, when the Roberts Commission of inquiry was holding hearings in Hawaii, Shivers made more strange comment
s: ‘You will be one of the ones to be called before the investigation,’ he told Burns. ‘What are you going to tell them?’ Burns said he would tell the truth. ‘You really gonna tell the truth?’ Shivers responded. ‘Exactly the truth?’ ‘Yes sir,’ Burns replied, ‘including what you told me.’
As it turned out, the Commission did not question Burns. It did call Shivers, but nothing in his testimony reflected his prophetic talk with Burns. Incredibly, although he was responsible for domestic security, Edgar himself was never questioned about Pearl Harbor by any official inquiry. The Army Board asked him to appear in August 1944, but he declined, on the grounds that ‘absence from the city … will make it impossible.’
The record shows that Edgar was indeed away, taking a four-week vacation with Clyde. He got away with sending in an affidavit instead, and never did submit to questioning about Pearl Harbor by any of the official inquiries.
The findings of the most thorough probe, conducted for the Secretary of War by Henry Clausen, remained unpublished until 1992, when Clausen published his book Final Judgment. Its litany of interservice follies includes an explanation of how and why, just five days before Pearl Harbor, Naval Intelligence abruptly stopped monitoring the phones of the Japanese Consul in Honolulu. The decision, Clausen disclosed, was the result of a ‘childish dispute’ between FBI Agent Robert Shivers and Captain Irving Mayfield of Naval Intelligence. Shivers had exacerbated a liaison problem, testimony revealed, by playing the bureaucrat and sending a formal complaint to telephone company officials. ‘I could not help asking myself,’ Clausen recalled, ‘what might have happened if Mayfield and Shivers had simply hung in there, discussed the matter calmly and kept the Navy’s phone taps in place.’ If the bugging had been continued, Clausen believed, it might have yielded vital last-minute clues to Japanese intentions.
For his part, Edgar kept up his recriminations against others, not least by suggesting that he had proposed the bugging of Tokyo’s diplomats in Hawaii and had been ignored. The Japanese consul had sent most of his reports over commercial circuits operated by RCA and Mackay Radio. Unlike the overseas telephone link, which was bugged with the authority of the Attorney General, neither the FBI nor the military had had authority to tap those circuits. By demanding the right to do so, Edgar had collided with an old adversary, Federal Communications Chairman James Fly.
The record shows that Edgar had wanted the FCC to monitor all telephone and cable traffic between the United States and Japan – along with Germany, Italy, France and the Soviet Union – and to supply the FBI with the results. Fly and his officials repeatedly refused, explaining that such eavesdropping was against the law. The only way he could cooperate, said Fly, would be if the law was changed, or in response to a direct order from the President.
According to The FBI Story, the history of the Bureau as authorized by Edgar, Fly was still resisting when Pearl Harbor was attacked. The implication was that, had it not been for Fly’s obstinacy, the disaster could have been averted. Fly offered a very different account.
‘The Radio Intelligence Division of FCC,’ he said, ‘did monitor foreign and potential enemy traffic, particularly the enciphered messages on the Tokyo/Berlin circuit … We did not have cryptologists. The RID picked up the pre-Pearl Harbor traffic and funneled it to the FBI, Army and Navy intelligence and the State Department. Finally Hoover requested that we discontinue this service for the stated reason of the FBI’s inability to break the code. But the FCC at my instructions continued to send the traffic to the FBI. In this line of monitoring, the RID picked up the crucial coded “winds” messages. These messages were on the desks of the Federal Bureau of Investigation on Sunday, December 7, when Hoover was in New York for the weekend. And the fleet went down.’
The ‘winds’ messages were the basis of a Japanese contingency plan, sent to diplomatic missions on November 19, advising them that in the event of normal communications being severed, the order to burn their codes would be transmitted in the guise of a broadcast weather report. ‘Higashi no kaze ame,’ ‘East Wind Rain,’ would indicate an impending break with the United States. Such a message was picked up by U.S. monitors on December 4, but the commanders in Hawaii were not informed. Documents on the subject were subsequently concealed from the official boards of inquiry.
The record shows that the FCC did monitor Japan’s traffic, did intercept a key ‘wind’ message on December 4 and did pass it on to Naval Intelligence within twenty-four hours. There is no reason to doubt Fly’s claim that the information also went to the FBI well before the raid.
Dusko Popov heard the first confused news of the attack aboard ship in the Caribbean, on his way back to New York. ‘The seriousness of the moment,’ he recalled, ‘could be read on everyone’s face. Except mine. It was the news I had been awaiting … I was sure the American fleet had scored a great victory … I was very, very proud that I had been able to give the warning to the Americans four months in advance … Then the news started trickling in … The Japanese had scored a surprise attack … I couldn’t believe what I was hearing … We knew they were coming … Somewhere, somehow, there had to be an explanation.’
Back in New York, Popov asked his FBI contacts what had gone wrong. Had his warning been ignored? Agent in Charge Foxworth told him not to ask questions, to ‘walk in step.’ ‘Searching for the truth beyond your reach,’ Popov recalled Foxworth saying, ‘may be dangerous. It may stir up an idea in Mr Hoover’s head … Mr Hoover is a very virtuous man.’
Two of the British officers involved, Ewen Montagu and Montgomery Hyde, saw Popov at this time. ‘I could see,’ Hyde recalled, ‘how angry he was with the FBI, who he was convinced had never taken any action on his earlier warning about the Japanese and Pearl Harbor.’
Popov’s relations with the Bureau eventually collapsed altogether. The FBI refused to let him know what information it was transmitting to Germany – over a ‘clandestine’ radio – purporting to come from Popov. ‘From the German point of view,’ recalled Montagu, ‘he had suddenly changed. He had provided them with no information of any value. He had not built a spy network. Most dangerous of all, he could not hope to provide answers to the really intensive questioning about the radio traffic that had been transmitted in his name …’
In the summer of 1942, in spite of the mortal risk that he would be unmasked as an Allied agent, Popov returned to his work in Portugal. He managed to regain the Germans’ confidence, then played a key role in feeding them phony plans for the Allied invasion of occupied Europe.
Popov’s friend Johann Jebsen, who had warned of a surprise attack on the United States and who continued to filter vital information to the Allies, did not survive. He was taken by the Gestapo, questioned under torture and shot.3
In the safety of Washington, meanwhile, Edgar is said to have extended his insinuations about Pearl Harbor to include President Roosevelt himself. In February or March 1942, according to former U.S. Air Force Colonel Carlton Ketchum, Edgar joined a group of politically like-minded associates, including Republican Congressman George Bender, former Assistant Attorney General Joseph Keenan and Senate Majority Secretary Leslie Biffle, at a private dinner at the Army-Navy Club. What Edgar was to tell the gathering, guests were admonished, was strictly off the record.
‘Mr Hoover said,’ Ketchum recalled, ‘that he had had warnings from repeated sources from early fall 1941 to just a few days before the Pearl Harbor attack … and that these warnings became more specific from one time to another … He said that, much more important, the President had had warnings during all of that time … Hoover was told by the President not to mention to anyone any of this information, but to be handled [sic] in the judgment of the President, and not to pass them on within the FBI … There was discussion in the group at this point, that the Army and Navy commanders could have been warned well in advance … so that the casualties would have been minimized. There were some rather bitter things said about the President’s conduct.’4
Recent resea
rch indicates the possibility that, in line with his expressed desire to ‘drag’ the United States into the war, Winston Churchill may have withheld last-minute intelligence warning of the Pearl Harbor attack. Most scholars, however, find it unthinkable that Roosevelt shared such foreknowledge and permitted the destruction of Pearl Harbor. Had he had advance warning, he would surely have seen to it that the Navy was ready for battle, perhaps at sea. Any aggression against American territory by Japan, even successfully defended, would have triggered a declaration of war.
Yet Ketchum’s story cannot be dismissed. Research confirms that Edgar was on intimate terms with the politicians named as the audience for his charge that the President suppressed vital Pearl Harbor intelligence. If the account is accurate, Edgar was among the first to make the allegation.
In the summer of 1942, six months after Pearl Harbor, a team of American secret agents took on a highly sensitive mission. Contrary to all international rules, they were to steal the secret codes used by the embassies of neutral countries that favored Germany. This involved breaking in at dead of night, cracking safes, photographing code-books and escaping without getting caught.
Working under Edgar’s rival William Donovan, the team pulled off this feat several times. Late one night, however, when the agents were inside the Spanish embassy in Washington, two FBI cars screeched to a halt outside and very deliberately turned on their sirens and flashing lights. Donovan’s men had to abort the operation, and several of them were arrested. Donovan had no doubt that Edgar was personally responsible.
It had not been enough for Edgar to have control of intelligence operations throughout Latin and Central America. He had been enraged because Donovan, now a general, had been appointed head of the wartime intelligence body, the Office of Strategic Services, and he was obstructing him at every opportunity. ‘The Abwehr,’ Donovan commented, ‘gets better treatment from the FBI than we do.’ Donovan’s Spanish embassy operation cut across existing FBI surveillance, so Edgar simply sabotaged it. On the eve of the landings in North Africa, his action came close to exposing vital Allied operations.