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‘The Secret Service,’ said Young, ‘would call the FBI in Washington, who would call the Bureau in L.A. to get them to call the FBI Resident Agent in Palm Springs – because the Secret Service had no representative there. And our guy would have the job of telling Angie to knock it off, to stop trying to get through to the President, to stop calling the White House …’

Even as Edgar received his information on Dickinson, he was assiduously monitoring yet another dalliance – with the most famous Hollywood beauty of them all.

Oddly enough, Marilyn Monroe was a pinup in the lives of both Edgar and President Kennedy. Her nude calendar shot, along with other pictures of naked women, graced the walls of the basement bar at Edgar’s home in Washington. They were there, some assumed, to deflect speculation about the Director’s homosexuality.

In 1954, when he was undergoing back surgery, Kennedy had stuck a poster of Monroe on the wall of his hospital room. It showed her in shorts, standing with her legs apart, and the patient had it fixed upside down, so her feet stuck up in the air.

The evidence suggests Monroe and Kennedy had an affair of sorts in the early fifties. They were certainly in touch, and sleeping with each other occasionally, during the election campaign of 1960. The President’s brother-in-law Peter Lawford, who talked about the relationship shortly before his death, recalled taking photographs of Monroe and Kennedy in the bathtub.

Such encounters continued into the first and second years of the presidency. The most famous blonde in the world was smuggled into Kennedy’s suite at New York’s Carlyle Hotel, even on board Air Force One, disguised in a black wig and sunglasses. Such escapades would have been dangerous at any time, and Monroe’s state of mind made them especially so.

Few except Monroe’s psychiatrists and closest friends knew how desperately Monroe was floundering. Her marriage to playwright Arthur Miller was in ruins and – as a longtime abuser of barbiturates – she was in a narcotic nosedive. There was a brief, anguished stay at a psychiatric clinic, then more doctors, more drugs and episodes of heavy drinking. Monroe suffered abrupt mood swings, from elated highs to black despair.

No public man with an image to protect should have gone anywhere near her. Yet John Kennedy continued to see Monroe, and Edgar was watching. Gordon Liddy, then an agent in Crime Records, was aware of the continuing coverage. ‘The stuff on the brothers and Monroe,’ he recalled, ‘was very, very closely held.’

It has been clear for some time now that Monroe came under electronic surveillance during the Kennedy presidency. Interviews with private detectives and technicians leave no doubt of it. Confusion remains, however, as to who commissioned the bugging and who received the ‘take.’3

Teamsters leader Jimmy Hoffa, a prime target of the Kennedy Justice Department, almost certainly received some compromising material. He said as much to fellow prisoners when he later went to jail, and his attorney, William Buffalino, confirmed it in a 1990 interview. Some bugging, meanwhile, may have been commissioned by mobster Sam Giancana.

By 1962, according to his brother, Giancana had lost patience with the Kennedys. Still under constant pressure from the Justice Department, he hired surveillance experts to collect all possible dirt on the Kennedy brothers. If collaborating with them had failed to help, the mobster intended to try blackmail, a tactic at which the Mafia excelled.

Peter Lawford had long since been under surveillance on the orders of someone else – Edgar. The sound specialist who installed the bugs, who was still operating at the time, revealed his role only on the formal understanding that his name is not used.

‘The job at the Lawford house,’ the source said, ‘was done for the Bureau, through a middleman. I installed the devices on FBI orders. They were in the living room, the bedrooms and one of the bathrooms.