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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