Official and Confidential_ The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover - Anthony Summers [67]
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.