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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 Edgar 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