Official and Confidential_ The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover - Anthony Summers [71]
He spent a week in Florida, traveling in a flashy Buick coupe he had bought in New York. The file shows that to appease the FBI, he rented a separate room for his girlfriend. Later, back in New York with time on his hands, he renewed his courtship of the actress Simone Simon, whom he had known in Paris before the war. According to Simon, their relationship was ‘very proper,’ with her mother acting as chaperone.
Finally, Popov wrote in his memoirs, he ‘encountered’ Edgar at the FBI office in New York. ‘I use the word advisedly,’ Popov recalled. ‘There was no introduction, no preliminaries, no politesse. I walked into Foxworth’s office, and there was Hoover sitting behind the desk looking like a sledgehammer in search of an anvil. Foxworth, dispossessed, was sitting silently in an armchair.’
Popov recalled how Edgar looked at him with ‘disgust,’ how he at once started ranting and ‘yelping.’ He ‘turned purple’ with rage and called Popov a ‘bogus spy,’ who had done nothing useful since he arrived. The thrust of the tirade was that the Yugoslav had taken a woman to Florida, ‘chased film stars’ and generally lived high on the hog. Edgar ran a clean organization, he said, and Popov had sullied it.
Popov retorted that he always lived luxuriously, that the Germans – who financed him generously – would think it odd if he did otherwise. He had been ineffective since his arrival only because the FBI had given him so little cooperation. But Edgar only got angrier. The meeting ended within minutes, with Edgar shrieking, ‘Good riddance!’ as Popov departed.5
Edgar’s defenders hold that he had no reason to take special note of Popov’s information, that – four months before Pearl Harbor – it deserved no more attention than myriad other snippets of intelligence. In August 1941, however, Edgar had two good reasons to listen to Popov with care.
The Popov information had not come out of the blue, nor did it come merely with a general recommendation from British Intelligence. It came, according to MI-5’s Colonel Robertson, only after careful advance contacts by Guy Liddell, then the organization’s Director of Counterespionage. Liddell had met Hoover and believed he had established a better rapport than some of his colleagues.
‘One reason we put Popov in touch with Hoover,’ recalled Robertson, ‘was that Guy Liddell was very friendly with the Director. He thought the best thing to do was to send Popov and his stuff over to Hoover. He thought – misguidedly, as it turned out – that Hoover would pay attention, since it came from him. The mistake we made was not to take the Pearl Harbor information out and send it separately to Roosevelt.’
At the time it was offered, Popov’s information may not have rated the attention of the President himself. Robertson insists that the FBI was the ‘natural’ place to send it, and that the British cannot be blamed for Edgar’s failure to handle it properly.
Ignoring Popov was even less defensible because his warning did not stand alone. Thanks to the British, Edgar already had firm evidence that the Germans, with the Japanese in mind, were snooping on Pearl Harbor. Earlier that year, as a result of vigilance by British censors in Bermuda, the FBI had intercepted a letter from Captain Ulrich Von der Osten, an Abwehr agent operating in the United States. The letter, mailed after a trip to Hawaii, contained a report on the island’s defenses, a map and photographs – notably of Pearl Harbor. ‘This,’ Von der Osten’s report concluded, ‘will be of interest mostly to our yellow allies.’
There was good reason for Edgar to remember that intercept in August. Another German agent, who was one of Von der Osten’s close collaborators, was arrested by the FBI just days after Popov handed over his questionnaire. Yet even though the case was still active and under Edgar’s personal supervision, he and his officials failed to