Official and Confidential_ The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover - Anthony Summers [73]
Popov also reported to his case officer, Colonel Robertson. ‘He was debriefed when he got back to London,’ Robertson recalled, ‘and he certainly reported that he’d seen Hoover. He was not going to make up a story of the nature he reported to us, that he and Hoover had had an awful row. I can’t see any reason for him to make up such a story.’
Chloe MacMillan, who worked with British Intelligence in Portugal, met with Popov when he eventually returned there. ‘He did see Hoover, I’m sure,’ said MacMillan, ‘and he did give them his warning about Pearl Harbor before it happened. When I saw him months later, he was still so depressed about what had happened.’ Other contemporaries had similar memories.9
British officials, moreover, had no doubts about the value of Popov’s information on Pearl Harbor. In a 1945 report, written at the time for official consumption only, Masterman said it had ‘indicated very clearly that … Pearl Harbor would be the first point to be attacked, and plans for this attack had reached an advanced state by August 1941.’
William Stephenson, who saw the Popov questionnaire, found it ‘striking.’ He was especially impressed by the fact that it requested data about the harbor depths at Pearl Harbor – so soon after the British had pioneered the use of air-launched torpedoes against the Italian base at Taranto. When he saw that, he recalled years later, he ‘had no doubt that Pearl Harbor was a target, and perhaps the target.’10
The FBI file shows that by October 20, 1941, seven weeks before Pearl Harbor, the Bureau had shared a paraphrased version of the Popov questionnaire with U.S. naval and military intelligence. It seems almost certain, however, that they did not receive the crucial backup information that went with it – Popov’s report on the statements of Jebsen, Baron Gronau and Major von Auenrode. Without those factors to put the questionnaire in perspective, its impact must have been greatly diminished.
The White House fared even worse than the Army and the Navy. Three months before Pearl Harbor, Edgar did send a description of the microdot system, along with two of Popov’s microdots, to President Roosevelt’s aide General Edwin Watson. The President himself saw the material within twenty-four hours. He did not, however, see the microdots with the questions about Pearl Harbor. Edgar did not send those to Roosevelt, although he himself knew their contents – the laboratory report on all the microdots had come in the very day of the letter to the White House.
Edgar’s ego had got the better of his intelligence. As he rushed to show off his knowledge of a new German espionage device, it does not seem to have occurred to him that the contents of the microdots might be more important that the dots themselves. There is no sign in the record that Edgar ever did tell the White House about either the Pearl Harbor questions or the other Popov information.
Rear Admiral Edwin Layton, who was Fleet Intelligence Officer at Honolulu in 1941, later prepared a massive study on the Japanese attack. He concluded, even without the new evidence assembled in this chapter, that Edgar ‘dropped the ball completely’ in his handling of the Popov information. ‘His failure,’ declared the Layton account, ‘represented another American fumble on the road to Pearl Harbor.’
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‘Hoover had shown his total incompetence for sophisticated wartime intelligence early on. His handling of the “Popov Affair” might well have been a tip-off for his future legendary secretiveness and over-simplified way of thinking.’
William Casey, CIA Director
Edgar was in New York for the weekend when the Japanese airplanes came screaming out of the skies over Hawaii. It was 1:25 P.M., East Coast time, 7:55 A.M. at Pearl Harbor. Intelligence chief William Donovan was also in the city, watching the