Official and Confidential_ The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover - Anthony Summers [77]
The record shows that the FCC did monitor Japan’s traffic, did intercept a key ‘wind’ message on December 4 and did pass it on to Naval Intelligence within twenty-four hours. There is no reason to doubt Fly’s claim that the information also went to the FBI well before the raid.
Dusko Popov heard the first confused news of the attack aboard ship in the Caribbean, on his way back to New York. ‘The seriousness of the moment,’ he recalled, ‘could be read on everyone’s face. Except mine. It was the news I had been awaiting … I was sure the American fleet had scored a great victory … I was very, very proud that I had been able to give the warning to the Americans four months in advance … Then the news started trickling in … The Japanese had scored a surprise attack … I couldn’t believe what I was hearing … We knew they were coming … Somewhere, somehow, there had to be an explanation.’
Back in New York, Popov asked his FBI contacts what had gone wrong. Had his warning been ignored? Agent in Charge Foxworth told him not to ask questions, to ‘walk in step.’ ‘Searching for the truth beyond your reach,’ Popov recalled Foxworth saying, ‘may be dangerous. It may stir up an idea in Mr Hoover’s head … Mr Hoover is a very virtuous man.’
Two of the British officers involved, Ewen Montagu and Montgomery Hyde, saw Popov at this time. ‘I could see,’ Hyde recalled, ‘how angry he was with the FBI, who he was convinced had never taken any action on his earlier warning about the Japanese and Pearl Harbor.’
Popov’s relations with the Bureau eventually collapsed altogether. The FBI refused to let him know what information it was transmitting to Germany – over a ‘clandestine’ radio – purporting to come from Popov. ‘From the German point of view,’ recalled Montagu, ‘he had suddenly changed. He had provided them with no information of any value. He had not built a spy network. Most dangerous of all, he could not hope to provide answers to the really intensive questioning about the radio traffic that had been transmitted in his name …’
In the summer of 1942, in spite of the mortal risk that he would be unmasked as an Allied agent, Popov returned to his work in Portugal. He managed to regain the Germans’ confidence, then played a key role in feeding them phony plans for the Allied invasion of occupied Europe.
Popov’s friend Johann Jebsen, who had warned of a surprise attack on the United States and who continued to filter vital information to the Allies, did not survive. He was taken by the Gestapo, questioned under torture and shot.3
In the safety of Washington, meanwhile, Edgar is said to have extended his insinuations about Pearl Harbor to include President Roosevelt himself. In February or March 1942, according to former U.S. Air Force Colonel Carlton Ketchum, Edgar joined a group of politically like-minded associates, including Republican Congressman George Bender, former Assistant Attorney General Joseph Keenan and Senate Majority Secretary Leslie Biffle, at a private dinner at the Army-Navy Club. What Edgar was to tell the gathering, guests were admonished, was strictly off the record.
‘Mr Hoover said,’ Ketchum recalled, ‘that he had had warnings from repeated sources from early fall 1941 to just a few days before the Pearl Harbor attack … and that these warnings became more specific from one time to another … He said that, much more important, the President had had warnings during all of that time … Hoover was told by the President not to mention to anyone any of this information, but to be handled [sic] in the judgment of the President, and not to pass them on within the FBI … There was discussion in the group at this point, that the Army and Navy commanders could have been warned well in advance