Official and Confidential_ The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover - Anthony Summers [78]
Recent research indicates the possibility that, in line with his expressed desire to ‘drag’ the United States into the war, Winston Churchill may have withheld last-minute intelligence warning of the Pearl Harbor attack. Most scholars, however, find it unthinkable that Roosevelt shared such foreknowledge and permitted the destruction of Pearl Harbor. Had he had advance warning, he would surely have seen to it that the Navy was ready for battle, perhaps at sea. Any aggression against American territory by Japan, even successfully defended, would have triggered a declaration of war.
Yet Ketchum’s story cannot be dismissed. Research confirms that Edgar was on intimate terms with the politicians named as the audience for his charge that the President suppressed vital Pearl Harbor intelligence. If the account is accurate, Edgar was among the first to make the allegation.
In the summer of 1942, six months after Pearl Harbor, a team of American secret agents took on a highly sensitive mission. Contrary to all international rules, they were to steal the secret codes used by the embassies of neutral countries that favored Germany. This involved breaking in at dead of night, cracking safes, photographing code-books and escaping without getting caught.
Working under Edgar’s rival William Donovan, the team pulled off this feat several times. Late one night, however, when the agents were inside the Spanish embassy in Washington, two FBI cars screeched to a halt outside and very deliberately turned on their sirens and flashing lights. Donovan’s men had to abort the operation, and several of them were arrested. Donovan had no doubt that Edgar was personally responsible.
It had not been enough for Edgar to have control of intelligence operations throughout Latin and Central America. He had been enraged because Donovan, now a general, had been appointed head of the wartime intelligence body, the Office of Strategic Services, and he was obstructing him at every opportunity. ‘The Abwehr,’ Donovan commented, ‘gets better treatment from the FBI than we do.’ Donovan’s Spanish embassy operation cut across existing FBI surveillance, so Edgar simply sabotaged it. On the eve of the landings in North Africa, his action came close to exposing vital Allied operations.
The agent who led the break-in, Donald Downes, later recalled how Donovan protested to the White House – to little avail. ‘No President,’ one of his aides commented, ‘dare touch John Edgar Hoover. They are all scared pink of him.’ ‘We had taken all imaginable precautions,’ Downes lamented, ‘all except one – the possibility of betrayal by someone high enough in the American government to know what we were doing.’
Edgar’s relations with William Stephenson, a staunch Donovan supporter, had sunk to an all-time low. Edgar sent an aide to whisper in the ear of Assistant Secretary of State Adolf Berle, a man with little affection for the British, that one of Stephenson’s men was using smear tactics to try to force his removal from office.
Former MI-6 official A. M. Ross-Smith, the controller of the accused agent, said decades later that Edgar’s allegation had been ‘completely untrue – absolute balls. It originated with a paid informant, a German-American who made up the story just to please his FBI paymasters. Hoover was just using it to further his own ambitions.’
False or not, the episode mushroomed into a high-level international row. The British ambassador, Lord Halifax, was summoned to a meeting with Berle and Attorney General Biddle. Edgar was not satisfied even when the ‘offending’ English official hastily left the country. It was impossible, he insisted, to continue working with the British. ‘Does J. Edgar,’ sighed William Stephenson around this time, ‘think he’s fighting on Bunker Hill against us Redcoats? Or has he heard of Pearl Harbor?’
For all their differences, circumstances forced the intelligence warlords to coexist. Donovan turned the OSS into