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Even then, the Bureau nearly blew it. The agent who took Dasch’s call responded by exclaiming, ‘Yesterday, Napoleon called!’ and slamming down the telephone. No one passed the word to Washington as Dasch had requested.

He did, however, give himself up to the FBI in Washington, and provided the Bureau with all the information necessary to locate his fellow saboteurs. He was acting, he explained, with the full knowledge of his comrade Ernst Burger. Later, he recalled, FBI agents asked him to plead guilty but keep quiet about his dealings with the Bureau, on the assurance of a presidential pardon within months. Instead, he languished in jail for five years, and was deported after the war.

U.S. Army Intelligence, meanwhile, believed Edgar’s arrest of the saboteurs had been premature and had wrecked plans to intercept other raiders expected to land a few weeks later. ‘Secretary of War Stimson was absolutely furious,’ recalled Lloyd Cutler. ‘Hoover grabbed all the glory. He just wanted headlines.’

He got them, and the Senate Judiciary Committee recommended that he be awarded a Congressional Medal of Honor, normally awarded only to those who had performed valiantly in battle. Although Edgar sent a stream of fawning notes of thanks to his supporters on Capitol Hill, the idea was dropped. On July 25, however, the twenty-fifth anniversary of his arrival at the Justice Department, he was celebrating anyway. Edgar posed beside a giant postcard of congratulations and sat for color photographs – still a novelty in those days – with Clyde at his elbow.

Then Edgar went off on yet another vacation with Clyde, cheered by anniversary congratulations from the President himself. Edgar responded with a gushing letter, telling Roosevelt the years under his leadership had been ‘some of the happiest years of my life.’ ‘You may rest assured,’ he wrote, ‘that you may continue to count upon all of us at the FBI …’

The truth behind the formal flattery was very different. For a long time now, Edgar had been snooping on the President’s wife.

14

‘If there had been a Mr Hoover in the first half of the first century, A.D., can you imagine what he would have put into his files about a certain trouble-maker from Nazareth, his moral attitudes and the people he consorted with?’

New York Times reader’s letter, 1970

Edgar and Clyde loathed Eleanor Roosevelt. One of the reasons he never married, Edgar liked to say, was that ‘God made a woman like Eleanor Roosevelt.’ He called her the ‘old hoot owl’ and mimicked her high voice in front of senior colleagues. Mrs Roosevelt was in her late fifties in World War II, and she was not physically attractive. While her husband sought solace with other women, contemporaries wondered about Eleanor’s passionate friendships outside the White House – some with women known to be lesbians. Edgar sniggered about these things behind the First Lady’s back.

‘The President,’ he told an aide on his return from a White House meeting, ‘says the old bitch is going through the change of life … we’ll just have to put up with her.’ He once descended unexpectedly on W. C. Fields, the comedian, asking to see certain ‘interesting pictures.’ Fields did, indeed, have three trompe l’oeil miniatures of the President’s wife. The right way up, they were ordinary pictures. Upside down, they were grotesque anatomical views of a woman’s vagina. Edgar thought them hilariously funny, and took them away with him.

It was Mrs Roosevelt’s politics, though, that Edgar could not abide. She was deeply committed to a host of liberal causes, more deeply – many thought – than a woman of her era should have been. Above all, she campaigned persistently for decent housing and fair treatment of America’s black citizens – and that really rankled Edgar. He once watched, glowering, at the Mayflower Hotel when she attempted to bring two black men into the restaurant. Told of rumors that black women in the South were joining ‘Eleanor Roosevelt Clubs,’ he ordered agents to investigate.

‘Whenever a black would speak out,’ said William Sullivan,