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No announcement about Cowley’s appointment to supervise Purvis was made, publicly or privately, which would lead to years of confusion over Cowley’s role; in the months to come, newspaper accounts would repeatedly refer to him as “Purvis’s chief assistant.” At least initially, Purvis was told that Cowley’s assignment to Chicago was a kind of inspection tour, a chance for Hoover’s main aide to assess the organization Purvis had built to apprehend Dillinger.

But the truth was obvious to everyone the moment Cowley arrived in Chicago. “No one said anything, but we all knew,” Doris Rogers remembers. “It was on the office grapevine, you know, just whispering and glances. ‘Cowley is coming.’ You just nodded. We knew what that meant. You knew it without being told.”

Cowley wasted no time taking charge. After a morning flight from Washington on Sunday, June 3, he was at the Bankers Building by noon. When he reached the nineteenth floor Purvis wasn’t there, so he busied himself debriefing the agents responsible for losing Helen Gillis. It was shoddy work, and Cowley said so. When Purvis arrived he tried to defend his men, but Cowley decreed the surveillance a failure. Of the fourteen agents assigned to the Dillinger case, four were watching Nelson’s sister’s home. Cowley immediately designated three for reassignment.

From all appearances, Purvis accepted his demotion without comment. But from the tone of their memoranda it’s clear there was little warmth between the two; in his 1936 book, American Agent, Purvis tellingly fails to mention either Cowley or his own demotion.dc “You could see the strain on their faces,” Doris Rogers recalls. “I felt sorry for Cowley. He was just doing his job. He was as ill at ease as Purvis. When you looked at Cowley, and you looked at Purvis, we all knew the fix was in. There was a sense Melvin had been betrayed. We all felt betrayed, defeated. You could see it by the way [Purvis] walked, by the way he wore his hat. A little hunched, a little bit shoulders. We all felt under siege. The enemy was moving in. The friends we had [in Washington] had all turned to enemies.”

On the nineteenth floor, morale sagged. It wasn’t just that Purvis’s men were exhausted, that their loyalty to Washington was shaken. The nature of their jobs had changed. Few sought a career in law enforcement. For most the FBI was to be a temporary job, a postcollege adventure, something to do till the Depression ended and real jobs beckoned. They hadn’t signed up to be killed. Doris Rogers was dating several of the agents, and many confided their doubts to her.

“When the feeling came that Purvis was being undermined, every agent in the office would have resigned if he could,” she remembers. “It wasn’t just loyalty to Melvin. By that time the agents were all tired, worn out. They wished they were home jerking sodas in a drugstore. They would have done anything to get out. They were being thrown into situations where they could get killed. None of them asked for that. It wouldn’t get them a Medal of Honor. It would only get them dead. They knew that. This was not their goal in life. The sense was, ‘What are we doing in this dreadful job?’”

Tension hung thick that Sunday afternoon as Cowley and Purvis drove to Fort Wayne to assess Purvis’s second major surveillance, at the Audrey Russ home. It, too, had degenerated into a fiasco. The three agents had actually moved from the Russ home to a hotel twelve miles away because the combative Mrs. Russ was expecting houseguests; she had graciously consented to telephone if Dillinger appeared. After an all-night debriefing, Cowley ordered the agents back to Chicago. He and Purvis returned to the Bankers Building at 5:15 A.M.14

Cowley, whose capacity for work appeared boundless, spent Monday reviewing the rest of Purvis’s apparatus, quizzing him on the efficacy of informants and getting up to speed on the Bremer case, on which six agents were working full-time. That night he drove to Indianapolis, where the next morning he toured the Mooresville area with