Burn After Reading (29 page)

On June 14, Ambassador Nomura called on Secretary Hull and besought him “in the interests of promoting friendly relations between our two Governments” to let Tachibana go home without a trial. “I went carefully into this case,” Hull wrote, “and decided to grant Nomura's request.”

It was not easy to develop a major espionage case like that of Tachibana. The F.B.I. was understandably chagrined when it thus saw its trapped bird fleeing the cage with the approval of the State Department. Under the circumstances, it is apparent that Pearl Harbor was not exclusively a military and naval disaster for which only generals and admirals must bear the responsibility. It was also a disaster of America's internal security establishment.

During the post mortems, it became a popular pastime to
ask high-ranking army and navy officers where they were when the bombs began to fall. Much was made of the fact that General George C. Marshall could not recall exactly what he was doing at that exact moment and said he thought he was out on a constitutional. But if the Army and the Navy were thus off guard, expecting nothing in particular to happen on that fateful Sunday, so was the Department of Justice.

Attorney General Francis Biddle was away in Detroit. Hoover was in New York. His ranking aides, including Assistant to the Director Edward A. Tamm, filled a box in Griffith Stadium watching the pro football game between the Washington Redskins and the Philadelphia Eagles.

America's internal security organs had a Pearl Harbor of their own. They were so preoccupied with fratricidal strife that they had too little energy or interest left for an effective campaign against alien foes on American soil.

Once the war had begun there was no reason to question the FBI's ability to deal energetically with foreign espionage agents and saboteurs. The efficiency at this end was somewhat aided by a strange inefficiency in the enemies' camp. After the war, General von Lahousen, one of the surviving executives of the
Abwehr,
told me that this was so because his organization never really had their hearts in planting spies and saboteurs on Uncle Sam's back. However, the astonishingly clumsy German effort was not substantially different from the general pattern and quality of the
Abwehr's
activities elsewhere. They were good only in countries where domestic dissension existed, where Nazism was popular with key segments of the population and where the
Abwehr
or the Kaltenbrunner-Schellenberg organization could subvert the natives.

As early as 1941, the FBI managed to break up what appeared to be the major ring of Nazi spies in the United States, headed by one Kurt Frederick Ludwig, a native of Ohio, presiding over a quaint assortment of Sad Sacks. The Ludwig ring of second-raters was set up here by an itinerant German
Abwehr
-man
moving about on a forged passport made out to Julio Lopez Lido. He was actually Ulrich von der Osten, an old-timer in German espionage, a sort of traveling sales manager covering an enormous territory from Shanghai to New York. His sudden death in a traffic accident on Times Square in New York led the FBI to Ludwig and from him to the other members of the ring.

In 1940, the FBI scored a tremendous victory of lasting significance, when it succeeded in penetrating, through exceptionally smart detective work, one of the
Abwehr's
greatest secrets, the microdot system used in the transmission of secret messages. In the early summer of 1942, the FBI arrested a group of German would-be saboteurs Canaris had sent to this country in two U-boats. This was the pathetic
Pastorius Operation
, arrogantly code-named after the first German ever to immigrate to the United States. The idea behind the ill-fated mission was to sabotage the American aluminum industry. Had it succeeded, it could have seriously slowed down aircraft production.

With the aid of a double agent still known only as ND98 (a mercenary spy who sold his services to the U.S. Legation as soon as he arrived at his overseas outpost in Montevideo), the FBI also participated in a carillon concert of its own. ND98 was supposed to forward information collected by three German agents in the United States from a clandestine radio somewhere in Uruguay. When he was safely in FBI hands, he asked the
Abwehr's
permission to transfer his activities to New York. There the FBI established him at a cozy hideout on Long Island with a radio transmitter. He began to send his baited messages on December 4, 1941, and kept at it until May 2, 1945, when the British captured the
Abwehr's
radio center near Hamburg. A total of two thousand eight hundred and twenty-nine doctored messages were thus sent to the
Abwehr
and eight hundred and twenty-four were received from the Germans. ND98 reached the height of arrogance, and maybe also absurdity, on June 1, 1944, when he advised his employers that D-Day had to be delayed “by a breakdown in the production of invasion barges”
and that the troops in England, which
Luftwaffe
reconnaissance could not fail to detect, were being rerouted to the Mediterranean.

The FBI covered the whole waterfront, North as well as Central and South America. It succeeded in thwarting several major resident directors of the
Abwehr
, Major Ludwig von Bohlen in Chile, and also his successor, Bernardo Timmerman; Josef Jacob Johannes Starziczny and Otto Uebele in Brazil; and a number of lesser fry in other Latin lands. It also broke up a large-scale smuggling operation, which supplied the eager Germans with such rare strategic materials as platinum from Colombia and industrial diamonds from Venezuela, by catching the head of the operation, a bogus British banker named Harold Ebury, at his palatial California home on Monterey Peninsula.

An interesting sideline of the FBI's big manhunt on spies and saboteurs was its campaign to recapture German prisoners of war who managed to escape from prison camps maintained in this country by the U.S. Army. At the height of the season, there were some four hundred thousand such prisoners in the United States, and they kept escaping at a rate of about seventy-five a month. All told, such escapes totaled two thousand eight hundred and three during the war years and the FBI managed to bring all of the Germans back alive, except three : Kurt Rossmeisl, Georg Gaertner and Curt Westphal. They are still at large.

J. Edgar Hoover directed the huge spy hunt with unprecedented finesse. Far from promoting it, he vigorously resisted the spy hysteria that was rampant in the early stages of the war. He was firmly, even bitterly, opposed to the mass evacuation of one hundred and twenty thousand Japanese-Americans on the West Coast to so-called “relocation centers.” He was appalled, not only by the inhumanity of this mass deportation, but also by motives that had little, if anything, in common with the needs of national defense. The sour taste that the “relocation” left in Hoover's mouth was reflected in a passage in Don Whitehead's
authoritative book,
The FBI Story
. He wrote: “With the hysteria, there were the cold calculations of men who wanted the Japanese moved for economic reasons and because of racial prejudices. The decisions for the movement were made in the upper reaches of the Administration. And so it was that tens of thousands of loyal Japanese-American citizens made the sad journey from their homes after a directive was issued giving the Army authority for the roundup.”

Hoover knew that those one hundred and twenty thousand Japanese-Americans represented no clear and present espionage danger. His own pre-war efforts had already located the seven hundred and thirty-three Japanese aliens he suspected as actual or potential spies. He had every one of them safely in custody.

The absence of large-scale German, Italian, and Japanese espionage and sabotage efforts in the United States was one of the miracles of the war. Aside from the FBI's energetic measures to plug every loophole, two major events aided in foiling any such enemy effort. The first occurred in June, 1941, five months before Pearl Harbor, when the Treasury Department moved to freeze all German and Japanese assets in this country and in most Central and South American countries. The lifeblood of espionage and sabotage is money. Not even the best secret service can operate without it.

The other event could not be surpassed in its ingenuity and melodrama. The center of German espionage in the United States was the Consulate General in downtown New York. When the Consulate was closed down months before Pearl Harbor, in another smart measure of prophylaxis, the
Abwehr
-men posing as consuls had to burn their papers. They called in the janitor of the building, a man named Dick Holland, and asked him to make a fire in the furnace, for this was summer and the furnace was cold. Holland (who almost certainly was an agent of the FBI) made the fire so that it burned in only one side of the furnace. When the Germans came down with their papers and gave them to Holland for burning, the ingenious janitor dumped
them into that side of the furnace where there was no fire. In this manner, the papers, only slightly seared, came into the possession of the Bureau.

Among the papers was the complete roster of German spies and informants active in the United States.

On a January afternoon in 1942, President Roosevelt called William J. Donovan to the White House and told him bluntly, almost bitterly: “We have no Intelligence Service!”

What the President thus compressed into just five words, General Dwight D. Eisenhower spelled out in detail after the war. He wrote :

“Europe had been at war for a full year before America became alarmed over its pitifully inadequate defenses … the greatest obstacle was psychological: complacency still persisted! Even the fall of France in May, 1940, failed to awaken us—and by ‘us' I mean every professional soldier, as well as others—to a full realization of danger.

“Within the War Department a shocking deficiency that impeded all constructive planning existed in the field of Intelligence. Between the two World Wars no funds were provided with which to establish the basic requirement of an Intelligence system, a far-flung organization of fact finders. Our one feeble gesture in this direction was the maintenance of military attachés in most foreign capitals, and, since public funds were not available to meet the unusual expenses of this type of duty, only officers with independent means could normally be detailed to these posts. Usually they were estimable, socially acceptable gentlemen; few knew the essentials of intelligence work. Results were almost completely negative, and the situation was not helped by the custom of making long service as a military attaché, rather than ability, the essential qualification for
appointment as head of the Intelligence Division in the War Department.

“The stepchild position of G-2 in our General Staff system was emphasized in many ways. For example, the number of general officers within the War Department was so limited by peacetime law that one of the principal divisions had to be headed by a colonel. Almost without exception the G-2 Division got the colonel. This in itself would not necessarily have been serious, since it would have been far preferable to assign to the post a highly qualified colonel than a mediocre general, but the practice clearly indicated the Army's failure to emphasize the intelligence function. This was reflected also in our schools, where, despite some technical training in battlefield reconnaissance and intelligence, the broader phases of the work were almost completely ignored. We had few men capable of analyzing intelligently such information as did come to the notice of the War Department, and this applied particularly to what has become the very core of Intelligence research and analysis—namely, industry.

“In the first winter of the war these accumulated and glaring deficiencies were serious handicaps. Initially the Intelligence Division could not even develop a clear plan for its own organization nor could it classify the type of information it deemed essential in determining the purposes and capabilities of our enemies. The chief of the division could do little more than come to the planning and operating sections of the staff and in a rather pitiful way ask if there was anything he could do for us.”

This brutally frank appraisal by Eisenhower was presented six years after the events he described took place and three years after the war he helped to win. His scathing criticism was confined to G-2, and rightly so, because, even during the period he described, the over-all intelligence picture was not so bad as the one he painted. Neither was President Roosevelt apparently well informed, nor was he quite fair, when he told Donovan that the United States had “no intelligence service.”

For one thing, the amazing cryptographic espionage
organization of the Army and Navy was functioning better than ever, reading the enemies' most confidential dispatches almost at will. It was during this period that the Navy's cryptoanalysts began to collect the data which enabled Admiral Chester W. Nimitz to repay the debt of Pearl Harbor astonishingly early in the war, and which actually turned the tide in the Pacific. Perhaps this is the place to tell that story so that the reader will have a balanced picture—both the good and the bad—of the state of U.S. intelligence at the time.

In the immediate wake of Pearl Harbor, Nimitz had to figure out what the enemy's next move would be. Nimitz allowed full scope to his intuition and assumed that the Japanese would next move against Midway, a lonely atoll one thousand one hundred sea miles west-northwest of Oahu, covered with a lush blanket of dwarf magnolia and inhabited by the gooney bird, a comic member of the albatross family.

Nimitz's intuition was inspired. In Tokyo, the move he suspected had, in fact, been decided upon by Yamamoto. He hoped to capture Midway and to destroy whatever was left afloat of the U.S. Pacific Fleet.