G-Man, page 38
* * *
—
His top priority, as the reality of the Nazi blitzkrieg sank in, was to contain the supposed “fifth column” threat, the possibility that enemy agents were already operating in the United States. The issue entailed a blend of fact and fiction, an exaggerated threat accompanied on occasion by a few honest-to-goodness in-the-flesh foreign spies. He recognized that the issue would produce another round of upheaval at the Bureau, demanding “the utmost from the facilities and personnel of this organization.” There was something familiar about the situation, though, with its sudden demands to scale up Bureau personnel against a backdrop of national unease. In his annual report to the attorney general, Hoover likened this “period of transition” to the first years of the crime war, when he had transformed his corps of gentleman lawyers into gun-toting G-Men. Only now the Bureau would have to remake itself as a large-scale intelligence agency, capable of forging judgments that went well beyond matters of legal evidence and criminal law.[5]
Most of the men upon whom Hoover relied to help with this project had been at his side for more than a decade. Many had been around longer than that, recruits from the first Kappa-Alpha-and-GW generation. There was Tolson, of course, whose role as Hoover’s personnel and internal operations man now took on added significance. Next in line was Ed Tamm, the somber Georgetown graduate who had done so much to run interference for Hoover during the “smear campaign,” along with the veteran Harold Nathan. Kappa Alpha brother Hugh Clegg ran agent training while Frank Baughman, Hoover’s onetime best friend, took charge of the firearms program. Managing them all was Helen Gandy, who’d marked her twentieth anniversary at the Justice Department just months before the outbreak of war.
The relative consistency of the Bureau’s leadership gave it an advantage over other federal agencies, many of them recent creations with an ever-changing roster of men at the top. So did the FBI’s years of secret experimentation in domestic intelligence gathering and counterespionage. Many of the duties that fell to the Bureau were still relatively new, however, requiring each division to adapt its criminal enforcement background to the exigencies of the country’s pseudo-war. The FBI lab underwent an abrupt shift, transforming itself from a criminal forensics facility into a wartime intelligence lab, focused on secret inks and microfilm technology and high-resolution cameras. At the Identification Division, what had once been a clearinghouse for criminal fingerprints evolved into a large-scale domestic surveillance program, compiling the prints of draftees, war-production workers, and foreign-born residents. The Bureau’s accountants turned their attention from securities fraud to the monitoring of foreign funds. Building on the work of the General Intelligence Division, Hoover organized a new National Defense Division and continued to expand surveillance of “German groups and sympathizers, Communist groups and sympathizers, Fascist groups and sympathizers, Japanese and others.” Field offices opened in Hawaii, Alaska, and Puerto Rico. A small number of agents also shipped out to foreign posts on “undercover assignments for intelligence purposes.”[6]
Hoover vowed that wartime pressures would not weaken his hiring standards, or significantly alter the culture of the FBI. In search of continuity, he encouraged National Academy graduates to join the federal ranks. He also looked to local universities—GW especially—for the sort of man he had always favored. Despite his efforts to preserve the Bureau’s established culture, he soon ran up against an incontrovertible fact: there were simply not enough fine-looking, well-mannered, twenty-five-to-thirty-five-year-old, white, fraternity-bred lawyers to go around. In the 1920s, when Hoover established these preferences, the Bureau had hired a handful of agents each year, carefully culling each application. By the middle of 1941, the Bureau was hiring fifty-two agents every two weeks, plus more than 160 clerks and stenographers. The sheer scale of the effort necessitated a quiet easing of the rules. Though Hoover never admitted to any change of policy, only a few of the old standards remained inviolate: there would be no women and few Black men as special agents, and anyone who “embarrassed” the Bureau would meet with swift discipline.[7]
Once hired, all of these new employees had to be trained, equipped, and paid, no easy feat at a time when federal agencies were scrambling for office space and wartime appropriations. During the late 1930s, Hoover had launched construction of a dedicated training building at Quantico, a Marine base in northern Virginia. The three-story brick schoolhouse opened in early 1940, just in time to become obsolete. The Quantico dining room, designed for sixty-four students and three instructors, was split into two shifts, serving upwards of seventy men each. At the barracks, eight trainees packed into bunk rooms meant for four, and the firing range began operating seven days a week.[8]
Hoover’s routine was changing as well, his work bleeding into the evening hours he had once reserved for Harvey’s and the Stork Club. “I am there from 9 in the morning until 7:30 in the evening,” he said of his office life in early 1941. “Then I go out to dinner, come back about 9 o’clock and usually work until 11:30 at night.” He was slightly exaggerating; office logs show that he often left for good after dinner. It was nonetheless true that everyone at the seat of government was working more than usual. By early 1941, the average agent was clocking four and a half hours of unpaid overtime, a point of pride in Hoover’s appropriations appearances. The Identification Division went on an emergency 24-hour schedule. On a typical day in 1940, clerks received 12,000 new fingerprint cards; by late 1941, an average day could mean 25,000 new prints. At the end of 1940, the identification division held 14 million fingerprints, “the largest reserve of information based on fingerprints in the world,” as Hoover noted. By the end of 1941, that number had almost doubled, to 24 million, and the pace showed no signs of slowing.[9]
The influx of personnel made short work of Hoover’s spick-and-span office culture, where galoshes under the desk and snacks in the drawer had once been censurable offenses. In the wartime space crunch, clerks ended up in hallways, reception areas, and classrooms, anywhere the Bureau could squeeze out a few feet. Six years earlier, when it opened, the Justice complex had seemed unimaginably grand and cavernous, one of the largest government buildings ever constructed. By 1941, it was wholly inadequate, a source of frustration, disease, and interdivisional strife. Justice planners tried to ease the congestion by spreading out to nearby buildings: a bus station, a skating rink, a former apartment house. The extra facilities barely made a dent in the problem, however, with dozens of new agents, clerks, and stenographers arriving each Monday morning. In January 1940, the FBI employed 2,432 men and women. By February 1941, it had 4,477 employees, with plans to reach 5,588 by June.[10]
In the midst of this crush, a congressman suggested that the FBI might need its own building someday. “Your Bureau is performing a service of the greatest importance to the Nation,” he declared during Hoover’s congressional testimony. “I am in favor of appropriating every dollar you need to combat alien influences and subversive activities and I would be in favor of providing you with a new building if you need one for efficient operation.” In the meantime, Congress provided money, more of it than Hoover had ever seen. In fiscal year 1941, his budget was more than $14 million, almost seven times what he had started out with under Harlan Stone. The following year, it leaped to $25 million, and the U.S. war effort was just getting started.[11]
* * *
—
Hoover’s response to this sudden rush of money, power, and personnel partially fulfilled the dark warnings proffered by civil libertarians just a few months earlier. Roosevelt’s wiretapping directive allowed the FBI to launch surveillance of foreign diplomats; by early fall, taps were up and running at the German, French, Italian, Russian, and Japanese embassies. The directive also gave Hoover wide latitude to decide who else needed to be watched. Under wartime authority, he expanded such surveillance activity far beyond anything he had undertaken in 1936, with his first tentative forays into exploring “Fascism and Communism.” By 1940, the category of “subversive” included virtually anyone who expressed sympathy toward a foreign power or hostility to the war effort, including striking workers and critics of White House policy. “None of these persons today has violated the specific Federal law now in force and effect,” Hoover acknowledged, “but many of them will come within the category for internment or prosecution as a result of regulations or laws which may be enacted in the event of a declaration of war.” Unlike criminal law enforcement, in which policemen gathered evidence after a crime had been committed, wartime surveillance was supposed to be a preventive endeavor. “To wait until [a declaration of war] to gather such information or to conduct such investigations would be suicidal,” Hoover wrote.[12]
In the middle of May, at the president’s suggestion, the White House press secretary dispatched several stacks of letters to Hoover with the suggestion that “you might like to go over these, noting the names and addresses of the senders.” The letters came from critics of Roosevelt’s war policy, including isolationists outraged at his apparent desire to entangle the United States in a European conflict. Many of the letter writers had rallied behind aviator Charles Lindbergh, who had moved to Europe after his son’s kidnapping and murder only to return to the U.S. in 1939 with a medal from Hitler and an awestruck description of German air power. In a radio broadcast three days after Roosevelt’s address to Congress, Lindbergh denounced the “hysterical chatter of calamity and invasion” behind the president’s preparedness drive. That broadcast, combined with Lindbergh’s refusal to hand back his medal from the Third Reich, led Roosevelt to conclude, “Lindbergh is a Nazi.” The White House wanted the FBI to deliver updates not only on Lindbergh himself, but on his most ardent followers.[13]
This was at heart a shameless political request: the president wanted the FBI to investigate his detractors. Under the logic of war, however, the distinction between political disagreement and “disloyalty” or “subversion” was less clear than ever. In early June, Hoover opened files on Roosevelt’s war critics, reporting to the White House any notable discoveries. Roosevelt made it clear that Hoover would be rewarded for the effort. “Thank you for the many interesting and valuable reports that you have made for me regarding the fast-moving situations of the last few months,” he wrote to Hoover on June 14. “You have done and are doing a wonderful job, and I want you to know of my gratification and appreciation.”[14]
Over the next several months, Hoover passed along dozens of other reports and updates, not only about Lindbergh and the isolationists but also about union officials, civil rights activists, communists, socialists, and members of the Bund. To assist in the gathering of information, the Bureau recruited thousands of informants, men and women willing to attend meetings, copy membership lists, and spy on their friends and family. The total number of Bureau informants recruited during the war will likely never be known, but an October memo to Roosevelt hinted at a vast recruitment effort, on a scale never before attempted by any federal agency. In a single Ohio factory, Hoover boasted, the FBI had already signed up 133 “confidential informants,” each of whom “believes that he is the bureau’s sole source of information within that organization.” Agents were performing similar feats at 1,200 other “key industrial facilities.” Even allowing for some exaggeration, it seems likely that more than 100,000 informants were spying for the FBI by the fall of 1940, and that was just within the nation’s defense plants. It did not begin to include the “subversive” organizations in the FBI’s files: the Bund, the Communist Party, and their lesser rivals.[15]
Hoover jealously guarded the Bureau’s right to recruit informants and conduct surveillance within any group that might conceivably disrupt the war effort, including labor unions. The year 1941 produced a wave of unrest in key defense industries—aviation, electronics, automobile, coal—where Communist Party members had helped to establish powerful unions in recent years. Hoover knew enough about New Deal alliances to insist that “I, of course, have no controversy with bona fide organized labor.” He maintained that the Communist Party—guided by the spirit of the Nazi-Soviet Nonaggression Pact—was fomenting industrial conflict to disrupt the American war effort, thus providing the logic for an ongoing program of labor surveillance. “I fully realize that the Bureau in initiating and carrying on investigations in this field must follow a very careful course between ‘Scylla and Charybdis’ and that undoubtedly some sources will accuse the Bureau of illegal activities,” he wrote to Jackson in the spring of 1941, positioning himself as a martyr to the cause of national security. “I believe, however, that we must have the courage to face the yelping of these alleged Liberals.”[16]
When outrage over the Bureau’s activities did surface, Roosevelt was quick to laugh it off. In the summer of 1941, Hoover showed up at the White House to discuss a humiliating tale about Harry Bridges, the Australian-born union leader and alleged communist whom Hoover and Roosevelt had been worrying about since at least 1936. On a recent visit to New York, Bridges had noticed strange goings-on in the hotel room next door, and quickly concluded that he was under Bureau surveillance. Rather than confront the agents directly, he rented a room in a hotel across the street, then invited reporters and friends to join him with a pair of binoculars, allowing them to see that agents were, indeed, at the ready with wiretapping equipment. Their observations, combined with Bridges’s discovery of a microphone inside his hotel phone, set off a national press cycle. “Harry Bridges Charges F.B.I. Men Spied on Him,” read a headline in The Baltimore Sun. When Hoover sheepishly retold the story to Roosevelt, the president offered up “one of his great grins,” then slapped Hoover on the back. “By God, Edgar, that’s the first time you’ve been caught with your pants down!” he declared, laughing.[17]
Roosevelt also backed Hoover and the Justice Department in another controversial move that summer. In June, agents raided the Socialist Workers Party around Minneapolis, where members of the Trotskyist group had recently been elected to run the Teamsters local. Several weeks later, a federal grand jury indicted twenty-nine SWP members under the Smith Act, charging them with plotting the violent overthrow of the U.S. government. These were “the first peacetime sedition indictments in more than 140 years,” in the words of one historian, and they came about largely in response to reports from FBI informants, who insisted that the SWP was hoarding weapons and preparing to commit acts of sabotage. When the case came to trial that fall, no stockpiles of guns were produced. The jury nonetheless convicted eighteen of the defendants, concluding that their talk of revolution constituted a grave criminal act. Roosevelt supported the decision to prosecute, hoping to shore up support from the Teamsters’ more conservative national leadership.[18]
* * *
—
The tug-of-war over homegrown radicalism was familiar to Hoover, a struggle that he had first engaged more than twenty years before. Other aspects of his work took him into more distant terrain, where he was less sure of his direction. The Bureau’s move into wartime intelligence did not require simply scaling up. It also necessitated a change of mentality and another shift in the Bureau’s culture. From 1924 through 1940, Hoover had focused on turning the Bureau into a model of professional law enforcement. Now he was supposed to transform it into a major international intelligence and counterespionage agency, capable of gathering secret information about enemy spies and, where possible, thwarting their activities.
As early experiences like the Rumrich case had shown, this proposition did not easily lend itself to Hoover’s emphasis on statistics and publicity. Spies rarely take credit for their achievements; the best operations remain, by definition, secret. They let investigations run for months, even years, without knowing whether anything is really being accomplished. Successful espionage requires cunning and deceit, sometimes involving relationships with unsavory characters. None of this came naturally to Hoover. And there was almost nobody within the government from whom he could learn. As an FBI report later noted, the Bureau plunged into counterespionage work that summer “under extreme difficulties and without any precedent whatsoever to follow with regard to this type of work.”[19]
The experience would no doubt have been far more difficult if not for the help of the one group on American soil that knew a great deal about such matters: the British intelligence service. The British had reached out to Hoover as the war ramped up. Though the Battle of Britain lay months in the future, by the spring of 1940 they were growing anxious about American foot-dragging, and about the bitter isolationist sentiments of men such as Lindbergh. Prime Minister Winston Churchill made no secret of his determination to bring the U.S. into the war, and he hoped to promote this aim by setting up a British intelligence outpost in New York. From there, his proxies could agitate on behalf of Britain and help the Americans build the clandestine infrastructure that would be needed for full-scale war. Churchill’s vision was extralegal; no nation in the world openly allowed a foreign power to run an intelligence service on domestic soil. To make it happen, the British decided that they needed Hoover’s assistance and permission.[20]
Hoover did not usually entertain this sort of offer: the arrangement was untested and controversial, and it required giving up control of his men and territory. It was also top secret, a fact that meant the FBI could not take credit for any success. Hoover agreed to meet anyway with William Stephenson, the debonaire Canadian millionaire tasked with carrying out Churchill’s orders. Upon moving to New York, Stephenson made a name for himself by throwing swank cocktail parties at his Dorset Hotel penthouse. At the same time, he possessed the uncanny quality of seeming to be nowhere and nobody. The future novelist Ian Fleming, a devotee of both cocktails and spy craft, later modeled his character James Bond in part on Stephenson.[21]
