Joseph E. Persico by Roosevelt's Secret War: FDR, World War II Espionage Read Free Book Online

was the country. As
The New York Times
editorialized: “No secret police is needed or wanted here.” He simply needed someone to knock heads together. Messersmith was wise enough to recognize the rivalries and jealousies among federal fiefdoms, particularly endemic among those trafficking in secrets. He thus sought to put a civilized tone on his first attempt to bring together the competing agencies by inviting their chiefs to his Georgetown home for dinner. Afterward, over port and cigars, they could figure out a way to stop stepping on each other’s toes. The dinner was hardly a success. The figure then with the major counterespionage role was FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, and Hoover did not deign to show up at Georgetown. He attended Messersmith’s next meeting only when ordered directly to do so by the President.
    Espionage involves peeking at the other fellow’s hand, marking the cards, cooking the books, poisoning the well, breaking the rules, hitting below the belt, cheating, lying, deceiving, defaming, snooping, eavesdropping, prying, stealing, bribing, suborning, burglarizing, forging, misleading, conducting dirty tricks, dirty pool, skulduggery, blackmail, seduction, everything not sporting, not kosher, not cricket. In short, espionage stands virtue on its head and elevates vice in its stead. As Europe went to war and America clung to the slope of a slippery peace, the country essentially lacked the back alleys, the counterfeiters, the potions, all the implements of deceit necessary to conduct what has aptly been called the game of the foxes. All FDR had, at this point, was a clique of gentleman amateurs, equally amateurish military attachés abroad, an underfunded codebreaking service, and an empty intelligence center with rivals messily competing around the edges for supremacy.

Chapter II
    Spies, Saboteurs, and Traitors
    ON A gray London morning, May 20, 1940, four men approached a flat at 47 Gloucester Place. Behind the door, a young man, clean-cut and studious-looking, sat amid the remains of his breakfast. He did not respond to the knocking even when a booming voice shouted, “Police!” Instead he bolted the door and called out coolly, “No, you can’t come in.” A Scotland Yard detective rammed his shoulder against the door and it burst open. The others filed in, a second detective, an officer from MI5, the British domestic military intelligence service, and the second secretary of the American embassy. The man they had broken in on was Tyler Kent, a code clerk also attached to the embassy. One of the detectives produced a search warrant, and Kent stood by, unruffled, as his visitors rummaged through his apartment. They found 1,929 U.S. embassy documents, including secret correspondence between Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill. The content of these messages was such that their exposure to the public could harm the President and the Prime Minister, and jeopardize America’s presumed neutrality in the European war. What they revealed could also influence the upcoming U.S. presidential election.
    Though they had been corresponding for months, Roosevelt and Churchill had met only once twenty-one years before, an unsatisfactory encounter from FDR’s viewpoint. Roosevelt confided to Joseph P. Kennedy, his ambassador to Britain, his initial reaction to Churchill: “I have always disliked him since the time I went to England in 1918. He acted like a stinker at a dinner I attended, lording it all over us.” Roosevelt was not alone in his distaste. The novelist-physicist C. P. Snow observed that Churchill was “widely and deeply disliked,” and had been so for most of his life. During the thirties, Churchill was viewed as brilliant, but a burnt-out case, a has-been who sought refuge in drink. The American undersecretary of state, Sumner Welles, in recalling a visit to Churchill’s office, noted, “Mr. Churchill was sitting in front of the