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

with the family to subsequent assignments in China, Germany, Switzerland, England, and Bermuda. He had received a first-class education, St. Albans, Princeton, the Sorbonne, and spoke French, Greek, German, Russian, Italian, and Spanish. Still, Kent had been hired by the State Department in 1934 not as a fledgling diplomat but as a clerk. He had come to London in October 1939 after serving at the American embassy in Moscow, where he had been assigned to the code room. His political ideas had begun to take shape at that time, characterized by a visceral hatred of communism.
    A code clerk was essentially a technician, and Kent’s fellow clerks encoded and decoded messages that were shaping history with the indifference with which bank tellers handle bundles of money. Kent, on the contrary, read, reread, and thought deeply about the secrets that passed through his hands. For him, the FDR-Churchill exchanges had taken on an alarming turn from the very first. In a dispatch dated October 5, 1939, Churchill, then First Lord of the Admiralty, asked FDR to have American warships alert the British navy to any German ship movements in the Atlantic. “The more American ships cruising along the South American coast the better,” Churchill observed, “as you, sir, would no doubt hear what they saw or did not see.” He began signing his dispatches “Naval Person,” chummily underlining his present and FDR’s former navy affiliation. Roosevelt readily complied with Churchill’s request. Admiral John Godfrey, director of British Naval Intelligence, reported on February 26, 1940: “. . . [T]heir [U.S.] patrols in the Gulf of Mexico give us information, and recently they have been thoroughly unneutral in reporting the position of the SS
Columbus,
” a German merchant vessel subsequently captured by the British.
    Another secret exchange further punctured the thin membrane of neutrality. American shipowners complained bitterly to the President that the Royal Navy was forcing their vessels into British ports to be searched. The British, seeking to maintain a blockade against shipments that might aid their enemies, believed themselves within their rights in detaining any vessels, including American. Roosevelt told Churchill of the American shipowners’ discontent. Churchill made a swift exception. He responded, “I gave orders last night that no American ship under any circumstances be diverted into the combat zone around the British Isles declared by you. I trust this will be satisfactory.”
    Roosevelt’s breaches of neutrality drove Tyler Kent to a desperate act. The American people, he was convinced, did not want to be enmeshed in Europe’s fight. A Roper public opinion poll taken immediately after the war began indicated that less than 3 percent of Americans wanted their country to enter the war on the Allied side. The largest percentage, 37.5 percent, preferred to “Take no sides and stay out of the war entirely.” Yet, here was an American president, in Kent’s view, conniving with the British, risking America’s entanglement in a conflict his people decidedly did not want. There could be little doubt of what Churchill wanted; as the Prime Minister put it to an Admiralty official, “Our objective is to get the Americans into the war. . . . We can then best settle how to fight it afterwards.”
    In another message to Roosevelt, Churchill dangled tempting bait before the President. FDR had earlier turned down Prime Minister Chamberlain’s request for the Norden bombsight. Now Churchill offered a quid pro quo: “We should be quite ready to tell you about our ASDIC methods whenever you feel they would be of use to the United States Navy” and added that FDR could be “. . . sure the secret will go no further.” Churchill was offering a new sound wave technique able to detect submerged submarines, later called, in the American version, sonar.