Codebreakers Victory (19 page)

Ewen Montagu, a member of the committee, has reported in his
Beyond Top Secret Ultra
that the head of British intelligence, Stewart Menzies, called J. Edgar to acquaint him with Popov and prepare the way for his mission. Montagu himself was sent to the U.S. to assist Popov in establishing the American double-agent network.

Yet, because of the fierce clash of personalities, because the turf-protecting FBI was incapable of achieving the broad cooperation of agencies necessitated by a Twenty Committee, the entire venture came to nought.

On August 12, 1941, Popov took a Pan Am flying boat from Lisbon to New York. There he met with the FBI's agent in charge, Percy "Sam" Fox-worth. Popov showed Foxworth the two German secrets he thought would be of greatest interest to the Americans. One was the questionnaire. The other was a sample of the microdot system the Nazis were developing as the means to condense a large amount of secret data into a dot that would appear like nothing more than a speck of dirt on the surface of an innocuous-looking letter.

To the question of when Popov could see the director, Foxworth hedged. The meeting couldn't take place for another two weeks. No explanation for the delay was given, but Anthony Summers, a biographer who has charged that Hoover was "a closet homosexual" and "a practicing transvestite," has determined that at the time Hoover was away on vacation with his near-constant companion, Clyde Tolson.

Popov decided he couldn't sit idle for a whole fortnight, and since one of the objectives asked of him on the questionnaire was that he investigate U.S. military bases, "especially in Florida," Popov decided he would drive to Florida in the flashy convertible he'd purchased. He couldn't take along Simone Simon, the French movie star he'd squired in the past. Instead, he would drive south with a new friend, an English model working in New York.

On his second day in Miami, he wrote in his memoir, he was lolling on the beach with his girlfriend when he was approached by a formidable figure in a business suit and tie who asked him to come along to the beach bar. There a second man, "looking like his half-brother," told Popov, "You are registered in this hotel as man and wife with a girl you're not married to."

House detectives, Popov thought, and suggested that he go get his wallet so things could be "cleared up."

The men were not house detectives. They were FBI agents and informed Popov he had broken the Mann Act, which made it a federal offense to transport a woman across state lines for immoral purposes. They did not add that it was one of the least-enforced measures in U.S. law. What they did tell him was that either he send the woman home immediately or he would be taken in, to face a minimum of a year and a day in prison.

Braving the model's annoyance that he had—disguising the real reason for his actions—given in to house detectives, Popov put her on a plane back to New York that same day and drove north alone.

These were the preliminaries to Popov's meeting with Hoover. Popov's memoir placed the meeting in Foxworth's office, with Hoover sitting at Foxworth's desk. The scene was set for a violent clash of personalities: the slim, suave, macho Yugoslav facing the pudgy, fussy but all-powerful American.

"Sit down, Popov," Hoover ordered, with what Popov remembered as "an expression of disgust on his face."

"I'm running the cleanest police organization in the country," Popov quoted Hoover as saying. "You come here from nowhere and within six weeks install yourself in a New York penthouse, chase film stars, break a serious law, and try to corrupt my officers. I'm telling you right now I won't stand for it." He pounded on the desk with his fist "as though to nail his words into my brain."

Popov defended himself. "I'm not a spy who turned playboy. I'm a man who always lived well who happened to become a spy." The Germans, he told Hoover, expected him to live well and would become suspicious if he didn't.

According to his memoir, he also told Hoover, "I did not come to the United States to break the law or to corrupt your organization. I came here co help the war effort." Popov explained about the questionnaire, the Pearl Harbor warning and the microdot system. He finished by dwelling on the plan to organize a double-agent network under FBI control. In describing what would be needed to make the system work, he said, "You cannot expect a crop if you don't put in the seed. You cannot deceive the enemy if you don't . . ."

He stopped. Hoover, giving in to braying laughter, had turned to Foxworth, saying, "That man is trying to teach me my job."

Popov saw that any further discussion was futile. He had communicated the critical information he had come to report. He stood up and walked out.

"Good riddance," Hoover yelled after him.

Popov refused to believe that his mission had been wasted. Several FBI officials, including Foxworth himself, saw the value of what had been handed them. The questionnaire alone should convince any thoughtful leader of its import. Besides, Popov thought, he could count on his British superiors to make the information known to high U.S. government officials.

He went off to Rio de Janeiro to meet with a German spymaster there and deliver a batch of double-cross material of his own devising. On December 7 he was on a passenger liner returning to the U.S. when news about the raid on Pearl Harbor began to trickle in. He anticipated hearing of a great U.S. victory. When instead he learned of the debacle, he couldn't believe his ears. "How, I asked myself, how? We knew they were coming. We knew how they were going to come. Exactly like at Taranto . . . I couldn't credit what I was hearing."

Like others involved in secret operations during the war, Popov was constrained by Britain's Official Secrets Act from telling his story until thirty years later. When his memoir,
Spy/Counterspy,
was published in 1974, it touched off a firestorm of controversy that has still not receded.

Apologists for Hoover and the FBI, for example, deny that Hoover and Popov ever met. The FBI says it has no record of any such meeting. They also claim that whatever was of value in Popov's questionnaire was passed on to the responsible military authorities and even to President Roosevelt. But subsequent research has found that while a paraphrased one-page version of the questionnaire was included in a sheaf of reports circulated by the FBI, it did not include the material on Hawaii.

So why didn't the British, knowing of Popov's troubles with the FBI, pick up the ball? The answer given by Masterman: "Obviously it was for the Americans to make their appreciation and to draw their deductions from the questionnaire, rather than for us to do so. Nevertheless, with fuller knowledge of the case and of the man, we ought to have stressed its importance more than we did."

Ironically, Hoover was much more taken with Popov's news about the microdot system than with the Pearl Harbor warning. In 1946 Hoover published in
Reader's Digest
an article telling how FBI agents had intercepted a Balkan playboy "son of a millionaire" in New York and in going through his possessions had discovered on the front of an envelope this "dot that reflected the light." Under a microscope that magnified the dot's contents two hundred times, he wrote, "we could see that it was an image on a film of a fully-sized typewriter letter, a spy letter with a blood-chilling text."

Hoover was careful not to add that the actual content of the first dot the FBI saw was a copy of the German questionnaire.

Where is the truth in all this? Certainly Popov, writing decades after the events, slipped up on some details and may well have embellished the account. But reading the questionnaire today in the context of what Popov and the British were trying to convey does raise the question of how those references to Hawaii and to Pearl Harbor could have failed, somewhere along the line of recipients, to set off alarm bells.

The FBI did, Montagu has written, use Tricycle's name in sending messages to his spymaster. But they were "low-grade, trumpery stuff that almost any half-witted agent could have got." Further, "It is almost impossible to believe—they never let Tricycle know what they had sent or what the Germans had asked." At the Twenty Committee's request, Popov was allowed to return to Britain and in "the greatest instance of coldblooded courage that I have ever been in contact with" he met with his spy-master in Lisbon, explained away his American failures and again became a key member of the committee.

Postwar events also show that Popov's British masters did not share Hoover's disdain of him. Hinsley rates him as one of the three "most valuable" double agents in Britain's cause. In recognition of the daring and dangerous but vitally important work he carried out, the British promoted him to the honorary rank of colonel, granted him British citizenship and awarded him both the Distinguished Service Medal and the Order of the British Empire.

Jebsen, however, was arrested by the Gestapo, for reasons that are not clear. This was a development of great concern to the Twenty Committee because of what he could reveal. But he was killed, presumably trying to escape, and honorably carried his secrets with him.

Amid all the controversies swirling around Popov, this is for certain: he went to his grave believing that J. Edgar Hoover was "the person responsible for the disaster at Pearl Harbor."

 

 

 

8

 

The U.S. Tackles Japan's Codes

 

 

When Secretary of State Stimson sniffed at the idea of reading other gentlemen's mail and closed down Herbert Yardley's Black Chamber, American cryptology seemed to have come to an end. It had not. Quietly, other agencies, from the FBI and the Federal Communications Commission to the army and navy, carried on the task, independently of each other and often involving rancorous internecine turf wars.

Inheriting Yardley's files, the U.S. Army Signal Corps in 1930 created the Signal Intelligence Service (SIS). To head it up, the corps hired William Friedman, whom many consider the greatest cryptologic genius of all time.

Friedman came to code work by a serendipitous route. Born in Russia in 1891, he was brought to the U.S. as an infant. His family settled in Pittsburgh, and as a high school youth, he became caught up in a Jewish "back to the land" movement which led him, when he was a graduate student at Cornell University, to plan a career in plant genetics. In 1915 an eccentric millionaire cotton merchant named George Fabyan went to Cornell in search of a geneticist to work at his Riverbank Laboratory, near Chicago, on improving crop strains. Friedman, recommended by one of his professors, became head of Riverbank's Department of Genetics and involved himself in such Fabyan projects as planting oats by the light of the moon to see whether the phases made any difference in their growth.

Fabyan, who had the wealth to support his flights of fancy, also became intrigued by a woman whose research had convinced her that Francis Bacon had written the works attributed to William Shakespeare and, what was more, had included coded messages to that effect in the early folios of the plays and poems. She claimed the secret messages also revealed that he was the illegitimate son of Queen Elizabeth I and the rightful heir to the British throne. To fill out his team conducting this research, Fabyan hired Elizebeth Smith, a Hillsdale College graduate, whose mother had insisted on the unusual spelling of her name to prevent its being shortened to
Eliza.

The theory of the Bacon codes was based on variations in the typefaces in the folios. Handy with a camera, Friedman helped the project by making photo enlargements of the type fonts. He was drawn to the cryptographic work. "Something in me," he commented later, "found an outlet."

Since Europe was then at war and American military involvement was becoming increasingly likely, Elizebeth and William foresaw the need for the U.S. to become more proficient in secret communications. Ever the opportunist, Fabyan enthusiastically supported this new phase of their research. For a time Riverbank was the only organization in the country skilled in deciphering coded messages. Their mutual professional and personal interests led Elizebeth and William to marriage in 1917.

When, later that year, the army created its Cipher Bureau, Fabyan arranged for the Friedmans to conduct classes in cryptography for army officers. A famous photo from that era shows Elizebeth and William surrounded by their eighty bright young students in khaki. The students' faces are turned either directly toward the camera or away from it to register a bilateral coded message: Bacon's aphorism "Knowledge is power."

As texts for his classes, Friedman began writing a series of booklets on cryptography—one of them with Elizebeth as collaborator. Impressed, the army brass offered him a first lieutenant's commission. He spent the last five months of World War I on General Pershing's staff in France, concentrating on breaking German codes. The experience gave him ideas that subsequently he was to use with great effect. On his return to Riverbank he published a new booklet,
The Index of Coincidence and Its Application to Cryptography.
David Kahn has written that it "must be regarded as the most important single publication in cryptology. It took the science into a new world."

Cryptanalysis had, previously, been rather an occult process in which the would-be breaker pored over a ciphertext waiting for some intuitive insight to lead to a solution. Friedman's "new world" consisted of methodically applying a statistical and mathematical science to codebreaking. His new booklet added a useful technique. He had observed that if the horizontal lines of a message are arranged so that the letters are placed in vertical rows precisely below each other, now and then the same letter will appear, the one directly beneath the other. This coincidence, he had determined, will vary in frequency with each language. In English it occurs in 6.67 columns of every 100. This was a step forward in cryptanalysis that gave Friedman a tool in analyzing the new machine-encoded ciphers when they began to appear.

During the 1920s both Friedmans were engaged in code work for the government. William made national headlines when he cracked the codes of the conspirators in the Teapot Dome scandal and helped send several of them to prison. He also became chief codebreaker for the War Department, where he developed the reputation of being like Midas, except that everything he touched turned not into gold but into plaintext. Elizebeth, in addition to starting a family, helped the Department of Justice and later the Treasury Department in efforts to enforce Prohibition. She broke the increasingly sophisticated codes of the rum-running syndicate and testified against them in well-publicized court cases.