Enemies: A History of the FBI (21 page)

A new position began to open for the FBI in American embassies throughout the Western Hemisphere: the “legal attaché.” Like the military attaché and the naval attaché, the post held diplomatic status, with the attendant rank, perquisites of office, and protections afforded by the embassy. The legal attaché was required to keep the American ambassador informed about what the FBI was doing in his country. He was ordered to work in harmony with his army and navy counterparts, if possible. He was, in theory, “the responsible American official with regard to clandestine intelligence matters, particularly in the field of subversive activities,” the secret history records.

The legal attaché system salvaged the FBI’s foreign intelligence service.

Hoover put the attachés to work making friends with the police chiefs and internal security ministers of Latin America. Wining, dining, and sometimes bribing the chief of police—preferably, the chief of the secret police—was a far more effective means of gathering intelligence than posing as magazine stringers and soap salesmen.

Liaison programs established by the legal attachés became the cutting edge of FDR’s Good Neighbor Policy in wartime. They grew with great speed, driven by the flow of American money and power and authority from United States embassies to Latin American presidents and police forces. Legal attachés and ambassadors persuaded politically insecure Latin American presidents that it would be wise to have an FBI man as a paid security adviser for protection. The adviser, of course, served double duty as a spy.

From the summer of 1943 onward, FBI liaisons made it “feasible to obtain almost any type of investigative assistance and information from the police in practically every country in Latin America,” the secret history recounts. Police chiefs and interior ministers, some of them now on the FBI’s payroll, provided Hoover’s men with access to intelligence from post offices, telephone and telegraph company networks, airlines and shipping companies, customs offices and a rich variety of government agencies—“including in many places the Presidential Palace.”

Every police chief and every president in Latin America had one thing in common with Hoover, if only one: anticommunism. Alliances built by the legal attachés during World War II lasted as long as there were leftists to fight in Latin America.

By the summer of 1943, German espionage in the Western Hemisphere was dying out. The danger of an Axis invasion was disappearing. As the tide of the war against Hitler began turning, American leaders started to envision the world after the war.

Hoover and a handful of like-minded men in Washington looked over the horizon and saw Stalin and the Red Army marching westward. They saw their battle would not end when fascism was defeated. They saw that the war on communism would go on.

But at this moment, Hoover faced the greatest challenge to his authority to fight that war.

14

THE MACHINE OF DETECTION

E
VER SINCE
W
ORLD
W
AR
I, Hoover had been hunting for an underground Communist conspiracy against the United States. After a quarter century of investigation, he finally saw the first earth-shaking evidence. In the spring and summer of 1943, the FBI secretly recorded conversations that would change the course of history.

The Bureau had been spying on Steve Nelson, the local Communist Party leader in Oakland, California, since 1940. In May 1941, the special agent in charge in San Francisco had placed Nelson on the Custodial Detention list, the secret index of Americans and aliens whom the FBI judged worthy of military detention in a time of national emergency.

Hoover convinced Attorney General Francis Biddle that a wiretap on Nelson would be “
a very likely source of information concerning the policies of the Communist Party.” The FBI had bugged Nelson’s home and tapped his telephone since February 1942. The files on Nelson revealed that he was a tough guy with an eighth-grade education. His real last name was Mesarosh. He was a Slav who had come to the United States on a false passport in 1920, joined the Communist Party in 1925, won nineteen votes as a candidate for Congress in Pennsylvania in 1936, and shed blood in the Spanish Civil War in 1937. He served on the national committee of the Party, and he skulked around with graduate students from the University of California at Berkeley.

On the night of March 29, 1943, the FBI recorded a conversation between Nelson and a man named Joe, aka “Scientist X.” Joe was a committed Communist and a physics student. He described a project at the Berkeley Radiation Laboratory dedicated to enriching uranium. He said thousands of people worked on the project in Los Alamos, New Mexico, and Oak Ridge, Tennessee.

Nelson took notes. A few days later, the FBI trailed him to a meeting on the grounds of a nearby hospital, where he passed some papers to a man who worked at the Soviet consulate in San Francisco.

On April 10, 1943, the FBI recorded Nelson talking with a Soviet diplomat named Vassili Zarubin, aka Zubilin. The FBI did not know it at the time, but he was the chief of Soviet espionage in the United States.

From the start, though, they knew he was
somebody
important. “
It was obvious that Zubilin was in control of the intelligence organization,” the FBI reported after it transcribed the conversation. The Soviet was counting out money, apparently paying Nelson for “placing Communist Party members and Comintern agents in industries engaged in secret war production.”

On May 7, Hoover sent a report to the White House saying that the government of the Soviet Union was using the American Communist Party to create a spy network in the United States.

The FBI saw, for the first time, in real time, a link between Soviet intelligence and American Communists. It was everything Hoover had ever feared, and worse. Soviet espionage was aiming to steal a secret so highly classified that Hoover himself knew next to nothing about it—not yet. A few weeks later, Hoover was informed for the first time about the Manhattan Project, the secret nationwide program to build an atomic bomb. Then he learned about the United States Army’s effort to read the encrypted cables used by Soviet spies and diplomats in their communications with Moscow.

It can take years to build a secret operation—to invent a new weapon, to create or destroy an espionage network, to crack a code. Now Hoover opened up two intelligence investigations that would consume the FBI for a decade. One was called CINRAD, short for Communist Infiltration of Radiation Laboratory. The other was called COMRAP, Comintern Apparatus. Both aimed to gain a grasp of the Soviet espionage networks in the United States. Starting in May 1943, roughly fifty FBI agents in New York and fifty more in Washington began trying to track and tap the Soviet spies who posed as diplomats and government purchasing agents at Amtorg, the Soviet trade mission. Shortly thereafter, Hoover sent 125 agents across the country, from New York to Chicago to San Francisco, to try to find the Soviet spies who worked under deep cover, without the protection of diplomatic immunity. The hunt at home would go on far longer than the war abroad.

“L
IKE CHILDREN LOST IN THE WOODS
”

FBI agents confronting Soviet espionage during World War II were “
like children lost in the woods,” the State Department’s Lawrence Duggan, a Communist agent himself, told the Soviet intelligence officer who debriefed him in Washington. The FBI knew very little about the workings of Moscow’s intelligence services. It had met Gaik Ovakimian, the Soviet espionage chief in New York, without understanding who he was. It had listened to Walter Krivitsky, a Soviet spy who defected, without understanding what he said.

The FBI was not incompetent or indifferent. It did not know what it did not know. Intelligence is a war in which the weapons are knowledge and foresight. Information is the most powerful force. If you have a spy in the enemy’s camp, you can win a battle. If you know your enemy’s mind, you can win a war.

The FBI had no reliable Soviet sources—and the government of the United States was not eager for a fight with the Soviets. Stalin was killing more Nazis than Roosevelt and Churchill combined. But if Americans who were collaborating with Soviet intelligence could be caught in the act of espionage, Hoover could use the powers of the Custodial Detention list to arrest them in secret, without a trial, and stick them in a military stockade for the duration of the war.

Then Attorney General Biddle found out about the list.

The courtly and patrician Biddle considered himself something of an expert on the subject of J. Edgar Hoover. He had studied the man from the start of the four years they worked side by side. He saw “
a human side of Edgar Hoover with which he is not always credited.…

“Hoover’s character interested me,” he wrote many years later. “I sought to invite his confidence; and before long, lunching alone with me in a room adjoining my office, he began to reciprocate by sharing some of the extraordinarily broad knowledge of the intimate details of what my associates in the Cabinet did and said, of their likes and their dislikes, their weaknesses and associations … I confess that, within limits, I enjoyed hearing it.”

Within his limits, Biddle admired many of the ways in which Hoover used his power at the FBI. The attorney general signed his share of wiretap orders, and he faced the wartime threats posed by America’s enemies with all the laws at his command. But he was disturbed all his life by the secret
operations of the FBI, “this great machine of detection with its ten million personal files” and “its obvious possibilities of misusing the trust it has won.”

Biddle wanted no repeat of the 1920 Red raids on his watch. He had ordered the FBI to work with a new Justice Department office he created, the Special War Policies Unit. Civilian panels oversaw wartime detentions of enemy aliens—only aliens, not American citizens. Biddle kept the work under the rule of law throughout the war.

In the nineteen months since Pearl Harbor, the FBI had arrested 16,062 suspected foreign subversives. But roughly two-thirds of them, about 10,000 people, were released after the civilian panels deemed they were not a clear and present danger to the United States. As had happened a generation before, the FBI had swept up thousands of people who were innocent. The steady dismissal of these cases had made the attorney general inquire into the depth and the accuracy of the FBI’s intelligence files.

On July 6, 1943, Biddle discovered that Hoover kept a list of Americans deemed deserving of military internment. He was aghast. No law allowed Hoover to have “
a ‘custodial detention’ list of citizens,” the attorney general told the director. He thought the secret files were themselves a danger to the United States.

The job of the FBI was “investigating the activities of persons who may have violated the law,” the attorney general wrote in his order abolishing the program. “It is not aided in this work by classifying persons as to dangerousness.…

“It is now clear to me that this classification system is inherently unreliable,” Biddle wrote to Hoover. “The evidence used for the purpose of making the classifications was inadequate; the standards applied to the evidence for the purpose of making the classifications were defective; and finally, the notion that it is possible to make a valid determination as to how dangerous a person is in the abstract and without reference to time, environment, and other relevant circumstances, is impractical, unwise, and dangerous.”

The director tossed the order aside. He disobeyed it in secret. He did not tell the attorney general or anyone else outside the FBI what he was doing. He simply started calling the list the Security Index. Nothing else changed, except the secrecy surrounding the index. His decision stayed secret until after his death.

Hoover, of course, retained his unquestioned powers to place people under surveillance. That gave him broad authority to conduct intelligence investigations into the political beliefs of Americans. Among the thousands of people added to Hoover’s Security Index during the war, the greatest number were American Communists—not merely Party members but people who wrote books or articles with Communist ideas, who spoke at Communist rallies, who went to meetings “
where revolutionary preachings are given.” The leaders of the German-American Bund and Italian Fascist organizations were on the list as well, along with homegrown American racists who belonged to groups like the Ku Klux Klan.

Hoover had standards: those who qualified for the list were people “
opposed to the American way of life.”

The attorney general wanted the FBI to focus on Axis agents. He did not think the time was ripe for a war on communism in America. “Hoover must have suspected that I would be too soft, particularly now that a war was on; too soft with Communists—so many liberals had not yet realized what the Communists were after,” wrote Biddle. “Hoover … was clearly not reflective or philosophic. Edgar Hoover was primarily a man of immediate action.”

Hoover had watched in frustration as the membership of the Communist Party, buoyed by America’s alliance with Stalin, grew toward an all-time high of 80,000 card-carrying members during World War II. His orders to the field required the investigation of every last one of them.