Enemies: A History of the FBI (81 page)

15.
“The Americans are currently investigating”:
“Bob” to Moscow Center, Nov. 20, 1945, KGB file obtained by Alexander Vassilev and reproduced in Haynes, Klehr, and Vassilev,
Spies: The Rise and Fall of the KGB in America
, p. 519.

16.
“President Truman was not a man”:
DeLoach oral history, FBI/FBIOH.

17.
S
HOWDOWN

  
1.
“Completely unworkable”:
Hoover to Attorney General, Jan. 15, 1946, FBI/FOIA; The attorney general objected to his blunt language: Ladd to Hoover, Subject: “Worldwide Intelligence,” Jan. 18, 1946, FBI/FOIA. President Truman’s aides deplored FDR’s decision to divide the world among the FBI, the army, and the navy. At the White House on Jan. 9, they warned him that the nation was “approaching the subject of intelligence in a most unintelligent fashion.” They proposed a new triad of power—the secretaries of war, state, and navy would be served by a new director of Central Intelligence. He would unify military intelligence and have dominion over the FBI. The Bureau would be demoted in the pantheon of American power. Harold D. Smith, “White House conference on intelligence activities,” Jan. 9, 1946, FRUS Intelligence, pp. 170–171.

  
2.
the first director of Central Intelligence:
Three directors of Central Intelligence served Truman from January 1946 to July 1947. They led a small and disorganized service called the Central Intelligence Group. The Central Intelligence Agency was created when Truman signed the National Security Act on July 26, 1947. The powers of the Agency were expanded in 1949.

  
3.
“He wanted it understood”:
Hoover to Tolson, Tamm, Ladd, and Carson, Jan. 25, 1946, FBI/FOIA.

  
4.
“General Eisenhower inquired”:
Hoover to Tolson, Tamm, Ladd, and Carson, Jan. 25, 1946, FBI/FOIA.

  
5.
“What do you want me to do?”:
William W. Quinn,
Buffalo Bill Remembers: Truth and Courage
(Fowlerville, Mich.: Wilderness Adventure Books, 1991), pp. 234–267.

  
6.
“It is of the utmost urgency”:
Souers to Truman, April 17, 1946, FRUS Intelligence, p. 276.

  
7.
“She was a flake”:
Jack Danahy, FBI Oral History Project interview, FBI/FBIOH. The Soviet spy network Bentley served was managed by her lover, Jacob Golos, who had died in 1943. The FBI already had a file on Golos. The Bureau had seen him meet the long-vanished Soviet spy Gaik Ovakimian back in 1941. Ovakimian, in turn, had come to the United States in 1933, when the Roosevelt administration first recognized the Soviets and allowed Moscow to establish diplomatic posts in Washington and New York.

  
8.
“There is an enormous Soviet espionage ring”:
Hoover memorandum, May 29, 1946, FBI/FOIA.

  
9.
“It
was
a time of some hysteria”:
Oral history interview with Tom C. Clark, Oct. 17, 1972, HSTL.

10.
“in the event of an emergency”:
Ladd to Hoover, Feb. 27, 1946, FBI, reprinted in
CI Reader
, “The Postwar Expansion of FBI Domestic Intelligence.”

11.
“intensify its investigation”:
Hoover to Attorney General, Personal and Confidential, March 8, 1946, FBI,
CI Reader
.

12.
“Move rapidly”:
Hoover notation on memo from Tamm to Hoover, July 18, 1946, FBI/FOIA.

13.
“All investigative files”:
C. H. Carson, “Closing of [Deleted] Office” and “Closing of SIS Offices,” Aug. 22 and Sept. 9, 1946, FBI/FOIA.

14.
“to avoid offending Mr. Hoover”:
Tamm to Hoover, Aug. 10, 1946, FRUS Intelligence. Hoover’s rage was not quelled. When Attorney General Clark protested Hoover’s unilateral withdrawal from the Western Hemisphere, FBI assistant director Ed Tamm gave him a piece of Hoover’s mind: “[Director of Central Intelligence] Vandenberg had the effrontery” to hire “men who had deserted from the service of the FBI” as his “alleged intelligence representatives,” he told Clark. These men were “definitely persona non grata” with Hoover.

15.
“Watch with meticulous care”:
Hoover notation on memo to Ladd, April 10, 1947, FBI/FOIA. Emphasis in original. Hoover took delight in every snafu that the Central Intelligence Group suffered. Its new station chief in Paraguay, whose Spanish was faulty, registered himself at his hotel as an American ambassador. By coincidence, the actual American ambassador to Paraguay, Willard L. Beaulac, left the country for a conference in Washington that day. The nation’s newspapers and radio stations had a field day reporting that Beaulac had been replaced by a mysterious stranger. An FBI radiogram reported the embarrassing incident. “Well, CIG is starting off true to form,” Hoover wrote on his copy of the report.

16.
“The ‘empire builders’ ”:
Hoover notation on memo from Ladd, June 2, 1947, FBI/FOIA.

17.
“a major blow”:
Acheson to National Intelligence Authority, Aug. 5, 1946, FRUS Intelligence, pp. 286–287.

18.
“I think we ought to have a showdown”:
Hoover notation on memo to Ladd, Oct. 29, 1946, FBI/FOIA.

19.
“the threat of infiltrating”:
“FBI Plan for United States Secret World-Wide Intelligence Coverage,” no date (but updated circa Sept. 1946), FBI/FOIA. The plan was continually updated; this version was included in a package of documentation in preparation for Hoover’s congressional testimony on the legislation that became the National Security Act of 1947.

18.
“R
ED FASCISM
”

  
1.
On September 26, 1946:
Clark Clifford, “Report to the President,” Sept. 26, 1946, HSTL;
“Reds, phonies, and ‘parlor pinks’ ”:
Truman diary entry cited in David McCullough,
Truman
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992), p. 517.

  
2.
“Communism, in reality”:
Hoover testimony, House Committee on Un-American Activities, March 26, 1947.

  
3.
“Who’s that young man?”:
Bradshaw Mintener interview, Ovid Demaris,
The Director: An Oral Biography of J. Edgar Hoover
(New York: Harper’s Magazine Press, 1975), pp. 120–121.

19.
S
URPRISE
A
TTACK

  
1.
“Very strongly anti-FBI”:
Clifford notes of conversation with Truman, May 2, 1947, HSTL.

  
2.
“a Frankenstein”:
Snyder oral history, HSTL.

  
3.
He artfully twisted the arms:
Hoover’s off-the-record briefing was printed at the FBI on July 3, 1947. Its delivery to selected congressmen working on the National Security Act came on Hoover’s terms—off the record. It appears here for the first time.

  
4.
“very frank in his statement”:
[Deleted] to Ladd, April 17, 1947, FBI/FOIA.

  
5.
“the raw material for building”:
Testimony of Allen W. Dulles, Hearing of the Committee on Expenditures in the Executive Departments, June 27, 1947. The hearing was closed; a sole surviving copy of the transcript of the testimony of key witnesses was kept in a locked safe at CIA headquarters. Staff members of the House Intelligence and Government Operations committees unearthed it in 1982.

  
6.
“It is a tragedy”:
Hoover notation on memo from Victor Keay to H. B. Fletcher re: Criticism of CIA, FBI/FOIA, Oct. 28, 1948; “If the people of this nation”: Memorandum for Mr. Ladd re: Central Intelligence Agency, Aug. 11, 1948, FBI/FOIA.

  
7.
“It strikes me as a waste”:
Hoover notation on memo to Ladd, Aug. 19, 1947, FBI/FOIA;
“
Please
cut out all”:
Hoover notation on memo, Ladd to Hoover, Oct. 23, 1947, FBI/FOIA, emphasis in original;
“Waste no time on it”:
Hoover notation on memo for Ladd, Dec. 11, 1947, FBI/FOIA.

  
8.
“the present widespread belief”:
“Subject: Intelligence Matters,” Top Secret memorandum of conversation by John H. Ohly, special assistant to secretary of defense, Oct. 24, 1947, HSTL.

  
9.
“the smuggling into the United States”:
Forrestal to Hoover, Dec. 20, 1948, Top Secret letter quoting Hoover memo to Forrestal dated Nov. 1, 1947, HSTL. Hoover’s Nov. 1, 1947, warning to Forrestal on the threat of Soviet atomic terrorism served as a political catalyst. Stratagems to subvert Stalin consumed the secretary of defense, who became a driving force behind the creation of the new clandestine service of the CIA and its overseas operations. The goal was nothing less than undermining the Soviet state, freeing the captive nations of Eastern Europe, and rolling Russia’s borders back to where they had been before World War II. The chief of the new covert operations outfit, Frank Wisner, sought the FBI’s help in vetting Russian and Eastern European exiles in the United States whom he sought to train and equip as political shock troops to attack Stalin and his allies. Hoover’s men were happy to oblige, as the task enabled them to add to Hoover’s dossiers on the CIA. Their boss cast an extremely skeptical gaze on Wisner and his men, whose plans went down in the FBI files as “Project ‘X.’ ”

10.
The United States Army’s Signal Intelligence Service:
The navy had its own project aimed at Soviet communications in the Pacific. The army and navy combined their attack before the end of World War II. The American code-making and code-breaking effort became the National Security Agency in 1952.

11.
At that point, General Carter W. Clarke:
On or before Sept. 1, 1947, Clarke briefed the FBI’s liaison to army code breakers, Special Agent S. Wesley Reynolds, on the gist of the Soviet diplomatic messages. The FBI’s official historian, John F. Fox, Jr., has recorded that “Clarke asked Reynolds if the Bureau knew of any Soviet cover names that might help his team’s effort. Reynolds soon turned over a list of 200 known cover names that the FBI had acquired. Most of them had not been found in the traffic to that point.” The army gave the FBI received fragments of their decryptions. Reynolds filed them; but “the message fragments were placed in a safe and forgotten” for nine months. John J. Fox, Jr., “In the Enemy’s House: Venona and the Maturation of American Counterintelligence,” presented at the Oct. 27, 2005, Symposium on Cryptologic History, National Security Agency.

12.
“In view of loose methods”:
Hoover worried about the disclosure of secrets throughout the American intelligence community. For example, the question of who knew about the army’s payment of $150,000 a year to American communications companies in exchange for copies of foreign diplomatic cables in the Venona program vexed Hoover as well as army general A. R. Bolling, who told the FBI that “only a few people, including the President and the Secretary of Defense” knew about the deal, and advised the Bureau to hold the fact very tightly. Keay memo to Ladd, May 6, 1949, FBI/FOIA. On the opening of the FBI investigation that led to the execution of the Rosenbergs, the documentation includes Ladd to Hoover, Jan. 8, 1953, “re: Julius Rosenberg, Ethel Rosenberg, Espionage-R”; Hoover to New York field office, Aug. 18, 1949; and New York field office to headquarters, Aug. 18, 1949, all first cited in FBI historian Fox’s 2005 conference report at the NSA, “In the Enemy’s House: Venona and the Maturation of American Counterintelligence.” Hoover first wrote in May 1952 that the army and the FBI might consider reading the CIA into Venona despite its “loose methods” and “questionable personnel.” Hoover note on a memo from Belmont to Ladd, May 23, 1952, FBI/FOIA.