The Air-Raid Warden Was a Spy: And Other Tales From Home-Front America in World War II (15 page)

A favorite tale making the rounds in the capital concerned the man who had fallen into the Potomac River. His cries for help brought a passerby. Instead of hauling the man from the water, the stranger demanded to know: “What is your name and where do you live?”

“John Smith, 26 South L Street. Help!” The passerby leaped in his car and drove to 26 South L Street. He told the landlady: “I want to rent John Smith’s room. He just drowned.” “You’re too late,” the woman replied. “It was just rented by the man who pushed him in.”

Under wartime pressures, the federal government grew so speedily that nobody—including President Roosevelt—could fathom everything that was transpiring. Executive orders flew like confetti out of the White House—and the president did not comprehend many of them.

Crippled by archaic procedures, Congress was often unable to function with the speed required by wartime decisions, so it often signed checks for billions of dollars, then left it to Roosevelt to decide how the funds should be spent.

A rash of wartime “alphabet agencies” (OWI, WPB, COE, FEPC, CWIRC, WLD, FCA, among many) sprang up. They confused both the home front and the Washington government. Roosevelt had a distaste for firing people who didn’t measure up—often they were old cronies—or had failed in some manner. Instead of chopping off their heads, the president let these bureaucrats remain, then he created new alphabet agencies to get the job done.
²

A Young Reporter Is Awed

A
S THE WAR PROGRESSED,
President Roosevelt held two regular press conferences each week. One was in the morning to give afternoon newspapers first crack at his remarks or disclosures, and the other was in the afternoon for the convenience of the morning sheets.

Carlton Smith, the NBC Washington manager, like those with other media in the capital, decided that the network would have to cover these presidential press conferences. Smith, in his wisdom, decided that NBC’s correspondent would have to possess these qualifications: tall, white, neatly dressed, Protestant. Consequently, he selected a newcomer to Washington, David Brinkley, in his early twenties, whose background was in United Press bureaus in middle-sized cities in the South.

Strangely, the awed Brinkley reflected, Smith had never asked him if he was highly conversant with the complicated national and global affairs with which Roosevelt had to deal daily. Had the boss done so, Brinkley’s answer would have to be “no.”

Brinkley began a crash course of self-education. Scanning through hundreds of Washington newspapers from the past year, he gained a working knowledge of the subtleties and nuances of the White House and its foremost resident.

When the young man from Wilmington, North Carolina, walked into the Oval Office for his first press conference in mid-1942, he felt as though his knees had turned to jelly. For the first time, he saw President Roosevelt—closeup. In those days, the White House press corps was small, and the correspondents gathered in a semicircle around the presidential desk.

Brinkley was also intimidated by being in the company of famous media figures whom he had known only by reputation, such as James B. “Scotty” Reston of the New York Times, among others. A few of the reporters continued the peacetime affectation of the famous statesmen they were covering, wearing homburg hats, striped pants, and pince-nez glasses.

For fear that he would show his ignorance, Brinkley covered Roosevelt’s conferences for more than two months in total silence. But he learned. And a decade and a half later, David Brinkley would become a household name on television across home-front America—and to an extent, around the world.
³

“Doll Woman” an Enemy Agent

I
N PORTLAND, OREGON,
on the afternoon of May 10, 1942, a mailman delivered a letter to the home of Mrs. Sarah Garland (not her real name). Stamped on the envelope were the words: “Addressee unknown.” It had been returned from Buenos Aires, Argentina, and Mrs. Garland’s name was given on the return address.

She had never seen the letter before and didn’t know anyone in Buenos Aires. Puzzled, she took the letter to the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

It was a gentle letter and seemed innocent. It started in part:

I just secured a lovely Siamese Temple Dancer; it had been damaged, that is tore in the middle. But it is now repaired and I like it

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very much. I could not get a mate for this Siamese Dancer, so I am

redressing just a small plain doll into a second Siam doll.

In the FBI laboratory in Washington, cryptographers studied the letter and concluded that “Siamese Temple Dancer” meant “warship.” The seemingly insignificant talk about dolls translated into a sinister meaning:

I just secured information of a fine aircraft carrier, it had been damaged, that is torpedoed in the middle. But it is now repaired and I like it very much. They could not get a mate for this so a plain ordinary warship is being converted into a second aircraft carrier.

The FBI took note of the fact that this letter, dated May 20, had been written a few days after the aircraft carrier Saratoga left Puget Sound in the state of Washington for San Diego.

The name signed to the doll letters was Marilyn Byers (not her real name), who now received a visit from a G-man. She knew nothing about the letter and certainly hadn’t written it. Then did she have any idea who might have used her name?

Byers thought a few seconds, then her eyes blazed. “I’ll bet it’s that damned Velvalee Dickinson in New York City,” she snapped. “I bought some dolls from her and because I couldn’t pay her right away she’s been after me with some nasty letters.”

Hostile letters written to Marilyn Byers by Dickinson were compared to the letter sent to Buenos Aires. They had been produced on the same typewriter.

In New York City, FBI men began probing into Dickinson’s background and daily routine. Then they confronted her. The one hundred dollar bills she had been taking from a safe-deposit box in a bank had been left to her as part of her late husband’s estate, she explained. When the agents began to shoot holes in this story, she changed it. Her late husband had been paid $25,000 (equivalent to some $275,000 in 2002) by the Japanese naval attaché, Ichiro Yokoyama, on November 16, 1941. That date was eleven days before the Pearl Harbor attack. Why did the Japanese officer pay such a whopping amount of money? Because he wanted information on the U.S. Navy, Dickinson replied.

She insisted vehemently that her husband had been the spy, that she had had nothing to do with obtaining and providing the information. However, FBI evidence indicated that she, not her husband, had been the spy for the Japanese.

Velvalee Dickinson was indicted on espionage charges, but the federal prosecutors agreed to accept her plea of guilty to violating censorship because, it was held, the evidence was circumstantial. However, Judge Shackelford Miller verbally scalded her: “It is hard to believe that [you] do not realize that our nation is engaged in a life and death struggle. You were certainly engaged in espionage. You were fortunate that the government did not have you tried
on espionage charges which could have resulted in death or life imprisonment for you.”
⁴

Panic Erupts at Concert

S
IX MONTHS INTO THE WAR,
much of the nation was still gripped by the jitters, a hangover from the flood of wild rumors that flowed seemingly without end. At an outdoor concert in St. Louis, Vladimir Golschmann was conducting the 1812 Overture before thousands of people. In the rousing finale of the piece, two shotguns were fired into the air offstage.

Near panic erupted as hundreds of spectators scrambled for the exits, thereby attracting the St. Louis police department’s riot squad.
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Standard Oil Aids the Nazis

I
N EARLY 1942, HOME-FRONT AMERICA
was stunned by testimony given at a hearing before the Senate Committee to Investigate the National Defense Program, chaired by Missouri’s Harry Truman. Better known as the Truman Committee, the panel’s crucial task was to root out waste, extravagance, and inefficiency.

Thurman Arnold, assistant U.S. attorney general in charge of antitrust prosecutions, testified before the Truman Committee that the development of vitally needed synthetic rubber and oil production in the United States had been delayed because of German agreements with Standard Oil of New Jersey.

Arnold disclosed that Standard Oil had helped Nazi Germany in 1939 to design facilities for manufacturing synthetic aviation gasoline. At the same time, the American company was induced by Adolf Hitler’s officials to withhold essential information necessary for the building of synthetic oil and rubber plants in the United States.

A battery of high-powered lawyers vigorously defended Standard Oil, but documents from the firm’s files subpoenaed by the Truman Committee indicated otherwise.

In a report, the Truman Committee declared: “The conclusion remains that whether or not Standard Oil so wished, it put itself in the position of furnishing information to the German company, through which it was available to the German government, while withholding the same information from the United States.”

Back in 1930, the investigators discovered, Standard Oil of New Jersey and the huge German conglomerate I.G. Farbenindustrie organized a chemical company in the United States. Called Jasco, Inc., its function was to develop and exploit new processes for making chemical products out of natural and refined gases.

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Although the joint enterprise was ostensibly a partnership, it was actually under tight German control. Jasco built a large plant near Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and lengthy experiments resulted in a new process of making acetylene, a component of acetyl acid used in making plastics, rayon, film, paints, and pharmaceuticals.

Under German orders, the experimentation at Baton Rouge was halted in 1935 at a time Adolf Hitler announced to the world that he was rearming Germany. All future experiments were carried out in the Third Reich, as Hitler called his empire after he had become dictator two years earlier.

On September 6, 1939, five days after Hitler sent his legions plunging into neighboring Poland to ignite what would be called World War II, the Germans ordered Standard Oil to dismantle the plant at Baton Rouge.

In 1942, three years after the Louisiana facility was demolished, Assistant Attorney General Thurman Arnold told the Senate Patents Committee in Washington that the Nazi government “was undoubtedly anxious to facilitate the destruction of any plant in the United States that might be useful if America were to go to war against Germany.”
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A Guidebook for Nazi Spies

L
ONG AFTER AMERICA
went to war, Nazi espionage operations in the United States continued to function masked as legitimate business concerns. One of these was Chemnyco, Inc., located in New York City. The company was affiliated with I.G. Farbenindustrie of Germany and served as a center for the collection of detailed information about American war production.

In late May 1942, agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation raided Chemnyco headquarters and hauled off a vast collection of espionage materials, including a copy of the Index of American Industry.

It was an exhaustive document of many pages. A summary was given of the nature of each American business listed. In many instances, it named and classified each worker politically and by race and religion, what he or she had done in the past, and how he or she might be used by Nazi saboteurs or spies in the future.

In many respects, the FBI discovered, more detailed information on a business firm could be found in the Index of American Industry than was available anywhere else in the United States.
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They Came to Blow Up America

J
UST PAST EIGHT O’CLOCK
on the dark night of June 12, 1942, the U-boat Innsbruck surfaced off Long Island, one hundred and five miles east of New
York City. Propelled by its nearly silent electric motors, the submarine edged closer to the beach. On board and preparing to be paddled ashore were four men wearing the uniforms of German marines.

Five nights later, a thousand miles to the south, a similar scenario was unfolding. U-boat 201 made landfall on a dark stretch of shore off Ponte Vedra Beach, twenty-five miles south of Jacksonville, Florida. Silently taken onto the sandy beach were four men in German marine garb.

These eight intruders were members of Operation Pastorius, one of the boldest and largest single sabotage missions ever undertaken. All of the saboteurs were German-born but had lived in the United States for extended periods before returning to the Third Reich. They were to receive hefty monthly salaries and promised high-paying jobs in Germany—or the United States— after Adolf Hitler had won the war.