The largest and the most eccentric intelligence operation ever run out of the National Press Building had no name, didn't officially exist, and is little more than a footnote in histories of American intelligence. From 1941 to 1945 it operated in complete secrecy and in the open. Camouflaged by a newspaper column, it reported directly to President Franklin Roosevelt in the White House and deployed agents across the United States and to Mexico, the Caribbean, and the Soviet Union. Its agents included journalists, businessmen, wealthy socialites, Somerset Maugham's gay lover, and Hitler's piano player.
Headquartered in room 1210 of the National Press Building, this espionage agency was modeled on the legendary Bureau of Current Political Intelligence (CPI), a super-secret agency buried deep inside the State Department. According to an account of the CPI from the 1930s, “if you want to find out what is in Stalin's mind or are curious concerning the substance of the next Papal Encyclical, [the CPI] will find out for you. If you need a man to discover the source of the latest shipment of machine-guns to a Central American bandit, or the reason why a permit has been denied to a Central Asiatic ‘scientific expedition,’ it will serve you very well, even though the trail of evidence leads straight to Whitehall, Wall Street or the Gaimusho at Tokyo.”1
The CPI's head, Dennis Tyler, was suave, debonair, unflappable, and, like the CPI, entirely fictional. Both were products of the imagination of a writer named John Franklin Carter, who signed some of his books “Diplomat.” As the New York Times noted in an October 1932 review of Diplomat's first novel, Murder in the Embassy, the author displayed “a close knowledge of the diplomatic service and a sense of humor that is refreshing in the serious business of concocting successful mystery tales.”2
Carter pulled off a remarkable feat: he created and led a real intelligence service that was modeled on the fictional CPI. He got his start when he wrote a nonfiction book profiling the leading contenders in the 1932 presidential election. The book didn't shy from describing Franklin Delano Roosevelt's physical disabilities, labeling him “the liveliest cripple in American politics.”3 Like many Americans, Carter misjudged FDR, predicting that as president, “when cornered he will play dead dog” because “he is not a fighter.” Reflecting the frustration of reporters who found it impossible to goad the candidate into taking positions on controversial topics, Carter wrote that Roosevelt “is as hard to pin down as a live eel on a sheet of oilcloth.” Despite these reservations, he concluded that “we could do far worse than elect as President a man who has been brought up to believe that privileges confer obligations and that life is not so serious that one can afford not to act like a gentleman.”
Roosevelt was enough of a gentleman that he wasn't offended by the young author's lack of deference, and the two became friends. That friendship led, almost a decade later, to a secret collaboration between Roosevelt and Carter. Together, FDR and Carter created a real intelligence operation based on Diplomat's fantasy of an off-the-books, secret intelligence operation led by a cultured wisecracker who battled the forces of evil between cocktails.
While the organization Carter created didn't approach the omniscience of the imaginary CPI, it did have the ear of the president, who treated Carter's reports as seriously as those produced by formal intelligence agencies. Carter's network operated in total secrecy, a feat that is noteworthy because some of the world's most inquisitive minds walked past its headquarters in the Press Building every day. Carter and his operatives didn't hide behind locked doors; they often climbed a short flight of stairs to swap stories and lies with reporters at the Press Club bar. One of Carter's men had the habit of over-patronizing the club's Tap Room and sleeping off the consequences on a nearby sofa. Throughout his clandestine career Carter wrote newspaper columns, spoke on the radio, and sought public attention.4
When Carter and Roosevelt first met in the summer of 1932, neither the writer nor the candidate—an avid reader of mysteries and detective novels—could have devoted much attention to transforming the imaginary CPI into a real intelligence agency. Roosevelt had an election to win, and if successful he would have to steady the nerves of a nation teetering on the precipice of ruin, then try to make good on his promises to restore prosperity.
Carter had a very different priority: earning a living. The sober, humorless men who ran the State Department had solved the mystery of the identity of Diplomat and his alter ego Jay Franklin, the pseudonym Carter used for magazine articles. They gave Carter a choice: either stop writing—not even publish poetry—or clean out his desk in the State, War, and Navy Building. He picked prose over public service. Broke, eager for adventure, and anxious to avoid the constraints of conventional employment, the former diplomat sailed to Europe hoping to make his mark as an international freelance correspondent.5
In Budapest, Carter stayed with an old friend, Nick Roosevelt, a former New York Times reporter and diplomat, who was roughly halfway between Teddy and Franklin Roosevelt in the sprawling Roosevelt family tree. Roosevelt suggested that Carter travel to Germany and look up Ernst Hanfstaengl, an old acquaintance of the Roosevelt family who was serving as the gatekeeper for foreign journalists seeking access to Nazi leaders.6 President-elect Roosevelt had also asked Carter to deliver a message to Hanfstaengl: If Hitler became too volatile “think of your piano-playing and try and use the soft pedal.”7
By the time Carter left Germany a few weeks later, he and Hanfstaengl had formed a friendship that changed the course of both men's lives and years later, under Roosevelt's direction, formed the basis for a madcap intelligence operation.
Ernst Franz Sedgwick Hanfstaengl, Adolf Hitler, and others, 1933.
Credit: Sueddeutsche Zeitung Photo / Alamy Stock Photo
Carter and Roosevelt, like all of Hanfstaengl's friends, called him “Putzi,” which roughly translates as “little tyke,” a name he'd acquired as an infant and hadn't managed to shed even as he grew into a towering man with a head too large to fit in a standard-issue German army helmet. Hanfstaengl was raised in Germany in a bicultural home, the son of a Bavarian aristocrat who had married the daughter of a prominent New England family.
Hanfstaengl traveled to Boston and started classes at Harvard in 1905. His outgoing character, musical talents, and family connections ensured that he was one of the most prominent young men on campus. The aristocratic German barely satisfied the college's academic requirements, but he excelled in the social sphere, befriending scions of the Astor and Roosevelt clans, and landing invitations to White House parties, where he played the piano for Theodore Roosevelt. After graduating, Hanfstaengl managed the family's art business in New York and spent evenings in front of a Steinway at the city's Harvard Club, where he met Franklin Roosevelt.
Putzi's sweet life soured in 1914. Regardless of their social connections or bonhomie, German patriots were less than welcome in wartime America. The US government seized the Hanfstaengl family's art as alien property and auctioned it for pennies on the dollar. Decades after the war, government investigators uncovered evidence that Hanfstaengl had provided the dynamite to saboteurs who blew up an arsenal on Black Tom Island in New York Harbor in July 1916, igniting more than a million pounds of ammunition. The explosion, the equivalent of a 5.5 magnitude earthquake, caused $20 million in damage (equivalent to about $500 million in 2018) and denied valuable materiel to the British.8
Giving up on life in America, Hanfstaengl moved back to Germany in 1921. The next year, at the request of a Harvard alumnus who was studying the German political scene for the State Department, Hanfstaengl attended a speech by an obscure rabble-rouser. Recognizing Adolf Hitler's potential to exploit Germany's chaotic political and economic situation, he charmed his way into the Nazi inner circle, becoming the first wealthy aristocrat to embrace Hitler and Nazism.
Hanfstaengl was just a few steps behind Hitler at the Bürgerbräukeller beer hall on the night of November 8, 1923, pushing tables over, rushing to seize the stage and, with it, control of the government from the Bavarian prime minister. Putzi remembered the scene in a memoir: “Hitler clambered on a chair and fired a round at the ceiling. Hitler then told the audience: ‘The national revolution has broken out! The hall is filled with 600 armed men. No one is allowed to leave. The Bavarian government and the government at Berlin are hereby deposed. A new government will be formed at once. The barracks of the Reichswehr and the police barracks are occupied. Both have rallied to the swastika!’”9
The poorly planned putsch was quickly suppressed. Hanfstaengl fled to Switzerland, while Hitler sought refuge in Putzi's home in the Bavarian Alps. When police arrived at the door, Hanfstaengl's American-born wife, Helene, persuaded her despondent houseguest to drop his revolver, along with his intention to commit suicide. The diminutive Hitler must have looked like a child playing dress-up when he met the authorities wearing Hanfstaengl's pajamas.
Following the trial that Robert S. Allen had covered, Hitler was sentenced to five years of confinement but served only nine months. After Hitler's release, Hanfstaengl became even closer to the Nazi leader, banging out Wagner operas on a piano for hours as the Führer worked himself into a frenzy and then flung himself onto stages at political rallies. Hanfstaengl's contributions to the Nazi cause included suggesting the Sieg Heil salutation and accompanying straight-arm salute, both inspired by his experiences as a cheerleader for the Harvard football team. Ironically, Hanfstaengl couldn't bring himself to salute Hitler.
Later dismissed as a court jester, Hanfstaengl did more to bring the Nazis to power than entertain its leader. He introduced the uncultured politician to members of the aristocracy, whose support was critical to his rise to power, financed a Nazi newspaper at a time when the party couldn't afford it, and, after the fascists gained control, served as the party's liaison to the foreign press.
When Hanfstaengl and Carter exchanged life stories they realized that Carter's parents had decades earlier been friends with Hanfstaengl's mother, the descendent of a famous Civil War general, John Sedgwick. Hanfstaengl arranged for Carter to observe Hitler delivering a speech and to interview the second-most powerful man in Nazi Germany, Herman Goering. Carter's friendship with Hanfstaengl did not make him sympathetic to the Nazi cause, but it did form the foundation for one of the oddest intelligence operations of World War II, a three-way partnership bringing together the German American aristocrat, Carter, and President Roosevelt.10
John Franklin Carter in 1936.
Credit: Farm Security Administration—Office of War Information Photograph Collection (Library of Congress)
Soon after Carter returned to the United States, just a few weeks before the election, FDR invited him for lunch at his Hyde Park, New York, estate. The wheelchair-bound Roosevelt, who relied on friends and relatives to travel and serve as his eyes and ears, must have appreciated Carter's impressions of Germany and his account of Putzi's rise to prominence in the Nazi hierarchy. FDR flattered the former diplomat by soliciting his ideas about reorganizing the State Department.11
Carter became a New Dealer, landing a job in 1934 as secretary of agriculture Henry Wallace's speechwriter and advisor. He also continued writing articles and books under various pseudonyms, including accounts of the activities of Dennis Tyler and the Bureau of Current Political Intelligence.
After two years Carter left Wallace's staff, rented an office on the twelfth floor of the National Press Building, and began a career as a journalist. His pro-Roosevelt syndicated column, We, the People, ran in hundreds of newspapers under the Jay Franklin byline, often alongside the Washington Merry-Go-Round column by Drew Pearson and Robert S. Allen, Eleanor Roosevelt's My Day column and Walter Winchell's On Broadway.
Carter's writings were more than partisan boosterism. He used access to editorial pages to advance agendas that he was pursuing behind closed doors. When he provided glimpses of Washington power struggles and inside dope on administration polices, the revelations were designed to affect the outcomes of the conflicts and shape policies. Although he had used the modest pseudonym “The Unofficial Observer” for The New Dealers, a book published in 1934 that billed itself as providing a Who's Who of the New Deal, Carter was not content with the role of observer. Nose pressed to the glass as some of the most momentous decisions of the era were made, he desperately wanted to be in the room making history, not just writing about it.
An incident in October 1939 illustrates Carter's close ties to the Roosevelt White House. It also demonstrates that although his column claimed to represent “the people,” when he was forced to choose between informing readers and supporting the president, “the people” always came second. Carter had provided the White House an advance copy of a column describing a split within the Catholic Church between supporters of Father Charles Coughlin and Cardinal George Mundelein. Coughlin was using a popular radio program to preach anti-Semitism, race hatred, and disdain for FDR and the New Deal, while Mundelein, a friend and supporter of the president, was trying to steer Catholics into the mainstream of American society. If American Catholics failed to support Mundelein, Carter warned, Coughlin “may become either a Savonarola or a Martin Luther.”12
Afraid that it would ignite a backlash against liberal church leaders, FDR asked Carter to kill the column. Carter responded immediately, scrambling to contact newspapers across the country. A note typed by one of FDR's personal secretaries, Grace Tully, and placed in the president's confidential files reported that the column had been “too dangerous” for Francis Spellman, a Roosevelt ally who had recently been appointed Archbishop of New York, and that it “was, therefore, ‘pulled’ from all papers except the ‘Washington Star,’” which had already printed it. Tully's note added that FDR felt Carter's column “tells a desperate truth about the Church, Coughlin, and liberalism.”13
By that time, Carter had devoted seven years to tireless promotion of the New Deal, mining his personal relationships with FDR and just about every political player of any consequence in Washington for insights and anecdotes that filled his books, radio broadcasts, and newspaper columns. While he may have convinced some of his readers, he had not convinced himself. The New Deal, Carter concluded, was a failure.
More important, Carter understood sooner than most of his peers that domestic policies were becoming irrelevant. The future, he realized, wouldn't be pounded out on government-issue typewriters but in dive bombers and tanks; America's fate would be shaped on European and Asian battlefields, not at Georgetown dinner parties. A president hobbled by Congress and the courts and harassed by powerful corporations couldn't meet the new challenges.
“The bitter time is at hand when we must speak and face the truth,” Carter wrote in a book published in January 1940. “What we call democracy is not working to the general satisfaction of the American people. What we call capitalism is not succeeding in distributing sufficient goods and services to more than a third of our nation. What we call individualism is facing the critical competition of other social philosophies which rest on collective authority. We face the necessity of armed defense East and West, and the difficult problems of reform and reorganization at home, and we are hampered by a political system which puts a premium on evasion and delay.”14
Carter argued in favor of strengthened authority for the president and told Americans that their prosperity and freedom required them to cast aside a defining characteristic of American democracy dating back to George Washington by electing FDR to a third term. He didn't inform his readers that he had been working for months out of the public eye to build support in the Democratic Party for a movement to nominate Roosevelt for an unprecedented third term.
As the calendar turned from 1939 to 1940, danger and deceit weren't confined to the pages of Diplomat's mystery novels. Nazi officers were reveling in Parisian nightclubs, the Luftwaffe was pounding London into a smoldering ruin in preparation for invasion, and FDR was simultaneously promising to keep America out of the war and desperately trying to equip the military with the men and weapons needed to win it.
Roosevelt was trying to steer the country through these crosswinds with one hand tied behind his back by an alliance of right- and left-wing isolationists, and with his vision obscured by an almost complete absence of foreign intelligence. At a time when Churchill, Stalin, Japanese leaders, and, to a lesser extent, Hitler could rely on large, sophisticated intelligence agencies with extensive networks of agents and skilled analysts, the American president's capacity for obtaining and assessing intelligence from abroad hadn't advanced much beyond Thomas Jefferson's. Like Jefferson, FDR relied on volunteers to travel abroad and report impressions, gossip, and undigested bits of news.
Carter summed up the situation in February 1941 when he told assistant secretary of state Sumner Welles that American intelligence was “pretty well loused up and floundering around.”15 The solution, the newspaper columnist said, was “a small and informal intelligence unit operating out of the White House without titles, without any bullshit.” And he knew just the man to head it: himself. The assignment, Carter believed, would be a just reward for the hard work he'd done behind the scenes to help secure the president's unprecedented nomination for a third term.
Although his ability to provide the president the secret information and sophisticated analyses needed to support critical decisions was debatable, Carter's diagnosis of American intelligence weaknesses was accurate. Europe and Asia were at war, it was clear that the United States would be compelled to join the fighting, and the men in charge of the nation's meager intelligence resources were spending more energy pursuing turf battles than collecting and analyzing intelligence for the president. Carter didn't know it, but there was a single bright spot in the American intelligence firmament: a tiny, underfunded Army team had been startlingly successful in breaking Japanese codes, thereby providing real-time insights into Japanese military and diplomatic actions and intentions.
Lacking military or law-enforcement experience, the conventional gateways to running an intelligence organization, and having built a career from publicizing rather than protecting confidential information, Carter was an unlikely candidate to play the part of FDR's Francis Walsingham, Queen Elizabeth I's swashbuckling spymaster. With characteristic immodesty, Carter presented the traits that appeared to disqualify him as assets. Professionals in formal intelligence agencies were not and could not get the job done, he said. The president, Carter suggested, needed a nimble organization staffed by outsiders who were fast on their feet and unencumbered by legal niceties or a bureaucratic mentality. His work as a columnist was the perfect cover, providing opportunities to frequent the White House without attracting attention and a license to speak with almost anyone about almost anything.
Welles knew Carter's idea would captivate Roosevelt, who had long been fascinated by intrigue, plots, and conspiracies. The president was convinced that espionage and intelligence were too important—and far too much fun—to be left to professionals.
During World War I, while serving as assistant secretary of the Navy, Roosevelt had tried to organize a Naval Reserve Force consisting of private yachts that would travel the seven seas gathering intelligence. He was a voracious consumer of spy and detective novels, and he liked to dabble at code making and breaking. Roosevelt even took the time from his hectic White House schedule to dictate the plot for a detective story and allowed a friend to commission six prominent authors to write chapters based on the plot. They were serialized in a magazine and collected into a book, The President's Mystery.16
Roosevelt approached espionage as a game, and like all games he believed it was best played with friends. FDR's closest friends, the four men with whom he had escaped for a bachelor's cruise on the yacht Nourmahal in 1931 just after a failed assassination attempt, had since 1927 run a secret club called “The Room” that met in a Manhattan townhouse fitted out with globes, maps, and comfortable chairs. The Room could be dismissed as men acting like boys, except that its wealthy, aristocratic members had ready access to prominent politicians, tycoons, explorers, and real intelligence operatives. The Room was run by FDR's friend Vincent Astor, who had inherited fantastic wealth and an international business empire when his father, John Jacob Astor IV, went down with the Titanic. Astor and FDR shared a love of the sea and a passion for intrigue.17
Carter was banking on Roosevelt's appetite for adventure on the afternoon of February 13, 1941, as he walked the four blocks from his office in the National Press Building to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Carter entered the White House a successful novelist, columnist, and political operative. He emerged from a meeting with FDR with an additional occupation: leader and, for the time being, sole member of a new intelligence operation that would work exclusively for the president under the strictest secrecy.18
Carter had in essence become Dennis Tyler, the “diplomatic detective,” and the president had blessed his plan to create a real version of the fictional Bureau of Current Political Intelligence. Carter and Roosevelt were well aware of the tradition, dating back to Christopher Marlowe and more recently practiced by Somerset Maugham (a visitor to the Room), of secret agents’ writing novels that titillated the public with fictional and embroidered versions of the covert lives they had previously sworn to keep secret. As they met in the White House, the president and the creator of the fictional Dennis Tyler must have relished the irony: Carter was the only person in history to reverse the sequence, first creating an imaginary master spy, along with a fictional intelligence agency, and then, with the help of the president of the United States, turning himself into a facsimile of that character and establishing a real organization modeled on the fictional entity.
FDR gave Carter's plan the green light on the condition that it be kept secret and with the understanding that if any hint of Carter's covert activities leaked to the public, the White House would deny any connection to him. The operation was off the books and lacked an organizational structure or official budget—even a name.
The president financed Carter's work from a slush fund Congress had provided to deal with unspecified “emergencies.” Money for Carter's operation, starting at $64,000 for the remainder of 1941 and growing to $120,000 for 1943 (equivalent to about $2 million in 2016), was laundered by the State Department. Assistant secretary of state Adolph Berle signed the checks, but Carter did not inform Berle about most of his activities. Berle took a dim view of those he learned about and quietly tried to undermine the amateur spy.19
Carter's first report to FDR, dated March 1, 1941—“Raw Material Situation in Belgium, as reported by Antwerp factory manufacturing electrical equipment for the Occupying Authorities”—consisted of three pages of lists of materials, from benzene to zinc, and notations about whether they were readily available, scarce, or unobtainable in the German-occupied country. Like hundreds of memos Carter sent to the president over the next four years, it was typed on stationery under the letterhead: JOHN FRANKLIN CARTER, “We, the People,” 1210 National Press Building, Washington, D.C.
The president replied in writing, instructing Carter to show his information to “the Army, Navy and State Department—and also to the British Embassy.”20 FDR's many notes to Carter, always terse and sometimes humorous, were typed on White House stationery by one of his personal secretaries, Grace Tully. They were addressed to “Jack Carter” and closed with the typed initials “F.D.R.”
The Belgian economic intelligence report was the first of a deluge of similar accounts Carter sent FDR based on interviews he and his agents conducted with a random assortment of individuals such as the chief dental officer of the Iraq Petroleum Company, who had fresh knowledge of situation on the ground. The descriptions of economic, political, and social conditions in Germany, Nazi-occupied Europe, Asia, and Latin America lacked context, and little effort was made to distinguish fact from rumor.
A March 8, 1941, memo from Carter on “Nazi Activities in the Union of South Africa” shows one reason why FDR looked forward to the novelist's reports while those from government bureaucrats gathered Oval Office dust. Carter told FDR that Nazi supporters in South Africa “number a quarter of a million of all sexes, shapes, ages and sizes,” and that soldiers on their way to England “are set upon and beaten up in dark alleys, they are spat at by foul-breathed women…”21 It is a safe bet that Roosevelt didn't receive any other reports that day with images as evocative as “foul-breathed women” spitting on soldiers.
In April, Carter forwarded to FDR a report written in confidence by a reporter for Time and Life magazines that painted an alarming, and accurate, picture of Japanese infiltration, subversion, and espionage in the Philippines. The Japanese, FDR was informed, had deployed agents under a variety of covers, especially as the owners of photography studios, to every corner of the archipelago, had blanketed the country with propaganda, and corrupted members of parliament, all in preparation for invasion and occupation.
To cope with an expanding covert workload, Carter decided that he needed a second-in-command. He had three criteria: The candidate must be acceptable to the president, have social standing and/or wealth, and be on friendly terms with the Brits. The last qualification stemmed from Carter's understanding that because of the centuries of experience and vast global reach of British intelligence, an upstart American intelligence operation couldn't hope to succeed without at least tacit support from London. Carter was in bad odor with the UK Foreign Office because at the State Department he'd been in charge of the British Empire Desk, which meant that his job often involved saying no to requests from his majesty's servants.22
Carter decided that Henry Field, whom he had met while canvassing for FDR's third term, fit the bill. Field was a great nephew and the financial beneficiary of the wealthy Chicago merchant Marshall Field, had grown up in England, had been educated at Eton and Oxford, and was as anglophilic as an American can be. He was also the black sheep of the Field family. Just before Carter met him in 1940, Field's uncle, who ran the Field Museum, had been forced to recall a book Henry had written about folklore in western Asia after it was discovered he'd plagiarized much of it. It wasn't an isolated incident: throughout his career Henry Field had a slippery relationship with the truth and a penchant for self-aggrandizement.23
Field had decided to redeem himself by joining the Navy. He was sitting in a hotel room in Washington preparing for an appointment to finalize paperwork to join the Office of Naval Intelligence when Carter knocked on the door and informed Field that he could not accept the commission because he'd been assigned to other duties “on higher authority.” Field balked, saying he was determined to join the Navy. Carter, with typical overstatement replied, “I don't think you quite understand. The President has ordered you to work for him. I am head of a small team working for the White House. You are now part of this team.”24
FDR kept Carter and his agents immensely busy. In the months before Pearl Harbor they spent as least as much time and energy on domestic as on foreign intelligence—though a great deal of their work stretched the boundaries of the concept of intelligence. Today it would be called “opposition research,” and it wouldn't be legal to finance it with funds entrusted to the president for “emergencies.”
Roosevelt sought Carter's assistance in dealing with a crisis in April 1941. He needed ammunition to attack a potent political opponent: the most admired man in America, Charles Lindbergh. “Lucky Lindy,” at the time a colonel in the Army Air Corps reserve, had been the first man to fly solo across the Atlantic, a feat that made him one of the original American celluloid celebrities. He had parlayed fame into access to political and business leaders around the world, including Nazi military leaders who boasted to Lindbergh about their progress in creating the world's largest, most powerful air force. The American aviation hero became convinced that the neither the United States nor England could win a war against Germany. This view meshed with his anti-Semitism, as well as his complete confidence in the cultural and moral superiority of Northern Europeans.
Americans looked up to Lindbergh not for his ideas, which until 1941 most had never heard, but for his exploits and persona. When he began to speak out against intervention, halls were packed and radio audiences swelled with people eager to see and hear the man who had captured the world's imagination. Lindbergh proclaimed German victory inevitable and American intervention folly, legitimizing a broad popular movement to keep America out of a war that Roosevelt had privately determined the nation must enter and win. Roosevelt desperately wanted to knock the wind from Lindbergh's sails.
FDR's strategy for neutralizing Lindbergh was typically indirect. He asked Carter to prepare a detailed study of the “Copperheads,” a term of derision that had been applied during the Civil War to Southern sympathizers and defeatists in the North. Carter gave Roosevelt a fifty-five-page report on April 22 and was in the Oval Office three days later for a typically raucous White House press conference. FDR began by railing against reporters who for a year and a half had been calling the aggressive patrols by US Navy ships in Atlantic and Pacific shipping lanes “convoys.” This was like calling a cow a horse, the president said, repeating the simile several times and congratulating himself on his wit. He then dropped a bombshell, revealing that he intended to expand the patrols, which many Americans believed were provocations intended to drag the country into war. US Navy ships would travel “as far on the waters of the seven seas as may be necessary for the defense of the American hemisphere,” Roosevelt said. He refused to say what they would do if and when they encountered the German navy.25
Near the end of the press conference, Constantine Brown, a reporter for the Washington Star, asked, seemingly out of the blue, “How is it that the Army, which needs now distinguished fliers, etc., has not asked Colonel Lindbergh to rejoin?”26
Thanks to Carter's report, FDR was armed with a response to the discreetly planted question. The president launched into a Civil War history lesson, noting that while there were “liberty-loving people on both sides” of the conflict, the Union and the Confederacy also had to deal with defeatists. “The Confederacy and the North let certain people go. In other words, in both armies there were—what shall I call them?—there were Vallandighams.” It must have been the first time a president had uttered the name Vallandigham since 1863, when the Copperhead had been court-martialed and exiled from Washington to Richmond, the Confederate capital. Driving the point home, FDR continued, “Well, Vallandigham, as you know, was an appeaser. He wanted to make peace from 1863 on because the North ‘couldn't win.’” The president made it clear that he considered Lindbergh a contemporary version of a Vallandigham Copperhead.27
An Associated Press story, which ran on April 25 in the New York Times and other newspapers across the country, reported, “Asserting that it was dumb to consider a Nazi victory inevitable, President Roosevelt classed Colonel Lindbergh today with appeasers who urged peace in the Revolutionary and Civil Wars on the ground that those wars could not be won.”28 The story also noted that just a few days before Lindbergh had said in a speech that the “United States cannot win this war for England, regardless of how much assistance we extend.”
It seemed at first that Roosevelt had overplayed his hand. Newspaper columns portrayed his attack on Lindbergh's patriotism as unfair. If the aviator had remained silent, he could have emerged from the incident stronger. But FDR had astutely judged his adversary.
Lindbergh took the bait. Three days after newspapers reported FDR's comparison of Lindbergh to Vallandigham, the aviator released a public letter resigning his military commission, citing the president's remarks about “my loyalty to my country, my character, and my motives.”29 Coming as Americans were being drafted under the recently enacted Selective Service Act, Lindbergh's resignation was viewed by the public as proof that Roosevelt's accusations were on target—as if Lindbergh was resigning to avoid putting himself in harm's way. One of the president's fiercest and most credible critics was discredited. Neither Lindbergh nor his reputation ever recovered.30
As Carter expanded his network and began producing more, and more interesting, reports, Roosevelt started forwarding them to other players in similar informal intelligence networks he had created or encouraged. For example, on May 19, 1941, FDR sent Nelson Rockefeller copies of two of Carter's memorandums about Nazi activities in South America. Rockefeller, head of the blandly named “Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs,” was leading a covert effort to push the Nazis out of South America. He was also providing financial and logistical support to British intelligence operatives who were waging a covert war in the United States to counter German interests. FDR's cover letter was marked “Private” and instructed Rockefeller, “Please show this to nobody. You might speak with me about this at your convenience.”31
About this time Carter added his voice to the chorus of those predicting a German invasion of the Soviet Union. It would come, he stated in a May 16 report to FDR, “about June 1.”32 Although accurate, the intelligence wasn't startling: Drew Pearson and Robert Allen had published a similar prediction a month earlier, and Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin had received numerous secret reports pointing to a June attack. Stalin disregarded over a hundred specific, accurate warnings. When the NKVD forwarded from its spy in Tokyo a precise description of the planned invasion Stalin denounced the report as lies from a “shit who has set himself up with some small factories and brothels in Japan.”33
In June FDR passed a report to Carter indicating that the situation in Martinique, a French colony in the Caribbean, was deteriorating. Pro-US mayors had been imprisoned by the Vichy government and the island had stockpiled a two-year food supply that would allow it to survive an embargo or siege. The president asked Carter to send one of his agents to assess the potential for the Caribbean island to become a base for hostile military operations against the United States.
Carter jumped on the task, informing Roosevelt that he had selected a Chicago businessman named Curtis Munson to travel to Martinique. Munson, Carter reported, was an old friend of undersecretary of commerce and FDR confidant Wayne Taylor, had visited Martinique in the past, and had military experience, having served as an aviator in the French Army during World War I. “He is a competent, level-headed business man, untainted by politics and without a record which could embarrass him,” Carter wrote.34
Carter arranged for Munson to travel to Martinique as a representative of the Department of Agriculture to compile a report on the food security situation. The French government held up Munson's visa for two months. In the interim, Carter sent FDR reports about Martinique from European Jewish refugees, including one from the anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss, who, fleeing the Nazis, had stopped there en route to Brazil. Levi-Strauss told one of Carter's agents that the “colored people of Martinique have been persuaded that if the US takes over the island, instead of having complete equality with the whites as they do under the French, they will revert to the position of the negro in the American south.”35
Roosevelt held a typical press conference on August 26, 1941, treating the assembled reporters to an amusing story—the punchline involved Mongolian ponies—and criticizing unnamed columnists for spreading “falsehoods” that originated with “certain forces [seeking] to sabotage the program of aid to opponents of Hitlerism.”36 As the reporters were filtering out of the room, Roosevelt casually asked Carter to stay behind. Munson, who had slipped into the White House by the side door and wasn't listed on the appointment calendar, joined Carter and delivered a verbal report on the political, economic, and military situation in Martinique. He had determined that fears about Martinique's military preparations were overblown.
While Munson was investigating Martinique, Roosevelt was looking north, to Iceland, where the British feared their small garrison was in danger of being overwhelmed by the Germans. A Nazi naval base could have imperiled the convoys that were keeping Britain alive. The New York Times had reported on July 4, 1941, that Montana senator Burton Wheeler, the most ardent isolationist in Congress, said American troops were preparing to take over Iceland. Wheeler was trying to mobilize public opinion to head off military action; he was also putting American troops and national security at risk by tipping off the Germans. The leak alarmed FDR, prompting him to cut short a trip to Hyde Park for urgent meetings with Navy and State Department officials. Three days later, the White House announced that US Marines had landed in Iceland.37
White House spokesman Stephen Early went out of his way to express support for British newspaper reports slamming Wheeler for providing advance warning that the Germans could have exploited to disrupt the operation. FDR asked Carter to find out how Wheeler had learned of the secret plans.38
Carter had been digging up dirt on Wheeler for months and sending it to Roosevelt, who passed it on to political operatives working to engineer Wheeler's defeat in the upcoming elections. Carter learned from an informant he'd recruited on Wheeler's staff that the senator had been tipped off about the Iceland expedition from Boston mothers who wrote Wheeler protesting that their sons were being loaded on ships along with equipment for a Polar expedition.
Carter often found that to obtain information Roosevelt had requested, he needed cooperation from government agencies, especially the FBI. This was problematic because he lacked any official standing. Some government officials, especially law enforcement and intelligence professionals, thought he was a crank, and seized on his informal status to justify ignoring Carter. Carter and his operation exemplified characteristics FBI director J. Edgar Hoover detested. A fanatic about discipline and order—he'd turned the FBI into a world-class law-enforcement agency in part by creating one of the world's most efficient filing systems—Hoover despised loose cannons and dilettantes. Even worse for Carter, the FBI director hated criticism. He rarely forgot or forgave a slight, real or imagined, public or private. Carter had a record of insulting the FBI director in ways both real and public.
That record was on Hoover's mind on September 5, 1941, when Carter telephoned his office saying he had just met with the president, who had asked him to bring Munson to meet with the director. To prepare for the meeting, Hoover's staff pulled the columnist's file. The first item was a January 7, 1937, New York Post story under the Jay Franklin byline poking fun at the FBI in general and Hoover in particular. Hoover had instilled a vigilance regarding criticism in his subordinates; he must have been pleased to note that without any prompting from Washington, the day after the article was published Special Agent R. C. Hendon had written and placed in the file a three-page memorandum summarizing Carter's professional career. It concluded that an informant “claimed [Jay] Franklin had an international bias with at least liberal if not radical tendencies.”39
More recent items in Carter's file included a We, the People column from March 1941 accusing Hoover of attempting to create an American Gestapo and predicting that as a result of congressional investigations into illegal arrests and wiretapping “our No. 1 G-man may become the first American political casualty of World War 2.” Carter concluded that Americans “don't want a gang of G-men to go around beating us up and destroying our liberties in the name of high-pressure patriotism.”40
The columns alone would have been more than enough to turn Hoover against Carter. In addition, Hoover felt that Carter's work for Roosevelt was an incursion into territory that should be reserved for the FBI. If these infractions weren't enough, the improvisational, and in many cases incompetent, style in which Carter ran his operation infuriated Hoover.
Given the trust the president had placed in Carter, Hoover couldn't insult him or refuse to cooperate—at least not until he'd collected some dirt on the upstart. A memo Hoover dictated for the FBI's files immediately after his first meeting with Carter reflected his caution. It noted that Carter and Munson had visited to inform him that Munson was traveling to New York at Roosevelt's request to study the refugee situation. Hoover added that he had informed B. Edwin Sackett, the special agent in charge of the bureau's New York Office, “to be very courteous to Mr. Munson in view of his influential backing.”41 The memo stated that “J. Franklin Carter, who writes under the name of Jay Franklin, has always viewed the FBI as a fascist organization and has stated that we are opposed to liberal thought; therefore, I instructed Mr. Sackett to see that Mr. Munson received as good an impression of the Bureau and its attitude as possible.”
Hoover's distaste was of little importance to Carter as long as he had Roosevelt's confidence. The president seemed to enjoy Carter's company and appreciate the boyish enthusiasm the newsman and novelist brought to serious matters. Regardless of his workload, he always found time to talk with Carter, to read and comment on his reports, and to give him oddball assignments that straight-laced military leaders and cabinet officials would have been reluctant to undertake.
Carter didn't wait for Roosevelt to assign him tasks. He sent a never-ending flow of memos to the president consisting largely of voluminous, useless, or absurd intelligence reports, harebrained schemes, and gossip, leavened by occasional nuggets of genuine insight or valuable intelligence. These often included half-baked suggestions for or criticisms of government officials. FDR usually had Tully pass Carter's reports to the head of the relevant government body with a terse note asking them to look into a matter or read one of Carter's memos and return it to the White House. These notes made it clear that although Carter had no official status he enjoyed the president's trust, a fact that led senior government officials to return his calls, meet with him, and at least pretend to collaborate with him.
While most of Carter's voluminous intelligence output was of little or no use beyond providing entertaining diversion for the president, he did produce some valuable information. The country would have been well served if FDR had acted on reports he requested from Carter in the fall of 1941 assessing the loyalty of Japanese living on the West Coast. Roosevelt was very concerned about the threat from fifth columnists, and he knew that Japanese living in California had many reasons to resent the American government. They were subject to prejudice and abuse that was in some ways worse than the treatment of blacks in the South.
Acting on orders from Carter, Munson spent three weeks on the West Coast interviewing FBI agents, military intelligence officials, and people from all walks of life—businessmen, students, fish packers, lettuce pickers, and farmers—to assess the loyalty of the Japanese community.42
Rather than restricting himself to the immediate task, assessing whether Japanese Americans posed a security threat, Munson felt it necessary to educate Carter and the president about the Japanese mind and soul. A sentence from a report he sent Carter on October 18, 1941, that was intended to sum up the mentality of Japanese Americans is typical of Munson's muddled approach (and his maddening run-on sentences):
Take the Shinto religion, Buddist [sic] religion, Christian religion, ancestor worship, family worship, all tied back to sun worship of which the emperor of Japan is the living titular head on earth; add to this the Oriental mind, western business culture, innate politeness and fear; add also the fact that each individual Japanese is playing all by himself in a field the size of the Yale Bowl with his own conscience as umpire, carrying the ball with as much competitive spirit as an American, while the stands—whom he wishes to please—are filled to overflowing with his departed ancestors each of whom is vitally interested and sitting judgement on his personal gyrations; add again a number of other things of varying importance, such as the fact that the Japs are the greatest joiners in the world and have associations for everything to join from “Fixing flowers properly in a bowl” to “War relief for Japanese Soldiers in China.”43
Munson's memos make it clear that the idea of putting Japanese Americans behind barbed wire was in the air. He argued that because rounding up the Japanese would be relatively easy, it was safe to leave this as a last resort. “In the first place there are not so many people of Japanese descent in the US that in an emergency they could not all be thrown into a concentration camp in 48 hours,” Munson wrote. “Of course you might get a few Chinamen too because they sort of look alike. But the looks are a great aid to rounding them up and in keeping them away from sabotage or other troublesome pastimes.”44
Such extreme measures were, Munson pointed out, unnecessary. “We do not want to throw a lot of American citizens into a concentration camp of course, and especially as the almost unanimous verdict is that in case of war they will keep quiet, very quiet. There will probably be some sabotage by paid Japanese agents and the odd fanatical Jap, but the bulk of these people will be quiet because in addition to being quite contented with the American way of life, they know they are ‘in a spot.’”45
Despite his racism and fascination with plumbing the depths of the Japanese soul, Munson managed to produce a report that in its conclusions was remarkably prescient. He told FDR that the Japanese in California were “straining every nerve to show their loyalty to the US. The Japs here are in more danger from us than we from them.”46
Munson's most valuable source was Kenneth Ringle, an Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI) lieutenant commander who had learned to speak Japanese during a three-year posting to Japan. When Munson met him, Ringle had spent over a year spying on the Japanese community in California. His activities included planning and leading a second-story job straight out of a Hollywood movie. One night in the spring of 1941, Ringle drove to the Japanese consulate in Los Angeles and, with police and FBI agents keeping watch outside, broke into the office. Just like in a B-movie, he had sprung a safecracker from prison to help with the caper. The ONI officer carefully removed and photographed every document in the safe, returned them to their original positions, and drove the safecracker back to prison.47
The burglary provided ONI and the FBI a comprehensive list of Japanese agents in California and taught American counterintelligence something critically important: the Japanese government distrusted American-born Japanese and was very unlikely to recruit them as intelligence operatives or saboteurs.
Carter presented Munson's findings to FDR in late October, telling the president that “reports from Curtis Munson still confirm the general picture of non-alarmism already reported to you.”48
Munson's final report from California, delivered to FDR on November 7, 1941, emphasized that while the majority of Japanese were loyal, there were some Japanese intelligence operatives in California. He reported that ONI had 750 to 900 Japanese suspects under surveillance, of whom they thought 150 to 180 “can be classed as really dangerous.” The threat of terrorism couldn't be discounted, he noted, as “there are still Japanese in the United States who will tie dynamite around their waist and make a human bomb of themselves…but today they are few.”49
Munson discovered a vulnerability more worrying than the possibility that a handful of Japanese Americans were capable of terrorism or treason. He was “horrified to note that dams, bridges, harbors, power stations etc. are wholly unguarded everywhere.”50 This point, far more than Munson's and Carter's assessment that the vast majority of Japanese Americans were loyal, attracted FDR's attention. Roosevelt's responses to Munson's reports made no mention of his overall conclusion that the vast majority of Japanese were loyal Americans. In a November 11, 1941, “Dear Jack” letter, the president instructed Carter to discuss West Coast security with coordinator of information William Donovan and Hoover “in view of the fact that immediate arrests may be advisable.”51
After spending several weeks in California, Munson sailed to Hawaii to continue his investigation, leveraging his status as a personal representative of the president to gain access to FBI agents, ONI officers, and other Navy personnel, who were remarkably free with information and opinions. Admiral Harold Stark issued an order granting Munson access to naval intelligence records.
The long, mostly irrelevant reports Munson sent from the Pacific failed to mention the most important conversation he had in Honolulu.
Munson had asked Navy captain Ellis Zacharias, commander of the Salt Lake City, a cruiser based at Pearl Harbor, and an expert on Japan, if Japanese residents of Hawaii were likely to mount an armed insurrection in case of war. “Forget about it,” Zacharias replied. “Hostilities would commence by an air attack on the fleet, [and] because of the necessity of secrecy on the part of the Japanese, they would not have been able to disseminate the necessary information on which to base an uprising or extensive sabotage.”52
Zacharias had devoted decades to studying Japanese military strategy and tactics. In 1926, while posted to Washington, he spent long evenings drinking martinis, playing poker, and trying to penetrate the mind of the Japanese naval attaché, Isoroku Yamamoto.53 Fifteen years later, Yamamoto planned the attack on Pearl Harbor.
Based on his knowledge of Japanese military tactics—sneak attacks were integral to Japanese military doctrine—and conversations he'd had in February 1941 with the Japanese ambassador to the United States, Admiral Kichisaburo Nomura, Zacharias predicted to Munson that a Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor would be launched on a Sunday; that it would happen at a time when three Japanese diplomatic envoys were in Washington; and that the attack would come without warning from the north.
Like Munson, Admiral Husband E. Kimmel, commander-in-chief of the US Pacific Fleet, had heard and disregarded Zacharias's predictions. American planes were parked wingtip to wingtip, maximizing the damage from Japanese bombers.
On December 8, 1941, the day after the attack on Pearl Harbor unfolded precisely as Zacharias had predicted—on a Sunday, from the north, when three Japanese envoys were in Washington—Carter forwarded to FDR a rambling, seventeen-page report from Munson. Roosevelt couldn't possibly have had time to struggle through Munson's musings about the socioeconomic structure of Hawaii. Defense workers who moved to the islands from the mainland, Munson informed the president, “contain the dregs of the waterfront element” and “include many of the ‘Okie’ class…to [whom] any brown-skin is ‘Nigger.’”54 The report is valuable in retrospect, however, because it reveals how ONI's lists of suspected Japanese agents made it possible to neutralize Japanese espionage in Hawaii without resorting to mass arrests.
The Pearl Harbor attack shocked Americans, but it was secretly celebrated by the nation's closest allies. Prime Minister Winston Churchill knew the blow would bring the United States into the war, a goal British intelligence had been pursuing relentlessly for almost two years through an enormous intelligence operation that included covert operatives based in the National Press Building.
Carter and Americans working for the Brits weren't alone in realizing the potential of the Press Building as a base for espionage. As separate conflicts in Europe and Asia merged into World War II, the United States remained nominally neutral. The Press Building and especially the Press Club came to resemble Humphrey Bogart's Casablanca. Operatives working for Japan, Great Britain, Germany, the Soviet Union (Germany's ally from August 1939 until June 1941), and American intelligence services worked and relaxed in intimate proximity, squeezing together into crowded elevators, passing each other in narrow corridors, and standing elbow-to-elbow in front of the Press Club bar.