It took the Pearl Harbor debacle, a sucker punch that cost 2,400 American lives and destroyed much of the Pacific fleet, to convince Franklin Roosevelt he needed to sort out the nation's intelligence mess. To prevent another sneak attack, and to support the war the attack had launched, America would have to emulate its enemies and allies by creating secret services capable of seeing, hearing, comprehending, and influencing events around the globe. The need was obvious. The disaster in Hawaii sparked a frenzied competition among the leaders of government agencies to fill it—and in the process vastly expand their power and prestige. They all knew that decisions about divvying up responsibilities and creating new intelligence capabilities would be made personally by the president.
John Franklin Carter, the newspaper columnist operating a secret, unofficial intelligence unit from a nondescript office in the National Press Building, was in the scrum as ambitious rivals seeking an oversized piece of the intelligence pie jostled for the president's attention. He was competing with FBI director J. Edgar Hoover; FDR's coordinator of information, William Donovan; State Department officials; and the heads of Army and Navy intelligence. Compared to its rivals, Carter's unit was infinitesimal. Based on its capabilities and his experience, he shouldn't have been a serious contender in turf battles with men who had spent decades in law enforcement, diplomacy, and the military. The journalist and amateur spymaster was in the mix because he had an asset they lacked: a close relationship with and easy access to Roosevelt.
While others wrote formal memorandums to the president through official channels and begged for coveted time on his calendar, Carter sent him chatty notes and lingered behind in the Oval Office after White House press conferences for informal meetings. He was in constant touch with Grace Tully, officially one of Roosevelt's private secretaries but in practice an influential, trusted member of the president's inner circle. Tully was the only person other than FDR who was fully aware of Carter's activities; she occasionally responded to his requests without consulting the president.
Hoover summed up his feelings about Carter in a handwritten note scrawled at the bottom of an internal FBI memo: “We know Carter well & most unfavorably. He is a crack-pot, a persistent busy-body, bitten with the Sherlock Holmes bug & plagued with a super-exaggerated ego.”1
The FBI director barely disguised his contempt, but Donovan, who shared Carter's love of idiosyncratic schemes and sought to exploit the journalist's access to the White House, maintained cordial relations. “Yesterday afternoon,” Carter wrote in a January 9 memo to Roosevelt, Donovan's aide “David Bruce showed me the master-plan he has developed for organization of a general world-wide secret intelligence service for the United States.” Carter damned the plan with faint praise, writing that it was a good “model for a central-office organization of intelligence,” but was “very hazy on actual operations.” He added that the plan was based on British and German methods that weren't suitable for the United States. Replicating the hazy thinking he criticized in Donovan's plan, Carter wrote that European intelligence methods were “the result of experience, plus development, plus national character” and therefore weren't applicable to the United States.2
Summarizing his own approach to intelligence, Carter suggested that “we should strive to develop something much simpler, more happy-go-lucky and casual, and utilize ignorance in the place of secrecy as a method.” By ignorance, he meant a decentralized intelligence system composed of teams that operated independently and without knowledge of each other's existence. Of course, Carter also knew just the man to lead such an organization. “I am very ambitious to be allowed to try to do something along these lines on a modest and experimental scale and would like to tell you my concrete plan of operations the next time you can spare a couple of minutes after a press conference,” he wrote to the president.3
A week later, Roosevelt signed a secret directive that, to Hoover's delight, assigned to the FBI authority for intelligence and counterintelligence throughout the Americas, from the Arctic to Tierra del Fuego. Hoover immediately telephoned the heads of intelligence at the State Department, Army, and Navy to inform them of the arrangement, making a point of reading a note the president had handwritten on the order: “I think that the Canadian and South American Fields should not be in the Coordinator of Information Field, nor in that of the J. Franklin Carter Organization.” Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI) director Rear Admiral Theodore Wilkinson told Hoover he was pained that FDR had acknowledged Carter's organization in writing, even in a secret directive. Hoover consoled Wilkinson, observing that FDR's note meant that “Carter would only operate in the United States.”4
In reality, Carter was not restrained by geographic or bureaucratic boundaries. Reporting only to the president, he dispatched agents to roam around Mexico and the Caribbean, travel to Moscow, and collect intelligence from and about every continent except Antarctica. The topics of Carter's inquiries were as wide-ranging as Roosevelt's curiosity, touching on military and geopolitical issues, political intelligence about Democrats and Republicans, the loyalty and competence of government officials, wacky inventions, screwball conspiracy theories, labor issues, military and civilian morale, domestic and foreign propaganda, the latest gossip from New York's “Café Society,” and countless other topics.
Carter's activities during the first full month of the war, January 1942, exemplify his activities over the coming years. He and his team were frenetically busy, but most of what they stirred up was dust. FDR seems to have kept the game going because Carter uncovered a few flecks of gold, and because he provided a welcome diversion.
On New Year's Day, Vannevar Bush, the government's top scientist, rebuffed Carter's request for information about an experimental internal combustion engine. Writing under letterhead with his National Press Building address, Carter had informed Bush that he was inquiring about the invention on FDR's instructions. The skeptical scientist requested “a copy of your direction from the President,” which Carter was unable to provide as Roosevelt refused all his requests for credentials or official documentation of his status.5
The next day Tully called Carter conveying a request from FDR to discuss his proposals about enlisting organized labor to fight Axis sabotage with secretary of labor Frances Perkins. There is no record of the secretary's response to Carter's offer to serve as a “personal, unofficial, informal point of liaison for various efforts of organized labor to contribute intelligence as well as strength and skill to the conduct of the war.”6 Carter's offers of unconventional assistance often left cabinet officials nonplussed.
On January 3, Carter forwarded a useless report to Roosevelt on an interview one of his agents had conducted with an American lawyer who had been posted to Tokyo. He sent scores of similar reports over the coming months.7
A few days later, the president was treated to the first of a series of fantastic, and fantastically stupid, reports that Carter's number two, Henry Field, claimed had been produced “under conditions of extraordinary secrecy from a man who is believed to have accurate and swift means of communication with Moscow.” The reports spun a tale that would have seemed ridiculous even in one of Carter's novels. An American military genius working for Stalin was directing the operations of the “Siberian Army,” an entity that, Field's report claimed, was poised to attack Japan within days using 8,300 planes that had been hidden in underground hangars. The imaginary American was, Field claimed, a member of Stalin's Strategy Board, “which is composed of 3 Americans, 1 German (brother of the man who arrested Hitler in Munich Putsch), 1 British General (hated by Chamberlain), and a Frenchman named Collet (brother of General Collet in Syrian campaign).” The report presented an elaborate back story for the hero, including graduating from MIT and leading victorious Soviet military campaigns from Finland to Rostov.8 Subsequent reports claimed the USSR had spent $6 billion building a series of underground forts from Leningrad to Odessa that were stuffed with troops waiting for orders to emerge and vanquish the Wehrmacht. The reports were filed in FDR's personal safe and were shared with Army intelligence.9
On January 9, Roosevelt dictated a note to Tully requesting that Carter inform Army and Navy intelligence of his concerns about Nazi infiltration of the United Service Organizations (USO), the voluntary organization formed to entertain American troops. The same day, another note communicated the president's tentative approvals of Carter's plan to send a Saturday Evening Post reporter to Mexico City to report on Axis activities, and his proposal to investigate wealthy refugees in New York.10
As Tully was banging out these notes, Carter was dictating a cover letter for his first valuable report of the month. It was an accurate and chilling account of the Soviet government's abysmal treatment of Polish soldiers and civilians who had been arrested when the USSR occupied half of their country. Tens of thousands were suffering in Russian prisons and labor camps.11
Also on January 9, Carter sent FDR his critique of Donovan's plans and his own proposal to establish a worldwide intelligence unit. The package he dropped off with Tully included a request, which the president ignored, that Vice President Henry Wallace sign identification cards for Carter's agents who were operating overseas.
Roosevelt and his closest advisors were certain that Hitler had sprinkled secret agents throughout the United States who were busy collecting intelligence and waiting for orders to begin sabotage operations. Carter fed the paranoia, for example with a January 12, 1942, report from one of his agents, the retired businessman Curtis Munson, expressing confidence that “there is a wealthy and entrenched fifth column in this country” that was waiting for a “green light by their superiors.” Ironically given his passionate defense of the civil rights of Japanese Americans, Munson advocated following Lincoln's Civil War precedent by suspending the right of habeas corpus and imprisoning thousands of German Americans or, alternatively, rounding them up and sending them to South Dakota to plow fields. FDR instructed Carter to “talk this over with the Attorney General and possibly the Immigration Commissioner and Mr. Hoover.”12
The German fifth columnists were no more real than Stalin's Strategy Board or the Nazi spies Carter imagined were hiding in Bob Hope's USO entourage.
Carter had assigned to another of his agents, a journalist named William Irwin, the task of investigating Japanese intelligence activities along the US-Mexico border. Irwin drove for thousands of miles through Mexico and Texas compiling lists of Japanese doctors, dentists, and ice-cream-shop proprietors. Based on rumors and intuition, he labeled many of them “key men” in a massive, and largely imaginary, intelligence operation directed from Tokyo. On January 16, Carter forwarded scores of pages of Irwin's notes to FDR, the FBI, the State Department, and military intelligence organizations.13
Additional topics of Carter's reports to Roosevelt in January covered: infighting between American intelligence organizations, such as attacks on Donovan by the FBI, Army and Navy intelligence, and the State Department; “sedition among the South Boston Irish”; efforts to manufacture the Sea Otter, a crackpot idea for a ship powered by automobile engines that had caught FDR's imagination; notes on interviews with American businessmen who had been stationed in Asia; a scheme to recruit members of de Gaulle's Free French intelligence operation in Mexico as American operatives; intelligence on proposed Japanese bombing targets; a report on Argentinian domestic politics based on an interview with the Buenos Aires representative of the Otis Elevator Co.; and plans to send Field on an intelligence-gathering mission to Trinidad.
Along with this flurry of covert activity, Carter attended press conferences at the White House and produced newspaper columns.
With the help of a staff that grew to twenty-five, Carter maintained this frenzied pace for three and a half years. Hoover, Donovan, generals and admirals, senior State Department officials, and nearly every member of the cabinet came to dread the notes Tully sent from Roosevelt forwarding one of Carter's memos with a request for comment or action. Nine times out of ten they were time-sucking nonsense: a suggestion forwarded to General Hap Arnold that the Army Air Forces consider bombing Japanese volcanoes to set off earthquakes; a report asserting with great confidence that the labor leader John L. Lewis was conspiring with French intelligence to mount a coup and depose Roosevelt; or fantasies about Ukrainian terrorists hell-bent on assassinating the president.14
Some of Carter's intelligence, however, was helpful. He passed on a tip in July 1942 from Gerald Haxton, Somerset Maugham's secretary, who noted that it was possible to pick up a telephone in New York and put a call through to Switzerland. Given the ease of communicating between Germany and Switzerland, this posed an obvious security risk, most immediately from German submarines to ships departing from Atlantic ports. As a direct consequence of Carter's information, Roosevelt ordered restrictions on communications with neutral countries that undoubtedly reduced the flow of intelligence to Germany.
Along with piles of garbage, Carter's agents provided Roosevelt with information that was accurate and even profound.
Of the thousands of reports Carter sent Roosevelt, the most alarming and probably the most significant was a 130-page dossier titled “Reports on Poland and Lithuania.” Compiled by the Polish underground, it was the most detailed report to date to reach the White House about the Holocaust. The dossier, which Roosevelt and undersecretary of state Sumner Welles received on December 30, 1942, reinforced and expanded on information the administration had received from other sources.15
The report included the first news to reach Washington about the Belzec concentration camp in southeastern Poland: “Inside and outside the fence Ukrainian sentries are posted. Executions are carried out in the following manner: a train carrying Jews arrives at the station and is moved up to the wire fence where the guards are changed. Now the train is brought to the unloading place by German personnel. The men are taken into barracks on the left, where they have to take their clothes off, ostensibly for a bath.”16 It went on to describe how men and women were herded into a building and killed, their bodies buried in a ditch that had been dug by “Jews who, after they have finished the job, are executed.”
The dossier revealed the existence of mobile extermination trucks in which poison gas was used to murder Jews, described the Auschwitz concentration camp, liquidation of the Warsaw ghetto, and atrocities in Lithuania. An appendix containing photographs of corpses stacked like firewood and other horrors made it difficult even for anti-Semites in the State Department to doubt the authenticity of the information.
Carter's team also continued in early 1942 to collect intelligence on the threats posed by—and, even more, to—Japanese, both citizens of the United States and of Japan, living on the West Coast and in Hawaii.
“We are drifting into a treatment of the Japanese corresponding to Hitler's treatment of the Jews,” Munson warned in a note to Tully.17 It was late February 1942, and Munson, Carter's agent on the West Coast, was despondent. Rather than protect the Japanese as Munson advised, the government was standing by as anti-Japanese hysteria threatened to boil over into an American version of Kristallnacht.
Carter had been sending reports to Roosevelt for months—before and after the Pearl Harbor attack—reiterating his conviction that 98 percent of Japanese on the West Coast and in Hawaii were loyal to America. There is “no substantial danger of Fifth Column activities by Japanese,” Carter informed FDR on December 16, 1941.18
In January 1942, Carter gave Roosevelt Munson's recommendations for handling the “West coast Japanese problem.” These included the president or vice president issuing a statement reassuring loyal citizens of Japanese descent that their rights would be protected, giving reliable second-generation Japanese Americans responsibility for ensuring the good behavior of all Japanese American residents, and creating a process to clear Japanese Americans for work in defense plants.
Despite Hoover's determination to sideline Carter and his organization, the amateur spy kept tabs on the bureau's energetic efforts to round up suspected Japanese spies operating in California and Hawaii. Working from lists prepared in advance by the Office of Naval Intelligence, the FBI quickly neutralized the real threats of sabotage and espionage.
Carter was also receiving from and sending to the White House reports from sources in local law enforcement and British intelligence, as well as private citizens, describing how unscrupulous individuals were terrorizing Japanese Americans into giving up their homes, farms, and businesses. In California, the Hearst newspapers were fomenting racial hatred, politicians were calling for mass evacuations, and there was an ever-present threat of vigilante violence.
In addition to Roosevelt, Carter's reports about West Coast Japanese were circulated to Hoover, the secretaries of War, State, and Labor, and Army officers who were responsible for defending the Pacific Coast. By the time Munson wrote to Tully in February, it was clear that the battle for a morally defensible policy was lost. Plans were already being drawn up for internment. To Carter's credit, he continued to stand up for the rights of Japanese Americans even after tens of thousands were sent to desolate concentration camps.19
Carter's most spectacular operation was even more controversial than his advocacy for Japanese Americans. It centered on his and Roosevelt's fondness for the prominent Nazi, Ernst “Putzi” Hanfstaengl, whom Carter had met in 1932 at FDR's suggestion, and their decision to bring him to the United States.
Hanfstaengl had taken a wildly improbable path to America. One of Hitler's earliest supporters, by the time the Nazis came to power he had fallen out of favor with the party leadership, so it came as a surprise when Hermann Göring summoned him to Berlin in February 1937. Göring, second only to Hitler in the Nazi hierarchy, told Hanfstaengl that the Führer had personally ordered him to travel to Salamanca, Spain, on a secret mission.
The journey began eight days after Hanfstaengl's fiftieth birthday, on February 10, 1937. After take-off, he was horrified when the pilot said that rather than landing in a part of Spain controlled by the pro-German nationalists, his orders were to eject Hanfstaengl over Republican-held territory. Terrified that he wouldn't survive his first parachute landing or that he'd be killed by anti-fascist forces, Hanfstaengl wasted no time when the plane developed engine trouble and landed near Leipzig. He fled, first to Switzerland and later to Britain, defying Göring's orders to return home.
At the start of the war the British government interned Hanfstaengl as an enemy alien. In a bid to escape confinement, he expressed an interest in aiding the fight against Hitler. Asked if he was willing to help destroy Germany, he replied that he wanted to overthrow Hitler, not destroy his country. The Brits decided correctly that Hanfstaengl was still a Nazi, locked him up, and in September 1940 shipped him along with hundreds of Nazis to an internment camp in Ontario, Canada.20
In February 1942 Carter, seeking information about a friend of Eleanor Roosevelt's whom he erroneously believed was a Nazi spy, asked the FBI to track down Hanfstaengl and obtain permission from British intelligence to conduct an interview.21 When Carter met with Hanfstaengl in March 1942, their conversation was supposed to be about the counterintelligence investigation. Instead, Carter quickly turned it into a recruitment pitch. Hanfstaengl was in a tight spot, squeezed between Canadian guards who treated him with all the consideration they believed a despicable Nazi deserved and German inmates for whom he was a traitor. Half starved, suffering from untreated dental maladies, and fearing violence from fellow prisoners, Hanfstaengl viewed Carter's offer as a lifeline.
Soon after he returned to Washington, Carter met with Roosevelt and Welles and proposed that they spring Hanfstaengl and bring him to Washington. When they asked what Putzi could possibly contribute to the war effort, Carter replied, “He actually knows all these people in the Nazi government. He might be able to tell you what makes them tick.”22
Hanfstaengl's potential value as an analyst didn't come close to justifying the political risks associated with bringing him to the United States. The American public would have been outraged if word leaked out that Roosevelt or his administration was collaborating with a leading Nazi. The presence of Hitler's confidant in Washington could also cause troubles in Moscow by exacerbating Stalin's fears that the United States and Britain were plotting to negotiate a separate peace with Hitler that would free the Germans to defeat and occupy the Soviet Union.
Roosevelt seemed to have something in mind other than importing an analyst or propagandist when he agreed to Carter's plan. The Germans were at the apogee of their power. It was hard to envision how the United States could defeat a military machine that had occupied most of Europe and appeared to be on the verge of victory in Russia. Roosevelt apparently hoped Hanfstaengl could help devise or implement a strategy that would inspire the German military to depose Hitler and negotiate peace with the Allies. That's certainly how Carter and Hanfstaengl interpreted Roosevelt's invitation.23
Giving Carter the green light to bring Hanfstaengl to Washington, Roosevelt said, “You can tell him that there's no reason on God's earth why the Germans shouldn't again become the kind of nation they were under Bismarck. Not militaristic. They were productive; they were peaceful; they were a great part of Europe. And that's the kind of Germany I would like to see. If he would like to work on that basis, fine.”24
The British government fought to keep Hanfstaengl in Canada but gave in when Roosevelt raised the issue with Churchill. The Brits insisted that Hanfstaengl remain under guard and that his presence in the United States be kept strictly secret. Sir Gerald Campbell, British Consul General to the United States, wrote to Carter in May 1942 noting that the “British authorities view the proposal to make use of Hanfstaengl with considerable misgiving.” He added, “I think we can all agree about the danger of confusing anybody's mind at this time into the belief that there are good and bad ex-Nazis.”25
In fact, Carter had long believed in good and bad Nazis, and he put Hanfstaengl in the former camp. His idea to bring Hanfstaengl to Washington, and apparently FDR's consent for the plan, were animated by this belief.
These notions weren't a secret. In a May 1941 newspaper column, Carter had suggested that the flight to Scotland of Rudolph Hess, the third most powerful man in Germany, was a sign that the conflict between warring Nazi factions was coming to a climax. He wrote that one faction wished to “stabilize German victories, leaving Germany the supreme power on the continent, but foregoing political empire,” while the other “propose to follow the world-revolution to world supremacy at any cost to German manpower and German ideas.” He informed his readers that “from the start of the Hitler revolution it has been obvious that there was a group of sincere, able and patriotic Germans who worked whole-heartedly for a greater Germany and a German mission which would create a Germany and a German people free to work out their destinies and to socialize and to rationalize the life of Europe.”26
It was, of course, incredible for anyone to make such statements at a time when German troops were enjoying their opportunity to “socialize” in Paris, Jews all over the continent were experiencing the Nazi efforts to “rationalize the life of Europe,” and innocent civilians were experiencing Luftwaffe pilots’ attempts to “work out their destinies” by bombing British cities.
In the column, which was printed in the Boston Globe and newspapers across the country, Carter counted Hess and several other leading Nazis as likely members of the enlightened Nazi group: “Putzi Hanfstaengl, long since exiled, also belonged to this group, as perhaps did Dr. Goebbels himself. Theirs was a European concept which, however brutal and inconvenient, was not necessarily incompatible with a world-order or Christian civilization.”
According to Hanfstaengl, when discussing terms for the transfer, Carter had attributed the restrictions to the machinations of small-minded men—and Jews. “There was quite some opposition to your being brought to Washington from some small unimportant men—some were jealous, some were Jews, some incompetent and stupid and afraid of competition,” Carter said, Hanfstaengl recorded in his diary a few hours after the conversation.27
Roosevelt was anxious to avoid publicity. While in the United States, Hanfstaengl was referred to as “Dr. Sedgwick” after his mother's maiden name, or simply as “Dr. S.,” and the enterprise was referred to as the S Project.
The S Project began in a dramatic fashion.
On the afternoon of June 30, 1942, Hanfstaengl, the most senior Nazi to set foot on American soil during World War II, shook hands with the commanding general at Fort Belvoir where he was to be interned and strode across a conference room, stopping in front of a large world map. “There is only one place for you to start the invasion of Europe, General, and that is here,” he boomed, thumping a long, bony finger on Casablanca. “Here is the weakest spot.”28
Hanfstaengl, believing he had merely stated the obvious, wasn't prepared for the response to his pronouncement. The general stormed out of the room, ordered a tripling of the guard outside the bungalow where the German prisoner was being held and had him confined to the building during daylight hours. As Hanfstaengl learned later, Casablanca was one of the primary targets for the most closely guarded secret in the American military, Operation Torch, the Anglo American invasion of North Africa that was launched in December 1942. Roosevelt had to intervene personally to persuade the Army that their prisoner had made an educated guess and that he wasn't a Nazi spy.29
Carter's enthusiasm for working with Putzi was tempered by one concern. The British government had spread the rumor that Hanfstaengl was homosexual. While Carter was happy to associate with a racist anti-Semitic Nazi, he was wary of homosexuals. He consulted Claire Boothe Luce, who suggested leaving the German alone with Gerald Haxton, Maugham's German-speaking secretary and lover, to see what transpired. When Hanfstaengl told Carter “I wish you'd get rid of this man. One of the things I couldn't stand about Hitler was all the fairies he had around him,” Carter decided he had passed the test.30
Hanfstaengl quickly wore out his welcome at Fort Belvoir after terrorizing African American soldiers. Souring on Hitler did nothing to sweeten his racism. He was moved to Bush Hall, a crumbling estate in Alexandria, Virginia, that Carter rented from two of Field's aged relatives. The scene quickly degenerated into a cross between the television comedies Hogan's Heroes and Fawlty Towers. The madcap scene, which Carter found amusing only in retrospect, featured the moody and petulant Hanfstaengl, drunken rebellious servants, balky plumbing, and a leaky roof. FDR, who remembered his German acquaintance's performances at the Harvard Club, ordered that a Steinway piano be placed in the house. Field, who despised Hanfstaengl and secretly kept the British government informed of his activities, ensured that it was never tuned. It was appropriate that the piano, like the whole S Project, was off-key as Hanfstaengl filled Bush Hall with the sounds of Bach, Beethoven, and Wagner, music that he'd once used to arouse Hitler. Carter and Field visited often, occasionally bringing intelligence officers who sought advice from “Dr. S.” Adding to the farcical nature of the adventure, for a time, Hanfstaengl was “guarded” by his son Egon, an American citizen who had enlisted in the US Army.31
When Egon shipped out for service in the Pacific, he left his .38 caliber revolver with his father. One day a Pentagon official happened to see it sitting on a table at Bush Hall and was appalled at the idea that a Nazi prisoner had access to a weapon. Carter took possession of the gun and later issued it to a recent college graduate named Alexander Sturm, whom he had recruited into his operation. The day Sturm reported for work Carter gave him the .38 in a left-handed holster—Sturm was right-handed—along with a temporary National Press Club membership card, a check for twenty dollars, and vague instructions about his duties as guard and assistant to “Dr. S.”32
Hanfstaengl listened to German radio broadcasts on a shortwave receiver that had been installed at Bush Hall by technicians from the Federal Communications Commission and wrote memos suggesting counterpropaganda, lacing his recommendations with information that he believed would get under the skin of Hitler and his inner circle. Roosevelt took an active interest in Hanfstaengl's work, reading his reports and occasionally sending questions through Carter. FDR solicited Hanfstaengl's ideas about how “word could effectively be brought to reach the German people with the assurance that we do not propose a general massacre of Germans and that in future a peaceful German people can protect and improve their living standards.” In response, Hanfstaengl suggested a broadcast to German soldiers by General Eisenhower or Marshall. The idea, which was never put into practice, was to plant the seeds for the German military to mount a coup against Hitler.33
In his reports, Hanfstaengl often urged the United States to drop its demand for Germany's unconditional surrender. For example, in an analysis of one of Hitler's speeches he wrote that “it is alone the ‘unconditional surrender’ clause which is in effect acting as a welcome corset in favor of the reeling Hitler regime, holding together what otherwise would burst asunder. That Hitler's days could be very substantially shortened by modifying the intransigence of this clause can be doubted by no one.”34
Hanfstaengl wrote a psychological profile of Hitler, spicing it up with salacious tidbits and speculation about the Führer's sex life. Hitler had an erotic fascination with whips, and he had probably been infected with a venereal disease by a Jewish prostitute in Vienna in 1909, his former supporter and friend wrote. “Real and complete sexual fulfillment” was impossible for Hitler, and sexual frustration led him to “into brooding isolation, and artificially dramatized public life.” Hanfstaengl commented somewhat cryptically on “rumors” that “Hitler's sexual life, such as it is, demands a unique performance on the part of the women, the exact nature of which is a state secret.” The Führer's combination of artistic sentiments and cruelty made him a hybrid of a romantic poet and a gangster, according to Hanfstaengl. “He is a compound, say, of Lord Byron and Al Capone.”35
When she heard about the Hitler profile, Tully knew Roosevelt would be interested. She arranged for a copy to be bound and delivered to the White House. As predicted, Roosevelt loved it, reading it in bed and advising Harry Hopkins and other White House officials to study it carefully for insights into Hitler.36
Hanfstaengl also wrote profiles of four hundred “key Nazis” that were turned over to Army intelligence.
In December 1942, journalists at Cosmopolitan magazine learned of Hanfstaengl's presence in the United States—almost certainly from British intelligence—and the broad outlines of his activities. Cosmopolitan's editor told Carter he planned to give the story to the virulently anti-Roosevelt Hearst newspapers. Carter convinced the editor to hold off until February 1. The State Department and White House agreed to Carter's plan to get in front of the story by issuing a press release on January 28. Carter contacted the columnist Dorothy Thompson; the foreign editor of the New York Herald Tribune; Henry Luce, the publisher of Life, Time, and Fortune magazines; and several other journalists, persuading them all to spin the story in a way that was favorable to FDR.37
Incredibly, Carter himself broke the news in an article distributed by the North American Newspaper Alliance. Writing as if he had only recently learned the bare outlines of the story, Carter told his readers that the “government is making public one of the best-kept secrets of its psychological warfare against Hitler and the Nazis, the fact that Dr. Ernst Sedgwick (Putzi) Hanfstaengl has been giving our government the lowdown on Hitlerism for several months.” He added that “details of the transfer from Canadian to American jurisdiction are still shrouded in official secrecy.” The story ran in newspapers around the country, including on the front page of the New York Times.38
While the Times didn't reveal Carter's role in the affair, other newspapers mentioned that he was involved in the operation. Carter lied to his colleagues, minimizing his role. If his fellow reporters knew anything about the other covert services Carter was providing the White House, or the existence of his intelligence unit, they kept the information to themselves.
The storm blew over quickly, but the publicity prompted an immediate and vociferous demand from the British government to return the prisoner.39
Carter had done just about everything he could think of to persuade Roosevelt to keep the S Project alive. On the morning of February 17, 1943, he stopped at St. Matthew's Cathedral on his way to the White House and said a prayer for Putzi, paused on the way out to drop a dollar bill into the Poor Box, and realized after it was too late to retrieve it that by mistake he'd deposited a five. It was, Carter confided to his diary, money well spent. When he arrived at the White House, Roosevelt said he would defy the British and hold onto Hanfstaengl. Carter drove out to Bush Hall with Field. “Much jubilation, rum punch and congrats,” Carter recorded in his diary.40
Hanfstaengl's reports became increasingly unhinged from reality, featuring predictions that Germany would invade Spain, Nazi armies would occupy Sweden, and many other events that never transpired. Roosevelt rejected Hanfstaengl's requests for a personal meeting and ignored his fantasy of sitting down with both the president and Churchill to plan the post-war order.
In the summer of 1944, the British turned up the heat, threatening to leak information about the administration's treatment of Hanfstaengl to Roosevelt's Republican challenger. The threat of newspaper stories about the White House pampering a Nazi in a mansion with servants were the last straw. Any sentiment FDR may have felt toward Putzi was no match for the risk of losing an election. In any case, the president had dropped all thoughts of anything other than complete military victory over Germany, so the Nazi insider's views on strategies for provoking an uprising against Hitler were no longer of interest.
On June 28, 1944, Tully noted in a memo for the official files that “The President directed me to notify Dr. Henry Field that he did not feel it was worthwhile to continue the Dr. S. project and therefore it will be terminated as of July 1.”41 Tully repeated the message to Carter on July 7, prompting him to write a memo to FDR praising Hanfstaengl, saying his life would be in danger in England, and arguing that returning him would serve as a deterrent against any German in the future taking risks on behalf of the American government.42
Roosevelt was unmoved. The British and Canadian governments squabbled over which country should take him, delaying Hanfstaengl's departure. In the end, Roosevelt said, “Hell, just put him on a plane and fly him over to England and turn him over. That's it.”43 And on September 24, 1944, that's exactly what was done.
Tully's file note on the termination of the S Project included one bit of welcome news for Field and Carter. Roosevelt had approved continuation of the “M Project,” a secret study of options for post-war migration (hence “M”) of the millions Europeans expected to be displaced by the war. FDR found time on the afternoon of July 30, 1942, in the midst of a schedule packed with meetings with Soviet ambassador Maxim Litvinov, Secretary of State Cordell Hull, and General Arnold, to dictate a memo greenlighting the M Project:
I love your memorandum of July thirtieth in regard to the multi-adjectived anthropologist. I think you are completely right. I know that you and Henry Field can carry out this project unofficially, exploratorially, ethnologically, racially, admixturally, miscegenationally, confidentially and, above all, budgetarily.
Any person connected herewith whose name appears in the public print will suffer guillotinally.44
Roosevelt was expressing satisfaction with Carter's report on his visit with Aleš Hrdlička, curator of physical anthropology at the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History. Roosevelt had carried on a lively correspondence with Hrdlička for over a decade and had absorbed the scientist's theories about racial mixtures and eugenics. Roosevelt, the scion of two families that considered themselves American aristocrats, was especially attracted to Hrdlička's notions of human racial “stock.”
A prominent public intellectual who had dominated American physical anthropology for decades, Hrdlička was convinced of the superiority of the white race and obsessed with racial identity. Shortly after the Pearl Harbor attack he'd written to Roosevelt expressing the view that the “less developed skulls” of Japanese were proof that they were innately warlike and had a lower level of evolutionary development than other races. The president wrote back asking whether the “Japanese problem” could be solved through mass interbreeding.45
Roosevelt had asked Carter to recruit Hrdlička to head up a secret international committee of anthropologists that would study the “ethnological problems anticipated in post-war population movements.” Carter's report on the meeting, which prompted Roosevelt's effusive memo, called Hrdlička a “stubborn, erudite, arrogant, charming, authoritarian, friendly, difficult, delightful old gentleman.”46
Outlining the president's charge for the committee, Carter told Hrdlička it was expected to “formulate agreed opinions as to problems arising out of racial admixtures and to consider the scientific principles involved in the process of miscegenation as contrasted with the opposing policies of so-called ‘racialism.’” The instructions were consistent with views Roosevelt had expressed for decades.47
In 1925, while undergoing therapy for polio at Warm Springs, Georgia, FDR wrote a series of columns for the Macon Telegraph, including one that touched on his ideas about immigration. He praised elements of Canada's immigration policy, especially its regulations “to prevent large groups of foreign born from congregating in any one locality.” He added, “If, twenty-five years ago, the United States had adopted a policy of this kind we would not have the huge foreign sections which exist in so many of our cities.” The future president remarked that “no sensible American wants this country to be made a dumping ground for foreigners of any nation, but it is equally true that there are a great many foreigners who, if they came here, would make exceedingly desirable citizens. It becomes, therefore, in the first place, a question of selection.” Roosevelt informed his readers that “a little new European blood of the right sort does a lot of good in every community.”
While the column doesn't define “the right sort,” it provides two examples of good emigrants, those from Southern Germany and Northern Italy. Roosevelt also expressed the opinion that “for a good many years to come European immigration should remain greatly restricted,” and that “foreigners” who had congregated in large American cities should be encouraged to disperse into the heartland.48 FDR apparently held onto these opinions when he moved into the White House. They may explain why he declined to intervene in the 1930s to lift or exploit loopholes in immigration caps that prevented Jews from escaping Nazi oppression, as well as his enthusiasm for the M Project.
Roosevelt's goals for the committee were consistent with the views he had expressed in 1925. He wanted it to identify “the vacant places of the earth suitable for post-war settlement” and the “type of people who could live in those places.” Initial work was to focus on South America and Central Africa. Roosevelt wanted the committee to explore questions such as the probable outcomes from mixing people from various parts of Europe with the South American “base stock.”49
FDR asked the committee to consider some specific questions, such as: “Is the South Italian stock—say, Sicilian—as good as the North Italian stock—say, Milanese—if given equal economic and social opportunity? Thus, in a given case, where 10,000 Italians were to be offer[ed] settlement facilities, what proportion of the 10,000 should be Northern Italians and what Southern Italian?”50
Roosevelt “also pointed out,” Carter informed Hrdlička, “that while most South American countries would be glad to admit Jewish immigration, it was on the condition that the Jewish group were not localized in the cities, they want no ‘Jewish colonies,’ ‘Italian colonies,’ etc.” Keeping with this theme, the president also tasked the committee with determining how to “resettle the Jews on the land and keep them there.”51
Hrdlička ultimately refused to participate in the M Project because Roosevelt wouldn't give him absolute control. Isaiah Bowman, president of Johns Hopkins University, was promoted from his role as a member of the committee to the head of the project. Roosevelt knew Bowman well and so was presumably aware of his anti-Semitic views.52 Bowman understood what Roosevelt was trying to achieve through the M Project. Years earlier, in November 1938, he had undertaken research for FDR about the prospects for European settlement in South America. Requesting the research, Roosevelt wrote to Bowman: “Frankly, what I am rather looking for is the possibility of uninhabited or sparsely inhabited good agricultural lands to which Jewish colonies might be sent.” Roosevelt added that “such colonies need not be large but, in all probability, should be large enough for mutual cooperation and assistance—say fifty to one hundred thousand people in a given area.”53
The M Project expanded far beyond Roosevelt's original charge, producing tens of thousands of pages of reports, maps, and charts analyzing the suitability of locations around the globe for settlement by Europeans who were expected to be displaced by the war, analyzing the characteristics of myriad racial and ethnic groups, and theorizing about optimal proportions in which to combine them in their new homelands.
While settlement contingencies for a wide range of peoples were studied, when Roosevelt described the M Project to Churchill during a lunch at the White House in May 1943, he focused on one particular group. FDR described it as study about “the problem of working out the best way to settle the Jewish question,” Vice President Henry Wallace, who attended the meeting, recorded in his diary. The solution that the president endorsed, “essentially is to spread the Jews thin all over the world,” rather than allow them to congregate anywhere in large numbers.54
Very few people outside the team that produced the reports were allowed to see them and they had no discernable impact on policy decisions. In retrospect, the M Project's principal accomplishment was to shed light on FDR's thinking about race and immigration, and to illuminate the hubris of 1940s social scientists who believed they could and should decide the fate of millions without consulting either those who would be resettled or the people who would host them.
When Roosevelt died on April 12, 1945, his personal files contained over three thousand pages of correspondence with Carter, profiles of hundreds of Nazis that Hanfstaengl had compiled, plus the massive outpouring from the M Project. Carter wrote to Truman explaining his work for FDR, offering to continue his unit's covert activities, and urging the new president to fund completion of the M Project.
Truman was deeply skeptical about the need for espionage or secret intelligence, and he had been informed by the State Department that the $10,000 per month that was being spent on the M Project was a waste of money. He terminated Carter's operations and cut off funding for the migration studies.
Following the termination of his career as a secret agent, Carter continued to write newspaper and magazine articles and books, including one that included a brief description of his wartime work for Roosevelt.55
Carter resumed his relationship with the White House in the fall of 1948, when he was recruited as a speechwriter for a campaign that most observers had written off as quixotic. He traveled on Truman's “whistle-stop” tour and wrote or contributed to most of the major speeches Truman gave in the final months of the campaign.56 As always, Carter didn't feel any need to inform his readers that along with writing about the news, he was working behind the scenes to make it.
Perhaps because he was on the right side of history, Carter has never been publicly criticized for his decisions to use journalism as a cover for spying or for deceiving his readers and colleagues by feigning objectivity about events in which he was secretly participating.
On November 28, 1967, at age seventy, Carter suffered a heart attack and died in his chair, behind a desk in his office in the National Press Building.57