J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and the Secrets (53 page)

B
y the end of 1945 the FBI had unearthed—largely through leads supplied by other intelligence services and repentant ex-Communist informants—what appeared to be no fewer than five major Soviet espionage rings. Ordinarily the FBI director would have bragged of such successes, parlaying them into more money and more agents when appropriations time came round. But not these cases. One by one, starting with the first, they blew up in his face. Only one resulted in a conviction, and even that was obtained by subterfuge.

On taking over the
Amerasia
investigation from the OSS, the FBI had immediately mimicked the other agency’s tactics, reburglarizing the magazine’s offices. But Hoover didn’t leave it at that. The seventy-five men he assigned to the case committed at least half a dozen other bag jobs, planted bugs, tapped phones, and placed the magazine’s editors, staff, and suspected sources under close surveillance.

The biggest difference between the OSS and the FBI operations, however, was that the FBI got caught.

With the evidence thus obtained—there were even identifiable fingerprints on some of the government documents—Hoover was convinced the FBI had a prosecutable case for espionage. However, James McInerney, then chief of the internal security section of the Criminal Division of the Justice Department, felt otherwise. Most of the evidence was inadmissible, he argued, having been obtained through either microphones or illegal searches. In addition, the documents were, he felt, “of innocuous, very innocuous character…a little above the level of teacup gossip.”
¹
As for the charge of espionage, there was no
evidence that any of the materials had been passed on to a foreign power.

But McInerney was not about to take on J. Edgar Hoover. He agreed to prosecute, hoping that at the time of the arrests the FBI would obtain enough admissible evidence to make the charges stick.

He took his time about it, however, and during the delay someone spread the rumor that it was the president himself who was postponing action, so as not to interfere with the current Hopkins-Stalin talks in Moscow. On hearing this, Truman was so incensed that—forgetting entirely the chain of command he’d once insisted upon—he called not his attorney general, Tom Clark, or even the FBI director, J. Edgar Hoover, but Myron Gurnea, the FBI supervisor in charge of the case, telling him, according to someone who was in the Oval Office at the time, “This is the president speaking. I don’t care who has told you to stop this. You are not to do it. Go straight ahead with this and it doesn’t matter who gets hurt. This has to be run down. If anybody suggests that you postpone, or anything else, you are not to do it without first getting personal approval from me.”
²

Hoover must have had decidedly mixed feelings: on the one hand, the president’s breach of bureaucratic protocol—he’d not only bypassed
him
but given orders to one of
his
agents—was a personal affront of monumental proportions; on the other, Truman had suddenly become an ally, taking
his
side.

Acting on the president’s orders, on June 6, 1945, the FBI conducted a series of simultaneous raids, seizing some eight hundred documents and arresting two of
Amerasia’s
editors and four other suspects on charges of violating the Espionage Act.

In an attempt to shore up his case, McInerney then reversed the usual procedure and presented his evidence to a federal grand jury
after
the arrests had taken place. That body was so unimpressed that it refused to indict three of the six—the editor Kate Mitchell, the writer Mark Gayn, and the foreignservice officer John Stewart Service—and reduced the charges against the remaining three—the senior editor Philip Jaffe, ONI Lieutenant Andrew Roth, and the State Department employee Emmanuel Larsen—from espionage to unlawful possession of government documents.

But the case had actually fallen apart much earlier, at the time of the arrests, because of an indiscretion on the part of one of the arresting agents. When Larsen was arrested, in his apartment, he overheard one agent tell another where to look for certain documents. Realizing the FBI had been there before, Larsen eventually got his super to admit that he had let the agents in on two or three prior occasions. With this proof of surreptitious entry, on September 28, 1945, Larsen’s attorney filed a motion to squash the indictment against his client.

Coincidentally, that same day Albert Arent, the attorney for Philip Jaffe, was meeting with Justice Department prosecutors in an attempt to reach a plea bargain for his client. To forestall his learning of Larsen’s motion, the JD attorneys tried to persuade the clerk of the court to temporarily keep the filing secret. Failing in that, they immediately switched to their fallback plan, engaging
Arent in four hours of noninterrupted negotiations. Arent emerged from the meeting convinced he had won an excellent deal for his client—a guilty plea to the charge of unauthorized possession of government documents, in return for a substantial fine of $2,500. His satisfaction was short-lived; in court the next day he denounced the JD attorneys as “sons-of-bitches.”
³

The
Amerasia
case not only brought to an end the brief Truman-Hoover alliance; it marked a turning point in Attorney General Tom Clark’s amiable relations with the FBI director. On learning about the
Amerasia
break-ins for the first time when the Larsen motion was filed, Clark recalled, “I told Hoover that I thought this was wrong, that we would have to dismiss the charges. He was furious. That probably started the deterioration of our relationship.”
⁴

There is no mention of
the Amerasia
case in the Bureau’s authorized history, Don Whitehead’s
The FBI Story.
Hoover himself later explained the lack of convictions in the case as being due to the taint of the OSS break-in, conveniently forgetting that it was the FBI which got caught.
^*

Having been caught, the FBI didn’t change its practices—it continued to bug, burglarize, and tap—but Hoover learned at least one lesson from the affair: not to tell the Justice Department exactly how evidence was obtained.

He also began, about this same time, to look for other ways to punish those whom he believed to be guilty, ways which circumvented judges, juries, and the legal restrictions of the courts.

The third-most-important woman in J. Edgar Hoover’s life—after his mother and Emma Goldman—walked into the New Haven, Connecticut, field office in late August of 1945 and told the SAs who interviewed her that for some half a dozen years she had worked as a courier for a Soviet spy ring operating in Washington, D.C.

Although the press later dubbed Elizabeth Bentley the “blond spy queen,” she was no Mata Hari. She
was
blond; she was also thirty-seven, but she looked much older, was overweight to the point of dowdiness, and was quite obviously very neurotic.

The agents were apparently so unimpressed with her, or her tale, that eleven weeks passed before the New York field office held a follow-up interview.

Even this might not have taken place, had not another incident occurred in the interim. On the evening of September 5, Igor Gouzenko, a cipher clerk in the Soviet embassy in Ottawa, Canada, gathered up his pregnant wife, his young son, and more than a hundred secret documents and attempted to defect to the Canadians. He first tried the
Ottawa Journal,
then the Justice Ministry and two other government agencies, but no one wanted to risk offending the Soviets.
^*
Only the efforts of a sympathetic neighbor and, reluctantly, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police saved the Gouzenkos from being seized by the NKVD.

Although no one wanted to hear it, Gouzenko informed the Mounties that all during the war, while Canada, Great Britain, and the United States were making sacrifices to help their Soviet ally, that ally had been operating espionage networks in all three countries, their highest priority being to obtain information on the processes used in the development and manufacture of the atomic bomb.

As a cipher clerk, Gouzenko dealt mostly with code names. However, using the documents, together with his recollections of conversations he’d heard, plus other leads, the intelligence officers were able to identify several dozen persons—including a member of the Canadian Parliament—as Soviet agents, the most important being a British nuclear physicist, Allan Nunn May.
^†
Not only had May supplied the Soviets with many of the technical details of the bomb’s construction,
and
a list of most of the Anglo-American scientists working on the Manhattan Project; he’d even given them samples of enriched uranium 235 and 233.

Hoover’s two representatives arrived in Ottawa on September 10 and were briefed by their Canadian and British counterparts, including Sir William Stephenson, “Intrepid” of the BSC. Not until October, however, were they allowed to question Gouzenko himself. Although the cipher clerk could supply few positive identities, he did provide one especially tantalizing clue. He stated “that he had been informed by Lieutenant Kulakov in the office of the Soviet
military attaché that the Soviets had an agent in the United States in May 1945 who was an assistant to the then secretary of state, Edward R. Stettinius.”
⁹

The FBI suddenly became very interested in Elizabeth Bentley. When she was finally located and interviewed, on November 7, 1945, she told quite a tale. A New England-born Vassar graduate, Bentley had gone to Italy for postgraduate study; had witnessed and been appalled by the rise of fascism; and, convinced the Communists were the only ones fighting it, had on her return to the United States joined the American Communist party. After proving herself, she had in about 1938 been instructed to go underground and was assigned to Jacob Golos, an NKVD agent who, as a front, ran a New York travel agency called World Tourists. Acting as Golos’s courier—he also became her lover—Bentley made biweekly trips to Washington, where her main contact was Nathan Gregory Silvermaster, an economist with the Farm Security Administration. According to Bentley, Silvermaster headed a large Soviet espionage ring, with contacts in almost every major agency in the government, who supplied him with “thousands” of official reports. He then photographed them—he had a darkroom in the basement of his home, she said—and gave her the rolls of exposed but undeveloped film for transmission to Golos.

Following Golos’s death in 1943 of a heart attack, Bentley had several other handlers, including a man who was later identified as Anatoli Gromov, the first secretary of the Soviet embassy, and she was, briefly, given courier duty with another network, this one operating under the control of Victor Perlo, an economist with the War Production Board. In addition, she collected information on her own, mostly from acquaintances in New York City.

Not having seen any of the original documents or photographs, Bentley did not know what they contained. Nor had she met most of the people in the two networks. But she had learned some of their names, and these she now supplied to the agents.

Initially, Bentley apparently provided fourteen names. In subsequent interviews the number grew to forty-three, and by the time she “surfaced” before HUAC, in 1948, it passed a hundred, leading some to suspect that Bentley was naming everyone she’d ever met, heard of, or had suggested to her.

Following her lover’s death, Bentley had become disillusioned with communism, she said, and had broken with the party; hence her August visit to the New Haven office.

It was obviously not a clean break, however, for on October 17, 1945—three months after her New Haven appearance and just three weeks before her first detailed interrogation by the FBI—Bentley had met Gromov and received $2,000.
^*

This was not the only discrepancy in Bentley’s account, but apparently it worried Hoover less than the realization that for the whole duration of the war
two major Communist spy rings had operated right under his nose and he had known nothing about them.

It compounded this oversight that the FBI already knew about Golos—in 1940 he’d been indicted for failing to register as a foreign agent, pled guilty, been fined $500, and given a suspended sentence—but had somehow overlooked Miss Bentley, who not only was his lover but had become the vice-president and secretary of the new travel agency he’d formed after World Tourists’s Soviet links were exposed.

There were other problems with Bentley’s story. First and foremost, it was entirely uncorroborated. There was no evidence, documentary or otherwise, to support her claims. Then too, she was an obvious hysteric and, if called upon to testify, would make a poor witness. But probably overriding such doubts was the knowledge that the information she had supplied would deliver an extremely damaging blow to two of the FBI director’s most hated enemies.

Hoover wasted no time. On November 8, the day after Bentley’s interview, he sent a top-secret, by-messenger-only memorandum to the president, via Harry Vaughan. It began:

“As a result of the Bureau’s investigative operations, information has been recently developed from a highly confidential source indicating that a number of persons employed by the Government of the United States have been furnishing data and information to persons outside the Federal Government, who are in turn transmitting this information to espionage agents of the Soviet Government.”

Hoover had to admit, however, “At the present time it is impossible to determine exactly how many of these people had actual knowledge of the disposition being made of the information they were transmitting,” but he assured the president, “I am continuing vigorous investigation for the purpose of establishing the degree and nature of the complicity of these people in this espionage ring.”
¹⁰

He then listed the names Bentley had provided. Of the fourteen, six had served with the Office of Strategic Services, while one, Duncan Lee, had been general counsel of the OSS and was a former law partner of William J. Donovan.
^*
Of the remainder, several had, at one time or another, worked in the Treasury Department. Of these, the most prominent was Harry Dexter White, Henry Morgenthau’s right-hand man.