J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and the Secrets (77 page)

L
istening over earphones from an adjoining hotel room, Special Agent Frederick Ayer, Jr., tried to keep his face from turning red. Although he’d been in the FBI only a few months—sworn in on August 25, 1941, he’d been rushed through an accelerated training program, then immediately assigned to the Washington field office—the young agent was already on his first technical surveillance.

Moreover, his target was not only a Nazi spy (alleged) but also a twenty-eight-year-old honey blond former Miss Europe, who—as the moans, groans, and exclamations indicated—was at this very moment busily “compromising” a young Naval Intelligence officer.

Ayer’s partner, an experienced ELINT man, had had time only to fill him in on a few of the details before handing him the earphones. This was a “special,” he’d told him. The report, which he was now typing while Ayer monitored the activity, would be hand delivered to the director.

The panting over, the couple were lazily conversing when Ayer suddenly froze. He recognized the man’s voice; there was no mistaking it; it belonged to one of his former Harvard classmates.

Although it meant violating the rules and regulations as set forth in the FBI Manual, Ayer couldn’t wait to get home and tell his wife: Guess who I bugged today?
John Fitzgerald Kennedy.

Inga Arvad had been busy during her twenty-eight years. First Miss Denmark, then Miss Europe (crowned by Maurice Chevalier), she married and divorced an Egyptian aristocrat, bluffed her way into a job as Berlin correspondent for a Copenhagen newspaper, interviewed Hermann Göring, and was among the select few invited to his wedding, where she was introduced to his best man,
Adolf Hitler. Apparently smitten—he pronounced her “a perfect Nordic beauty”—the führer granted her three exclusive interviews and took her, as his personal guest, to the 1936 Olympic Games.
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Returning to Denmark, she appeared in a movie, married its director, Paul Fejos, and became the mistress of a wealthy Swedish industrialist, Axel Wenner-gren. Arriving in the United States in 1940, she enrolled in the Columbia School of Journalism, where she was spotted by a visiting lecturer, Arthur Krock of the
New York Times.
Krock, who had a well-deserved reputation as a “skirt chaser,” passed her on to Frank Waldrop, executive editor of the
Washington Times Herald,
with the suggestion that he might wish to employ her. This was not the first attractive young lady Krock had recommended for employment (Waldrop jokingly asked him, “Who are you, our staff procurer?”), and Waldrop assigned her to write an interview column called “Did You Happen to See?”
²
Introduced to John F. Kennedy by his sister Kathleen, who also worked for the
Times Herald,
she interviewed Kennedy for her column and added him to her list of lovers. For his part, the young ensign, who was four years her junior, fell hard, even asking his father for permission to marry her.

Kennedy Senior strongly opposed the union. In addition to the obvious reason—Arvad was already married and the Kennedys were Catholic—one other probably went unstated: if her friendship with Hitler became known, it would resurrect talk about the ex-ambassador’s own pro-German leanings. (He had nothing against her personally, Joseph Kennedy assured Inga, and proved it by making passes whenever his son was out of the room.)
^*

Shortly after Pearl Harbor, a female staffer on the
Times Herald
denounced Arvad to Waldrop, claiming that she was a German spy. Waldrop, in turn, reported both Arvad and her accuser to the FBI, and Hoover instructed the Washington field office SAC McKee to “immediately institute appropriate physical surveillance.”
⁴

There were a few red faces at the FBI, and one in particular. Just three months earlier, Arvad had persuaded one of the capital’s most reclusive officials to consent to an interview. The subject of her October 30 column—whom she described as having the “keenest most intelligent eyes” and “a splendid physique”—was none other than the nation’s number two G-man.
⁵

Clyde Tolson rarely granted interviews; this would be one of his last.

Checking into Arvad’s background, the FBI discovered her friendship with Hitler and Göring, as well as her relationship with Wenner-gren, whom both the FBI and ONI were investigating on the suspicion that he was using his 320-foot yacht, the
Southern Cross,
to refuel German U-boats. By early 1942 the surveillance also turned up John F. Kennedy, as well as others she was seeing. That Arvad was still married to Fejos seemed to disturb Hoover even more than did her German connections, as several of the FBI reports refer
disapprovingly to Kennedy’s “affair with a married woman.”
⁶

Hoover reported his findings to President Roosevelt (who urged that she be “especially watched”),
⁷
Attorney General Biddle (who authorized a telephone tap), and the Office of Naval Intelligence.

Both the director of ONI, Captain Theodore S. Wilkinson, and the assistant director, Captain Howard F. Kingman, wanted to kick Kennedy out of the Navy, but Captain Samuel A. D. Hunter, Kennedy’s immediate superior, argued that such action would mark the young man for life and instead persuaded them to transfer him to the naval backwater of Charleston, South Carolina, and a job that would have little access to classified materials. It was a safe as well as a compassionate decision: everyone was well aware that, because of the ex-ambassador’s influence, the matter was politically sensitive.

Kennedy, however, didn’t break off the affair. On two weekends in February 1942 the FBI tailed Arvad (who was traveling under the alias Barbara White) from Washington to Charleston. One surveillance summary read, “Surveillance maintained upon subject from the time of her arrival in Charleston, S.C. at 8:20
A.M.
on 2-6-42 until her departure therefrom on 2-9-42 at 1:09 A.M. to return to WDC. While there, John Kennedy, Ensign, USN, spent each night with subject in her hotel room at the Fort Sumner Hotel, engaging in sexual intercourse on numerous occasions.”
⁸
At the request of the Bureau, the hotel had assigned them a prebugged room. They exchanged Washington gossip but discussed no military secrets.

According to some accounts, Joseph Kennedy learned of the FBI surveillance shortly after this—possibly from his old friend J. Edgar Hoover—and persuaded a former Wall Street colleague, Assistant Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal, to transfer his son overseas. According to William Sullivan, however, it was Hoover himself who recommended the transfer, “for security reasons.”
⁹

Although the end result was certainly not what the FBI director had intended, Kennedy was sent to the South Pacific, had his P-T boat rammed and sunk, returned home a hero, and—on the basis of his carefully edited war record, two ghostwritten books, and his father’s behind-the-scenes manipulation—was launched on his political career, serving first as a congressmen, then as a senator, and, in July of 1960, as the Democratic nominee for president of the United States.

If Hoover felt in any way responsible for Kennedy’s rise, he never bragged about it.

When the freshman representative from Massachusetts first arrived in Washington in 1947, he told Langdon Melvin, Jr., a close friend and legislative aide, that one of the things he wanted to do, now that he was a member of Congress, was get the Inga tape from the FBI. “I told him not to ask for it,” Melvin would recall, that “he’d never get it.”

Later, after he’d been elected senator, Kennedy told Melvin that he was
really
going to get the tape this time, to which his friend bluntly responded, “I
told him not to be stupid.” It apparently became an obsession with him. And, lest he forget, there were reminders.

In 1963 President Kennedy was grand marshal at the Harvard commencement. Among those in attendance was a former classmate, and former FBI agent, Frederick Ayer, Jr. As Kennedy, resplendent in silk top hat and tails, walked down the aisle, Ayer whispered, quite audibly, “How’s Inga?” Flashing an enraged glare, the president hissed, “You son of a bitch!”
¹⁰

Hoover’s documentation on the Arvad affair, and the uses to which the FBI director might put it, concerned John F. Kennedy and his father throughout the 1960 campaign and long afterward.

Damaging as the revelations of Kennedy’s sexual involvement with a suspected Nazi spy would have been to his political hopes, it could have been worse. For, voluminous as the FBI’s Kennedy-Arvad file was—it ran to 628 pages and included transcriptions of the two bugged weekends in the Charleston hotel room—it was incomplete.

Finally having decided that Inga Arvad was probably not a spy, or that at least “no subversive activities were discovered,”
¹¹
the FBI in March 1945 closed its investigation.

Fortunately for Kennedy, Hoover never learned of a last meeting of the pair, in New York City in November 1946. Three months later Arvad married the former cowboy actor Tim McCoy, who was thirty years her senior, and moved to Arizona. And six months after that she gave birth to a son, whom she named Ronald McCoy.

Not until twenty years later, when Ronald was in college, did Inga break her long silence and tell her son that she had been pregnant when she married McCoy, adding, “I don’t know who your father was for sure…I really don’t know if it was Jack or Tim. I don’t know.”
¹²

Nor was this Hoover’s only file on the Kennedys. Joseph Kennedy himself rated several and was mentioned at length in numerous others.

Certainly mindful of Hoover’s files, Kennedy Senior went out of his way to court the FBI director, making sure cards were sent on all the right anniversaries.
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He did not forget Tolson either. Each Christmas, in addition to a case of Jack Daniel’s Black Label, the former bootlegger included a case of Haig & Haig scotch. He also invited both men to his son John’s wedding to Jacqueline Bouvier. Regretfully declining, Hoover sent the Cape Cod resident agent in their place, who reported back that even in the midst of the wedding reception the groom had found time to praise the FBI director. “Senator Kennedy complimented
you and the Agents of the Bureau on the splendid job done and volunteered that he was anxious and willing at all times to ‘support Mr. Hoover and the FBI.’…The Honorable Joseph Kennedy [was] also present when the above statement was made and he, in turn, joined with his son in expressing his high regard for the Bureau.”
¹³

Bourbon, scotch, and flattery aside, there was only one way the Kennedys could assure Hoover’s continued silence about Inga Arvad and certain other extremely embarrassing items in his files. No one needed to spell it out. It was simply understood by everyone concerned. And since it was unstated, no one could call it blackmail.

Less than three weeks after JFK’s nomination, on August 4, 1960, the
New York Times
reported, “During a series of news conferences on his lawn today, Senator Kennedy was asked whether, if elected, he would retain J. Edgar Hoover as director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and continue the agency’s program as it is constituted. He replied that he would, of course, retain Mr. Hoover and planned no major changes within the agency.”
¹⁴

Although the statement was, in all likelihood, triggered in the usual way, by a planted question from a favored reporter, both the candidate and his father must have anticipated it well in advance, realizing there was only one possible response.

Although Hoover favored Nixon and did what he could behind the scenes to aid the campaign, he did not overlook the possibility that Kennedy might be elected, and acted accordingly.

For example, Hoover informed Kennedy that one of his staff members had formerly been a Communist, thus giving him time to dismiss the man and put himself in the FBI director’s debt, before leaking the same information to Nixon, who eagerly released it.

On the one hand, the devout Presbyterian established a working relationship with Father Cronin, Nixon’s chief speech writer, and energetically furnished him with derogatory information about the Kennedys and their operatives. On the other, he was clearly unnerved by the growing number of Roman Catholics in the FBI, convinced that they were all supporters of JFK.

Their loyalty was critical, for Hoover’s surveillance of the Democratic nominee was adding volumes to the Official/Confidential files. And the themes were not traditionally presidential.

“Associate of Top Hoodlums Attends Religious Services with Massachusetts Senator John F. Kennedy” was the reporting agent’s superscription for an event back in February 1958. Phoenix agents had learned that the “closest friend” of the “top hoodlum”
¹⁵
Joseph Bonanno had attended mass alongside Kennedy at Sts. Peter and Paul Church in Tucson.

Early in 1960 an airtel memo to the director described orgiastic goings-on during the Las Vegas filming of the Rat Pack movie,
Oceans 11.
“Show girls from all over the town were running in and out of the Senator’s suite,” the report claimed. Kennedy was fraternizing at the Sands Hotel with the singer
Frank Sinatra, described by an informant as “a pawn of the hoodlum element,” and his own brother-in-law, the actor Peter Lawford, who supposedly held “an interest of one half of one per cent” in the mob-controlled gambling palace. One unusually beautiful party girl, “a tall brunette UF [unidentified female],” was observed for the first time. Hoover learned much about her when she began visiting the White House for sexual matinees the following year.
¹⁶

From taps and bugs intended to reveal the workings of organized crime, the FBI learned that Sinatra had asked the notorious Chicago Mafia boss Sam “Mo Mo” Giancana for help with the controlled wards of Mayor Daley’s highly predictable electorate. In fact, Hoover learned that returns were creatively falsified to swing Illinois into the Kennedy column. He was certain of the information. His taps covered the phones of the sly counters in workingclass Chicago River precincts as they put together a counterfeit victory.