Joseph E. Persico (11 page)

Not only did Vincent Astor face rivals in Phillips, the ONI, MID, and FBI, but a new competitor was about to enter FDR's clandestine service. John Franklin Carter had first met Roosevelt in January 1932 after writing a profile of the then New York governor for
Liberty
magazine. The piece prompted an impressed FDR to invite Carter to Albany just as the governor was beginning to emerge as a Democratic candidate for the presidency. Carter told FDR, “You're going to be elected President.” Roosevelt, he later recalled, “wasn't quite as sure as I was.”

Carter had been born in Fall River, Massachusetts, in 1897, one of seven children of an Episcopalian minister. He attended Yale with Stephen Vincent Benet, Thornton Wilder, Archibald MacLeish, and Henry Luce and thereafter was rarely out of sparkling company. Carter worked for just one month on a new magazine called
Time,
launched by his classmate Henry Luce, before he left to join
The New York Times.
Carter became an ardent New Dealer and in 1936 went to work as a speechwriter and idea man for Henry Wallace, then secretary of agriculture. He was described by a colleague as “brilliant, cynical, occasionally cockeyed and always exciting.” After leaving government, Carter started a syndicated column, “We the People,” written under the pen name Jay Franklin. His office in the National Press Building was just blocks from the White House.

Early in 1941, Carter tested out on undersecretary of state Sumner Welles a scheme that had been percolating in his mind as America seemed fated for war. He told Welles that the various intelligence services were “pretty well loused up and floundering around. There might be a use for a small and informal intelligence unit operating out of the White House without titles without any bullshit. . . .” Besides, Carter believed that since he had worked hard to get FDR elected for the controversial third term, he deserved something. Welles passed Carter's idea along to the President, who immediately asked the columnist to stop by the White House. Carter had a head start before he even met with the President. He did not like the State Department, nor did FDR. Roosevelt found its policy guidance rigid and excessively neutral. State, in his judgment, was defeatist, reflected in the pessimism of his envoy to Britain, Joe Kennedy. He suspected department careerists of leaking secrets to the isolationists, and he had distrusted State's notoriously porous Gray code even before the Tyler Kent episode. The President was aware of the old story that as far back as the 1920s the American consul in Shanghai made his retirement speech to the diplomatic community in this code, his remarks understood by all. More important, FDR believed the department was poorly equipped to conduct intelligence abroad. A young Dean Acheson, who would one day rise to secretary of state, noted, “Techniques for gathering information differed only by reason of the typewriter and the telegraph from the techniques which John Quincy Adams used in St. Petersburg and Benjamin Franklin was using in Paris.”

Carter made his pitch to the President for the informal White House intelligence ring and found FDR receptive. Roosevelt was aware that during World War I President Wilson had been secretly advised by a body called The Inquiry. At its peak, The Inquiry numbered 126 scholars, scientists, and literary figures, including the historian Samuel Eliot Morison and the journalist Walter Lippmann, currently writing for
The New Republic.
Its members worked out of anonymous quarters in Manhattan and prepared confidential peace terms and redrawn maps of Europe for Wilson to pursue in the postwar era. To FDR, what Carter was proposing had the ring of The Inquiry. The man seemed to know everybody—officials, diplomats, the entire press corps domestic and foreign, and corporate executives all over the globe. He also had access to the National Broadcasting Company's worldwide shortwave network. And FDR grasped that Carter's profession offered the perfect cover for delivering intelligence, a Washington journalist coming to the White House occasionally to interview the President.

On February 13 the President approved the establishment of “a small special intelligence and fact finding unit” under Carter. He also arranged for plausible deniability. As Carter described FDR's terms, “The overall condition was attached to the operation by President Roosevelt that it should be entirely secret and would be promptly disavowed in the event of publicity.” It was left to Adolf Berle at State, FDR's intelligence handyman, to implement the Rube Goldberg apparatus the President had concocted. That year's military appropriations act included an “Emergency Fund for the President,” from which FDR transferred $10,000 to the State Department. State was then to finance Carter, ostensibly by buying from him surveys on conditions in various countries, with Germany leading the list.

On February 20, a week after FDR had approved Carter as his newest spy, Berle described to his superior, Sumner Welles, his less than impressive first encounter with the columnist. “Jay Franklin (J.F. Carter) came in to see me today. He stated as a result of his conversation with the President and with you, and preparatory to the work he had been asked to do, he had spent some seven hundred dollars, and that he would be broke by the end of this week. . . . He wanted an advance of some kind against the compensation which he would eventually receive for his work. Accordingly I lent him seven hundred dollars.” Berle concluded, “I am not, of course, familiar with what the President has asked him to do, nor do I wish to be. . . .”

Carter was cast in the Roosevelt mold—quick, bright, bold, passionate in his beliefs, with the passion leavened by practicality and a sense of humor. The new spy's assignments roved indiscriminately. Besides collecting intelligence, FDR wanted Carter to do political analysis, evaluate new weapons, troubleshoot military bottlenecks, and monitor other intelligence operations. It would no doubt have surprised and saddened Vincent Astor to learn that the President specifically asked Carter to keep an eye on his old friend's operation.

After several months, Carter had only eleven full-time agents on the payroll in his determination to keep the operation compact. He managed a clever multiplier effect by obtaining from the U.S. Passport Division the names of persons given visas for travel to foreign countries and those of foreigners coming into the United States. Carter's operatives would then coach willing outward-bound travelers in what to look for abroad, and would question arriving foreigners willing to describe military and industrial conditions, particularly in the Axis countries.

*

The boldest covert operation that FDR had been pursuing, while America was still technically neutral, was unknown to either Carter or Astor, the FBI, or the military intelligence branches. Back in July 1940, Treasury secretary Henry Morgenthau had dined with the British ambassador, Lord Lothian, Henry Stimson, and Frank Knox. Lothian had conducted a clever campaign of ingratiating himself with Americans, among whom Morgenthau, because of his closeness to FDR, had become a prime target. The British peer, born Philip Henry Kerr, was fifty-eight at the time, a tall, big-boned man with a high brow and Roman nose, every bit the lord. Despite his rank and wealth, Lothian had quickly grasped that Americans were much taken with bluebloods exhibiting a just-plain-folks demeanor. Thus he wore a battered gray fedora, drove his own car, and bought his own train tickets when traveling in the United States.

That July evening, during an after-dinner conversation, Lothian pointed out to Morgenthau that though Japan's belligerency and territorial ambitions were obvious, the United States was still selling fuel to the Japanese. Lothian then dropped a bombshell: “If you will stop shipping aviation gasoline to Japan,” he offered, “we will blow up the oil wells in the Dutch East Indies so that the Japanese can't come down and get [them]. . . . At the same time the Royal Air Force could concentrate its bombing attacks on German plants producing synthetic gasoline.” Caught in this three-way squeeze, the Axis powers would simply run out of gas. The United States was not at war with Japan, nor was Britain. The ambassador's proposal could be seen as nothing less than blatant aggression against the Japanese. The scheme, Morgenthau later confided to his diary, left him with his “breath . . . taken away.” If the British “would blow up the wells, it would simply electrify the world and really put some belief in England. . . . [I]f we don't do something and do it fast, Japan is just going to gobble up one thing after another.”

The next day, Morgenthau went to the White House to test Lothian's idea on FDR. The Treasury secretary, a Jew, had become a hard-line interventionist, prompted in part by what Hitler was doing to his co-religionists in Europe. He later told FDR, “[T]his thing might give us peace in three to six months.” The President thereupon launched into a monologue lasting half an hour, during which he astonished Morgenthau with his pinpoint knowledge of oil deposits around the world. FDR also told him that he had been thinking for months of blockading all of Europe, “just leaving a small channel open directly to England through which all ships would have to pass. . . .”

Morgenthau's visit had run overtime, and Stimson, Knox, and Sumner Welles were outside the office waiting to see the President. FDR asked Morgenthau if he minded if they came in. “By all means, they are great guys,” he answered. With the others ushered in, the President casually floated the Lothian proposal, without mentioning Morgenthau's role. To the Treasury secretary's delight Stimson favored taking a hard line against Japan. But Welles was aghast and warned that so rash a move would cause Japan to declare war on Great Britain. The meeting had been vintage Roosevelt—elicit several opinions, the more contrary the less likely FDR was to go off on a wrongheaded course. The debate over Lothian's proposed swap, an American fuel embargo for British destruction of the Dutch East Indies oil fields, ended in an Oval Office stalemate.

Still, the President hankered after the near impossible, hurting Japan without provoking war. The next opportunity rose in December 1940. Roosevelt was outraged by Japan's indiscriminate bombing of Chinese cities and the aerial machine-gunning of helpless civilians. Morgenthau wrote in his diary: “. . . [H]e [FDR] has mentioned it to me that it would be a nice thing if the Chinese would bomb Japan.” China's leader, Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, had sent Morgenthau a plea for five hundred U.S. aircraft. With airpower, Chiang argued, he could retake Canton and Hankow. He could threaten bases on Hainan and Formosa, even Japan itself. Chiang's request had been delivered to Morgenthau by the generalissimo's American air advisor, Claire Chennault, a former U.S. Army Air Corps captain. As Chennault explained to Morgenthau, the objective was to “burn out the industrial heart of the [Japanese] Empire with firebomb attacks on the teeming bamboo ant heaps of Honshu and Kyushu.” The Treasury secretary had close ties to the Chinese ambassador to Washington, T. V. Soong, Chiang's brother-in-law. Soong wanted Morgenthau to sell Chiang's proposal to FDR. Morgenthau leveled with the ambassador. “Well, his asking for 500 planes is like asking for 500 stars.” Still, he took the Chinese proposal to the President, who put one question about Chiang to Morgenthau: “Is he still willing to fight?” Yes, Morgenthau assured him, “that is what the message is about.” “Wonderful,” the President replied. “That's what I've been talking about for four years.”

Five hundred planes were out of the question, but Roosevelt offered a compromise. He asked what the Chinese might think of obtaining a few long-range American bombers, with the understanding that they would be used to firebomb Tokyo and other Japanese cities. When Morgenthau relayed this proposal to T. V. Soong, the Chinese ambassador was ecstatic. “This would give us a chance to hit back,” he answered.

On the morning of December 19 the President held a cabinet meeting after which he asked Morgenthau, Hull, Stimson, and Knox to stay behind. They retreated to the Oval Office, where they debated the practicality of giving China bombers to attack Japan. The President ran his finger over a map that T. V. Soong had provided showing Chinese air bases only a tantalizing 650 miles from Tokyo. He appeared to give his approval to Morgenthau's idea when he said, “The four of you work out a program.”

FDR's swings, from cautiously scotching a chance for Astor's Room to spy inside Japan to endorsing an outright act of belligerency against that country, reflect the multiplicity of the Roosevelt character. His biographer James MacGregor Burns observes: “As war administrator, as businessman, as president he liked to try new things, to take a dare, to bring something off with a flourish.” A clandestine strike against Japan fitted that definition perfectly.

Two days after the meeting with the President, Morgenthau invited Soong, General Mow, of the Chinese air force, and Claire Chennault to his elegant three-story home at 2201 R Street near Washington's Embassy Row. Over drinks they estimated the number of bombers, pursuit planes, and logistical support required to hit Tokyo. Chennault raised a problem. They could not expect barely trained Chinese pilots simply to hop into B-17s and make for Japan. Only American pilots backed by American flight and ground crews could currently perform such a mission. That was no problem, Morgenthau said. The U.S. Army Air Corps would release men from active duty who could then volunteer to fly for China. Morgenthau's brainstorm—American planes, flown by American pilots, firebombing Japanese cities—remained a rashly belligerent act. He believed, nevertheless, that he had the President's proxy to go forward.

Secretary of War Stimson began having second thoughts. On Sunday, December 22, he invited the Treasury secretary, Knox, and the Army chief, General George C. Marshall, to his home “to try to get some mature brains into [the plan], before we got committed to it.” General Marshall doubted the Army could spare any planes for China. His massive authority carried weight. Morgenthau agreed to scale down the program and drop the request for bombers. He asked instead for a hundred pursuit planes. Stimson approved the compromise. When informed of the deal, Soong and Chennault, having started from zero, were delighted to get any planes. FDR unhesitatingly approved a scheme under which an initial hundred pilots resigned from the Army Air Corps and volunteered to fly P-40 pursuit aircraft, presumably financed by the Chinese, but secretly paid by the U.S. government. They would receive $600 a month plus $500 for every Japanese plane destroyed. Thus was born a World War II legend, the American Volunteer Group, more colorfully, the Flying Tigers, led by Claire Chennault.