Uncle John's Great Big Bathroom Reader (66 page)

Newton-John was still smarting from her first film role, in a movie called
Tomorrow.
She hated the film and didn’t want to be trapped in another film she didn’t like. So she insisted on filming a screen test for
Grease
, and she reserved the right to turn down the part if she didn’t like herself in the test. The test went fine, and she took the part.

CHECK THEIR I.D.’S

Dinah Manoff (Marty) was the only real teenager among the cast. She was 19. Travolta was 24, Newton-John 29, Jeff Conaway (Kenicke) 27, Didi Conn (Frenchy) 26, Barry Pearl (Doody) 27, Michael Tucci (Sonny) 28. Stockard Channing (Rizzo) was the oldest. She was 34.

BOOM AND BUST

Film critics hated
Grease
as much as the fans loved it. The
New Yorker
, for example, called it “a bogus, clumsily jointed pastiche of late 1950s high school musicals.” Yet it was the #1 moneymaking film of the year and has since become the highest-grossing musical flick ever ($400 million worldwide).

In 1998, the critics greeted the 20th anniversary reissue of the film with their usual chorus of boos. “No revival, however joyously promoted, can conceal the fact that this is an average musical, pleasant, upbeat, and plastic,” said one. “Because she looks genetically engineered,” snapped another, “Newton-John didn’t bring much life to the party.”

Yet Grease keeps rolling on.

       
•
 
The play has been staged an estimated 90,000 times by amateur and stock companies.

       
•
 
The video of the movie has sold more than 11 million copies since its release in 1983, making it one of Paramount’s top ten best-selling videos of all time.

       
•
 
The soundtrack—with its three former Top Ten hits—still sells about 9,000 copies per week in this country. Total copies sold around the world: 20 million.

Ever since the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor in 1941, people have wondered if the U.S. could have prevented it. In our
7th Bathroom Reader,
we reprinted an article that speculated on whether President Roosevelt knew it was coming, and let it happen anyway, to draw America into World War II. (Answer: probably not.) In another volume, we told the story of how radar operators mistook Japanese planes on their screen for a mechanical malfunction. Now we have the ultimate story—the tale of how FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover had advance information about Pearl Harbor...and ignored it.

P
OPOV...DUSKO POPOV

In 1940, agents for the Abwehr, Nazi Germany’s military intelligence service, approached a 30-year-old Yugoslavian playboy named Dusko Popov, and asked if he’d like to become a spy for Hitler’s war machine.

Popov detested the Nazis. But he accepted their offer...and then turned himself in to MI-6, the British counterintelligence agency. “Following intensive training by both the Germans and the British,” Curt Gentry writes in
J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and the Secrets
, “Popov became one of Britain’s most successful double agents, the misleading information he fed the Nazis resulted in a number of major intelligence victories.”

Helping Out

Popov betrayed every German agent with whom he came into contact. As Ernest Volkman writes in
Spies: The Secret Agents Who Changed History
, because of Popov’s work, the British “were able to identify every single agent or asset dispatched from Germany. Those sent to British territory were rounded up and evaluated as possible double [agent]s; those who either refused or did not seem suitable for the task were executed.”

And because the British had cracked the Abwehr’s secret codes, they could even monitor how well Popov’s steady stream of misinformation was influencing decision-making in Berlin.

...On Second Thought, Let’s Not Invade

Popov’s efforts may have even altered the course of the war by saving Great Britain from invasion and defeat at the hands of the Nazis. According to Volkman, Popov’s greatest achievement was to convince the Germans, via cooked documents, that the British were militarily much stronger than the Germans assumed (although, in fact, Britain had no real power to halt a German attack in 1940). The deception played no small role in Hitler’s eventual decision to abandon Operation Sea Lion, the planned invasion of the British Isles.

COMING TO AMERICA

The Abwehr was so completely fooled by Popov’s deception, and so impressed with his work, that it gave him one of the most important intelligence assignments of the war. Suspecting that the United States would soon enter the war on the side of the British, the Abwehr ordered Popov to travel to New York and set up a spy ring that would study and report back on the size and strength of the U.S. military.

The assignment represented an incredible opportunity—not for the Nazis, but for the U.S. and Britain: With Popov’s help, the U.S. government, acting through the FBI, might be able to monitor, mislead, and ultimately destroy all Nazi espionage efforts in the United States for the remainder of the war.

Meeting with the FBI

There was more: When Popov met with agents in the FBI’s New York field office, he took with him two items of interest to the bureau.

The first was samples of the Abwehr’s new “microdot” technology, which was capable of shrinking an entire page of text to a tiny dot the size of the period at the end of this sentence. The microdot could then be glued on top of a comma or a period in an ordinary typed letter and sent back to Germany through the regular mail. Even if the letter were intercepted and read, it was unlikely the microdot would be discovered because Great Britain and the United States had never seen anything like it.

The second item of interest was a 97-line questionnaire listing
the information that Germany’s ally, Japan, hoped to obtain with the help of Popov’s spy ring. Most of the questions were general in nature, but four addressed military installations on the Hawaiian Islands, and five additional questions, the most specific of the list, asked about a naval base called Pearl Harbor. Here’s the questionnaire that the FBI was handed:

Hawaii—Ammunition dumps and mine depots.

1. Details about naval ammunition and mine depot on the Isle of Kushua [sic] (Pearl Harbor). If possible, sketch.

2. Naval ammunition depot Lualuelei. Exact position? Is there a railway line (junction)?

3. The total ammunition reserve of the army is supposed to be in the rock of the Crater Aliamanu. Position?

4. Is the Crater Punchbowl (Honolulu) being used as ammunition dump? If not, are there other military works?

Naval Strong Point Pearl Harbor.

1. Exact details and sketch about the situation of the state wharf, of the pier installations, workshops, petrol installations, situations of dry dock No. 1 and of the new dry dock which is being built.

2. Details about the submarine station (plan of situation). What land installations are in existence?

3. Where is the station for mine search formations? How far has the dredger work progressed at the entrance and in the east and southeast lock? Depths of water?

4. Number of anchorages?

5. Is there a floating dock in Pearl Harbor or is the transfer of such a dock to this place intended?

BOMBS AWAY!

Popov had learned from a friend named Johann Jebsen, also a double agent, that the Japanese foreign minister and several top naval officials had taken an unusual interest in a stunningly effective attack by the British navy on the Italian port of Taranto. Using only 19 bombers launched from a single aircraft carrier more than 170 miles out to sea, the British navy had knocked nearly half the entire Italian fleet out of commission.

Jebsen himself had escorted the Japanese officials to Taranto,
and he noted that they were particularly interested in the success of the British technique of dive-bombing the naval targets. When he learned of the questionnaire that the Abwehr had given Popov, he was convinced that the two were connected. “If my calculated opinion interests you,” Jebsen told Popov, “the Japanese will attack the United States.” Most likely at Pearl Harbor, most likely using dive-bombers.

STUCK IN NEW YORK

Popov told the FBI everything he knew. His information was good...perhaps too good. Percy “Sam” Foxworth, the FBI’s Agent in Charge of the New York office, was skeptical from the start. “It all looks too precise, too complete, to be believed,” he told Popov. “The questionnaire plus the other information spell out in detail exactly where, when, how, and by whom we are to be attacked. If anything, it sounds like a trap.”

Popov was under orders from the Abwehr to go immediately to Hawaii, but the FBI vetoed the trip and ordered him to remain in New York until Director J. Edgar Hoover decided whether to approve the Nazi spy ring. So Popov took up residence in an exclusive Park Avenue penthouse, where he resumed his passions for women (his British code name was “Tricycle,” reportedly because of his penchant for taking two women—preferably twins—to bed at the same time), alcohol, and the good life while waiting for Hoover to make up his mind.

Keeping an Eye on Things

Unfortunately for Popov and the Allied war effort, Hoover ordered Popov’s penthouse placed under surveillance. Heavy surveillance. “If I bend over to smell a bowl of flowers,” Popov later complained, “I scratch my nose on a microphone.”

When word of Popov’s lavish accommodations and lurid lifestyle found its way to Hoover’s desk, the director was furious. Any link with Popov, if exposed, could sully the FBI’s carefully constructed, squeaky-clean public image. What would happen to the Bureau’s reputation if the public learned that it couldn’t catch Nazi spies on its own without the help of a womanizing foreigner who wore too much cologne and smoked cigarettes out of an ivory holder?

MEETING MR. HOOVER

Popov spent more than five weeks in New York before J. Edgar Hoover finally agreed to meet with him.

The meeting did not go well. “There was Hoover,” Popov wrote in his autobiography, “looking like a sledgehammer in search of an anvil.”

“I can catch spies without your or anybody else’s help,” Hoover barked. “What have you done since you came here?”

“Nothing but wait for instructions, which never came,” I answered. Hoover breathed in deeply and noisily. It seemed to calm him. “What kind of a bogus spy are you?” he said accusingly....”You’re like all double agents....You’re begging for information to sell to your German friends so you can make a lot of money and be a playboy....” He turned to [an assistant] and said, “That man is trying to teach me my job.”

....I recognized the futility of it all. “I don’t think anyone could teach you anything,” I told the FBI chief, and walked toward the door.

“Good riddance,” he screamed after me.

Hoover vetoed the German spy ring. That was just the beginning. He also confiscated the funds Popov received from Germany and nearly arrested his Abwehr handler, which would have exposed him as a double agent and made him useless to the British; and then he forced the British to withdraw Popov from the U.S. Not that Popov minded—as Curt Gentry writes, Popov wasn’t unhappy about leaving. The trip had, he felt, been a waste of time—with one extraordinarily important exception. When the Japanese launched their “surprise” attack on Pearl Harbor, Popov knew, the United States would be ready and waiting.

MISSED OPPORTUNITY

Did Hoover’s insecurities cost the United States the most important intelligence coup of the war? Popov wasn’t alone in thinking so. In 1945, Rear Admiral Edwin Layton, the Fleet Intelligence Officer at Honolulu during the bombing of Pearl Harbor, published a report on the attack. He found that where Popov’s warning was concerned, Hoover “dropped the ball completely....His failure,” Layton concluded, “represented another American fumble on the road to Pearl Harbor.”

In June 1942, J. Edgar Hoover claimed credit for the FBI’s capture of eight Nazi saboteurs who were deposited by submarine along the New York and Florida shores. Here’s what really happened....

A
LONG THE WATERFRONT

Not long after midnight on June 13, 1942, a Coast Guards-man named John Cullen saw four men struggling with an inflatable raft in the heavy surf off the town of Amagansett, on the eastern coast of Long Island.

Cullen stopped to investigate. The men told him they were fishermen, and Cullen might have believed them...except that the men were armed (fishermen at sea usually aren’t), and they offered him $260 to forget he’d ever seen them. Why would fishermen do a thing like that?