On August 14, 1941, nearly four months before Pearl Harbor, a senior FBI official sent Edgar a report on Dusan ‘Dusko’ Popov, a Yugoslav who had just arrived in New York. He was a double agent, dealing with the Allies and the Germans at the same time. And thirty years later, when he published his war memoirs, he would startle the world with the claim that he had warned the FBI in advance that the Japanese planned to attack Pearl Harbor. He had tried, he said, to give this information to Edgar personally, but had encountered only a stream of abuse.
Popov, the son of a wealthy industrialist, was twenty-nine in 1941. The ground had been laid for his wartime adventures when, while studying law in pre-war Nazi Germany, he forged a strong friendship with another well-to-do student, a German named Johann Jebsen. In 1940, when Jebsen came to Belgrade and told Popov he was working for the Abwehr, German military intelligence, he asked his friend to do the same. For both men it was the start of a tortuous and dangerous trail – one that would end in death for Jebsen.
Popov was openly opposed to the Nazis, and Jebsen’s role with the Abwehr was only a front. He was in fact anti-Hitler and had close links to the Abwehr chief Admiral Canaris, who, scholars now believe, was working against Hitler throughout the war. Asked by Jebsen to go to England as a German spy, Popov promptly made contact with British Intelligence. He was told to play along with the Germans and keep reporting back to the British.
Popov traveled to London by way of neutral Portugal, meeting his German control, Major Kremer von Auenrode,4 on the way. In London, Lieutenant Colonel T. A. ‘Tar’ Robertson, a senior officer in Britain’s domestic security service, MI-5, decided the Yugoslav was a potentially valuable asset. After an intense induction period, Popov returned to Lisbon to feed the Germans a mass of misleading information prepared by the British.
The Germans took the bait. Popov, code-named ‘Tricycle’ by MI-5, spent the first half of 1941 shuttling back and forth between Portugal and England, always returning to Lisbon with phony information for the Abwehr. In May that year, bemoaning Germany’s poor espionage presence in the United States, von Auenrode asked him to go to New York and set up a spy ring. Popov had little choice. He could hardly do otherwise if he was to retain the Germans’ confidence. The British, for their part, saw a way to take advantage of the situation.
Stewart Menzies, head of the Secret Intelligence Service, or MI-6, which handled foreign intelligence operations, now approved a plan. Popov would go to the States – as a ‘loan’ to Edgar and the FBI. If he did set up a spy ring, as the Germans hoped, the Allies would use it for deception from the very start. The collaboration, moreover, would strengthen relations with the FBI and give the Americans their own ready-made double-cross operation. Edgar, consulted at the highest level, agreed.
In Lisbon, as Popov prepared to leave for America, he picked up an intriguing piece of intelligence from Jebsen. At a meeting on the cliffs overlooking the Atlantic, Jebsen spoke of a recent journey he had made to Taranto, the Italian naval base that had been devastated in a sneak attack by British planes flying off aircraft carriers. The Japanese, Jebsen told Popov, had pressed the Germans for details of just how the British had carried out the operation. Germany’s Air Attaché in Tokyo, Baron Gronau, expected Japan to try a similar surprise attack within six months – around the end of 1941. An attack where? Popov asked. ‘If my calculated opinion interests you,’ Jebsen replied, ‘the Japanese will attack the United States.’
Furthermore, when von Auenrode briefed Popov on his American mission, he gave him a list of intelligence requirements. It included a detailed set of requests for intelligence about Hawaii, and several specific inquiries about Pearl Harbor. Of a ninety-seven-line questionnaire for the whole U.S. mission, thirty-five lines were devoted to Hawaii. There were questions about the precise positions of ammunition and mine depots, oil dumps, hangar locations, the submarine base, the anchorages. ‘You are to go to Hawaii,’ said von Auenrode, ‘and as soon as possible.’
According to Popov, everything then made sense – the Japanese interest in Taranto, the Air Attaché’s talk about a surprise attack, Jebsen’s heavy inference that it would be against the United States and, finally, the target: Pearl Harbor.
Popov promptly reported all this to British intelligence and, as his former case officer has confirmed, it was taken very seriously indeed. ‘I saw the questionnaire immediately,’ recalled Colonel Robertson. ‘I was terribly impressed with it, and I thought the first thing we should do was to send the Japanese information over to America …’
Control of Popov now shifted to MI-6, which instructed Popov to pass the intelligence to the Americans as soon as he arrived in New York. ‘They thought it preferable,’ he was to recall, ‘that I be the bearer of the tidings, since the Americans might want to question me at length to extract the last bit of juice.’
Popov arrived in New York aboard a Pan Am flying boat on August 12, 1941, and soon met with senior FBI officials, including one of Edgar’s Assistant Directors, Earl Connelley, and New York Agent in Charge Percy ‘Sam’ Foxworth. The file shows that he gave them their first sight of the microdot system, the new German intelligence technique by which long messages, photographically reduced to tiny dots, could be concealed in seemingly innocuous correspondence. Popov also delivered the Pearl Harbor questionnaire – in plain text as well as in microdot form.
Foxworth responded cautiously to the information about Pearl Harbor. ‘It all looks too precise,’ Popov quoted him as saying. ‘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.’ The decisions on Popov and his mission, Foxworth added, would be made in Washington, by Mr Hoover.
In the partially censored FBI file – as made available for the first edition of this book – virtually all of Foxworth’s initial one-page report to Edgar about Popov is blanked out. So is the entire opening section of the twelve-page report made by Assistant Director Connelley. There is no way of knowing what was verbally reported to Edgar, since all concerned are dead. The record does show, however, that Edgar was kept personally advised about Popov. Three weeks after Popov’s arrival he scrawled a terse note to Foxworth: ‘Sam: see Connelley in N.Y. and get this Popov thing settled.’
In New York, Popov was by now distinctly unsettled. His regular FBI contact, Charles Lanman, had told him he was not to go to Hawaii, which the Germans expected him to do as soon as possible. Nor was he at this stage given any information to feed back to the Germans, to maintain credibility. ‘There must be a hitch,’ Lanman said, ‘somewhere between your people, the British Security Coordination, I mean, and our office in Washington … Mr Hoover will be here in New York in two weeks, and will see you then.’
The real reason for the delay, the files show, was that Edgar was heading off on his usual vacation with Clyde. Popov, meanwhile, decided to fill in the time with a trip to Florida, where the Germans had also asked him to snoop on U.S. military installations. He decided to take a woman friend along, a prospect that caused consternation at the FBI. Very probably acting on Edgar’s personal instructions, agents told Popov this would contravene the Mann Act, the law that prohibited transporting women across state lines for the purposes of prostitution. Popov went ahead anyway.
He spent a week in Florida, traveling in a flashy Buick coupe he had bought in New York. The file shows that to appease the FBI, he rented a separate room for his girlfriend. Later, back in New York with time on his hands, he renewed his courtship of the actress Simone Simon, whom he had known in Paris before the war. According to Simon, their relationship was ‘very proper,’ with her mother acting as chaperone.
Finally, Popov wrote in his memoirs, he ‘encountered’ Edgar at the FBI office in New York. ‘I use the word advisedly,’ Popov recalled. ‘There was no introduction, no preliminaries, no politesse. I walked into Foxworth’s office, and there was Hoover sitting behind the desk looking like a sledgehammer in search of an anvil. Foxworth, disposses
sed, was sitting silently in an armchair.’
Popov recalled how Edgar looked at him with ‘disgust,’ how he at once started ranting and ‘yelping.’ He ‘turned purple’ with rage and called Popov a ‘bogus spy,’ who had done nothing useful since he arrived. The thrust of the tirade was that the Yugoslav had taken a woman to Florida, ‘chased film stars’ and generally lived high on the hog. Edgar ran a clean organization, he said, and Popov had sullied it.
Popov retorted that he always lived luxuriously, that the Germans – who financed him generously – would think it odd if he did otherwise. He had been ineffective since his arrival only because the FBI had given him so little cooperation. But Edgar only got angrier. The meeting ended within minutes, with Edgar shrieking, ‘Good riddance!’ as Popov departed.5
Edgar’s defenders hold that he had no reason to take special note of Popov’s information, that – four months before Pearl Harbor – it deserved no more attention than myriad other snippets of intelligence. In August 1941, however, Edgar had two good reasons to listen to Popov with care.
The Popov information had not come out of the blue, nor did it come merely with a general recommendation from British Intelligence. It came, according to MI-5’s Colonel Robertson, only after careful advance contacts by Guy Liddell, then the organization’s Director of Counterespionage. Liddell had met Hoover and believed he had established a better rapport than some of his colleagues.
‘One reason we put Popov in touch with Hoover,’ recalled Robertson, ‘was that Guy Liddell was very friendly with the Director. He thought the best thing to do was to send Popov and his stuff over to Hoover. He thought – misguidedly, as it turned out – that Hoover would pay attention, since it came from him. The mistake we made was not to take the Pearl Harbor information out and send it separately to Roosevelt.’
At the time it was offered, Popov’s information may not have rated the attention of the President himself. Robertson insists that the FBI was the ‘natural’ place to send it, and that the British cannot be blamed for Edgar’s failure to handle it properly.
Ignoring Popov was even less defensible because his warning did not stand alone. Thanks to the British, Edgar already had firm evidence that the Germans, with the Japanese in mind, were snooping on Pearl Harbor. Earlier that year, as a result of vigilance by British censors in Bermuda, the FBI had intercepted a letter from Captain Ulrich Von der Osten, an Abwehr agent operating in the United States. The letter, mailed after a trip to Hawaii, contained a report on the island’s defenses, a map and photographs – notably of Pearl Harbor. ‘This,’ Von der Osten’s report concluded, ‘will be of interest mostly to our yellow allies.’
There was good reason for Edgar to remember that intercept in August. Another German agent, who was one of Von der Osten’s close collaborators, was arrested by the FBI just days after Popov handed over his questionnaire. Yet even though the case was still active and under Edgar’s personal supervision, he and his officials failed to spot the linkage between the Von der Osten letter and the Popov information, and to give Popov the hearing he deserved.
After the run-in with Edgar, Popov turned for help to a senior member of the British intelligence team in New York, Charles Ellis. The Director of the FBI, Ellis observed, pulled tantrums every day. He would ask Stephenson to intervene. Stephenson tried and got nowhere.6 So did an emissary sent from London by MI-6 chief Colonel Menzies. Menzies’ concern was that Edgar’s obduracy would destroy all the painstaking work that had gone into making Popov a star double agent.
Soon, Popov discovered the FBI had placed microphones all over his Manhattan apartment. Life with his Bureau contacts became a series of verbal skirmishes. He was, however, at last given a trickle of low-grade information to send to the Germans, and clearance to travel to Brazil to meet an Abwehr contact. Popov left New York, not to return until after Pearl Harbor.
So far as one can tell, Edgar did not tell Donovan’s department, which existed to coordinate intelligence, about Popov either. Edgar’s attitude to British intelligence in the weeks before Pearl Harbor, the British history notes say dryly, ‘was quite evidently to suppress its activities if he could.’
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When Popov’s memoirs were published in 1974, two years after Edgar’s death, the FBI flatly rejected his allegations. Edgar’s successor as Director, Clarence Kelley, said the Bureau ‘certainly did not receive information which indicated the Japanese would attack Pearl Harbor.’ According to Kelley, the files showed that Popov ‘never personally met Mr Hoover,’ that his story was more fiction than fact. Thomas Troy, former CIA officer turned intelligence historian, claimed that Popov ‘never personally warned Hoover about such an attack … He warned nobody.’ Popov, both men suggested, was little more than a troublesome playboy.
British Intelligence veterans said the opposite. John Masterman, the wartime head of Britain’s interservice XX, or Doublecross, Committee, which used double agents with legendary success, had assessed Popov for himself from the start, and addressed him affectionately in future correspondence.7 He considered Popov ‘a leading and highly placed agent … one of the leading figures in the doublecross world.’
Montgomery Hyde, who worked with British intelligence in New York, thought him ‘one of the most important British double agents’ – a rating endorsed by the author Graham Greene, an MI-6 veteran. Ian Fleming, who also met Popov during the war, may have used him as one of the models for James Bond. Former Commander Ewen Montagu, of Naval Intelligence, thought Popov a man of steel and basic common sense, who ‘made a great contribution to the Allied victory.’
So well regarded was Popov that the British eventually gave him the honorary rank of colonel, British citizenship, the Order of the British Empire, the Distinguished Service Medal and a Modigliani painting – a gift from the royal family. He was godfather to the nieces of MI-6 Chief Stewart Menzies.
FBI files contain no written record of a meeting between Edgar and Popov, but that proves nothing. Edgar made an art form of concealing information in alternate file systems, or simply not recording it at all. Edgar’s office records, released only in 1991, show that he was indeed in New York in late September 1941, the approximate time of the meeting alleged by Popov – a fact Popov could not have known when he wrote his memoirs.8
Popov did not concoct his story in the seventies to create a publishing sensation, as detractors suggest. He reported the episode to his superiors at the time. William Stephenson, who disliked saying anything that would damage Anglo-American relations, avoided public comment on the Popov controversy. He discussed it in private, however, with his biographer, coincidentally also named William Stevenson.
‘Our conversation was not for publication at the time,’ said writer Stevenson. ‘But he was very clear. He said Popov had indeed met Hoover – he knew all about it. He thought it was a terrible failing in Hoover, who had this straitlaced attitude that shut him off from realities. Stephenson had no doubts about Popov’s credibility, and he thought the FBI had totally failed to pick up on what Popov was trying to tell them about Pearl Harbor.’
Popov also reported to his case officer, Colonel Robertson. ‘He was debriefed when he got back to London,’ Robertson recalled, ‘and he certainly reported that he’d seen Hoover. He was not going to make up a story of the nature he reported to us, that he and Hoover had had an awful row. I can’t see any reason for him to make up such a story.’
Chloe MacMillan, who worked with British Intelligence in Portugal, met with Popov when he eventually returned there. ‘He did see Hoover, I’m sure,’ said MacMillan, ‘and he did give them his warning about Pearl Harbor before it happened. When I saw him months later, he was still so depressed about what had happened.’ Other contemporaries had similar memories.9
British officials, moreover, had no doubts about the value of Popov’s information on Pearl Harbor. In a 1945 report, written at the time for official consumption only, Masterman said it had ‘indicated very clearly that … Pearl Harbor
would be the first point to be attacked, and plans for this attack had reached an advanced state by August 1941.’
William Stephenson, who saw the Popov questionnaire, found it ‘striking.’ He was especially impressed by the fact that it requested data about the harbor depths at Pearl Harbor – so soon after the British had pioneered the use of air-launched torpedoes against the Italian base at Taranto. When he saw that, he recalled years later, he ‘had no doubt that Pearl Harbor was a target, and perhaps the target.’10
The FBI file shows that by October 20, 1941, seven weeks before Pearl Harbor, the Bureau had shared a paraphrased version of the Popov questionnaire with U.S. naval and military intelligence. It seems almost certain, however, that they did not receive the crucial backup information that went with it – Popov’s report on the statements of Jebsen, Baron Gronau and Major von Auenrode. Without those factors to put the questionnaire in perspective, its impact must have been greatly diminished.
The White House fared even worse than the Army and the Navy. Three months before Pearl Harbor, Edgar did send a description of the microdot system, along with two of Popov’s microdots, to President Roosevelt’s aide General Edwin Watson. The President himself saw the material within twenty-four hours. He did not, however, see the microdots with the questions about Pearl Harbor. Edgar did not send those to Roosevelt, although he himself knew their contents – the laboratory report on all the microdots had come in the very day of the letter to the White House.
Edgar’s ego had got the better of his intelligence. As he rushed to show off his knowledge of a new German espionage device, it does not seem to have occurred to him that the contents of the microdots might be more important that the dots themselves. There is no sign in the record that Edgar ever did tell the White House about either the Pearl Harbor questions or the other Popov information.
Rear Admiral Edwin Layton, who was Fleet Intelligence Officer at Honolulu in 1941, later prepared a massive study on the Japanese attack. He concluded, even without the new evidence assembled in this chapter, that Edgar ‘dropped the ball completely’ in his handling of the Popov information. ‘His failure,’ declared the Layton account, ‘represented another American fumble on the road to Pearl Harbor.’
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