In the Enemy's House

by Howard Blum

  In contrast to her husband’s fitful rages, Lilly Lamphere was a preternaturally calm, almost taciturn presence, as seemingly bland and unassuming as the flat Minnesota country near the banks of the Leaf River where she’d been raised. Or, perhaps, as some relatives speculated, her seeming withdrawal from family life, if not the world, was simply a defense against Joe’s pugnacious bluster. When she wasn’t cooking, she’d be deep into some book; she had run the post office in quiet Trout Lake, Minnesota (there were more fish in the lake than people in the town, the locals were fond of saying), for several years when they’d first been married, and had taken to spending the vacant hours escaping into whatever book she could find. Lilly had a fondness for Jane Austen, but the Bible was her favorite; you could turn to any page and learn something, she liked to say.

  With his two incompatible parents locked into their own disparate worlds, Bob grew up as the overlooked middle child. The way he remembered it, he was pretty much always on his own. Which suited him fine. There was nothing he liked better than heading up into the hills, wandering about on the ridgeline with his .22 rifle and his mongrel hunting dog, “out of sight of people from dawn to dusk.”

  Still, Bob was both of his parents’ son. He had his dad’s temper, all right. He got into his share of fights at school; the immigrant Finnish miners’ sons in Mullan saw him as an outsider, and even though he was outnumbered he wouldn’t take their guff. It was rough going for a while. But after he took some boxing lessons, putting in strenuous hours on the heavy bag and sparring nearly to the point of utter exhaustion day after day in the ring, he was able to give as good as he got.

  It was a rough-and-tumble skill that came in handy when he was older and worked summers in his father’s mine. His father made it a point that Bob should pull the worst jobs, sticking him deep in the hole so nobody could say that Joe Lamphere was playing favorites. Nevertheless, there were always a few ornery miners who’d try to give the boss’s son a hard time, and Bob would invariably only take so much before he’d call them on it. Fists would fly, and at the end, more often than not, he’d be the one left standing.

  From his mother, Bob had inherited a love of reading. History, particularly books about the Civil War, kept him occupied as he lay in bed before falling off to sleep. And the more he read, the more Bob came to realize that books, an education, could be his path out of a life in the mines. He’d spent too many summers twisting the sweat out of his socks each night after climbing up from the dark, suffocatingly hot hole not to want something else for himself. So he set his sights on getting into college—Bob liked to challenge himself—and he did well enough in high school to be accepted into the University of Idaho’s accelerated law program: in five years, he’d earn both his law and his bachelor’s degree.

  But then in 1940, out of the blue, his mother took sick and, as if in an instant, she was gone. And now Bob could see no reason for sticking around in Idaho. The way he rationalized things, his father, who had grown sickly over the last few years, wouldn’t last long without his wife; it would be a kindness if Bob spared his old man the burden of financing his final year of law school. Bob would enroll somewhere else, find himself a job, and pay his own tuition. Yet even bolstered by all this comforting, altruistic logic, part of him knew he was just ready to get out of Idaho. He was eager to put some distance between all he’d endured while growing up and his future.

  Bob wound up in Washington, D.C., a quaintly genteel Southern city in the early 1940s that nevertheless seemed a cosmopolitan world away from the isolated northern Idaho hill country. He found a clerk’s job in the Treasury Department, a menial, entry-level bit of paper pushing. But it paid him enough to cover the tuition for night classes at National Law School, and while his nine-to-five workday was set in stone, the job was undemanding, so he could find time to study, too.

  His days and nights were full. Bob, in fact, was too busy to return to Mullan for his father’s funeral—and, anyway, his father, knowing his time was running out, had written to tell his son not to interrupt his studies for his sake when the time inevitably came. In 1941, Bob not only got his degree, but, without the help of a cram course, passed the D.C. bar on his first try.

  And now Bob began to think seriously about what he’d do next. He set off brimming with confidence; the world of government, as he envisioned it, was his oyster. After all, the New Deal had lavishly expanded the federal bureaucracy; there had to be plenty of jobs available for a young lawyer. Yet once he began knocking on doors throughout official Washington, Bob quickly began to understand that a law degree was one thing, and connections—political, school, and family—were another. And a lot more valuable.

  But as fate would have it, just as he was wondering if it might make sense to return to Idaho, where people at least knew the Lampheres, one of his professors happened to mention that the FBI had sent word to the law schools in the district: the Bureau was looking for candidates.

  “THIS APPLICANT PRESENTS A FAIR appearance and during the interview he was chewing about four sticks of gum. He is timid in approach and his personality is leaning toward the negative side. . . . The recommendation is unfavorable.”

  That was how the Bureau’s initial interviewer sized Bob up. But from Bob’s perspective (or so he’d suggest years later, when all his subsequent success went a long way toward invalidating this dismal appraisal), Mr. Wilcox, with typical Bureau rigidity, had just been trying to shove him into a box where he’d never fit. Where the FBI saw timidity, Bob saw a quiet confidence; he didn’t feel any need to bang any drums on his own behalf. As for his “negative personality,” Bob put that down to his tendency to weigh both sides of any proposition. And as for his chewing gum, well, Bob would concede, with a mature embarrassment, that you could take the boy out of Idaho, but you couldn’t take Idaho out of the boy. Yes, he’d later acknowledge, at twenty-three he still had to get used to big city ways.

  Yet someone in the Bureau must have had some appreciation of Bob’s qualities, because, despite the interviewer’s grumpy evaluation, on September 16, 1941, he received a letter signed by J. Edgar Hoover: “You are hereby offered an appointment as a Special Agent in the Federal Bureau of Investigation, United States Department of Justice, in grade CAF 9, with salary at the rate of $3200 per annum.”

  THERE WERE FIFTY FLEDGLING G-MEN in Bob’s class at Quantico, the Marine base in Virginia where the FBI had its training center. He was the youngest, and yet he was, he’d acknowledge with a contrarian’s pride, “more than a bit brash” when thrown into the competitive instructional exercises. It was, as he recalled, a group cut pretty much from the same calico cloth: small-town boys mostly from the Midwest, white, Protestant, and, like their revered Director Hoover, staunch patriots and no less staunch political conservatives.

  And their timing in joining the Bureau, they congratulated one another, pumped with their newfound camaraderie, was propitious. They had signed on at a great moment in history, the winds of war and unrest blowing across the globe. Nazism, fascism, communism—these hostile “isms” were the new enemies that would replace the John Dillingers. Heroes-in-the-making, they were, to a man, eager to join the fight against the insidious forces determined to infiltrate and subvert America.

  But before they could be dispatched into this seething, complicated new world, they had to be trained for the task. It was a demanding process. Classes were from nine a.m. to nine p.m., Monday through Saturday, with just a half-day on Sunday as a grudging concession to the Sabbath. They shot .38 pistols and tommy guns until they could routinely cluster their shots in the center of the target, flipped their opponents onto gym mats with exotic jujitsu moves, lifted fingerprints off the most unpromising surfaces, learned how to testify in a clear, concise English in the courtroom, and made sure to say “Yes sir” and “No sir” to practically everyone they encountered.

  And throughout the whole grueling process, two articles of faith, two inviolable tenets, were constantly drummed in. One: you’d bet
ter not screw up. If you displeased a superior, or, heaven help you, Mr. Hoover, your career would be over in an ignominious instant. (There was no civil service protection, and, as a consequence, there were no second chances. There was only the director’s iron prerogative.) And, two: the FBI was the best of the best, and you were expected to be better than all other lawmen, in every category. Nothing less would be tolerated.

  Yet all the training, all the indoctrination, only made the waiting all the harder. When the sixteen weeks were finally over, after Bob had passed the final exam and had been given his credentials, his gold badge, and his .38, he rejoiced. At last, his great, new, important adventure was about to begin.

  2

  BOB, THE STERN-JAWED NEOPHYTE AGENT, was sent in the early days of the anxious wartime winter of 1942 to the Washington field office. It was a time when the home front remained on edge, still unnerved by the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor and wondering what might come next. While across the Atlantic, the war in Europe was shaping up to be a long, no-holds-barred brawl, with the prospects for victory seeming more and more beyond the Allies’ grasp. Bob was eager to do his part.

  Straight off, he was apprenticed, as he was promisingly informed, to “an experienced agent.” Yet what were his mentor’s experiences? As far as Bob could tell, he had measured out his years in the Bureau filling out forms and obeying countless regulations, and now he’d been designated to pass on this dull knowledge to his protégé.

  It was a grim apprenticeship. Bob learned how to sign in and out of the office each day with an automaton’s precision, to make sure there was always a Number 3 card on file to show what case he was working on at the moment, to fill out the 302s detailing his daily progress on any investigation, to update each month the serial numbers of any firearms he owned, and on and bureaucratically on.

  Worse, the constant monitoring, the lack of independence, let alone the lack of trust, were not just gnawing but, Bob felt, offensive. Coffee breaks—a telling example—were prohibited; in this draconian world, they were viewed as nothing less than fraud, the theft of government time. If you had knowledge that one of your fellow field agents was breaking even the most minor of rules, you were duty bound to report him (yet those who did were branded with the epithet of “submarine”—i.e., they attacked with stealth—by their more laissez-faire colleagues). If you were not at home and reachable at the phone number on file, the Bureau required you to call in every two hours. Even the unexpected good fortune of spending a night at a girlfriend’s house was no excuse; you still had better call to leave the number with the office before settling in. And don’t even think you could get away with an evening off the leash: the Bureau would randomly telephone an agent’s home, checking to see if he was in—and woe be it the next day to the man who had been negligent enough to go off without leaving a contact number.

  Bob loathed all these stringent rules, and the more he felt squeezed by them, the more he wanted to rebel. Taking orders was one thing, but this was tedious and demeaning. The Bureau, he felt, was constantly looking over his shoulder, monitoring his every move. By both instinct and disposition, he was still the free spirit whose greatest pleasure was wandering off into the hills. He didn’t need a watchdog. He was beginning to wonder if he had made a disastrous mistake.

  BOB WAS QUIETLY SUFFERING THROUGH this raw, uneasy mood when his first field assignment came in. He was ordered to Birmingham, Alabama; the Bureau deliberately threw novice agents into waters far from where they’d been raised and then observed with cool detachment if they sank or swam.

  Bob swam. Away from headquarters and Hoover’s looming tyrannical presence, life as an FBI agent was a lot closer, he happily discovered, to what he had once imagined it might be. There were still the petty regulations, the daunting mountains of paperwork, and the puritanical restrictions on personal conduct and dress, but there was also the chance to be a cop working for the best team in the country.

  The special agent in charge (SAC) of the office took careful measure of Bob, apparently liked what he saw in this gruff, strapping, quietly confident young man, and then turned him loose to work on an eclectic slew of wartime cases. There was Bob, joining in a raid on a series of brothels adjacent to an army base in Tennessee, checking into whether a death at a defense plant in Huntsville might be a murder (it wasn’t), and looking into suspected sabotage at coastal dockyards.

  While in the process, going around the South, flashing his gold badge and Bureau credentials, he experienced something that was as gratifying as it was unexpected: despite his youth, people instinctively respected him. It was a time, he would recall, when “the FBI agent was a king.” And Bob, although new to the throne, quickly took to all its trappings. He enjoyed the prestige his Bureau employment conferred.

  For Bob, the South was a friendly, hospitable place. People were always going out of their way to invite a new agent to dinner, buy him a beer, or simply introduce themselves and ask if there was anything they could do to make his time in Birmingham more comfortable.

  Not least of the perks, Bob, who always had a mischievous eye for the ladies, encountered a bevy of agreeable young women as he traveled across the South. But he couldn’t help finding their manner too restrained, too genteel. He liked a woman “who knew how to laugh,” he’d say with a sly grin.

  For Bob, this was no casual metaphor. Rather, it was a very specific desire. One woman’s throaty, naughty laugh had captured Bob’s heart and continued to echo evocatively in his memory. He had met Geraldine Elder—everyone called her Geri—at a frat party back when he had been attending the University of Idaho. But Geri was not your typical coed. She had been raised largely by her maternal grandmother, a beaver trapper, on a remote Wyoming ranch. When her grandmother died, her father, an itinerant barber, took over her upbringing, and she traveled with him across the Pacific Northwest. Yet despite this vagabond childhood, a life where making ends meet was always a tense challenge, Geri had managed not only to go to school but to excel. Her elementary school teachers, who skipped her one grade, and then, still impressed by her abilities, another for good measure, judged her the smartest girl in the class. And with a pert, aquiline nose, fierce blue eyes, and a smile as wide, bright, and fresh as the great outdoors of her childhood, she was, it was generally conceded, darn near the prettiest, too.

  By the time Bob first saw her across the room at the frat party, Geri had already made up her mind to quit college. She was determined to learn how to fly, and soon took a bookkeeping job to pay for the lessons. She was a natural pilot, with a steady hand on the stick and a soul full of daring. Nearly three years later, when Bob, after a deluge of ardent letters and long-distance phone calls, had convinced her to marry him and move across the country to live in Alabama, Geri had established a reputation as one of the few pilots in Idaho who’d ferry smoke jumpers into the very heart of a blazing forest.

  The wedding took place in March 1942, in Birmingham, just the two of them and a preacher, and it wasn’t long before both newlyweds realized they’d made a colossal mistake. What they admired in each other—the certitude, the determination, the uncompromising ambition—were rock-hard qualities that collided time after time in the petty course of married life. They were, it was growing painfully clear, too alike to be comfortable sharing a future together.

  Then, three rocky months after the wedding, the Bureau intervened to make an already deteriorating situation much worse. Bob was transferred to New York.

  THE BIG CITY WAS A world away from the Big Sky Country where they’d been raised. Nothing was familiar, nothing offered a sense of peace or safety. Thirty years later, Bob still fiercely held “a small town person’s distaste” for the “raucous, frantic, ultramodern” tempo of New York. For Geri, who in her previous life had literally piloted her small plane into the eye of an inferno, “to step off a curb and into traffic was an adventure.” They found a claustrophobic three-room apartment in Jackson Heights, Queens, and no sooner had they moved in than th
ey both were looking for a way out.

  Thanks to the war, Geri found it first. She volunteered for the Women’s Flying Training Detachment and was quickly accepted into the first class of women aviators. In November, she eagerly hightailed it to Houston for training. She never came back to New York, or, for that matter, to Bob. (In fact, after her much-decorated service in the war, Geri, along with her new husband, ran, for decades, a bush pilot service that crisscrossed Alaska.)

  Bob, fearful of portraying himself as rash, waited what he hoped was a sufficiently decorous four months before informing the Bureau of the change in his marital status. In March 1943, he wrote Inspector Acers, his superior in the New York field office: “An agreement has been reached between the writer and his wife that they are to remain separated, and a divorce is contemplated. . . . Both the writer and his wife believe this is desirable in view of the fact that the marriage has not been happy or successful.” But he took care to reassure the inspector that “the marital difficulty is not the outgrowth of any quarrel, and there has been no infidelity, or anything of that nature.”

  Inspector Acers, however, was not placated. He dashed off a censorious note to the director, insisting that Bob’s glib explanation of his impending divorce was “illogical.” And Hoover, now also chagrined, in turn notified the SAC of the New York office to “closely observe the work of Agent Lamphere and submit a special efficiency rating on him.”