This coincided with another great stroke of fortune. Atomic fission was not possible without uranium ore and the only viable source of uranium ore at that time lay in a gold mine deep in the Belgian Congo. When seven months later the Germans overran Belgium, one M. Edgar Sengier, director of Union Miniere, the vast Belgian mining complex in the Congo, fled to America. Once in the United States, however, Sengier became aghast that the world’s largest cache of uranium ore was still stored in one of his mines. Forewarned a year earlier of the dark and bizarre significance of this material, Sengier took it upon himself to order his agents in Africa “to ship discreetly to New York, under whatever ruse was practicable, this very large supply of uranium ore.”* Thus, for better or worse, some two and a half million pounds of uranium found its way to a warehouse on Staten Island, safe from the Germans and available for American use in one of the greatest and most menacing scientific enterprises of all time.5
Roosevelt fully understood that if war was to come it would be a thoroughly modern war and that it would be won in large part by the side that could develop the most efficient and massive production of war materials and the most powerful and innovative technologies. He therefore called upon the leading scientists and businessmen in the country to serve on special boards toward achieving these ends, and had he not done so America’s position after it was finally drawn into the war on December 7, 1941, would have been far worse than it already was.
The problem over what to do about Japan was becoming ever more vexing. Recognizing correctly that if Japan gained control of China she would soon exercise hegemony over all East Asia, the Roosevelt administration had begun, in 1938, to extend large loans to the Chinese government to aid Chinese defense. For its part, Japan proclaimed its Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere, which was nothing more than a flimsy excuse for taking over nearly half of the world. By then nearly 70 percent of the entire Japanese national budget was going to its military and the whole country was on a war footing. While the United States army was languishing with fewer than 250,000 undertrained and underequipped men (plus the incoming draftees)† the Japanese Imperial army now contained more than six million, including reserves. Her navy had built up so rapidly that the Japanese Imperial Fleet had become more powerful than the Pacific fleets of the United States and Great Britain combined.6
Roosevelt cautiously put an unofficial “moral embargo” on certain items such as selling aircraft and aircraft equipment to Japan, but the two things Japan needed most to fuel its war machine were oil and scrap metal, which since the 1930s she had been importing from the United States in immense quantities. These, for the time being, still moved across the Pacific from West Coast ports, but in nowhere near the amounts needed to keep up with Japan’s huge military expansion. Oil in particular was a problem. Japan produced virtually no oil, and had been able to stockpile enough for only two years under the most favorable conditions. In case of full-scale war with the United States and the Western Allies, those reserves would possibly not last a year. Fear of an oil shortage had become so rampant that Japan’s military government banished almost all civilian motorcars and trucks except those that ran on charcoal or wood-burning engines, and the people either walked or rode bicycles. So far as scrap metal and steel went, Japan was down to her last few months’ supply.
In order to pressure Japan to get out of China, the U.S. embargo was stepped up the following year. Official American sanctions now forbade shipping to Japan such things as high-octane aviation fuel, arms and ammunition, and strategic materials such as aluminum. By the end of September 1940, with Hitler’s Axis powers rolling over Europe and Africa, Japan for all practical purposes removed the last pretense of diplomacy when its government joined with Hitler and Mussolini in the Axis alliance. The United States reacted by adding scrap metal and steel to the list of materials embargoed to the Japanese.
In March 1941, just after he was sworn in for an unprecedented third term, Roosevelt boldly led the United States a step closer to war by manipulating Congress to get his Lend-Lease Act signed into law. This measure, which effectively obliterated the Neutrality Act, provided that America would grant England and China “all possible aid short of war.” The Axis now faced the prospect of America’s industrial might being turned against it while the United States, in Roosevelt’s words, became the great “arsenal of democracy.”
The furor with which this deed was received by the American isolationist movement was expressed by Senator Burton K. Wheeler, a Montana Democrat and former socialist, who prompted an outrage by declaring that Lend-Lease would mean “ploughing under every fourth American boy for the sake of British imperialism.” Wheeler and like-minded colleagues in Congress had labored long and hard to restrain Roosevelt from what they saw as “dragging” the United States into a European war, or, perhaps more accurately, allowing England to drag America into such a war. By 1940 the wave of isolationism that had been spreading across the United States was reaching its apogee and it was all too true that, for one reason or another, the majority of Americans opposed getting into the war.
In the summer of 1940 the America First Committee, headquartered in Chicago, declared its existence. Its board of directors included some of the most well known and respected people in the country, including a former U.S. Army general in command of the American Legion, a Chicago meatpacking baron, automaker Henry Ford,* the famous World War I flier Eddie Rickenbacker, various Nobel Prize winners, and the president of Sears and Roebuck.7 Its chief spokesman would turn out to be the most notable American hero of the period, Colonel Charles A. Lindbergh, who had made history by being the first to fly solo over the Atlantic Ocean.
After the kidnap-murder of his infant son, Lindbergh and his wife moved to Europe. He had made visits to Germany and was highly impressed by what he had seen of the Nazi military machine, in particular its airpower; he was so impressed, in fact, that he became convinced no European nation could stand up to it, especially not the decadent and foolish British or French. Not only that but the famed pilot of The Spirit of St. Louis publicly declared that the only people who favored war with Germany were “the Roosevelt family, the British and the Jews.” His America First movement claimed a membership of nearly one million and held frequent mass rallies at such places as Madison Square Garden to preach against the war.8*
The isolationists were a mixed bag of pacifists, Anglophobic Irishmen who wished to see England destroyed at any cost, anti-Semites, Roosevelt haters of all stripes, conservatives with investments abroad, liberals such as Kingman Brewster Jr., who would go on to become president of Yale and rail against the Vietnam War, nervous parents, anxious students, much of the organized labor movement under one of its Roosevelt-hating leaders, John L. Lewis, and a host of pro-German and pro-Italian immigrants who made up such organizations as the German American Bund, the American Nazi Party, and the American Fascist Party. And as soon as the Soviet Union threw in its lot with the Nazis, the Communist party too came on board—an interesting mix, since the German-Italian fascists were dedicated to the eradication of communists and vice versa. Nevertheless, each faction ground its own ax and put Roosevelt and his people in a difficult, even precarious way.
Among those who stood out prominently as spokesmen for these diverse bedfellows was one Father Charles E. Coughlin, a renegade Catholic priest from Detroit, who rallied both British-hating Irish Catholics and chauvinistic Italian-American Catholics to the cause through his rabid nationally broadcast radio show and syndicated newsletter. Transcripts of Father Coughlin’s radio program make today’s conservative talk show hosts seem mild by comparison. Of the so-called interventionists (read the Roosevelt administration) Father Coughlin had this to say: “Like thieves who operate under the cover of night, there are in our midst those who operate beneath the cloak of protected auspices to steal our liberty, our peace and our autonomy. ... Sneakingly, subversively, and un-Americanly hiding behind a sanctimonious stuffed shirt ... these men form the most dangerous fifth colu
mn that ever set foot upon neutral soil. They are the Quislings* of America. They are the Judas Iscariots within the apostolic college of our nation.”9
In an America still mired in the throes of the Great Depression, with millions still wondering where their next meal would come from, and with images of the slaughter of World War I still fresh in their minds, the appeals of Father Coughlin and his cohorts struck a resonant note. Roosevelt accordingly continued to move with caution and circumspection.
In the meantime all sorts of clandestine spying, sabotage, and propaganda schemes were being acted out across America, most notably in New York, Washington, and on the West Coast. Agents from the warring nations, or those soon to be at war, sought secret information and technology and conspired to influence members of Congress and other important American citizens to pronounce themselves on one side or the other in the growing conflict. The FBI and the armed services intelligence branches were responsible for uncovering treacherous activity, which was growing ever more frantic. Some of these incidents deserve attention for the purposes of illuminating the lengths to which people are driven in tempestuous times.
At the center of many intriguing activities was an extraordinary man named William Stephenson, a wealthy forty-four-year-old Canadian who had been a champion Olympic boxer and an ace fighter pilot during World War I. Afterward he settled in England where he became famous as the inventor of modern wireless photography, which also made him a millionaire and set him up as the owner of many large and diverse companies. When war broke out Stephenson was sent by none other than Winston Churchill himself to run the British intelligence service in America where, working out of an office in New York City, his code name became “Intrepid.”
With Great Britain fighting for her life and the United States nowhere near entering the war, Stephenson, with Roosevelt’s blessing, set about to counter pro-German and pro-Italian propaganda that was being financed by the Axis powers. One of the first things Stephenson noticed was that isolationist groups had gotten to various members of Congress and, using the congressmen’s free franking or postal privileges, were able to send out millions of antiwar and pro-German newsletters throughout the country. By cultivating friendships with members of the press, Stephenson exposed this abuse and was instrumental in bringing down the virulent isolationist New York congressman Hamilton Fish.
He then set about exposing an important German agent named Dr. Gerhard Westrick who, through his friendship with the president of the Texas Oil Company (Texaco), had succeeded in getting that corporation to violate the British blockade and supply oil to the Axis powers. After Stephenson passed along this information to the New York Herald Tribune, Dr. Westrick found himself deported back to Germany on a Japanese ship.
Next Stephenson dedicated himself to unraveling the immensely complex relationships between the German industrial giant IG Farben and its dummy subsidiaries in the United States. IG Farben has been described as “probably the largest corporation of its kind in the world,” and was an octopustic monopoly that would make any antitrust lawyer drool. Stephen-son and his people waded through the labyrinths of agglomerations and cartels that made up the American operation of this Nazi-controlled behemoth and succeeded in getting the U.S. Department of Justice to indict and put out of business a number of its American subsidiaries on grounds of restraint of trade.10
One of Stephenson’s juicier and most successful operations, however, lay in the field of true espionage and is worthy of any spy novel. This was his use of an attractive American divorcee named Amy Elizabeth Thorpe, the thirty-year-old daughter of a Marine Corps officer, whose code name was “Cynthia.” Tall, blond, and possessed of “explosive sexual charms,” Cynthia went about her tasks apparently “not for money, but for thrills.”11
In the winter of 1940–41 the Italian fleet vastly outnumbered the British Mediterranean fleet and posed a direct threat to the British convoys presently bringing troops and supplies to the fighting in North Africa. Cynthia’s first assignment was to try to procure the Italian navy’s code ciphers, a daunting task to say the least. Nevertheless, she somehow got herself introduced to the Italian naval attache serving with the Italian embassy in Washington, Admiral Alberto Lais, who, though married with a wife and children, fell promptly in love with her.
Whatever “explosive sexual charms” Cynthia used must have been wildly effective, because this otherwise respected senior officer ordered his cipher clerk to hand over a copy of the Italian codes to her, and she in turn gave them to Stephenson, who immediately dispatched them to the British Admiralty in London. Two months later they were put to good use when the British Mediterranean fleet ambushed the Italian navy in the Battle of Cape Matapan and put it out of action for nearly a year. Churchill proudly declared that this victory “disposed of all challenge to British naval mastery of the Eastern Mediterranean at this critical time.”12
A month later the love-struck admiral stupidly disclosed to Cynthia that he had ordered the sabotage of all Italian ships then in U.S. ports in order to keep them from being seized by the Americans in case war broke out between the United States and the Axis. Cynthia reported this news to Stephenson, who gave it to the U.S. Office of Naval Intelligence, which saw to it that the sabotage was arrested, that the ships were seized anyway, and that Admiral Lais was deported back to Italy as an “undesirable” person. At the dockside before his departure the admiral devoted all his attentions to Cynthia, who had come to see him off, and ignored entirely his weeping wife and children. Cynthia then turned to her next assignment, which would be even more difficult and which will be reported here further along.
While all this was going on in the East, U.S. intelligence gatherers began to observe an alarming flow of unfriendly messages from Tokyo to its Japanese consulates on the Pacific coast. There were at that time some 112,000 Japanese-born noncitizens (issei) and American-born Japanese (nisei) located mostly from the state of Washington down to the southern tip of California. Many were small businessmen and vegetable farmers and many others were fishermen, whose proximity to U.S. naval bases, shipyards, and ports disturbed American security officers. This was because all Japanese, whatever their origins, were thought to be loyal and obedient to their emperor, who was considered to be divine.
By late 1940 the Japanese Foreign Ministry in Tokyo was sending secret messages to its U.S. embassy and various consulates requesting “utilization of our ‘Second Generations’ and resident nationals” to commit acts of espionage and to stir up antiwar feelings among “Negroes, communists, anti-Semites and labor union members.” The U.S. Office of Naval Intelligence reported that “a number of second-generation Japanese have been placed in airplane plants for intelligence purposes” and “will observe closely all shipments of airplanes and other war materials [from the West Coast] and report the amounts and destinations of such shipments.” The Japanese consulates were soon sending a series of detailed responses to the Tokyo authorities outlining almost every aspect of U.S. warplane production on the Pacific coast, as well as which warships were in harbor and which ones had sailed.13
What made U.S. interception of these sinister communiques possible is one of the greatest success stories of World War II: the American intelligence establishment broke the Japanese diplomatic code, which was called PURPLE. This mind-boggling feat was largely the work of one exceptional man, William F. Friedman, chief of the U.S. Army Signal Intelligence Service, but to understand just how remarkable his accomplishments were we must first go back to the way Americans approached such subjects as code breaking, and eavesdropping in general.
Modern code breaking by the United States had its beginnings in World War I with the establishment of the cryptologic section of the Military Intelligence Division, headed by Herbert O. Yardley, a $ 17.50-a-week telegraphic clerk in the State Department, who created a near hysteria when, for fun, he managed to break all its top-secret diplomatic codes, which the embassies used to communicate with headquarters and vice versa. When America ent
ered World War I Yardley was put in charge of all cryptological intelligence, but the Americans were far behind the British and French in such skullduggery and were not particularly successful. When the war ended the Departments of War and State decided to continue their code-breaking efforts and Yardley was put in charge of this highly clandestine enterprise. Operating out of a converted town house off Fifth Avenue in New York City’s Murray Hill neighborhood, it became known as the Black Chamber.
All sorts of methods were used to obtain the codes: intercepting them from radio waves, burglary, bribery, and inducing or coercing the telegraph companies to give them up. During the Naval Armament Limitation Conference of 1921—22 Yardley was able to break the Japanese code, providing the Americans with Japan’s rock-bottom position for negotiations. During the 1920s, the Black Chamber solved the diplomatic codes of some forty nations, an amazing achievement, but when Henry L. Stimson, an old-fashioned Wall Street lawyer, became secretary of state upon the election of Herbert Hoover, he was appalled to learn of Yardley’s black-bag operations and disbanded the Black Chamber with the observation, “Gentlemen do not read each other’s mail.”
Enraged at being canned, Yardley decided to wreak his revenge by publishing a book, The American Black Chamber (1931), which sold briskly and was serialized in the widely popular Saturday Evening Post. In it he told all, destroying the Black Chamber’s work of a decade. It especially created a furor of outrage in Japan with the revelation that the U.S. State Department had been intercepting Japanese cables to their delegation at the Washington Naval Conference. The Japanese promptly scrapped their code-cryptology system and in its place substituted what would become known as PURPLE, the most difficult encryption process the United States had ever encountered.*