Sponsor Read

This podcast series by The National WWII Museum is made possible by the support of the Dale E. and Janice Davis Johnson Family Foundation.

Bradley Hart

It's the morning of December 7th, 1941. A fleet of Japanese aircraft carriers and escorts has moved across the Pacific Ocean undetected, maintaining strict radio silence. American military leaders have hints that an attack is likely, but they don't know where or when. The US Navy's key codebreaking unit, called station HYPO, could not yet decipher Japan's naval codes. American codebreakers have already cracked the Japanese diplomatic code known as purple code, but the intelligence it provides about Japanese intentions comes too late. At 7:55 that Sunday morning, a surprise air attack stuns Pearl Harbor and the nation. More than 2000 Americans are dead. The United States will now enter World War II and a new American spy agency will be born. I'm Bradley W. Hart at The National WWII Museum in New Orleans. In this podcast series, we're exploring the secret World War II, a war fought in the shadows, in covert operations, both at home and overseas. Joining me is Nicholas Reynolds, former US Marine, CIA officer, and the author of numerous books on intelligence history, including "Need to Know: World War II and the Rise of American Intelligence." We're also joined by Jeffery Rogg, author of "The Spy and the State: the History of American Intelligence." Nicholas, thank you so much for being with us.

Nick Reynolds

It's a real pleasure to be here.

Bradley Hart

Jeffrey, thank you so much for being here.

Jeff Rogg

Thank you, Bradley. It's just awesome to be here with you.

Bradley Hart

I wanna open up with a broad question for our audience here. Many people, and many of our listeners certainly have a broad understanding of World War II, the major battles, Pearl Harbor, Okinawa, Midway, D-Day. What we often don't think about, though, is the intelligence story behind the scenes. Nicholas, I wanna start with you. Why is this an important part of World War II history?

Nick Reynolds

There's a number of ways to answer that question. The most important answer is perhaps because you need to know, if you wanna understand World War II, you need to know the whole story, and a big part of that story is the intelligence picture. A good example is codebreaking, which was kept secret until the 1970s. And it was codebreaking that helped the British survive the Battle of Britain. It was codebreaking that got the US Navy into the right position at Midway. It was codebreaking that provided the best intelligence about D-Day. So if you don't look at intelligence, you're only getting three fourths of the story.

Bradley Hart

And that's a great point. Many of the stories we're gonna tell in this podcast can only be revealed fairly recently. Codebreaking in the 1970s, in my research, I see documents that I'm actually helping get open through things like FOIA, the Freedom of Information Act, all the time. Jeff, what do you think from your research?

Jeff Rogg

What I like to remind people is when you look at the entirety of American intelligence history, this is one of the giant moments, because so much changes and some of the key players that we'll talk about, for instance, William J. "Wild Bill" Donovan realized that the American intelligence system needed to change and they changed it forever. So this is a period where you encounter a country that was growing into its role in the world, and we didn't even have a dedicated foreign human intelligence espionage service. I mean, that's almost shocking to think about today. And we were still struggling with older problems in American intelligence, including how do you coordinate all these different competing organizations. And so leading figures realized this, and they knew that it had to change, and they had to fight old traditions, old biases, including the American people's bias against espionage and intelligence. And so this is one of the moments, almost like Nick said, it's part of the story of World War II, but it's part of the story of American history.

Bradley Hart

Well, let's talk about that change. You talked about the biases that many Americans have against intelligence. During World War I, of course, the US kind of sets up a semi intelligence service, certainly in the military side of things, as a necessity of the war. But the 1920s, a lot of that infrastructure gets shut down. And there's this sort of idea that gentlemen don't read other gentleman's mail, as one of the sort of famous aphorisms from this age. Tell us about that. What do we do during World War I and how does it change in the twenties?

Jeff Rogg

Absolutely. Won't go back too much further than that. But World War I is representative of what always happened. You know, there's an ebb and flow to intelligence. Americans like it when we're scared and we're at war. And then as soon as the war's over, kind of like the military, why do we need it? Especially because it, like you said, it's un-American. It's un-American. And that's something that every person who was involved in intelligence, almost everyone that I read, the leading figures, acknowledge that. They say, we know we're doing something that the American people don't really like. And the problem with the first World War is the target shifted, where originally, the focus was Germany and it was German saboteurs. And there was the black Tom explosion in New Jersey. An ammo dump was blown up, an ammunition holding site. And you know, it hurt and affected and damaged the Statue of Liberty. It was felt in Philadelphia. So Americans knew, hey, we have to go after German spies. By the end of the war though, you had the Russian revolution. You had the rise of socialism and anarchists. And so the, like I said, the target shifted and intelligence started doing things that people questioned, warrantless surveillance, warrantless detainment. You know, they were doing slacker raids and targeting everyday Americans, and they were doing it to each other. And so by the end of the First World War, the American people turned against intelligence. And the intelligence agencies themselves that existed at the time, military intelligence organizations, the Bureau of Investigation, which became the FBI, sort of get pushed into the shadows. And they knew they had to act in the shadows too. And so that's where intelligence was during the twenties and thirties. Still there, but in the shadows.

Bradley Hart

Nick, how does it begin, say, laying the groundwork, let's say, to get out from the shadows?

Nick Reynolds

So I think of the Roosevelt administration and the events in the 1930s. Roosevelt lacks general political intelligence and doesn't really know how to get it except from people that he knows and is comfortable chatting with. German spies pose a refreshingly concrete challenge in the 1930s, and they're going around trying to steal American technology and smuggle the plans back to Germany, and they eventually get caught. But the FBI does learn from this, and so, is now on alert for that kind of theft, spying, as classic espionage, really stealing, stealing secrets.

Bradley Hart

And we'll talk a lot more about German spies in this episode, actually. But one thing I want to talk about just at the start of the series is some of the terminology we often use in sort of the intelligence sort of history community or the intelligence community writ large. We throw around terms like spying. We throw around terms like espionage. One of the classic terms in this period is the fifth column. We talk about foreign agents. These are all actually kind of terms that we use somewhat interchangeably, I think, or in the general public we do. But they all have very specific meanings within the law, within the intelligence community. Nick, I wonder if you could unpack some of the key terms of what they actually mean from a sort of a technical and historical standpoint.

Nick Reynolds

So I'm a retired CIA officer, and these words have very specific meanings at CIA, which is not to say that everyone else should adopt those definitions, but spying at CIA is essentially a matter of stealing secrets. The idea is that you recruit an agent and the agent actually steals the secrets and brings them to you, the case officer, the intelligence officer. So that makes foreign agents a complicated matter because by US law, a foreign agent is somebody who works for a foreign government. And that is a mechanism. The Foreign Agents Registration Act is a way to prosecute people who are actually spying, but their bills are paid by the Soviet Union. They have an office in New York. They say they're trade reps or you know, a travel agency, but in fact they're running spies. So there's three things right there unpacked in slightly different ways. Then there's subversion and subversion in the fifth column kind of go together. And this is the idea that there's a force undermining your country and its defense. And this is something that comes into play after, around 1936 in the Spanish Civil War, when one of Franco's generals said, we're advancing on Madrid with four columns, and there's a fifth column already in Madrid. And so these are people trying to persuade citizens not to, you know, don't pick up that rifle, don't go do your duty, don't get in the trenches. You're gonna lose anyway. Why risk your life? So that's how this idea of fifth column and subversion plays in here. You know, and this is something that a lot of the players that we're talking about here, like William J. Donovan, they're concerned about the fifth column. They write about the fifth column, they talk about it at great length. So they think the Germans are actively trying to undermine the American defense, undermine morale of the country, as it were.

Bradley Hart

So tell us more about codebreaking. To my layman's mind, codebreaking is something that I think I hardly understand. I hardly understand how it was done, hardly really understand how codes were constructed in this period. Can you take us through what must have been this incredibly difficult, largely analog process of how these codes were broken and sort of how that progresses over the course of the war?

Nick Reynolds

So this is mostly the story of US Army codebreaking in the 1930s, in Washington DC, the principal character, the manager, if you will, the leader who counts, is a man named William F. Friedman. Friedman develops a talent for codebreaking in an unusual way. He studies genetics and he tries to examine a crackpot theory by his boss that Shakespeare didn't write Shakespeare and there was a secret code embedded in the place. But anyway, in World War I, he becomes a codebreaker then, and code maker, and then stays in the field. And he's a very gifted, he's gifted in a number of ways. One is his personality. He's easy to get along with, he's a good leader. He gives, he hires the right people above all. And he hires statisticians. He hires linguists. Doesn't really care who you are as long as you have these skills. And in the 1930s, they take on the Japanese diplomatic codes and how do they break the codes, right? The first thing you gotta do is you have to get the raw material, you have to get. The Japanese codes, part of the time, went over Western Union. And so what Western Union would see would be groups of five numbers, you know, a page and each, you know, so it's, it looks like a bunch of words, but they're all that groups of five and their numbers. First thing you gotta do is get a hold of that. There's actually laws against Western Union divulging it to, not to its addressee. And so the US government has to come, has to find workarounds. And the, you know, another option when the Japanese use different technology is, is intercepting it when they transmit directly to the target target embassy. But anyway, so they've got these pages of numbers, they use yellow pad and pencil, and they're looking for patterns and they just have the kind of mentality that enables them to do this. You know, you might stare at the same pages for weeks or months at a time. You might put it aside and then go back to it. And eventually patterns start to emerge. And, you know, they start making guesses that maybe this combination means and, and that combination means or, and this set of letters probably means Imperial Japanese government. So then you feed this back into the mix, right? So you try on another set of telegrams, you test that hypothesis, you know, and then eventually, you know, amazingly, by about 1940, they break, they get a significant break into this code. And then Rowlett.

Bradley Hart

That's Frank Rowlett, who helped break Japan's Purple Code.

Nick Reynolds

At home, in his spare time, creates the machine that created the codes. So they create a machine in Rowlett's garage that you can feed the plain text in and it'll give you the encrypted message or vice versa. It's just a stunning achievement. So there's the guy who broke the Japanese code. I think that's a simply stunning story, you know, American ingenuity, sticktoitiveness. And, so that, you know, codebreaking is the king of intel in World War II, I think. It didn't have to be that way, right? It could have been the other way. The Germans could have been better at making their codes and we could have been worse, in which case you would've wanted more human. The real answer is you want both. But in World War II, I say codebreaking is king.

Bradley Hart

Now, Jeff, one thing that comes across in your book, because it takes sort of a long view of US intelligence, is that the legality of some of this shifts dramatically over time. And let me just throw out a hypothetical example, actually, from my research is there are agents who might be being paid by a foreign government, but that's actually legal up until 1938, to not disclose, who are taking photos or clipping things out of the newspaper and sending it to, for instance, an address in Lisbon or something, a neutral country during the war that they, that is actually a front for the Abwehr, for German intelligence something along those lines. That activity, the legality of it, as I understand it, shifts over time. Is that a correct assumption?

Jeff Rogg

Sure, well, and the longer issue that America had is intelligence isn't even written in the Constitution. So we don't really have a legal regime built around intelligence and espionage in this country. But, you know, the problem is, is it's one thing to write a law, it's another thing to enforce it, it's even harder to interpret it. And where I thought this was interesting, and this ties into what Nick was talking about as far as the scene in the 1930s, is J. Edgar Hoover, who runs the Bureau of Investigation, which became the FBI, is so careful about interpreting laws. And one of the things that had happened during the First World War as far as the law towards what the FBI, or at the time it was the BOI, could investigate, was the State Department had to make requests of the BOI to loan agents or the Secret Service, the Treasury department's quasi law enforcement intelligence organization, in order to loan agents to investigate German diplomats. And so one of the ways in which German saboteurs and spies were first discovered was, the State Department, William Jennings Bryan, requested the Secret Service investigate German diplomats. And so in the First World War, there's this great story of a secret service service agent stealing a German diplomats briefcase on a train in New York and making off with it. And what it reveals is how much money the German government, I mean, we're talking about like millions of dollars, probably hundreds of millions in today's currency, is investing in things like propaganda.

Bradley Hart

And no one had any idea about this, this is the important point.

Jeff Rogg

No, and so this explodes. When it enters the news that there's spies in your midst. this is so important because this is where you get the American people on board. And so this is when intelligence organizations are like, okay, you know, we're back in the game. So, you know, the issue that you have is you have this fascinating combination of a country that it isn't just unprepared in terms of its intelligence organizations, but it's unprepared legally for even how, you know, how do you arrest, prosecute, try. And then as Nick pointed out, well, arrest and prosecution is different than espionage and intelligence. And so everything's in conflict with each other before the Second World War.

Bradley Hart

September of 1939, Adolf Hitler invades Poland. The Second World War has begun. Britain and France declare war. The US is still far from entering this conflict in a military sense. We won't do that until after Pearl Harbor. But already in the background here, after the war begins, it seems like President Franklin Roosevelt and his administration have sort of decided that more needs to be done in this intelligence space. And as you mentioned, a lot of this sort of intelligence gathering and codebreaking ability has been kind of shut down, put on the shelf, during the interwar period, and now they're gonna take some of these tools off the shelf. What causes Roosevelt beyond the outbreak of war to think in new ways? And what's he thinking about in, would you say, early 1940 in terms of what tools need to be back in the US toolkit?

Nick Reynolds

So, I look at the summer of 1940 as the, as a key date sort of when these pressures reach the tipping point. And what happens in the summer of 1940 is Hitler basically becomes master of the continent, especially western Europe. Paris falls on the 14th of June, and that is just a, you know, that's a sea change for France, of course, and for Britain. And so we see the American ambassador in Paris calls Roosevelt, and he picks up the phone in the middle of the night and it's Paris has fallen. That's a big change. And so the Brits now are without their main ally on the continent, their main ally period. They've gotta look for something else. And the only something else out there is the United States. The United States is still torn between the interventionists and the isolationists. So what the Brits start doing is saying, hey, we've gotta get over there and we've gotta move the needle. We have to change American politics so that the idea of supporting Britain becomes acceptable to the majority. And that's where British intel comes in. And to me, that's how we get into this story. The bigger story of the development of American intelligence is because the Brits come over, it's covert action. It's, they buy newspapers, they buy Time on the air. They try to embarrass isolationists. They try to promote interventionists. And it's the sort of thing that actually the, those are the foreign agents that you're trying to prevent under the 1938 Act. But, so they start doing this and then they kind of go, well, wouldn't it be nice if we had an American partner? Wouldn't it be nice if we had a counterpart, if there was an organization that would work with us and support us both here in the United States and overseas? And so they go, initially, they know J. Edgar Hoover's a major player in this space, and they take a look at Hoover and they decide, hmm, this is not really, this is not really who we're looking for. And so they start, who else is out there? Who are the other players that we might make common cause with? And they settle on William J. Donovan.

Bradley Hart

5,000 miles from Pearl Harbor, a professional football game is underway in New York. A man named William J. Donovan is paged over the stadium's intercom. Donovan's nickname is "Wild Bill." He's a Medal of Honor recipient, a hero of World War I, an accomplished Wall Street lawyer and already the head of a civilian intelligence organization called the Office of the Coordinator of Information, or COI for short. Within months of that fateful Sunday afternoon, Donovan will be leading a new agency that revolutionizes the American approach to overseas intelligence and special operations. So let's talk about William J. Donovan, a legend in intelligence history. He has a statue in the CIA headquarters is my understanding.

Nick Reynolds

He does.

Bradley Hart

Who is Donovan? What's his background and how does he get involved at this critical moment in American history?

Jeff Rogg

Oh, Donovan, he's a fascinating, complicated, and sometimes in some ways, very simple figure. So starting with Donovan, you know, who was Donovan the man? Donovan's from Buffalo, New York, humble Irish Catholic background. Marries into wealth, goes to Columbia, and he supposedly, he gets his name as a gridiron, a football player at Columbia "Wild Bill." There's also a story that he got it in the First World War, but Donovan was a, he was a man of action and he was also a man of, he was a man of action adventure. He deeply believed in service to this country and fighting for it. So he looked for opportunities to insert himself into combat. So he led a National Guard calvary unit in the Mexican theater, you know, Pancho Villa raids era. And then he really found his, I guess his calling in the First World War. So he's in charge of a famous regiment, the fighting 69th out of New York. And it's, you know, again, kind of like the National Guard. They're not necessarily really expecting to get into heavy combat, and they do in the First World War. And there's a great somewhat overlooked biographical account of Donovan. You know, we get lost in the second World War with Donovan, but a biographical account by a man named William vanden Heuvel who was Donovan's assistant in Thailand, towards the end of Donovan's life when he was ambassador there. And he writes the battlefield account of Donovan, and what emerges, if it's true, you know, and I think, let's be fair, maybe some of it is embellished, some of it's not. But what emerges as a portrait again of Donovan where, and we'll talk about this with OSS, whatever flaws he has as a man, and you know, as a general, when he's, or director of the OSS, or you know, when he moves through the ranks, he seemed to be a very competent, extraordinarily brave and capable leader, military leader. You would want him as your leader. One report is during the First World War, there was a gas attack when he was actually rescuing men who had been, I guess, cut off or blown out by artillery. And he, during the gas attack, as it subsides, he tells his men to keep their masks on and he takes his mask off to see. And then there's another account where he's leading, you know, his men weren't the, like, all Americans weren't really ready for combat. And so he's leading his regiment on a forced march, 30 something miles. And originally he's on a horse because he has to go up and down the line. And at one point, he's exhorting a group on this march, regimental march. And one of 'em says, "Yeah, but you have a horse." And Donovan says, "Who said that?" And he gets the soldier, he dismounts, gets the soldier, puts the soldier on the horse, takes the soldier's pack and finishes the march. And the soldier had never ridden a horse before, by the way. So everyone thought that was entertaining. So Donovan then, you know, this is, this suits him, the First World War. Donovan wins, he's the only American to win the three highest awards for valor. He wins the Silver Star, the Distinguished Service Cross, and belatedly, it's awarded in 1922, the Medal of Honor. So again, he has a pretty impeccable and impressive military resume. Civilian life does not suit Donovan very well.

Nick Reynolds

You know, I was thinking about this as I was coming over here today, you know, what exactly is he between the wars? Right? He's supposedly a Wall Street lawyer, but he's also a self-appointed expert on foreign policy. And he travels around the world, you know, why does he start doing this? And as far as I can piece together, initially, it's sort of a fascination with excitement warfare. He's sort of like a self-appointed war correspondent. He interrupts his honeymoon to go to an obscure war in the far East, you know, and says, honey, I'll be back in a couple weeks. You just stay in the hotel here. I'm going off to see, you know, the fighting in Siberia, or whatever it is.

Bradley Hart

A true romantic.

Nick Reynolds

A true romantic, well, he was that, but not a great husband. So anyway, I think it starts out like that and it sort of generalizes from looking at warfare to looking at the intersection of warfare and foreign policy. And he, you know, so he goes to see Mussolini in the mid thirties, right? And he just, he just kind of shows up and says, you know, Benito, you need to talk to me. And he does, and Benito does. And Donovan says, hey, I need to go see what's going on in Ambazonia. And Mussolini goes, okay, go ahead. You know, and so he goes to see the German maneuvers. He's looking at, I believe 1937, 38, maneuvers of the German army. So this is a guy who is gathering this information, and it's not really clear why, right? It's to satisfy his own curiosity and his own need for excitement and interest, I dare say passion, in war and foreign relations. But it doesn't really go to anything, right? Does it? You know, there are informal clubs in New York. There's the room, Vincent Astor. He sort of floats in and out of these circles. And, you know, you could say that they're doing this sort of like risk analysis. It's sort of like a company that pays someone to say, you know, should I invest in Shanghai this year? No, the Japanese have just moved their troops in that direction. But it's more than that. That's a small part of it, but the bigger part is they're just fascinated by this, you know? And Donovan is a great example of this kind of internationalist in between the wars, many of whom happen to be Republicans, right? They don't like, they don't like the New Deal, but they're kind of on the same sheet of music with Roosevelt when it comes to foreign affairs.

Bradley Hart

So how does Donovan know Roosevelt? Does he know him socially?

Nick Reynolds

Roosevelt, they both went to the same law school. I believe they overlapped. I'm sure they overlapped in, but you know, did they hang out together? Roosevelt is an aristocrat and Donovan is a guy on the way up. They were aware of each other. And politically, as I say, they were, you know, at this stage, they would've been on opposite sides. 'Cause Roosevelt become, eventually, governor of New York, an office for which Donovan runs. And Mrs. Roosevelt campaigns against him saying he's just another heartless Republican. Don't vote for him. So these are guys who have some overlap in their views on foreign policy, but they're, in my reading, they're not really friends.

Bradley Hart

And despite this sort of, I guess, fractious relationship we might say, awkward relationship in some ways, a relationship that changes over time, certainly, FDR taps Donovan for a very sensitive mission in July of 1940. And this is actually visiting wartime London. Why does Roosevelt choose Donovan and what's the importance of this mission at this moment?

Nick Reynolds

So the Brits like Donovan for, first of all, they welcome any attention from the United States. He's got the World War I cachet. And so if you look at who's running Britain at the time, you see a lot of people who fought in the trenches, maybe even in the same part of France during World War I, wear the same decorations, that's the defining event of that generation, right? World War I. And here's a guy who's shared that with them. He's very good at building bridges. In his first trip to London, he gets to see Churchill. Churchill invites him to lunch. He gets to see Menzies, the head of MI6, who's got a military cross from World War I. So, you know, he gets to see the director of Naval intelligence, John Godfrey. Has him over to his house and takes him to his club. The Brits see this as a way to get their message over to the United States. And so it's really a win-win all around. He goes back to the United States and says, hey, the Brits are in trouble, but they're hanging on and they'll do even better if we help them, if we send them, send them destroyers, ammunition, whatnot.

Bradley Hart

During this trip though, is this where you think Donovan gets the idea for founding or creating a new intelligence service in the United States? Or what's the role of sort of this learning on the intelligence side?

Nick Reynolds

That's the Brits really, the Brits are, are harping on this idea that, hey, you don't have an intel service. The Admiral Godfrey, the DNI, Director of Naval Intelligence, goes over to the United States, gets in to see Roosevelt and lectures Roosevelt after dinner one night, just the two of 'em, lectures, Roosevelt on, you really need an intelligence organization. You guys are flying blind essentially. The idea at the back of his head is, is it should be Donovan, it should be. But he doesn't say that. He figures that would be over the top. But the Brits keep pushing and pushing and pushing this idea. Donovan himself is a little bit reluctant at first, 'cause he thinks of himself as a warrior. And so Donovan's kind of there. Donovan is like, I wanna be in combat in this next war. And the Brits kind of have to twist his arm to, you can make a much bigger contribution in this way. And so it's a British agenda, essentially, that he is following. Roosevelt somewhat, someone said Roosevelt had a second class mind, but a first class personality. So he is, just the, he's a wonderful head of state. He has carried the nation through the depression, basically by the strength of his character. But he's not really a guy who sits down and looks at org charts and thinks, well, this is the best way for, you know, this organization needs to be subordinated to that organization. Here is the orderly way to go forward. And so he's getting these ideas that there should be something. There should be some kind of intelligence organization. And he's also hearing that there's Donovan whom he sorta knows, and Donovan is the right guy to lead it. And he kind of gives in, in the end. He kind of says, okay, you know, we'll do this thing called the coordinator of information. And it'll be Bill and it'll be part of the executive. And so that happens in June, 1941. That is a big milestone in the history of American intelligence.

Bradley Hart

I wanna fast forward a little bit to December 7th/8th 1941, when the US actually formally enters the conflict. How does that change the overall intelligence situation, pretty much overnight you might argue.

Nick Reynolds

So it makes it all more important that the US have as robust an intelligence structure as possible. And paradoxically, so Donovan's already the coordinator of information, so he's already in the mix, right? He's got a prominent position in Washington and what does he wanna do on, you know, after Pearl Harbor, right after Pearl Harbor, he wants a combat command and he writes to Roosevelt. We have the letter. A colonel at that point, he's still Colonel Donovan, a colonel to his commander in chief. "Send me into combat, sir." And Roosevelt writes back a nice note and says, "I'm gonna refer this to Stimson and Marshall and let's see what they say." And of course they let him down gently as well. He is in his late fifties at this point. He's not really current in how you run an army division or he's not fit for combat. And so they tell him, Bill, you really gotta lower your sights or maybe put the gun down altogether. What you need to do is run an intelligence organization. And eventually we get in the sort of the first six months of the war, COI, which was almost shapeless managed by Donovan. Basically we step up in Washington and the Army and the Navy also do their bit. Some of the Navy story is kind of dramatic and it's focused on the Pacific and Pearl Harbor's a big part of it. And they feel really bad, because they've missed the, so the codebreakers, the intel guys at Pearl Harbor are really upset that they have missed the attack on the Japanese attack. So they literally work day and night trying to figure out the Japanese Navy's next moves. And it's all source intelligence. It's a little bit of codebreaking, it's a little bit of traffic analysis. It's a little bit of sort of old fashioned naval intelligence moving ships around on a map and trying to figure out where they're going. So that's basically what happened. The US sort of parachutes into the war or is dragged into the war. There are a lot of metaphors that you could use here. Hitler does us a big favor by declaring war on us, because Roosevelt's kind of scratching, declaring war on the Japanese. Okay, that's easy. They attacked us. So we we're just acknowledging what's going on. But Roosevelt was kind of scratching his head going, well, how am I gonna do this Europe thing, which was always more important to him. You know, the Pacific's not unimportant, but Europe, the Atlantic, the British, were always his primary focus. And in fact, that's the way that, that's an official war aim of the United States, right?

Bradley Hart

Germany first.

Nick Reynolds

Germany first. And so Hitler does 'em a favor by a couple days later saying, oh, by the way, we're declaring war on you. Taking his own generals by surprise.

Bradley Hart

The attack on Pearl Harbor leads to an investigation into potential intelligence failures. Operational details of the attack are already clear. The first wave of Japanese bombers arrive at 7:55 AM Hawaii time, and a second wave arrives less than an hour later, at 8:54 AM. More than 350 Japanese warplanes take part in the attack on Pearl Harbor, striking the USS Arizona, sinking the ship, and killing more than a thousand crew members. The sunken USS Arizona will remain at the bottom of Pearl Harbor to the present day. Seven other battleships are also damaged in the attack. But after World War II, a congressional committee is tasked with exploring a basic question, how could this happen? The Chief of Naval Operations testifies that in the days leading up to Pearl Harbor, he delivered a clear warning to US forces in the Pacific. "This dispatch is to be considered a war warning. An aggressive move by Japan is expected within the next few days." But that warning didn't mention Hawaii. The army there is on the lookout for saboteurs. And some sources even suggest that the Imperial Japanese fleet is moving towards Southeast Asia, far from Hawaii. I'm joined again by Jeff Rogg. So as we approach the attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7th, 1941, you talk in your book extensively about intel failures leading up to the attack, or what some people would describe as intel failures. There's still a debate over whether Pearl Harbor represents, or the scale of the intelligence failure leading up to that. Certainly from a signals intelligence perspective, the US had broken the Japanese codes. There's that aspect of the story, but take us through intelligence leading up to Pearl Harbor and the failures that you perceive existing there.

Jeff Rogg

Sure, so I guess the first thing I'd say, and this is something that I try and correct in the book is, we have to be careful when we talk about intel failures as if they're exclusive to intelligence and exclusive to the intelligence community. And what I mean by that is, more often than not, a policy failure precedes an intelligence failure. And then because intelligence fails, it becomes a policy failure again. And there's this truism that we say in intelligence, you know, studies where there's no such thing as policy failures, only intelligence failures. Now American intelligence, just like 9/11, failed in the most immediate sense of the word, which is intelligence is, for instance, with a surprise attack, is supposed to tell you this is the thought. Who, what, where, why, when, how?

Bradley Hart

It shouldn't be a surprise.

Jeff Rogg

Right, it shouldn't be a surprise. So does intelligence fail immediately? In the most immediate sense when it doesn't do that? Yes. But there's bigger problems built into it. So, you know, one thing I try and do is pull apart what happened before Pearl Harbor. It's true that we'd broken the Japanese Purple Code, but the Japanese were also smart. When they set off on Pearl Harbor, they didn't use radio communications. So they, because they knew from people like Herbert Yardley, who wrote "The American Black Chamber," that we were tapping into Japanese codes and codebreaking. There also was a very interesting, I mean this is, anyone who's worked for the US government would not be surprised at bureaucratic solutions. But in the run up to the second, or to Pearl Harbor attack, the army and army intelligence was focused on the Japanese army. The navy and naval intelligence was focused on the Japanese Navy. Now the big departments above them, the army and navy, were actually more focused on Germany. Within those components, though, their intelligence organizations and signals intelligence was focused respectively when in terms of Japan, army on army, navy on navy, who was doing diplomatic codebreaking. Well the army and navy come up with the most bureaucratic solution ever, which was called the Odd Even Day Agreement. One of 'em would break Japanese diplomatic codes on the odd day and the other one on the even day. How does that even sound remotely functional? It doesn't, that's why it was dysfunctional. So you have a problem, in other words, in how you're gathering intelligence. Then what was also interesting is the American Ambassador, Joseph Grew, in January of 1941, actually wrote that there could be a surprise attack on Pearl Harbor. Now this would be really interesting intelligence because January 1941 is when the Japanese started planning the Pearl Harbor attack. So, I mean, it sounds like it was good intel. So the United States had months and months of, you know, it had like 10 months, 11 months, to try and actually find out if that was true. Now, again, I'm a little bit softer on the intelligence community, on these failures, because there was a lot going on beyond Intel at this time in 1941. And so, you know, is a policymaker only gonna pay attention to that. But Grew also cables in November. You know, the war drums with Japan are beating hard and Grew cables in November, 1941 and says, "You know, we're looking monitoring for signs of Japanese military and naval preparations, but I won't be able to give you substantial warning." And by this point it's too late. You know, more or less. So what I do like to say about Pearl Harbor, the navy in particular, naval intelligence, they hold most, at the end of the day when, you know, everyone's accounting's done, they hold most of the responsibility. They're holding, they're stuck holding the bag. Again, look at the whole intelligence system. It was uncoordinated, it was dysfunctional. There were stove pipes. It was sometimes hard to get your policymaker's attention. Remember, like the COI was only six months old at this point and it barely had any access to intel anyways. It was just getting its house together. So this is a collective national intelligence failure. And what I like to say and remind people is, you know, at any point in American history, we sort of have the intelligence system that we bargained for. So when Pearl Harbor happened, we had the intelligence community that we wanted, the intelligence system that we asked for as a country, as dysfunctional and uncoordinated as it was.

Bradley Hart

In 1941, as events in Europe and the Pacific are escalating, something surprising happens right here in the US. The FBI discovers a Nazi German espionage network operating on American soil. 33 people will ultimately be convicted in the case, including the ringleader, a man named Fritz Duquesne. The network of agents he led became known as the Duquesne Spy Ring and it would become with the largest espionage case in US history that resulted in convictions. FBI Director Jay Edgar Hoover recorded his own report on the case, heard here in this archival audio.

Jay Edgar Hoover

Sawyer visited Germany in 1939, where he was approached by the Gestapo who urged him to return to the United States as a spy. Before leaving Germany, he sent word to us. A spy trap was set. Sawyer was working for the FBI. Walking into this trap is Colonel Fritz Duquesne a leader of the spy ring and a professional German spy. These spies had a radio station on Long Island, which unknown to them, was operated by an FBI agent.

Bradley Hart

To learn more about German spies in the US, I'm turning to an expert who's uniquely positioned to explore the domestic threat before and during World War II. John Fox, the official historian at the FBI. John, thanks so much for joining us.

John Fox

Thank you, Bradley, I've been looking forward to it.

Bradley Hart

Let's talk about German espionage. There are two major spy rings that I would argue really, I think scandalized the American public in a lot of ways. The first one being in 1938, the second in 1941, shortly before Pearl Harbor. And the first one, I think it's fair to say, kind of catches people by surprise. And the second one, the FBI plays fairly brilliantly and we'll talk about that, the Duquesne spy ring. But let's talk about the 1938 Rumrich Spy Ring case. So the key player here is actually a doctor named Ignatz Griebl, who is a a German doctor who's been involved with some of these pro German groups, but it will take its name from Guenther Rumrich, who's a former US Army sergeant, who has a fairly bold attempt at obtaining some important American materials. So take us through the Rumrich Spy Ring and how the FBI handled it.

John Fox

Rumrich, was in the army twice. Both times he went AWOL and faced some time. Ended up sending a note to a German contact saying, if you want me as a spy, I'd be happy to volunteer. Just put an ad in the paper and let me know. And he comes up with these hair-brained ideas for getting information. And you know, some of them, you know, sort of half work. You know, he calls up the army and pretends to be, you know, someone else to get the numbers of venereal diseases, you know, in east coast camps. You know, a way of measuring troop preparation and that sort of thing. He comes up with an idea to get blank passports that fails miserably because he pretends to be a state department officer in New York and he needs, he ends up asking for blank passport applications instead of blank passports, which is what he was trying to get. But he had also sent this idea back to Germany saying, I think I can get a copy of the US East Coast Defense plans. I will pretend to be a army official up here in New York. I have to brief my local counterparts and I need to see a copy of it before I do. So I'll have the courier bring it to my room in the hotel. I will then knock 'em on the head unconscious and take the plans. This gets intercepted by MI5 in Scotland, because he was using a dead letter drop in, in there. And MI5 then informs our representatives in England. It gets back to the Army and state. They end up get working with the New York Police Department to arrest Rumrich. Some of these other elements of the plan, the FBI's brought in and they find out that he's already in jail. So he basically is sitting in jail and becomes a link that the FBI, and especially the agent in New York who's put on the case, Leon Turrou, is able to pursue. It's one of these where the chronology of the case is kind of interesting because the FBI gets onto it after the guy has been arrested. And so Turrou starts to interview him, and Rumrich talks about these other spies connected with him, including Griebl, and you know, others. And Turrou starts going around and interviewing everybody and setting up, you know, basically like a criminal investigation. You know, we're gonna have a grand jury. We're gonna consider what's going on here. And, of course, you know, as he's telling everybody this, he has, you know, Griebl talking to him for some time. But you know, Griebl was not an idiot. You know, he of course ends up, you know, fleeing the country as do most of the, I think it was about 16 people that that Turrou actually identifies. And so we only end up having three in hand and then they bring Rumrich to trial, and of course, it becomes a mess for a number of reasons, not least of which Rumrich is a little nuts. Turrou himself ends up having some problems because he had come up with a deal with some of the local papers to serialize the story of this whole thing in the newspapers and gets fired from the FBI in large part because of this.

Bradley Hart

Let's talk about the Duquesne Spy case. This is three years later. It's in 1941. It's really on the road to Pearl Harbor, I would say. This is a huge case. The Duquesne case involves 33 people. Ultimately it's the largest espionage case that results in convictions in American history. And the FBI plays this one very differently than the Rumrich case, in part because the FBI turns one of the key players in this, really from before the plot has even started. Take us through the Duquesne case and how the bureau plays this.

John Fox

The Duquesne case is named after Friedrich Duquesne, who had actually acted as a German intelligence agent in World War I era. And of course, his loyalty was due to Germany. The case begins because the Germans, after the Rumrich case, start to try to develop more sources against the United States. Their efforts are mixed in many respects. You know, they have a few successful operations here and there largely because of very pro German Americans who support them. But even then, in more sensitive operations, that's becoming a little more, the Americans are becoming a slight bit more wary. And the period between the end of the Rumrich case and the Duquesne case, shows a lot of growth in the FBI's national security role. As far as it goes, what happened was, an American was visiting family in Germany and got pushed, basically strong armed, he said, by elements of of German intelligence to come back to America and play a role in the transmittal of information of intelligence from the New York area back to Germany. And he is wary of this. He is not a wholehearted supporter of Nazi Germany. Of course, doesn't want to get his family in trouble. Agrees to it. Actually gets a couple weeks of rapid training radio and some of those trade craft skills that one might need and is given a set of instructions to come back with him. And on his journey back to America, he informs officials in one of our consulates over in Europe that this happened. He's put in touch with the FBI and the FBI pretty much debriefs him as soon as he arrives in New York and they realize that they have an opportunity here. Yeah, and at this point the bureau has been in closer contact with, especially MI5. The British are starting to increase some of their operations here as well. Some of them liaison, some of them a little more broadly cast under a man named William Stevenson who sets up the British security coordination in New York. But as far as as this case goes, the informant comes back and starts working with the FBI and his role is because of his tech skills and that he is asked to set up a radio transmitter, so that he can secure intelligence from a variety of German sources here in the United States and then transmit that back to Europe. And so the FBI helps 'em to set up the radio transmitter, in fact controls the transmissions as they're going out. They help 'em to set up an office in New York City where German spies will come in and give them intelligence and they have it set up so that they can film the transactions as it's going on. And you can see the pictures on the FBI website and several other places, you know, and it's got a desk and the spy would sit at the desk and you'd see the back of the, you know, the FBI source there and you'd see a calendar. So it's showing the date, and you know, it's this setup and the FBI's running this double agent operation for about seven or eight months, you know? The summer of 1941, decided it is time to round the group up. They arrest them, and of course, it becomes a huge spy trial. You know, a couple spy trials actually, not all of them are tried at the same time. Fritz Duquesne, because of his prominence, and, you know, he's kind of the éminence grise here in the whole mix, you know, becomes kind of the face of it to some extent. But it was a fairly loose coalition of different people who were willing to give information to the Germans. Some of them, you know, played more of a support role to intelligence. Some of them, you know, were a little more gadfly like. Some were fairly organized in their collection. None of them had, you know, any serious training or really organized connection in a sense to the Abwehr. You know, they start to develop that through this period. In part, the Abwehr is learning from its mistakes as well.

Bradley Hart

This is German military intelligence.

John Fox

German military intelligence, which became the principle, you know, foreign intelligence threat to the United States.

Bradley Hart

In part two of our podcast, the US officially gets into the spy game in a big way. And after the tragedy at Pearl Harbor, the US Navy's codebreaking unit, Station HYPO, makes a breakthrough deciphering Japan's naval codes. And the entire trajectory of the Pacific War is about to shift towards the allies at the Battle of Midway. Be sure to subscribe to the Secret World War II wherever you get your podcasts, to get our latest episodes when they come out. And check out our website for additional resources for each episode, reading lists featuring the work of our experts, and links to videos and oral histories from the collections here at The National WWII Museum.