| 21 December 2006 All Through the Night It is the shortest and darkest day of the year, and I noted with sadness the news that CAPT Tony Marsloe, USNR, left us last week. His passing was at such an advanced age that most of his comrades have preceded him to his rest, but he deserves honor and remembrance as we celebrate the ancient rhythms of the world with the rituals that comfort us in the darkness. Tony had seen ninety-five winters, and among other accomplishments, was an authentic war hero, and was the dean emeritus of the Naval Reserve Intelligence community, which had a unique role in counter-intelligence. Through happenstance, and the lack of funds in the period between the wars, the active component of naval intelligence had dwindled to a tiny staff in Washington. It was totally inadequate to deal with the coming storm. Counter-intelligence activities and other matters “of interest to the Navy Department” were assigned to the Reserves. It might be interesting to take a stroll through those days when armed Nazis patrolled just off the Jersey Shore and the Russians were our allies. Anthony “Tony” Marsloe was commissioned before WWII and assigned to the Third Naval District Intelligence Office (DIO-3) in New York City, the brightly-lit Baghdad on the Hudson. The Third Naval District was established in May of 1903 and headquartered in Manhattan. It's Commander was responsible for Connecticut, New York, the northern part of New Jersey (including Counties of Mercer, Monmouth, and all counties north thereof), and also the Nantucket Shoals Lightship. At times it even included Puerto Rico, a situational assignment dictated by excellent communications between Manhattan and San Juan. At its wartime peak, the office accounted for was over three hundred officers and sailors, virtually all of them reservists. The only regular Navy presence were the District Intelligence Officer and his assistant, who were retired officers recalled to active duty. RADM Tom Brook's father worked with Tony in District THREE, although he headed up B7, which was the Communist desk. Tom later became the 41st Director of Naval Intelligence, and recalls Tony from his earliest days as an Ensign. With Tony's passing, only two men remain of those who served in DIO 3ND during the war. One is CAPT Dan Foley, who lives out in Texas, and the other, YNC Howie Cummings, lives in New York state and attends the annual NRID3-1/NIP NY dinner. Back in the mid-1930's, the newly-formed Federal Bureau of Investigation and its aggressive young director John Edgar Hoover were assigned primacy in counterintelligence cases, although the Army and Navy were entrusted with the lead in areas of special interest to the Military Departments. Of course there was the intent to collaborate, but this was the time of the fullest flower of inter-service rivalry, not to mention the dogged determination of young Hoover to carve out his primacy in Washington. The Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI) was concerned with collecting information regarding the characteristics and weaponry of foreign vessels. To a lesser degree, tactics, movements, disposition and intention of those navies was of interest, but this was very much a capabilities-based age of analysis. ONI assumed responsibility under the Navy's "General plan" to develop and gather “all manner of information on possible adversaries during World War One. The Plan allowed for certain collection activities to be done by covert means. By 1916, the first undercover operation, termed “Branch Office,” had commenced activity in New York City under the control of ONI. Staffed by naval reservists on active duty and civilian volunteers working without pay, the Branch Office achieved impressive counterintelligence success in pre-empting German subversion and sabotage. The American Black Chamber was also part of the New York cityscape. You might say that New York was Spook City. The city was the terminus for overseas cable communications, and the headquarters of the companies that provided telegraph services, it thus it was the natural place for exploitation operations to be located. Herbert O. Yardley ran a shell company in Manhattan. The company was actually a clandestine cryptologic effort funded by the State Department and the Army. It was shut down in 1929 by Secretary of State Henry Stimson, whose famous admonition that “gentlemen do not read other gentlemen's mail.” The closure put an abrupt end to a most valuable source of information, and unquestionably contributed to the intelligence failures ahead. The contribution of Yardley's work to the conduct of diplomacy were indisputable. He had cracked the cipher system used by Japanese negotiators at the Washington Naval Conference in 1921-22. He provided transcripts U.S. chief negotiator, Charles Evans Hughes, and thus the American delegation was aware of the minimum acceptable demands of the Imperial Japanese Navy at the conference. The famous 5:5:3 ratio of capital ships agreed between Britain, the United States and Japan was a direct result of the intercept operation. The closure of the Black Chamber, and the stock market crash in October of that year brought deep cuts to the Navy Department. Funding for personnel or operations was slashed across the board, and ONI was reduced to the barest minimum. The only answer was to rely on a dedicated corps of Reserve officer and volunteers to gather information on individuals and activities that could pose a threat to naval security. As early as 1927, some ad hoc groups had been created and were starting to operate in a manner that would be refined during the ensuing decade of the Great Depression. Movie Director John Ford out in Hollywood sailed his personal yacht on missions to collect intelligence on foreign warships. But ONI by 1934 was a small and neglected organization with only twenty-four officers and a clerical staff of eighteen. Although the perception that the rise of Fascist organizations overseas was an emerging threat, there was simply not enough money to do much about it. In New York, Naval Intelligence reservists routinely searched passengers on incoming ships, provided security at docks and waterfront facilities and conducted investigations of “subversive activity” of interest to the Navy Department. The ad hoc nature of the collection effort coupled with a bifurcated chain of command created confusion. ONI operations were directed from Washington, while others were controlled within the District Headquarters. In New York, between the dozens of city agencies with varying authorities, there were FBI and Army counterintelligence activities constantly in progress. It led, naturally, to mendacity, rivalry and duplication of effort. In June, 1939, Franklin D. Roosevelt issued a Presidential proclamation that put Hoover's FBI in charge of “all matters of an espionage, counterespionage, and sabotage nature.” In 1940, the chiefs of the three agencies involved drew up an agreement as to jurisdiction, with particular emphasis given to foreign operations. Further revision of this agreement, defining clearly the work to be handled by each agency, was accomplished in the Delimitations Agreement of 1942. It was the first Intelligence Reorganization Act, and served as a prototype for all the others that would follow down through the years with the same mixed results. This was the environment that Tony Marsloe entered as young ONI Reserve officer. He immersed himself in the shadowy alternate government that controlled matters “of interest to the Navy.” The Mob ran the docks and the distribution of goods and services from them. Tony was instrumental in establishing contacts between Naval Intelligence and Wiseguys like “Socks” Lanza, “Lucky” Luciano, “Bugsy” Seigle and Meyer Lansky. We have always loved our gangsters in America, and the romantic image is captured in the 1942 Humphrey Bogart vehicle “All Through the Night.” In the film, Nazi fifth columnists, led by sinister, sadistic Peter Lorre, are infiltrating a city that looks very much like New York. High-rolling gambler Bogart is assigned by the G-Men to smoke them out. Bogart is led to a warehouse where he uncovers a room filled with Nazi paraphernalia and beautiful woman (played by the seductive Kaaren Verne) who needs to be saved from the Nazis. The patriotic Mob pitches in to help quash the Fascists, and in the fiery climax a motorboat packed with explosives is directed toward a battleship to blow it up. Audiences loved it, and they loved seeing the little rat Lorre get it in the end. The reality was a little different than what happened in the third reel of the movies, and there are some tantalizing connections that no one really wanted to talk about in the years to come. New York was where it was all happening. The Dulles Brothers, Alan and John Foster, were Wall Street Bankers. An aggressive Special Prosecuting Attorney was named Tom Dewey. And the men that owned the unions that ran the docks were not nice people at all. Charles "Lucky" Luciano (born Salvatore Lucania) was one of them. Pictures of him as a young man show a poker-faced young man with a smooth complexion and eyes with the expressive features of poker-chips. He is credited with turning syndicated crime into a nation-wide organization by basing it on legitimate business models. Born in Sicily, he and his family moved to New York City in 1906. At an early age he established himself as a creative and effective thug on the Lower East Side who could carry out a hit without mussing his hair. He eventually worked his way up to being a top aide to crime boss Giuseppe "Joe the Boss" Masseria. In the 1920s Masseria was involved in a prolonged turf war with a rival crime boss named Salvatore Maranzano. The latter was a megalomaniacal man with the unwavering desire to become the anti-Mayor Laguardia: the one and only ruler of New York. When Maranzano began to poach on Masseria's boot-legging territory, the latter declared war, and enlisted the world. All the ethnic groups in Gotham participated in the mayhem with glee: Italian, Irish, Jew and German. The struggle would come to be known as the Castellmarise war, and it would claim hundreds of lives between 1928 and 1931. Luciano tried to stop the fighting, considering it to be a distraction from the business of making money. Luciano was a rising star in the business, and he was on a dock at on the Hudson River inspecting a load of fresh chiba when four of Maranzano's goons rolled up in a car. They grabbed him and taped his mouth shut. They beat him savagely on the hour-long drive to Staten Island. When they got there, they slit his throat and cheek and then dumped him for dead in a ditch. Luciano survived the attack, and that is where he got his nick-name. He had an epiphany after the incident, seeing it as a sign that the gang war had to end, and soon. He enlisted childhood friends Bugsy Siegel and Meyer Lansky and went to see Maranzano. They struck a deal with him to sell out their Boss and divide the Masseria empire: Marazano would get the liquor turf he coveted, and Luciano and his pals would get the New York franchise for prostitution and drugs. Lucky set up a date with his boss for tax day, April 15th, 1931. He told Masseria to meet him at their favorite Coney Island spaghetti restaurant, the Nuova Villa Tammaro. Masseria gorged himself on a seven-course Italian meal, which would be his last. When the food was gone, Luciano coolly started a game of cards with his boss, and then excused himself to use the men's room. As he left the table, Bugsy Seigel, Joe Adonis, Vito Genovese, Albert Anastasia and Meyer Lansky entered the restaurant. Lucky could honestly tell the cops that he was busy when his boss got whacked. Luciano left the restaurant as the new Capo of the Masseria Family. Six months later, Siegel and Luciano bumped off Marazano. This placed Lucky in charge of Manhattan, and through negotiations with Dutch Schultz and other borough turf barons, Luciano was able to consolidate power and streamline the organization along commercial lines. He was riding high until 1936. It was then that Special Prosecutor (and later New York governor) Thomas E. Dewey charged him with sixty-two counts of compelling prostitution. There ensued a dramatic trial that stole the front pages for weeks and made Dewey a media star. It featured pathos and horror, and included testimony by twenty-eight prostitutes, one of whom was permitted a shot of whiskey on the stand to dampen the tremors of heroin withdrawal. Luciano was convicted and sentenced to a minimum of thirty years in prison. He was shipped from Sing Sing to the Clinton State Prison at Dannemora, near the village of Malone in upstate New York. Lucky became "Inmate No. 92168," in what was known as the "Siberia" of penitentiaries, colder and more remote than Alcatraz. He was confined in his cell for fourteen to sixteen hours a day from July 2, 1936, until the wartime spring of 1942. In Siberia or not, Luciano was in touch with his comrades back in New York. They were influential enough to get him unrecorded visits from friends and family. He was thus able to continue to run his business operations from his cell, but after six years he wanted a change badly. He was not eligible to apply for parole until April 24, 1956, and that was unacceptable. Meyer Lansky thought that wartime mobilization could bring new opportunities, and the German Navy had dispatched U-boats to operate in the approaches to New York harbor. He sent out discrete inquiries to see if his organization might be of assistance to the Nation in time of need. In exchange for a few discrete favors, of course. The U-Boat menace was just one of the problems confronting ONI. Securing the New York harbor against sabotage was a prime mission, and that is where Tony Marsloe and the THIRD Naval District Intelligence Office came into the picture. The Mafia controlled the longshoremen's unions, which in turn controlled who was hired to work on the docks. Longshoremen were selected for jobs at the "shape up" in hiring halls, the ones who looked German could be cut out of the workforce. Perhaps suspicious characters on the docks ended up in the water with no questions. It wasn't legal for the government, of course, but it was certainly in the purview of those that ran the docks. Three naval officers visited Luciano with a proposition he could not refuse. There were some minor incentives. Luciano was transferred in May 1942 to a more secure location, at Great Meadow Prison in Comstock, New York. Lucky didn't break a single prison rule and was considered a model prisoner. Friends dropped by on a frequent basis, especially Meyer Lansky. However, there were other visitors that Lucky didn't know, but he expected. The Allies were preparing to open a second front in Europe. An invasion of Sicily was a start, Naval Intelligence made numerous unrecorded visits to Great Meadow to solicit help from Lucky. Can he get word to the Mafia leaders on Sicily asking for help? Lucky assured them he could, and it was later proven, he did. Tony Marsloe went behind the lines to connect with the Mafia families who wanted the Germans gone so that business could get back to usual. Operation HUSKY was a tremendous gamble, but it was the logical continuation of Operation TORCH in North Africa, and the neutralization of Rommel's Afrika Korps as a threat. Capture of the island meant regaining sea and air control over the Central Mediterranean, and easing some of the pressure against Russia. But waiting on the island was the Italian Sixth Army, with 200,000 men, and the 15th and 90th Panzer Grenadier Divisions of the German Wehrmacht. Lucky's information let Tony Marsloe link up with the right people, who gave him the right information. Sicily was conquered. Back at Great Meadow, life improved. Lucky did not have liberty, but he could get anything wanted, including booze, good food, and women. With his service to the U.S. government, he felt justified an pressing for an early release from prison, and there were those who supported his loyal service. At war's end, the person who could grant commutation of sentence was also the person who put him in jail. Thomas Dewey was now the Governor of New York, and favored to be the Republican nominee for President against Harry Truman. In 1946, in recognition to his service to the Nation and Naval Intelligence, Dewey granted commutation of sentence with the condition that Luciano be deported to Italy. At 8:50 a.m., Sunday, February 10, 1946, he set sail from New York aboard the S.S Laura Keene. He did not come back alive, though he wanted to. The Italian government set strict rules on Luciano's freedom of movement, though it must have been looking the other way when he flew off to Havana in 1946 to help blue-print Mob operations in Cuba. He was supposed to stay in the immediate vicinity of Naples, where he could see the units of the SIXTH Fleet come and go in the harbor, and hear the sound of New York accents in the streets of the Gut near the docks. He hosted Frank Sinatra, among many others, and was the very life of the Neopolitan Party. An intelligence officer who served in Naples in the 1950s recalls that Lucky's spread was lavish, and the living was easy. Relations with the Family in New York cooled over time, but that was only to be expected, given the distance. He did not get whacked, perhaps as a tribute to his contributions in making the Mob a business-like and profitable proposition. Lucky remained well-to-do to the end, though like every great man, he was concerned with his legacy. He had heart troubles, but he remained optimistic, a consummate man of business. He wanted to tell his unique American story, and set up a visit from a professional screenwriter to draft a script about it. On January 26, 1962, Lucky was at the Naples airport to meet him when he suffered a massive heart attack and died on the spot. He was 65, and would still have been in jail at Dannemora, if he had not been able to cut the deal of his life. Only in death was he allowed to return home. Naval Intelligence's most infamous agent is buried in a substantial crypt at St. John's Cemetery in New York City. Robert MacNamara closed the Brooklyn Navy Yard in 1966, the same year Lucky's original sentence would have been up. Ten years later the THIRD Naval District was disestablished and the office in lower Manhattan closed. The information and connections Luciano provided enabled Tony Marsloe to conduct two missions behind the lines in preparation for Operation HUSKY, which he was decorated with the Purple Heart and the Legion of Merit. After the war, he remained active in the reserves and achieved the rank of Captain. CAPT Anthony “Tony” Marsloe, USNR, aged ninety-five, will be buried with full honors at Arlington National Cemetery on 31 January, 2007. I am going to try to make it, if I can. I'm pleased to note that Naval Intelligence got out of the Mob business in 1945, though saddened that it also got out of the counter-intelligence business altogether not long after the THIRD District went the way of the buffalo. There was a time when the Service meant something at the national level, but those days seem quaint and far away now. Not everybody left their special friends, though. A lot of interesting people and things came out of New York after the war and went to Washington. Tom Dewey didn't make it to the White House, though some of the Chicago papers thought he did through the early editions. The Dulles Brothers came down and did very well indeed. There was a time when the questions about the mob connection with the Agency that Allen Dulles helped to found were big news. There is a movie about it directed by Robert DiNiro and starring Matt Damon, both of whom have made a lot of money portraying mobsters. There are some strange coincidences about who knew whom in show business and politics and the Spook trade, and who did what at whose bidding. There are still some open questions about that, though most are buried now. Some of them are in Arlington National Cemetery. Where they rest, with their secrets, all through the night. Copyright 2006 Vic Socotra |