Vic Socotra

30 August 2009

Janus

(The Two-Faced Roman God)

I am going to briefly touch on an important part of the story of the missing Nazis this morning. I have a proposal to write, and a trip down to see Heckle and Jeckel, the feral Kat Kings of Culpeper County.

If I had the time, I would explain in greater detail the reason that cops and intel weenies don’t get along and never will. You can do the short version by looking at the commotion bout who was placed in charge of the special Joint Interrogation Unit by President Obama. It is the FBI, of course, and it is a function of the Janus-like divide between intelligence and law enforcement.

The intel weenies are looking forward, and are supposed to collect information that helps divine the future. The cops look backward, and are burdened with the lies of the human heart, and in a working democracy, the shackles of jurisprudence and the burden of the chain of evidence.

Cops have to prove things in court. Spooks don’t. Think of it as Jack Bauer of “24” versus Robert Stack of the old “Untouchables” television show.

The story of how J. Edgar Hoover came to be sitting with the Spooks of the Department of War and the Navy is entertaining, and contains the elements of master showmanship. Hoover was a determined and ruthless cop who parlayed some spectacular operations against bank-robbers and organized criminals into the first real national-level law enforcement organization. He got the Bureau Federal standing and jurisdiction just in time for the biggest war in the sorry history of mankind.

See, the Spooks have their own problems. Part of it is baggage from the Civil War, and the reluctance to have a national secret organization on US soil after the necessary excesses of a war between the several states. Military tribunals, summary executions. Things like that.

Plus, in the new age of technology, intelligence is composed of competing disciplines, each with its own peculiar mind-set. There are the Takers, who use every trick to get what they want, and the Listeners, who exploited the mysteries of radio to produce actionable information. The Listeners paired with the Brainiacs, the scientists who understood the process of devising codes sophisticated enough to protect the mountains of data required to effectively operate diplomatic and military operations world-wide.

Eventually, these differing tribes would all have their own multi-billion dollar Agencies, with reserved parking. But in late 1941, as the war raged in Europe and the Japanese set sail for Pearl Harbor, the Army and the Navy were at war with themselves over who had control of the biggest secret of the biggest war that had ever happened.

That was the ULTRA secret, and the reason that just about everything you know about the War is not quite right. Most of the secrets have been released by now, but there is not world enough or time to go back and correct the official histories with the nuance of the miracle of the penetration of the Axis codes by the Allies.

It was that penetration- and it was not perfect, by any means, that enabled the Brits to identify and turn all the German agents in the UK to their own purposes. And it was entirely possible that the German effort against the US, which was inevitable once war was declared- might be turned exactly the same way.
So there the Spooks and the Cops sat, glaring at one another. J. Edgar Hoover had the responsibility for domestic security, hard-won through media spectacles like the shooting of bank robber John Dillenger by Special Agent Melvin Purves outside the Biograph Theater in Chicago.

That is the other thing. A good Spook is subtle. A successful cop often is in the papers, page one, above the fold.

J. Edgar got rid of Purves, by the way, driving him right out of the buiness. Purves was getting too popular with the media and interfering with Director Hoover’s persona as the Number One lawman in America. It is the way things worked in his Bureau.

I was going to tell you about Operation Pastorius this morning, but I have to get to work on that damned proposal. I imagine you can wait for the tale of the U-202, whose messages back to Admiral Donitz were being read by the Allies, and the four Nazis who were going to get in a rubber raft and row into the beach at Amagansett, Long Island.

There they met Punchy, who was taking a six mile walk on the beach. He was also known as Coast Guard Seaman Second Class John Cullen. It is a cool story. I think you will like it.

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