Vic Socotra

04 September 2009

American Double Cross

(German Agent Fritz Duquesne)

The FBI is Roosevelt’s creation. Everyone would agree with that; the issue would be that they would probably have identified the wrong one. The concept of a national investigative force was problematic for the first four score and twenty years of the Republic, since despite the unpleasantness between the states, their primacy in law enforcement was supreme.

Teddy Roosevelt was a progressive, and he supported the establishment of a mechanism to look into criminal activity that crossed state lines. He directed the creation of the small unit of Justice Department investigators that, under the tender stewardship of John Edgar Hoover, commencing in 1924, became the national arm of law enforcement.

What he took over was an organization with an expanding mission. With the entry of the United States into World War I in 1917, the Bureau of Investigation acquired the portfolio for enforcement of the Espionage, Selective Service, and Sabotage Acts. It was also directed to support the Department of Labor by investigating enemy aliens. Special Agents with general investigative experience and language skills augmented the career bureaucrats.

They were let go when the need was done. When Hoover took over in 1924, the Bureau of Investigation had approximately 650 employees, including 441 Special Agents working in field offices in nine cities.

From the beginning, Hoover was keenly aware that budget was directly related to public feelings about the Bureau. Accordingly, he told he Attorney General in 1925, he wrote, "The Agents of the Bureau of Investigation have been impressed with the fact that the real problem of law enforcement is in trying to obtain the cooperation and sympathy of the public and that they cannot hope to get such cooperation until they themselves merit the respect of the public."

It seems high minded enough, but what it means is that public relations is a core value of the Bureau, just as the decentralized nature of it. By the time of the Crash in 1929, there were approximately 30 field offices, with Divisional headquarters in New York, Baltimore, Atlanta, Cincinnati, Chicago, Kansas City, San Antonio, San Francisco, and Portland. There is even a field office in Washington, DC, of all things.

The Depression provided a fertile ground for the Bureau’s charter against enemy aliens. European Fascists had their counterparts and the German-American Bund, the Silver Shirts, and similar groups. At the same time, the American Communist Party experienced dramatic growth. Hoover saw the unsettled times as an opportunity to move from combating gangsters to fighting threats to national security.

The second President Roosevelt gave authority for the Bureau to begin investigations in 1936 and increased it in 1939 as war broke out in Europe with a Presidential Directive. Congress handed Mr. Hoover the ultimate authority in 1940 when it passed the Smith Act, which made the advocacy of violent overthrow of the government a Federal crime.

The FBI also participated in intelligence collection. Hoover’s Technical Laboratory cooperated uneasily with engineers, scientists, and cryptographers in the Army and Navy to enable the United States to penetrate and sometimes control the flow of information from the belligerents in the Western Hemisphere.

Here is the big deal: the smashing of the Frederick Duquesne spy ring represented an American counter-point to the British Double Cross organization that had co-opted the Nazi spy networks in the UK.

Actually, the operation began with a walk-in, not an investigation. The FBI was assisted by a loyal American with German relatives who acted as a double agent. For nearly two years the FBI ran a radio station for him, learning what Germany was sending to its spies in the United States while controlling the information that was being transmitted to Germany. The investigation led to the arrest and conviction of 33 spies.

I’d love to tell you more about that- and why the organization was rolled up with great theatrics (and a complete loss of the source of intelligence) but that will have to wait until tomorrow.

Remember: when we left Long Island and Ponte Vedre beach, there were eight Nazi saboteurs on the loose. The big Duquesne espionage trial in 1941 proved to the American people that the FBI was on the job, poised to protect them.

Of course, the disclosures in court also destroyed the radio collection capability, and with armed Nazis on the loose, there was no one listening at the FBI to what the Germans had to say.

It is about public relations, after all, not intelligence.

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