Joseph E. Persico Read Online Free Page B

suspected of blowing up the National Storage Plant on Black Tom Island in Jersey City, New Jersey, on July 30, 1916, a blast that killed seven men, injured thirty-five more, and destroyed millions of dollars’ worth of munitions intended for the Allies. FDR became obsessed by the threat of internal subversion, a concern that was to dominate his intelligence thinking for years. No rumor was too wild to enlist his attention. One ONI informant reported that a German-American colony in New Hampshire was plotting to acquire a plane to bomb the Navy yard at Portsmouth. Roosevelt sent out investigators. In October 1917 a friend returned from a visit to Block Island with a possible explanation as to why the battleship
Texas
had run aground there. Visibility at the time was an ample six hundred yards, his friend told FDR. A sailor who had earlier lived on Block Island with Germans suspected of spying had been the forward lookout on the
Texas
when she struck the beach. FDR ordered another investigation. ONI personnel, quickly grasping the boss’s prejudices, began feeding him what he wanted to hear. A typical report to the assistant secretary on the Krantz Manufacturing Company of Brooklyn noted, “The employees are almost German to a man. Every official has a German appearance . . . and [they] always converse in German.” With FDR’s fervent support, ONI hired hundreds of new investigators, the rapid expansion justified by threats, fanciful or hypothetical, against Navy installations.
    The spy thriller atmosphere pleased Roosevelt to the point of apparently producing spy fiction. FDR later liked to tell how “the Secret Service found a document in the safe of the German consul in New York entitled: To Be Eliminated.” The first name on the list was Frank Polk, intelligence coordinator at the State Department. “Mine was the second,” Roosevelt would inform rapt listeners. The Secret Service, he maintained, then provided him with a revolver and holster. He wore the gun for only a few days, Roosevelt claimed, then left it in his desk drawer. No evidence supports any part of this story.
    On July 9, 1918, the assistant secretary boarded the USS
Dyer,
the Navy’s newest destroyer, to witness the war in Europe. Upon his arrival in England, FDR met his first grownups in the espionage game and was suitably dazzled. He spent two hours in London with Admiral Sir Reginald Hall, director of Britain’s Naval Intelligence, known as Blinker for the rapid batting of his eyes, especially when he was excited. Blinker Hall had already influenced American history. It was Hall who created Room 40, the Royal Navy’s codebreaking arm, and it was Room 40 that decoded the Zimmerman telegram, which revealed a German plot to induce Mexico and Japan to go to war against the United States. Hall had leaked the telegram to Washington, significantly affecting President Wilson’s decision to enter the war. Dr. Walter Page, America’s ambassador to Great Britain, said of Hall: “Neither in fiction or fact can you find any such man to match him. . . . The man is a genius—a clear case of genius.”
    Blinker Hall, in a wing-tipped collar, his head haloed in a ring of frizzy white hair, his eyes batting with anticipation, warmly admitted Roosevelt into the inner sanctum of British espionage. He had been describing German troop movements to his guest when he suddenly broke off and pointed across the room. “I am going to ask that youngster at the other end of the room to come over here,” Hall said. “I will not introduce him by name. I want you to ask him where he was twenty-four hours ago.” The officer approached, and Roosevelt put the question to him. He had been on enemy soil, inside Germany, “[I]n Kiel, sir,” he replied to an astonished FDR. Blinker Hall brushed the feat aside. He had spies passing back and forth between the German-Danish border and England practically every