Read Online Joseph E. Persico by Roosevelt's Secret War: FDR, World War II Espionage - Free Book Online

choose to run again, the last thing FDR needed was premature disclosure that he was considering turning over fifty American ships to one side in a war his countrymen hoped to avoid. Yet, even Berlin knew that he was contemplating the destroyer transfer. From the time Bletchley Park detected the leak, MI5 and Scotland Yard had begun to investigate its source. Since Roosevelt’s dispatches to Churchill came to London and since Ambassador Mackensen’s dispatches originated in Rome, the British suspected that the link was the Italian embassy in England. Their search led to Don Francesco Maringliano, who was followed to the Russian Tea Room, which in turn pointed the investigation toward Anna Wolkoff and Tyler Kent. Kent’s behavior may have been more perverted patriotism than deliberate treachery, but the outcome was the same. What Roosevelt and Churchill told each other in their most confidential communications passed from Kent to Wolkoff to Maringliano, to the Italian foreign ministry, to Ambassador Mackensen, and to the Nazi foreign office. By May 20, British officials believed they had more than enough evidence to arrest Wolkoff and to search Kent’s lodgings. It was then that they had found the extraordinary cache of pilfered documents, duplicate keys to the code room, and a steel cabinet plastered with stickers proclaiming, THIS IS A JEW’S WAR.
    Kent, as an American citizen employed by the State Department, should have enjoyed diplomatic immunity. Nevertheless, the British police took him into custody and brought him to Joe Kennedy at the ambassador’s residence. There the clerk from the code room found himself facing not only the American envoy, but also an immensely rich, politically powerful figure. Kennedy later described his fifteen minutes with Kent: “. . . I asked him how on earth he could break trust with his country and what he must be thinking about in its effects on his parents. Kent never batted an eye. He played up and down the scale of an intense anti-Semitic feeling, showed no remorse whatever except in respect to his parents and told me to ‘just forget about him.’ It was a tragic scene.” After Kennedy had finished with him, the British police locked up Kent in Brixton Prison.
    More than a little irony and some hypocrisy pervades this scene. Kennedy had amassed a formidable fortune in banking, shipbuilding, motion pictures, and, reportedly, bootlegging during Prohibition. Like many men who have made money, he wanted to prove he could shine in other circles. He contributed substantially to FDR’s national campaigns, thus winning appointments as head of the Securities and Exchange Commission and then the U.S. Maritime Commission. Still he was hungry. Kennedy next had his eye on the Treasury Department. However, FDR was not about to dislodge his old friend Henry Morgenthau Jr. The President knew that he owed Kennedy something more, and he used his eldest son, Jimmy, as his go-between. Young Roosevelt made so many journeys to Marwood, Kennedy’s Maryland estate, that he and the older man became friendly. On one such occasion Kennedy confessed that if he could not have Treasury he was “intrigued by the thought of being the first Irishman to be ambassador from the United States to the Court of Saint James’s.” Jimmy later recalled, “I really liked Joe, but he was a crusty old cuss and I couldn’t picture him as an ambassador, especially to England.” Nevertheless, young Roosevelt relayed Kennedy’s wish to FDR. “When I passed it on to father,” Jimmy subsequently wrote, “he laughed so hard he almost toppled from his wheelchair.” But as time went on, Roosevelt was taken by Kennedy’s audacity. As Jimmy described a conversation with the President, “he was kind of intrigued with the idea of twisting the lion’s tail a little. . . .” FDR summoned Kennedy to the White House, and young Roosevelt has