Read The Air-Raid Warden Was a Spy: And Other Tales From Home-Front America in World War II for Free Online

him a huge cache of American secrets.
    Now, after the G-men around the nation had been put on the alert, they waited impatiently for the order. From San Francisco, Special Agent in Charge
    N. J. L. Pieper telephoned Louis Nichols, an assistant FBI director in Washington, and said: “The boys are getting jumpy. Shouldn’t we get going?” “Not yet,” Nichols replied. “We’ve got to wait for the proper papers to be signed after President Roosevelt issues an emergency proclamation.”
    In the meantime, Director Hoover, rated in public opinion polls as the second most popular American (just behind Roosevelt), had turned his office suite in the Justice Department Building into a militarylike command post. When the green light came from the White House, Hoover leaped into action. Hour after hour, he barked orders on the telephone as his agents fanned out across the nation and Hawaii, Alaska, and Puerto Rico.
    Assisted by local police, sheriffs’ departments, and military intelligence officers, the G-men moved with speed and coordination. Within the first seventy-two hours after Pearl Harbor, 3,846 subversive suspects were taken into custody. Each had a hearing before a civilian board and was represented by a court-appointed lawyer. 16

A Feud over Wiretapping
    A LTHOUGH CONFRONTED BY the most serious threat in America’s history, squabbles over jurisdiction broke out after President Roosevelt designated the FBI to “take charge of communications censorship.” J. Edgar Hoover promptly put a halt to all communications to Japan.
    Federal Communications Chairman James J. Fly and his aides were outraged over what they considered to be an intrusion onto their bailiwick. Fly fired off a message to the communications companies, calling on them to ignore the FBI order. However, Fly’s order was ignored.
    Mission: Halt Ambassador’s Hara-Kiri 23
    Hard on the heels of that brouhaha, the FCC and the FBI got into another fuss over the FBI’s right to make security checks (that is, wiretaps) on messages being sent to Tokyo, Rome, Berlin, Moscow, and other world capitals. Hoover maintained that it was the responsibility of his agency to make these checks, because Roosevelt had designated the FBI to be in charge of security on home-front America.
    Curiously, with the United States at war, Chairman Fly and his FCC bureaucrats held that wiretapping or interception of messages was illegal, an interpretation of the law not shared by Attorney General Francis Biddle, who was Hoover’s boss, and legal experts in the Justice Department. Biddle’s view was that authorized wiretaps and intercepts were legal as long as the information obtained was not divulged to unauthorized persons.
    Friction intensified when Fly and the FCC refused to turn over to the FBI the fingerprint cards of some 200,000 radio operators and communications employees. Fly pointed out that the prints had been taken only to check the citizenship of the workers and that turning over the prints might be regarded by the people fingerprinted as a serious breach of faith on the part of the FCC. Besides, Fly stated, the workers’ union leaders objected to the transfer.
    Attorney General Biddle fired off a sharp letter to Fly. “The evidence is strong that messages have been surreptitiously transmitted to our enemies by radio [from the United States],” Biddle stated. “Military attacks upon the territory of this country may have furthered and facilitated thereby. . . . I should hate to have something serious happen which might have been easily avoided.”
    Fly continued to balk. The cards should not be kept in FBI files because “it would be unfortunate if the employees were subjected to disclosure of past misdemeanors and other crimes that had nothing to do with national security matters.”
    Biddle was unmoved. “If there is anyone in a position to do real harm in the present states of affairs, certainly the radio operator is included,” he responded to Fly. “Unless