“Jesus!” Donovan exploded. “Where the hell did you learn all this?!”
“The first name on that list is Jennifer Gould,” Keegan said. “She was my fiancée and Avrum Wolffson’s half-sister.”
There was stunned silence in the railroad car.
“Do you know about this unit, Bill?” Roosevelt interrupted. Donovan nodded slowly.
“And she was executed?” Roosevelt asked Keegan, gently.
“She was buried alive,” Keegan said. “Along with fifty other prisoners.”
“Good God!” Roosevelt exclaimed. A silence followed, a respectful silence that was finally broken by a now soft-spoken Donovan.
“How fresh is this information?”
“I learned it eight days ago.”
Roosevelt leaned back in his chair again and stared at a corner of the car. According to Hoover, there were several Nazi agents in America. The FBI had been investigating their ties to the German-American Bund for over a year. But Hoover had never come up with such specific information.
“Do you have anything else on this man?” Donovan asked.
Keegan decided to hedge a little. He knew he had them both going. He shook his head slowly.
“So we’ve got a sleeper agent with the code name Twenty- seven, living somewhere in the U.S. with a plan to keep us out of the war? That’s it?”
“Yes sir, except I assure you again, this is not hot air. I am convinced that Twenty-seven exists and knowing Vierhaus, I think whatever their plan is, it has some validity. Why take a chance?”
“There’s no place to start!” Donovan said. “We have no source of information in Germany to back-check. We have no description, no name. The sentence died out.
“On the other hand,” said Roosevelt, “can we afford to dismiss it? It seems to me that the closer we come to war, the more frequent these threats are going to become.”
“I don’t suggest we dismiss it,” said Donovan, sighing. “Let’s get back to the problem at hand. From a jurisdictional point, this is an FBI matter.”
“No way,” Keegan said immediately and emphatically.
“I beg your pardon?” Donovan said with raised eyebrows.
“Colonel, I’m not one of Mr. Hoover’s favorite people,” said Keegan. “He has a long memory, sir. He’d probably laugh at the information, then bury it. I can’t give him specifics and I can’t jeopardize my contact. I won’t do that. That’s why I came to you, Mr. President. I don’t know who else to turn to.”
Roosevelt and Donovan exchanged quick glances. Keegan had a definite point. In the matter of intelligence, Roosevelt had a problem with Hoover, a powerful and popular figure in America. Hoover had invented a weekly roll called the “Ten Most Wanted,” plastered the faces of America’s most dangerous criminals in post offices and literally declared war on bank robbers. In one year, his college-graduate machinegun squads, led by the hard case Melvin Purvis, whose credo was “shoot first, then ask questions,” had killed Pretty Boy Floyd, Ma Barker and her “Boys,” Machine Gun Kelly, John Dillinger and Homer Van Meter.
But by 1935, Hoover’s G-men were running out of quarry. And since there was still no effective intelligence service, Hoover had turned his attention to the Communist threat, placing known members of the party under surveillance, gathering information on them, and taking over the responsibility for intelligence gathering in the Western Hemisphere.
Hoover had been annoyed by the proposal that Donovan establish an intelligence agency. He had acquiesced only so long as Donovan stayed out of his territory. It was a touchy issue and one which Roosevelt had to juggle carefully, since Hoover and his agents had very little experience in gathering or analyzing intelligence data. The compromise he made was that Donovan’s group would operate outside North, Central and South America, leaving the entire Western Hemisphere in Hoover’s jurisdiction.
Roosevelt knew the danger in the compromise: Hoover could follow the same path which Himmler had followed in Germany. After the Reichstag fire, Himmler’s list of Communists had been used to frame the Communists for the fire, then track them down and murder over one thousand members of the party in the weeks following the lire. The lists being gathered by Hoover might also be used for political rather than national security purposes. The power-hungry FBI director was not above such abuse of his office.
Keegan’s request could precipitate a political crisis which Roosevelt could not afford at the moment. And yet the president believed Keegan’s information was probably accurate. The ex-rumrunner had presented him with an unusual dilemma.
“Do you have a suggestion?” the president asked Keegan.
“Let me go after him,” Keegan said flatly.
“What!” Donovan said.
“Just a minute, William, hear him out,” said Roosevelt.
“I need credentials that will get me into the bureau’s files and also give me credibility when I ask questions.”
“Without Hoover knowing about it?” Donovan said. “That’ll be the day.”
“I promise you, I’ll confine everything specifically to this investigation.”
“What do you know about investigating anything?” Donovan asked.
“Logic. It’s all logic. That’s all we have to go on. Logic and intuition. Maybe we get lucky. Maybe we get on his trail. Maybe we get a fingerprint, something like that. I run it through the system, see what we turn up. This is nothing but a track down, Colonel Donovan. It’s not a murder investigation.”
“I think Edgar might disagree with you there, Keegan,” said the stoic Donovan. “Even if he doesn’t believe the information, he’d get extremely ugly if he found out someone outside the bureau was stepping on his toes.”
“I only need access to the files for about four months—say March through June of 1934.”
Donovan suddenly was very interested. He leaned forward on the sofa and put his drink on the floor, his eyes narrowing. “You’re holding out on us,” he snapped.
“Anything else I could tell you would be pure conjecture.”
“Let me judge that,” Donovan said.
“What have we got to lose?” Keegan asked naively, unaware of the political implications of his request. “We know Hoover will fluff off the information anyway. Why not let me take a crack at it? Does he have to know?”
“Subterfuge, Francis?” Roosevelt asked wryly.
Keegan smiled. “I guess you could call it that, Mr. President.”
“What else can you call it?” Donovan asked.
Keegan could tell Roosevelt found the idea appealing.
“You’re talking about a lot of time and work, Francis,” the president said.
“I’ve got nothing else to do. And if I abuse the privilege you can always revoke my library card.”
“Library card, I like that,” Roosevelt said with a chuckle.
“I’ll pay my own expenses,” Keegan added.
“A dollar-a-year man, eh?” Roosevelt said. The idea was beginning to appeal to him. Since he had become president, Roosevelt had surrounded himself with unpaid advisers from many different fields who were paid a token fee of one dollar a year.
Donovan picked up his glass and took a drink without taking his eyes off Keegan.
“We’re in a curious situation,” Roosevelt said. “I think the three of us would agree that war between Germany and England and France is inevitable. But the American people don’t want to hear about it. I made a speech in Chicago the other night warning the country about the threat of fascism. I thought it would rally the people and I was certainly mistaken about that, my friend. Nobody supported my position. What an outcry! What criticism. It’s a hell of a note, boys, when you’re trying to lead the country and you look over your shoulder and there’s nobody there.”