Another new one called Wedge; From P.Harbor to 9/11 How the Secret War Between the FBI & CIA has Endangered National Security by Mark Riebling...
...ON MAY 25, 1941, Commander Ian Fleming entered the United States on a secret mission. He took a taxi from LaGuardia Field to Rockefeller Center, in midtown Manhattan, where he got out with his boss, Rear Admiral John H. Godfrey, the director of British naval intelligence. Flags of a hundred nations fringed the plaza’s International Building, as if to advertise the many spy services within: America’s Federal Bureau of Investigation on the 44th floor; the Japanese consulate on 35; and on 36, behind a door marked “Rough Diamonds, Ltd., ” the British Secret Service. When Fleming later began writing novels, he would have his fictional James Bond shoot a Japanese cipher clerk here—hinting that this was based on the author’s own killing of a Japanese agent, by “accidentally” crashing a construction sandbag through a window. As far as history can establish, however, Fleming’s real purpose in America was at once more prosaic and more profound. In the words of a Most Secret British document, he was to help Godfrey “report on United States intelligence organizations, ” and “to coordinate them with those at the disposal of the United Kingdom.” In practice, that would mean pushing for an American central-intelligence agency, and helping choose its chief.
The task fell mostly to Fleming, for the admiral had to handle such matters as the hunt for the German battleship Bismarck, and in any case it was Fleming’s job, as an assistant, to read files and command facts. He began working closely on the project with station chief William Stephenson, a Canadian millionaire-inventor and former amateur lightweight boxing champion, cable address Intrepid. Stephenson’s secret duties, performed under a cover as passport-control officer, included recruiting agents like actor-playwright Noël Coward to report on fascist sympathizers, and hiring Italian crime families to sweep the New York docks for Nazi spies. Another of Stephenson’s tasks was to liaise with the Americans, and he had been urging them to create their own spy service while there still was time.
The problem assumed a new urgency on the day after Fleming arrived. Worried by Japanese aggressiveness in the Far East, President Franklin Roosevelt declared a full “state of emergency. ” On the eve of her inevitable entry into the worst war in world history, it was pathetic and dangerous that the United States had no brain trust to analyze foreign affairs, no espionage service to practice the darker arts of clandestine collection, no counterspy component to keep her secrets safe. America was not exactly a secret-intelligence virgin—General Washington had been helped by Nathan Hale and hurt by Benedict Arnold, and Pinkerton’s detectives had caught Confederate spies for Abraham Lincoln—but the country still had no central intelligence.
Instead, Fleming learned, feuding U.S. intelligence chiefs had a jurisdictional “twilight-zone” problem. Two years earlier, Roosevelt had decreed that the FBI would handle spy work in the Western Hemisphere, while military and naval intelligence would cover the rest of the world. Although these “Big Three” were ordered to pool their efforts, that was easier demanded than done. If, for instance, the Navy was running a double agent in Hawaii, and he came to the continental U.S., must he then be handed over to the FBI? Naturally the Bureau thought so, and naturally the Navy thought not. When Roosevelt convened a Cabinet meeting on these matters in April 1941, all parties admitted that “a certain amount of twilight zone was inevitable, ” but the president did not see why it couldn’t be overcome. In Britain, he observed, such matters were handled by “a gentleman known as Mr. X, whose identity was kept a complete secret.” Why shouldn’t America have its own Mr. X? The Big Three agreed that it would help to have a single coordinator; who that man should be, they would leave to the president.
The president had then turned to Winston Churchill. FDR did not especially like the prime minister or his alcoholically bombastic “curtain raising of history, ” but America needed British experience and advice. Admiral Godfrey and his young attaché had thus been invited to visit.
After sitting for a few days with Stephenson at Rockefeller Center—drinking gin and smoking Turkish cigarettes, digesting case histories and reviewing P-files (personality dossiers)—Fleming began to grasp that there was really one main obstacle to the centralization of American intelligence. So in early June, the British team boarded a train to Washington, to confront him.
https://exploringrealhistory.blogspot.com/2020/03/part-1-wedge-from-pharbor-to-911-how.html
