Studies in Intelligence

Thursday, July 17th, 2003

Studies in Intelligence describes how FDR, despite his familiarity with then-new-fangled surveillance gear, trusted the Russians completely “and was bugged like no other American president in history”:

Roosevelt was no stranger to technical surveillance. In 1939, piqued by an incident in which he believed that the press had deliberately misquoted him, he had a secret recording system installed in the White House as a means of self-protection. Since German tape-recording technology had not yet found its way to America, something had to be invented. FDR’s assistants took the problem to David Sarnoff of the Radio Corporation of America. In June 1940, Sarnoff personally presented the President with a “continuous-film recording machine” that made use of motion-picture sound film. Set in a wire cage in a room beneath the Oval Office, the device was activated either by the President using a switch inside his desk drawer or by his technician down below throwing a switch on the machine itself. A single microphone poked out through a lamp on FDR’s desk.

Between 23 August and 8 November, 1939, during his campaign for an unprecedented third term, the President recorded fourteen of twenty-one press conferences held in his office, plus a number of private conversations, the latter possibly by mistake. It seems that he never used the system to entrap anyone, and no one knows why he stopped it. Relatively innocent by today’s standards of invasion, it nevertheless demonstrates that the President was acquainted with listening devices before his conferences with Stalin.

In the very year of the Teheran conference, he was reminded of hidden microphones when watching Mission to Moscow, a movie based on a book of that title by Joseph E. Davies, America’s second Ambassador to the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Produced in 1943 with the President’s blessing, possibly even at his explicit request, this blatant piece of propaganda was designed to drum up public enthusiasm for a political shotgun wedding: It colored Stalin as a simple, practical man with whom one could do business; rhapsodized about Soviet construction, government, and politics; and justified the Soviet blood purges, the Moscow show trials, and Stalin’s two-year pact with Hitler, which had ended when Hitler turned the tables on Stalin and invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941.

Attempting to forestall any criticism of the Soviet system, Davies even contrived to make a brief for bugging. In one scene, set in the American Embassy in Moscow, the Ambassador’s assistants warn him of listening devices, but he rebukes them severely:

I say nothing outside the Kremlin that I wouldn’t say to Stalin’s face. Do you? . . . We’re here in a sense as guests of the Soviet government, and I’m going to believe they trust the United States as a friend until they prove otherwise. Is that clear?

When the assistant persists that still, after all, there may be microphones, Davies, played with aplomb by FDR’s favorite actor, Walter Huston, cuts him off: “Then let ‘em hear! We’ll be friends that much faster!”

Leave a Reply