Flowers From Berlin Read Free Page A

well as my own chief assistant. He's currently employed at Bureau headquarters on Constitution Avenue."
    Roosevelt pursed his lips and waited impatiently. He glanced downward to the papers on his desk. Hoover shifted his weight slightly in the armchair.
    Then Roosevelt looked up again. "Tell me, J. Edgar," the President said, "weren't we successful several months ago in infiltrating a man into Germany? A man who returned some very good intelligence for us? He was a linguist and a financial man of some sort. Even had explosives training in the United States Army."
    "Yes, Mr. President. That's entirely correct."
    "I believe he's returned home, has he not?"
    "Yes, sir."
    Now the President cleared his throat.
    "Yes, of course," said Hoover, as if to suddenly remember. "Naturally, the man is still employed by the Bureau. I believe his name is--"
    "Cochrane," Roosevelt said. "I recall. William Thomas Cochrane. Where is he?"
    "He's currently assigned to Baltimore."
    "Baltimore?" The President arched an eyebrow. "Doing what?"
    "He's in the Mid-Atlantic States Banking Fraud Division," Hoover said.
    Roosevelt added nothing for many seconds. "Really?" he finally breathed.
    "I can reassign him this afternoon," Hoover volunteered.
    The President smiled widely and extinguished his cigarette, carefully removing the stub from the holder. "Very good, J. Edgar," Roosevelt concluded. "I was confident that you would know exactly who should head this investigation."
    As if by magic, two Secret Service men appeared and moved to a position behind the President of the United States, preparing to wheel him to the luncheon for which he was already five minutes late. Hoover instinctively rose. The Secret Service agents, employees of the Treasury, ignored him completely.
    "I think," Roosevelt said in parting, "that you and I should meet again, J. Edgar. In about a month. I'd like to know how this saboteur has been captured."
    Hoover thought his ears were failing. "A month?" he asked.
    "Good Gracious, Mr. Hoover!" Roosevelt suddenly roared, his chair halting, his face florid. "There's a war breaking out in Europe! You don't think we have all year, do you?"

TWO

    Franklin Roosevelt and J. Edgar Hoover: the aristocrat from Hyde Park and the ambitious self-made Washingtonian who in 1917 had landed a twenty-five-dollar-a-week job as a file clerk in the crime bureau. They were never the best of friends. Frequently, during the overlapping years of their careers, they were political adversaries. Extraordinary events were essential even for the two men to sit cordially in the same room with each other.
    But extraordinary events had already occurred— with no distinct pattern at varying times on two different continents. At their center were three principals: a dedicated spy serving Hitler's Germany, a young Englishwoman, and a widowed American banker in the employ of his own government. Certain events reached as far back as two decades. Others were recent.
    For example, late in June of 1939, the spy who called himself Siegfried had again traveled to New York. He had been at Fritz Duquaine's apartment in Manhattan's East Eighties when a third man, one whom both Duquaine and Siegfried expected, knocked on the door. It was past 11 P.M. Duquaine recognized the knock and admitted his visitor, a naturalized American named Wilhelm Hunsicker. Hunsicker, as Siegfried sat in an armchair and studied him, was a hulking, heavy, thick-browed blue-jowled man who was the head butcher on the passenger liner SS Panama . Duquaine often used Hunsicker for special assignments. The Panama had been in port for twelve hours and would be sailing again that next evening, bound first for Cork, in Ireland, and ultimately Genoa, Italy.
    But Hunsicker was also a courier who brought with him an urgent message from the Gestapo. Siegfried was no longer to use the old route for messages—the diplomatic dispatch route through the Portuguese Consulate in New York, via Lisbon to