Joseph E. Persico by Roosevelt's Secret War: FDR, World War II Espionage Page A

years before by Sir Herbert Leon, a Victorian businessman. Sir Herbert evidently possessed more commercial acumen than aesthetic judgment. One architect described his estate as “. . . a maudlin and monstrous pile probably unsurpassed . . . in the architectural gaucherie of the mid-Victorian era . . . altogether inchoate, unfocused and incomprehensible.” Bletchley Park’s sole redeeming virtue was its location roughly midway between Oxford and Cambridge. This position attracted the Government Code and Cypher School, Britain’s codebreaking agency, which moved to Bletchley Park just before the war started. There a clutch of mathematicians, linguists, academics, and eccentrics, recruited largely from universities, labored over foreign codes with considerable success, though the cryptographers were having a deuce of a time with one seemingly unbreakable German cipher encrypted on a machine called the Enigma.
    Among codes the British were able to break was one used by the German foreign ministry. Soon after Maringliano’s delivery of the Kent messages to Rome, the codebreakers intercepted cables sent by Hans Mackensen, the German ambassador to Italy, to the foreign ministry in Berlin. One report demonstrated that Mackensen knew all about Churchill’s assurances to Roosevelt that American merchant vessels would not be forced into British ports to be searched. This intelligence played right into Germany’s hands. Hitler’s foreign office now tipped off other neutrals, who quickly bombarded the British Admiralty, complaining about the favoritism shown the Americans.
    More explosive was a message FDR sent on May 16, six days after Churchill took over as prime minister, which Tyler Kent had stolen. As Nazi military victories began swallowing up the European continent, Churchill knew that the key to Britain’s survival lay in keeping the sea lanes open, free of German submarines. He asked FDR to spare fifty old moth-balled American destroyers to bolster his thinly stretched fleet. The Bletchley cryptanalysts were shocked to find Roosevelt’s response to this request reported nearly verbatim in a dispatch sent from Ambassador Mackensen to the German foreign minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop. The secret FDR cable now available in Berlin read, “It would be possible to hand over 40 or 50 destroyers of the old type, but this is subject to the special approval of Congress, which would be difficult to obtain at present.”
    That Roosevelt was even considering giving fifty ships to Britain would raise Cain among American isolationists. Almost from the moment he had become president, FDR had been struggling inside a straitjacket of neutrality. In the mid-thirties, the U.S. Senate’s Nye Committee held hearings that concluded the United States had been sucked into the First World War by international bankers, munitions manufacturers, and war profiteers, a consortium branded in the shorthand of the day the “Merchants of Death.” In 1934, 1935, and 1936, Congress enacted laws deliberately intended to keep America out of Europe’s congenital squabbles. This legislation prohibited loans to any government in default on its war debts, barred even private loans to warring governments, and outlawed arms shipments to any belligerent. In 1938 a proposed amendment to the Constitution would have required a nationwide vote before the country could go to war, except if invaded. The measure was narrowly defeated in the House of Representatives only after strenuous lobbying by the White House.
    FDR believed that the politicians were making the mistake usually attributed to generals—fighting the last war. Nineteen thirty-nine was not 1917. Hitler had reneged on his promise that if given Czechoslovakia’s Sudetenland his appetite would be appeased. Instead, in March 1939, he seized the rest of Czechoslovakia. Next he began threatening Poland over the Polish Corridor, the strip of land