Hitler’s Spy Revealed Japan’s Pearl Harbor Plans, but Lifestyle Offended the FBI
Dusko Popov, a playboy spy working against the Nazis, brought the FBI evidence of Japan’s interest in Pearl Harbor in 1941. He showed J. Edgar Hoover a German questionnaire requesting specific details about the harbor’s defenses. Hoover, disapproving of Popov’s lifestyle, refused to take the warning seriously. Four months later, Japanese planes attacked, killing 2,403 Americans. The intelligence that might have prevented America’s worst military disaster was dismissed because of personal distaste.
