In Part One of Gentleman Spy, we described how Vincent Astor and his well heeled friends leveraged their wealth, social standing and global connections into an adjunct espionage service to what, in the 1930s, was still a relatively primitive U.S. intelligence apparatus. Today, we pick up the story with Astor venturing into the Pacific aboard his super-yacht, Nourmahal, to spy out Japanese activity in the Marshall Islands.
VINCENT ASTOR’S YACHT, the Nourmahal, was among the largest private boats on the seas. Partly financed by the more than $300,000 profits realized from his investment in the 1926 film version of Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ, the 263-foot ship was over-the-top in both luxury and technology for its time. It was built by the Krupp Iron Works, which would later turn out U-boats, in Kiel, Germany,
Astor occasionally used the Nourmahal (Persian for “light of the palace”—or, more playfully, “harem’) to host monthly meetings of “The Room,” a small, tightly knit group of powerful, well-connected men —no women—who met in secret to share intelligence garnered from New York’s social whirl, travel, and business dealings. With 11 state rooms and a crew of more than 40, the “Nourmy,” as Astor’s guests called it, also sometimes hosted his friend, patron and, beginning in 1933, President of the United States, Franklin D. Roosevelt.
Not all the cruises were social, however. In 1938 Astor and Kermit Roosevelt, Theodore Roosevelt’s son, undertook a reconnaissance mission under cover of scientific expedition to surveil Japan’s military activity on the Marshall Islands. Outfitted with a radio on loan from the U.S. Navy, they were to report on things like docks, fuel depots, and airstrips.
Astor seemed nearly giddy on the eve of his spy mission.
“I don’t want to make you jealous, but aren’t you a bit envious of my trip?” he wrote the president. “My deportment in the Marshalls will be perfect,” he went on. “When and if, however, there is something that deserves taking a chance—or if I notice increasing suspicion or resentment, I would like to be able to send a ‘standby’ message to Samoa or Hawaii.” The emergency signal would be the word, “automobile.”
The mission, not altogether successful, did yield some intelligence, according to ONI historian Jeffery M. Dorwart. Although unable to get close enough to the targets for visual accounts, Astor intercepted radio signals from Eniwetok Atoll confirming it as a principal Japanese naval base and Bikini a secondary.
Conversations with British officials supplemented his reports. It would be among the last of the long voyagers for Astor on the Nourmahal. Like his previous yacht, the Noma, the ship would see service in the war effort, commissioned into the fleet of the U.S. Coast Guard in 1940, then the U.S. Navy in 1942.
When the State Department got wind of Astor’s back channel arrangement, the flow of intelligence was temporarily halted. It resumed with the 1940 arrival of William Stephenson (famously known as Intrepid), head of the British Security Coordination (BSC), and his American-born wife, Mary. Astor personally invited Stephenson to lodge at the St. Regis, the luxurious and technically advanced hotel—telephones in every room and an early version of air conditioning— founded in 1904 by his father, John Jacob Astor IV, one of the richest men of his time, who had died in the 1912 sinking of the Titanic. The invitation, puckishly derided the luxury hotel as a “broken down boarding house.”
Despite the anodyne name, the British Security Coordination would eventually grow into one of the largest and wide-ranging clandestine intelligence operations of the war. With FDR’s secret approval, the BSC was going to help nudge Americans into supporting Britain’s desperate defiance of the Nazis. Stephenson’s aggressively vague remit allowed him to launch operations that ranged from traditional intelligence-gathering via secretly recruited agents to highly creative black propaganda efforts. Among the BSC operations Stephenson oversaw were honey traps, safe-cracking in embassies, planting stories in the press, and even a high-profile publicity tour by an astrologer who predicted American victory in the war.
On February 4, 1941, Stephenson wired back to London, “President has appointed Vincent Astor as his personal liaison with me…This arrangement is a great step forward and should considerably facilitate our efforts…”
