For a long time after Pearl, FDR had come to rely on the assistant secretary of state, Sumner Welles, to do most of the administration’s real foreign-policy work. Then, just the previous week, Sumner Welles had suddenly tendered his resignation, and the scuttlebutt around the better-informed sections of government and the intelligence services was that Welles had been obliged to resign following the commission of an act of grave moral turpitude with a Negro railway porter while aboard the presidential train on its way to Virginia.

“I don’t mind telling you that these goddamned snobs at State are in for one hell of a shake-up. Half of them are pro-British and the other half anti-Semitic. Mince them all up and you wouldn’t have enough guts to make one decent American.” Roosevelt sipped his martini and sighed. “What do you know about a place called Katyn Forest?”

“A few months ago Berlin radio reported the discovery of a mass grave in the Katyn Forest, near Smolensk. The Germans allege it contained the remains of five thousand or so Polish officers who had surrendered to the Red Army in 1940, following the nonaggression pact between the Germans and the Soviets, only to be murdered on Stalin’s orders. Goebbels has been making a lot of political capital out of it. Katyn’s been the wind breaking from the tailpipe of the German propaganda machine since the summer.”

“For that reason alone, in the beginning I was half-inclined to believe the story was just Nazi propaganda,” Roosevelt said. “But there are Polish-American radio stations in Detroit and Buffalo that insist the atrocity occurred. It’s even been alleged that this administration has been covering up the facts so as not to endanger our alliance with the Russians. Since the story first broke, I’ve received a report from our liaison officer to the Polish army in exile, another from our own naval attache in Istanbul, and one from Prime Minister Churchill. I’ve even received a report from Germany’s own War Crimes Bureau. In August, Churchill wrote to me asking for my thoughts, and I passed all the files over to State and asked them to look into it.”