Judging by the photo, Inga was undoubtedly an attractive woman; a blue-eyed beauty with light silky hair, high cheekbones, full lips, a pleasant smile and a flawless complexion. She had an athletic figure fit for a ballerina and she really wanted to be one. Born in Denmark, she spent her childhood in France and Germany and learned the language of both countries. Growing up in England, her mother gave her a bit of an English upbringing. She was said to be able to convince her interlocutor that she was important, to be in complete control of the conversation and to be able to skilfully divert attention away from her own complicated life story.
Inga arrived in America on 29 February 1940 on board an Italian ocean liner. She was alone, without her mother Olga Arvad or her husband Paul Fejos. The ship’s passenger list stated that she was a housewife and that she intended to settle permanently in America, as her husband was a naturalised American. Europe was already deep in war at that time, with the Germans occupying Poland and their submarines cruising the Atlantic. Her husband Paul had arrived in America three months earlier and, as a member of an expedition to explore the Indian tribes of the early Amazon and to search for the lost cities of the Incas, he immediately travelled on to Peru.
After arriving in America, Inga brought her mother, who was living in Denmark, which had been occupied by the Germans, and then wrote to her husband in Peru, saying she wanted to divorce him. They were married for four years in 1940, half of which they spent apart. Inga never wanted to be dependent on him, not even after the divorce, so she enrolled at Columbia University’s journalism school. It is not clear how she managed to do this, as she did not have a proper education and missed out on enrolment. All that is known is that she stated in her application that she had acted in a few Danish films, interviewed Hitler several times as a journalist and reported from Göring’s wedding.
Some of her Jewish colleagues were convinced that she was a Nazi sympathiser, and one of them decided to inform the FBI. “I would like to draw your attention to my Danish colleague Inga Fejos, a pretty blonde who claims to have been a well-known journalist in Denmark. She speaks very convincingly about her acquaintanceship with Göring, Goebbels, Himmler and Hess and about the strong impression she made on Hitler.” The FBI decided to find out what the beautiful blonde’s intentions were, but found nothing suspicious and dropped the investigation.
Inga and John meet
Inga herself once admitted that she couldn’t be without a man. What was behind this need – love, sex, a sense of security, friendship or a little of each – is unknown, but it is known that she met a Danish refugee, Niels Blok, soon after she arrived in America. Her mother Olga was very opposed to the relationship and constantly argued with her daughter about it, which is probably why Inga decided to look for a journalism job in Washington, where “there is always something going on”.
With the support of her male protectors, she managed to get a job at the Washington Times Herald on her tenth day in Washington, probably because she promised them an interview with one of America’s most mysterious men, Axel Wenner-Gren, a multi-millionaire suspected by the FBI of being a Nazi agent.
Today, Wenner-Gren is completely forgotten, but between the two great wars he was an important businessman with companies all over the world. He was neither an engineer nor an inventor, but a man who knew how to sell what people needed. In 1908, he realised that an electric vacuum cleaner could change the fortunes of American housewives and brought several companies together to form the corporation that is today Elextrolux. He bought SAAB, then still involved in aviation and the military industry, was majority owner of German Krupp, which produced steel, arms and ammunition, and a major supplier to the German war industry.
He tried in vain to mediate between England and Germany to prevent war. When it broke out, despite his efforts, he retreated to his Bahamian estates, where he was a neighbour and friend of the Duke of Windsor, the former King Edward VIII, who was considered by all to be a Nazi sympathiser.
In June 1941, the 60-year-old Wenner-Gren was back in Washington on business. The FBI was already monitoring him and listening in on his conversations, so they knew how Inga’s interview went. This interview was far from professional, as the industrialist himself determined what he would say. The conversation was a spirited discussion of the issues that were dividing America at the time, tearing families apart and making enemies out of friends.
After that interview, Inga wrote short, irrelevant articles, and then she got a daily column in the Washington Times Herald. She wrote about all sorts of things and sometimes took on foreign policy issues, but she was best known for managing to get interviews with people who did not appear in public, much less talk to journalists. One of them was FBI Assistant Director J. Edgar Hoover, who even praised her article at the end.
A few days after the publication of this article, her colleague at the Page Huidekoper called the FBI and mentioned that she knew Inga, and Inga, who was supposedly in charge of Nazi propaganda in Denmark, knew Hitler. The fact that she knew so much about her was backed up by the fact that they had shared an apartment in Washington for some time. Page Huidekoper was also a friend of the children of the US Ambassador to London, Joseph P. Kennedy, and was particularly close to his daughter, Kathleen Kennedy, nicknamed Kick. The Kennedy children returned to America when war broke out in Europe and Kick asked Page to find her a suitable job.
Kick became one of the secretaries at the Times Herald. Naturally, she crossed paths with Inga there and they soon became good friends. They confided in each other a lot, but not everything. Kick realised that Inga was different from her, envied her charm, her insight, her knowledge of languages and her communication skills, and remarked on several occasions that Inga looked very much like her older brother John Jack, who was being transferred to the Navy Department in Washington at that very moment. John and Kick Kennedy were the closest of all the Kennedy children and Kick was the only one in the family who forged John, not Joe, into stardom. She was also convinced that Inga would charm John.
Inga was sceptical about her brother’s enthusiasm, but attended a small reception where John was also present. She later recounted, “He walked in and I could see that Kick was not exaggerating. He was very charming, with his tuft of thick hair, blue eyes and natural manner, he reminded me very much of his sister. When he appeared, you knew he was in the room. He exuded an animal magnetism.”
When she met him, John was already a physical wreck. He had a long history of stomach problems and was on a strict diet. He had colitis, inflammation of the colon, and was regularly on strong medication, which caused back problems. He was also plagued by Addison’s disease; it was not well understood at the time, but it is now known that it causes the glands not to produce enough hormones, which weakens the immune system. Despite all the problems that plagued him, John wanted to join the army any way he could. Of course, he was turned down. “If I don’t serve in the army, it will have a bad effect on my later career,” he was convinced.
His brother Joe had signed up for the Navy, he wanted to become an aviator, and John didn’t want to be left behind. Even his father was called a coward by some because he objected to “our boys dying on foreign soil”. And that was probably the reason why his father finally listened to his pleas and, through his connections, got him a medical check-up and a job in a Naval Intelligence office. He was convinced that his son would thus avoid physical exertion.
In his new job, John analysed and disseminated information obtained from foreign sources. And because he worked in intelligence, his relationship with Inga, who was suspected of being a Nazi spy, soon came under scrutiny.
Inga and John quickly became lovers. The Kennedy family knew about it, and while Father Joseph didn’t mind John getting a bit “wild”, he didn’t want any scandal. After all, Inga was a married woman. Who the Kennedys were was known to everyone, but especially to Inga. And if she knew a lot about him, all he knew about her was that she was married. But her past did not remain hidden for long either.
Denmark’s first beauty
So what was Inga like? “It was my mother who encouraged me to go on strange adventures,” she once said of herself. Her mother Olga reportedly always wanted Inga to be “something more” than others. Her husband died when Inga was four, and she became even more attached to her daughter. They travelled extensively in European countries, climbing in the Alps, riding donkeys in the south of France and visiting every museum they came across. They rarely returned to their native Denmark, especially when Inga had to go to school. She was described by former classmates as a “strange” bird, driven forward by her ambitious mother.
She wanted to become a ballerina, but clearly lacked perseverance. In Paris, she was accepted as a pianist at the music academy, but the tuition was too expensive. The enterprising Inga tried to earn some money by entering a beauty contest, and it was this decision that changed her life profoundly.
In 1931, there were not many beauty contests, and men, in particular, felt that by taking part in them, girls were giving up the life that women had usually led before the start of the First World War. Beauty contests were a new and radical expression of female sexuality. The female body was no longer hidden under flimsy clothes and women, as sensual beings, no longer merely tolerated sexual intimacy in peace, but also enjoyed it. This new thinking was quickly reflected in films, where horny women like Theda Bara were as popular as the virgins portrayed by Mary Pickford.
In 1921, when she was just 17 years old, Inga entered a beauty contest in Denmark. The pageant was still very simple at that time. The contestants walked in front of the jury a few times in their evening dresses and that was the end of the competition. She won and earned her place in the Beauty of Europe contest in Paris. She travelled there accompanied by her mother and saw the contestants celebrated like real stars.
She didn’t win in Paris, but she attracted a lot of attention. So much so that Kamal Abdel Nabi, a 25-year-old Egyptian who studied political science in Paris, came close. His father was an Egyptian refugee and owner of a large amount of land along the Nile. They danced the night away, went on a picnic the next day and Kamal asked her to marry him. The seventeen-year-old was convinced that marriage would ensure a carefree future, her mother was even more convinced, and in April 1931 the couple were married at the Egyptian embassy in Paris.
But disappointment soon followed. Nabi’s family had a lot of land, but very little cash, and Nabi was poorly paid for his occasional work at the embassy, and the couple were not used to saving money. They avoided creditors and in the end it was Mother Olga who had to pay all the bills. As Miss Denmark, Inga still had a lot of fans, which annoyed Nabi very much. “He was jealous and I was jealous too, but life was happy.”
After the wedding, the couple moved to Cairo, and Olga’s mother, of course, went with them. Her Egyptian father-in-law gave them a Mercedes with a chauffeur, and a bunch of maids did the housework for them. Labour was cheap in Egypt in 1931, but other things were not. “We lived like millionaires, but we didn’t have enough money to get our shoes repaired,” Inga once told me later. Just as in Paris, creditors were constantly knocking at their door.
She was never accepted by her husband’s family, who were all unhappy that Nabi had not married a “nice Muslim girl” instead. So she increasingly thought of returning to Europe and trying to pursue a career in film. This was not an easy decision, as Egypt was an attractive country and she still loved her husband. Moreover, she could not leave the country without his permission. She was only allowed to leave when she contracted pneumonia and was advised to recuperate in Davos, Switzerland. She promised Nabi that she would return, but she never did. After arriving in Denmark, she officially separated from him and settled in Copenhagen. She was married for less than two years.
In her apartment in Copenhagen, she was thinking about how to move forward. She had not brought any property from her marriage, the economic and financial crisis of the 1930s was still ongoing, and she had only $5000 in her account, which was only enough for emergency needs. She thought of trying her hand at film. The Danish Nordisk Film was the oldest silent film studio in the world and its new owner hired the Hungarian-American Paul Fejos to make sound films, which were becoming increasingly popular.
Like many artists who left Central Europe after the end of the war, he settled first in Berlin and then in Paris. He was penniless and held a variety of odd jobs, including being a speaker at funeral ceremonies. Somehow he managed to make his way to Hollywood, was a vagabond and stole oranges from orchards to survive. Then he managed to convince a young producer, Spitz, that he was capable of making a good film at minimal cost. The film was still quite successful and even Charlie Chaplin praised it.
After this success, he signed a contract with Universal and directed a few more films, both silent and sound, but finally, disillusioned, he travelled to Denmark to make films for Nordisk Film. He started looking for actresses. Inga convinced him with her beauty and her knowledge of foreign languages and he offered her a role. He was 16 years older than her, already divorced and falling in love all over again with the actresses he was shooting with. As a director, he could not get on with her, and they argued constantly during the shoot. The film, much to Inga’s disappointment, also met with a cold reception.
But Inga refused. If she can’t make it in film, she’ll make it in journalism, she told herself. She knew that this year, 1935, she would get most of her interesting news in Nazi Germany, ruled by a dictator with a funny moustache who was adored by the masses, and she knew she had to go there.
It is not known what she later told John Kennedy about Nazi Germany. What is known is that they discussed his views on world events, not what she thought about them. Was John really in love with her or was this just another of his many female trophies? He certainly followed in the footsteps of his father, Joseph P. Kennedy, who made no secret of his affairs and once brought his mistress, the famous actress Gloria Swanson, on a family yacht cruise. His wife Rose had to pretend not to know what it was all about. His affairs were commonplace for the family and some of the family members even delivered girls to him.
John’s desire to conquer as many women as possible probably stemmed from his belief that he would die young. “If I don’t have a woman for more than three days, I get a terrible headache,” he once confided to British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan. He received the last sacraments three times before becoming President. In his youth, he spent a lot of time in hospitals and undergoing tests because doctors wanted to find out what was wrong with him. But according to the information that is known, John was faithful to Inga during their affair, which began in October 1941 and lasted until the summer of 1942.
When he was still a civilian, he liked to meet his girlfriends in New York’s famous nightclubs, but now that he was in the Navy and seeing Inga, who was still married to Fejos, these meetings were more discreet. He occasionally mentioned to her that he would run for the US presidency if he lived long enough, but he was aware that he would have to overcome a major obstacle on the way there – his older brother Joe P. Kennedy Jr. When Joe Junior was born, his grandfather, the Mayor of Boston, said: “Of course he’s going to be President of the United States, and his mother and father have already decided that he’s going to go to Harvard and play football and baseball and study a little bit.”
Joe Junior was blessed by nature with everything; he was strong, vital, intelligent, healthy and full of energy, and his parents adored him. John was the opposite of his brother; he was sickly, spoilt and timid. He was also self-conscious and, reportedly, as soon as he got to Harvard, he said to his roommate, “Dr. Wold, I want you to know that I’m not as smart as my brother Joe.”
His parents found the idea of John’s presidential ambitions amusing, seeing him as a supporter of his older brother’s political career. Only his sister Kick was convinced that John was better than his older brother. It was only when he was at Harvard and his older brother Joe had already graduated that John slowly began to emerge from his brother’s shadow.
FBI launches investigation
Realising that war was imminent and that there would be no more opportunities to travel the world, John set out on his journey and in 1939 visited Nazi Germany, Poland, the Soviet Union, the Baltic Republics, Turkey, Palestine and Egypt. He returned to London just days before Hitler invaded Poland. On his return to America, he began to see Inga regularly and even secretly asked in high Catholic circles whether the Church could annul their marriage.
The FBI has also heard rumours about this. “Rumour has it that Ambassador Kennedy’s son will marry a woman who is divorced from her current husband.” But the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor put an end to many people’s life plans. John Kennedy was now working all day in the navy and soon admitted to being completely exhausted. Time to see Inga was running out.
Soon, Germany declared war on America and the security situation in Washington became more tense. The Times Herald had a room in the basement of the building, called the “morgue” because it was used to store old newspapers, newspaper clippings and photographs. One day a staff member went in to get some information and the archivist reportedly said to her, “I found a photograph from 1936 of our Inga at the Olympics in Berlin with Hitler in his box.”
The employee felt a patriotic duty to inform the nearest FBI office. The news somehow reached Kick Kennedy’s ears, and she immediately called Inga and told her what they were saying about her. Inga was surprised, as she did not know that she had been photographed with Hitler, but she was not particularly worried, as many politicians were photographed with firers at that time. But the FBI was already in a frenzy of searching for enemies. “Do we even know how many foreign spies are in Washington?” officials wondered.
She was questioned by the FBI. She was not arrested, but she knew she had not convinced the interrogators. The FBI then started looking for the suspicious photograph, but it was not found in the Times Herald editorial office. The only photo they found in the “morgue” was one taken by her publicity agent and sent around with the caption “Meet Miss Inga Arvad”, who had so charmed Chancellor Adolf Hitler during her visit to Berlin that he made her the head of Nazi propaganda in Denmark.
So what did Inga have to do with the Nazis? In the spring of 1935, journalists were drawn straight to Germany to cover what was happening in that country. Among the foreign correspondents who came there, there were many women journalists, because journalism was the most suitable job for women at that time, alongside nursing. Inga’s appetite for journalism was whetted when she saw that a career in film was unlikely to be anything.
She persuaded the Danish women’s newspaper Vore Damer to be their German correspondent. She wanted to interview Hitler or Göring in Berlin, but neither had time for an unknown reporter. Then, at a dinner at the Danish embassy, someone mentioned that he had heard that Göring was going to marry a divorcee, Emmy Sonnemann. Although it was only a rumour, Inga saw this as her big chance. She telephoned the bride-to-be, arranged to meet her and wrote a successful story. So successful that she was invited to the wedding. There she met and talked to everyone who mattered in Germany, especially Goebbels and Rudolf Hess.
The newspaper to which she had successfully sold the story of Göring’s marriage wanted even more; an interview with Adolf Hitler himself. Inga knew she had to make good use of her new acquaintances from the Göring wedding and write about them as well as possible. So she ended her interview with Goebbels by saying, “Dr Goebbels is not only a great orator and a skilful propaganda minister, he is also a great personality.” And Goebbels described her in his diary as “a beautiful Dane who is enthusiastic about the new Germany”.
But how excited was she really and how much did she know about what was happening in Germany? The Nazis were not ashamed of their work. Unlike the Soviet Union under Stalin, Nazi Germany was still quite an open society. Visitors, including journalists and diplomats, were not allowed to enter the barracks and camps, but were otherwise, as a rule, unhindered in their travels around the country. Thus, foreigners could see the persecution of the Jews, but they were not too bothered about it, because anti-Semitism was not confined to Germany, even though the most appalling conditions prevailed there.
Years later, Inga denounced anti-Semitism and had some Jewish friends, but at that time her articles did not contain any accusations against the Nazi regime. After visiting a Nazi youth camp, she even wrote about “happy and fresh faces saying that life is wonderful”.
An interview with Hitler was a rarity. Those who managed to get one later reported that Hitler did not even let them have a word, but immediately began his monologue. Inge, who was interviewed by Goebbels, described her conversation with him, which appeared in the Berligske Tidende newspaper on 1 November 1935, to her readers as follows: “Everyone loves him immediately. He seems to be lonely. His gentle eyes express strength.”
When Goebbels introduced her to Hitler, she greeted him with Heil Hitler. She then asked him about his personal life, why he was a vegetarian and what was the role of women in Germany. Goebbels wrote in his diary that Hitler was impressed by her. According to many observers of what was going on in Germany at the time, the Nazis were convinced that Inga would one day be useful to them, and so they looked through her fingers at some point. They were not always happy with her articles, especially the one in which the Berlin police chief admitted that he was “an enemy of the Jews”. The Olympic Games were on the horizon and the Nazis did not want negative publicity.
Interview with Hitler
After returning from Germany, Inga reconnected with Fejos, who had left Hollywood to film in Denmark. She was convinced she was too young to marry Nabi, but now, at 22, she felt she was just the right age. So she and Fejos married in January 1936. He had just turned thirty-nine. Then, in March 1936, the International News Service published Inga’s photograph and a text about Hitler’s appointment of her as head of Nazi propaganda in Denmark. Goebbels, who was the Nazi Minister of Propaganda, must have been involved, because shortly afterwards Inga received an invitation from Berlin to be Hitler’s guest of honour at the Summer Olympics.
Hitler certainly wanted the Berlin Olympics to be a success. Although some countries threatened to boycott the Games because of persecution of Jews, there were few anti-Semitic posters during the Games and some Jewish athletes were even included in the German Olympic team. But inviting Inga to watch the Games from the Firer’s private box was unusual, especially as Hitler invited her to a private lunch afterwards and presented her with a silver-framed picture of himself at the end.
So Inga had a second interview with him, which finally put her in the ranks of the chosen few of German high society. Other journalists could not even hope for such privileges. At a social gathering in the villa of a German prince, one of the “important Nazis” approached her and suggested that she join their service, go to Paris, attend social gatherings there and report to them what the guests were discussing. She would be well paid for her work and would have an unlimited account to cover her expenses. She told them she would think about the offer, but after a roundabout way of finding out that the Gestapo would visit her if she refused to spy, she took the first plane back to Copenhagen in the morning.
In the meantime, Fejos returned from filming a documentary in Africa. He started preparing for an anthropological expedition in South-East Asia. Inga joined him on this trip for ten months, happy to escape the stifling European atmosphere. In Malaysia, where they went after visiting a series of Indonesian islands, they met Axel Wenner-Gren, one of the richest men in the world, in Penang. In December 1937, they spotted a large yacht, the Southern Cross, owned by the Wenner-Gren couple, in Penang harbour. The yacht, which had three bedrooms, a large dining room and a lounge with crystal chandeliers, had once belonged to Howard Hughes. Inga and Fejos managed to get an invitation to have dinner on her and Wenner-Gren started talking to Fejos about a joint project and partnership.
On his return to Europe in February 1938, Fejos arranged an archaeological expedition to Peru at Wenner-Gren Castle in Sweden, to search for vanished Inca cities covered by jungle. The couple ended up in New York, from where Fejos himself travelled to Peru. It must be admitted that he was very successful in his search for Inca sites, but this did not stop the FBI from seeing the expedition as an attempt to infiltrate the Nazis into South America.
One of them is said to have been Wenner-Gren, who was known as a friend of Hermann Göring. In addition, in the summer of 1941, Argentina informed America that it knew that tens of thousands of Nazis were hidden in remote places, especially in the upper Amazon, in the very same area where Fejos was exploring. The news was false, but it was important enough to attract American attention. It was Wenner-Gren who was suspected of being the financier of the Nazi penetration of South America. The US and British governments blacklisted him, confiscated all the assets they could get their hands on and banned companies from doing business with him.
Wenner-Gren settled in Mexico with his wife and tried to get his property back through lawsuits. But no one wanted to deal with his lawsuits. Even before these events, it was Wenner-Gren who “got” Inga into an American university and later got her a job at the Washington Times Herald. Years later, when the Justice Department asked the FBI to interview Inga in February 1945, it was mainly to find out whether she had worked for Wenner-Gren as a secret agent.
Frank Waldrop, editor-in-chief of the Washington Times Herald, has for years wondered how Inga’s photo was discovered in the morgue. Why would someone go through old newspapers and photographs? It was only in 1970, under the Access to Information Act, that he discovered that the archivist at the morgue was an FBI employee and that there were two other FBI employees in the editorial office who also supervised him. This came as quite a shock to him, as he was himself an FBI collaborator and he had also occasionally harassed Inga Arvad. “They were really cunning. Hoover is to be congratulated,” he chuckled.
The Secrets of Edgar Hoover
No other government agency in America has been so closely linked to one person as the FBI was to J. Edgar Hoover. For forty-eight years, from 1924, when he was appointed Director of the FBI, until his death in 1972, the FBI was at the whim of this man. Nobody, not even the White House, knew exactly what he was doing. All the information that came into the FBI passed through his hands in one way or another. The most confidential information, often obtained illegally, was kept in a safe in his office, separate from the official files and thus removed from the scrutiny of Congress or the US administration.
Inga Arvad had attracted his attention even before her acquaintance with Kennedy, thanks to her articles in newspapers. She became a controlled person. Her telephone conversations were tapped, her apartment was broken into, her mail was examined and her bank account was monitored. They did all this illegally. Hoover did this because he knew that President Roosevelt would turn a blind eye, because he was not a great defender of personal rights.
Before the outbreak of World War II, Roosevelt was worried about Germany’s strong armament, so he summoned Hoover to his office and ordered him to investigate the influence of Nazism in America. Roosevelt also minimised the influx of emigrants to America, fearing that they would include Nazi agents. Hoover was more afraid of communism than of fascism, but he was nevertheless happy to be given a completely free hand by the President’s order. In December 1941, an American court sentenced 14 people to long prison terms on charges of being part of a Nazi spy ring in New York.
One of the accused was a beautiful Viennese woman, Lilly Stein, a photographic model and prostitute, who agreed to work for the Abwehr because she had been threatened with a concentration camp. The FBI was surprised how many male lovers she had among the celebrities. It is therefore not surprising that the FBI saw in every suspicious foreign woman a spy.
When they broke into Inga’s apartment, they found what they thought were some interesting things. Inga had carefully recorded all her expenses going back several years. As a journalist, she had a lot of information that could prove she was interested in illicit items. But what caused the most excitement was a telegram she had received from Feyos that had been intercepted by the FBI and contained only one word: asawaqit.
They immediately sent the word to their technical laboratory for linguistic analysis, assuming it was a secret code. After weeks of research, they concluded that it could mean “aksam vakit”, which means “until the evening” in Turkish. It was supposedly a secret message sent by Fejos from Peru to Inga. In fact, in the language of the Greenlandic Eskimos, whom Fejos admired, it only meant I love you. The FBI also scrutinised all her articles, hoping to find secret messages about the US coastal defence system. FBI agents also carefully noted that a man had repeatedly come and gone from her apartment and spent nights there. They did not know who he was, only that his name was John. It was only when they learned his surname was Kennedy that alarm bells rang at the FBI.
Things got even more complicated when Paul Fejos returned to New York from Peru in December 1941. Inga immediately told him she wanted a divorce. They had been married for six years but had spent little time together. Fejos knew that his wife was seeing other men and was jealous beyond belief. Somehow he found out that his rival was John Kennedy and took the rather unusual route of discovering him. He met John’s father, Joseph P. Kennedy, and threatened him with a scandal that could have a negative impact on his son’s career. The old Kennedy agreed with him. Both were convinced that it was best to end the romance between Inga and John as soon as possible.
Inga was unpleasantly surprised to read a news story in the Washington Times Herald’s Social Chronicle that was undoubtedly about her. “One of the marriageable Kennedy sons has become the target of the affections of a Washington columnist who has already consulted a lawyer about divorcing her researcher husband. Daddy Kennedy is against it.” Her name was not mentioned, but everyone knew that her husband was a researcher.
Fejos, of course, read the news and wrote her an indignant letter, and Inga began to wonder who had actually put the story in print. She was sure that it could only have been John’s father. What’s more, John had been transferred from Washington to a naval base in Charleston. Once at his new post, she visited him and noticed that he had become indecisive and had begun to think differently about some things. He had almost decided to enter politics after the war. She was convinced that the father had taken a hard grip on his son and that his attitude towards her had changed as a result.
Despite the fact that she had a feeling that the future of the relationship was not bright, she started talking to Fejos about divorce. The meeting was stormy and full of accusations and ended with her crying. Fejos told her viciously that John Kennedy had not spoken well of her. Among other things, he had said to him: ‘I wouldn’t dream of marrying her. In fact, I picked her up off the road.”
Divorce
But things have gone downhill in other areas too. J. Ennis, Director of the Office for the Control of Enemy Aliens, has asked the FBI for all information on her in order to assess whether she should be subject to an arrest warrant and internment. FBI Director Hoover was annoyed that someone was interfering in his affairs and therefore sent Ennis only general information about her, which did not suggest that she was a danger to the country.
Ennis was not the only one to ask Hoover about it. William Donnovan, the head of US intelligence, wanted to know if there was any truth in the rumour that Inga was a “German spy”. Hoover decided that she needed to be monitored even more closely. So they sounded her hotel room when she came to Charleston to visit John. The reports of her visits were very graphic and the movements of both were strictly controlled. During one of these meetings, Inga expressed fears that she might be pregnant. John said nothing and started talking about something else.
In the FBI building in Washington, apart from a small cinema room where Hoover watched films for distribution in America, as well as pornography, there was a small, carefully locked room where he collected photographs, films and sound recordings that he thought “should be saved”. It was also where the audio recordings were kept, which the agent wrote proved that the couple in the room had “repeatedly had sexual intercourse”. Kennedy was very afraid of these recordings.
Inga sensed that John had cooled down and had made a decision, because he had recently asked her about her “involvement in a matter”, which he was supposed to have learned about from reliable sources. One weekend he visited her in Washington and told her that they had to end their relationship. The FBI eavesdropped on this conversation. However, they still remained in contact, mainly because John’s health had deteriorated. He asked for a six-month leave to prepare for a risky spinal operation, but was not granted it, only to be sent for tests at a naval hospital.
In the meantime, Inga wanted to end her relationship with Fejos anyway and travelled to Reno, Nevada, which has become a Mecca for quick divorces. Reno was the largest city in Nevada at the time, despite having only 20 000 inhabitants. In the 1930s, Nevada was the least populous state in the USA. Hoping to attract new business and residents, its administration passed two laws in 1931. The first allowed gambling and gambling, the second divorce, restricting it to a minimum six-week stay in town. So Inga began her stay in Reno, bored and writing long letters to John, who was undergoing tests at the naval hospital.
She didn’t know what she would do after the divorce. She was twenty-seven years old and no longer tempted to work at the Times Herald. In June 1942, a judge in Nevada annulled her marriage to Fejos, saying that he had “abandoned her for more than a year”. Fejos accepted the divorce amicably and married his companion of the last six months, Marianne Arden, three weeks after the divorce.
After the divorce, Inga and John’s relationship started to crack and the FBI lost interest in her. Advisers even suggested to Hoover that he close her case, and Hoover initially agreed in principle. He did, of course, report to Roosevelt on the work of the FBI, and when he mentioned the Ingo case to Roosevelt, Roosevelt’s response implied that the President knew something about Ingo that he did not know, and that he had got this information from a source unknown to him. President Roosevelt had his own intelligence unit within the White House, headed by the journalist John Franklin Carter. Carter had also worked briefly in Germany in the 1930s and could have learned something about Inga that others did not know. He therefore decided that it was best for the FBI to keep her under surveillance.
Inga got bored of her job at the Times Herald and decided to find a new one. In the summer of 1942, she made several trips to New York because a former colleague promised to find her a job at the Office of War Information. This must have attracted the attention of the FBI, and Hoover decided to prevent her from getting a job in such a sensitive office. Could she have applied for this job because she was a German spy?
But Inga had another reason for her frequent trips to New York. She was rather lonely when John Kennedy left her, so she accepted the courtship of Niels Blok, a Danish writer and journalist who had been an acquaintance of the family for many years. He drank a lot and was terribly jealous, but he was with her every step of the way and she could not say no to him when he asked her out. She was not madly in love with him, if she was at all, but the fact was that he was a pleasant companion for a woman who did not want to grow old alone. She also wanted children and knew that at twenty-nine, time was running out.
But even though they had been living together for some time and Blok wanted to marry her in any way he could, Inga could not decide to take this step. Her acquaintances were already convinced that they were married, and so was John, who wrote to his friend: “As you have probably heard, Inga is married – and not to me. Apparently she wanted to leave Washington and go to New York, so she married a man she’s known for years and who loves her, but she doesn’t love him.”
John had previously been told that he did not need spinal surgery and that his problems were related to muscle overload. He decided to request a transfer to the battlefield and knew that his request would not be turned down.
Last meeting
While Inga was desperately looking for a job in New York, as Blok was still penniless, the FBI was still entertaining the idea of arresting and interning her as an “enemy alien”. This was so common in the months after the attack on Pearl Harbor, when war hysteria was at its height and every American saw in a person unknown to him a possible spy, that reports to the FBI of suspicious persons rained down. Moreover, in June 1942, a German submarine landed eight spies on the East Coast of the USA and the FBI could hardly cope with all the work.
Hoover decided to stop controlling and monitoring her. They stopped eavesdropping on her conversations, they no longer secretly searched her apartment, and for the first time in months she was free. However, they did not close her file. She finally got a job as a journalist with the North American Newspaper Association (NANA), which was made up of some eighty newspapers, including some of the largest. As a journalist, she was able to describe her impressions of Germany, which were now full of contempt and hatred for people about whom she had only written positively a few years before. The editorial board was pleased with her articles and in August 1943 they offered her the column Hollywood Today. Twenty million Americans were now reading her stories in NANE newspapers about the affairs, divorces and similar adventures of famous actors.
Meanwhile, John Kennedy, who found himself in the Pacific Solomon Islands, realised that the South Pacific was not the place to be, with its beautiful sandy beaches. He killed time by writing letters, some of which he sent to Inga. Finally he was given command of a fast scout boat, PT-109, and he was a good skipper, although he suffered badly from a bad back.
On 1 August 1943, while he was taking part in an attack on a Japanese convoy, his boat was cut in two by a Japanese destroyer. For years, John rejected any criticism that he could not steer the boat well. But it is true that none of the other boats came to his rescue, because they were all convinced that he and his crew were dead. In reality, they stayed alive, spent long hours in the water, managed to make their way from a nearby islet and then to another. After seven days, John managed to inform the base through the locals that they were alive. He did not return to America until January 1944, after four months of convalescence, and was discharged from active service in the Navy because of back problems.
When he returned, he first travelled from San Francisco to Los Angeles to visit Inga. She was surprised to see how he had returned from the Pacific. He was thin and bitter, his broad smile was gone, his sense of humour had vanished. They spent a few days together, but both realised that the romance was over. Only then did John visit his parents. Meanwhile, his eldest brother Joe junior had lost his life in the war and the family now pinned all their hopes on his political career.
Inga loved Hollywood and Hollywood loved her. She didn’t skimp on the praise when it was due, and she didn’t dig into the ugliest shit that was going on. She also fell in love all over again, and her chosen one was the army surgeon William G. Cahan. But again she was unlucky, because the handsome surgeon was married. John visited her again at the end of 1944. When he arrived at her apartment, Cahan was there too. They talked about Harvard, football and film. “After a while it became clear that one of us would have to leave. To my relief, he did,” Cahan later recalled.
In April 1945, Inga became an American citizen after being questioned by the FBI for the last time in February about her German period. However, she was very upset to read in Canadian newspapers that she was a German spy and that she should be banned from coming to Canada. By that time, her contract with NANO had expired and she had become a freelance journalist. She also wanted to become a film actress, and the test shoot was successful, but she never signed a contract.
But it was really strange that she started thinking about marrying Tim McCoy, a 55-year-old cowboy who was both a real and a movie cowboy. He had lived among the Indians, learned their language and customs, and then made a bunch of trivial westerns in Hollywood. Inga wanted children endlessly and McCoy, who already had three children from a previous marriage, wanted a new family. But the relationship became complicated when John Kennedy reappeared in her life in November 1946.
Not much is known about their last meeting. Inga has only mentioned it a few times to her son Ronald McCoy. She was 33 at the time and felt much older, plagued by arthritis and gout. John won his first race for the US Congress in November that year. His political path was thus mapped out and she knew that there was no place for her on it. On New Year’s Day 1947, she felt she was pregnant – but with whom? Her first thought was to have an abortion. McCoy, unaware of her meeting with John, did what he thought he had to do. They married on Valentine’s Day in 1947 near New York. The baby, who was born, was named Ronald, had fair hair and looked very much like McCoy, which reassured Inga.
She has followed John’s political career with interest. But there was someone else watching his rapid rise – J. Edgar Hoover. When John was elected to Congress, he wanted to get his hands on the dossier that Hoover had. In fact, it was a joint dossier between him and Inge. His father had told him that such a file existed, although neither of them knew exactly what was in it. John did not want it to come out that he was the lover of a woman suspected of being a Nazi spy. A future politician who falls for suspicious women? Something unheard of for a career American politician.
Hoover never threatened or demanded anything. He just let it be known that he had confidential information about someone. He simply said, “We have information that your opponents might want. Mr President, I can assure you that we are keeping this information so that nobody can get it.’ Of course, to the surprise of his advisers, Kennedy immediately extended his term as FBI Director for another four years after his election. At the same time, he made his brother Robert Bobby Kennedy Secretary of Justice, so that he could oversee what Hoover was doing.
Inga and her family later moved to the small town of Nogales in Arizona. Her children Ronald and Terry were grown, her husband was on the road a lot, and she was reading books. She was no longer in good health, although her doctors said she was “doing quite well”. Arthritis, high blood pressure and a mild stroke in early 1964, just a few months after Kennedy’s assassination, took their toll on her health. In 1973, she felt particularly unwell and doctors diagnosed her with cancer, which had already spread. She died in December 1973, aged 60.
There was no funeral ceremony and when McCoy died five years later, their coffins were buried together. J. Edgar Hoover died in May 1972, and subsequent FBI directors had no interest in hiding his “private archives” any longer – at least not the parts that had not already been destroyed by Hoover’s secretary. The Attorney General issued a decree that all “inactive” files should be made available to historians.
