When the Duke and Duchess of Windsor sailed into Palm Beach, Florida, on the SS Berkshire from Nassau on April 18 1941 they were looking forward to enjoying three days of relaxation at the Everglades Club playing golf and drinking and gossiping with American high society.
Little did they know that the previous night instructions had gone out from President Roosevelt to FBI chief J Edgar Hoover to launch what was to be an extraordinary covert intelligence exercise that had to fool both the exiled royals and the US secret service agent who was guarding them.
The exercise was launched after the FBI had been passed intelligence that the duke and duchess were being used by the Nazis to obtain secrets which could wreck the allies' war effort. The US investigation became even more lurid when FBI agents interviewed a benedictine monk in a Franciscan monastery in the United States; Father Odo had once been the Duke of Wurttemberg, a minor German royal with connections to Queen Mary, the duke's mother, and her brother, the Duke of Athlone, then governor general of Canada.
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