Eleanor Roosevelt spies allege affair

(AP) Army counterintelligence agents filed surveillance reports on Eleanor Roosevelt during World War II, opened her letters and once bugged her hotel room, prize-winning author Joseph Lash reports.

The agents also claimed that Lash had an affair with President Franklin D. Roosevelt's wife in 1943, according to previously secret intelligence documents which Lash details in a forthcoming book.

Roosevelt did not believe the reports, and the records indicate he was so angered by the surveillance that his orders led to the dismantling of the Army counterintelligence corps, the biographer said.

Lash, 72, whose "Eleanor and Franklin" won a Pulitzer Prize in 1971, talked about his new book recently in a telephone interview from his home in Key West, Fla. An FBI report in the book referred to a secret tape recording from a hotel room which "indicated quite clearly that Mrs. Roosevelt and Lash engaged in sexual intercourse during their stay in the hotel room."

Lash denied he and Mrs. Roosevelt ever had an affair, though they often met in her homes or hotel rooms during a friendship which spanned the quarter century until her death in 1962.

Other biographers have strongly suggested that Mrs. Roosevelt during this period was having a homosexual affair with Lorena Hickok, a reporter.

Roosevelt, confined to a wheelchair during the years before his death in 1945, is widely believed to have had a longtime affair with Lucy Mercer, his wife's former social secretary.

Lash's new book, "Love, Eleanor," scheduled for publication April 23, says: "Eleanor Roosevelt loved deeply and lavished her affection on men as well as women with a force that was the stronger because her husband was so little able to give her the intimate companionship she craved.

"Her passionate nature, which hungered for appreciation and affection, mystified some. Others it confounded, especially outsiders with neat categories about sexual roles and behavior."

In the interview, Lash said he and the late first lady had a physical relationship "only in the sense of a peck on the cheek."

He also said he does not think the late president knew that his wife was under surveillance until he was informed of the alleged affair.

"My hunch is that he did not know," Lash said. "There is no evidence to indicate counterintelligence had FDR's approval to report on Mrs. Roosevelt and bug her. I don't believe they had that approval."

"Love, Eleanor," focusing on letters between himself, Mrs. Roosevelt and Lash's wife, the former Trude W. Pratt, includes copies of several intelligence documents Lash said he obtained in 1978 under the Freedom of Information Act. BIOG: NAME:

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