Very Special Episodes: How a High-End Doll Shop Became a Hotbed for Espionage

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January twenty first, nineteen forty four was a Friday in New York City and a woman named Velveley Dickinson had an errand to run. At fifty years old, she was a tiny little thing, short and skinny, with round glasses and hair pinned up in the wavy coffure of the era. You might have described her as plain, ordinary, harmless. Her occupation suggested the same. Dickinson owned a doll shop on Madison Avenue, just a block from Central Park, A doll shop owner with a name like Velvele. How sweet, But

Welcome back to very special episodes. I'm Jason English. She is Danish Swartz. That's zam Bernette. And yeah, a good old fashioned spy story.

I loved this one.

I am obsessed with this story totally.

In the name Vilvoe Dickinson, how dope is that it's like honey on the tongue.

It's like a James Bond villain.

Yes, exactly.

I will say I always kind of thought that this sort of spy i'll say Shenanigans felt just like it was in pulp novels and like, you know, James Bond movies where I didn't realize spies were actually doing things like this.

Totally the South American dead letter drop. I mean, you're like, oh my goodness, that's real. Yeah, I loved this for all that.

Yeah, with no spoilers, we'll just say there's a male scam in here. That I've been thinking about ever since I first heard about it. Oh yeah, Dana, I don't know if you realize this. This is our second doll story we've collaborated on a few years ago. In the Haleywood podcast about Bruce Willis buying up a town in Idaho, one of the episodes is about the house that he bought for Demi Moore's dolls.

I have to say, Jason, throughout the entire Like Award season, because Demi Moore obviously had an amazing role in the substance she was everywhere she was at the oscars, I just could not stop thinking about the full human sized dollhouse in Haley, Ida.

Now I don't know as much about her doing this, but did she go and like hang out there like on bad days or was it just like to show people, like you got to go see my dollhouse.

I really hope that she did spend time there, and I think occasionally, but like she didn't live there full time.

No, No, I couldn't imagine that. That would be freaky.

Also, it feels like if you use it as a guest house, it would feel like a punishment, like a creepy punishment to like tell your friends like, oh yeah, you can stay in the house as I keep on my antique dolls.

And ippe like haunted Victorian dolls.

In nineteen oh eight, thirty six years before Velveley Dickinson's dramatic arrest, the FBI was only just coming into being. The Gilded Age had given way to the Progressive era, and America's rapidly growing cities were teeming with new immigrants, with overcrowded slums, with violence and corruption, labor unrest, a flourishing criminal underworld, crooked political bosses, law defying corporate overlords.

All matters relating to investigations under the Department, except those to be made by bank examiners and in connection with the Naturalization Service, will be referred to the Chief Examiner for memorandum as to whether any member of the Force of Special Agents under his direction is available for the

And just like that the FBI was born. It wouldn't officially be called the Federal Bureau of Investigation until nineteen thirty five, but for simplicity's sake, we're going to refer to it as the FBI from here on out. In the beginning, the fbis remant wasn't exactly the stuff of page turning thrillers. There was a lot of white collar crime, I'm antitrust cases, fraud, copyright violations, that sort of thing. But the bureau's scope began to expand over time.

From our earliest days, we had a couple of dozen responsibilities, and they included national security matters.

That's John Fox, an academic who has served as the FBI's official historian since two thousand and three.

But as our nation grew in importance in the world, both economically and politically, as we got involved in World War One and then afterwards, the national security matters started to become more prominent and the Bureau got new authorities because of the potential threats that we faced here at home.

Those threats largely faded into the background after the First World War and during Prohibition, the FBI found itself with new fires to put out bootlegging, speakeasies, bank robberies, gangster shootouts, really anything that fell under the rubriate of organized crime. But it wasn't long before dark clouds began rolling in from across the Atlantic.

As World War two started heating up, and especially as it broke out in Europe, the Bureau moved back to the national security realm and things changed rapidly. We went from a couple hundred people in the Bureau to more than ten thousand very quickly. We were involved with our nations domestic security, protecting our businesses and government institutions from

In a nineteen forty four propaganda film, j Edgar Hoover referred to these wartime counter espionage efforts as the Battle of the United States.

Battle of the United States took place in every community in the nation. It was a struggle against enemy agents who had been sent to this country to disrupt our industries, destroy a morale, and damage the impact of all fighting armies. These agents were directed by the same high command that directs the German and Japanese armies in combat, their ends were the same.

One of the most famous sagas from this era was the Dukane spy Ring, which would go down as the largest espionage operation in US history to result in convictions. By the time of its conclusion at the end of nineteen forty one, the Bureau had set up dozens of field offices across the country. It needed that firepower to tackle investigations like the Dukene case, in which thirty three Nazi spies were brought to justice right as America was being pulled into the war.

Their conviction was made single by emotion to film taken by our agents with cameras concealed at their meeting place. Taking this film was danger's work.

By the time we were involved in the Duquesne spy Ring, we were actually using some pretty sophisticated counter espionage work. We had set up a private office for our informant and he was basically to collect the intelligence from a couple of dozen German agents who would bring it to him. We weren't quite up to the standards of Great Britain at the time, and the Soviets were pretty effective too, but we were rapidly becoming a major force.

Even before America's entry into the war. It wasn't just German spies that found themselves in the FBI's crosshairs.

There were also a couple of Japanese related espionage cases, dealing with people either selling information to Japan or Japanese nationals basically trying to gather intelligence in areas where they weren't supposed to be.

Once the US declared war on Japan, which had evaded American intelligence with its surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, the pressure to sniff out Japanese agents was even greater. That explained why, just two months after Pearl Harbor, in February nineteen forty two, the FBI took an interest in a peculiar letter brought to its attention by wartime censors. The purpose of the wartime censors was to monitor international mail. Physical letters embedded with coded messages were a key method

So fine more than maclauchlin is this massid maclachlin. How about the mail you get? For so much of it every day, and it seems to come from all over the world. I have many friends who still remember me, Masian maclachlin. Yes, yeah, it's not too much trouble. Would you mind saving some of the stamps of your letters.

The letter that got flagged in February nineteen forty two was bound for Buenos Aires, purportedly from a woman in Portland, Oregon. It mentioned a quote wonderful doll hospital where the sender had left three quote old English dolls for repair. The

It's not entirely clear whether the FBI opened up an investigation based strictly on this first letter, but certainly in general the FBI would have taken this as something to pay attention to. They would have sent out leads to its offices in the Pacific Northwest to see if these details rang some memory bells with our agents out there.

Before long, the plot thickened. One day in June, a woman named Mary E. Wallace greeted the postman as he arrived at her door on a maple lined street in Springfield, Ohio. Your letter to Argentina came back, the mail carrier told her letter to Argentina. He handed Wallace an envelope marked return to writer, addressed to a woman in Buenos Aires named Ines Lopez de Molinali. The name and return address in the upper left hand corner were indeed Wallace's, but

Part of it said, you asked me to tell you about my collection. A month ago. I had to give a talk to an art club, so I talked about my dolls and figurines. The only new dolls I have are three lovely Irish dolls. One of these three dolls is an old fisherman with a net over his back, another is an old woman with wood on her back, and the third is a little boy.

Wallace had in fact given a talk to an art club recently about her dolls, and she did in fact have three new dolls, albeit not Irish ones. Reading the letter, which also made reference to a mister Shaw whose quote car was damaged but is being repaired now, Wallace couldn't help but think of some flyers she'd seen in the post office, the ones that warned about foreign espionage being carried out via the mail service. Could the letter in

My understanding of why these letters were returned was that the addresses themselves were not accurate, that there was a problem in some way with the delivery for those addresses, whether the postal code was wrong, or the street didn't exist or something, and so as appeared that this was an error on the spy's part.

The letters were typewritten, each addressed to Inez Lopez de Molinali in Buenos Aires. They all bore signatures that resembled those of the women being impersonated, and they all included accurate information about the women's personal lives, including information about their interest in dolls. The messages were deciphered by codebreakers, most notably Elizabeth Friedman, famously known as America's first female cryptanalyst.

I just secured a lovely Siamese temple dancer. It had been damaged that is tour in the middle, but it is now repaired and I like it very much. I could not get a mate for this signed dancer, so I am redressing just a small plane ordinary doll into a second sciand doll.

Translation.

I just secured information of a fine aircraft carrier warship. It had been damaged that is torpedoed in the middle, but it is now repaired, and I like it very much. They could not get a mate for this, So a plane ordinary warship is being converted into a second aircraft carrier.

Yet another letter, postmarked from Seattle with the return address of a woman in Spokane, reads as following, I must.

Tell you this amusing story. The wife of an important business associate gave her an old German bisk doll dressed in a Hulu grass skirt. It is a cheap, horrid thing. I do not like it and wish we did not have to have it about well. I broke this awful doll last month. Now the person who gave the doll is coming to visit us very soon. I walked all over Seattle to get someone to repair it. No one

When FBI agents consulted with naval authorities in Seattle, they were able to figure out that the doll in this instance referred to a worship damaged at Pearl Harbor, just like mister Shaw's car from Mary Wallace's letter.

All of these letters appear to refer to a combination of dolls, a state of disrepair or brokenness, and various foreign nations. The ones that I'm familiar with are mostly from the West coast, and I believe they were all being mailed to someone in South America. These were not being mailed directly to Japan, but rather we're going to what would be known as a dead letter drop that would collect mail for a different intelligence service.

How and why had the purported senders been chosen, What was the connection between these individuals other than dolls, and above all, who had actually written the letters. When the agents reinterviewed Mary Wallace, she remembered something crucial. She had corresponded with a doll shop owner in New York City, and in one of those letters, she'd mentioned certain details that also appeared in the mystery letter bearing her name. What were the odds? Light bulbs started going off for

In her dealings with her doll loving ladies, Missus Dickinson seems remembered as grasping, but as one who sold no junk. Sometimes she maybe cooked up a local color yarn to make a good doll sell better bona fide doll history being at best, pores such slight and attractive arata often raised the selling price. A New England collector remembers her for her thinness, her shrewdness, and the fact that he felt he couldn't trust her.

As the FBI launched its investigation into Valveley Dickinson in nineteen forty two, it all started to make sense. FBI historian John Fox.

We found out that a significant period in the nineteen thirty she had been involved in various business matters with a lot of Japanese, that she was a member of a Japanese kind of cultural friendship club, that she knew some of the key Japanese diplomatic officials in the area.

Working at the California brokerage company in the mid nineteen thirties, Dickinson had handled accounts for members of a Japanese community in the state's Imperial Valley region. She also became a member of the Japan American Society. Her dues to the society one year were paid by an attache of the Japanese consulate in San Francisco, where Dickinson had been a

D C.

Dickinson's occupation in the rare doal trade sometimes took her around the country for work. In the months after Pearl Harbor, she had traveled to the Pacific coast with her husband. Retracing their steps, the FBI found that the couple had visited the areas from which the letters had been postmarked on the dates they had been sent. Agents even located

We did a deep dive into her background, and that meant crossing the country and interviewing lots of people, and so this took time. Spionis is a hard case to make, and catching a spy red handed is often very important.

The FBI had to make sure its case was as ironclad as possible before making a move. They surveiled Dickinson for a year and a half. Maybe she was doing more than just writing coded letters about dolls. Maybe they could actually see her in the midst of a furtive microfilm handoff or an incriminating teta tet, or maybe they could at least identify accomplices willing to turn a dime. No dice. Dickinson, it seemed, was a lone wolf, unless, of course, her husband was in on the act before

When the course of the investigation, our surveillance of Dickinson becomes more regular and eventually more obvious.

Which brings us back to the afternoon of Friday, January twenty first, nineteen forty four.

Our agents follow her into a bank and she in the midst of getting a significant sum of money, so I think fifteen thousands or more dollars out of her safe deposit box. The FBI finally moves in. They had received the authorization from the US Attorney to make an arrest. At this point, it was time to stop the immediate investigation and bring this forward to the court's.

Like we said at the top, Dickinson didn't make things easy.

The reports of the day suggest that Dickenson went into a fit of rage, fighting with them to the point that the agents basically had to secure and Handcoffer right there in the bank and then take her, of course, to be arraigned.

Bank officials would later suggest that newspaper accounts of Dickinson's arrest were exaggerated, so we'll let you decide which version to believe. In either case, Dickinson was charged with violating wartime censorship laws. Weeks later, on February eleventh, a federal grand jury indicted her for using a quote code and device to surreptitiously transmit information that was quote vital to

We would have taken the numbers of the bills and then traced them to see if we could figure out where they came from. Our investigation at least showed that some thirteen thousand dollars of it could be traceable to Japanese.

Sources, sources like say a captain stationed in the Japanese Naval Inspector's office in New York City. For Dickinson, the stakes were high. If convicted, she faced up to ten years in prison and a ten thousand dollars fine. But if the authorities expected her to be cooperative, they were sorely mistaken because Dickinson had a much different story to tell. Unlike the case of the Duquane spy ring, the FBI

We of course questioned Dickenson about where she had gotten the money, and of course, in questioning her, a lot of her stories really didn't hold up.

First, Dickinson told the arresting agents that the money had come from insurance companies, a savings account, and her doll business. In a subsequent interrogation, Dickinson changed her tune. The money actually belonged to her late husband, she said, claiming to have found it hidden in the bed after he died. Belvile couldn't be sure where the money had come from, but she believed it may have come from the Japanese consul in New York City. The FBI wasn't buying it.

She has been minimally cooperative in questioning, trying to basically pass off the messages and the money to her husband, and in turn, of course, the FBI sought to either confirm or deny each of her statements, and so as our investigation continued, the circumstantial evidence against her grew.

In the grand scheme of things, you could argue that Dickinson's spycraft was small potatoes, diishing minor information about the repair of damaged naval ships and a handful of letters that hadn't even made it to their intended recipients. Surely the enemy had better spies on the ground than that, or maybe not so much.

As far as the Japanese went, because most of their intelligence officers were Japanese nationals when we declared war in nineteen forty one after the Pearl Harbor attack. Their ability to operate in the United States itself was minimal, and so their best bet were these few things like Dickinson trying to basically sneak out some key information to her intelligence contacts by the means that she used. The Japanese did not have an effective means of getting intelligence from the United States.

That's why it was so important for US officials to bring Dickinson to justice. At first, the Attorney General moved where a quick trial, but it kept getting pushed back. Dickinson meanwhile changed lawyers. She was initially represented by Arthur Garfield Hayes, the famed civil liberties attorney, but his firm parted ways with Dickinson after just one week, and she ended up with counsel appointed by the court. The delays enabled the prosecution to strengthen its hand and turn up

The original indictment against this woman charged that she sent but one letter to Argentina in violation of censorship regulations. We now charged that she sent a number of letters to Argentina, some of them containing information concerning movements and repairs of battleships after Pearl Harbor. We charged that she did this for money received from Japanese agents.

This was a major development. Not only had Dickinson run a foul of the censorship statues, but she would also face trial for espionage, a capital offense that made her the first American woman to be so accused since the

The proof against the defendant was highly circumstantial in nature in the absence of her confederates now in Japan. In my judgment, the defense to be offered by the defendant was to have been that the letters were written by her husband, Lee, who died March twenty ninth, nineteen forty three.

And that McNally told the judge would leave the jurors with enough room for reasonable doubt. As for Dickinson, what had prompted her eleventh hour change of heart.

When the government came back and indicted her for espionage. It actually put the idea of the death penalty on the case. Now, it's not clear that the government necessarily would pursue that part of it would have had to, you know, if they linked some of that information to potential ship sinkings. And things like this. This was the time of war, and she was trying to provide sensitive information to the people that we were at war with,

After pleading guilty, Dickinson finally admitted to FBI agents that she was at least partly behind the letters. Her methods were hardly very cloak and dagger. She had simply gleaned information about the warships by chatting up unwitting citizens near the navy yards in Seattle and San Francisco. She claimed the instructions on coding the letters, as well as twenty five thousand dollars in one hundred dollars bills, had been passed to her husband by the Japanese naval attache Ichiro

She's still, you know, wants to kind of hold to that facet of it was my husband and plays into the censorship charge in that if it was espionage, they would have had to show that she was doing this. They could show that she was involved in this transmission of information and that she had sent the letters out, but she could still, in a sense, hold on to the fiction that this was her husband and not her.

The FBI's investigation, of course, suggested otherwise. The Bureau found that Velvey knew Yokuyama well, whereas her husband didn't know him at all. A doctor for the ailing mister Dickinson claimed that his mental faculties were impaired at the time. Furthermore, mister Dickinson's nurse and the couples made both emphatically denied that any money was hidden in his bed. Whatever the truth,

It is hard to believe that some people do not realize that our nation is engaged in a life and death struggle. Any help given to the enemy means the death of American boys who are fighting for our national security. You, as a natural born citizen, having a university education and selling out to the Japanese was certainly engaged in espionage. I think that you have been given every consideration by the government. The indictment to which you have peded guilty

Velvly Dickinson was ordered to serve her time at the Federal Correctional Institution for Women at Alderton, West Virginia. There she crossed paths with Unice Kennedy, who served as a social worker at the prison in nineteen fifty The two women maintained a correspondence after Dickinson's conditional release on April twenty third, nineteen fifty one, and Kennedy helped her find

The second motive for becoming a spy might have been mister Dickinson's failing health, a desperate reason for secretly earning extra monies in order to meet every costly medical emergency. But mister Dickinson was dying quite inexpensively of heart failure at home. The third reason for Missus Dickinson's having become

John Fox of the FBI thinks she could have been motivated by all of the above.

There seems to have been a connection to Japan, to Japanese culture, and to the Japanese people such that she seems to have been supporting it, at least through some sympathy for their cause. It's not known that she was a deep idiologue though in that sense, and so some of it could have been money. And as far as spies go, sympathy and some kind of financial remuneration often go hand in hand.

The doll spy affair was hardly the most significant FBI case during World War Two. Sure, the intel in those letters would have been useful to the Japanese had they actually received it, but as far as intelligence goes, it was a drop in the bucket. Still, it reflected the growing ambitions, capabilities, and importance of America's domestic intelligence service at a key moment in its history. And quite frankly, it's just a really great yarn.

It's fascinating just because of some of the unique aspects of the case. I can't think of any other spy case where someone used a basically, you know, maked code based on antique dolls that make this unique and can tinue to give us something of interest to look at even today.

All right, after each episode, we go to our resident casting directors Aaron and ask if we were to make a film version of this story. Who would you cast?

Yeah, Who's Velveley?

Yeah.

I thought about this a bunch and I was like, Okay, I want a certain vibe, I want a certain like feel, And so then I started thinking about different actresses that could pull it off. In the two leading candidates I came down to two was Diane Krueger from National Treasure and Inglorious Bastard's.

Yeah right.

I thought she could have that vibe where you would believe she was a dollmaker but also believed she was a spy. I was like, okay, And then the other one was, if you want to go more of a fun route with it, was Amy Adams. I just always like her in period pieces.

This will be here, Oscar.

I was also thinking Amy Adams.

Too, Yes, I love that.

The whole time, I was like, Amy Adams would kill this role.

I don't know if you can see that. I wrote Amy Adams as well, we got the trifecta.

Let's call her agent.

How about FBI historian John Fox? Do you have anyone for him?

Mulling over this one, I didn't come up with somebody that I absolutely loved for it, but I was like debating and then like I would say, because he's a historian, I tended to go a little academic in with this, and I've done it before with these people, but I always really love Paul Giamatti as an academic, and so I just could see Paul Giamatti in the role.

Look up a picture of FBI historian John Fox. I think you nailed it. Nailed Oh really?

Oh nice? I did not.

I did do blind.

This is casting blind, So that's cool. Would you guys have any very special characters from this one, because I definitely did.

I'm going to say, one of the antique dolls to the antique dollars in the window, what about.

You, Jason?

So Mary Wallace is the one who who had the letter to Argentina come back and then turned over the mysterious letter to her postmaster. So she's the one where I'm just thinking, how creepy a scam. Someone has mimicked your penmanship, written stuff that has some details that were in your life, and you just get this letter. You must think, Am I going crazy here?

Yeah?

Totally.

You fully would think you're going insane. It does feel I don't mean to be like this is a novel, but it's like there's always those like the Girl on the Train, the Girl on the airplane. Like, I feel like a novel about a woman getting letters that she doesn't remember writing and she's going crazy and then it turns out it was just part of an international spy conspiracy.

Like, let's write this novel.

I think you should definitely keep that one in the back pocket because that one is just a genius idea. I love the idea of a woman like not necessarily the woman going crazy part, but the letter writing is what's driving her insaying like is this me, Like you have physical evidence in front of you.

Yeah.

From my very special character, I could not help but love Charles Bonaparte, son of Jerome Bonaparte, Napoleon Bonaparte's grand nephew.

Right.

I had even looked up this kid and I was like, is he somebody who I should like? And I was like, he was an Attorney General of us. Love that under tr But also he was nicknamed Charlie the crook Chaser when he was like before, yeah, that was a nickname. And also he was a major activist for the rights of black people in Baltimore. This guy starts what would become the FBI, that just seems wild to me. So I was like, Wow, the FBI really came a long way, or I guess the opposite.

My favorite Napoleon descendant story is Dana. I learned about this on Noble Blood About is it just.

Joe Joseph New Jersey Joe, Yeah, New Jersey.

Joe just moved to New Jersey, lived out in a good life here.

Yeah. It's a very fun because you're like, well, when Napoleon was overthrown, he had installed his brother as like, you know, a very prominent royal, but then Europe was like get out anyone with the last name Bonaparte, get out of here, and so he just went to New Jersey, start fresh.

In New Jersey.

Very special episodes is made by some very special people. Today's episode was written by Joe Pompeo. You might remember him from past episodes like The Great Gatsby Won earlier this month and the Case of the Missing Novelists. Our show is hosted by Danish Wartz, Zaron Burnett, and Jason English. Our producer is Josh Fisher. Editing and sound design by Josh Fisher and Jonathan Washington, Mixing and mastering by Beheve Frasier. Original music by Alise McCoy. Research in fact checking by