The FBI and the Missing Tesla Papers Page 457

Therefore, King Peter took a cab to the Hotel New Yorker to speak to a virtual patriarch of his country. In Peter's diaries (quoted by Cheney, pp. 261-262), the King said that he had hoped that Tesla could have returned to Yugoslavia in order to free it; and also that he and Tesla had wept for all the sorrows that had torn apart their homeland.

The FBI: A few months later, Tesla was dead, a maid discovering his body on January 8, 1943. Upon his passing, while Hugo Gernsback (2/1943) rushed to make a death mask, Kenneth Swezey, a writer and friend for many years, Sava Kosanovich, Tesla's nephew and George Clark, director of a museum and laboratory at RCA, entered the apartment. With a locksmith and the hotel management present, they removed various documents from Tesla's safe (Cornels, 1/9/1943). Although the FBI alleged that "valuable papers, electrical formulas, designs, etc., were taken," other officials who were present (i.e., the hotel management) confirmed that Kosanovich removed only three pictures, and Swezey took the 1931 testimonial autograph book created from the occasion that he himself had organized to commemorate Tesla's 75th birthday.

These events were monitored by J. Edgar Hoover (1/21/1943), a hardline anti- communist who considered himself to be a protector of American interests. Hoover (1/21/1943) wrote in a lengthy (and partially censored) memorandum under the heading of "Espionage," that he feared that Kosanovich, as heir to the Tesla estate, "might make certain material [i.e., Tesla's secret weaponry papers] available to the enemy" (especially the Axis Powers). Hoover had identified Kosanovich as a member of the Eastern European Planning Board, but as we have seen from the complicated condition in the Balkan states, there was really no way for Hoover to ascertain where Kosanovich's alliances rested. He could have been associated with King Peter, the Communist Tito, fascist factions associated with Mussoulini, Hitler, the Soviet Union (which was an ally during the war, but still considered by Hoover to be an enemy of the United States) or none of the above.

Consistent with his suspicious nature, Hoover was also suspect of Tesla's sympathies, even though the inventor was friendly with Vice President Henry Wallace and Eleanor Roosevelt, and had conversed with Franklin Roosevelt himself. Hoover wrote:

A review of the Bureau files reveals considerable information on Nikola Tesla and his inventions... [and that he] made a speech at