Reprinted from Bill's Big Blog-o-Rama

An Open Letter to all/any JFK Historians  August 24, 2010

Dear Mr. or Ms. [So and So] –

I love your book about John F. Kennedy and can’t put it down.

I’m writing a story about Inga Arvad for my blog and in the course of my research I have hit upon several facts that I think may have been overlooked by you and other John F. Kennedy biographers. I dabble a bit with screenplays too, and I find Ms. Arvad to be thoroughly charming and quite an amazing woman really. I know if I had met such a woman at the same time in my life, I would have been deeply smitten for life.

“Inga-Binga” may or may not have been an actual German spy, but she was surely well-connected and situated well enough to have caused the United States great damage, at a time when German U-boats were sinking our merchant ships practically within sight of shore and coming ashore with teams of saboteurs and agents at night. I am inclined by my great love for movies and my inherently romantic nature, to picture her as a somewhat reluctant or casual agent, sent here before the war, who found herself in more serious and dangerous straits after the attack on Pearl Harbor. Indeed in 1942 every factory and fixture was a potential target for saboteurs and every farmer with a pitch-fork and evidently every girl in or out of high-heels was looking for enemy agents. As an officer in Naval Intelligence, in charge of defending those very factories, I can’t help but wonder if John F. Kennedy was using or controlling her, and not the other way around. And if she were a spy, how frightening must it have been for her when the two teams of German saboteurs were executed in the electric chair that same year.

Can you tell me if Ms. Arvad had any brothers or sisters who were still living in Denmark during the war? If any of her siblings had had similar political leanings as she did in early adulthood, they might surely have been recruited to work for the Nazis. For example, there were many Danes and other Scandinavians who served with units of the Waffen SS.

I have read that the FBI thought at one point that she had an uncle who was a Berlin police chief, but that turned out to not be the case. Is it at least possible that Inga may have had relatives in the US and visited as a child with her aunt and uncle? I would like to know, because I found a record at Ellis Island of a family named Petersen who came to the US from Copenhagen via Liverpool, England in 1917 with a four year old girl named Inga, who stayed with a person named Marius Petersen in New Jersey.

When JFK checked into the Chelsea Hospital in 1942 for his back he was treated by a noted physician Dr. Marius Smith-Petersen. Do you know if he was related in any way to Inga Maria Petersen, or can you say for certain that he was not?

Do you know the origin, if there was one, of the phrase Inga-Binga? My sister thought that she had heard it used in a Bugs Bunny cartoon, and she was right, but that cartoon wasn’t made until 1950. Was Inga-Binga or Binga-Binga a common phrase during the war?

So many of JFK’s relationships seem almost circular. For example JFK investigated the sinking of the Athenia for the American embassy, and at the same time Axel Wenner-Gren’s yacht was picking up survivors. Might Inga and her husband Paul Fejos have been on board the yacht? Might they all have met? Is that how Inga came to America? And I have read that Page Huidekoper, the woman who later accused Inga of being a German spy, worked for Joe Kennedy at the American embassy in Great Britain and later lived with Kathleen “Kick” Kennedy and/or Inga Arvad when they were both working at the Washington Times-Herald. And it was Page Huidekoper who got Kick Kennedy her job at the Herald, and Kick got Inga her job at the Herald, and Arthur Krock introduced them both to Cissy Patterson the owner, but Cissy was already close friends with Joe Kennedy who already knew Arthur Krock.

And last but not least, can you tell me why there are so few pictures of Inga Arvad, and if there are any archives that might still be holding copies of the Times-Herald that contain her “Have you seen [so and so]?” columns?

Thanks,

William Dubiak

Bill’s Big Blog-o-Rama