Jim Golden and FDR’s Amelia Earhart “Watergate”

In a March 2, 2015 post titled “Jim Golden’s legacy of honor in the Earhart saga,” I introduced the late Jim Golden, a close friend of Fred Goerner and, in the day, a near-legendary figure in Earhart research circles.  Golden’s unique career included eight years as a Secret Service agent in the Dwight D. Eisenhower administration, two years as Howard Hughes’ chief of security in Las Vegas, and a stint in the U.S. Justice Department, from where he tried to help Goerner search for the elusive top-secret Earhart files that President John F. Kennedy had allowed Goerner and California newspaperman Ross Game to see briefly in 1963, just before JFK’s assassination in Dallas.

Among the secrets Golden shared with Goerner was the revelation that Amelia Earhart and Fred Noonan were brought to the islands of Roi-Namur, Kwajalein Atoll by air from Jaluit Atoll by the Japanese in 1937, a fact he learned from Marine Intelligence officers during the American invasion of Kwajalein in January 1944.

Private First Class James O. Golden, circa 1944. As a photographer assigned to independent duty in Marine Intelligence on Kwajalein in January 1944, Golden saw a report by officers of the 24th Marine Intelligence Unit that remains hidden in top-secret government files. 

During several telephone conversations I had with Golden in the summer of 2008, he recalled his experiences as a 19-year-old enlisted Marine photographer in the intelligence section of the 4th Marine Division during the Kwajalein campaign.

“The Marines wrote up a detailed report capturing the info that related that in 1937 two white persons, a male and female were brought by plane to Roi,” Golden told me, “the man with a white bandage on his head and the woman with short-cut hair wearing men’s pants, who were taken across a causeway to the Namur Admin building.  Three days later taken out to a small ship in the lagoon, which then departed.  I read the report myself.  This report would routinely be forwarded to 4th Div. Intel, then on to the U.S. Navy.  This report must have been the first sighting [sic] of her capture by the Japanese by U.S. forces at that time.”

The following story, “FDR’s Amelia Earhart ‘Watergate,’” by one Leon Freilich, was published in the Jan. 3, 1978 issue of the Midnight Globe tabloid newspaper, which at some later date changed its name to the familiar Globe that adorns check-out racks in supermarkets and other retail stores nationwide, along with its better-known rival, the National Enquirer.  The story later appeared in the Amelia Earhart Society Newsletter’s June 1992 issue.  (Boldface emphasis mine throughout.)

“FDR’s Amelia Earhart ‘Watergate’”

The late President Franklin Delano Roosevelt covered up the truth behind aviatrix Amelia Earhart’s mysterious disappearance and created his own Watergate — nearly 40 years before Richard Nixon.

Amelia Earhart was the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic.  She tried in 1937 to fly around the world and disappeared into the Pacific.  Now a top-level Justice Department official, James Golden, charges that FDR withheld the facts of her disappearance for his own ends.

This is the headline of the Jan. 3, 1978 Midnight Globe story on Jim Golden’s bold charges of cover-up in the Earhart disappearance by Franklin D. Roosevelt as well as every subsequent administration to protect FDR’s checkered legacy, which would have never survived public knowledge of his failure to come to the aid of Earhart and Fred Noonan when they were in Japanese hands in 1937.

“Amelia Earhart was killed in the line of duty, and President Roosevelt refused to let it get out,” Golden, director of enforcement for the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration in Washington, D.C., told MIDNIGHT GLOBE.

“She was a spy for the Navy. She didn’t just ‘disappear,’ as Roosevelt led the press and public to believe. Amelia Earhart was taking reconnaissance shots of Japanese naval facilities when her plane was forced down.  She died at the hands of the Japanese.”

Similar accusations of a cover-up have been leveled in the past, and a book [Fred Goerner’s The Search for Amelia Earhart] detailed some of the charges several years ago.  However, this is the first attack on Roosevelt’s credibility by a top figure in the federal government.

Why did FDR stonewall the facts?  “Amelia Earhart was a glamorous aviatrix and America’s favorite woman adventurer,” Golden said.  “For some reason, she’d agreed to use her round-the-world flight as a mask for a spying operation.  In those days spying was considered the lowest of the low in this country. So when she lost her life, Roosevelt was afraid he would lose millions of votes in the next election. Consequently, he stifled the truth.”

How does the high-level government prober know this? “There’s a top-secret file with all this information in the White House,” he revealed to MIDNIGHT GLOBE. “It can’t be released, except by the President. “But two of my friends in the intelligence community have seen it. I consider them wholly reliable. They told me the file includes a four-page summary of Japan’s secret report on the Amelia Earhart case.

“This summary relates that she and her €co-pilot [sic], Fred Noonan, were captured by Japanese forces on July 2, 1937, near Saipan, the Central Pacific headquarters for Japanese ships.  The Japanese took the two there and kept them under heavy interrogation for a year and a half.  Then they beheaded Noonan. Amelia Earhart died the very next day.  The records said the cause of death was dysentery, but even if that’s true, the blame belongs on her captors, who kept her penned up in primitive conditions.”

Jim Golden, Washington, D.C., circa mid-1970s.  As a highly placed U.S. Justice Department official, Golden joined Fred Goerner in the newsman’s partially successful search for the elusive, top-secret files that might have finally broken open the Earhart case.  During his unique career, Golden led Vice President Richard M. Nixon’s Secret Service detail and directed the personal security of Howard Hughes in Las Vegas.

The file confirmed what Golden had learned first-hand during World War II.  “I was a Marine intelligence officer [actually a private first class] and landed on Saipan [actually Kwajalein] in January 1944,” he said.  “Some of the elders described to me in minute detail how a white woman and man had been seized from a fallen giant bird.

“That would be their plane.  And the pair were kept on the island as prisoners until the Japanese chopped off the man’s head.  The woman — Amelia Earhart, of course — was never seen again.

“The natives’ testimony plus the secret file fit together too neatly to spell anything but the full story.  I’m telling you this not to embarrass the U.S. government.  My motive is simply this: Amelia Earhart gave her life for her country, and it ought to have the good grace to thank her for it.”  (End of Midnight Globe article.)

In an October 1977 Albuquerque (New Mexico) Tribune story on Golden, “Prober says Amelia Earhart death covered up,” Golden, then with the U.S. Justice Department, told reporter Richard Williams that President Franklin “Roosevelt hid the truth about Miss Earhart and Noonan, fearing public reaction to the death of a heroine and voter reaction at the polls. . . . What really bothers me about the whole thing is that if Miss Earhart was . . . a prisoner of the Japanese, as she seems to have been, why won’t the government acknowledge the facts and give her the hero’s treatment she deserves?” Golden asked.

Sadly, Golden passed away unexpectedly at his home on March 7, 2011 at age 85.  As I wrote in closing “Jim Golden’s legacy of honor in the Earhart saga,“ in 2015, “We’ll never see the likes of Jim Golden again, and I hope someday we’ll meet in a much better place.”

More on Jim Golden’s amazing life and contributions to the Earhart saga can be found in the pages of Amelia Earhart: The Truth at Last.