Official and Confidential

by Anthony Summers

  Another member of Congress, also a prominent campaigner for the privacy rights of American citizens, fell foul of the FBI and Life magazine in circumstances that suggest the Bureau maliciously fed Life false information.

  In the mid-sixties, Cornelius Gallagher was regarded as one of the best and brightest of the Democratic Party’s young men. A Korean War hero from Bayonne, New Jersey, he had been in Congress since 1958. Six feet tall, silver-haired in his early forties, he soon became congressional adviser to the Arms Control Agency and a delegate to the Disarmament Conference. He was friendly with the Kennedy brothers and was mentioned as a possible Vice President to Lyndon Johnson in 1964.

  Like Senator Long, Gallagher’s major domestic interest was what he perceived as the encroachment of the Big Brother mentality. He worried about the thousands of people whose private lives, thanks to modern gadgetry, were no longer private at all. He wondered about data banks and the growing use of lie detectors, about genetic engineering and the psychological testing of children. Who had access to such information? What safeguards did the citizen have?

  The result of the Congressman’s worrying was the creation in 1963 of the Subcommittee on Privacy, an out-growth of the House Committee on Government Operations. Private business, educational bodies, even medical institutions, drew much of its fire. Soon, however, in part because the FBI and the IRS pried personal information out of credit bureaus, the committee’s work began to give both those agencies bad press.

  It was not what Gallagher was doing so much as what he refused to do that brought the first clash with Edgar. The trouble began when he came under unexpected pressure from the Teamsters Union and from Roy Cohn, Edgar’s protégé from the McCarthy days.

  Cohn, who said he was speaking on Edgar’s behalf, astonished the Congressman by urging him to hold hearings on evidence of illegal FBI and IRS surveillance. The purpose, Cohn explained, was to embarrass former Attorney General Robert Kennedy, on whose authority the wiretaps had been installed.

  When Gallagher refused to hold hearings, saying it was outside his committee’s mandate, Cohn responded with wheedling and threats. ‘Mr Hoover wants to give you a big buildup,’ he said. ‘If you’re their friend, anything you need you get. But if you’re not a friend, and you don’t cooperate, that means you’re an enemy.’

  Months later, while signing correspondence one evening, Gallagher paused at a letter he knew nothing about. ‘In the letter, which was all typed and waiting for my signature, I was asking the Attorney General to supply my committee with copies of the authorizations for the bugging of Martin Luther King. I knew about that bugging, because John Rooney had taken great delight in playing the sex stuff to me. But I had no plans to ask for the files, and I had dictated no such letter. I called in my secretary and asked where the letter had come from.’

  Gallagher’s secretary, Elizabeth May, recalled the incident vividly. ‘Roy Cohn,’ she said, ‘had dictated the letter to me on the telephone. He indicated that he was following FBI instructions. I typed up the letter and left it for the Congressman with the rest of his mail. I thought he must know about it. When Mr Gallagher asked me what it was, and I told him, he was really wild. He called Cohn right away.’

  At a new meeting with the Congressman, Cohn told Gallagher the letter was ‘another chance’ for him to cooperate, and urged him to send it. When Gallagher refused, Cohn told him: ‘You’re gonna be sorry …’ The Congressman ignored the threat and pressed on with his privacy hearings.

  At Easter 1967, there was a mysterious burglary at Gallagher’s house by raiders apparently interested only in documents. Police contacts told the Congressman it was ‘an FBI job.’ ‘Then,’ Gallagher recalled, ‘a top guy I knew at Bell Telephone told me the FBI was bugging our phone.’

  The real body blow, however, was an article that fall in Life magazine. It focused on ‘the Fix,’ the blackmail and bribery that guarantees the Mob the blind eye, or the active assistance, of police and elected officials. Specifically, Life named the mobster ‘Bayonne Joe’ Zicarelli, and claimed he was ‘on the best of terms with the widely respected Democratic representative from Hudson County, Congressman Cornelius E. Gallagher …’ The politician and the mafioso, said the magazine, had regular ‘get-togethers,’ sometimes for Sunday brunch, at a suburban inn.

  Gallagher strenuously denied the relationship, but complained to Life executives in vain. When he considered suing for libel, lawyers warned the case would generate more adverse publicity and that public officials rarely win libel cases. Then, in July 1968, three Life reporters interviewed the Congressman at his office. He readily admitted two innocent encounters with Zicarelli, who was a prominent figure in the area, but again denied compromising contacts.

  That same month, Gallagher’s attorney, Lawrence Weisman, asked him to fly to an urgent meeting at Newark Airport. What they had to discuss, he said, could not be discussed on the telephone. At Newark, Weisman explained that he had spent part of the day at Roy Cohn’s office. At Cohn’s suggestion, he had listened in on an extension as Cohn talked on the telephone with Cartha DeLoach of the FBI.

  DeLoach allegedly claimed the Bureau had ‘incontestable’ proof that a missing New Jersey gambler, Barney O’Brien, had died of a heart attack in the Congressman’s house ‘while lying next to Gallagher’s wife.’ The body had supposedly been removed by Kayo Konigsberg, a gangster linked to Zicarelli. According to Gallagher and his attorney, DeLoach made it clear he had recently been in touch with Life. ‘If you still know that guy,’ DeLoach was quoted as saying, ‘you had better get word to him to resign from Congress. He’s not going to last more than a week after the story hits.’

  The story hit on August 8, 1968, and it was one of the most savage attacks on a public figure in the history of twentieth-century journalism. THE CONGRESSMAN AND THE HOODLUM, shouted the headline. Gallagher was described as ‘a man who time and again has served as the tool and collaborator of a Cosa Nostra gang lord.’

  At the core of the story was what appeared to be a journalistic scoop, drawing on transcripts of an eight-year-old wiretap on Mafia boss Zicarelli. According to Life, they showed that the mob boss had reached out to the congressman to get the police off his back:

  GALLAGHER: I got hold of these people [Bayonne Police] and there will be no further problem.

  ZICARELLI: I hope so, because they’re ruining me.

  GALLAGHER: They damn well better not.

  ZICARELLI: They’re doing a job on me like was never done before.

  GALLAGHER: I laced into them.

  The Life exposé sparked prolonged public debate. To the astonishment of many, however, the Congressman was reelected that year with a healthy majority. He continued his campaign for privacy rights and for laws to limit the powers of the IRS and the Bureau of the Budget.

  It was an IRS investigation in 1972 that brought the ruin the Life article had failed to achieve. Gallagher was charged with evading taxes and helping a local official to do the same. He pleaded guilty, following an impassioned speech to the House about his ordeal, and went to jail for seventeen months.4 Meanwhile, thanks to a redrawing of constituency boundaries, his congressional seat ceased to exist. Gallagher received messages of support and sympathy from Gerald Ford, then Vice President, former Secretary of State Dean Rusk and many others. Rusk has characterized Edgar as ‘a veiled blackmailer.’

  The House Ethics Committee found no evidence that the Congressman had ever been involved with organized crime. Life had run its story about the supposed cadaver in Gallagher’s house in spite of the fact that its alleged source, Kayo Konigsberg, was in the Mental Center for Federal Prisoners at the time. He later said the Life account was ‘a phony’ and that the FBI had tried to persuade him to ‘frameup’ the Congressman.

  There is no evidence that the damning ‘transcript’ of conversations between Gallagher and the Mafia boss Zicarelli ever existed in the files of any law enforcement agency. In 1968 the IRS, the CIA, the Narcotics Bureau, the Secret S
ervice, the New York City Police, the Manhattan District Attorney and the New York Rackets Bureau all pleaded ignorance. As for the FBI, Attorney General Ramsey Clark said he was advised that ‘the FBI does not have and has not had any transcripts or logs that could be the basis for the quotations in the Life magazine story …’ Nor have any such transcripts turned up in the thousands of documents that have since been made public.5 A review of FBI files in Newark, New Jersey, has produced none, and agents who worked the Zicarelli case in the sixties said they knew of no such evidence.

  Life reporter Sandy Smith, who obtained the ‘transcript’ in 1968, had made his name as an organized-crime specialist while working for the Chicago Tribune, a paper especially favored by the FBI. In 1965, when Playboy consulted Smith about an article by a former agent critical of the FBI, he recommended it be rejected and passed it on to the Bureau. Bureau documents describe Smith’s value to the FBI as ‘inestimable’ and say he was ‘utilized on many occasions.’6

  While Smith refused to comment on that, former Life reporter Bill Lambert, who also worked on the Gallagher story, recalled that his colleague was so close to the FBI that he was ‘almost like an agent.’ It was possible, he agreed, that someone at the FBI might have fed him a phony transcript. Former Assistant Director DeLoach, for his part, admitted he knew Smith well in 1968, but had no comment on the Life story. ‘I do not,’ he claimed, ‘recall the Neil Gallagher matter.’

  Another key figure in the story, however, did remember. In 1986, when Roy Cohn knew he was dying, he was told that Gallagher’s wife was still tormented by the allegation about O’Brien, the gambler who had supposedly died in her arms. Cohn then countersigned a formal letter stating that the O’Brien allegation had come from DeLoach. He quoted DeLoach as saying that if Congressman Gallagher ‘did not stop his hearings on evasion [sic] of privacy, he would make the information public.’ Cohn passed on the threat, he now confessed, just as Gallagher had claimed.

  In 1992, still a popular figure in New Jersey, Gallagher turned seventy-one. A measure of his confidence in his innocence was that he agreed to give the author free rein with any documents on him the FBI might release under the Freedom of Information Act. More than four years after applying, not one document was forthcoming.

  Mitchell Rogovin, who was an Assistant Attorney General at the time of the expose, spoke of ‘all the leaking to Life magazine’ by the Bureau in those days. It was, he said, ‘part and parcel of the retributive mode that went on … This was one of a lot of cases …’

  Former Attorney General Ramsey Clark expressed grave concern about the Gallagher case and that of Senator Long. The leaking of unproven information to the press, he said, was ‘inexcusable.’ ‘This,’ he had sighed at the height of the crisis, ‘is the work of the old man down the hall.’

  This was the dark side of Edgar, the most insidious violation of his office. Most Americans saw only the other side, the formidable propaganda machine and the impressive corps of agents.

  ‘J. Edgar Hoover,’ Newsweek declared in 1957, ‘has become as bipartisan as the Washington Monument, as much an institution as the Smithsonian.’

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  ‘The FBI is a closely knit, cooperative organization of more than 14,000 men and women. I like to speak of it as a “we” organization.’

  J. Edgar Hoover, 1956

  One day in 1959, as the lights came up in a screening room at FBI headquarters, Edgar was observed to be weeping. He had just watched a preview of Hollywood’s movie The FBI Story, and he was crying with happiness. He thought the film, which portrayed a super-efficient agency staffed by a happy band of exemplary agents, ‘one of the greatest jobs I’ve ever seen.’

  In his address to the Appropriations Committee that year, Edgar catalogued a battery of impressive facts. The Identification Division now held more than 150 million fingerprints on file, and most of those submitted by police had been successfully identified. The Laboratory had made 165,000 scientific examinations, an all-time high. FBI investigative staff had performed more than three million hours of overtime. The FBI National Academy had celebrated twenty-three years of training law enforcement officers. Three and a half thousand agents, along with 10,000 other Bureau employees, had as usual achieved a near-perfect conviction rate. Chairman Rooney thanked the ‘eminent Director,’ and dismissed him after perfunctory questioning.

  Within the FBI, a generation of agents was beginning to ask questions. The structure of the organization had not changed since the reshuffle of 1924, but there were now two FBIs. There was the Field, with its corps of brave, hardworking agents serving in the front line against crime; and there was FBI Headquarters – the Seat of Government, as Edgar liked to call it – with its ever-expanding bureaucracy made up of men who had been office-bound for years. Communication within the Field was becoming a sterile business. Many active agents thought of headquarters as a place for timeservers and promotion-hunters, a source of meaningless paperwork and fatuous orders.

  British MI-5 officer Peter Wright, at the FBI on a liaison visit, thought the Seat of Government a ‘magnificent triumphalist museum’ peopled by vacant-looking staff. At a meeting with Edgar and two Assistant Directors, he was shocked to see how the aides ‘for all outward toughness and the seniority of their positions … were cowed.’

  Fear was woven into the fabric of FBI life. Edgar punished Acting Assistant Director Howard Fletcher, who had tried to change an unfair wages system, by excluding him from promotion. Bernard Brown, Assistant Agent in Charge in New York, was demoted and transferred to the boondocks for commenting to a journalist without permission. One man – his name is deleted from the FBI release – was reported for telling a risqué joke to a class at the FBI Academy. ‘I regret very much having told such a story,’ he told Edgar in a groveling letter. ‘I want to assure you, as I did Mr Tolson, that I do not consider myself a jokester … I have, of course, learned my lesson.’

  The myth of the infallible Director had been institutionalized. ‘Boys,’ an instructor told a group of rookie recruits, ‘J. Edgar Hoover is an inspiration to us all. Indeed, it has been said, and truly, “The sunshine of his presence lights our way.”’ Lectures to recruits were approved in advance by Edgar and his aides.

  The first test for new agents came at the end of the training course, when they filed into the presence to shake Edgar’s hand. As they waited in the anteroom, men were seen frantically wiping their hands on their pants. A moist palm was enough to end an agent’s career before it began. So were pimples or a bald head.

  Once, as a group of recruits left his office, Edgar summoned the instructor back. ‘One of them,’ he snapped, ‘is a pinhead. Get rid of him!’ Afraid to ask which man Edgar meant, the instructor surreptitiously checked his pupils’ hat sizes. There were three men with small heads, all of them size 67/8. To placate Edgar, and to protect Training Division officials, all three were fired.

  ‘In our class,’ said former agent Jack Shaw, ‘we had a kid from Kansas called Leroy, who’d been a schoolteacher. He had a high-pitched voice, and this didn’t fit with the Bureau stereotype: tall, commanding, blond, blue-eyed, the perfect accent. Word came down about this, so they worked on Leroy to lower his voice. He got it to a manly level, and he was smart and sharp in every other way. But when he went for his final test, the Assistant Director looked at him and said, “Have your ears always protruded like that?” Leroy had large, flapping ears, and they told him his ears were wrong. He left that day.’

  An agent who lost his gas credit card received a letter of reprimand from Edgar. Agent Francis Flanagan was talking on the phone one day, hat on and cigarette in mouth while trying to keep a key informant on the line, when Edgar walked in. His punishment, for failing to spring to his feet, was an immediate transfer to Sioux Falls, South Dakota.

  During the fifties, word reached headquarters from San Francisco that a nude belly dancer had performed at an agent’s retirement party. Edgar ordered all 200 partygoers to file a report, but not one adm
itted having seen the dancer. Each claimed he had been in the men’s room during the performance. For once, by sheer weight of numbers, Edgar’s wrath was thwarted.

  In the sixties, a clerk called Thomas Carter would be subjected to an inquisition because of an anonymous letter claiming he had slept with a young woman. Carter admitted spending the night with the woman, who was his fiancée, but insisted he had done so ‘clothed in Bermudas and a sports shirt.’ One of his roommates was then asked if he had heard the bed creaking. He had not, but Edgar fired Carter anyway. Carter sued, arguing unfair dismissal, and the courts decided in his favor.

  Grown men tolerated such nonsense because an agent’s job had great advantages. It was well paid, sometimes exciting, and there was the prospect of retirement after twenty years, a decent pension and a second career based on the FBI background.

  There was also safety in numbers. It was an unlucky man who attracted the full blast of Edgar’s wrath or who suffered under the worst of his centurions. In offices far away from the throne, agents found ways to function as well as the system would permit – and at its best it was very good indeed. As in the Army, men put up with the sillier rules, kept their noses clean and got on with the job.

  Yet the rules seem to have become increasingly absurd. Field agents, for example, had to spend a minimum number of hours out of the office, even when there was nothing to do. This was obligatory at times when the headquarters’ inspection team was expected. ‘Stay out of the office,’ one official told his men. ‘If you’ve seen all the movies, then go to the library or someplace … The main thing is to stay out of here.’

  ‘Since we weren’t allowed to drink coffee in the office except before 8:15 A.M.,’ former agent Jack Shaw recalled, ‘agents used to go down to Casey’s Kitchen on Sixty-seventh Street. John Malone, the Assistant Director in Charge, would position himself in the lobby of the office to catch them coming back. He was infamous for shouting, “Hey, you there!” as an agent came in through the swing door. Sometimes the agent would turn right around and go out again, with Malone chasing him out into the street, yelling.’