Official and Confidential

by Anthony Summers

  Edgar went on playing the game he knew so well, doing favors, making himself seem indispensable. When Nixon picked John Mitchell, a wealthy lawyer without obvious qualifications, to serve as Attorney General, he reportedly asked that the usual stringent FBI checks be waived. Edgar had no problem with Mitchell, whom he described as ‘honest, sincere and very human … There never has been an Attorney General for whom I’ve had a higher regard.’ Mitchell was to wind up serving nineteen months in jail for conspiracy, obstruction of justice and lying under oath during the Watergate crisis.

  In the early days, Nixon had Edgar over to the White House almost every month. ‘He’d come in at breakfast,’ the President would recall. ‘He got us information. There were times when I felt the only person in this goddamned government that was standing with me was Edgar Hoover … He was giving me the stuff that he had … little things.’

  During the Nixon presidency, the FBI institutionalized the supply of dirt to the White House under the code name ‘Inlet.’ Edgar ordered field offices to look out for six categories of information, including ‘items with an unusual twist or concerning prominent personalities which may be of special interest to the President …’

  Nixon’s officials were unimpressed. Henry Kissinger and Alexander Haig laughed openly over redundant reports on the late Martin Luther King. ‘The FBI investigative work I saw was of poor quality,’ said John Ehrlichman, ‘rumor, gossip and conjecture … often hearsay, two or three times removed. When FBI work was particularly bad I sent it back to Hoover, but the rework was seldom an improvement.’

  At the White House, Haldeman leafed through information on U.S. politicians, picked up while surveilling filmgoers. Edgar, he thought, was just ‘lobbying … trying to pique the President’s curiosity.’ Haldeman was uneasy, too, about Edgar’s access to the Oval Office through Rose Mary Woods, the presidential secretary later to become celebrated for her ‘accidental’ erasure of one of the Watergate tapes. She had worked for Nixon since the early fifties, and Edgar was on first-name terms with her.2 Under pressure from Haldeman, the President agreed to try to ‘minimize the connection.’ It was a turning point in his relationship with Edgar.

  ‘FBI Director Hoover,’ Newsweek reported in May 1969, ‘no longer enjoys direct access to the White House …’ Realizing Nixon’s advisers were responsible for the change, Edgar struck back in characteristic fashion. That month, using Rose Mary Woods to ensure the message got through, he passed on an astonishing allegation – that Haldeman, Ehrlichman and a third aide, Dwight Chapin, were homosexual lovers.

  ‘We found out,’ said Haldeman, ‘one night when Mitchell and Ehrlichman and I had been out with the President for a dinner cruise on the Sequoia, the presidential yacht. When we came back, Mitchell’s limo dropped Ehrlichman and me off. Mitchell got out of the car, walked us away so the driver wouldn’t hear and told us Hoover had come up with this homosexual report. It came from a bartender who was a source for the FBI on stuff like this. We were supposed to have attended homosexual parties at the Watergate complex. There were dates, places, everything. Well, every factual allegation he made was totally false and easily disproven. Mitchell advised us to give depositions to the FBI, that it would be useful for us to have in our records. We did as he suggested.

  ‘Mitchell’s conclusion,’ said Haldeman, ‘was that this was an attempt by Hoover to lay a threat across our path, to keep us in line, remind us of his potential.’ ‘I came to think,’ said Ehrlichman, ‘that Hoover did this to show his claws, or ingratiate himself to Nixon – probably both. It was my early introduction to the way the game was played.’

  This was just the start of the game. In midsummer, after more bizarre statements by Edgar about Robert Kennedy and Dr King, former Attorney General Ramsey Clark – and The Washington Post in an editorial – called for his resignation. The President, it was reported, was looking for a way to dump him.

  Nixon denied the rumors. In October, to the astonishment of aides, he left the White House to dine at Edgar’s home – a compliment he had not paid even to cabinet members. He made sure photographers were there to see him bid Edgar an affable good night on the doorstep. Yet, Ehrlichman said, ‘the President seemed uncomfortable that evening. He left as early as he decently could.’

  After the first calls for his resignation, probably in July, Edgar had quietly visited Nixon to discuss a new report from one of his agents. Marianna Liu, the President’s Chinese friend, was shortly to be granted permanent residence in the United States. One of her sponsors was listed as William Allman, a businessman with whom Nixon had stayed in Hong Kong. Another was Raymond Warren, a Nixon-era immigration official who lived in Whittier, California, Nixon’s hometown.

  Nixon has since denied having used his influence to help Liu obtain U.S. residence. According to William Sullivan, however, the FBI’s information was that the woman had been given ‘top priority.’ Marianna Liu was admitted to the United States, went to live in Whittier and reportedly saw Nixon again after her arrival.

  Years later, asked about reports that she visited the White House, Liu became upset. ‘I’m not saying anything else about me and Mr Nixon,’ she cried. ‘Are you trying to get me killed?’

  On New Year’s Day 1970, as Edgar turned seventy-five, Nixon telephoned to wish him Happy Birthday. Again he made sure the press knew, and again he said there were no plans for Edgar to retire. A few months later, on reading a fresh news report that he planned to resign, Edgar scrawled a petulant note – ‘I will not.’

  A new gag was now making the rounds in Washington. Plans were being made, it was said, to make Edgar’s reappointment automatic – in the year 2000.

  Terrorized as they were by Edgar’s homosexual smear, the President’s aides would have been interested in an account of what he himself was up to in 1969. Much later, information reached the police that, on vacation in California with Clyde, he went to great lengths to indulge a sexual interest in teenage males.

  The story was told to this author by Charles Krebs, one of a group of Los Angeles homosexuals who kept close company in the late sixties. One of Krebs’ friends was Billy Byars, Jr., wealthy son of the oil magnate who had used the bungalow next to Edgar’s at the Del Charro hotel in La Jolla. With the help of an acquaintance he had made through knowing Byars, Jr., said Krebs, Edgar made the contacts necessary to have teenage boys brought to him at La Jolla.

  Byars was thirty-two in 1969, a part-time filmmaker, fitness enthusiast and dilettante. He went on to produce The Genesis Children, an X-rated movie with scenes featuring naked male adolescents. He was indicted in 1973, along with fourteen other men, shortly after Edgar’s death, during a police inquiry into other movies that featured sex acts involving young boys. Byars was by then abroad, reportedly in Morocco, and stayed out of the United States for many years to come.

  According to Krebs and others, Byars’ house in Los Angeles, at the summit of Laurel Canyon, was for a while a haven for adult homosexuals and male teenagers. Some of Byars’ friends were aware, as Del Charro staff and Byars himself confirmed, that their host knew Edgar and sometimes saw him at La Jolla. They noticed that a card arrived from Edgar one Christmas and that a fifteen-year-old youth at the house talked openly of having met Edgar at the Del Charro. ‘Hoover bawled me out,’ he complained, ‘for having long hair, but I told the old faggot where to go. No way was I getting a haircut.’

  ‘It was accepted in our circle that Hoover and Tolson were homosexual,’ Krebs recalled. ‘The impression I had from Byars was that Hoover and Tolson had had a sexual relationship with each other when they were younger, but not anymore. They were just two old aunties together in old age, but they were queens. On three occasions that I knew about, perhaps four, boys were driven down to La Jolla at Hoover’s request. I think the arrangements were made by one of Billy’s friends, an older man.

  ‘I went down to La Jolla with the group a couple of times, and we spent a good deal of time at a bar called Rudi’s Hearthside, where the
Hoover rendezvous were. We’d go to the Hearthside with the boys, the fifteen-year-old and another youngster. Hoover and Tolson would be driven there in a limo, always at night. I saw them and their security a couple of times – guys in suits and pointy shoes who looked like crooks. I’d be left behind and they’d go off in two cars, Hoover’s and the one carrying the boys. The way I heard it, they’d drive to a reservoir up in the hills. The two cars parked headlight to headlight, with a cover car down the hill. And the boys would go and get in the Hoover car, and that’s where they’d do their business.’3

  Detective Don Smith of the Los Angeles police vice unit interviewed the juvenile witnesses in the 1973 sex-movie case. ‘This was a group of homosexuals,’ he recalled, ‘some of them pedophiles. There were a number of Hollywood people, also doctors, lawyers, schoolteachers, a head of a corporation. These were upstanding community leaders, but that was their quirk … The kids knew them as “Uncle Mike” and “Mother John,” not by their real names. They’d describe the vehicles the guys were driving in and the chauffeurs who got out and made the pickups. The kids brought up several famous names, including those of Hoover and his sidekick.’

  Charles Krebs expressed anger at the memory of the expeditions to La Jolla. ‘Here was J. Edgar Hoover, himself a homosexual. Any law they ever brought up to help homosexuals, he shot it down. Anyone they thought homosexual who tried to get a job, he shot them down. He built dossiers on them and had people follow them around. Anyone who was a faggot he hated. Yet he was doing the same thing.’

  33

  ‘Justice is only incidental to law and order.’

  J. Edgar Hoover, 1968

  In April 1969, a brooding President Nixon called Edgar to discuss the unrest sweeping the nation about Vietnam. Nixon was worried about student unrest, about draft resisters and the possibility of a mutiny by troops in the field. It was the sort of thing, he felt, that ‘brings down governments.’ Edgar’s response was to compare the situation to the Russian revolution of 1917. Rambling on about ‘bleeding hearts,’ he told Nixon that campus rebellion could be solved if ‘presidents of the universities showed more guts and expelled the individuals …’

  Later, when Ohio National Guardsmen fired into a crowd at Kent State University, killing four young people and wounding eight, Edgar had no compassion. ‘The Guardsmen used as much restraint as they could,’ Edgar informed presidential aide Egil Krogh. ‘The students invited and got what they deserved.’

  In fact, official investigations showed the students were shot when they were hundreds of feet away from the Guardsmen, too far to be any threat. None of those killed were militants. A tape of the incident shows that the fatal salvo was preceded by a single gunshot. ‘This could have been fired,’ wrote the historian William Manchester, ‘either as a signal or from fear, by Terence F. Norman, a spurious “freelance photographer” who was really an informer on the FBI payroll …’

  All Vietnam protests, however peaceful, were infiltrated by FBI agents. On Edgar’s orders, informants were paid to report on the plans – and private lives – of peace activists. Some of the victims were famous. Jane Fonda, trailed by the FBI long before her controversial visit to North Vietnam, was reported as arriving at an airport ‘disheveled and dirty.’ Her address book, containing ‘names, addresses and telephone numbers of many revolutionary and leftist groups,’ was confiscated and Xeroxed for FBI files. The actress’ mail was opened, her phones bugged, her bank records examined. She became, for the Bureau’s record, ‘Jane Fonda: Anarchist.’

  The famous were at least somewhat protected by their celebrity. There was no such protection, however, for the obscure Scott Camil, a two-tour Marine veteran, home from Vietnam with his wounds, nine medals and grave misgivings about the war. After Camil helped found Vietnam Veterans Against the War and threw away his medals in front of the Capitol, Edgar ordered a ‘full-scale aggressive investigation.’ The former Marine was put out of circulation, first on kidnapping charges, which were dropped, then for possession of marijuana. Agents have since admitted they had been told to find a way, any way, to ‘neutralize’ Camil as a peace activist.

  The instrument for the most serious abuses of the period was the Bureau’s COINTELPRO project, originally launched thirteen years earlier to undermine the Communist Party using dirty tricks – fake documents, bogus phone calls and fabricated news stories.1 In 1968, with Edgar’s approval, agents concocted a letter to Life magazine signed by Howard Rasmussen of Brooklyn. Rasmussen did not exist, and the purpose of the letter was to smear a leader of the Youth International Party, better known as the Yippies. Morris Starsky, an Assistant Professor at Arizona State University who happened to be an antiwar activist, lost his job after an anonymous letter was sent to college officials. That letter, too, had been dreamed up at the FBI.

  The FBI worked to divide and disrupt, to set one radical group against another. Bureau artists churned out bogus fliers attacking the ‘crap’ influence in the New Mobilization Committee Against the War in Vietnam, then submitted a copy to Edgar. It was labeled ‘Obscene,’ with the apologetic explanation that it was necessary to use bad language to get through to the New Left.

  The FBI, established to prevent crime, now provoked it. Robert Hardy, a former Bureau informant in New Jersey, testified that agents urged him to persuade antiwar activists to break into the offices of the local draft board. ‘They told me,’ he said,

  all they wanted was evidence of a conspiracy … In the course of the next month, upon the instruction of my FBI agents, my leadership role increased to the point that it became absurd. I was not only encouraging the group to raid the Camden draft board, I was initiating all the plans to do so. I provided them with the tools they needed – ladders, ropes, drills, bits, hammers … On instructions, I once tried to give them guns, but they refused … All this was paid for by the FBI.

  Far from settling for evidence of conspiracy, said Hardy, his control agent told him the break-in was to be allowed to go ahead. It did, and the protesters were caught red-handed. Hardy’s Bureau contact told him the orders ‘had come direct from the little White House in California … The FBI again had gotten its man. The country could now see positive proof that the administration was correct in warning the country about the threat from the Left … I will never forget the role I played in this abuse of American justice.’

  The fact that the FBI denied Hardy’s story is no reason to doubt it. The Bureau was conducting itself just as badly in other areas. The black movement, and especially the militant Black Panthers, came under ruthless attack. Unlike the mainstream civil rights movement, the Panthers preached revolution. Many were armed and dangerous, others not. Edgar lumped them together as ‘the greatest threat to the internal security of the country.’

  People the Panthers approached for funds, such as church groups and women’s organizations, were shocked to receive copies of the Panthers’ Coloring Book for Children, depicting black children killing white policemen. The Panther leadership disapproved of the book and had ordered that all copies be destroyed. The FBI, however, obtained copies and circulated them – to deter possible donors.

  The Newark Agent in Charge proposed the sending of a fake telegram, supposedly from within the Panthers’ organization, warning that white ‘supporters’ were sending poisoned food donations to Panther charities. To ‘prove’ it, he suggested, the Bureau laboratory could ‘treat fruit such as oranges with a mild laxative-type drug by hypodermic needle or other appropriate method and ship fruit as a donation from a fictitious person …’ Incredibly, Edgar’s office thought the plan ‘had merit,’ and rejected it only ‘because of the lack of control over the treated fruit in transit.’

  A vicious campaign was mounted to discredit Jean Seberg, the movie actress remembered for her role as Joan of Arc. Because the actress was among the Panthers’ several prominent white backers, this suggestion went to Edgar from Agent Richard Held, a COINTELPRO specialist in Los Angeles:

  Bureau permission is
requested to publicize the pregnancy of JEAN SEBERG, well-known white movie actress, by Raymond Hewitt, Black Panther Party … by advising Hollywood Gossip Columnists in the Los Angeles area of the situation. It is felt the possible publication of Seberg’s ‘plight’ could cause her embarrassment and serve to cheapen her image with the general public. It is proposed that the following letter from a fictitious person be sent to local columnists:

  I was just thinking about you and remembered I still owe you a favor. So – I was in Paris last week and ran into Jean Seberg, who was heavy with baby. I thought she and Romaine [sic] had gotten together again, but she confided the child belonged to Raymond Hewitt of the Black Panthers. The dear girl is getting around! Anyway, I thought you might get a scoop on the others. Be good, and I’ll see you soon.

  Love,

  Sol

  The FBI had discovered from a wiretap that Seberg was pregnant. To conceal that fact, Edgar recommended that the sending of ‘Sol’s’ smear letter should be delayed ‘until Seberg’s pregnancy would be obvious to everyone.’ Just two weeks later, however, Los Angeles columnist Joyce Haber ran a story referring to an unnamed actress who was evidently Seberg. ‘Papa,’ it said, ‘is said to be a rather prominent Black Panther.’ The story was repeated by the Hollywood Reporter and – three months later – by Newsweek, which identified Seberg by name.

  As the FBI well knew, Seberg was already emotionally disturbed and under psychiatric care. Soon after the publicity started, she took an overdose of sleeping tablets. The baby she was carrying was born prematurely days after the Newsweek story, but survived for only two days. The infant’s father was almost certainly neither a Black Panther nor Seberg’s estranged husband, the French novelist Romain Gary, but a Mexican she had met while making a movie.