The actress became obsessed about the loss of the baby and – when she learned of it years later – about the sinister role of the FBI. She committed suicide in 1979, almost nine years to the day after the child’s death. ‘Jean Seberg,’ said the grieving Romain Gary, ‘was destroyed by the FBI.’
None of this emerged until after Edgar was dead, and – in spite of the evidence in its files – the FBI did not admit leaking the Seberg smear to the press. Bill Thomas, then City Editor of the Los Angeles Times, said he recalled only that the story came from ‘a law enforcement source.’ Richard Held, the agent who initialed the original proposal to headquarters, went on to head the San Francisco office of the FBI. He would say only that his memo was ‘a bureaucratic requirement in response to pressure from someone in Washington.’
Edgar sent a report on Seberg to the White House, describing her as a ‘sex pervert … presently pregnant by Raymond Hewitt of the Black Panthers,’ the very day the first gossipy item appeared in the Los Angeles Times. He sent a copy of the report to the Attorney General.
Former FBI Assistant Director Charles Bates, who studied the Seberg file, had no doubt of its origin. ‘This got the okay from Washington. It was probably given to the press orally, to avoid detection. But the Director saw this – his marks are on the papers. He knew about it. There’s no excuse, and the FBI should admit it.’
Dick Gregory, the black comedian, was targeted with potentially fatal malice – on Edgar’s orders. He had three faults: He was black, he was a vociferous supporter of the civil rights movement and he had referred publicly to Edgar as ‘one of the most dangerous men in this country.’ Edgar therefore sent orders to the FBI office in Chicago, where Gregory lived, to:
develop counter-intelligence measures to neutralize him … This should not be in the nature of an expose, since he already gets far too much publicity. Instead, sophisticated completely untraceable means of neutralizing Gregory should be developed.
In some intelligence circles, ‘neutralize’ is said to be synonymous with ‘kill.’ It did not mean that at the FBI, but Edgar’s next order might well have resulted in Gregory’s death. He noted that Gregory had recently made an outspoken attack on organized crime, calling its members ‘the filthiest snakes that exist on this earth.’ And he told Marlin Johnson, the Chicago Agent in Charge, to:
Consider the use of this statement in developing a counter-intelligence operation to alert La Cosa Nostra to Gregory’s attack …
Edgar’s order can be read only as incitement to have Gregory beaten up, perhaps killed, by the mob. Johnson, now retired, refused to say whether or not he carried out the instruction. Gregory survived.
FBI dirty tricks, the Senate Intelligence Committee later discovered, provoked ‘shootings, beatings and a high degree of unrest’ in the Black Panther movement. For two Panthers in Chicago, the FBI tactics brought sudden death. Fred Hampton and Mark Clark died in a hail of gunfire, and three others were wounded, when police burst into their apartment at 4:00 A.M. on December 3, 1969. It later emerged that the police had fired ninety-eight rounds, the Panthers – maybe – one.
In 1982, after persistent litigation, the survivors were awarded $1.85 million in damages against the police, in a case that revealed the killings had been the direct result of action by the FBI. The Bureau had provided the police with detailed information on Hampton’s movements, along with a floor plan of the apartment. Veteran agent Wesley Swearingen quoted a Chicago colleague as telling him: ‘We told the cops how bad these guys were, that the cops had better look out or their wives were going to be widows … We set up the police to go in there and kill the whole lot.’2
Elmer ‘Geronimo’ Pratt, a former Panther leader in California, spent twenty-seven years in jail for the alleged murder of a woman during a robbery. As revealed on CBS’s 60 Minutes, however, the FBI concealed the fact that key testimony at his trial was provided by a Bureau informant. Pratt’s conviction was overturned in 1997. He was freed, but his life had been ruined.
Edgar, it is known, had personally ordered that a way be found to put Pratt out of circulation. He was fully briefed on all Bureau operations against the Panthers, and ensured that they were among the most closely held secrets in FBI history.
From the standpoint of the Nixon White House, Edgar did not do enough to counter radical movements. In 1969 and early 1970, bombings or bomb threats were running at eighty every day. There were 400 threats on one day alone in New York City. Blasts ripped through the Manhattan offices of IBM, General Telephone and Mobil Oil. Forty-three people were killed, and property worth $21 million destroyed.
It was, President Nixon recalled, a ‘season of mindless terror.’ Few were caught and, of 40,000 incidents, 64 percent were by bombers whose identity and motive were unknown. The men around Nixon had grumbled from the start about the paucity of FBI intelligence on things that really mattered – as distinct from dirt on people’s private lives. There were other things, however, that seemed intolerable in the present situation.
Relations between the FBI and the other intelligence agencies were at an all-time low. Edgar had been hostile and uncooperative toward the CIA since the forties, when he had been thwarted in his desire to do its work himself. Yet while he rarely deigned to meet with Directors of the CIA, his agents had long found ways to cooperate with the Agency. In the spring of 1970, however, in a fit of pique over a trifling formality, Edgar ordered all liaison to cease. In a city where there is rarely unanimity on anything, the news shocked everyone in the secret world.
Edgar’s veteran liaison with the CIA, Sam Papich, was so appalled that he tendered his resignation. ‘I hope you will share my alarm,’ he wrote Edgar. ‘I am absolutely convinced that the intelligence services of Great Britain, France, West Germany and others are well penetrated by the Soviets … The break in relations between the FBI and CIA will provide a basis for promoting further rifts … I appeal to you to leave the door open.’
Edgar was not listening. He was shortly to sever the FBI’s links with the National Security Agency, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the military services and the Secret Service – with everyone, indeed, except the White House.
As old men isolate themselves, so Edgar was trying to isolate the FBI. Nixon’s aides thought the situation the height of folly, especially at a time of crisis. They were frustrated, too, to discover that agents were now inhibited in their ability to perform ‘black-bag’ jobs – Bureauspeak for illegal break-ins. Edgar had smiled on such operations for decades, only to call a halt in 1966, when Bureau methods came under unprecedented scrutiny. This formal order had been a device to protect Edgar’s rear, not some sudden rush of respect for the proprieties. And black-bag work had continued, though more cautiously. The young men around Nixon, however, had no time for an old man’s caution.
In April 1970, H. R. Haldeman went to the President with complaints about Edgar and suggestions for change. Nixon listened, and ordered the nation’s intelligence chiefs to conduct a rapid review of the security situation – a process that turned out to be a humiliating charade.
Aware of Edgar’s scorn for his peers at other agencies, Nixon played to his vanity by making him Chairman of the Review Committee. Less adroitly, he appointed a presidential assistant, Tom Huston, to coordinate it. Though very right-wing, Huston riled Edgar from the start. He was young – twenty-nine – highly intelligent and well read, and he sported sideburns and longish hair. Edgar wrote him off as a ‘hippie intellectual.’
For a long time now, albeit reluctantly, Edgar had been sending an aide to meetings of the nation’s most prestigious intelligence group, the U.S. Intelligence Board. His attitude to that body is well summed up by an incident during the Nixon era – when each agency was asked to provide a small plaque, bearing its seal, for display on the conference room wall. Edgar had sent one three feet in diameter, three times larger than anyone else’s. Now, as Chairman of Nixon’s Review Committee, he behaved accordingly.
At the first
meeting Edgar astonished everyone with introductory remarks saying the President merely wanted a history of the current unrest. When colleagues had to put him right, explaining that Nixon wanted to know what was wrong with intelligence on the radical movements, Edgar turned crimson. Then he abruptly ended the meeting.
Two weeks later Edgar angered the rest of the committee by adding his own footnotes to a text all the agencies had already approved. Then, at the signing session, he amazed everyone by reading the entire forty-three-page document out loud. After each page, as Edgar went around the table asking for comments, he would get Huston’s name wrong. It was ‘Mr Hoffman’ or ‘Mr Hutchinson,’ anything that began with H, but never the correct name. This meeting also ended in discord.
Huston’s recommendations, approved by the President, called for more surveillance of ‘domestic security threats,’ the monitoring of internal communications used by American citizens, fewer restrictions on opening mail, more informants on college campuses, a full-scale resumption of black-bag jobs and the establishment of an umbrella group, linking all the agencies, to manage internal security.
That any president could have approved such a package, the Senate Intelligence Committee would one day declare, was ‘deeply troubling.’ Edgar also objected vociferously, but not on reasons of principle. ‘Hoover was for the Huston plan,’ Nixon said in 1988, ‘but only if he did it. He did not trust the CIA, he didn’t trust anybody else. He was paranoiac, almost, about doing anything that would make him get in bad with the media …’
Tom Huston fought a fierce rear-guard action. He sent a ‘Top Secret – Eyes Only’ message to Haldeman, pointing out that Edgar was the only official raising objections:
At some point, Hoover has to be told who is President. He has become totally unreasonable … The Director of the FBI is paid to take risks where the security of the country is at stake … If he gets his way it is going to look like he is more powerful than the President …
Nothing happened. Richard Nixon never was one for confrontations. Edgar went off on vacation to La Jolla. Tom Huston was moved sideways and eventually resigned. Yet, in a way no one could have understood fully at the time, the ground had shifted. Edgar had alienated men whose actions were to determine his own last days, the future of the FBI and the history of the nation.
William Sullivan, long one of Edgar’s most trusted aides, emerged embittered from the Huston confrontation. Like several of his colleagues in the Domestic Intelligence Division and like Sam Papich, of CIA Liaison, Sullivan had long been grumbling about restrictions in the fight against domestic terrorism. He had also started playing a double game, simultaneously urging Huston on while letting Edgar think he was defending Bureau policy.
There was more than self-preservation at stake, for the men around Edgar had been eyeing the succession. If Edgar was to be replaced from within, Sullivan and DeLoach were the two main contenders. According to DeLoach, ‘Sullivan would go to the extent of writing eight-page letters to Mr Hoover saying effectively, “You’re getting old for your office. You deserve to be compared with Konrad Adenauer and Charles de Gaulle. Think of them as the greatest leaders in the world, and you are like them.” And Mr Hoover would call me over and read me those damn letters, and I would almost regurgitate.’
In the midst of the Huston furor, DeLoach decided there was no longer any point in waiting for Edgar to retire. He decided to take up a longstanding offer and go to work for one of the President’s close friends, Donald Kendall, as a vice president of Pepsico. ‘I went in to see the old man,’ DeLoach recalled, ‘and we talked for two hours and forty-seven minutes, him doing ninety-eight percent of the talking. And when I got up to leave he said, “If you decide to leave, come back and let me know.” I said, “That’s what I came in to tell you,” and he said, “Well, I thought you were one who would never leave me.”’
In the two weeks that followed, Edgar refused to speak to DeLoach and cut him off from top-level mail. Then he did something that upset not only DeLoach, but Clyde and Miss Gandy, too. He appointed William Sullivan to step into DeLoach’s place, to become Assistant to the Director, number three man in the Bureau, right behind the ailing Clyde. Not that it made any difference to Edgar. ‘I will never,’ he told DeLoach, ‘leave the directorship of the FBI.’
‘Whatever you say,’ Edgar insisted that day, ‘I think Sullivan’s loyal to me.’ Sullivan had been loyal for the past thirty years. But now, with his newfound friends in the Nixon administration, with one eye on the directorship and the other on his deep differences with Edgar, he was not trustworthy at all. Sullivan became a Judas, waiting for the moment to betray.
At the White House, Huston was replaced by a young man named John Dean, and he soon reached the conclusion now shared by many in the Nixon hierarchy. ‘Hoover,’ he was to recall, had ‘lost his guts.’ Quietly, in the months that followed, Dean worked behind the scenes to further the domestic intelligence plans Edgar had snuffed out. Frustrated by Edgar’s intransigence, the brash young men at the White House now began to work around him.
It was a trend that would lead everyone involved down a trail of treachery.
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‘I know Nixon was afraid of him … Knowledge is powerful, and he had knowledge of the most damaging kind.’
William Sullivan, former Assistant to the Director, 1975
On certain wintry mornings in 1970, while Edgar was still sleeping at his home on Thirtieth Place, a young man with a Pancho Villa mustache would park outside, walk rapidly down the alley beside the house and pick up the garbage. This was not, however, the garbageman. He was Charles Elliott, a rookie reporter for Washington Post columnist Jack Anderson.
An hour or so later, as Edgar climbed into his limousine to go to work, Elliott would be watching. During the day, when he knew his quarry was away, he stood on the doormat emblazoned with the initials J.E.H., beside the mailbox topped with a roosting eagle. He peered through the glass of the front door at the bronze life-size bust of Edgar, dominating a foyer crammed with mementos. Then he interrogated the neighbors.
The Post published the results of the snooping on New Year’s 1971, as Edgar began the last full year of his life. ‘We decided,’ Anderson wrote, ‘to turn the tables on J. Edgar Hoover and conduct an FBI-style investigation into his private life.’ In fact, the garbage was less than revelatory. It produced some handwritten dinner menus, on stationery headed ‘From the Desk of the Director,’ one of them featuring crab bisque soup, spaghetti and meatballs with asparagus, peppermint ice cream and strawberries. There was evidence that the great man drank Black Label whiskey and Irish Mist, Coca-Cola and club soda, took Gelusil for indigestion and cleaned his teeth with Ultrabrite.
An enraged Edgar called Anderson, accurately enough on this occasion, ‘the top scavenger of all columnists.’ Elliott, who had actually removed the garbage, came home one evening to find two ‘FBI types’ on his doorstep. They snapped photographs of him, then ran for their car. Elliott’s roommate, who happened to be the son of an FBI agent, later made it clear Elliott was no longer welcome in the apartment.
Subsequent Post columns contained serious revelations. Anderson disclosed that Edgar’s millionaire friends had long been picking up the tab for his summer vacations in California. He said Edgar had accepted more than a quarter of a million dollars in royalties from Masters of Deceit and two other books on Communism he had not even written. ‘This is an offense,’ Anderson pointed out, ‘that, if it had been committed by some other government official, the FBI might have been asked to investigate.’
If those articles scared Edgar, a third must have shaken him to the core. ‘Competent sources,’ Anderson wrote, ‘told us that Hoover had consulted Dr Marshall de G. Ruffin, the society shrink, about his nightmares.’ Anderson was perilously close to one of Edgar’s most sensitive secrets, for it was Ruffin whom Edgar had consulted years earlier about his homosexuality.1
Edgar was rattled. He talked about Anderson with Attorney General Mi
tchell and, after the story about the psychiatrist, with Mitchell’s deputy, Richard Kleindienst. ‘With these jackals,’ he said, ‘I wouldn’t put anything past them … I have been undecided whether to sue for libel or not.’ ‘If they spelled your name right,’ Kleindienst advised, ‘leave it alone.’
Clyde Tolson, Anderson reported, was now too ‘feeble’ to do his job properly. It was true. Clyde suffered another stroke that year, failed to recognize his own nephew when he visited him in the hospital and found it hard to follow conversation. To hide his faults when he did go to work, Clyde was henceforth smuggled out of his apartment by a back door. A discreet arrival at the office was easy – via the underground parking lot and an elevator that stopped near his office. Yet that year Edgar gave his friend a special bonus for excellent service. ‘Mr Tolson,’ he wrote, ‘performs his tasks quickly and with outstanding accuracy … His services are without parallel.’
Edgar’s own schedule, never as grueling as his publicity suggested, was now very light. ‘By the time I left in 1970,’ said Cartha DeLoach, ‘he would come in at nine on the dot, stay until eleven forty-five, go to lunch at the Mayflower and come back around one. Then he would close his doors until three and go right on home. I never could get him during that time. That was his workday, every day.’
Out-of-town officials now found Edgar virtually inaccessible. ‘Months and months went by,’ said Neil Welch, ‘when he wasn’t seeing anybody. It’d been regular as clockwork that he saw all Agents in Charge once a year. But for the last year and half he cut them all off. We just couldn’t get any information – just total silence. Nobody had seen him, nobody could see him. Asking how he was was like it must’ve been trying to find out how the Tsar was, in Russia …’
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