Lessons from a Dark Time and Other Essays

by Adam Hochschild

  In the immediate wake of the Ramparts story, something happened that none of us at the magazine had anticipated. Reporters began to look at public records to see what else the CIA’s conduits, like the mysterious Foundation for Youth and Student Affairs, had funded.

  They found hundreds of recipients: the American Society for African Culture, the International Commission of Jurists, the American Friends of the Middle East, programs within the AFL-CIO and the National Council of Churches, journalists’ groups, and more. As with the NSA, usually a few key people in the organization knew where the money was coming from, but most others did not. The CIA wanted to foster the impression that, from many walks of life—professional, religious, ethnic, educational—scores of organizations were of their own free will taking a strongly anticommunist stand. If these groups mixed that with liberalism on other issues, so much the better, many in the CIA felt, for it was liberals and leftists abroad whose minds the agency most hoped to sway.

  No single group was more important to the CIA, however, than the National Student Association. After the exposé, some CIA defenders argued that it had been a good thing to create a democratically oriented international student federation as an alternative to the communist-dominated one. Paget adds a curious fillip to the argument, which should be a warning to any regime that thinks it can secretly pull the strings of a front group forever. Many of the top officials of the USSR’s own puppet international student federation in Prague were Czechs. Surprisingly, the group’s three most important leaders all became major figures in the Prague Spring of 1968, the sweeping array of democratic changes that lasted more than six months before it was crushed by Warsaw Pact troops. Prague Spring started less than a year after the Ramparts story broke. It’s a pleasure to imagine spymasters in Moscow and Langley pounding their desks at almost exactly the same time, in fury at the young people who had escaped their control.

  • • •

  And pound their desks they certainly did. When President Lyndon B. Johnson heard about the impending Ramparts story, he summoned CIA chief Richard Helms back to Washington from a trip to the nuclear lab at Los Alamos. The CIA, in turn, called home some two hundred agents from overseas to discuss damage control. The agency quickly persuaded some friendly members of Congress to declare that they had known and approved of the agency’s relationship with the NSA (not true), and twelve former NSA presidents signed a statement that the CIA had never interfered with their activities (also a lie—the CIA had directed much of what they did). Paget dryly notes that three of the statement’s signers were CIA career agents at the time; all but one had continued to work for the agency after his term as NSA president expired.

  Learning of the close tie between the two organizations left many people feeling not just shocked but personally betrayed. A year or so after the Ramparts story was published, I met a former South African student leader, a committed anti-apartheid activist. After his student days, he had gone on to try to gather support overseas for an underground resistance movement. In this effort he had found a sympathetic ear in an American with a deep interest in Africa who had been a top official of the NSA and then worked at the pro-Western International Student Conference in Holland. The two became such close friends that one was the best man at the other’s wedding. Now, stunned by the Ramparts article and the revelation that the American must have been reporting to the CIA all along, the South African was agonized, wondering how much of what he had confided had made its way back to the apartheid regime in Pretoria.

  He was right to wonder, for we know now that despite Washington’s routine public denunciations of white rule, the U.S. intelligence establishment shared a huge amount of data with Pretoria for decades. This included satellite intercepts of African National Congress radio communications as well as the information, passed on by a CIA officer in Durban, that allowed the South African police to put their roadblock at the right place to seize Nelson Mandela in 1962, the arrest that began his twenty-seven years behind bars.

  The CIA clearly knew that revealing its control of the NSA could have reverberations around the world and might unravel its whole web of covertly funded organizations. When it discovered that we were putting together the story, it established a “Ramparts Task Force” at Langley and gathered information on many of us who worked at the magazine. A decade after the exposé, under the Freedom of Information Act, I was finally able to get some of these CIA files and found myself described as “a needle to the Agency,” even though I was a very low man on the Ramparts totem pole. It was chilling to discover how closely the agency was watching the magazine and its editors and writers.

  Do democratic governments have the right to collect intelligence and to gather it secretly? Of course: we live in a world full of malicious regimes and movements. But intelligence gathering can all too easily expand into realms that have nothing to do with thwarting possible attacks. This can mean passing on information about student leaders to repressive regimes, or, as we learned more recently, eavesdropping on the cell phone of German Chancellor Angela Merkel, or vacuuming up the e-mails and text messages of millions of people at home and abroad—and all of this while the highest intelligence officials deny to Congress that any such thing is happening.

  The more clandestine intelligence operations are, the more we need rigorous vigilance to ensure that the ends do not corrupt the means. Otherwise we start to look like our enemies: to combat a Soviet front organization, we create a front organization of our own; to build allegiances against communist secret-police regimes, we finger people for the Shah’s secret police; to fight the brutality of Al Qaeda, we torture prisoners at secret sites. The power that the CIA wielded over the NSA was financial; the power whose abuse Edward Snowden alerted us to was electronic. In neither case were there checks or balances. Both scandals warn us of what can happen when great power is exercised without oversight or conscience.

  2015

  THREE

  Hoover’s Secret Empire

  ANTICOMMUNISM HAS ALWAYS BEEN FAR LOUDER and more potent in the United States than communism. Unlike sister parties in France, Italy, India, and elsewhere, the Communist Party in this country has never controlled a state or major city, or even elected a single member to the national legislature. American anticommunism, by contrast, built and destroyed thousands of careers; witch-hunted dissidents in Hollywood, universities, and government; and was a force that politicians like Joseph McCarthy and Richard Nixon rode to great heights. This was not the first time that heresy hunters have overshadowed the actual heretics: consider the Inquisition, which began before Martin Luther, the greatest heretic, was even born, or how Stalin shot or imprisoned so-called Trotskyists by the millions—numbers many times those of Trotsky’s beleaguered, faction-ridden followers.

  No one hunted heretics more fiercely than J. Edgar Hoover in his decades-long reign as director of the FBI. More than forty years after his death, we know a great deal about this manipulative, power-hungry man, but the California investigative journalist Seth Rosenfeld adds significantly more in Subversives: The FBI’s War on Student Radicals, and Reagan’s Rise to Power. It is based on some three hundred thousand pages of documents pried out of the resistant FBI over more than two decades in a series of lawsuits. These papers document FBI surveillance, disinformation, and other monkey business during the student revolts that roiled the University of California at Berkeley in the 1960s.

  At that time, these upheavals made Berkeley surely the only college campus in the world with four full-time daily newspaper correspondents stationed on it, and as a greenhorn reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle, I was one of them. I spent close to a year sharing a ramshackle office with writers for rival papers, within earshot of the campus’s wide, sun-drenched central plaza, where speeches and demonstrations took place. We would call in photographers if a major press conference or clash with the police seemed in the offing. I spent considerable time covering such events in Berkeley before and after that year as well, watchi
ng firsthand, for instance, the mass arrest of 773 Free Speech Movement sit-in demonstrators in December 1964 for demanding an end to restrictions on political speaking and organizing on campus. That day the university’s stately buildings looked like an armed camp as police and sheriff’s deputies dragged protestors down the staircase of the administration building to be bussed off to the county jail. I covered some of the later massive marches and teach-ins against the Vietnam War and witnessed the astonishing sight of a California National Guard helicopter swooping low across the campus in 1969 indiscriminately spraying a dense white cloud of tear gas.

  I thought in those years that I could clearly see every aspect of this political battleground. But it turns out there was much that none of us knew. For example, I and dozens of other journalists were on hand to cover one large protest march against the Vietnam War where demonstrators tangled with the Oakland police. But none of us had the slightest idea that the march’s monitors, who were trying to keep things peaceful, were having their walkie-talkies secretly jammed by the FBI. Nor did we have any idea of the extent of the bureau’s decade-long vendetta against Clark Kerr, who was first chancellor at Berkeley and then president of the entire University of California system.

  Everyone knew that the FBI had no love for student leftists, but Hoover’s intense hatred for Kerr is the major revelation of Rosenfeld’s book—and it was evidently a revelation to Kerr as well when the author shared some of this material with him shortly before Kerr died in 2003. “I know Kerr is no good,” Hoover scrawled in the margin of one bureau document.

  Although Kerr was largely reviled by the activists of the Free Speech Movement, who were—quite rightly—protesting the university’s banning of political advocacy on campus, he was far more than the soft-spoken, colorless bureaucrat he appeared to be. For one thing, he had a wry sense of humor, quipping that the real purpose of a university was to provide sex for the students, sports for the alumni, and parking for the faculty. More important, he was a man of principle. From 1949 to 1951, for example, the university was riven by a fierce controversy over a loyalty oath required of all employees. More than sixty professors refused to sign, and thirty-one of them, as well as many other staff, were fired. Though a staunch anticommunist, Kerr spoke out strongly against the firings and the witch-hunt atmosphere surrounding them. His stand won him the enmity of right-wingers, and he was soon on Hoover’s radar.

  • • •

  The heresy that Hoover feared most was not communism; it was threats to the power of the FBI. What pushed him over the line from hostility to absolute rage at Kerr was an exam question. High school students applying to the University of California had to take an English aptitude test, which included a choice of one of twelve topics for a 500-word essay. In 1959, one topic was: “What are the dangers to a democracy of a national police organization, like the FBI, which operates secretly and is unresponsive to criticism?”

  When he heard about this, a furious Hoover issued a blizzard of orders: one FBI official drafted a letter of protest for the national commander of the American Legion to sign; other agents mobilized statements of outrage from the Hearst newspapers, the Catholic Archdiocese of Los Angeles, and the International Association of Chiefs of Police. An FBI man went to see California Governor Edmund G. Brown and stood by while Brown dictated a letter ordering an inquiry into who had written the essay question.

  Hoover himself wrote to members of the university’s board of regents, who swiftly apologized. But his ire did not subside; he ordered an FBI investigation of the university as a whole, assigning an astounding thirty employees to the task. The result was a sixty-page report, covering professorial transgressions that ranged from giving birth out of wedlock to writing a play that “defamed Chiang Kai-shek.” The report also noted that seventy-two university faculty, students, and employees were on the bureau’s “Security Index,” a list Hoover kept of people who in a national emergency were to be arrested and thrown into preventive detention.

  This new trove of documents reveals that when the FBI didn’t have another weapon handy, it sent poison-pen letters. The man initially suspected of writing the offending essay question, for instance, was a quiet UCLA English professor and Antioch College graduate, Everett L. Jones. When intensive sleuthing couldn’t find anything to tie Jones to the Communist Party—the usual FBI means of tarring an enemy—someone in the bureau wrote an anonymous letter on plain stationery to UCLA’s chancellor, signed merely “Antioch—Class of ’38,” saying that the writer had known Jones and his wife in college, where “they expressed views which shocked many of their friends” and later became “fanatical adherents to communism.”

  Hoover’s anger at Clark Kerr was reignited in 1960, when thirty-one Berkeley students were among those arrested in a demonstration against a House Un-American Activities Committee hearing in San Francisco’s City Hall—an early landmark in what would be a tumultuous decade of American student protest. Hoover was outraged when Kerr refused to discipline the students taking part. Reasonably enough, Kerr said that any student demonstrators were acting as private individuals and “were not in any way representing the university.”

  The upheavals of the Free Speech Movement, which had Berkeley in turmoil during the 1964–65 school year, and of the protests against the Vietnam War that began shaking the campus soon after, brought renewed scrutiny by the FBI. As always, Hoover’s anticommunism had little to do with the USSR: although the FBI’s responsibilities include counterespionage, only twenty-five agents in Northern California were assigned to this, while forty-three were at work monitoring “subversives,” which meant people like Berkeley students—and, it turns out, even people the student activists thought were their enemies, like the university’s regents.

  Gathering information about several liberal pro-Kerr regents, Hoover funneled it and other ammunition to a major enemy of Kerr, regent Edwin Pauley, a wealthy Los Angeles oilman. An FBI official then reported back to Hoover that an appreciative Pauley might be a useful informant and could “use his influence to curtail, harass and . . . eliminate communists and ultra-liberal members on the faculty.”

  California’s governor and several other state officials were ex officio regents, and the political balance on the board changed when Ronald Reagan was elected governor in 1966. At Reagan’s first meeting, Kerr was fired. Even though Hoover can’t be blamed for costing Kerr his job, he had already made sure that there was another one the educator didn’t get. Some months earlier, President Lyndon B. Johnson had decided he wanted Kerr to be his next secretary of health, education, and welfare. “I’ve looked from the Pacific to the Atlantic and from Mexico to Canada,” LBJ told Kerr in his famous arm-twisting mode, “and you’re the man I want.” Kerr said he would think it over. Meanwhile, Johnson ordered the usual FBI background check. Hoover sent the president a twelve-page report that included allegations from a California state legislative red-hunter who claimed that someone named Louis Hicks had worked with Kerr in the 1940s and declared that Kerr was “pro-Communist.”

  “Hoover’s report failed to note, however,” Rosenfeld writes, “that when FBI agents interviewed Hicks he denied making the charge.” The report made a string of similar misrepresentations, among them another such charge—with no mention of the FBI investigation that found it untrue. Before Kerr could tell LBJ that he had decided to turn down the post, the president withdrew the offer.

  • • •

  Hoover’s FBI did its best not only to wreck the careers of its enemies but to promote those of its friends, like Reagan. It is jarring to see how much help he got from an agency that is supposed to have nothing to do with partisan politics. Reagan had been trading information with the FBI about alleged radicals ever since his days as president of the Screen Actors Guild in the 1940s, and he continued to feed the bureau Hollywood political gossip long afterward. The FBI did work for him in return, for example, investigating whether a live-in boyfriend of his estranged daughter Maureen was already married
(he was).

  Another FBI favor for Reagan also concerned a wayward child: his son Michael. In 1965, after Hoover had at last, reluctantly and under much pressure, finally begun investigating organized crime, an agent reported that “the son of Ronald Reagan was associating with” the son of Mafia clan chief Joseph “Joe Bananas” Bonanno. Both sons enjoyed pursuing girls and driving fast cars, and the young Bonanno already had a police record at eighteen. The logical procedure would have been for FBI agents to interview Michael Reagan for any information about the Bonannos he might have learned, but Hoover ordered instead that the agents should simply suggest to his father that he tell Michael to find another companion. Reagan, just then gearing up for his first run for governor, was most grateful.

  The FBI did him many other courtesies over the years: a personal briefing from Hoover, data for his speeches, and quiet investigations of people the University of California was thinking about hiring—even though screening applicants for jobs outside the federal government was not in the bureau’s jurisdiction. But Hoover’s biggest favor of all for Reagan was something he didn’t do. In 1960, an informer thought “reliable” reported that Reagan secretly belonged to the John Birch Society—an organization even the FBI thought so extreme (it considered President Eisenhower a communist) that it was kept under surveillance. Rosenfeld says that he could not tell from the available records whether this claim was true. But, he notes, “it was precisely the kind of uncorroborated information” that the bureau had quietly slipped to dozens of politicians or journalists over the years when it wanted to damage somebody’s reputation. This report, which could easily have wrecked Reagan’s future political career, Hoover kept quiet.