• • •
One appeal of hunting heretics is that it is easy. By contrast, good police work—such as building a solid legal case against the Bonanno family or a sophisticated white-collar criminal—is extremely hard. Small wonder that Hoover preferred the first to the second. But what happens to a professional anticommunist when, on the home front anyway, there are almost no more communists left? After 1956, when Khrushchev’s admission of Stalin’s crimes and the Soviet invasion of Hungary drove thousands out of the Party, there were only about five thousand Party members left in the United States, some 30 percent of whom were FBI informants. The FBI then rather clumsily began looking for new targets. In a curious echo of the hostility of the USSR and its satellite regimes toward the antiauthoritarian overtones of rock music, Hoover grew alarmed about the counterculture. Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters came into his sights, as did organizations like Berkeley’s Sexual Freedom League.
But the world was shifting under the FBI’s feet. In the good old days, if you couldn’t wreck someone’s career by tying him or her to a known communist, you could still do so by exposing a sexual misdeed. Or you could simply hint that you had such information—something Hoover did for decades to blackmail potential congressional critics into silence. The bureau dispatched a poison-pen letter in 1965 revealing that a prominent Berkeley antiwar activist had fathered an illegitimate child, but the FBI’s Northern California chief wrote Hoover bemoaning the fact that such leaks were no longer effective. These student radicals, he explained, “do not have the same moral standards as a Bureau employee.” In such treacherously changing times, what was a poor blackmailer to do?
Rosenfeld’s many years of digging have produced other notable revelations. The most controversial concerns Richard Aoki, a military veteran and particularly confrontational student leader in the later stages of Berkeley 1960s activism; he urged his comrades, for instance, to steal weapons from National Guard armories. Aoki also provided guns to Black Panther Party members and gave them weapons training. When his book was first published, Rosenfeld startled just about everyone by showing that Aoki was an FBI agent provocateur. This accusation generated a furious fusillade in Aoki’s defense in the pages of the Chronicle of Higher Education and other publications. But in my reading of both sides, the charge seems well documented and convincing; moreover, when Rosenfeld asked him directly if he was an informer, Aoki gave a vague and ambiguous answer.
Aoki’s defenders do not believe that so charismatic a leader could have been anything other than the passionate fighter for justice he appeared to be. Yet in the murky world of surveillance and double agents, some people can serve two masters. Perhaps the most famous such figure was Yevno Azev (1869–1918), for a decade and a half the key informer for the tsarist secret police, for whom he infiltrated the Russian revolutionary movement and betrayed hundreds of his comrades. But while leaking the details of some assassination plots to the authorities, he nonetheless zestfully helped plan others, including the murders of a provincial governor, the Grand Duke Sergei (the tsar’s uncle), and the minister of the interior. Neither Azev nor his alarmed police handlers, it appears, ever figured out which side he was really on. Was that true for Richard Aoki? We will never know: ill with kidney disease, he committed suicide several years before Rosenfeld published his findings.
Aoki’s record raises other questions: Were more undercover agents whom we don’t yet even know about responsible for the move toward violent confrontation in the late 1960s by other groups, such as the Weather Underground? Was the Black Panther Party’s long descent into criminal violence mainly the work of FBI agents provocateurs? I think the answer is no—even though we know now that both groups were heavily infiltrated. There was already plenty of madness in the air by end of the 1960s. The trail of Black Panther extortion, beatings, murders, and other crimes—especially in Northern California—is so long as to be beyond the FBI’s ability to create it. And by 1970, there were also too many white leftists who romanticized third-world revolutionaries, talked tough, wore military fatigues, and spoke a different language than the nonviolent one of Berkeley’s 1964–65 Free Speech Movement.
The leaders of that movement knew their fight was a universal one. They cared about civil liberties from Mississippi (where FSM leader Mario Savio had been a civil rights worker) to Moscow (FSM veterans held a Berkeley campus rally for two imprisoned Soviet dissidents). The outstanding FSM figure was Savio, whom I came to know toward the end of his too-short life—he died of heart problems at fifty-three in 1996—a gentle, eloquent, deeply intelligent man whose passion for civil liberties and social justice had the strength of a religion. Even though Savio’s lifelong battle with depression and keen belief that the movement could not thrive if it were centered on him personally led him to stay in the background after 1965, it did not prevent the FBI from following his every move, monitoring his bank account, and aggressively questioning his neighbors, employers, friends, and landlords.
Even at its worst, the FBI was far less draconian than dozens of secret police forces active around the world, then and now. Poison-pen letters are one thing; torture and summary execution another. But changes in technology have made surveillance temptingly easy. In the 1950s, in order to eavesdrop on a meeting in the author Jessica Mitford’s house in Oakland, two bumbling FBI agents hid in a crawl space beneath it; their mission almost came to grief when one fell asleep and started snoring. But today those agents—and, of course, powerful corporations—would have access to vastly more: not just Mitford’s phone calls, which they were already tapping, but her credit card statements, her Google searches, her air travel itineraries, her bookstore purchases, her e-mails, her text messages, her minute-by-minute locations as signaled by the GPS in her mobile phone. A $2 billion National Security Agency center in Bluffdale, Utah, which holds longtime records of this sort on whomever the NSA chooses to monitor, is the largest intelligence data storage facility on earth—five times the size of the Capitol building in Washington, DC. Naturally, it’s all in the name of stopping terrorism, but the combination of electronic data collection, a vague and nebulous foreign threat, and tens of billions of dollars pouring into “homeland security” each year makes a heady mix for new demagogues. That essay question on the 1959 University of California entrance exam is one we must never stop asking.
2013
FOUR
The Father of American Surveillance
MANILA, 1901. THE CITY IS A STEAMY mix of grand Spanish colonial buildings mildewed from tropical humidity, the ramshackle dwellings of hundreds of thousands of Filipinos, and horse-drawn wagons rumbling through squares and gates with names like Plaza de Cervantes and Puerta de Isabel II. Hastily erected hotels, houses of prostitution, and gambling dens cater to a flood of newly arrived Americans: bureaucrats, missionaries, merchants, speculators—and soldiers. Despite its swift victory in the Spanish-American War three years earlier, the United States is now in the middle of its first protracted war in Asia. Filipino nationalists, delighted to be free at last from several centuries of Spanish rule, have discovered that the U.S. troops, with leggings tucked into their high boots, whom they first hoped were liberators, are in fact here to establish an American colony. The brutal conflict now under way will eventually leave more than two hundred thousand Filipinos dead.
Although he may have watched the Army-vs.-Marines baseball games when off duty, Captain Ralph H. Van Deman was almost certainly too abstemious to loiter in the city’s bars and brothels or place bets at the Manila Jockey Club, but for an ambitious U.S. Army officer, wartime Manila was nevertheless the place to be. Van Deman was far from the usual picture of a dashing young warrior: tall, gray-eyed, and almost cadaverously thin, he had a long, hawklike face and ears that seemed to jut out from his head at right angles. His route to the military had been an unusual one, for after attending college first in Ohio and then at Harvard, he had studied law for a year, then completed medical school. An early experience that may have influe
nced him more than these many classrooms, however, had been serving, during his student years, in the Ohio National Guard when it suppressed a violent coal miners’ strike. By 1901, Van Deman had been on active duty for ten years.
When he took up a new post in Manila in February that year, the lanky 35-year-old polymath at last discovered his métier, an endeavor that would remain an obsession for the rest of his life. The conflict in the Philippines, now largely forgotten, was a counter-insurgency war, and for that the U.S. military needed not battleships and fortresses but intelligence information. In an old Spanish military building in a walled quarter of the city, Van Deman was placed in charge of the Bureau of Insurgent Records—a post that would turn him into the founding father of American surveillance. His assiduous spying in war and peace would span half a century and three continents and presage a vengeful nastiness eerily familiar to us today: racial stereotyping, the smearing of political enemies with fact-free rumor, and charges that those who opposed U.S. government policy were unpatriotic or treasonous. Van Deman’s career would culminate in helping a particularly unscrupulous future president on his path toward the White House.
In Manila, the American occupation authorities were deeply alarmed that so many Filipinos wanted independence. Van Deman put the Army’s intelligence operation into high gear, ordering 450 officers throughout the archipelago to provide data “from every possible source” on all mayors, priests, and “active civilian sympathizers.” As a sign of his operation’s growing importance, it was moved to U.S. Army headquarters on the bank of the Pasig River, one floor down from the commanding general. To compile his storehouse of data on suspect Filipinos, Van Deman used the most sophisticated information management system of his day: file cards. Each had printed at the top descriptive card of inhabitants, with spaces beneath for an American officer to fill in such details as a person’s appearance, age, occupation, “blood connections,” and “relative importance in the community.”
The prisoner Santiago Nepomuceno, for example, suspected of killing an American, was “very ignorant and depraved.” Escolastico Salandanan was “very thick with former leading insurgent officers.” Under the “Attitude toward U.S.” section of the cards, comments range from “doubtful” and “presumably treacherous” to “ostensibly very friendly, but in his heart I believe him strongly antagonistic to Americanism.”
For the data on his cards, Van Deman drew not only on U.S. Army officers but on the territorial and Manila police, both under American control. In the capital alone, his office had two hundred undercover agents on the payroll. Tips also flowed in from the tax and customs authorities. Alfred W. McCoy, a University of Wisconsin history professor who has closely studied Van Deman’s career, concludes that, combined, these forces amounted to “a modern surveillance state.” Surveillance, of course, is always about control—in this case suppressing the independence movement. It soon withered, not only because of American military might but because nationalists suspected, correctly, that their organizations were infiltrated.
On the thousands of Van Deman’s dusty file cards that survive today, one fact goes eerily unmentioned: much of the information about these Filipino patriots was obtained by torture. The U.S. Army’s routine method of interrogation on the islands was a precursor to modern-day waterboarding. “Now, this is the way we give them the water cure,” an infantryman named A.F. Miller wrote to his family in Nebraska in 1900. “Lay them on their backs, a man standing on each hand and each foot, then put a round stick in the mouth and pour a pail of water in the mouth and nose, and if they don’t give up pour in another pail. They swell up like toads.” Photographs show Filipinos enduring this.
Why did these “insurgents” want independence? According to Van Deman, it was “owing principally, I am sorry to say, to advice from anti-imperialist and anti-administration citizens in the United States.” Like so many white men of his era, he felt anyone who resisted colonialism must be a dupe of outside agitators.
The security apparatus Van Deman helped build would last through several decades of American colonial rule. By the 1920s, Manila’s police force would have some two hundred thousand alphabetized file cards, covering fully 70 percent of the population, a surveillance-lover’s dream. As in so many countries since then, ruthless police and military forces built or heavily aided by the United States have continued to burden the Philippines ever since the country finally became independent in 1946.
Van Deman was not the only white man of his era who saw colonialism as natural. Rudyard Kipling, after all, had urged America to “take up the white man’s burden” by annexing the islands. Caucasians, millions believed, had a God-given right to rule everywhere over their black and brown inferiors. Among those who disagreed, however, were some of the 6,000 black U.S. Army soldiers who took part in the Philippine War. Horrified generals withdrew some “colored regiments” ahead of schedule after twenty or more black soldiers deserted, most joining the other side. Van Deman would have heard much talk of such doings over the Australian beef and French wines at Manila’s Army and Navy Club, and his belief that black Americans were not to be trusted would be a cornerstone of the next stage of his work in surveillance.
• • •
After returning home in 1903, Van Deman married a woman fifteen years younger than he. Like so many women of her time, Sadie Van Deman left little trace in the written record, with one startling exception: she was the first woman in the Americas to fly. She was a friend of Wilbur and Orville Wright’s sister Katherine, and she asked if she could join Wilbur on a four-minute flight in 1909. On several later trips, he allowed her to take the controls. After some years, however, the couple divorced. Van Deman continued to rise up the military promotion ladder and was selected for the first class to attend the new Army War College. In early 1917, he married again, and that union would last.
At this time, the United States was bitterly torn over whether to enter the vast, bloody war raging in Europe. Many Americans resisted the push to war, particularly radicals who believed that workers should be fighting the ruling class, not each other. But public outrage was rapidly growing over the sinking of American ships by German submarines and the notorious “Zimmerman Telegram” from the German foreign minister urging Mexico to ally itself with Germany and regain its “lost territory in Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona.” The day that President Woodrow Wilson went to Congress to call for war, an angry mob broke into the headquarters of the Emergency Peace Federation across the street from the White House, smashing chairs and desks and spattering the office with yellow paint. When the New York Yankees played their season opener the following week, they marched onto the diamond in military formation, resting bats on their shoulders like rifles.
America’s declaration of war on April 6, 1917, found the gaunt figure of Van Deman stuck in a staff position at the War Department, frustrated that the Army did not have an intelligence agency. He put this proposal to Army chief of staff General Hugh Scott, who turned him down. Then he made an adroit but risky leap over Scott’s head and used two go-betweens to place the idea before Secretary of War Newton Baker. His lobbying was successful, and Baker ordered him to set up a new Army intelligence branch. Soon promoted to colonel, Van Deman pursued the task with zeal, his staff swelling to 282 officers, 29 sergeants, and more than 1,000 civilians, most of them volunteers.
The war Van Deman was intent on waging was not in the trenches of France but at home. To his mind, Germany and its allies were far from the only enemy. The year 1917 also saw the Russian Revolution, and the triumph of the Bolsheviks greatly inflamed American political tensions between powerful captains of industry and a militant labor movement; between the long-dominant Protestants of northern European descent and waves of later immigrants, mostly Catholic and Jewish, who were often sympathetic to socialism and anarchism; and between the propertied classes of small towns—like Van Deman’s native Delaware, Ohio—and the rapidly growing big cities, which seemed filled with threatening foreigner
s and radicals.
Van Deman could amass his huge staff because his worldview so embodied that of the American establishment of his time. Deeply distrusting immigrants, people of color, and any political activism they engaged in, he saw himself as defending the traditional social order against rebels at home and revolutionary ideologies from abroad. He warned the Justice Department, for instance, of weekly meetings at the home of the principal of the Colored High School in Baltimore, “presided over by a white man” of “loose habits” who had allowed talk that “the atrocities committed by Germany are no worse than the lynchings and burnings which have taken place in the South.”
“In the fall of 1917,” he later wrote, “it became evident that agents of the Central Powers were circulating among the Negro people of the United States.” This was nonsense, for it did not take any German or Austro-Hungarian spies to make black Americans angry that they were forced into underfunded schools and low-paid jobs and that in the first two decades of the twentieth century alone more than 1,400 black men were lynched.
Nothing was beyond suspicion. One report to his office related “several incidents of where colored men had attempted to make appointments with white women.” Van Deman was ready to believe the wildest of rumors, asking an agent to investigate word that “fortune tellers, supposed to be gypsies . . . [are] entering the kitchens of well-to-do residents and telling the fortunes of the servants. These fortunes . . . all point out that unless Germany wins the war the colored race will be made slaves again.” He gave credence to another claim that Germans stirring up blacks were going door to door posing as sewing-machine salesmen. From an agent in New York came a report that “German money in large sums is being used in the Harlem district among the negro population” to purchase $600,000 worth of property.
Lessons from a Dark Time and Other Essays Page 5