* A highly trained Russian officer, Abel had been infiltrated into the United States many years earlier to develop a cover identity as a struggling artist in Brooklyn. Although it was never clear how Abel managed to extract U.S. nuclear secrets under such disguise, FBI agents did seize his code book, microfilm, hollow pencils, and other spy paraphernalia when they arrested him, and Soviet officials considered the deeply planted KGB agent to be of such value that they traded their captured American U-2 pilot, Francis Gary Powers, for Abel in a celebrated spy exchange of 1962.
* Later U.S. Representative and Brooklyn District Attorney.
* Less than fourteen years later, after elevation to federal District Court, Smith would order all tapes, transcripts, and other FBI intercepts of King’s private life to be impounded for fifty years under seal of secrecy.
* Shortly after delivering one of his most famous lectures, “The Romance of Death,” at Howard University, Johns himself dropped dead, in a sequence his admirers swore Johns had prearranged with God.
* Hoover would leak word of the taps when Robert Kennedy was running for president in 1968, after King’s death, and John Seigenthaler, seeing the stricken look on Kennedy’s face when asked about the rumors during a practice debate, knew instantly that he did not need to ask whether it was true, nor could he bear to ask why. Instead, after Kennedy himself was killed that year, Seigenthaler wrote a letter of apology to Stanley Levison.
† Thelton Henderson, later a District Court judge in California.
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