The Secrets of the FBI

by Ronald Kessler

  On May 1, 1972, Helen Gandy, Hoover’s personal secretary, handed him the first in a series of exposés by Jack Anderson, whose column appeared in the Washington Post. Previously, Anderson had enraged Hoover by assigning a reporter to rummage through his trash at home. The resulting column revealed that on Sundays, Hoover ate a hearty breakfast of poached eggs and hotcakes. It also revealed that he brushed his teeth with Ultra Brite, washed with Palmolive, and shaved with Noxzema shaving cream. Now, in his latest column, Anderson revealed that the FBI had conducted surveillance of Martin Luther King Jr.’s sex life.

  Besides attending sex orgies, King was having an affair with a young woman in his office, says an agent who monitored wiretaps on King’s office and home phones.

  “Besides his home, King had an apartment,” the former agent says. “On Tuesdays, he’d go to the apartment, ostensibly to meditate and write sermons.” In fact, King’s girlfriend would meet him there for sex.

  For a man whose lifelong mantra had been “Don’t embarrass the bureau,” the continuing stream of unfavorable disclosures had to be unnerving. Yet Hoover rarely revealed his true personal feelings. Sphinx-like, he projected the same persona to his friends and family as he did to the general public. The only difference was that in person, he showed a sense of humor.

  Occasionally Hoover cracked a smile or played a prank. James H. Geer, who would later head the Intelligence Division, recalled the time when a nervous new agent went to shake Hoover’s hand after graduating from training, and mistakenly introduced himself as “Mr. Hoover.”

  “Very nice to meet you, Mr. Hoover,” the director responded, smiling.

  Shortly before six in the afternoon of May 1, 1972, Tom Moton, Hoover’s FBI chauffeur, drove him to Tolson’s apartment, where the two had dinner. Moton drove Hoover home at 10:15 p.m.

  By eight-fifteen the next morning, Annie Fields, Hoover’s housekeeper, became concerned. By then, she should have heard the sound of the shower. Hoover’s toast, soft-boiled eggs, and coffee were getting cold. James Crawford, Hoover’s previous FBI chauffeur, had come over to plant some roses. Checking on him, he found Hoover’s body sprawled on the oriental rug next to his bed. He touched one of his hands; it was cold.

  After examining Hoover’s nude body and consulting with his doctor, the District of Columbia medical examiner, Dr. James L. Luke, attributed the director’s death to “hypertensive cardiovascular disease.” As part of the speculation about his love life, a rumor had gone around that Hoover had an underdeveloped sex organ. That was not true, Dr. Luke tells me.

  When Hoover’s will was probated, it turned out that Tolson received his estate, estimated at $560,000, including his home. It was the equivalent of $2.9 million today. Gandy received $5,000, Annie Fields $3,000, and James Crawford $2,000. The bequest to Tolson was the final word on the closeness of their relationship.

  Hoover preached that even the appearance of impropriety must be avoided. He disciplined agents for losing their handcuffs. Yet after the death of the imperious FBI director, a Justice Department and FBI investigation found that over the years, Hoover had FBI employees build a front portico and a rear deck on his home at 4936 30th Place, NW, in Washington. They installed a fish pond, equipped with water pump and lights, and they constructed shelves and other conveniences for him. They painted his house, maintained his yard, replaced the sod, installed artificial turf, and planted and moved shrubbery. They built a redwood garden fence and installed a flagstone court and sidewalks.

  FBI employees also reset Hoover’s clocks, retouched his wallpaper, and prepared his tax returns. Many of the gifts Hoover received from FBI employees, such as cabinets and bars, had been built by them on government time. Hoover also ordered FBI employees to write Masters of Deceit for him under his name. He pocketed part of the proceeds.

  When the FBI and Justice Department finally investigated the abuses in the mid-1970s at the direction of FBI director Clarence M. Kelley, “a number of these agents had already retired from the bureau, and we were running all over the country interviewing them,” says Richard H. Ash, who headed the FBI task force. “The agent being interviewed would say, ‘Wait a minute.’ And he would go over to his files, pull out a log about all these things they had done, because it was eating at them that they were being used that way.”

  “Hoover [and some of his aides] would be prosecuted under today’s standards. No question of it. And should have been,” Buck Revell, formerly the bureau’s associate deputy director over investigations, says. “Hoover for the money he kept from the books he supposedly wrote but didn’t write. Using government funds and resources for personal gain. And use of government employees to maintain his residence. Again, that is fraud against the government. Taking vacations and putting in vouchers for expenses. Agents have been prosecuted for that. Those things that were somewhat taken for granted back then would be prosecuted today.”

  “Hoover did a good job for many years,” says John McDermott, the former Washington field office special agent in charge who became deputy associate FBI director. “He went wrong along the way. He became a martinet. In seeking to prevent embarrassment to the bureau, he equated the bureau with himself. Everyone told him how good he was. He came to believe the exorbitant praise he was receiving. Anybody who can be conned by a flatterer has a character weakness.”

  Hoover ran the FBI for forty-eight years. Never again would one man so dominate the bureau.

  In 1975 and 1976, the Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, headed by Senator Frank Church, held hearings on FBI and CIA abuses. These included surveillance of Martin Luther King Jr., illegal wiretapping and mail openings, and surreptitious entries or “black-bag jobs.”

  Prior to that, members of Congress took the position they did not want to know what the FBI and CIA were doing. The Church Committee hearings, as they became known, exposed real abuses and a lack of focus that undercut the mission of those agencies. The hearings ultimately improved both agencies and established an effective oversight mechanism.

  When creating the FBI on June 29, 1908, as an unnamed investigative bureau of thirty-four special agents within the Justice Department, Congress had been leery of creating a national police force. Because of that, agents initially were not even empowered to carry weapons.

  Despite limitations on its power, questions arose very quickly about the extent of the bureau’s authority and methods. Yet whenever a new threat arose, those questions would be set aside, and Congress would entrust the bureau with new powers.

  5

  BREAK-IN AT THE WATERGATE

  SIX WEEKS AFTER HOOVER’S DEATH, A SUPERVISOR AT THE Washington field office (WFO) called FBI agent Jerry Pangburn at home at seven in the morning on June 17, 1972.

  WFO said the Metropolitan Police Department had arrested five men who had broken into Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate office building during the night. The police found a device with wires sticking out of it that could be a bomb. As the supervisor of the bomb squad, Pangburn needed to check it out.

  Pangburn called two agents on his squad and told them to take a look at the device. An hour later, one of the agents called from Second District police headquarters to say he wanted to bring the device into WFO to have Pangburn examine it. Pangburn reminded him that rule number one in the training manual is don’t bring a bomb into the office.

  “Don’t worry about it, it’s not going to hurt anything,” the agent said.

  Pangburn took one look at it and realized it was not a bomb. It was a listening device, concealed in the plastic cover of an electric door chime that had been attached to a wall near a secretary’s desk at the DNC.

  Pangburn called Robert G. Kunkel, the special agent in charge (SAC) of WFO, and told him the device was an electronic bug. Kunkel asked a supervisor to call Angelo J. Lano at his home in Hyattsville, Maryland. Thinking the break-in was a burglary, the supervisor told Lano that international jewel
thieves had broken into the Watergate.

  A man of average height with black hair and a mustache, Lano, thirty-three, was assigned to a miscellaneous crimes squad. One of Lano’s duties was to keep track of thefts from the Watergate complex, which included a hotel and condominiums where some of Washington’s toniest residents lived. It was Lano’s day off, and he was about to leave for his son’s Little League practice. On weekends, the field office assigned both a criminal agent and a counterintelligence agent to be on duty.

  “I’m not going down there,” Lano said to the supervisor. “You already have a criminal guy working. I have Little League practice.”

  Almost immediately, Kunkel called him.

  “What’s the problem?” Kunkel asked.

  “There is a criminal guy working down there,” Lano said. “I have Little League practice.”

  “You’re the only person who knows the place,” Kunkel said. “You won’t be there long. Just check it out and come right back.”

  For the next three years, Lano would work on nothing but the Watergate break-in. As the case agent, he was the individual most responsible for breaking the case and bringing to justice those who attempted to cover up the involvement of the White House and Committee for the Re-Election of the President.

  Lano called Peter Paul, another agent on his squad, to ask if he would ride with him to the Metropolitan Police Department’s Second District headquarters, then at Twenty-third and L Streets, NW. The police said the burglars had been caught in the sixth-floor offices of the Democratic National Committee. They had two Minolta 35-millimeter cameras, rolls of high-speed film, walkie-talkies, Mace, and Playtex rubber surgical gloves.

  Two of the suspects had given police the same phony name. The police were checking their identities through fingerprints. Eventually, the burglars were identified as Bernard L. Barker, Virgilio R. Gonzalez, Eugenio Martinez, Frank A. Sturgis, and James W. McCord Jr. All had some connection to the CIA. Two years earlier, for example, McCord had retired from the CIA’s Office of Security.

  At the police station, Lano emptied a carry-on bag containing the items the police had seized from the suspects. He found additional bugging devices concealed in rolls of toilet paper. The police had not yet noticed the devices. Instead of a jewel theft, the agents were looking at an interception of communications case.

  After searching two of the burglars’ rooms at the Watergate Hotel, the police found four packets of hundred-dollar bills and two address books, one listing E. Howard Hunt as working at “WH.” To savvy Washingtonians, that stood for White House. It later turned out Hunt had also been involved in the break-in.

  Developing more evidence, Lano realized that while the Watergate break-in had begun as an effort by Nixon’s “Plumbers” to obtain political intelligence, it was now a massive attempted cover-up. He requested more help. Within two days, two dozen agents from his squad—known as C-2, for Criminal Squad Number Two—had been assigned to work the case.

  Agents quickly focused on the White House, but they found themselves stymied because the Hoover bureau had a rule that no one in the White House could be interviewed without permission from headquarters. It would take four or five days for headquarters to give approval. Lano urgently told headquarters he needed to conduct interviews at the White House without prior approval, and he received permission to do so.

  Nearly every field office in the FBI became involved in checking leads. Lano wanted agents familiar with the case to conduct critical interviews anywhere in the country. Again, the Hoover bureau required agents to obtain approval from headquarters to travel into the jurisdiction of another field office. Lano obtained approval for agents on his squad to interview key subjects anywhere without getting the go-ahead from headquarters.

  Two weeks after the break-in, agent Paul P. Magallanes interviewed a secretary to McCord at the Committee to Re-elect the President, popularly referred to with the acronym CREEP. The White House assigned a lawyer to sit in on all the interviews. In this case, the young woman was not forthcoming.

  “The next morning I get a call from the office indicating that the young lady we interviewed the day before was on the phone and wanted to talk with me,” Magallanes says. “They patched her through to my home, and she said, ‘Listen, I’m the girl you interviewed. I really have a lot to say. I couldn’t say anything in front of the White House lawyer. I want to talk with you.’ ”

  The woman specified two conditions: She wanted Magallanes to pick her up in his personal vehicle, not an FBI car, and she wanted him to bring along a different partner. For some reason, she felt uncomfortable with the other agent who had participated in the interview with her.

  Magallanes asked agent John W. Mindermann to go with him. They picked her up in Magallanes’ personal car and talked with her while they drove around downtown Washington.

  “She proceeded to furnish us all kinds of information in terms of what happened after the burglary was discovered,” Magallanes says. “She said that McCord and G. Gordon Liddy, because McCord was then released on bail, came back to the office and started shredding documents and all kinds of things.”

  It was a hot Saturday in Washington, and the car began to overheat. Magallanes called Kunkel.

  “Hey, get a hotel room and debrief her as much and as long as it takes,” the SAC instructed.

  They checked into a room at the Mayflower Hotel, the closest hotel. After several hours, the agents were wrapping up the interview, and the young woman said. “You know, you think I have a lot of valuable information. My friend has even more information.”

  “Who’s your friend?” Magallanes asked.

  “Well, she is the accountant for CREEP, and she is really frustrated as to what is happening here, and she has all this information that you guys would be very interested in,” the woman said.

  When Magallanes asked if she would arrange to have her friend talk with the agents, the woman said she would ask her and call Magallanes on Monday.

  “Monday came along. No call,” Magallanes says. “I couldn’t call her. She was still working at CREEP. In those days, we didn’t have cell phones or anything. Tuesday came along. No call. Wednesday, no call.” Finally on Thursday, the woman called.

  “Listen, my friend said that she’s willing to meet with you and your partner, but she wants to get to know you first,” she said. “She wants to know if she can trust you.”

  The accountant wanted to meet the agents at the Key Bridge Marriott in Rosslyn, Virginia. She suggested having dinner with them.

  The next evening, the agents met the two women at the lounge at the Marriott. After small talk about their families, the accountant said, “I trust you guys. You know, I’ll talk to you about Watergate. I’ll tell you everything you want to know.”

  The accountant—who later publicly identified herself as Judy Hoback—suggested they go to her house in Bethesda, Maryland.

  “All four of us went out there, and that was the first time in the investigation that we discovered that the CIA was not involved and that the White House was involved with a lot of shenanigans, a lot of illegal activities,” Magallanes says. “She said that CREEP had something like three million in cash gathered by White House aides, in the safe.”

  Hoback said the money was used for unlawful activities, such as the Watergate break-in.

  The interview continued until four in the morning.

  “She laid the whole thing out at her house,” Mindermann says. “We met her at the Key Bridge Marriott in the lounge there, even had a drink, against FBI rules. We followed her out at her request to her home in suburban Maryland. And the reason why I have so much respect for her, she was a young woman in her early thirties, she’d been widowed, her husband had dropped dead of a heart attack. She was a single mom with a little tiny house in suburban Maryland with a kid. And she desperately needed this assistant bookkeeper’s job. And yet she had the courage to lay it all out.”

  6

  DEEP THROAT

&nbs
p; THE FBI HAD NEVER BEFORE TAKEN ON A PRESIDENT. IN FACT, it had rarely investigated any branch of the government. In Hoover’s FBI, local sheriffs and members of Congress were off-limits, not to mention sitting presidents, cabinet officers, and White House aides.

  But Hoover was gone now, and only once did bureau headquarters try to put the brakes on the agents as they investigated the Watergate break-in and cover-up. That was when L. Patrick Gray, as acting FBI director, deferred to the Nixon White House to avoid delving into money funneled through Mexico for the break-in. Nixon claimed he was trying to protect CIA operations in Mexico. In fact, he had invented the excuse to help cover up the involvement of his own reelection committee. The delay lasted only a week.

  “They didn’t try to suppress what I did,” says Daniel C. Mahan, another agent on the Watergate case. “It was one of the FBI’s finest hours.”

  As leaks from the FBI’s investigation of Watergate appeared in Washington Post stories by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein and elsewhere, Gray called in twenty-six agents on Angie Lano’s squad on June 24, 1973, and accused them of “suffering from flap jaw.”

  “Somebody is leaking to the press,” Gray said. “And I want that agent or those agents who are doing the leaking to step forward. I want them to put their credentials on the table, and I want them to resign, or I’ll fire them.”

  There was dead silence.

  Gray continued to berate the agents. His face turning crimson, he stood screaming at the top of his lungs, “I will get to the bottom of this. I am a former Navy captain. I have commanded a nuclear submarine. I am a graduate of Georgetown University Law School. I have conducted many investigations in the Navy, and I know how to conduct an investigation.”

  Gray then turned abruptly and left the conference room.

  “I couldn’t believe what I was hearing,” Magallanes says. “Nobody could believe what he was hearing.”