by Tim Weiner
“Move rapidly & get out of it as quickly as possible,” he commanded. Seven weeks later, the FBI was all but gone from Central America and the Caribbean, and it soon would be out of South America too. “All investigative files, both pending and closed, were burned,” Hoover’s field lieutenant, C. H. “Kit” Carson, reported to headquarters as he shut down operations in Mexico, Guatemala, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Honduras, Venezuela, Haiti, and Cuba.
Hoover went to the White House and laid down the law. If the president wanted the FBI out of the realm of foreign intelligence, if he wanted the director of Central Intelligence in charge, that was what he would get.
But nobody who had ever worked at the Bureau—active, retired, first-rate, third-rate—would be allowed to work for the new Central Intelligence Agency, Hoover told the president’s chief of staff, Admiral Leahy. The admiral advised General Vandenberg “to avoid offending Mr. Hoover.” But when Vandenberg proposed to create a global registry of foreign contacts, Hoover warned his top FBI aides: “Watch with meticulous care any & all Directives of this outfit as I think it is drunk with power & will slyly grasp for everything.” When Hoover saw newly drafted legislation that would give the director of Central Intelligence more authority, he wrote: “The ‘empire builders’ … perpetuate their present monstrosity and intrude even more into civilian and domestic fields.”
Hoover’s refusal to work with the fledgling CIA approached insubordination. His defiance of the State Department neared rebellion. Hoover’s spiteful decision threatened “a major blow to the effectiveness of our security and intelligence work,” wrote Undersecretary of State Acheson. Hoover was undeterred. He had all but declared war on the White House.
“I think we ought to have a showdown,” he wrote to Mickey Ladd.
His rage at the president’s reluctance to fight a full-bore war on communism grew ferocious. He began to petition members of the Senate and House to give him the power to protect America against “the threat of infiltrating foreign agents, ideologies and military conquest.” His views on the threat were so strong that they started to sway the liberals of Washington—and through them, the president himself.
Hoover was creating the political culture of the Cold War in the United States.
18
“RED FASCISM”
ON SEPTEMBER 26, 1946, the White House counsel Clark Clifford and his assistant George Elsey delivered a secret report to Truman telling him to prepare for war with the Soviets. They drew from the work of Hoover and the FBI as they sketched out a battle plan for Armageddon.
They told Truman that he had to prepare to fight a third world war with atomic and biological weapons. The enemy was a Soviet dictatorship aiming for world conquest, aided by an insidious intelligence service, and assisted by an American underground. Every American Communist, they wrote, was potentially a spy and a soldier for Moscow. Truman wrote in his diary that week: “The Reds, phonies, and ‘parlor pinks’ seem to be banded together and are becoming a national danger. I am afraid they are a sabotage front for Uncle Joe Stalin.”
In November 1946, for the first time since before the Depression, the Republicans swept the national elections and won majorities in the Senate and the House. Their campaigns had struck a strong new anti-Communist tone. Their message was that Americans had to choose between “Communism and Republicanism.”
The Republicans’ political rhetoric flowed directly from a forty-page pamphlet published by the United States Chamber of Commerce, which printed and distributed 400,000 copies nationwide. Its title was “Communist Infiltration in the United States.” Its message was preached from political stumps and church pulpits throughout the land. Its author was Father John F. Cronin, a Baltimore priest who had many adherents among the heavily Catholic ranks of the FBI. His material came straight from the Bureau’s secret and confidential files, including passages from Hoover’s reports to the White House. Father Cronin befriended a freshman member of the 80th Congress who had been elected on the issue of the Communist threat and arrived in the capital from California in January 1947.
Richard Milhous Nixon was thirty-four years old, a politician of high intelligence, immense ambition, and a barely tapped but bottomless talent for intrigue. He had risen from humble roots by virtue of hard work fueled by frustrated dreams. Ten years before he came to Washington to be sworn in to the House of Representatives, while he was still in law school, Nixon had applied for a job at the FBI. He never heard back. But he would make the most of his contacts with the Bureau for the next quarter of a century. In February 1947, Father Cronin helped him make the first of those connections. He personally briefed Nixon on the FBI’s investigations into American communism and Soviet espionage, introduced him to agents who specialized in Red-hunting, and became Nixon’s back-channel liaison with the Bureau.
In his first days as a member of Congress, Nixon took a seat on the House Committee on Un-American Activities. Its chairman was J. Parnell Thomas, Republican of New Jersey, a petty-minded vulgarian who soon would be doing prison time for political corruption. The committee’s excesses were notorious. Back in 1939, its headline-grabbing investigation of the film industry faltered when, by implication, it called the curly-headed moppet Shirley Temple a Communist. But by now the committee’s professional staff included ex-FBI men and former Party members whose files constituted a secret if highly selective history of American communism. The staff’s liaison with the Bureau would become one of the strongest forces in Cold War politics.
“A MALIGNANT AND EVIL WAY OF LIFE”
On March 26, 1947, the committee convened to hear public testimony from J. Edgar Hoover. It was an epic moment in Hoover’s life. He was fifty-two years old; he had run the FBI for nearly a quarter of a century. He was the face of anticommunism in America.
On this day, Hoover broke with higher authority. For the next quarter of the century, until the day he died, he would obey executive orders when he saw fit. His testimony was an act of defiance against the Truman administration, a declaration that Hoover now stood in alliance with the president’s strongest political enemies in Congress.
He held sway over presidential powers. Five days before, after months of pressure from Hoover, Truman had signed an executive order commanding the biggest government investigation in American history: the Federal Loyalty and Security Program. The FBI would run background checks on more than two million government employees, and launch deep investigations into the personal lives and political beliefs of more than fourteen thousand of them. The program would unearth no Soviet spies inside the government. But the hunt for the disloyal spread throughout the American political system.
Hoover now told Congress and the American people that the Communist Party, driven by Soviet Russia’s dreams of world domination, was burrowing into the social and political frameworks of the United States on a mission to overthrow America—and that the Truman administration was not taking the threat seriously. “Communism, in reality, is not a political party,” he testified. “It is a way of life—a malignant and evil way of life. It reveals a condition akin to disease that spreads like an epidemic, and like an epidemic, a quarantine is necessary to keep it from infecting the nation.”
The Communist Party, on paper, might look like an insignificant force in American politics—Hoover said it had seventy-four thousand members—but he said its influence was infinitely greater: “For every party member there are ten others ready, willing and able to do the party’s work. Herein lies the greatest menace of communism—for these are the people that infiltrate and corrupt various spheres of American life.”
Hoover said that far too few Americans “possessed the zeal, the fervor, the persistence and the industry to learn about this menace of Red fascism. I do fear for the liberal and the progressive who has been hoodwinked and duped into joining hands with the Communists. I confess to a real apprehension so long as Communists are able to secure ministers of the gospel to promote their evil work … I do fear so lon
g as school boards and parents tolerate conditions whereby Communists and fellow travelers, under the guise of academic freedom, can teach our youth a way of life … I do fear so long as labor groups are infiltrated, dominated, or saturated with the virus of Communism … I fear for ignorance on the part of all of our people who may take the poisonous pills of Communist propaganda.”
Hoover proclaimed his political support for the Committee on Un-American Activities and its members in the war on communism. They were now a team. The FBI would gather evidence in secrecy, working toward the “unrelenting prosecution” of the subversives. The committee would make its greatest contribution through publicity—what Hoover called “the public disclosure of the forces that threaten America.”
Hoover and Nixon met eye-to-eye at the hearing that day, and they hit it off famously. Nixon asked where American Communists posed the greatest dangers. Hoover pointed him to subversion on campus, on the airwaves, in the movies, and above all inside the government itself.
Nixon’s performance impressed Hoover.
“Who’s that young man?” Hoover asked an old friend after the hearing. “He looks like he’s going to be a good man for us.”
19
SURPRISE ATTACK
THE PRESIDENT WAS increasingly convinced of the dangers of the Communist threat. But he was also deeply wary of J. Edgar Hoover. “Very strongly anti-FBI,” the White House counsel Clark Clifford wrote in his notes of a May 2, 1947, conversation with Truman. “Wants to be sure to hold FBI down.”
Truman felt that Hoover led “a sort of a dictatorial operation,” said Treasury Secretary John Snyder, an old friend and a political confidant to the president. “That was, I think, Mr. Truman’s general feeling, that Mr. Hoover had built up a Frankenstein in the FBI.”
Hoover knew what the president thought. He used his knowledge skillfully as he kept up his struggle to take control of American intelligence. He artfully twisted the arms of ranking members of Congress as they weighed a new National Security Act in the spring and summer of 1947.
The bill proposed to unify the American military services under the aegis of the Pentagon; to create a secretary of defense to oversee the army, the navy, and a nuclear-armed air force; to form a new National Security Council to coordinate military, intelligence, and diplomatic powers at the White House; and to establish the first permanent peacetime American espionage service. “Espionage is as old as man,” Hoover began. “We have always had it and we will continue to have it until the brotherhood of man becomes a reality as well as an ideal.” Until then, the United States had to have a permanent and professional spy service established under law. He said no one was better qualified to run it than he himself.
Hoover acknowledged “the uneasiness and apprehension of responsible leaders” starved for information on the intentions and capabilities of the Soviet Union and its allies. He said he would meet their needs. He would oversee foreign intelligence collected by FBI agents, diplomats, and military officers overseas. State Department experts in Washington would analyze the work. The Bureau would continue hunting foreign spies and tapping into Communist plans in the United States.
Good intelligence could prevent another Pearl Harbor. “A future attack might be launched against American territory,” Hoover said. “Its disastrous effects can be minimized through intelligence coverage which will forewarn us and thus make it possible to be prepared. The modern advances of science and its military application are a warning of what we might expect, but that is not sufficient: we must prepare ourselves by knowing when and where and how an attack will be directed at us. We can do this only by possessing adequate intelligence coverage on a worldwide basis.”
Hoover said “the FBI could provide the worldwide intelligence coverage with a staff of approximately 1,200 employees at an estimated cost of $15,000,000” a year. By contrast, he pointed out, the plan for the CIA ran to estimates as high as “3,000 employees at an annual cost of $60,000,000.” Hoover condemned the proposal for the CIA as nothing but the “dreams of visionary but impractical empire-builders.”
Rear Admiral Roscoe Hillenkoetter had just become the third director of Central Intelligence in fourteen months. (Hoover and his aides had met the admiral and found him “very frank in his statement that he knew nothing” about his new job.) Hoover argued that intelligence should be “a career and not just another tour of duty”; hiring time-serving military men to run intelligence operations for a year or two was “unfair to the nation.” Above all, Hoover asserted, America did not want a Central Intelligence Agency led by a shadowy czar who would run America’s spying operations, evaluate the secrets they gathered, and pass judgment on the work of the FBI’s foreign espionage agents.
Hoover capped his secret briefing by playing on the president’s fears of a secret police. “Luckily for us,” he said, “there is no more horrible example of what can happen through the creation of one vast central superstructure that both investigates and judges than the German Gestapo.”
“IT IS A TRAGEDY”
Hoover was surpassed by a rival whose rhetoric flew higher. Allen Dulles was Wild Bill Donovan’s leading protégé, a star at Donovan’s Wall Street law firm, and the brother of John Foster Dulles, the Republican Party’s shadow secretary of state. Puffing on his pipe, he gave suave, sophisticated, and factually slippery testimony to a closed congressional hearing on the National Security Act on June 27, 1947.
Dulles testified that the blueprint for the new CIA was sound. The United States had “the raw material for building the greatest intelligence service in the world,” he said. A few dozen skilled men serving abroad should do the trick. “I do not believe in a big agency,” he said. “You ought to keep it small. If this thing gets to be a great big octopus, it should not function well.… The operation of the service must neither be flamboyant nor over-shrouded in mystery and abracadabra which the amateur detective likes to assume. All that is required for success is hard work, discriminating judgment, and common sense.”
One month later, on July 26, President Truman signed the National Security Act. The FBI was given no new powers to prosecute the Cold War. The director of Central Intelligence was given many.
Hoover began spying on the CIA from that day forward. He started wiretapping CIA officers suspected of Communist sympathies or homosexual tendencies. Reading reports on “utter confusion” at the Agency, Hoover commented: “It is a tragedy that the true phoniness of CIA isn’t exposed.” The Agency begged for FBI men experienced in espionage. Hoover consented, with the hope and expectation that his agents would serve as his spies inside the CIA. Few did—too few for Hoover’s satisfaction—although one soon reported: “If the people of this nation are depending upon CIA in its present form to prevent another Pearl Harbor disaster, they should start digging fox holes now.”
Hoover’s political warfare intensified month by month. “It strikes me as a waste of time to cultivate this outfit,” he wrote after offering CIA officials a tour of the FBI’s training academy. He furiously rejected an aide’s draft of a polite letter to the director of Central Intelligence: “Please cut out all of the slobbering palaver. We know they have no use for us & I don’t intend to do a Munich.” When the CIA asked the FBI what it knew about the Comintern, Hoover swatted down the request: “Waste no time on it. We have more pressing matters.”
Hoover quickly formed an alliance with the new secretary of defense, James Forrestal, a Wall Street magnate who had been running the navy. On October 24, 1947, Hoover dominated a Pentagon meeting attended by leaders of the CIA, army and navy intelligence, and the president’s national security staff. He invoked “the present widespread belief that our intelligence group is entirely inept.” He inveighed against State Department leaks about a New York grand jury’s investigation into the Communist Party. He explained the FBI’s suspicions about the influence of left-wing scientists working for the newly formed Atomic Energy Commission, the civilians overseeing America’s deadliest weapons. The comm
issioners told him that America knew nothing about the Soviet threat.
“THE SMUGGLING INTO THE UNITED STATES OF AN ATOMIC BOMB”
Hoover sent a terrifying letter to Forrestal the next week. He warned against “the smuggling into the United States of an atomic bomb, or parts thereof which could be later assembled in this country.” He envisioned Moscow’s spies carrying the components of a bomb in diplomatic pouches, saboteurs assembling them in secret, and suicide bombers blowing up the landmarks of the government of the United States. The fear of a surprise attack ruled the day.
Hoover’s warning in November 1947 was the first of its kind. Over the next decade he issued a steady stream of alerts against the threat of terrorists and spies wielding atomic, biological, and chemical weapons against American cities, a nightmare that still haunts the nation’s leaders. Forrestal convened a secret group he called the War Council, comprising the uniformed and civilian chiefs of the American military, to respond to Hoover’s alarm. The council reached out to Vannevar Bush, the government’s chief science adviser, and Karl Compton, the president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; both men had advised President Truman to drop the atomic bomb on Japan without warning. The War Council led a highly classified project to assess the threat of weapons of mass destruction as instruments of political terror. It explored “the use of biological agents” and “fissionable materials”—a dirty bomb—and set off a search for a shield against a catastrophic attack that continues to this day.
“Your original letter was the thing which first prompted us to undertake this study,” the secretary of defense wrote to Hoover. “Because of the major responsibilities of the Federal Bureau of Investigation for the development of information which bears upon the whole subject,” Forrestal continued, “preparedness in this particular field will require the very closest cooperation between our two organizations.”