by Tim Weiner
Hoover’s visions of nuclear kamikazes and teenaged suicide bombers falling from the skies were intended to bludgeon the mind of the American government. His apocalyptic scenarios sounded like science fiction, but they truly represented his worst fears.
They also depicted a threat that the FBI could meet: the political mobilization of American Communists in wartime.
Hoover timed his report to the White House with precision. One week before, a federal grand jury in New York indicted the atomic spies who had helped to deliver the secrets of the Manhattan Project to Moscow. The August 17, 1950, indictment against Julius Rosenberg was ironclad. The trial jury would see the evidence as incontrovertible. So would the judge. So would the American people.
On September 23, Congress passed the Internal Security Act of 1950. It contained provisions Hoover had been demanding for a decade. The laws defining espionage and sabotage were expanded and strengthened. Subversive citizens now were subject to political imprisonment. Communist and Communist-front organizations were required to register with a new Subversive Activities Control Board. The new attorney general, J. Howard McGrath, decided that the Internal Security Act gave legal sanction to Hoover’s Security Index, with its provisions for preventive detention, its proposals for the suspension of constitutional protections, and its ever-growing roster of more than twenty thousand Americans. Hoover’s index was now legal—an accepted part of the American national security establishment. It remained in effect for the next twenty-one years.
The year 1950 brought many bleak days for President Truman. None was darker than November 1.
In the morning, the new director of Central Intelligence, General Walter Bedell Smith, delivered a bulletin: Communist Chinese soldiers had entered the Korean War. The CIA’s reporting gravely underestimated the size of the attack. Three hundred thousand Chinese soldiers struck in a human avalanche that killed thousands upon thousands of American soldiers. They came close to driving the Americans from the mountains into the sea. Behind them stood the new dictator of China, Chairman Mao Tse-Tung. American generals assumed Stalin backed Mao, brandishing his new atomic bomb.
In the afternoon, a freakish heat wave engulfed Washington; the mercury hit eighty-five degrees. Truman lay down for a nap at Blair House, across the street from the White House; the executive mansion was in a state of collapse and undergoing renovation. On the sidewalk, at the Blair House door, stood two Puerto Rican nationalists, one armed with a German Luger, the other with a German Walther, carrying sixty-nine rounds of ammunition between them. They tried to shoot their way into Blair House and kill the president in the name of Puerto Rican independence. One of them died, as did a Secret Service agent. The second assassin was arrested, convicted, and sentenced to death. Truman commuted the sentence to life. The FBI’s investigation into the leaders and followers of the independence cause lasted more than fifty years.
On November 28, 1950, after the scale of the Chinese attack in Korea was clear, Truman convened a rare full-dress meeting of the National Security Council. The threat of a third world war with weapons of mass destruction was now upon the world. Truman declared a national emergency, tripled the Pentagon’s budget, appointed General Eisenhower the supreme commander of NATO, and rejected top secret calls by General Douglas MacArthur and the Joint Chiefs of Staff to drop the entire American arsenal of atomic bombs on China and Manchuria. But Truman said he was prepared to use the bomb if he had to.
“It looks like World War III is here,” Truman wrote in his diary on December 9. “I hope not—but we must meet whatever comes—and we will.”
“TWENTY YEARS OF TREASON”
The FBI, tracing old leads from Venona, suspected the continuing presence of a KGB agent in the British Embassy in Washington. The Bureau knew only that he was a diplomat who held high rank and the code name of Homer.
The British and the Americans had been entwined in intelligence for a decade now, but Hoover had never been comfortable with the partnership. He scorned American Anglophiles. He looked askance at British intelligence boffins. He was appalled by their reticence on the Homer investigation.
Top British and American intelligence officers gathered on a warm Saturday night in April 1951 at the Washington home of Kim Philby. Among the guests were James Angleton and Bill Harvey of the CIA; Bob Lamphere and Mickey Ladd from the FBI; Robert Mackenzie and Jeff Patterson of British intelligence; and Philby’s disheveled houseguest, a British diplomat named Guy Burgess. Dinner was unpalatable, drinks plentiful. The veterans of World War II had floated into the 1950s on a sea of alcohol. Angleton, a reigning intellectual at the CIA, liked to drink lunch with Philby, sharing details of American and British plans for commando raids behind the Iron Curtain. He predicted Philby would be the next chief of British foreign intelligence.
The party ended badly. Burgess was drunk and disorderly, inciting snarling catfights with the Americans and their wives. Mickey Ladd of the FBI wondered aloud why Philby, the leading British intelligence officer in Washington, had a character like Burgess living under his roof.
A few weeks later, on May 25, 1951, newspapers on both sides of the Atlantic reported that Burgess and Donald Maclean, chief of the American desk at the British Foreign Office in London, had disappeared together behind the Iron Curtain. Maclean had been the first secretary at the British Embassy in Washington in 1944 and 1945.
He was Homer.
His flight to Moscow brought the chief of British foreign intelligence, Sir Percy Sillitoe, to Washington. Sir Percy carried an attaché case bulging with dossiers on Philby, Maclean, and Burgess, and he shared the contents with Hoover and the FBI. The three Britons were friends of twenty years’ standing, going back to their days at Trinity College, Cambridge. In the 1930s, all three had been Communists or socialists. The dossiers held more open secrets: Burgess was famous for his promiscuous homosexuality, Maclean was a closet case, and Philby had married an Austrian Communist and Soviet agent. All three were alcoholics. All this was known by their superiors, yet they were protected and promoted. Maclean and Burgess were in Moscow now; Philby had been recalled to London. Hoover argued that Philby clearly was a Soviet agent, and that he had enabled Moscow to penetrate the CIA and the Pentagon at the highest levels. Sir Percy politely disagreed, unwilling to accept that a man of Philby’s rank and breeding could be a traitor.
Reflecting on the past lives of the British spies at Cambridge in the 1930s, Hoover conflated their communism with their homosexuality.
The connection seemed self-evident to him. Homosexuality and communism were causes for instant dismissal from American government service—and most other categories of employment. Communists and homosexuals both had clandestine and compartmented lives. They inhabited secret underground communities. They used coded language. Hoover believed, as did his peers, that both were uniquely susceptible to sexual entrapment and blackmail by foreign intelligence services.
The FBI’s agents became newly vigilant to this threat. “The Soviets knew, in those days, a government worker, if he was a homosexual, he’d lose his job,” said John T. Conway, who worked on the Soviet espionage squad in the FBI’s Washington field office. Conway investigated a State Department official suspected of meeting a young, blond, handsome KGB officer in a gay bar. “It was a hell of an assignment,” he said. “One night we had him under surveillance and he picked up a young kid, took him up to his apartment, kept him all night. Next day we were able to get the kid and get a statement from him and this guy in the State Department lost his job.”
On June 20, 1951, less than four weeks after the Homer case broke, Hoover escalated the FBI’s Sex Deviates Program. The FBI alerted universities and state and local police to the subversive threat, seeking to drive homosexuals from every institution of government, higher learning, and law enforcement in the nation. The FBI’s files on American homosexuals grew to 300,000 pages over the next twenty-five years before they were destroyed. It took six decades, until 2011, before homosexuals could openl
y serve in the United States military.
Hoover then ratcheted up the Responsibilities Program, a new nationwide campaign launched in secret in the spring and summer of 1951. The FBI, under law, was supposed to share its investigative files only within the executive branch of government. Hoover already had breached that wall by leaking files to his favorite members of Congress. The Responsibilities Program began feeding governors, mayors, and other state and local leaders ammunition to attack subversives at home. The local special agent in charge of FBI regional offices served as the go-between for Hoover and the nation’s political officials. For the next four years, the Responsibilities Program served as a tool for purging the faculties of state universities, colleges, and public schools of hundreds of suspect leftists, until its secrecy was breached by a publicity-hunting state education commissioner. Together, the Responsibilities and Sex Deviates programs resulted in the dismissals of uncounted teachers across the country.
Hoover took up the homosexual issue in his first meeting with Truman’s director of Central Intelligence, Walter Bedell Smith, a four-star army general who had been Eisenhower’s chief of staff throughout World War II. General Smith had earned a reputation as Ike’s hatchet man, the sharp teeth behind Ike’s warm grin. He had served as Truman’s ambassador to the Soviet Union; he had gone eyeball-to-eyeball with Stalin. He was a man of great force and short temper, intolerant of imperfection. He and Edgar Hoover hit it off. They had a lot in common.
They sat down for an informal luncheon in a private suite at the Mayflower Hotel. After pleasantries, Hoover raised the issue of homosexuality at the CIA. “General Smith seemed to be considerably amazed at the wide prevalence of this condition,” Hoover wrote. “He inquired as to the percentage of persons in the population who had tendencies along this line.” Hoover said he would send over an FBI synopsis of Alfred S. Kinsey’s Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, which reported that one man out of ten was a practicing homosexual, a far greater number than most Americans supposed.
Hoover and General Smith had greater concerns. They thought that the Soviets had infiltrated the CIA. Each and every one of the guerrilla operations the Agency had launched in the past two years had gone wrong. Hundreds of the CIA’s recruited foreign agents had been parachuted behind enemy lines, inside the Iron Curtain, and almost all of them had been captured or killed. The CIA was making no headway in its war on communism overseas. The FBI was not breaking any new cases against Communist spies, either.
Some of these failures could be laid to Philby’s betrayals—but not all of them. If the Soviets still had a man in the high councils of American intelligence, then the secret operations of the United States could still be sabotaged, at home and abroad.
Hoover decided that he had to change the way the FBI and the CIA worked with each other against the Soviets. Hoover assigned the FBI’s Sam Papich to serve at CIA headquarters, and General Smith assigned Jim Angleton to get along with the FBI. Papich, born in Montana, with roots in Yugoslavia, had served undercover for the FBI in Rio de Janeiro during and after World War II, posing as a representative of Dun and Bradstreet. Angleton, born in Idaho, educated at Yale, was an American spy in Italy during the war. These two men kept liaison between the FBI and the CIA alive for the next two decades.
Angleton soon thereafter became the chief of the counterintelligence staff at the CIA, the man in charge of identifying Soviet spies. He made a professional practice of studying the espionage cases of years gone by, trying to decode decades of Soviet deception. He found patterns in the carpet of the past few others could see, some of them invisible to the naked eye and the rational mind.
His elevation to chief of counterintelligence was a coup for J. Edgar Hoover. The depth of Angleton’s discussions with the FBI was astonishing; he was by far Hoover’s best source on what was going on inside the CIA. “He has been very cooperative and, as you know, has volunteered considerable information which has been of assistance to us,” Papich reported. “The fact that he has dealt with the Bureau in a very frank manner, free of the cloak-and-dagger atmosphere usually found in CIA, has made him a person who could work with the Bureau.”
On July 2, 1952, Angleton told the FBI that the CIA’s political front groups and propaganda organizations throughout Europe were “widely exposed to penetration by Soviet agents.” He said that the KGB must have planted spies among the thousands of Eastern European and White Russian refugees the CIA recruited in Germany and England in its efforts to roll back the Soviets. The CIA’s operations in Europe were filled with political exiles and “émigrés who were using the organization to feather their nests,” Angleton said. He let drop that the CIA’s covert operations commander, Frank Wisner, who already had spent hundreds of millions of dollars in secret, had just requested $28 million more to expand his overseas empire. Hoover wrote in his royal blue hand: “It is shocking that such waste and looseness can prevail and nothing can be done about it.”
There was something to be done. The national security of the United States hung in the balance of the 1952 presidential election. Hoover worked to ensure that General Eisenhower would be president of the United States and Richard Nixon the vice president. The Republican ticket was set on July 11. The Democrats chose Governor Adlai Stevenson of Illinois on July 24. Hoover already had a report on Stevenson in hand. Assistant FBI director Mickey Ladd had dredged it up from the Sex Deviates files: “Pursuant to your request, there is attached hereto a blind memorandum concerning Governor Stevenson, who, it has been alleged, is a known homosexual.”
At the hour of Adlai Stevenson’s presidential nomination, a nineteen-page memo about the Democratic candidate went to the FBI’s Lou Nichols, who handled relations with Congress and the press. It featured a compendium of vicious gossip, including a report from a New York police detective who said the governor not only was one of the best-known homosexuals in the state of Illinois but used the drag name “Adeline.” Hoover made sure that this scuttlebutt reached Richard Nixon, the Republican campaign committee, and a large number of journalists.
The election of Eisenhower and Nixon in November 1952, along with a Republican sweep of the House and the Senate, ended two decades of Democratic dominance in Washington—the era that Senator Joseph McCarthy called “twenty years of treason.” At the start of those twenty years, Hoover had led a small, weak organization with 353 special agents and a budget well under $3 million. He now led an anti-Communist army of 6,451 men with 8,206 support staff and $90 million to spend.
A few days after his victory, Ike assured Hoover that he wanted him to run the FBI for as long as he was president, and that he would have the complete support of the White House in the years to come. Some men were more respected in Washington, but not many. Some may have been more feared, but very few.
22
NO SENSE OF DECENCY
A DIRECT TELEPHONE LINE now ran from the White House to Hoover’s home. Eisenhower called only on occasion, but Nixon called twice a day, early in the morning and late at night.
Hoover extended his influence into every corner of the ever-expanding national security establishment. As Hoover reported to the newly inaugurated president on January 26, 1953, FBI agents now worked “day-to-day and person-to-person” at the White House, the Pentagon, the Office of the Secretary of Defense, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the National Security Agency, the CIA, the State Department, Congress, six American embassies, army intelligence bases in Germany and Austria, and a dozen more centers of America’s global power.
Hoover took a seat at the National Security Council, alongside the secretary of defense and the secretary of state. The new attorney general, Herbert Brownell, Jr., took Hoover’s word as law. Brownell’s deputy and successor, William Rogers, became a close personal friend to Hoover, and he sat down twice a week for working lunches with the director. Hoover helped to shape the policies and strategies of the government on everything from national security to civil rights.
American anticommunism came to f
ull power under Eisenhower. Hoover’s men investigated nominees for posts ranging from foreign ambassador to congressional aide. They oversaw internal security purges throughout the government, destroying lives and careers over suspicions of disloyalty or homosexuality.
Hoover’s impact at the State Department was immense. With the full backing of Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, an FBI agent named R. W. “Scott” McLeod took a job as the internal security chief at State. His political purges of Washington and embassies and consulates overseas used FBI methods, including wiretaps, to force liberals and suspected leftists out of the Foreign Service. An uncounted number of diplomats resigned in despair.
FBI men were ever present in the new organizations Eisenhower created to project American influence and power, such as the United States Information Agency, which broadcast American ideas throughout the world. FBI special agents Charles Noone and Joe Walsh ran the USIA’s internal security operations in Washington and New York. The FBI conducted full field investigations of every USIA employee, checking every detail of their lives from childhood onward.
“Our bible was Executive Order 10450, issued by President Eisenhower,” Walsh recounted. “This order related to Federal employees as affecting the country’s national security. Denial of such employment was spelled out to include anyone associated with communism, homosexuals, drunks, and other social aberrants who might be considered threats to the security of the USA. It was a nasty business—seeking out and identifying people suspected of homosexuality,” he said. “There were several awfully decent and intelligent people who worked within the Agency whom I got to know well and enjoyed working within the Agency programs who, suddenly and peremptorily, dropped out of the picture—disappeared! Under investigation, they had admitted their homosexuality and had resigned.”