by Tim Weiner
No one in government was exempt, even those who already held top secret security clearances. Stanley Grand was a State Department officer working with the CIA on the coup that overthrew the government of Guatemala in 1954. “It was not a good time for the State Department,” he recalled. “We all had to be reinvestigated by the FBI and get new clearances, which most of us did. Some people were terribly damaged.… One officer I know, who was an excellent officer, got so fed up because he knew the kind of false charges that might be brought against him, that he committed suicide. It was a tragedy.”
But Ike’s new internal security regime was a triumph for Hoover. It affirmed the president’s faith in the FBI as the front line of American national security.
The White House read Hoover’s reports on the Soviets as the most authoritative in the government. Attorney General Brownell said: “The FBI reported to me one of the results of their counterintelligence work against the communist conspiracy. They had learned that Stalin was ill and Malenkov was acting for him and would succeed him if Stalin died. Stalin did die on March 3, 1953, and it is now history that Malenkov succeeded him.”
By contrast, the United States had no ambassador in Moscow when Stalin died, and the CIA had no spies inside the Soviet Union. The first CIA officer dispatched to Moscow was seduced by his Russian housekeeper—she was a KGB colonel—photographed in the physical act of love, blackmailed, and fired by the Agency for his indiscretions in 1953. His replacement was caught in the act of espionage, arrested, and deported shortly after he arrived.
The FBI now had Communist informants across America. Through witnesses, wiretaps, bugs, break-ins, and relentless surveillance, the FBI had penetrated and infiltrated the Communist Party of the United States. Many Communists indicted and convicted under the Smith Act went to jail in silence, some went underground, but others became cooperating witnesses. Hoover took some satisfaction when top Communists went to prison, but he saw his intelligence operations as more crucial than any law enforcement work. The two missions demanded different techniques.
A cop confronting an evildoer wants to string him up. A spy wants to string him along. Waiting and watching required a terrible patience. Hoover had it. After twenty years of attack and a decade of counterattack, the FBI was starting to understand the scope of the KGB’s operations in America.
The Bureau had a handful of double agents working against the KGB. The first productive break was the case of Boris Morros. Born in Russia in 1895, the same year as Hoover, Morros came to the United States in the wake of the Bolshevik revolution, making his way to Los Angeles and the world of make-believe. He worked at Paramount Pictures, arranging musical soundtracks for B movies, and he ran the Boris Morros Music Company on the side.
He had gone to the Soviet consulate in New York seeking a visa for his father, who wanted to return to Mother Russia in 1934. The visa officer, who served Soviet intelligence, asked: Will you do your country a favor in return? Morros agreed to create a legend—a ghost job with false credentials—in Paramount’s Berlin office. The legend served as a deep cover for Vassili Zarubin, later the chief of Soviet espionage in the United States during World War II. Zarubin returned the favor. He paid Morros for the use of his Hollywood music company as a front for undercover Soviet spies.
The FBI had recorded Zarubin in the spring of 1943 talking to the American Communist Steve Nelson about placing Soviet agents inside the Berkeley Radiation Laboratory. That summer Hoover received an anonymous letter from a disgruntled Soviet intelligence officer in Washington. The letter identified Zarubin as the Soviet foreign intelligence chief responsible for espionage in America. It said Soviet spies were recruiting and running large networks of underground agents who were “robbing the whole of the war industry in America.” It named five Soviet intelligence officers operating under diplomatic and commercial cover in the United States—including Boris Morros.
But the FBI had waited four years before sending an agent to talk to Morros in Los Angeles in June 1947. The inexplicable delay prompted Hoover to write a poignant note: “How many other like situations exist in our own files is what concerns me. H.”
Happily for Hoover, Morros agreed to work for the FBI. His decision to double-cross Moscow was rare indeed. Rarer still was the fact that a flash of his old Soviet case file had become legible to the army code breakers and the FBI, confirming that Morros had deep KGB connections. The Soviet code makers were careless every once in a great while. Moscow’s cover name for Boris Morros, born Boris Moroz, was Frost. The Russian word for frost is moroz. Any small chink in the armor of Soviet intelligence was a gift from the gods of war.
Morros had become the FBI’s man after a decade of work for Moscow. The Bureau called his work the Mocase. His music company still served as a front for KGB operations in New York and Los Angeles. He had produced a breakthrough for the FBI in 1948, securing an invitation to travel to Geneva to meet Aleksandr Korotkov, the man who ran the KGB’s worldwide ring of illegals. He met with Korotkov again in Moscow in 1950. For the Kremlin’s benefit, Morros spun tall tales of his invitations to the White House and the Vatican. The KGB bit, despite its doubts.
The case was unique in the early 1950s: neither the CIA nor the Pentagon ran an agent inside the KGB. A few select outsiders in the White House and Congress knew that Hoover had achieved this breakthrough—very few.
“THE FBI IS J. EDGAR HOOVER”
In Congress, three investigative committees now worked with the FBI against the Communist threat. The House Un-American Activities Committee hounded Hollywood leftists and denounced fellow travelers in the clergy. The Senate Internal Security Subcommittee pursued Soviet intrigues at the United Nations and Communist sympathizers on college faculties. The Senate Permanent Investigations Subcommittee was now under the command of a new chairman, Senator Joe McCarthy, Republican of Wisconsin.
McCarthy had been in full cry for three years. A garbled version of an outdated and inaccurate FBI report had been a key source for the first false charge that brought him fame in 1950: that the State Department was infested with hundreds of Communists. He did not have a list of names, as he claimed, only a number that changed over time. But the senator nevertheless owed a measure of his fame and power to his use and abuse of FBI reports provided by Hoover’s congressional liaison agents. McCarthy and his chief investigator, an ex-FBI man named Don Surine, read sheaves of Bureau reports on the Communist threat. In turn, Surine kept Hoover posted on McCarthy’s work.
Like his colleagues in Congress, the senator regularly paid fealty to Hoover in public and in private. “No one need erect a monument to you,” McCarthy wrote to the director in one typical tribute. “You have built your own monument in the form of the FBI—for the FBI is J. Edgar Hoover and I think we can rest assured that it always will be.”
In the spring of 1953, American politics seemed ready for Senator McCarthy’s pitiless brand of anticommunism, as the execution day of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg loomed. The judge who had pronounced the death sentence against the atom spies said their crimes were “worse than murder.” His rhetoric matched the tenor of the times. The judge said that Julius Rosenberg had put the atomic bomb in Stalin’s hands, which “caused, in my opinion, the Communist aggression in Korea, with the resultant casualties exceeding 50,000, and who knows but that millions more of innocent people may pay the price of your treason.” On June 19, 1953, came the execution day. Even Hoover had doubts about the political wisdom of putting Ethel Rosenberg to death. But the FBI had made the case.
“THE VICTIM OF THE MOST EXTREMELY VICIOUS CRITICISM”
Senator McCarthy’s attacks were scattershot, but on occasion, when the Bureau’s reports steadied his hand, his aim was true. Sometimes he hit a bull’s eye, as when he threatened to expose the fact that the CIA had a well-paid employee who had been arrested for homosexual activities, or when he tried to wring testimony from an International Monetary Fund official who the FBI suspected was a Soviet agent.
Hoover understood McCarthy. He told a newspaper reporter: “McCarthy is a former Marine. He was an amateur boxer. He’s Irish. Combine these, and you’re going to have a vigorous individual who’s not going to be pushed around.… I never knew Senator McCarthy before he came to the Senate. I’ve come to know him well, officially and personally. I view him as a friend, and I believe he so views me. Certainly, he is a controversial man. He is earnest and honest. He has enemies. Whenever you attack subversives of any kind, Communists, Fascists, even the Ku Klux Klan, you are going to be the victim of the most extremely vicious criticism that can be made. I know.”
But when McCarthy started tearing at the pillars of national security, Hoover had to fight to control the damage that the senator was inflicting on anticommunism and the American government.
In the summer of 1953, the senator began to plan an inquisition against the CIA. McCarthy leveled accusations of Communist Party membership or Communist-front activity against CIA employees in executive sessions of his investigative committee. Allen Dulles, the director of Central Intelligence, was badly shaken; McCarthy had warned him that the CIA was “neither sacrosanct nor immune from investigation,” as Dulles told his brother, the secretary of state.
Hoover’s agents told him that “Senator McCarthy had found the CIA to be a very ‘juicy’ target.” The FBI’s congressional liaison, Lou Nichols, reported that the senator and his staff had lined up “thirty-one potentially friendly witnesses” prepared to testify against fifty-nine CIA employees and officials.
McCarthy’s targets included James Kronthal, a homosexual CIA station chief suspected of succumbing to Soviet blackmail, who committed suicide while under investigation; a second CIA officer who had “an intimate relationship” with Owen Lattimore, a State Department officer falsely accused by McCarthy as the top Soviet spy in the United States; and sundry CIA employees suspected of “alcoholism, perversion, extramarital sex relations, narcotics violations and misapplication of CIA funds.”
Many of McCarthy’s charges were drawn directly from the FBI’s raw and uncorroborated reporting, including third-hand hearsay. Wary about the wholesale disclosure of the FBI files, Hoover sent word to the senator to slow down. Instead, McCarthy reloaded and took fresh aim.
On October 12, 1953, the senator began a week of closed-door hearings into suspicions of Soviet espionage at the Army Signal Corps center at Fort Monmouth, New Jersey, where Julius Rosenberg had worked. Rosenberg had been an electrical engineer at the Signal Corps when the FBI first learned that he was a secret Communist. Seven engineers who worked on Signal Corps radars and radios were suspected members of the atomic spy ring—and four of them were still at large the day the Rosenbergs died.
The senator had obtained a three-page summary of a 1951 letter from Hoover to General Alexander R. Bolling, the army intelligence chief, naming thirty-five Fort Monmouth workers as suspected subversives. A radar specialist and an electronics engineer soon were fired because they once had known Julius Rosenberg. Thirty-three others were suspended pending security investigations. But the army found no spies among them.
McCarthy’s fury boiled over. The stage now was set for the Army-McCarthy hearings, the first great live television news event in history. The show reached a high point on May 4, 1954.
McCarthy pulled out his copy of Hoover’s letter on the thirty-five suspected subversives at Fort Monmouth, and he shoved it at the dapper secretary of the army. Hoover was mortified at McCarthy’s public brandishing of the letter. Not many people knew that the senator had enjoyed access to Hoover’s secret files.
Hoover and President Eisenhower now concluded that McCarthy’s assault on the army and the CIA was subverting the cause of anticommunism. At their behest, Attorney General Brownell issued a ruling that McCarthy’s possession of Hoover’s letter was an unauthorized use of classified information—a federal crime. McCarthy responded by calling on every one of America’s two million government workers to send him all the secrets they had about corruption, communism, and treason. Ike, enraged, issued a decree that no one in the executive branch of government would answer to a call to testify to Congress about anything at any time, the most sweeping claim of executive privilege in the history of the American presidency.
The strains on McCarthy grew. He was drinking bourbon in the morning and vodka at night, sleeping two or three hours before going on national television to rail against the secret Communists in the American government. The drama on TV was strong stuff. So was the shadow play behind the scenes.
On June 2, 1954, Senator McCarthy publicly renewed his vow to go after the CIA, making the announcement on television at the Army-McCarthy hearings.
The president struck back. At the White House, on June 8, Ike told his aides, including his press secretary, Jim Hagerty: “My boys, I am convinced of one thing. The more we can get McCarthy threatening to investigate our intelligence, the more public support we are going to get. If there is any way I could trick him into renewing his threat, I would be very happy to do so and then let him have it.”
Hoover told his men to shut off all collaboration with the senator. Without the FBI’s files to guide him, McCarthy ran aground. The CIA ran an operation to confound him. One of McCarthy’s men had tried blackmailing a CIA officer, telling him that either the officer would furnish classified CIA documents to McCarthy in secret—or McCarthy would destroy him in public. Allen Dulles and his counterintelligence expert, Jim Angleton, advised the CIA officer in question to feed disinformation to McCarthy about communism in the American military, hoping to mystify and mislead him at the moment his confrontation with the army approached its crashing climax.
On June 9, 1954, McCarthy fell. The subject of the day was his futile search for spies at Fort Monmouth. McCarthy’s counsel, Roy Cohn, confronted the army’s lawyer at the hearing, Joe Welch. Welch was making mincemeat of him. Cohn looked like a toad in the talons of an eagle. McCarthy, burned out and hungover, came to Cohn’s defense. He had cut a deal with Welch: if the army did not ask how Cohn had avoided military service in World War II and Korea, a question without a good answer, McCarthy would not bring up the issue of Fred Fisher. Welch had kept his word. McCarthy now broke it. Few in the enormous television audience could have heard of Fisher, a Republican lawyer in Welch’s firm. McCarthy, his voice dripping with venom, now named him as a member of the National Lawyers Guild, “the legal bulwark of the Communist Party.” Fisher had joined the guild at Harvard Law School and left it shortly after graduation.
McCarthy then turned on Welch.
“I don’t think you yourself would ever knowingly aid the Communist cause,” the senator said. “I think you are unknowingly aiding it when you try to burlesque this hearing.” Welch was stunned but not speechless. His rebuke resounded: “Let us not assassinate this lad further, senator. Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?”
With the fall of Joe McCarthy, Hoover regained his role as the nation’s leading crusader in the war on communism. President Eisenhower relied on him more than ever to shape and sharpen American responses to the threats of espionage and subversion.
McCarthy, censured by the Senate, descended into self-destruction. He drank himself to death three years later. Hoover went to his funeral. So did the young Democrat who had served as the committee’s minority counsel, Robert F. Kennedy. It was a fitting moment for the two to meet.
23
GAME WITHOUT RULES
AFTER THIRTY YEARS as director of the FBI, Hoover’s political antennae were so finely tuned that news of the most sensitive presidential decisions arrived almost immediately on his desk.
On July 16, 1954, President Eisenhower summoned a retired three-star general named Jimmy Doolittle. Ten years before, Doolittle had led the first American bombing of Tokyo. Now the president wanted Doolittle to help him overhaul the CIA. Ike wanted the report done by October.
Hoover found out about this top secret investigation within days. “The
President stated that he wanted General Doolittle to conduct a thorough and objective study of CIA’s covert operations,” Hoover learned from Pat Coyne, an FBI veteran who served as the National Security Council’s most trusted intelligence staffer. Ike wanted “to unearth any evidence that the CIA was not operating efficiently and to make any recommendations which would improve the organization in any way whatever. He summarized his position by stating that he wanted Doolittle to make the survey as thorough and exhaustive as would be done if the President himself were handling the assignment.”
Hoover also got word that Doolittle had told the president: “There was one individual in Government who could be of extremely valuable assistance to him regarding correct and proper administration of intelligence operations. Doolittle stated that this person was J. Edgar Hoover.”
Hoover strongly doubted that the problems of the CIA could be fixed. He wrote to his national security aides: “I have a completely defeatist attitude as to any effective corrective measures which might improve CIA. H.”
Hoover had made plainly evident his personal and professional contempt for the CIA’s chief, Allen Dulles. He deigned to meet with Dulles no more than half a dozen times during the eight years of Eisenhower’s presidency. He made sure that his aides reflected his thinking.
“How in the world can I do business with the Bureau?” Dulles had shouted at his FBI liaison in an unguarded moment. “I try and you keep striking back.”
The Doolittle investigation presented Hoover one more opportunity to stake his claim to preeminence in American intelligence.
“WIPE OUT CIA ENTIRELY”
The FBI’s intelligence division chief, Al Belmont, indoctrinated General Doolittle and his investigators for three hours on August 25, 1954.
“Doolittle viewed the Bureau as a model in guiding him,” Belmont reported with satisfaction. “I placed unusually great stress on the fact that the Bureau, in addition to being a law enforcement body, was also very much in the intelligence field. I made it clear that we were expending every effort to keep apprised of all activities of the Communist Party. We had Soviet and satellite diplomats under constant observation; and that as far as the Bureau was concerned, we could never relax.”