by Tim Weiner
The attorney general proposed that henceforth taps and bugs would have to have his written approval. He was even more astonished when Hoover appeared to agree. LBJ had made it clear to both men that he wanted wiretaps kept to a minimum—except when it came to his opponents on the left. Katzenbach readily approved surveillances on the antiwar activists of the Students for a Democratic Society.
SDS had led the first big antiwar marches on Washington. The FBI had been watching the group for three years, from the moment it was conceived. The first SDS manifesto read: “Communism as a system rests on the suppression of organized opposition. The Communist movement has failed in every sense.” But Hoover still saw the student movement through a Soviet prism. A purely American protest against authority was inconceivable to him. After that first march, Hoover had reported to the White House that “Students for a Democratic Society, which is largely infiltrated by communists,” had made plans for antiwar protests in eighty-five more cities. He promised LBJ a full report on the Communist influence over the anti–Vietnam War demonstrations.
Hoover ordered his intelligence and internal security chiefs “to penetrate the Students for a Democratic Society so that we will have proper informant coverage similar to what we have in the Ku Klux Klan and the Communist Party itself.… Give this matter immediate attention and top priority as the President is quite concerned about the situation and wants prompt and quick action.” But the Bureau had very few sources in the New Left. No underground squads infiltrated coffeehouses and colleges—not yet. Electronic surveillance was of the essence if Hoover wanted intelligence.
“Wire taps and microphones,” Hoover reminded the attorney general, had “made it possible for the FBI to produce highly significant intelligence information to assist our makers of international policy, as well as to hold in check subversive elements within the country.” Yet Katzenbach declined to authorize new hidden-microphone bugs on the student left. He was painfully aware of the pervasive surveillance that had been placed on Martin Luther King; he feared the political consequences of its exposure.
Hoover said he was “extremely concerned” at the decision. But he reported that he had “discontinued completely the use of microphones” and that he had “severely restricted” new wiretaps against the antiwar and civil rights movements.
Bewildered FBI agents wondered whether the old man was losing his nerve. What was Hoover doing? Why was he doing it? Very few understood the answer. Hoover had reason to fear that the FBI’s lawbreaking would be exposed.
Senator William Fulbright, Democrat of Arkansas and chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, was threatening to create a new committee to oversee the FBI’s intelligence work; President Johnson warned Hoover to keep a very close eye on Fulbright, whom he suspected was holding secret meetings with Soviet diplomats. A far less prominent Democratic senator, Edward Long of Missouri, had started a scattershot series of hearings on government wiretapping. “He cannot be trusted,” an FBI intelligence supervisor warned.
Hoover strongly suspected that Senator Robert F. Kennedy was leaking information about the FBI’s bugging practices. He confronted Katzenbach. The attorney general denied it. “Just how gullible can he be!” Hoover wrote.
“HOOVER PUT US OUT OF BUSINESS”
Hoover knew a politically explosive case involving the FBI’s illegal bugging of a shady Washington lobbyist was working its way up to the Supreme Court.
The defendant was Fred Black, a powerful influence peddler appealing a tax-evasion conviction. The FBI had bugged Black’s suite at the Sheraton-Carlton Hotel in Washington in 1963, and it had recorded his conversations with his lawyer. The secret recordings were illegal on their face, as was the breaking and entering required to install the bugs. Hoover fought bitterly with the Justice Department over the legal necessity of disclosing these facts to the Supreme Court as it considered the case of Black v. United States.
Hoover used Justice Abe Fortas, newly appointed to the Court by LBJ, as a confidential informant in the case. Deke DeLoach, the FBI’s liaison to the White House, served as the go-between. Over breakfast at his home, Justice Fortas laid out a political strategy to blame the bug on Bobby Kennedy. “He was always willing to help the FBI,” DeLoach wrote, while noting that the justice’s conduct in discussing a case before the Court was “blatantly unethical.”
Despite Hoover’s best efforts, the solicitor general of the United States, Thurgood Marshall, revealed the FBI’s conduct to the Court. (Marshall had been a target of FBI surveillance for many years, as the leading lawyer for the NAACP.) The Court overturned the conviction. In months to come, the justices would rule that the FBI’s electronic surveillance of a public telephone booth was unconstitutional, and it would compare government eavesdropping to the “general warrants” used by the British colonialists to suppress the American Revolution.
The public disclosures of the FBI’s procedures were front-page news, as Hoover had feared. Hoover had always controlled the force of secret information. Now that secrecy was starting to erode, and with it went a measure of his power.
On July 19, 1966—six days after the Black bug was revealed in court—Hoover banned the FBI from using black-bag jobs and break-ins. “No more such techniques must be used,” Hoover instructed his lieutenants.
The practice of breaking and entering was “clearly illegal,” the FBI’s intelligence chief, William Sullivan, had reminded the director in a formal memo. “Despite this, ‘black bag’ jobs have been used because they represent an invaluable technique in combating subversive activities of a clandestine nature aimed at undermining and destroying our nation.”
Hoover’s old guard believed the FBI would be handcuffed. The paladins of the FBI’s intelligence and internal security divisions were dumbstruck by the director’s order.
Edward S. Miller, rising through the intelligence ranks to the number-three post at headquarters, said: “In our time in the Bureau—and that is Hoover’s time, and subsequent to that—the only thing we had was our reliance on investigative techniques that had made us very successful against the Communist Party and Soviet Communism.” The Bureau would rise or fall by “conducting business the only way we felt that we were authorized to do,” said Miller, who faced a federal indictment a decade later for his use of black-bag jobs.
Along with breaking and entering, Hoover also suspended the Bureau’s long-standing practice of opening first-class mail.
The FBI’s mail-opening program dated back to World War I. It violated the Fourth Amendment’s ban on unwarranted searches and seizures. It had gone on without an interruption since 1940, when the British had taught the Bureau the ancient art of chamfering, cutting envelopes with scalpels and resealing them undetected.
The search for secret communications among spies and subversives in the satchels of the U.S. mails had expanded mightily in the seven years since 1959. The FBI ran covert mail-opening operations out of post offices in eight American cities—New York, Washington, Boston, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Detroit, Seattle, and Miami—inspecting hundreds of thousands of letters and parcels, looking for evidence of espionage. Since the start of World War II, the mail-opening program had led to the identification of four Communist spies and two Americans who had offered to sell military secrets to the Soviets. Opening mail was so patently illegal that Hoover had never thought to ask any attorney general or any president for that power. Was it worth the risk to the FBI? Hoover thought not.
Hoover’s edicts created a furor inside the American intelligence community. The National Security Agency and the CIA had worked with the FBI since 1952 on a worldwide effort to steal the communications codes of foreign nations, friends and foes alike. A crucial element in that program was a gang of FBI and CIA safecrackers and burglars who could steal codebooks from foreign embassies and consulates. The ban on bag jobs threatened to bring breakthroughs in code cracking to a standstill.
The military and civilian chiefs of the National Security Agency, General Ma
rshall Carter and Louis Tordella, went to see Hoover. They had been given fifteen minutes to make their case for reinstating the FBI’s old methods. The one-sided conversation ran for two and a half hours as Hoover rambled on about his greatest cases of the 1930s and 1940s. Carter and Tordella finally got a word in, sometime during the second hour, to plead for covert intelligence collection. Hoover turned them down.
“Someone got to the old man,” Bill Sullivan told Tordella. But no evidence exists that anyone twisted Hoover’s arm. He knew that if his methods came to light, the Bureau would be tarnished forever. The danger of exposure was growing by the day. The political tide of civil liberties was rising. Hoover stood increasingly isolated against old-line liberals in Congress and New Left lawyers in the courts. A concerted attack on the FBI’s extralegal intelligence techniques could destroy Hoover’s image as the avatar of law and order in America.
The cost of his cautiousness was high for the FBI chieftains pursuing spies and saboteurs.
“Hoover put us out of business in 1966 and 1967 when he placed sharp restrictions on intelligence collection” using bugs and black-bag jobs, said Bill Cregar, a former professional football player who had become one of the Bureau’s leading Soviet intelligence specialists. “We need technical coverage on every Soviet in the country. I didn’t give a damn about the Black Panthers myself, but I did about the Russians.”
Hoover’s restrictions on illegal intelligence-gathering methods hobbled the FBI’s spy hunters. The Bureau’s increasingly relentless focus on American political protests drained time and energy away from foreign counterintelligence. The results were evident.
For the next decade, from 1966 to 1976, the FBI did not make a single major case of espionage against a Soviet spy.
“ONE BIG JOB BEFORE YOU GO OUT”
The president’s hunger for intelligence on the American Left grew more and more ravenous. Hoover tried to satisfy it by burrowing into the growing antiwar and black power movements with infiltrators and informants.
The Bureau instituted a nationwide program called VIDEM, for Vietnam demonstrations. It sent the White House a steady stream of intelligence on the leaders of the movement, the identities of people who sent telegrams to the president protesting the war, and the organizers of church and campus meetings on Vietnam. One peace conference in Philadelphia generated a forty-one-page FBI report, based on thirteen informants and sources, including verbatim transcripts of each speech and background checks on the chaplains, ministers, and professors in attendance.
Some FBI agents made extraordinary efforts to confirm the suspicions of the president and the director that the Soviets were behind the antiwar movement. The FBI’s Ed Birch—the man who had nailed Colonel Abel of the KGB in 1957—had trailed the Soviet spy Viktor Lesiovsky across the country as he traveled from his diplomatic post at the United Nations secretariat earlier in the 1960s. He suspected that Lesiovsky, who had met in 1962 with Stanley Levison, Martin Luther King’s counselor, was secretly financing the American Left with Soviet funds. “That guy traveled,” Birch said. “But what got me was the places that he went to,” including the University of Michigan, the seedbed of SDS. “It was always my impression—but I couldn’t convince anybody in the Bureau of this—that this guy helped with the funding of the SDS.” The evidence of Soviet financial support for the American antiwar and civil rights movements always proved elusive.
The nation’s cities became war zones in the long hot summer of 1967. Black Americans fought the army and the National Guard as well as the police across the country; the forces of law and order suppressed seventy-five separate riots, sometimes with live ammunition and orders to shoot to kill. Forty-three people died in Detroit, where the army was deployed for eight days of combat and patrols; twenty-six in Newark, where the army was alerted for riot duty. In all, the nation suffered eighty-eight deaths and 1,397 injuries; the police arrested 16,389 people; economic damage was estimated at $664.5 million.
As Detroit smoldered on the morning of July 25, 1967, Hoover called the president with some real-time intelligence: the transcript of a wiretapped conversation between Martin Luther King and Stanley Levison, who remained under FBI surveillance.
“King was told by Levison, who is his principal advisor, and who is a secret communist, that he has more to gain nationally by agreeing with the violence,” Hoover reported, confiding that this fresh intelligence was the result of an FBI tap. Hoover said that King thought “the President is afraid at this time and is willing to make concessions.” The president did not fear Martin Luther King. But he was afraid that there was an unseen hand behind the upheavals. He thought foreign agents—maybe the Cubans, perhaps the Soviets—might be instigating the urban riots. He told Hoover to “keep your men busy to find the central connection” between the Communists and the black power movement. “We’ll find some central theme,” the president said.
Hoover said he would get right on it. One month later, on August 25, the FBI inaugurated COINTELPRO—BLACK HATE.
Orders went out to twenty-three FBI field offices to “disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize the activities of black nationalist hate type organizations.” The Bureau singled out Martin Luther King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference along with Stokely Carmichael and H. Rap Brown’s Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). Hoover publicly labeled King along with his more radical counterparts as the leading “rabble-rousers” and “firebrands” inciting black riots. BLACK HATE went hand in hand with the newly created “Ghetto Informant Program.” Within the year three thousand people had been enlisted as FBI sources—many of them respectable businessmen, military veterans, and senior citizens—to keep watch over the black communities of urban America. BLACK HATE and the Ghetto Informant ranks soon doubled in size and scope.
In the fall of 1967, the urban riots ebbed but the peace marches grew. The protesters in Washington chanted: “Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?” The president ordered the FBI, the CIA, and the army to root out the conspiracy to overthrow his government.
“I’m not going to let the Communists take this government and they’re doing it right now,” LBJ shouted at Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, Secretary of State Dean Rusk, and Director of Central Intelligence Richard Helms during a ninety-five-minute Saturday morning meeting on November 4, 1967.
On his orders, liberal-minded men—like the new attorney general, Ramsey Clark, and his deputy Warren Christopher, later President Bill Clinton’s secretary of state—commanded the FBI to spy on Americans in concert with the United States Army and the National Security Agency. Some 1,500 army intelligence officers in civilian clothing undertook the surveillance of some 100,000 American citizens. Army intelligence shared all their reports with the FBI over the next three years. The CIA tracked antiwar leaders and black militants who traveled overseas, and it reported back to the FBI.
The FBI, in turn, shared thousands of selected files on Americans with army intelligence and the CIA. All three intelligence services sent the names of Americans to the National Security Agency for inclusion on a global watch list; the NSA relayed back to the FBI hundreds of transcripts of intercepted telephone calls to and from suspect Americans.
The president had created a concerted effort to organize a secret police. He was trying to synchronize the gears of the FBI, the CIA, and the army to create an all-pervasive intelligence machine that would watch citizens as if they were foreign spies.
But the political forces at work in the world in 1968 were too powerful to control. None of the intelligence the president received calmed his troubled mind. By the time of the Tet offensive at the end of January 1968—with 400,000 Communist troops striking almost every major city and military garrison in South Vietnam—LBJ believed that his enemies had encircled him in Washington.
He was a haunted man when he spoke to Hoover on February 14, 1968.
“I don’t want anybody to know I called you,” LBJ said in a hoarse whisper
, breathing heavily, sounding exhausted.
“I want you personally to do one big job before you go out,” the president said. What he wanted was an intensified search for spies in Washington. He suspected that American politicians and political aides were serving the Communist cause.
The FBI’s electronic surveillance of foreign embassies and consulates now included closed-circuit television monitoring as well as wiretap coverage of the Soviets in Washington and New York. LBJ told Hoover to step up the surveillance in a search for Americans leaking information to the nation’s enemies. He wanted reports on senators, congressmen, their staffs on Capitol Hill, and any other prominent American citizens who might be in secret contact with Communists in foreign embassies. He feared that congressional staff members were secretly working for the Soviets, perhaps delivering government documents to the KGB, on behalf of their bosses.
“If you don’t do anything else—and that is while you and I are here—I want you to watch, with all the care and caution and judgment that you ever have built up over forty or fifty years, these embassies and what those who’re dedicated to overthrowing us are doing,” the president said.
“I would watch it like nobody’s business and I’d make it the highest priority,” LBJ told Hoover. “See who they’re talking to, what they’re saying … I just want you to personally take charge of this and watch it yourself.”
He wanted Hoover to scrutinize politically suspect members of Congress with special attention. “I’m going to insist that everybody who has secret documents be carefully cleared,” he said. “Say to those committee chairmen, ‘The President has ordered us to check everybody.’
“Because when McNamara goes up and testifies before Fulbright that we are breaking the North Vietnamese code and a goddamn Commie sympathizer goes and tells it, they just change their codes.… Chase down every damn lead and see who they saw and who they talked to and when and how … You the only guy in the government that’s watching it. I just want to order you now to be more diligent than you’ve ever been in your life.”