by Tim Weiner
So did Nixon and Kissinger. Front-page stories on their strategies for dealing with the Soviet Union and Southeast Asia, seemingly taken directly from the minutes of the National Security Council, appeared almost every week. By Kissinger’s account, twenty-one newspaper articles based on leaks about the president’s secret foreign policies were published in the first hundred days of the administration. Nixon would explode in anger at the headlines: “What is this cock-sucking story? Find out who leaked it, and fire him!” Kissinger learned to imitate his boss; sometimes he could outdo him: “We must crush these people! We must destroy them!”
On April 23, Nixon spent twenty minutes on the telephone with Hoover, thinking out loud about a plan to plug the leaks. Two days later, the president sat down with Hoover and Attorney General John Mitchell at the White House.
Nixon’s sworn account of the Oval Office meeting on the leaks was succinct. “Hoover informed me that … there was only one way to deal with it.… He had authority to wiretap … Wiretapping being the ultimate weapon.”
“I told Mr. Hoover we would go forward with this program,” Nixon remembered. “I called Dr. Kissinger in and indicated to him that he should take the responsibility of checking his own staff.” Kissinger, of course, complied. “Here he was in this room with J. Edgar Hoover, John Mitchell, Richard Nixon,” said Kissinger’s aide, Peter Rodman. “They’re saying: ‘Let’s do some taps.’ And J. Edgar Hoover and John Mitchell say: ‘Yeah, we can do that. Bobby Kennedy did this all the time.’ ”
Kissinger would select suspects for surveillance. If Hoover concurred, the taps would go in. The responsibility for finding the leakers and stopping the leaks would rest entirely on the FBI.
On the morning of May 9, Hoover picked up his telephone to hear the unmistakable voice of Kissinger in high dudgeon. He was furious about a front-page story in The New York Times. Nixon had been bombing Cambodia, a neutral nation, seeking to strike Vietcong and North Vietnamese supply depots. The bombing violated international law. But the story violated the principles of secrecy. The president saw it as an act of treason—“a leak which was directly responsible for the deaths of thousands of Americans.” He believed that the secret bombing could save American soldiers fighting in South Vietnam. Kissinger conveyed his wrath to Hoover. The director’s notes of the conversation reflect it: “National security … extraordinarily damaging … dangerous.”
The Kissinger wiretaps were on. “Dr. Kissinger said he appreciated this very much,” Hoover wrote, “and he hoped I would follow it up as far as we can take it and they will destroy whoever did this if we can find him, no matter where he is.”
Hoover gave the task of installing the taps to his intelligence chief, Bill Sullivan. Sullivan was more than willing to follow orders from the White House. He had had his eye on Hoover’s job for years. Now he would have the full attention of the president’s men, and there was little he would not do to serve them. He soon would have the attention of the president himself.
Sullivan secured the voluminous wiretap transcripts and logs as “Do Not File” files. He kept them locked in an office he maintained outside of FBI headquarters, and he provided Kissinger and his military aide, Colonel Al Haig, with daily summaries. Nixon sent Kissinger to the FBI with instructions to “express your appreciation to Mr. Hoover and Mr. Sullivan for their outstanding support.” His orders were to “inform Mr. Hoover that you have discussed these problems in detail with the President” and to “ask Mr. Hoover if he has any additional information or guidance which he feels would be helpful in this very difficult situation.”
Some of Nixon’s closest aides knew these taps fell into a twilight zone of the law. Nixon thought he had the power to spy on anyone he pleased on the grounds of national security. In 1968, Congress had passed a law saying the president could authorize wiretaps to protect the United States from foreign spies and subversives. But the targets of these taps were not KGB agents. They were thirteen American government officials and four newspaper reporters. Over the next two years, though the leaks went on, the taps never revealed a shred of incriminating evidence against anyone. But they were the first step down the road to Watergate.
On May 28, 1969, at 3:00 P.M., Nixon took a seat beside Hoover in the ceremonial East Room of the White House. Together they presided over the graduation of the eighty-third session of the FBI National Academy, a training course for American law enforcement commanders and foreign police chiefs. Minutes before, in the Oval Office, Hoover had personally delivered a set of the Kissinger wiretap summaries to the president.
In the East Room, Hoover gave Nixon a gold badge, making him an honorary member of the FBI, and Nixon spoke about the rule of law. “Our problem,” the president said, “is to see to it that, all over America, our laws—the written laws—deserve respect of all Americans, and that those who carry out the law—who have that hard, difficult, grueling, sometimes dangerous task of enforcing the law—that they carry out their responsibilities in a way that deserves respect.”
“NOBODY KNEW WHAT WAS RIGHT AND WHAT WAS WRONG”
That same afternoon, in Chicago, a young FBI agent named Bill Dyson was about to be initiated into the rules of a lawless world. He remembered the day with clarity. It was the start of a new life.
Dyson was twenty-eight years old, on his first tour of duty, barely two years after joining the FBI. His boss told him he was going to be working on a wiretap. He was not exactly sure what a wiretap was, or how they worked, or what laws regulated them. But he followed his supervisor down into a windowless room in the bowels of the Bureau’s office. His superiors sat him down and said: “Here’s your machine.”
They put him on the four-to-midnight shift listening to members of the Students for a Democratic Society. The SDS formally convened in Chicago three weeks later. One faction declared it would begin an armed struggle against the government of the United States. Over the summer, and into the fall, Dyson listened as the members of the group argued, debated, and plotted. He was witnessing the violent birth of a terrorist gang.
“I watched them become the Weathermen! I was with them when they became the Weathermen!” he said. “It was exciting. I was watching history.” Almost exactly fifty years before, in Chicago, in September 1919, J. Edgar Hoover’s agents had spied on the birth of the Communist Party of the United States. Dyson was following in their tradition.
The Weathermen saw themselves as revolutionaries who could overthrow America, a vision fueled in part by doses of LSD. They called themselves Communists, but their tactics were closer to those of the Italian anarchists who had bombed Washington and Wall Street in the days after World War I. “Anarchist is a very nice word for them,” said John Kearney, who led the New York FBI’s secret Squad 47 in many missions against the Weathermen, and later faced indictment for his warrantless break-ins. “They were terrorists.”
Their leaders were white, good-looking, well-educated; some came from wealthy families. They tried to form armed alliances with the Black Panthers. They traveled to Cuba and met with representatives of the government of North Vietnam. They drilled discipline into one another with a grinding groupthink that Chairman Mao might have admired. They fought one another and slept with one another. And Dyson listened. “I knew more about these people than they knew about themselves. If you work a wiretap, a good wiretap, you will become that way,” he said. “I lived with these people sometimes twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.”
But then the Weathermen became the Weather Underground. They began to shift from open rabble-rousing to clandestine bomb making in the fall of 1969. They seemed to vanish. Dyson’s taps went silent. The FBI was caught flat-footed. The wiretappers traced calls to pay telephones; they placed radio transmitters in public phone booths. But the trail went cold. That sent a chill of fear through FBI intelligence chief Bill Sullivan, who had reported on September 8, 1969, that the group had “the potential to be far more damaging to the security of this Nation than the Communist Party ever
was, even at the height of its strength in the 1930’s.”
Starting from Chicago, clandestine cells of four or more Weathermen spread across the country, from New York to San Francisco. That winter, three key members of the New York faction blew themselves up in an elegant town house on West 11th Street while trying to wire sixty sticks of dynamite in a bomb intended to kill soldiers at Fort Dix, New Jersey. After that deadly fiasco, the movement went deeper underground, but it managed to take credit for a fresh outrage every few months during the Nixon years, taunting the FBI and the White House with wild-eyed communiqués, planting bombs at will in seemingly impenetrable places. A group barely one hundred strong—with a core of a dozen decision takers and bomb makers—began to drive the government of the United States half-mad with fear as the sixties became the seventies.
Dyson, who became the FBI’s lead case agent on the group, took them at their word. He judged the threat as deadly serious, and so did his superiors. The message from the underground, as he read it, was one of murderous intent: If you don’t end the war, we’ll kill your Congressmen. We’ll kill your Senators. We’ll kill the President.
“They were able to get into the U.S. Capitol, build a bomb into a wall, and blow it up at will,” Dyson said. “They got into the Pentagon.… They were able to call up and say it’s going to go off in exactly five minutes and it would go off in five minutes. They were as good as any terrorist group in the world in terms of their sophistication.”
They carried out thirty-eight bombings. The FBI solved none.
“We didn’t know how to investigate terrorism,” Dyson said. “We did not have enough intelligence on these people.”
That presented the FBI with a terrible problem. Its answer was to take the most drastic measures. “There were certain people in the FBI who made the decision: We’ve got to take a step—anything to get rid of these people. Anything!” Dyson said. “Not kill them per se, but anything went. If we suspect somebody’s involved in this, put a wiretap on them. Put a microphone in. Steal his mail. Do anything!”
Dyson had questions about the rule of law: “Can I put an informant in a college classroom? Or even on the campus? Can I penetrate any college organization? What can I do? And nobody had any rules or regulations. There was nothing …”
“This was going to come and destroy us,” he said. “We were going to end up with FBI agents arrested. Not because what they did was wrong. But because nobody knew what was right or wrong.” Not knowing that difference is a legal definition of insanity. Dyson’s premonitions of disaster would prove prophetic. In time, the top commanders of the FBI in Washington and New York would face the prospect of prison time for their work against the threat from the left. So would the president’s closest confidants.
“NIXON ORDERED THE FBI INTO THIS”
Nixon, Mitchell, and Ehrlichman had dinner at Hoover’s home on October 1, 1969; the White House counsel recorded this rare event. They had cocktails in “a dingy, almost seedy living room,” its walls covered with old glossies of Hoover with dead movie stars. They ate chili and steak in a dining room lit with lava lamps glowing purple, green, yellow, and red. After-dinner drinks were served in Hoover’s basement, from a wet bar decorated with pin-up drawings of half-naked women.
The conversation was more alluring. “Hoover regaled us with stories of late-night entries and FBI bag jobs,” Ehrlichman recounted. “He told us about FBI operations against domestic radicals and foreigners, and our reactions were enthusiastic and positive.” Nixon and Mitchell “loved that stuff.” From that night forward, Hoover had every right to believe that the president of the United States wanted him to use every power he had against the threat.
Across the country, some two million people marched against the war in Vietnam that fall. The FBI found it hard to distinguish between the kid with a Molotov cocktail and the kid with a picket sign.
Through October, November, December, and into the new year and the new decade, almost every day brought reports of threats and attacks from left-wing groups in America’s biggest cities, its college campuses, and in many a small town, too. Bombs struck at Rockefeller Center in New York; the county courthouse in Franklin, Missouri; the sheriff’s office in Sioux City, Nebraska. The Black Panthers shot it out with the Chicago police, and the police counterattacked with help from the FBI, killing two prominent Panther chieftains as they slept. Armed black militias, including a small gang that became known as the Black Liberation Army, allied with members of the Weather Underground. “They were trying to shoot and kill police officers,” said the FBI’s William M. Baker. “When they saw a white officer and a black officer working together, the Black Liberation Army, in an effort in their minds to create a revolution, would shoot both of them and then claim responsibility for it. Well, President Nixon ordered the FBI into this.”
Bill Sullivan sent the word down the chain of command that winter: the ban on operations that Hoover once deemed “clearly illegal” was over. He vowed to do anything to stop the Weathermen. Sullivan’s deputy, Charles D. Brennan, newly appointed as the chief of the internal security division, said the same. He felt tremendous pressure from the White House to defend the nation against “attacks against the police in general and the FBI in particular” from the left. He believed the FBI had to deal with the radicals’ threat “to form commando-type units” that would carry out acts of terror, “including assassinations.”
FBI agents across the country began to mount new operations aimed against peaceful marchers and violent militants alike. A deep-cover squad tried to infiltrate the far left by posing as politically radicalized Vietnam veterans well supplied with guns and drugs. Four or five of them liked their new lives so much that they never came back. “They were a bunch of renegades,” said the FBI’s Bernardo Perez, who drew the difficult assignment of reining them in years later.
Hoover did not know about some of the most politically charged operations. The director turned seventy-five on January 1, 1970. Sullivan and many of his top agents saw the director’s powers of perception dimming, his authority slipping, his awareness of what went on from day to day at the FBI starting to fail.
“Hoover had no idea that we had agents stand there looking like they were kids in jeans and that kind of stuff at these demonstrations,” said Courtland Jones, an FBI agent who had day-to-day responsibility for the Kissinger wiretaps. “Hoover’s reaction was: ‘Who authorized this?’ ”
“He was really out of touch,” Jones said. “He should have bowed out, years before his death. The one thing that he never did and would never tolerate was to groom anyone to take his place.”
Only one man was willing to run the risk of gunning for Hoover’s job. Only one man came close to succeeding. That was Bill Sullivan, the man who knew the deepest secrets of the FBI.
34
“PULL DOWN THE TEMPLE”
AFTER HALF A CENTURY as America’s counterrevolutionary in chief, Hoover no longer commanded unquestioned authority.
He had made enemies at the White House and inside the FBI, and they had started summoning the courage to denounce him. The president and the attorney general were talking about replacing him. The control of secret information had always been the primary source of Hoover’s power. He had lost it.
On Monday, June 1, 1970, he made a fateful choice. He would later call it “the greatest mistake I ever made.” He decided that Bill Sullivan would become his top commander, in charge of all the Bureau’s criminal investigations as well as its intelligence programs. Sullivan ran the daily work of the FBI—a heady dose of power for a man known to many of his colleagues as Crazy Billy.
Hoover had thought he was loyal. He had been once. But Sullivan, COINTELPRO’s creator and overlord, a master of political warfare, had been chafing under Hoover’s increasingly heavy and unsteady hand, confiding in his counterparts at the CIA and his contacts at the White House that the boss had lost his nerve. He said the FBI was losing the battle against the radical left. It was time
, Sullivan advised the CIA’s Richard Helms, to start “moving ahead of the winds of change instead of being blown by them.”
Now he had a chance to make his case directly to the president of the United States.
Nixon knew Sullivan had been handling the Kissinger wiretaps, listening in on some of the most prominent reporters and columnists in Washington as well as their suspected sources in high office. A year before, after the first taps were installed, Nixon had sent a fiercely ambitious twenty-nine-year-old White House lawyer named Tom Charles Huston over to the FBI to meet with Sullivan. Huston had been an army intelligence officer and a leader of the conservative Young Americans for Freedom; Nixon fondly called him an arrogant son of a bitch. He made Huston the point man for all White House intelligence liaisons.
Sullivan realized that the presidential aide could open the door to the Oval Office. As they conferred in secret throughout 1969 and 1970, he carefully cultivated Huston, praising his intellect and vision. Huston returned the high regard. “I do not think there was anyone in the government who I respected more,” Huston said.
In Nixon’s name, Huston urged Sullivan to hunt down the foreign financiers of American political ferment, to find proof that the international Communist conspiracy supported the radical left and the black militants. The demand went unsatisfied, to Nixon’s displeasure. “President Nixon was insatiable in his desire for intelligence,” Deke DeLoach said. “He would constantly ask the FBI for more and more intelligence to prove that the riots in our country were being caused by insurgent groups in foreign countries. And they weren’t.” Sullivan in turn put intense pressure on his underlings—“gave us all hell because we couldn’t prove that the Soviets were behind racial and student unrest,” said Jim Nolan, then a young FBI agent rising through the intelligence ranks. “We knew they were not. Nothing would have scared the Soviets more than these students.”