by Tim Weiner
Sullivan blamed the failure to find the proof on Hoover. He told Huston that Hoover had cut off all formal liaisons with the CIA and the military in a fit of pique; that the FBI lacked the counterintelligence skills to obtain the secrets that the White House desired; that the Bureau needed more freedom to spy on Americans, especially on students under the age of twenty-one; that the restraints on black-bag jobs, bugging, wiretapping, and surveillance were far too constricting. Huston reported all of this to Nixon. The president readily believed it. He was railing to his advisers that the top secret reports he received on his enemies, foreign and domestic, were meaningless drivel.
By the spring of 1970, Sullivan had set upon a plan to satisfy the president’s thirst for secret intelligence—and to promote himself as Hoover’s successor. As Sullivan’s star rose at the White House, Hoover’s began to fall.
“MAGNIFIED AND LIMITLESS”
On Friday, June 5, 1970, Nixon called Hoover and Helms to the White House. They sat alongside Admiral Noel Gayler, director of the National Security Agency, and Lieutenant General Donald Bennett, chief of the Defense Intelligence Agency.
“The President chewed our butts,” General Bennett remembered.
Nixon was on the warpath abroad and at home. Campuses across the country had exploded after Nixon invaded Cambodia and escalated the war in Vietnam. National Guardsmen had shot and killed four students at Kent State University in Ohio. More than a hundred bombings, arson attacks, and shootings had followed in May. The Weathermen and the Panthers, whose leaders had been to Cuba and Algeria for indoctrination, had shown that they could hit draft boards, police stations, and banks at will.
The president said that “revolutionary terrorism” was now the gravest threat to the United States. Thousands of Americans under the age of thirty were “determined to destroy our society”; their home-grown ideology was “as dangerous as anything they could import” from Cuba, China, or Russia. “Good intelligence,” he said, was “the best way to stop terrorism.”
Nixon demanded “a plan which will enable us to curtail the illegal activities of those who are determined to destroy our society.” Sullivan had already drafted it. He had been working on it for two years. It would all but abolish the restraints on intelligence collection. The White House gave him the go-ahead to achieve that goal.
Sullivan convened five meetings of America’s spy chiefs and their deputies. “Individually, those of us in the intelligence community are relatively small and limited,” he told the first meeting, at FBI headquarters, on June 8. “Unified, our own combined potential is magnified and limitless. It is through unity of action that we can tremendously increase our intelligence-gathering potential, and, I am certain, obtain the answers the President wants.” Hopes ran high among the old guard. “I saw these meetings as a perfect opportunity to get back the methods we needed,” said the FBI’s Bill Cregar, who ran foreign counterintelligence programs against the Soviets. “And so did Sullivan.” The obstacle, both men knew, would be Hoover himself. He did not want to coordinate the FBI’s work with the CIA or any other intelligence service. Quite the opposite: he had cut off communication with his counterparts so thoroughly that the link between Huston and Sullivan was the only formal liaison left between the Bureau and the rest of the American government.
The program that emerged became known as the Huston Plan. But it was Sullivan’s work from top to bottom. And it had the secret imprimatur of the president of the United States.
The plan called for America’s intelligence services to work as one. The walls between them would come down. The restrictions on intelligence gathering in the United States would be lifted. The FBI’s agents and their counterparts would be free to monitor the international communications of American citizens, intensify the electronic surveillance of American dissidents, read their mail, burglarize their homes and offices, step up undercover spying among freshmen and sophomores on campus—in short, to keep on doing what the Bureau had been doing for decades, but to do more of it, do it better, and do it in concert with the CIA and the Pentagon.
The plan conformed to the president’s philosophy on national security: Do anything it takes. He knew that opening mail was a federal crime and that black-bag jobs were burglary. But they were the best means of gathering intelligence. And Nixon believed that if a president did it, it was not illegal.
On July 14, after Huston brought the plan to the White House, the president said he approved it. But Hoover dissented. He “went through the ceiling,” Sullivan remembered, as soon as he realized that the plan would have to be carried out on his authority—not Nixon’s. The president had not signed it; his approval was verbal, not written. “That leaves me alone as the man who made the decision,” he said. “I’m not going to accept the responsibility myself anymore, even though I’ve done it for many years.… It is becoming more and more dangerous and we are apt to get caught.”
Hoover demanded a meeting with Nixon. And he stared the president down.
Nixon believed that “in view of the crisis of terrorism,” the plan was both “justified and responsible.” But he realized that “it would matter little what I had decided or approved” if Hoover balked. “Even if I issued a direct order to him, while he would undoubtedly carry it out, he would soon see to it that I had cause to reverse myself. There was even the remote possibility that he would resign in protest.”
Nixon withdrew the plan at Hoover’s behest. His inner circle began to denounce the director as an unreliable ally in the war on revolutionary terrorism. “Hoover has to be told who is President,” Huston told Haldeman on August 5. “He has become totally unreasonable and his conduct is detrimental to our domestic intelligence operations.… If he gets his way it is going to look like he is more powerful than the President.”
The new White House counsel, a thirty-one-year-old lawyer named John W. Dean, took charge of salvaging the plan. He worked in liaison with Sullivan. Despite Hoover’s dissent, electronic surveillances and surreptitious entries increased. The FBI started recruiting informants as young as eighteen. Undercover operations against the Left expanded. (The small but growing contingent of FBI agents who looked, dressed, and acted like their targets had a camaraderie and an esprit de corps all its own; the agents called themselves “Beards, Blacks, and Broads.”)
These operations sometimes took place on Sullivan’s say-so, sometimes at the command of Attorney General Mitchell, and sometimes on orders from the president himself.
The control of the FBI’s most powerful weapons began to slip from Hoover’s grasp into the hands of Nixon’s political henchmen. They believed that the ideal of national security overrode the rule of law. Their mission, above all, was the re-election of the president.
“BRING ABOUT A CONFRONTATION”
The president began to think about forcing Hoover from power. “Mitchell and I had a two-hour session with the P,” Haldeman wrote in his diary on February 4, 1971. “We discussed the whole question of J. Edgar Hoover and whether he should be continued.”
Nixon chose a devious strategy. He told Mitchell to revive the Internal Security Division at the Justice Department under Assistant Attorney General Robert Mardian—a man Hoover personally despised, though he was an ardent anti-Communist. Nixon ordered Mardian and Sullivan to step up intelligence operations against the Left, to work “like J. Edgar used to.” He was starting to speak of Hoover in the past tense. He knew that his orders could “bring about a confrontation,” Haldeman wrote. “The P made it clear that Hoover has got to be replaced before the end of Nixon’s first term. We need to make this point to Hoover in such a way as to get him to resign.”
The attorney general began to feel out candidates to succeed Hoover. The strongest one was Sullivan—but Mitchell found him nakedly ambitious, a name-dropping wheeler-dealer. At least three other Hoover aides were jockeying for the job. The corridor chatter in the halls of Justice was vicious. “I was told five times that Hoover would be fired,” Mardian said.
While a growing cohort of his enemies inside the Nixon administration plotted to supplant him, Hoover’s foes on the left mounted a devastating and demoralizing attack on the secrecy and power of the Bureau itself. They pulled a black-bag job on the FBI. On the night of March 8, 1971, a band of thieves broke into the Bureau’s two-man office in Media, Pennsylvania, a placid suburb outside Philadelphia, jimmying the glass-paneled door in an office across the street from the county courthouse. The job was easy; the FBI had no security system to seal the secrets inside of room 204. They stole at least eight hundred documents out of the files. The group, which called itself the Citizens’ Commission to Investigate the FBI, never explained why the Media office was chosen as a target. Barry Green, whose family managed the office building, arrived at dawn to find FBI agents and police “running all over the place, trying to figure out how this could have happened and who could have done it,” he remembered. “Who would invade an FBI office? It was like invading the lion’s den.”
Hoover reacted to the theft as if an assassin had tried to cut out his heart. He suspected the thieves were allied with the radical Catholic priests Daniel and Philip Berrigan, who had been imprisoned for destroying draft files; Hoover himself accused them, in public, on the thinnest evidence, of conspiring to kidnap Henry Kissinger. He assured the White House that arrests were imminent. But despite a nationwide investigation that lasted for at least six years, no one ever was charged in the theft. The case remained unsolved.
The Citizens’ Commission to Investigate the FBI copied the stolen files and delivered them to members of Congress and the press. It took weeks, in some cases months, before the reporters began to understand the documents. They were fragmentary records of undercover FBI operations to infiltrate twenty-two college campuses with informers, and they described the wiretapping of the Philadelphia chapter of the Black Panthers. It took a year before one reporter made a concerted effort to decode a word that appeared on the files: COINTELPRO. The word was unknown outside the FBI.
In a desperate effort to keep the deepest secrets of the FBI from being exposed, Hoover ordered an end to COINTELPRO six weeks after the Media break-in. Hundreds of operations, almost all of them aimed at the Left, were killed. Sullivan, their intellectual author, was incensed. He told his allies that Hoover had sheathed the most powerful weapon the Bureau had ever deployed to disrupt, disarm, and destroy its enemies.
Nixon revived their purpose a few weeks later.
“LET’S GET THESE BASTARDS”
The newly installed White House tapes were rolling now, and they recorded the old friendship and the new frictions between Nixon and Hoover.
Reminiscing in the Oval Office on May 26, Hoover recounted the hatred between President Johnson and Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy. He said he had warned that Kennedy would try “to steal the nomination from Lyndon” at the Democratic National Convention in 1964.
“That’s what got me in bad with Bobby,” Hoover said.
“In bed with him?” Nixon said.
“No—in bad with him,” Hoover chortled.
Nixon then attempted a vocal impersonation of LBJ: “Ah couldn’t have been President without J. Edgar Hoover. Now don’t let those sons of bitches getcha.” Laughter ensued.
Later that day, on the telephone, Nixon told Hoover to do anything it took to find a pair of Black Liberation Army snipers who had killed two New York City police officers. “The national security information we seek is unlimited,” said Nixon. “Okay? And you’ll tell the Attorney General that’s what I’ve suggested—well, ordered—and you do it. Okay? Don’t you agree with this?”
“I agree with it thoroughly,” Hoover said.
“By God, let’s get these bastards,” the president said.
“I’ll go all out on the intelligence on this thing,” Hoover responded.
“Go in with everything you’ve got,” Nixon said. “Surveillance, electronic and everything.” The president invoked the mantra of national security; Hoover responded ritually.
Two weeks later, The New York Times began to publish the Pentagon Papers, a top secret history of the Vietnam War. The papers had been purloined by Daniel Ellsberg, who had worked on the study as a civilian analyst for the Defense Department. He had become a dedicated antiwar activist, and he had been trying to leak the study for many months. Hoover and Sullivan quickly identified Ellsberg as the prime suspect.
On June 17, Haldeman told the president that he thought the Brookings Institution, a think tank in Washington, might have files that could serve as evidence against Ellsberg. Nixon leaped at the idea of stealing them. “Do you remember Huston’s plan? Implement it,” said the president. “Goddamn it, get in and get those files. Blow the safe and get it.”
Nixon wanted political intelligence so badly that he created his own secret squad of burglars and wiretappers. He authorized the creation of a secret White House unit that had the capability to conduct those kinds of missions. The group was nicknamed the Plumbers, because in the beginning they sought to plug the leaks that plagued the president. They would carry out black-bag jobs, wiretaps, and disinformation campaigns on his behalf.
Their mastermind was a strange kind of genius named G. Gordon Liddy. He had spent five years in Hoover’s FBI, from 1957 to 1962, rising to the rank of a supervisor at headquarters, where he had learned the dark arts of COINTELPRO. Liddy was installed in a cover job as general counsel for the Committee to Re-elect the President, whose chairman was John Mitchell. He drew up plans, which he presented in person in the office of the attorney general, to spend $1 million on secret agents who would kidnap antiwar leaders and spirit them off to Mexico, entrap liberal politicians with prostitutes working out of bugged houseboats, plant informants inside the campaigns of Nixon’s opponents, and wiretap the Democratic Party apparatus for the 1972 presidential campaign. Mitchell disapproved of kidnapping and blackmail—in retrospect, he said, he should have thrown Liddy out the window—but the espionage elements of the plan survived.
Liddy bungled them from beginning to end. His first mission was breaking into the office of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist, where he failed to find defamatory files. His last mission, nine months later, was bugging the Democratic Party headquarters at the Watergate, where he and his confreres, all former agents of the FBI and the CIA, were captured.
“Why Watergate?” said the FBI’s Ed Miller, a veteran of many a black-bag job, who would soon rise to succeed Sullivan as third in command at the Bureau. “Because of Sullivan’s influence on the White House … They became enamored with surreptitious entries as being a gangbuster investigative technique. And that’s when the White House decided to create their own.”
If Hoover would not do the dirty work the president wanted done, Nixon would have to do it himself.
“RAISE HOLY HELL”
The president created the Plumbers because he thought Hoover had lost the will to conduct political warfare. Many of the elements of the bill of impeachment drawn up against Nixon three years later grew out of his frustrations with the FBI, his thirst for the secrets Hoover no longer supplied, and the bugging and burglary that followed.
The Pentagon Papers case was the breaking point. Ellsberg, after going underground, surrendered on June 28, 1971. The FBI had to make a case, under the Espionage Act of 1917, that could send him to prison for the rest of his life. But “Hoover refused to investigate,” Nixon said. “That’s why we conducted the investigation over here. It was as simple as that.”
The plot to remove J. Edgar Hoover started the next day.
The denouement began with a “bizarre story,” as Nixon recounted it: “Edgar Hoover refused to investigate because Marx—Marx’s daughter was married to that son-of-a-bitch Ellsberg.” The father-in-law of the son-of-a-bitch was not Karl Marx, nor Groucho Marx, as Nixon pointed out, but Louis Marx, a wealthy toy manufacturer who contributed every year to a Christmas charity run by Hoover. He was officially listed at headquarters as a friend of the FBI. Sulli
van and his intelligence chief, Charles Brennan, decided that Marx had to be interviewed in the Ellsberg case. He was ready to testify against his son-in-law. Hoover said no. But the interview went ahead. Hoover summarily removed Brennan as chief of the Intelligence Division.
Enraged, Sullivan tried to organize a revolt among the leaders of the FBI. The White House and the attorney general heard within hours about his fury. Mitchell told the president on June 29 that a revolution was brewing in the Bureau. “In terms of discipline, Hoover is right. In terms of his decision, he was wrong,” Nixon told Mitchell. “He just cannot—and I really feel that you have to tell him this—he cannot, with my going tomorrow to address the FBI graduation, and also with the Ellsberg case being the issue—he cannot take anything which causes dissension within the FBI ranks. It’s just going to raise holy hell. They’ll say, ‘This crotchety old man did it again,’ see. That’s my feeling about it.”
Mitchell replied: “Well, I don’t think there’s any doubt about it, Mr. President. I think this might be the last straw as far as he’s concerned.”
Nixon said: “You tell him, ‘I’ve talked to the President and, Edgar, he doesn’t want to embarrass you in a disciplinary matter where he has overruled the director, but he feels very strongly. He’s coming over there to the FBI, you know, and after all, we—and he knows that discipline is important, but he feels very strongly that we must not have the Ellsberg thing be a reason for dissension in the Bureau. That could raise holy hell.’ Could that be all right?”