Manufacturing Hysteria

by Jay Feldman

  The Miscellaneous M Unit’s method was to extract “confessions” from suspects—a refusal to cooperate was considered tantamount to an admission of “guilt”—and then threaten to reveal their secrets unless they cooperated and named others. In the vast majority of cases, there were no hearings. As the State Department security officer Peter Szluk, who referred to himself as “the hatchet man,” later boasted, “Hearings … what the hell for? That was a waste of time! … Szluk says the son of a bitch is a queer, out he goes!”51

  Any untoward suspicion—of political or sexual deviance—was duly reported, as workers rushed to inform on their colleagues. “Every allegation is now being investigated,” pledged McLeod.52

  In all, close to a thousand State Department employees were dismissed for “sex perversion” during the Cold War years. In The Lavender Scare, David K. Johnson estimates that figure to be one-fifth of the total number of homosexuals who lost their government jobs in that time.

  Always one to sense which way the wind was blowing, J. Edgar Hoover had jumped on the bandwagon in June 1951, instituting the FBI’s own Sex Deviates program, which began by providing government officials with all “information concerning allegations” of homosexuality of both “present and past employees.”53*

  By 1954, the FBI was also providing information to other law-enforcement agencies, as well as to institutions of higher learning.

  The scapegoating of gays was carried out despite there having been, as Stewart and Joseph Alsop (the latter himself a homosexual) wrote, “not a single case of actual subversion in all the State Department’s security firings—and it is doubtful if there was one such case throughout the Government.”54

  Nativism and xenophobia also came into play during the Cold War. In a systematic rerun of the Depression-era scapegoating of Mexicans and Mexican-Americans, the Eisenhower administration instituted Operation Wetback in July 1954. The program was designed to crack down on the large numbers of illegal immigrants in the southwestern states who formed the cheap-labor backbone of the region’s agricultural industry. Under Operation Wetback, police officers and Border Patrol agents made sweeps of Mexican-American barrios, stopping “Mexican-looking” individuals on the street and requiring them to produce identification. The program caused a storm of protest on both sides of the border, and it was abandoned in the fall, but not before more than half a million people, many of them the U.S.-born children of illegal aliens (and therefore American citizens), were either deported or “voluntarily” repatriated. What had taken the better part of a decade in the 1930s was accomplished in less than six months in 1954.

  Meanwhile, the surveillance game had a new player. The Central Intelligence Agency—created by the 1947 National Security Act as the successor to the Office of Strategic Services, which had coordinated intelligence activities during World War II—was established to “collect intelligence through human sources and by other appropriate means.”55 The NSA specifically stated that the “Agency shall have no police, subpoena, or law enforcement powers or internal security functions,” but all too soon the CIA was deeply into the business of spying on U.S. citizens.

  In February 1953, with the knowledge and consent of U.S. postal authorities, the agency began keeping track of all correspondence sent between the United States and the Soviet Union that passed through the New York postal facilities. A 1975 Senate investigation of the CIA found that while the ostensible purpose of this operation was to give U.S. intelligence agencies information about Soviet intelligence activities, it gradually grew to encompass much wider parameters. By the time of the Vietnam War, the program was targeting domestic dissenters and war protesters, and its main purpose had become bolstering the FBI’s internal security functions.

  When the CIA first approached postal authorities with the proposal for the project, it was presented as being only to examine the outsides of pieces of mail, but early on, agents started secretly opening a small number of letters, reading their contents, and then resealing them. That this was the intent from the start is spelled out by the July 1952 internal memo proposing the program. “Once our unit was in position,” says the memo, “its activities and influence could be extended gradually, so as to secure from this source every drop of potential information available. At the outset, however, as far as the Post Office is concerned, our mail target could be the securing of names and addresses for investigation and possible further contact.”56

  By the end of 1955, eight agents were working full-time on mail interception, and several others were participating on a part-time basis. A November memo noted that the opening of mail was being carried on without the knowledge or approval of postal officials. While the memo stated that any disclosure of this activity would be likely to cause “serious public reaction”—perhaps even a congressional inquiry—it also confidently maintained that “any problem arising could be satisfactorily handled.”57

  There is no doubt that the CIA was fully aware of the illegality of the program, as internal memos indicate an ongoing concern with what might follow if the operation were discovered. In February 1962, a memo from the deputy chief of counterintelligence acknowledged that “a flap would put us [the project] out of business immediately and give rise to grave charges of criminal misuse of the mail by government agencies.” If the program did come to light, however, “it should be relatively easy to ‘hush up’ the entire affair, or to explain that it consists of legal mail activities conducted by the Post Office at the request of authorized Federal Agencies … [I]t might become necessary, after the matter has cooled off during an extended period of investigation, to find a scapegoat to blame for the unauthorized tampering with the mails.”58

  By 1959, the CIA was opening 13,000 pieces of mail a year. The New York City project continued until 1973, and in its final year alone CIA agents handled 4.35 million pieces of mail, examining the outsides of 2.3 million of them, photographing the exteriors of 33,000, and opening 8,700. Mail interception was also carried out for shorter periods of time in San Francisco, New Orleans, and Hawaii.

  In 1975, a Senate investigation of the CIA found that the interceptions were “illegal and improper.” Even the simple examination of envelopes as carried out was against the law. As the Senate report noted, “Mail cover operations (examining and copying of envelopes only) are legal when carried out in compliance with postal regulations on a limited and selective basis involving matters of national security. The New York mail intercept did not meet these criteria.”59

  Moreover, such activity was in direct contravention of the CIA’s charter. “The nature and degree of assistance given by the CIA to the FBI in the New York mail project,” says the Senate report, “indicate that the primary purpose eventually became participation with the FBI in internal security functions. Accordingly, the CIA’s participation was prohibited under the National Security Act.”60

  In conclusion, the report leaves no doubt about the legality of the mail-opening operation: “The CIA’s domestic mail opening programs were unlawful. United States statutes specifically forbid opening the mail.”61

  All told, the surveillance state underwent an enormous expansion during the Cold War years. In 1958, an independent study estimated that 20 percent of all employed Americans had been subjected to some type of loyalty or security screening.62 This included about fourteen million people in the federal civil service, the military, the Atomic Energy Commission, the private sector associated with defense contracts, and at seaports. In The Great Fear, David Caute estimates that in the federal government alone, approximately twenty-seven hundred employees were dismissed, and twelve thousand more resigned between 1947 and 1956.63

  The witch-hunt investigations were carried out with the sworn testimony of several dozen former Communists who were paid professional informers. One of the most prominent of the group, Harvey Matusow, later wrote a book titled False Witness, in which he detailed his own perjured testimony and that of others.

  The second great red scare was th
e most intense and protracted period of political repression in the history of the United States. The persecution of Communists brought about the demise of the Communist Party, although, as Caute observes, “no plausible evidence ever emerged to prove that the CP drew up contingency plans to sabotage vital industries and lines of communication in the event of war. The government took a sledgehammer to squash a gnat.”64 In so doing, the government was not only eliminating the gnat but also attempting to prevent the spread of the gnat’s “subversive” ideas. It was those ideas—that is, a powerful critique of the social inequities of the capitalist system—rather than any tangible political power, that made the Communist Party so threatening to the established order.

  Once again, in a time of crisis, the government found it expedient to scapegoat minority groups—in this case political and sexual minorities—manufacturing hysteria over the supposed danger they posed, and then using that hysteria as a justification for a crackdown on civil liberties and a suppression of dissent. And once again, the American people fell in line with the government, as liberals and conservatives, Democrats and Republicans all joined in the scapegoating.

  The second great red scare had subsided by the end of the 1950s, but the undemocratic methods used to crush the Communist Party and to hound gays would continue to be used against political minority groups for another decade and a half.

  *There has been a great deal written by Hoover biographers and FBI historians concerning the matter of Hoover’s sexuality. The question of whether or not he was a homosexual has not been conclusively answered.

  CHAPTER 14

  There Are No Rules

  In July 1954, President Eisenhower asked the retired Air Force lieutenant general James H. Doolittle to chair a committee that would “undertake a comprehensive study of the covert activities of the Central Intelligence Agency” and make recommendations aimed at improving “the conduct of these operations.”1 The Doolittle Committee’s secret report, which was presented to Eisenhower on October 19 and remained classified for more than twenty years, ended with what a 1970s Senate investigative committee called a “chilling” conclusion. “It is now clear,” stated the Doolittle Report,

  that we are facing an implacable enemy whose avowed objective is world domination by whatever means and at whatever cost. There are no rules in such a game. Hitherto acceptable norms of human conduct do not apply. If the United States is to survive, longstanding American concepts of “fair play” must be reconsidered. We must develop effective espionage and counterespionage services and must learn to subvert, sabotage and destroy our enemies by more clever, more sophisticated and more effective means than those used against us.2

  In dealing with American Communists during the 1950s, the FBI and other agencies conducting domestic intelligence readily embraced the mind-set expressed in the Doolittle Report. Eisenhower himself expressed no hesitation about employing such an approach in the battle against domestic Communism—when he once reprimanded the chief justice of the Supreme Court, Earl Warren, for the high court’s decisions upholding the constitutional rights of homegrown Communists, and Warren in turn asked him, “What would you do with Communists in America?” Eisenhower matter-of-factly stated, “I would kill the S.O.B.s.”3

  In defending the roundups of 1919–20, Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer had established the precedent that law-abiding political dissidents were not entitled to the protections of the Constitution when he wrote that the Justice Department “decided that there could be no nice distinctions drawn between the theoretical ideals of the radicals and their actual violations of our national laws.”4 The same principle was also enforced against Communists during the Cold War.

  During the 1960s and early 1970s, this approach was applied not only toward Communists but against virtually every other dissident strain in American life, as the Cold War state of mind continued to permeate American public life. Intelligence and law-enforcement agencies came to regard any individual or group that challenged or even merely questioned the status quo as “the enemy” and, as such, deemed them fair game for the most underhanded and unethical sorts of dirty tricks. By this logic, peaceful American citizens were transformed into the equivalent of foreign combat troops or foreign espionage/sabotage agents, thereby justifying the use of whatever legal, illegal, and extralegal methods were necessary to defeat them.

  Such procedures were carried out primarily by the FBI, the CIA, the National Security Agency, the Internal Revenue Service, and Army Intelligence, but also to varying degrees by the Secret Service; the Civil Service Commission; the Immigration and Naturalization Service; the Departments of State, Justice, the Treasury, and Health, Education, and Welfare; the Post Office Department; the Office of Economic Opportunity; and Presidents Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon.

  According to the 1970s Senate committee that investigated these government activities, such methods were “used to disrupt the lawful political activities of individual Americans and groups to discredit them, using dangerous and degrading tactics which are abhorrent in a free and decent society … The tactics used against Americans often risked and sometimes caused serious emotional, economic, or physical damage. Actions were taken which were designed to break up marriages, terminate funding or employment, and encourage gang warfare between violent rival groups.”5 Abuses by the FBI alone included committing extortion and mail and wire fraud, inciting violence, and sending obscene materials through the mail.

  The new offensive against First Amendment rights was initially proposed on August 28, 1956, when Alan Belmont, head of the FBI’s Internal Security Section, sent a memo to the agency official L. V. Boardman, saying that the FBI’s already existing efforts to discredit the Communist Party and its leaders were about to become “an all-out disruptive attack on the CP from within.”6

  At the time, party membership had fallen below five thousand, about fifteen hundred of whom were FBI agents and informers, and as a letter from J. Edgar Hoover to the presidential special assistant Dillon Anderson a year earlier clearly indicates, the bureau did not consider actual espionage or sabotage by the CP to be a danger. On the contrary, Hoover maintained, the only threats the party posed were “influence over the masses, ability to create controversy leading to confusion and disunity, penetration of specific channels in American life where public opinion is molded, and espionage and sabotage potential.”7 In other words, when the FBI began its new “counterintelligence” program, it was concerned not with imminent illegal actions by the Communist Party but with any influence the party might have on the ideas and the thinking of Americans.

  Belmont’s memo lists several disruptive actions the FBI was actively working on and concludes with the assurance: “The Internal Security Section is giving this program continuous thought and attention and we are remaining alert for situations which might afford additional opportunities for further disruption of the CP, USA.”8

  The new plan, called “Counterintelligence Program–Communist Party USA,” received Hoover’s enthusiastic approval. While various disruptive tactics had been directed at the CP in the past, COINTELPRO-CPUSA was the first structured, methodical course of action in this realm and, as such, ushered in a new and devastating era of covert attacks on political dissidents.

  COINTELPRO-CPUSA was undertaken without the knowledge or consent of the attorney general, the president, or Congress and from its inception was governed by Hoover’s obsession with secrecy. The attorney general and the White House were not informed until nearly two years later, when Hoover revealed in a May 1958 memo how select informants had been instructed to provoke contentious discussions on hot-button issues within the party, and how the bureau had carried out anonymous mailings to certain CP members who might be swayed by anti-Communist propaganda. These and other disruptive actions stimulated acrimonious debates, fomented suspicions and jealousies, and “increased factionalism at all levels of the organization.”9 The memo boasted that party leaders were unable to decide whether these action
s were initiated by the government or by dissidents within the party.

  What the memo did not spell out, however, were other commonly employed tactics, which is hardly surprising because many of them were illegal. The FBI used anonymous letters and telephone calls, for example, to spread defamatory information—usually untrue—to spouses and colleagues, including accusations of homosexuality, adultery, and sexually transmitted disease. Another common bureau practice was to feed news stories to “friendly” reporters and columnists, accusing specific party members—without evidence—of a variety of criminal activities, including embezzlement, fraud, and bigamy. The FBI also notified friends, neighbors, employers, co-workers, business associates, and neighborhood shopkeepers that an individual was a Communist, causing frequent losses of employment, income, and social contacts. In many instances, the bureau gave the names and addresses of underground CP members to the Internal Revenue Service, resulting in widespread harassment audits of these individuals. Hoover personally approved all of these actions.

  One of the most effective ploys was called “putting the snitch jacket” on somebody. This technique played upon the ubiquitous fears of informers within the ranks, by planting “evidence,” or through anonymous letters and phone calls asserting that a certain individual was a stool pigeon. Placing the snitch jacket on someone served multiple purposes, including deflecting suspicion from actual FBI agents and informants, crippling the party’s effectiveness by eliminating capable leaders, and exploiting existing rifts by intensifying dissension among rival factions. While not illegal, the gambit was nonetheless morally and ethically questionable, resulting as it often did in denunciation and expulsion from the party, which brought the loss of employment and social ostracism of the victim and the victim’s family. In a number of these cases, those accused committed suicide or died of stress-related heart attacks.