by Master of Deceit: J. Edgar Hoover;America in the Age of Lies
J. Edgar Hoover truly understood the power of filing. Every action undertaken by FBI agents was described, recorded, and explained. Hoover needed to know, and have a defense for, absolutely everything that went on in his agency. But the fact that his eyes were everywhere did not mean the outside world was permitted the same sight.
As far back as the 1920s, Hoover had set up a raft of discrete filing systems so that everything he needed to know would flow to him but would be hidden from outsiders. According to New York congressman Emanuel Celler, Hoover had a file “on every member of Congress and every member of the Senate.” Whenever a senator drank too much and had a brush with the law, whenever a representative checked into a hotel room with a woman who wasn’t his wife, whenever rumors swirled about a powerful man who was attracted to men, Hoover found out and noted the details on a file card. Reports like this were called Summary Memoranda and were kept in sealed envelopes. Since they were not part of the regular FBI record system, Hoover could truthfully say that the Bureau kept no files on politicians. He also kept track of other sexual material — for example, pornographic books, films, and records. These were placed in an Obscene File, which was kept in Hoover’s office and also not listed in the public files.
FBI agents mastered the art of the “black-bag job,” which meant breaking into the office of a person or organization to plant a microphone or to rifle through notebooks, diaries, and calendars. These undercover actions violated the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution, which protects against “unreasonable searches.” As a result, they were recorded in a file titled Do Not File. That way, if an inquisitive outsider asked for damaging files, they would not exist. How could investigators ask for something they had no way of knowing about? Some illegal acts were described in files that were destroyed every six months, but an “executive summary” of the now-missing files was kept separately, in a Confidential File. There was even a third level of file: the Personal and Confidential, files that Hoover’s loyal secretary hurried to shred just after he died.
Hoover gathered secrets the way Gollum in The Lord of the Rings pursues the ring — they were his “precious.” In time his men would add new methods of illegal surveillance, such as planting listening devices in private rooms and intercepting telegrams or steaming open letters to read people’s correspondence.
Only Hoover and his most trusted men knew what the many secret reports actually contained — which set up yet another layer of deception. None of their snooping, legal or illegal, turned up proof that the Nazis were behind the America First Committee. In fact, agents discovered that the committee was trying to steer clear of extremists and had no foreign backing. As obnoxious as the beliefs and arguments of the AFC were to those eager to confront Hitler, it was a political pressure group legally exercising its right to speak. Hoover hid those reports and instead continued to feed the president bits of negative information about his political enemies. Not only did the FBI gather information illegally; it also lied about what it discovered. Hoover’s goal, and thus that of his extremely loyal lieutenants, was to please the president while extending the Bureau’s secret power. As 1941 neared its end and war loomed, the FBI was like a tree: its leaves turned to the warm sun of presidential approval, its roots extending ever farther into the underground soil.
From 1936 on into the war years, danger performed its magic. Because America faced such real threats, Hoover gained vastly more power. He was visible as an image of the Protector of the Law, yet invisibly, behind the scenes, he could bend, break, or ignore the law. That combination of patriotic propaganda and covert abuse is extremely dangerous. Hoover figured out how to violate the rights of anyone he chose while simultaneously recording everything and hiding anything that could endanger him. By marrying this carefully plotted structure of lawbreaking and deceit with his systematic policy of collecting Washington secrets, Hoover gained a stranglehold on the country. In the name of the law, he was outside the law. And that was only one layer of his dark power.
This memo, now available on the FBI website, details how files called “June,” which mentioned “confidential investigative techniques,” were to be taken out of the regular filing system and housed only in abstracts. The memo cautions that access to the abstracts must be carefully controlled, since they are “most revealing.”
Hoover kept refining the public-relations formula he had crafted in the Gangster Era: whispering campaigns to undermine rivals combined with ever more books, articles, radio shows, and movies telling his story. He kept a list of friendly newspaper columnists, headed by Walter Winchell, who served as his eyes and ears. In turn, the director gave them useful tidbits of information to use against their rivals and enemies. He shaped the media through his backdoor favors and by parceling out his vast store of secrets. Then he reached out to conservative organizations such as the American Legion, once again relying on them to pass back tips, and feeding them news about the Communist menace. Everywhere he went, he spread the message: Be afraid. Be on guard. Spies lurk all around. The FBI is your protector, for only we see everything; only we can outspy the spies.
In the late 1930s, Hoover began to speak out publicly, sharing his dark vision of an America under threat. One of Hoover’s best biographers thinks a personal tragedy may have darkened the director’s mood. For in 1938, his mother — his companion, the person with whom he had shared a home his entire life — died. Perhaps in some way, Annie’s death freed him, for Hoover finally moved out of his childhood home and bought a new house in a better part of town. But in another way, his only truly intimate bond — his emotional umbilical chord — snapped. Cartha DeLoach, his longtime ally, was sure that when Annie died, “Hoover’s capacity to feel deeply for other human beings” was buried with her.
Hoover kept a photograph of his mother on his desk — just visible here behind the small lamp and pens. Her death, in 1938, may have ended his only deep emotional bond with another person.
From the late 1930s on, liberated by his understanding with FDR, driven perhaps by his own isolation, Hoover began his crusade against Communists, their “fellow travelers,” their allies, and what he saw as their foolish friends.
There was, though, one group that was even more deceptive in its public statements than the FBI, and it was vastly more ruthless in its private actions: the Soviet Communists. The Communists were like a mirror image of Hoover and the FBI, but exaggerated to a grotesque and deadly degree. Hoover was often much more insightful than others about just how false-faced, calculating, and heartless the Soviet leader, Josef Stalin, could be. Perhaps he understood his enemy so well because he saw a glimpse of himself in that distant reflection.
FACT: In 1932, Josef Stalin, general secretary of the Soviet Communist Party, became focused on building up industry and needed to buy machines from other countries. In order to get money, he decided to sell off the wheat crop grown in the Ukraine, which was then part of Soviet Russia. But he would have wheat to sell to foreigners only if he took it away from those who grew the grain and lived on the bread. Stalin hoarded and then exported so much wheat that approximately five million Ukrainians starved to death.
FACT: The Battle of Stalingrad, which lasted from August 1942 to February 1943, was a turning point of World War II. The Soviets lost perhaps a million soldiers defending the city, while some forty thousand civilians were killed in just one week. But by taking the immense losses, holding the city, and destroying the invading German army, the Soviets greatly weakened the Nazis, making the Allied victory possible.
THE INSIDE STORY: The scale of death and destruction in the Soviet Union between 1930 and 1945 is beyond imagining. On the one hand, Stalin’s forced famine in the Ukraine and his Great Terror killed millions. Some scholars consider the reign of death he inflicted on his own people comparable to Hitler’s Holocaust. On the other hand, the Red Army accepted staggering losses in its determination to hold off and then defeat the Nazis. Depending on your point of view, you could see the Soviet Communists as t
he most callous murderers or the most self-sacrificing heroes. For many Ukrainian Americans, Stalin’s murders were the ultimate crimes, and anti-Communism became a crusade. For many Jewish Americans, the Soviet role in fighting Hitler was the ultimate heroism, and anti-Communism was another form of anti-Semitism.
The siege of Stalingrad. The 2001 movie Enemy at the Gates tells a fictionalized version of the story based on a real duel between rival snipers.
By 1928, Josef Stalin (an invented name meaning “man of steel”) had replaced Lenin as the head of the Soviet Union. Then, starting in 1936, something shifted in Stalin’s mind. He became fearful, which forged his determination to find the “enemies of the working class” and “grind them down without stopping, without flagging.” He meant exactly what he said. Stalin began to arrest, torture, convict, and murder his fellow Soviet citizens — and not just any old Communists. He set out to eliminate — that is, kill — the heroes of the 1917 Revolution, the very leaders who had been closest to Lenin. “We shall annihilate every one of these enemies,” Stalin thundered, “even if he is an Old Bolshevik. We shall annihilate him and his relatives, his family. Any who in deed or in thought, yes, in thought, attacks the unity of the socialist state will be mercilessly crushed by us. We shall exterminate all enemies to the very last man, and also their families and relatives.”
Stalin’s murder campaign is known as the Great Terror or the “purge trials,” since he was eliminating those he did not like from the Party. Those trials were a death sentence for the Americans who had rushed off to Russia to build the workers’ state.
As Stalin forced former heroes of the Soviet Union to make false confessions, his government erased them from the historical record, even scrubbing them out of photographs. Nikolai Yezhov was extremely loyal to Stalin and helped organize his murder campaign. But in 1940, when Stalin no longer found Yezhov useful, he was executed, and so no longer deserved to appear next to the Soviet leader.
By 1938, school in Soviet Russia was no longer about calling classmates “comrade” and reading Mark Twain. Students were praised if they turned in their parents to the police, to be imprisoned or executed. Teenagers were taught to admire fourteen-year-old Pavlik Morozov, who told the police that his father was secretly keeping more than his share of grain. Young Communists competed to expose enemies of the state. And no one seemed more like a traitor to Communism than an American.
Pavlik Morozov was treated as a hero in the Soviet Union for turning his father in to the police to be executed, though he himself was soon murdered. Teenagers were encouraged to use him as their example and guide.
We met the Abolins when they left America to move to the Workers’ Paradise (see chapter 8). Lucy Abolin’s brothers and her father were handed over to the authorities, then executed. So-called trials would take ten minutes or less, and there was no appeal. No one in Russia would dare to disagree with a court verdict, because that would mean his or her own death sentence. Lucy’s mother was sent off to a prison camp, where she, too, died.
Eliminating Americans was also a fine way to harvest documents. The Americans who had come to the Soviet Union to build Communism were asked — and often coerced — to give up their passports. This made it much harder for those who tired of Communism to leave. And as the Americans were executed, the government built up its hoard of passports to hand out to spies sent to America under false names.
Stalin’s campaign of murder took approximately two million lives. But some Communists simply could not admit that the Soviets could be so vile. Paul Robeson was a great American singer, actor, and activist who was also a member of the American Communist Party. Though he never admitted that in public, he made no secret of his admiration for the Soviet Union. Robeson, who was said to be fluent in some twelve languages, would sing to miners in Wales, to factory workers in Russia, and to May Day crowds in America with the same booming bass voice, the same all-encompassing embrace. Listen to him sing, moving easily from Chinese to Russian to a black spiritual to Yiddish to a slightly amended English version of the “Ode to Joy,” from the end of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, and you cannot help sharing his vision of solidarity among all the peoples of the world.
Robeson was in Russia during the Great Terror. In a few cases, he did what he could to protect someone, to save a life. But when he was questioned about the deaths taking place all around him, he lied, denying what he knew to be true. Paul Robeson Jr. was in Russia with his father and could not help noticing that friends and their families were disappearing. In one instance, he confronted his father, saying, “We all knew he was innocent, and you never said a word.” Paul Sr. felt that the cause of the people, the cause of Communism, was too important. He could not risk giving ammunition to its enemies. “Sometimes,” he told his son, “great injustices may be inflicted on the minority when the majority is in the pursuit of a great and just cause.”
Paul Robeson was just what this picture suggests — a larger-than-life man who sang for, spoke for, and believed in working people. Unfortunately, his strong beliefs made him unable to be truthful about what he saw going on in the Soviet Union.
The “great injustices” that left a trail of corpses and blood through the Soviet Union created the first of a series of crises for American Communists. Would they, like Paul Robeson, defend the cause either by denying Stalin’s crimes or, worse, by arguing that the millions of imprisoned or murdered Russians deserved their fate? Or would they break with Moscow, the homeland of the Communist ideal? In the name of science, Communism had turned into the most repressive religion, complete with its own Inquisition.
Stalin’s drive to eliminate the heroes of 1917, followed by the reports of untold millions of deaths, forced American Communists into a stark choice: total commitment or total rejection. By 1937, one American Communist who had been such a believer in revolution that he was spying for the Soviets lost faith in the cause. And then on August 23, 1939, “Carl,” as he called himself, received the most horrifying news: Stalin had signed a deal with Hitler. They agreed not to fight each other and, instead, to carve up Poland between them. For American leftists still wrestling with what to think of the Great Terror, this was the last straw. Anyone who had passed secrets on to Russia now knew that information might well be shared with Hitler. It was one thing to feel you were supporting the motherland of Communism; it was quite another to think you were spying for the Nazis. Carl approached FDR and the FBI, trying to pass on word of the spy cell he had helped to run in Washington. For the moment, no one would listen. But Carl’s story was the hint of larger, deeper, shifts that were beginning to take place. Some Party members were losing faith, some allies of the Party were pulling away, and some who had felt bullied and intimidated by the Party were storing up their resentments. The Party of the future was becoming the mistake of the past. Hoover’s moment to turn his fire against Communism was coming — but first there was a war to win.
December 7, 1941, is a watershed date that every American should know, the day the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor propelled America into World War II. But you could make the case that the more significant date in that same year was June 22. That was the day on which Hitler broke his alliance with Stalin and invaded Russia. In an instant, Russia went from being the Nazis’ oil supplier to a crucial ally of Britain and the United States. Indeed, Russia took the brunt of the Nazi attack: while some three hundred thousand American soldiers would be killed during the war, Russia lost approximately nine million soldiers and perhaps nineteen million civilians. Russia gave everything it had to defeat the Nazis.
You can forgive American leftists and Communists for a moment of whiplash; they went from having to defend Stalin’s pact with Hitler to announcements of U.S.-U.S.S.R. solidarity. The sudden warming of relations between Moscow and Washington was good news for Soviet spies. Americans who passed information on to Soviet handlers could once again feel they were helping an ally, a close cousin in the fight against fascism. But Hoover did not trust the Russians
. Convincing the public that it was safe under the watchful eyes of the FBI was one of his main goals during the war.
Hoover’s first big opportunity began in the dead of night on June 13, 1942. John Cullen, a Coast Guardsman patrolling a beach on the far eastern tip of Long Island, New York, noticed four men battling the waves to land a raft. According to The FBI Story, one of the men looked directly at Cullen and snarled, “How old are you? Do you have a father and mother? I don’t want to kill you. You don’t know what this is all about. Why don’t you forget it? Here is some money. Go out and have yourself a good time.”
Cullen knew something was very wrong. One of the men had started to speak in German. Looking out at the water, Cullen could just discern a long, thin object that could be the ridgeline of a submarine. Were the Nazis invading? The Guardsman managed to get away and rushed off to tell his superiors — who at first didn’t believe him. Eventually, the Coast Guard went back to the beach, where they found explosives, blasting caps, and even German uniforms buried in the sand. But by then the four men — who were indeed Nazis sent to America to blow up bridges and spread fear — had taken the first train to New York City. By noon, Hoover learned that four saboteurs were on the loose somewhere, perhaps in America’s largest and most vulnerable city.