by Curt Gentry
On December 5, 1950, the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, presided over by Judge Learned Hand, on hearing Boudin’s appeal in the Coplon cases, unanimously set aside both the Washington and the New York convictions. The Washington conviction was reversed because of the wiretapping of privileged conversations between Coplon and her original attorney, Archibald Palmer; the New York conviction was set aside on two grounds: the illegality of the arrest; and the government’s refusal, supported by the U.S. District Court, to turn over the products of the illegal wiretapping.†
On the twenty-seventh of that same month, Congress, at the urging of FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, passed legislation giving federal agents the power to make warrantless arrests in cases involving espionage, sabotage, and other major crimes.
Attorneys Palmer and Boudin and Judges Ryan, Sylvester, and Hand earned permanent places on J. Edgar Hoover’s enemies list. As for Coplon, Hoover spent seventeen years savoring his revenge.
Although Hand’s decision that the arrest was illegal meant that the materials in Coplon’s handbag couldn’t be introduced into evidence, and without them the Justice Department had no case and therefore no intention of retrying Coplon, Hoover persuaded the attorney general to refuse to dismiss the indictments.
As for what this meant, Coplon expressed it best herself, in a December 22, 1984, letter to the Nation, following an erroneous statement by Harrison Salisbury to the effect that she had fled the country following her conviction.
After denouncing Salisbury’s charge as “an outrageous lie and careless editing,” she continued, “In the thirty-four years since my trials, I have lived in New York City continuously, raised a family of four,* worked and been active in my community. For seventeen of those years, until my case was dismissed in 1967, I remained on $40,000 no-interest cash bail raised by my family (a considerable amount in those days). During those years I was not permitted to vote, drive a car or leave the Southern or Eastern Districts of New York. Flee the country indeed! I couldn’t cross the Hudson River to attend the unveiling of my father’s gravestone.”
Coplon’s indictment was finally dismissed by Attorney General Ramsey Clark—whose father, Tom Clark, had been AG during the Coplon trials—during the administration of President Lyndon Baines Johnson, over the very strong protests of FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover.
The Coplon case resulted in many changes, all of them secret. On June 29 Hoover informed the SACs that “highly confidential” and “most secretive” sources—that is, the records of all technical surveillances—were to be kept separate from the general case files so that, as Athan G. Theoharis and John Stuart Cox have noted, they wouldn’t be “vulnerable to court-ordered discovery motions, congressional subpoenas, or requests from the Justice Department.”21
When such information was sent to FBIHQ from the field, it was to be placed in a sealed envelope marked with the code name JUNE; this then was to be placed in a second envelope, addressed to the director and marked PERSONAL AND CONFIDENTIAL.†
In early July, Hoover further amended and expanded this procedure, in another SAC letter. Agent reports containing any “sensitive” materials which if made known could cause embarrassment to the Bureau would be divided into two parts: investigative and administrative pages, with the sensitive material being placed in the latter. As an example, Hoover cited the hypothetical case of a Communist party member whose loose morals included heavy drinking and living with a known prostitute. The evidence regarding his party membership should be included in the investigative pages; the accusations regarding his loose morals, in the administrative pages. Or, in another example he cited, if, during the course of a white-slave-trafficking investigation, agents recovered “an address book containing data identifying prominent public officials…unless the names appearing therein are material to the investigation, this type of information should be placed in the administrative section.”23
But Hoover had more in mind than a hooker’s trick book. Because SAC letters, even if telexed or coded, could conceivably fall into the wrong hands, they were always followed up by a telephone call from an inspector or assistant director who transmitted orally what the director really meant.*
A list of the sensitive matters which should be restricted to the administrative pages would include the identities of informants; discrepancies in the testimony of a government witness; incriminating personal information regarding same; privileged medical records; sealed court documents; illegally obtained bank, telephone, or credit company records; IRS and census data (which, despite disclaimers to the contrary, were usually made available to the FBI on an informal basis, or by informants in the appropriate departments); and, of course, the use of any form of technical surveillance—mail openings, breakins, wiretaps, microphone installations, and the theft and decipherment of codes—and the products of such acts.
Eventually, however, some Justice Department attorneys “wised up” to these practices, and in 1951 Hoover modified the procedure, making the administrative pages “cover letters.” The former special agent G. Gordon Liddy has explained how this worked: “Instead of the report’s containing page after page of narrative, each interview was placed on a special form, called an FD-302. Only that form was given the defense,” while investigative “leads and sensitive matters were put in a ‘cover letter’ that accompanied the report but, because not considered a part of it, were withheld from the defense and the courts.”24
The more sensitive materials, however, were never seen by Justice Department attorneys or anyone outside the Bureau. These were kept separately, in field office safes, in the special file room at FBIHQ, in a “blackmail file” in the printshop, and in the files of the assistant directors and the associate director. The most sensitive of all were kept in the director’s own Official/Confidential and Personal files.
Thus, from about 1949 on, as one legacy of the Coplon case, it was no longer possible to take literally the facts as set forth in the FBI case files (including a good portion of those later released under the Freedom of Information Act). They told only part of the story, or as the Nation editor and publisher Victor Navasky put it, in critiquing the work of an author on the Hiss case, “He makes the mistake of assuming that FBI memorandums provide answers rather than clues.”25
There was still another legacy, as the former special agent Walter Sheridan has pointed out. When the supervising agent in the Coplon case testified that no wiretaps had been used in the investigation and later testimony proved otherwise, the Bureau “got badly burned.” To circumvent a recurrence, a “separation of functions” was introduced. In a case which involved wiretapping, for example, the agent who was called to the stand to testify wouldn’t be the agent, or clerk, who participated in the actual tapping, “so he could honestly say that he didn’t know the source of information.”*26
The refusal of his agents to sign affidavits stating that no wiretapping had occurred in the Coplon case must have concerned the FBI director. That one agent had committed perjury on behalf of the Bureau didn’t mean that all other agents in the future would be willing to do likewise. In this way he protected them and, of course, himself too.
Through both of the Coplon trials, the FBI had been able to keep one secret: the identity of the “confidential informant” whose lead had resulted in the identification of Judith Coplon as a probable Soviet spy. All through 1949 Meredith Gardner had patiently continued deciphering the “Venona” traffic, as the cables between the KGB in Moscow and the Soviet embassy in Washington and its consulate in New York had become known. Others of his findings now began bearing fruit. Evidence developed by the FBI led to the identification of the Soviet agent inside the Manhattan Project as a British atomic scientist, Klaus Fuchs, while the list of possible spies within the British embassy in Washington during the period 1944-45 had narrowed from five to three, with the most likely suspect being one Donald Maclean.
Because of the British connections, when the new MI-5/MI-6 representative arrived in Washington
in August 1949, to serve as liaison with both the FBI and the CIA, he was made privy to this information. Although known as Kim to his friends, who soon included Mickey Ladd of the FBI and James Jesus Angleton of the CIA, his full name was Harold Adrian Russell Philby.†
Former headquarters personnel describe the printshop in the basement of the Department of Justice Building similarly: it was the FBI’s chamber of horrors.
Ostensibly, the printing section, which was a unit of Crime Records, was responsible for publishing the annual Uniform Crime Reports, the monthly Law Enforcement Bulletin, and The Investigator, an in-house magazine, as well as the director’s speeches. But behind its always locked doors were darker secrets. One was the “blue room,” the small theater where Hoover, Tolson, and other select FBI officials watched surveillance films and pornographic movies. Another was an ultra-secure room which housed files and physical evidence—such as still prints, films, and recording tapes from especially sensitive surveillances—which the director deemed worth preserving.* And still another was the office of the man who, for more than two decades, served as the FBI’s chief blackmailer.
The FBI’s official congressional liaison was whoever was currently heading Crime Records—Lou Nichols or his successors, Cartha “Deke” DeLoach, Robert Wick, Tom Bishop. One of the congressional liaison’s duties, as Bishop bluntly put it, was “selling” hostile congressmen on “liking the FBI.”27
More often than not, this was the job of the man in the printshop, operating on oral instructions from the fifth floor.
William Sullivan explained how this worked, in an interview after he left the FBI: “The moment [Hoover] would get something on a senator he’d send one of the errand boys up and advise the senator that we’re in the course of an investigation and we by chance happened to come up with this data on your daughter. But we wanted you to know this; we realize you’d want to know it. Well, Jesus, what does that tell the senator? From that time on the senator’s right in his pocket.”28
Cartha DeLoach provided another example, when lecturing a class of some fifty senior agents called back to SOG for retraining in November 1963, the same week President Kennedy was assassinated. Asked what headquarters did with all “this memorandum stuff we put in about things we see,” DeLoach responded, “You fellows have been in the Bureau for more than ten years so I guess I can talk to you off the record. The other night we picked up a situation where this senator was seen drunk, in a hit-and-run accident, and some goodlooking broad was with him. By noon of the next day the good senator was aware that we had the information and we never had any trouble with him on appropriations since.29
Said to know more dirt on more people than any man in Washington excepting only Hoover and Tolson, the man in the printshop was the Bureau’s unofficial liaison to Congress and the other branches of government. He was also one of the most hated, and feared, men in the capital. When his name was announced by receptionists, public officials were said to turn pale with fright.
No memorandums were made of such visitations.
Wheeling, West Virginia, was, as far as the Republican National Committee was concerned, a third-rate speech stop, and so a third-string speaker, a freshman junior senator from Wisconsin, was assigned to deliver the Lincoln Day address to the Ohio County Republican Women’s Club on February 9, 1950.
“While I cannot take the time to name all of the men in the State Department who have been named as members of the Communist Party and members of a spy ring,” Joseph R. McCarthy improvised, “I have here in my hand a list of 205—a list of names that were known to the Secretary of State and who, nevertheless, are still working and shaping the policy of the State Department.”30
By the time McCarthy reached his next speech stop, Salt Lake City, the number had changed to fifty-seven and the list had been misplaced in his other bag, but it didn’t matter. The charges, carried initially by the AP wire, were already making headlines across the country.
McCarthy’s problem, in addition to his inability to recall figures, was that he had no list and no names.
On his return to Washington, he put in panicked calls to a number of friends, including the journalist Jack Anderson. McCarthy and Anderson had arrived in the capital at about the same time, McCarthy as a freshman senator, Anderson as Drew Pearson’s legman.
Ironically, Anderson owed his job to J. Edgar Hoover. Some months earlier, Hoover had privately informed his friend Drew Pearson that his chief assistant, Andrew Older, was a member of the Communist party, thus enabling Pearson to fire him before one of his rivals picked up the story. As Older’s replacement, Pearson had hired Anderson, a young reporter fresh from the Shanghai Stars and Stripes. It was a favor that Hoover would regret, literally until the day he died.
New to Washington, and unaware of how many enemies Pearson had, Anderson found McCarthy’s office “a hospitable oasis in what often seemed a desert of hostility. He knew how to make a footsore reporter feel esteemed.” Moreover, “with his gift for straightforward deviousness McCarthy had made himself available to us as a source, a purveyor of inside information about his colleagues and their secret conclaves.” McCarthy would, with Anderson listening in, even call such high-ranking senators as Robert Taft and William Knowland and ask them questions the reporter had prepared; believing they were talking in confidence to a fellow member of the club, they’d respond with answers Anderson himself could never have received. The relationship flourished. “I became a familiar in the inner sanctum of his office,” Anderson would remember, and “at my wedding in 1949 he was a prominent and engaging ornament.”
After the Wheeling speech, McCarthy called Anderson and told him he had “hit the jackpot” and had gotten hold of “one hell of an issue.” But he needed help. McCarthy knew next to nothing about communism, foreign or domestic. Earlier, seeking an issue for his 1952 reelection campaign, the senator had consulted several advisers: one had suggested increased pensions for the elderly; another championed the St. Lawrence Seaway; while the third, Father Edmund Walsh, a Georgetown University dean, had recommended the issue McCarthy finally picked, Communist infiltration of the government.
Anderson, feeling he “owed him,” without consulting his boss passed on some information from Pearson’s files, with the warning that these were unverified allegations which needed further checking; those they could prove had already been used in the column. McCarthy would, throughout his brief but spectacular career, ignore such subtle distinctions.*31
Using the argument that “the cause was on the spot,” McCarthy also appealed to Congressman Richard Nixon, who—riding high after the recent conviction of Alger Hiss—apparently gave him access to some of the files of the House Un-American Activities Committee. But most of his help came from his friend J. Edgar Hoover.
The Hoover-McCarthy friendship also dated back to 1947. Upon arriving in the capital, the freshman senator had been quick to convey his respects to the FBI director, and the pair seemed to hit it off immediately, since it wasn’t long before McCarthy was seen dining with Hoover and Tolson at Harvey’s or accompanying them to the track. As early as February 1948 Hoover extended McCarthy the honor of letting him address the graduating class of the FBI National Academy, even though Hoover already had extensive files on the senator, including allegations which, if made public, could have ended McCarthy’s career.
On returning home from his speaking tour, McCarthy called Hoover and told him he was getting a lot of attention on the Communist issue. But, he frankly admitted, he had made up the numbers as he talked (Hoover, the master statistician, advised him against using specific figures), and he asked if the FBI could give him the information to back them up.
Hoover set down the conversation in a memo, which Alan Belmont showed to William Sullivan. Since McCarthy had already proven himself irresponsible, Sullivan felt the Bureau should distance itself from the senator;† Belmont, though concerned, observed, “I don’t think there is any need in trying, and Senator McCarthy can be very use
ful to us.”34
Belmont was right on both counts. There was no changing the director’s mind—“Review the files and get anything you can for him,” Hoover had already ordered—and McCarthy would prove very useful. “McCarthy was never anything more than a tool of Mr. Hoover’s,” a former aide recalled. “He used him when he was useful and then, later, dumped him when he wasn’t.”35
Although Sullivan would protest, “We didn’t have enough evidence to show there was a single Communist in the State Department, let alone fifty-seven cases,”36 FBI agents spent hundreds of hours poring over Bureau security files and abstracting them for the senator and his staff. But Hoover’s help went far beyond that. Crime Records supplied speechwriters for McCarthy and two of his aides, Roy Cohn and G. David Schine. Lou Nichols personally took McCarthy in hand and instructed him in how to release a story just before press deadlines, so that reporters wouldn’t have time to ask for rebuttals. Even more important, he advised him to avoid the phrase “card-carrying Communist,” which usually couldn’t be proven, substituting instead “Communist sympathizer” or “loyalty risk,” which required only some affiliation, however slight—the signing of a petition or subscribing to a newspaper or magazine would do—with an organization on the attorney general’s list. (Usually McCarthy didn’t even bother with that. That a person had worked for the State Department or the government or the Army was enough to make him suspect.) When McCarthy won reelection and became chairman of the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations of the Senate Government Operations Committee, Hoover lent him ex-Communist witnesses (Chambers, Louis Budenz, John Lautner), together with summaries of what they could testify to. He also helped him pick his staff (at one point there were so many ex-agents working for McCarthy that his office was dubbed “the little FBI”), okaying the former agent Don A. Surine as his chief investigator. Although Surine had been fired from the Bureau for fraternizing with a prostitute in a Baltimore white-slave case, Hoover liked him personally and Surine, working closely, albeit secretly, with Assistant Director Mickey Ladd, could be counted on to advance the Bureau’s interests. Hoover also warned McCarthy that a number of his aides, including Roy Cohn, were said to be homosexuals, and that one, Charles Davis, had been dishonorably discharged from the U.S. Navy for homosexuality, but McCarthy treated the matter lightly even after Ed Babcock, a Wisconsin Young Republican leader who was serving on the senator’s staff, was picked up for, and pled guilty to, homosexual solicitation in Lafayette Park. To afford deniability, confidential FBI reports were reworded, then laundered, usually with military intelligence acting as the go-between. There were also name checks, hundreds of them, and, presumably, in at least some cases, mail openings, bugs, and taps.