by Curt Gentry
This alert was in writing. Hoover and Kennedy no longer spoke to each other, and Hoover would brag about snubbing him at official functions.
Despite the backbiting and mutual suspicion, however, the three men could cooperate when their aims were not in conflict.
As violence escalated in the South and the Ku Klux Klan threatened to grow more powerful, abetted by officers of the law at the local level, Kennedy wrote Johnson to suggest that the FBI employ “the techniques followed in the use of specially trained, special assignment agents in the infiltration of Communist groups.” In effect, he was advising a COINTELPRO for the Klan. And he reminded the president of what they both apparently believed: “the information gathering techniques used by the Bureau on Communist or Communist related organizations have of course been spectacularly efficient.”60
Johnson, too, wanted the FBI to take some of the heat in the frightening convulsions down South. But he didn’t come down on Hoover until after June 22, when three young civil rights workers disappeared near Philadelphia, Mississippi. The area was already notorious for arson and physical assault against blacks and whites involved in the movement.
The president sent Allen Dulles down to the state to see what the federal government should be doing. Kennedy announced that the case would be treated like a kidnapping, guaranteeing a federal presence. On June 27 Johnson’s special emissary had two recommendations. The power of the Klan had to be broken, and Hoover had to send down more agents.
The Bureau’s MIBURN, an investigation code-named for “Mississippi Burning,” began after local authorities had failed to develop any leads. About two hundred sailors from the U.S. Navy were also called in to help in the search, but, to the president’s growing consternation, nothing had been found—except one fairly persuasive indication that the three young men were dead. In a nearby swamp their car was discovered. It had been stripped and torched.
The weeks dragged on, and Johnson and Hoover were both attacked for not pursuing the investigation vigorously enough. In a dramatic public relations move, the president forced his reluctant FBI director, who had been stung by Dulles’s suggestion, to open a Bureau office in Mississippi. Hoover, veteran of many a staged news photo, had no choice but to appear on the scene in Jackson,* symbolically acting out a total FBI commitment to catching the murderers of the civil rights activists. This pose contrasted with his earlier refusals to get involved. “We’re investigators,” he had said. “Not policemen.”
Still, the mystery yielded no useful clues.
And still there were those in the nation who wondered whether Hoover was the victim of his own overblown reputation. If his agency was so infallibly professional, why couldn’t his crack agents solve a triple murder in a small town in dinky little Neshoba County, Mississippi? This was the FBI famed for tracking down the most vicious of killers, the most ingenious of embezzlers, the most dangerous of subversives, so there must be some reason why it couldn’t solve this one. Or wouldn’t.
Truth was, the FBI, harried by Hoover, who was being hounded by Johnson, turned the county upside down for forty-four days and couldn’t get anywhere. Until agents found out, or figured out, that someone they knew pretty well would blow the whistle on the killers for a payment of $30,000. He knew exactly what they’d done. He was one of them.
Nineteen men were indicted, eight convicted, for conspiring to violate the civil rights of the three young men by kidnapping and shooting them. Everyone charged belonged to the KKK, including the informant, a law officer who had worked with the FBI on the case—and known all along that the bodies had been dumped into a thirty-foot-deep hole at a dam construction site and buried under hundreds of tons of dirt by a bulldozer.
So here was the situation: the despised Robert Kennedy, the detestable Allen Dulles, and many others felt that FBI resources should be concentrated on the problem of disorder in the South. So did Lyndon Johnson, presumed author of the phrase “for an indefinite period of time,” who also wrote that he wanted his FBI director “to put people after the Klan and study it from one county to the next.”61
On August 27, responding to Hoover’s request for a feasibility study, the Domestic Intelligence Division recommended a program to “expose, disrupt and otherwise neutralize the KKK.” By September 2 the director was advising SACs that “consideration should be given to disrupting the organized activity of these groups and no opportunity should be missed to capitalize upon organizational and personal conflicts of their leadership.” This COINTELPRO was to be handled in strictest secrecy, he warned his agents.
As the “sensitive operation” went into effect, Hoover sent his characteristically long-winded memos to a succession of attorneys general. They seemed to describe the FBI’s southern operation in numbingly complete detail. They did not. The illegal COINTELPRO-White Hate activities were mentioned rarely, briefly, and vaguely. As one of the recipients of these reports, Nicholas Katzenbach, would say, Hoover “used terms of art, or euphemisms, without informing the Attorney General that they were terms of art.”62
In the field, agents resented the restrictions of the FBI Manual and lobbied for greater freedom to act—or they simply disregarded the Bureau’s few weak prohibitions about reporting on the lawful political activities of U.S. citizens. The unlawful or improper acts of the secret anti-Klan program continued to 1971, averaging about forty “actions” annually.* Seventeen KKK groups and nine others, such as the American Nazi and National States Rights parties, were targeted.
Hoover’s stamp was evident on it all. For the purpose of “discrediting and embarrassing”63 leaders of the Klan, the FBI used illegal means to procure personal tax returns and related materials. Without informing the IRS Disclosure Branch, as required by law, agents had surreptitiously gained the documents from employees of the IRS Intelligence Division. “Notional” organizations were set up by FBI informants in order to splinter the United Klans of America. One such counterfeit group attained a peak membership of 250 deluded adherents.
But the spirit of J. Edgar Hoover shone most brightly in the anonymous letters crafted to split up marriages or sunder old friendships, all in the name of “disruption” of a hate group. In at least one sense, the FBI director assumed that, beneath their sheets, Klan members were the same as American Communists: they couldn’t concentrate totally on party work with an enraged wife in the house.
And so the grand dragons and their mates were bedeviled with such crude inventions as this anonymous letter: “Yes, Mrs. A, he has been committing adultery. My menfolk say they don’t believe this but I think they do. I feel like crying. I saw her with my own eyes. They call her Ruby…I know this. I saw her strut around at a rally with her lustfilled eyes and smart aleck figure.”† The correspondent, identified as “a God-fearing klanswoman,” was in fact an FBI agent who had been advised to type the note “on plain paper in an amateurish fashion.”65
To the Bureau’s surprise, not every American citizen crumbled before this kind of onslaught. In North Carolina, Klan members received an FBI creation, supposedly from the group’s shadowy “National Intelligence Committee,” that fired the state’s grand dragon and suspended Robert Shelton, the imperial wizard. Shelton immediately complained to his local postal inspector and, apparently in good faith, to his nearest FBI office as well. Spooked, the Bureau held back a second letter until it could learn the intentions of the Post Office, whose investigators decided not to recommend any action to the Justice Department. To postal authorities the letter looked like KKK internecine warfare rather than actual mail fraud. The FBI listened without comment, or confession, and prepared to put the second letter in the mail, but someone came up with the more exciting concept of the “notional” Klaverns.
As these activities expanded under LBJ, Hoover did not feel the need to weary his bosses—Robert Kennedy, Nicholas Katzenbach, Ramsey Clark—with the details. A favorite euphemism in memos was the uninformative verb “neutralize.” Yet at least once the director buried a frank admission
in a ten-page memo, knowing that it would be overlooked even as it seemed to receive implicit approval from Attorney General Clark: “We have found that by the removal of top Klan officers and provoking scandal within the state Klan organization through our informants, the Klan in a particular area can be rendered ineffective.”66
There was no reaction from above. Although Clark later testified before a Senate committee that the COINTELPRO-White Hate actions “should be absolutely prohibited and subjected to criminal prosecution,”67 he could credibly state, as well, that he either did not read the telltale sentence above or did not read it carefully. In that regard, he was like all other attorneys general who had to deal with the tsunamis of Hoover memos.
Hoover had reason to be proud. One of his memorandums noted, under the subhead “Positive Results Achieved,” that an American Nazi had been ousted from the party after the FBI “furnished” information that led to “publicity” that he was of Jewish descent.*68 On one occasion Ohio Klansmen were discomfited to receive anonymous postcards reading, “KLANSMAN: Trying to hide your identity behind your sheet? You received this—someone KNOWS who you are!” The Cincinnati FBI office allowed as how its people had heard about the mailing, but claimed, “We don’t know who’s behind it.”69 In fact, the FBI had dropped the cards in a rural mailbox somewhere along U.S. 40, fully aware that not only the addressees but gossipy small-town postal workers would pay heed. Officially, every agent taking such actions worked under the rubric spelled out in several memos: “All recommended counterintelligence action against Klan-type and hate organizations will be required to be approved at the Seat of Government.”70
When the FBI director bragged about his accomplishments against the Klan to the White House in September 1965, he obviously thought he was on top of all COINTELPRO-White Hate activities, though he did not explain the program, of course. He did boast that his men had developed almost two thousands informants on KKK matters, penetrated each one of the fourteen existing Klan groups, and had access to top leaders in half of them. He mentioned one COINTELPRO activity by the by—thwarting a kickback scheme engineered by an insurance salesman who donated premium refunds to the Klan coffers.
Hoover’s letter also noted that his informants had helped prevent violence throughout the South by alerting the FBI to weapons caches set aside for racist plots. “I have furnished these examples to illustrate to the President the approach this Bureau is taking to meet the challenge of racial lawlessness.”71
But it cannot have been as the old man thought. Yes, agents were supposed to clear unusual actions with SOG. Yes, agents lived in fear of Washington. Even so, it would not be surprising to learn that there was more than a little creative free-lancing during the COINTELPRO-White Hate years, for the men in the field knew that Hoover wanted results. And they knew that his faith in the FBI could verge upon belief in the miraculous.
Take the Medgar Evers murder on June 12, 1963, more than a year before the COINTEL program. FBI bribes and informants uncovered names of some who had plotted to kill the NAACP’s Mississippi field secretary, but not the actual gunman. Pressured by Hoover, FBI agents decided to enlist the aid of a small-time crook arrested in the act of committing armed robbery.
The deal was simple. The robber would be allowed to “walk” if he could terrify someone into revealing the identity of Evers’s assassin. The FBI knew their man. With the help of an agent, he kidnapped a TV salesman who was a member of the White Citizens Council in Jackson. Driven through the night deep down into Louisiana bayou country, a gun digging into his ribs the whole way, the quarry was tied to a kitchen chair in a deserted safe house. As several FBI men crouched outside an open window, the hoodlum extracted one version of the killing. It didn’t play. The agents knew better. A second version didn’t get any takers, either. Finally, the robber, his Sicilian honor in doubt before his very attentive audience of government agents, rammed a .38 in the captive’s mouth and explained his intentions. Moved, the quaking salesman fingered Byron De la Beckwith, an ex-Marine who had left his 30.06 rifle at the murder site.72
Elated, Hoover would boast that the FBI Lab had used a partial fingerprint on the rifle sight to find De la Beckwith in Marine records—even though it is impossible to use a partial to identify an unknown suspect. Impossible. Did Hoover believe that his technicians had been able to overcome the limitations of nature? Did he simply not want to know what had actually happened in the field?
Either way, his agents got away with their scam, and it is not unlikely that the word went forth. The old man wants results. The old man doesn’t—or won’t—read between the lines. Just as the FBI was becoming ever more vigorously involved in actions against the Klan and civil rights leaders, in other words, the supervisors in Washington seemed farther away.
“So this meeting was called to bring together FBI agents to explore every possibility of spying upon and intimidating Dr. Martin Luther King.”73 That was Senator Walter Mondale’s summation during the Church committee hearings late in 1975. Approximately twelve years before, on December 23, 1963—a month and a day after John Kennedy was murdered—Hoover’s priorities were made clear. While others wrestled with the ambiguities surrounding the assassination, the nation’s top cops met for nine hours at SOG on a more important matter. Sullivan’s description foreshadowed the senator’s, but in the house bureaucratese: Hoover’s elite aimed to explore “avenues of approach aimed at neutralizing King as an effective Negro leader.”74
Two Atlanta agents met with Sullivan and four other SOG personnel, including the chief of the FBI’s Internal Security Section, in order to decide “how best to carry on our investigation to produce the desired results without embarrassment to the Bureau.” The “conference was of exceptional benefit,” according to a Sullivan memorandum.
The results were not unexpected. From the lengthy meeting was conceived a list of twenty-one proposals, which characterize themselves:
NUMBER ONE: Can colored Agents be of any assistance to us in the Atlanta area and, if so, how many will be needed?…
NUMBER FIVE: Does the office have contacts among newspaper people aggressive enough to be of assistance to us?…
NUMBER SEVEN: What do we know about King’s housekeeper? In what manner can we use her?…
NUMBER TWELVE: What are the possibilities of placing a good looking female plant in King’s office?75
Hoover was there in spirit, and everyone in the room knew it. “This is not an isolated phenomenon,” Sullivan would testify to the Church panel. “This was a practice of the Bureau down through the years.” And no one objected or eased back into the shadows. “Everybody in the Division went right along with Hoover’s policy,” the director’s “third Judas” explained.76
Conceivably, Hoover and his people already knew of an upcoming accolade to Dr. King that would be like wormwood and gall in the director’s belly. In-house memorandums about editorial meetings still flowed regularly to his desk. Reporters, researchers, and staff writers at Time magazine were undoubtedly already at work on the major cover story slated for the issue dated January 3: the “unchallenged voice of the Negro people” had been chosen Time’s “Man of the Year.”
A memo quoting the UPI press release about the honor crossed Hoover’s desk on December 29. On it he wrote, “They had to dig deep in the garbage to come up with this one.”
But if the subject was odoriferous, the article itself was scrutinized with the dedication of medieval monks parsing the Scriptures. And one insight into the youthful despair of the civil rights leader was found especially noteworthy. King, according to Time, had twice tried to commit suicide before he was thirteen by jumping out of a second-story window. The FBI pondered, and the fruit of its speculation ripened fully within the year.
“They will destroy the burrhead,” commented J. Edgar Hoover, reviewing the transcripts of tape recordings produced by a bug at the Willard Hotel.77
Two days after the Time cover story, on January 5, 1964, FBI agents in the ca
pital had installed a microphone in the room assigned to the Reverend King. “Trespass is involved,” Sullivan had admitted in a departmental memo.78 Trespass of another kind would follow.
Fifteen reels of tape were recorded by this special MISUR, but the highlights came the first night. Two women employees of the Philadelphia Naval Yard had joined the Man of the Year and several SCLC friends for an unbuttoned fling. Even as FBI workers were painstakingly transcribing the tomfoolery,* Sullivan was peering into the future, when King would “be revealed to the people of this country and to his Negro followers as being what he actually is—a fraud, demagogue and moral scoundrel.” He decided that the Bureau should somehow help raise Samuel R. Pierce, Jr.,† a Manhattan attorney then working with the former attorney general William Rogers, to “be in the position to assume the role of the leadership of the Negro people when King has been completely discredited.”
“OK,” Hoover wrote on his subordinate’s memo describing this cockeyed scheme.79
On January 10 he heard the selected passages from the Willard tapes that inspired his “burrhead” comment, and he smelled blood. He picked up the phone to alert Johnson’s closest aide, Walter Jenkins, to the nature of the material. It was Friday afternoon, and LBJ had to wait a few days until the FBI’s written account was ready.
His impatience can be imagined, but it was abundantly satisfied when DeLoach arrived with eight pages of “Top Secret” analysis of the Willard party only four days later. The FBI agent, the president, and the presidential aide discussed the material. When Jenkins opined that a leak to the press would be a good idea, DeLoach could reply that the director had already thought of that.