by Curt Gentry
For some years William O. Douglas had been writing, in great secrecy he believed, the final volume of his memoirs, dealing with his Court years. He was so obsessed with preventing leaks that he made only one copy of the manuscript.
Sometime between October 4 and November 12, 1968, the final draft of his section on Lyndon Baines Johnson was stolen from his office in the Supreme Court.
No novice at writing, having published thirty other books, Douglas began the difficult task of trying to re-create from memory the missing pages: “…his passion for power encompassed money. He and Lady Bird came to Washington originally bringing with them about $20,000. Lyndon ran that sum up to at least $20 million by the time he left the White House. His fingerprints will be found on no documents; his footprints never appeared. Telephone logs never recorded what he said, for he spoke through stout allies, like Sam Rayburn, to stout bureaucrats, like Laurence C. Fly of the Federal Communications Commission.”45
But it wasn’t the same, he realized. The earlier draft, as best he could remember it, had been far stronger. And for this he never forgave J. Edgar Hoover or Lyndon Baines Johnson.
The irony of the Douglas impeachment attempt was that it need never have happened. If the FBI had been tapping and bugging Douglas on a continuing basis, as he suspected, Hoover would have learned that the justice was planning to retire in the spring of 1969, on his thirtieth anniversary on the Court—he’d already written his letter of resignation—but with the IRS audit and the impeachment talk, the feisty Douglas had decided “to stay on indefinitely until the last hound dog had stopped snapping at my heels.”46
Asked if the Supreme Court had been bugged, William Sullivan told the author, “We didn’t need to. We had lots of sources on the Court, clerks and such.”47
Recently released FBI documents identify some of those sources. During the various appeals in the Rosenberg case, the FBI kept a close watch on the Court. The chief of the Supreme Court police, Captain Philip H. Crook, was an informant. In a 1953 memorandum Crook was described as having “furnished immediately all information heard by his men stationed throughout the Supreme Court building. He kept the special agents advised of the arrival and departures of persons having important roles in this case.” Another FBI memorandum stated that Harold B. Willey, then clerk of the Supreme Court, told FBI agents the best places to be to “know what action individual judges, or the court as a whole, was taking.” A few days after the executions of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, an FBI memo recommended that Captain Crook, Mr. Willey, and T. Perry Lippitt, the marshal of the Supreme Court, be sent “a letter of appreciation by the director for their wholehearted cooperation in this case.”48
On Friday, May 9, 1969, the New York Times, in a front-page story by its Pentagon correspondent, William Beecher, reported that the United States was conducting bombing raids in Cambodia. Although this escalation of the Vietnam War wasn’t news to the Cambodians, the North Vietnamese, or the U.S. Air Force, which had been falsifying its reports since the bombing started, it had been kept from the American public; and Henry Kissinger, reading the article while weekending at the presidential compound in Key Biscayne, Florida, was enraged.
At 10:35 A.M. Kissinger placed a call to J. Edgar Hoover and asked if he could “make a major effort” to find the source of the leak, using “whatever resources” were necessary. Hoover told him he would take care of it right away. There was no mention of wiretapping, at least not in the FBI director’s memorandum of the conversation, but Kissinger’s remarks, together with his request that the investigation be handled “discreetly,”49 certainly didn’t rule it out.
Still upset, Kissinger called Hoover two more times that day, asking what progress had been made. At 5:05 P.M. Hoover called Kissinger to report that Beecher might have obtained the information from a number of places: the Department of Defense, where the personnel were “largely Kennedy people and anti-Nixon”; the Systems Analysis Agency in the Pentagon, where “at least 118 of the 124 employees” were “still McNamara people and express a very definite Kennedy philosophy”; or Kissinger’s own office in the White House, from someone on the staff of the National Security Council.
It is unclear from Hoover’s memorandum of the conversation who first mentioned the name of the Kissinger aide Morton Halperin, whom the FBI director described as one of those “so-called arrogant, harvard-type Kennedy men,”* but it is clear Hoover considered him a prime suspect.
That was as far as they had gotten, Hoover reported. Kissinger urged the director to follow this as far as the FBI could take it, adding that they (presumably meaning he and the president) would “destroy whoever did this.”51
Unknown to Kissinger, Hoover had already asked William Sullivan to place a technical surveillance on Halperin’s home telephone. This was to be special coverage (SPECOV), Hoover told Sullivan, on a strictly need-to-know basis, and Sullivan repeated this to Courtland Jones, when he called the Washington field office supervisor in his office in the Old Post Office Building.
The FBI had a number of secret listening posts in Washington and its environs, including a large facility at the FBI Academy at Quantico, Virginia—it was from here that the wires of the Central Intelligence Agency, at nearby Langley, were supposedly tapped—but the heart of its electronic surveillance operations was the Old Post Office Building, which was located in the Federal Triangle, close to FBI headquarters in the Justice Department Building but far enough away that an attorney general wouldn’t accidentally walk in.
Since the Post Office had moved into its new building in 1934, the Bureau had gradually taken over most of the old building. Here, behind locked doors, with the tightest possible security, scores of monitors sat in front of small consoles, earphones on their heads, listening to, and recording, thousands of conversations.
However, there was a problem with the Old Post Office Building: it was haunted, by a live ghost. Years before anyone could remember, Admiral Richard Byrd, the polar explorer, had been assigned offices here, and he would wander the halls, dropping in on the FBI monitoring stations. Locked doors, receptionists, guards, color-coded passes—nothing seemed to hinder him: monitors, poised over their consoles, would suddenly look up and see the admiral standing there. Fortunately, he never seemed very interested in what they were doing; he was, the agents decided, just lonely and wanted someone to tell his stories to. Hoover tried, numerous times, to have him evicted, to another office building, but Byrd was a legend, too, with his own supporters, who didn’t want to discomfit him. When he died, in 1957, the agents missed him.
With Sullivan’s instructions in hand, Jones went to the office of Ernest Belter, who headed the WFO monitoring station.
“I just got a call from Bill Sullivan and he got a call from the White House and he wants us to put on this coverage right away,” Jones said. He then handled Belter a piece of scratch paper with the name, address, and telephone number of Morton Halperin on it.
“Is it really urgent?” Belter asked.
“Well, it’s from Sullivan,” Jones responded, “so that automatically makes it urgent.”
Jones told Belter that knowledge of the coverage was to be tightly held; only old and trusted employees were to be used. They would receive no paper on this installation, and they were to generate no paper. There would be no indexing of the log summaries, no use of symbol numbers, no ELSUR cards. Only one copy of the daily log would be made, and it should be hand carried to Sullivan’s office first thing each morning.
This went against all established procedures, and it worried Belter a bit. There was a nagging thought in the back of his mind, but he suppressed it and got to work. The supervisor James Gaffney, liaison to the telephone company, was dispatched to see Horace Hampton.
Hampton, an executive of the Chesapeake and Potomac Telephone Company, had a good working relationship with the FBI, one based on “profound mutual trust,” according to Belter. For more than twenty years, he’d handled all the Bureau’s national-security wireta
p requests for the Washington area. Highly patriotic, he felt he and the telephone company were making an important contribution to the country’s defenses. But he had warned the agents that if they ever tried to put one over on him, and put on a tap that was not for purposes of national security, he’d cut them off immediately and never give them another thing.*
Gaffney returned in less than an hour with the cable pair numbers of Halperin’s home telephone. Conveniently, a master cable ran from the telephone company to the Old Post Office Building, and a technician was sent downstairs to make the necessary hookup.
There were problems. Halperin lived in Bethesda, Maryland, which meant adding a long loop to the telephone line, which affected the volume and necessitated special amplification equipment, and it was nearly 5:00 P.M. before the equipment was functioning.
After this, the procedure was fairly simple. When there was an incoming or an outgoing call on the line, a red light on the console would come on, and the monitor, who was wearing headphones, would plug his jack into the console with one hand, hit the start switch on the tape recorder with the other, and begin listening, at the same time making notes, which he’d later, replaying the tapes if necessary, expand into a typewritten summary, or log, of the calls received that day.
Verbatim transcriptions of entire conversations weren’t made unless deemed necessary, while the tapes themselves were usually destroyed every two weeks by erasing them. Technically, it was an uncomplicated audio system and, contrary to popular myth, it produced neither clicks nor feedback on the line.
It did, however, generate considerable paperwork. In addition to the logs, which were made in two copies—one for the case officer, the other for the confidential file room—there were ELSUR index cards, again in duplicate, with the name of each person heard on the tapes; a cable pair book; the use of file, classification, serial, and case numbers, if the materials were to go into the master files; a symbol assignment book (a symbol was used to indicate, to authorized FBI personnel, that the source of the material was a wiretap); indexing; and so on.
But not in this case. Sullivan wanted no paper, beyond the single copy of the daily log. Except for that scrap of notes which Jones had brought in, and which Belter had already destroyed, they didn’t even have written authorization. This was one of the things that bothered Belter.
Another, of lesser import, was that there was no traffic on the line. However, because the next day was a Saturday and he didn’t want to have to come in to confirm that the tap was working, Belter stuck around past his usual departure time. At 6:20 P.M., however, the monitor reported traffic. A voice, which the monitor soon recognized as that of Dr. Halperin, was on the line. Officially the tap was now operational.
Because this was a “White House special,” one of the few Belter could recall, he assigned two monitors to the number, telling them only that it involved “the leak of information”—so loose a term they’d find it necessary to take down anything even possibly relevant—and then he went home, taking with him that nagging concern, which would bother him all weekend.
Unknown to Ernie Belter, Court Jones was worrying about it too.53
Saturday morning the Kissinger aide Colonel Alexander M. Haig, Jr., came to Sullivan’s office and requested wiretaps on four people, three National Security Council staff members and an assistant to the secretary of defense. The request was made on “the highest authority,” Haig stated (by which Sullivan presumed he meant Kissinger or the president), and involved “a matter of most grave and serious consequences to our national security.” Haig “kept pounding away at that point,” Sullivan recalled; “he was himself personally very disturbed and upset by this and he said Dr. Kissinger was even more so,” that Dr. Kissinger “considered his entire policy would be ruined unless these leaks could be stopped and that damage to the country would be irreparable.”54
Haig also stressed that the matter was “so sensitive it demands handling on a need-to-know basis, with no record maintained. In fact, he said, if possible it would be desirable to have the matter handled without going to the Department”—skipping the attorney general. But Sullivan told him the AG was already aware of the problem.
Rather than send the product to his office, Haig suggested he come to Sullivan’s office and read it there. That way they would maintain tighter control.55
Looking over the four names, Sullivan found one that was familiar. He didn’t tell Haig, however, that Halperin was already being tapped.
Sullivan was unable to reach the director that day—Helen Gandy took a message but wouldn’t relay the call, which meant Hoover was probably at the races—but Sullivan did talk to him on Sunday, repeating Haig’s requests.
From his handling of the matter, it was apparent that Hoover already saw its blackmail potential.
“Do it just the way the White House wants it done,” he instructed Sullivan, meaning he should put on the other taps, “but make sure everything is on paper.”56
If Haig wanted to read the logs in Sullivan’s office, that was fine; but a summary of the logs should be hand delivered by a special systems courier (which required a signed receipt) to both the president and Dr. Kissinger. The Bureau would, of course, keep copies. And each of the taps should be authorized, in writing, by Attorney General Mitchell.
Nothing was to be oral. Everything was to be on paper. And all the paper would be safely stored in one place, in the director’s own office. Later, when he was under fire and even his own office no longer seemed safe, Hoover amended these instructions and asked Sullivan to keep the materials in his office. It was a decision he regretted until the day he died.
The director was not the only one obsessed with paper. It was an occupational hazard of the FBI.
Monday morning, May 12, having worried all weekend, Ernie Belter voiced his concern to Court Jones. Everyone at headquarters knew that Bill Sullivan and the director had been feuding, that there was a lot of tension. All they had by way of authorization for the tap was a single telephone call. From Sullivan.
“God, I hope Sullivan isn’t freewheeling and dealing direct with the White House and cutting out the regular routine.” Bypassing the attorney general was one thing—that was common enough—but what if he was cutting out the director himself? It was a frightening thought, and Jones, who admitted he’d been worrying about the same thing, said he’d make some inquiries.
Later that same day, however, they received the authorization—signed by both the AG and the director—not only legitimizing the Halperin tap but adding three others; greatly relieved, they set to work adding the new taps. Still, “it made us a little bit nervous,” Belter recalled, “the fact that we were covering White House people…people still in the White House.” Frequently they picked up Henry Kissinger, who talked as if he were aware his every utterance was being recorded—as he, of course, was—and on occasion there was even the familiar voice of President Nixon.57
On May 20 both Kissinger and Haig came to Sullivan’s office and read all of the logs. When the president’s foreign-policy adviser had finished, he remarked to Sullivan, “It is clear that I don’t have anybody in my office that I can trust except Colonel Haig here.”58 He then added two more names, both of NSC staff members.
By this time Sullivan was getting the impression that Kissinger had been bitten by the secrecy bug, that his main interest was in hearing what other people were saying about him.
Two months after the start of the program, Sullivan, desperately needing the personnel and equipment for a major espionage investigation, asked Hoover if he could remove the taps.
“No, the White House put them on; let them take them off,” the director responded. “This is not an FBI operation. This is a White House operation.”59
When Sullivan suggested to Haig that the taps had failed in their purpose—there was still no clue as to the source of the New York Times leak—Haig, after checking with Kissinger, insisted the taps be kept on, so “a pattern of innocence” could be esta
blished.60
In all there would be seventeen wiretaps, ranging in duration from five weeks to twenty-one months, the longest being that of Morton Halperin, who was tapped for a year and a half after he left the NSC and no longer had access to classified documents. Those tapped included seven NSC staff members, four newsmen, two White House advisers, a deputy assistant secretary of state, a State Department ambassador, a brigadier general with the Defense Department, and one of Nixon’s speech writers.* Henry Kissinger ordered fourteen of the wiretaps, John Mitchell two, and H. R. Haldeman one.
No national-security leaks were ever discovered. The White House never did learn who leaked the Cambodia bombing story, but much was learned about the social contacts, vacation plans, marital disputes, mental problems, drinking habits, drug use, and sex lives of those who were tapped, as well as their wives, children, relatives, and friends.*
According to Richard Nixon, the taps produced “just gobs and gobs of material: gossip and bullshitting.” “The taping was a very, very unproductive thing,” he later told John Dean on one of the White House tapes. “I’ve always known that. At least, I’ve never, it’s never been useful in any operation I’ve ever conducted.”61
But those immediately under the president felt differently. By putting taps on two of their closest aides, Henry Kissinger was able to spy on Defense Secretary Melvin Laird and Secretary of State William Rogers.
The “gobs and gobs of material” also contained a vast amount of political information. Some samples:
Two of those tapped left the government and went to work for the Democratic presidential candidate Edmund Muskie. His campaign plans were duly reported, as was LBJ’s decision not to endorse Muskie.