J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and the Secrets

by Curt Gentry

  This was writing for the record, and J. Edgar Hoover, master of the art, recognized it as such. Sullivan was up to something and had to be slapped down as quickly as possible.

  Not surprisingly, the executive conference agreed. Sullivan’s comments, which the director circulated, sent shock waves through the FBI hierarchy. Typical was the response of Rufus R. Beaver, who accused the assistant to the director of being “more on the side of CIA, State Department and Military Intelligence Agencies, than the FBI.”2

  Much as it may have pained him—for he still addressed his longtime aide as “Bill,” and started his communications to him “Dear Sullivan”—the director agreed. Sullivan was way out of line, and had been since the Williamsburg speech. But the director couldn’t fire him, not after the dismissal of one “disloyal” agent, Shaw, had touched off such a furor. Nor could he demote or transfer him. The removal of Sullivan’s name from the Bureau’s speakers list had already been reported in the press. (Hoover suspected Sullivan himself of this and other leaks, particularly items which appeared in the Evans and Novak column, including a recent, especially upsetting “piece of garbage” entitled “Capital Playing New Guessing Game: Who Will Succeed J. Edgar Hoover?”)

  Under attack from a dozen external enemies, including Congress, the press, and the cabal in the White House, Hoover obviously didn’t need evidence of a palace revolution within the FBI.

  Washington’s premier bureaucrat, J. Edgar Hoover came up with a bureaucratic solution, one that would demean Sullivan (just as Sullivan’s promotion had demeaned DeLoach), limit his power, and keep him muzzled until he was forced to retire.

  On July 1 the director called in Mark Felt and informed him that he was promoting him to a newly created position: deputy associate director. The post would be just below that of Associate Director Tolson and directly over that of Assistant to the Director Sullivan. Although Hoover stressed that “containing Sullivan” was the primary reason for the appointment, Felt realized there was a secondary reason. Even though no mention had been made of the associate director’s health, someone was needed to take over Tolson’s functions.

  Could he control Sullivan? the director asked.

  Although it was William Sullivan, over the strong objections of John Mohr, who had persuaded the director to promote Felt to head of the Inspection Division, Mark Felt knew where his loyalties lay. He was sure he could, he responded.

  “Watch everything that comes out of the domestic intelligence division very carefully,”3 Hoover cautioned, unaware of how prescient his warning was. Judas’s betrayal was only days away.

  Following Felt’s appointment, Sullivan’s home telephones were tapped and one of his secretaries was “turned.”* Bill Sullivan had handled such matters for too many years to miss any of this.

  William Sullivan’s frequent meetings with Robert Mardian, head of the Justice Department’s Internal Security Division, had not gone unnoticed. Just a month earlier the FBI executive conference had cautioned Bureau officials to be “very careful” in its dealings with Mardian.5 Hoover had put it even more bluntly to Sullivan, warning him to stay away from “that goddamned Armenian Jew.”6 But Sullivan ignored this edict, as he often did others.

  Shortly after Felt’s appointment, Sullivan again met with Mardian. Hoover was getting ready to fire him, he told the assistant attorney general. But before he did, he wanted to pass on a number of very sensitive documents which he had been storing in his office.

  This was “out of channel” material, Sullivan explained, from wiretaps. He was afraid that Hoover would use it to blackmail the president into keeping him on as FBI director. He’d used such materials similarly in the past.

  Mardian was unaware of the Kissinger wiretaps, but he did know this was a matter bigger than he could handle, and he promised Sullivan he would get back to him just as soon as he’d talked to the attorney general.*

  Informed of Sullivan’s remarks, Mitchell apparently called either the president or one of his aides at the western White House, in San Clemente, because Mardian received a call from there instructing him to proceed immediately to Andrews Air Force Base to catch the courier jet to California. This he did that same day, July 12, briefing the president shortly after his arrival.

  In response, Nixon told him to return to Washington, obtain the materials from Sullivan, and hold them until he received further instructions from the White House.

  Upon arriving in the capital the following day, Mardian contacted Sullivan, and a little later Charles Brennan, whose office was in the same building, showed up in Mardian’s office with a beat-up old satchel bearing the initials “W.S.” Mardian hid it in his closet for two days, before receiving a call instructing him to deliver it to Dr. Kissinger and Colonel Haig at the White House.

  When the pair opened the satchel, Mardian noticed that it was “crammed full” of documents. He didn’t examine them, but Kissinger and Haig did, carefully checking the contents against a master list Sullivan had provided. In addition to the seventeen wiretap authorizations, summaries, logs, and related correspondence, Sullivan had also included the documentation on the 1969 Joseph Kraft surveillance. After they were satisfied that everything was accounted for, Mardian took the satchel to Haldeman, in the Oval Office, who also compared the contents to the master list.† After Haldeman had checked them, Mardian gave the materials to either Ehrlichman or the president himself (he later refused to specify which). In any event, Ehrlichman ended up with them, placing them in a two-drawer, combination-lock cabinet in his own office.

  Unknown to J. Edgar Hoover, part of his insurance had just been canceled. Early one morning not long after the bag job on FBIHQ—the exact date is unclear, but it was sometime in July 1971—Mardian called Sullivan and asked him to come to his office.

  Pointing to the wall clock, which read 9:45, the assistant attorney general told the assistant to the director, “At ten o’clock, our problem with Hoover will be solved. The albatross will be lifted from our neck. The president has asked Hoover to see him at the White House at ten, and he’s going to ask Hoover to resign.”

  Sullivan’s reaction, as he later remembered it, was quite simple: “I was delighted.”

  However, if Sullivan had anticipated being named Hoover’s successor, that hope was short-lived. Mardian also informed him that they had “a man ready to move into the job.”*9

  Sullivan returned to his office to prepare for the long-awaited announcement. But when Mardian called that afternoon, he could tell that something was wrong. Not trusting the telephone, Sullivan went directly to Mardian’s office. The assistant attorney general’s face was dark with anger. “Goddamn,” he swore, “Nixon lost his guts. He had Hoover there in his office, he knew what he was supposed to tell him, but he got cold feet. He couldn’t go through with it.”11

  Sullivan later read the director’s memorandum of the meeting and concluded that Hoover hadn’t stopped talking from the moment he entered the Oval Office. “It is his usual line of conversation, starring John Dillinger and Ma Barker and a cast of thousands, and he kept talking until Nixon ended the interview.”12

  Sullivan returned to his office to consider his options. There weren’t many. Actually there was only one.

  Since Hoover wasn’t leaving, he’d have to. But he decided then and there he wouldn’t exit quietly: “I was going to go with a bang.”13

  On July 19, 1971, J. Edgar Hoover signed a new will, which was witnessed by two of the women in his office, Erma D. Metcalf (secretary to Helen Gandy) and Edna Holmes (the director’s office manager).

  Although there were a number of small, specific bequests, the bulk of his estate was to go to Clyde Tolson, who was also named his executor. “In the event Clyde A. Tolson’s death should occur prior to or simultaneously with mine,” Hoover stated, the estate was to be divided equally between the Boys’ Club of America, Inc., and the Damon Runyon Memorial Fund for Cancer Research, Inc.

  Since the previous will was presumably destroyed
—either at this time or following the director’s death—it is not known what changes were made or, equally intriguing, why he chose this particular moment to set his affairs in order.

  One of G. Gordon Liddy’s first assignments after being recruited by the White House Plumbers was to expedite the FBI investigation of the Ellsberg case.

  Liddy was considered the perfect choice for the job since he was a former special agent (1957-62), had been a protégé of Cartha “Deke” DeLoach (and thus presumably knew where the bodies were buried), and had the reputation of being a gung-ho type. Liddy was best remembered by older agents for two things: having run an FBI check on his wife before marrying her, and having gotten caught by local police while committing a bag job in Kansas City, Missouri. He’d been released, Bureau scuttlebutt had it, only after a call was made to the local police chief, and former special agent, Clarence M. Kelley.

  Through Mardian, Liddy was able to circumvent the Justice Department sign-in requirements, thus supposedly keeping his visits secret from the FBI director. Reestablishing contact with some of his former comrades, Liddy learned that the Bureau had changed since he’d left it. Gone, he was told, were “the good old days of individual initiative,” such as the time a southern governor had refused to cooperate with the Bureau in its investigation of the Ku Klux Klan, until the FBI burned a cross on his lawn. “The picture I received of the Ellsberg investigation was bleak,” Liddy reported back to the White House. “Hoover, I was told…did not have his heart in the investigation. Further, Hoover was in poor shape physically and mentally, a result of the natural process of aging. The wife of a government employee, a nurse, was said to be giving him massive injections of some substance to keep him going.”* The director’s feud with Sullivan, Liddy was told, had wrecked the Domestic Intelligence Division, “by causing people to choose sides or just be fearful of the fallout. Things were going rapidly from bad to worse.”

  On August 2 Liddy talked to Sullivan, who appeared, to Liddy, “very insecure in his position, almost frightened. He gave the impression of a man doing his utmost to do his duty as he saw it, but under attack from above and below.” Because Sullivan was in charge of all the day-to-day investigative activites of the FBI, the whole organization was suffering.

  At Sullivan’s suggestion, Liddy had lunch with Brennan, who introduced him to the two men immediately responsible for the Ellsberg investigation, Section Chief Wannall and Bureau Supervisor Waggoner. Waggoner seemed eager to cooperate, but it was otherwise with Wannall, whom Liddy suspected of being a “torpedo,” Bureau jargon for an informer for the higher-ups. When Liddy requested the investigative files on Ellsberg, Wannall told him he’d have to clear it with Hoover. “He also stated,” Liddy noted in his report to the White House, “that it was the FBI policy to regard the security leak problem of other agencies as their own business, and not something for the FBI to clean up.”

  This was hardly what the White House wanted to hear.

  Liddy’s report received a wider circulation than he’d anticipated. It even got back to Mardian and Mitchell at the Justice Department. The attorney general was less than happy with Sullivan and Brennan, for discussing their conflicts with Hoover. “This problem is well known to and receiving the attention of the president of the United States,” he told the pair. “You don’t need to program Liddy about it.”15

  At the White House, the memo so impressed Liddy’s superiors—Young, Krogh, and Ehrlichman—that two months later he was given the sensitive assignment of developing a list of presidential options for dealing with the J. Edgar Hoover problem.

  But before that, there were more pressing matters that Liddy had to handle, such as burglarizing the office of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist.

  Because he couldn’t trust anyone else, Sullivan came into the office on a Saturday morning and typed out the letter himself on his old upright.

  “Dear Mr. Hoover:

  “It is regretted by me that this letter is necessary…”

  Opinions of Bill Sullivan varied widely. Ramsey Clark thought him “a tough guy who would tell you a hard truth.”16 Lou Nichols, while acknowledging that Sullivan was the Bureau’s leading expert on communism (he’d helped ghost most of the director’s books and speeches on the subject), thought he’d missed his true calling: “Bill should have been a monk in a Jesuit monastery.”17 Since no one, ever, openly opposed the director, there were those who thought him mad, or at least suffering delusions of grandeur. But there was one recurrent comment made by enemies and friends alike. As Alan Belmont, a friend who had also occupied the number three hot seat, put it, “Sullivan’s strongest feature was his loyalty to the director.”18

  No more. His loyalty, he now decided, belonged to the Bureau. They were not one and the same, Sullivan had finally concluded, not anymore. With his letter, Sullivan tried to separate the Siamese twins.

  It was a painful, personal letter, not meant for the record. It showed the agony Sullivan had been going through, and the rage, particularly at the director’s insensitivity toward those who had served him faithfully and well. It reviewed the disagreements between him and Hoover and the times they had worked harmoniously together. It concluded:

  “What I have said here is not designed to irritate or anger you but it probably will. What I am trying to get across to you in my blunt, tactless way is that a number of your decisions this year have not been good ones; that you should take a good, cold, impartial inventory of your ideas, policies, etc. You will not believe this but it is true: I do not want to see your reputation built up over these many years destroyed by your own decisions and actions. When you elect to retire I want to see you go out in a blaze of glory with full recognition from all those concerned. I do not want to see this FBI organization I have gladly given 30 years of my life to…fall apart or become tainted in any manner…

  “As I have indicated this letter will probably anger you. When you are angered you can take some mighty drastic action. You have absolute power in the FBI (I hope the man who one day takes over your position will not have such absolute power for we humans are simply not saintly enough to possess and handle it properly in every instance). In view of your absolute power you can fire me, or do away with my position…or transfer me or in some other way work out your displeasure with me. So be it. I am fond of the FBI and I have told you exactly what I think about certain matters affecting you and this Bureau and as you know I have always been willing to accept the consequences of my ideas and actions.

  “Respectfully submitted, W. C. Sullivan.”19

  Three days later the director summoned Sullivan to his office. They argued for two and a half hours and settled nothing. On September 3 Hoover wrote to “Mr. Sullivan”—the salutation indicating his fall from grace—requesting that he submit his application for retirement, to take effect immediately after he’d taken his accumulated leave. Sullivan took the leave, but the requested letter was not forthcoming.

  They met again on September 30, for the last time, and resumed shouting.

  “I’ve never received such a letter since I’ve been the director of the FBI, and nobody has ever spoken to me like this before.”

  “If someone had spoken to you like this before,” Sullivan responded, “I wouldn’t have to be speaking to you like this now. I should have told you these things a long time ago.”

  Hoover countered, “I’ve been giving this controversy between us a great deal of prayer.”

  Humbug, Sullivan wanted to say, but didn’t. Instead he told the director that he ruled the Bureau by fear and that he, for one, no longer intended to be intimidated.

  “It’s very clear to me that you have no faith in my leadership,” Hoover shouted.

  “Yes,” Sullivan replied, “nothing could be more clear than that.”

  “You no longer have any faith in my administration.”

  “Right. I think you’d be doing the country a great service if you retired.”

  “Well, I don’t intend to,” Hoover spu
ttered.

  The director’s voice now changed to a self-pitying whine. “I never thought that you’d betray me—that you’d be a Judas too.”

  “I’m not a Judas, Mr. Hoover,” Sullivan retorted. “And you certainly aren’t Jesus Christ.”

  Hoover had the final word. “I’ve taken this up with Attorney General Mitchell and he agrees with me that it is you who should be forced out. I’ve discussed this matter with President Nixon and he also agrees.”20

  Without so much as a good-bye, Sullivan turned and walked out, returning to his office to resume packing his personal effects. The following morning, October 1, Sullivan came to work to find that his name had been removed from the door and the locks changed.

  It must have been almost an afterthought on Hoover’s part, again a strong sign that he was slipping.

  Not until the morning of October 1 did E. S. Miller, the new head of the Domestic Intelligence Division, search Sullivan’s office and, failing to find the object of his search there, make an equally unproductive search of the filing cabinets and other secure areas in the DID.

  The Kissinger wiretaps were one of the most closely held secrets of the FBI. Within the Bureau itself, only the director, Sullivan, and those who worked on the taps were aware of their existence. Even Miller was at first unsure what “the extremely sensitive material which Mr. Sullivan had been maintaining for the Director” consisted of.21

  But when he found out, Miller was quick to grasp its importance. As he reported to Alex Rosen, “It goes without saying that knowledge of this coverage represents a potential source of tremendous embarrassment to the Bureau and political disaster for the Nixon administration. Copies of the material itself could be used for political blackmail and the ruination of Nixon, Mitchell and others of the administration.”22