J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and the Secrets

by Curt Gentry

  There were some well-publicized problems, mostly in the counterintelligence field. A Bureau supervisor waited three months before investigating Barbara Walker’s claim that her ex-husband, John Walker, was a Soviet spy. Edward Lee Howard, a CIA renegade, escaped to Russia while supposedly under FBI surveillance. Richard Miller, a special agent with the Los Angeles field office, confessed to having passed a Bureau document on U.S. intelligence needs to a female KGB agent with whom he was having an affair. Brought to trial and sentenced to two life terms plus fifty years, Miller was the first FBI agent ever convicted of spying for the Soviets.‡ But these were aberrations, Bureau spokesmen explained, claiming they were far outnumbered by the Bureau’s unheralded successes. The difference was that, unlike Hoover’s, Webster’s first priority wasn’t page-one headlines. It made sense. Respect for Webster remained as high as ever.

  There were murmurs of discontent, most of them from agents who had served under Clarence Kelley. It was Kelley, they pointed out, who brought the FBI into the high-tech era, by adopting new data-collection and information-retrieval systems, Kelley who pioneered Abscam (Neil Welch had first used video surveillance, which so impressed juries, while Buffalo SAC), and Kelley who had cleaned up the corruption in the Administrative Division—but Webster took all the credit.

  Included among Kelley’s legacies were the FBI guidelines, which had been drawn up by Attorney General Levi in 1976. Acting as the Bureau’s spokesman before the Church committee, James Adams had begged Congress for guidelines, implying that many of the “excesses” of the Hoover years would never have happened had the Bureau’s authority been clearly spelled out. William Sullivan, for one, thought this was a cop-out. “For godsakes,” he told an interviewer, “we have manual after manual in the Bureau loaded with guidelines…Guidelines telling you how to shake hands, what kind of clothes to wear, on up to guidelines saying that you should never break any law…All kinds of guidelines and if we abided by these guidelines we would never have gotten into any of these things.”60

  Under the Levi-Kelley guidelines, the FBI had to have evidence of a criminal act, or intent to commit a crime, before it could place an individual under surveillance or infiltrate a suspected criminal or politically subversive organization.

  But after Ronald Reagan became president—the second FBI informant to attain that high office, Gerald Ford having preceded him—there was a move to loosen these “restrictions” on the FBI. At first it was covert, buried in a little-publicized recommendation in the attorney general’s August 30, 1981, voluminous task force report on crime. Recommendation 31 called for a comprehensive review of all legislation, guidelines, and regulations that “impeded” the effective performance of federal law enforcement and suggested that the attorney general take “whatever appropriate action is necessary within the constitutional framework” to eliminate those impediments.*61

  In March 1983 it became overt, Attorney General William French Smith announcing that he had just completed the first comprehensive revision of the FBI guidelines since 1976. Once again, the Bureau could investigate an organization on proof of “advocacy” of violence. Instead of “domestic security,” the new rubric was “domestic and international terrorism.” “FBI Gets Wider Powers for Domestic Spying,” read a typical headline.

  Although the American Civil Liberties Union and other civil rights advocates protested, noting that the Supreme Court had ruled that mere advocacy was not enough to warrant prosecution and that such investigations would “chill legitimate First Amendment activity,” the criticism was not sustained.62 Nothing bad would happen, everyone seemed convinced, as long as Judge Webster was director.

  In May 1987 President Reagan announced that William Webster would be the new director of the Central Intelligence Agency, replacing the late William Casey. If anything could cause the earth to move in Congressional Cemetery, this was it. But not until July did the president and Attorney General Edwin Meese III find someone to fill the FBI vacancy. He was William S. Sessions, a reputedly tough, law-and-order judge from Texas. Asked why the president had picked Sessions, whom Newsweek promptly dubbed a “Webster clone,” a senior administration official quipped, “Because he was willing to do it.”63 Washington scuttlebutt had it that at least a dozen others had been asked to take the job, and declined.

  Confirmed by a vote of 90 to 0 that September, Sessions said that he would like to see greater clarity and specificity in the guidelines. Sessions had barely settled into office when he was buried under an avalanche of criticism, most of which more rightly belonged to his predecessors. A great deal of the new FBI director’s time was spent apologizing for things he wasn’t responsible for.

  At the time Sessions became director, in November 1987, the FBI had 439 Hispanic agents. In 1988 some 300 of them filed a lawsuit charging the Bureau with “systematic discrimination.” In addition to being subject to overt and covert harassment, the suit alleged, Hispanic agents were being denied regular assignments (many of them found themselves on the “Taco Circuit,” where they were used only to monitor wiretaps on Spanish-speaking suspects), promotions, and entry into the FBI Career Development Program.* The agents won the suit, and in September 1990, on the recommendation of a special court-appointed review panel, Director Sessions promoted 11 Hispanic agents who had previously been denied promotions because of their ethnic background.

  It was not a popular decision, in some quarters. “A lot of the old-timers around here believed that the Bureau would be admitting too much if we handed out promotions to the Hispanic agents,” observed a senior official. “And, of course, that’s what we’re doing. We’re admitting that there has been a serious problem and that we’re trying to overcome it.”65

  Nor was the discrimination restricted to Hispanics. A black agent from the Chicago field office, Donald Rochon, also sued the Bureau, claiming that he and his wife had been victims of a planned campaign of often vicious racial harassment by his white colleagues. They forged his signature on a death and dismemberment policy, pasted a photograph of an ape over that of his son in a family portrait, drowned a black doll in effigy, ordered unwanted merchandise sent to his home address, scrawled “don’t come” across invitations to office parties, and made threatening, and obscene, telephone calls to his wife, who was white. Apparently no one had told them the COINTELPROs against blacks were over. When SA Rochon complained to his superior, he was himself censured. When one of the harassing agents, Gary Miller, confessed to some of the “pranks” and was suspended without pay for two weeks, fellow agents established a fund to cover his salary loss. Two other special agents found to have participated in the abuse were ordered to join Miller in three one-hour sessions of racial sensitivity training. As Patricia Motto, one of Rochon’s attorneys, put it, after failing repeatedly to get the FBI to take any serious disciplinary action, “You start to feel like you’re fencing with Hoover’s ghost.”*66

  “The FBI is a proud organization,” Director Sessions told the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Civil and Constitutional Rights. “It has sometimes been difficult for us to recognize that there is a potential for injustice in our own ranks.”67

  The committee chairman, Don Edwards, himself a former FBI agent and one of the Bureau’s most perceptive critics, released figures showing that black agents were resigning at almost twice the rate of white agents.

  Deputy Assistant Director John D. Glover, the Bureau’s highest-ranking black, disputed Edwards’s conclusions. Glover left the FBI that same month, to accept a job as head of security at Bristol Myers.

  The year 1988 also brought the startling revelation that William Webster’s FBI had conducted a massive investigation of more than thirteen hundred organizations and individuals who were opposed to President Reagan’s South American policy. The main target was the Washington-based Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador (CISPES), but the investigation, in which fifty-two of the fifty-nine field offices participated, soon spread to include the National Council o
f Churches, the Maryknoll Sisters, the United Auto Workers, and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. It must have seemed like old home week to some veteran agents, except that it lasted for four years, from 1981 to 1985, and there was evidence it was still going on when it was finally exposed.†

  The investigation had apparently begun in late 1981, when someone in the Bureau suspected that CISPES was acting as an unregistered foreign agent for Marxist groups in South America. No evidence of this was found, however, or any proof that the group had ties with Salvadoran guerrillas, as was for a time conjectured, and so the investigation seemingly lay dormant until 1983, when two FBI informants claimed that the group was supporting “terrorism” in the United States and El Salvador.* With that the investigation mushroomed, to include nuns, college students, union members, church workers, and aliens. Although no terrorist connection was found, hundreds of people were surveilled and photographed, their meetings infiltrated, their families, friends, and employers questioned, their trash and financial and telephone records examined. Under the new guidelines, the rules for investigating terrorist organizations were less stringent than those covering domestic political groups.

  David Lerner of the Center for Constitutional Rights, a lawyers’ group which obtained evidence of the investigation under the Freedom of Information Act, stated, “In tone, some of the [heavily censored] documents do sound like the days of Hoover. Things were a lot more insidious under Hoover, of course. But what is similar is the same venomous attitude toward political activists.”69

  The Senate Intelligence Committee, in issuing its 138-page report on the CISPES case, decided it was “an aberration among the thousands of counterintelligence and counterterrorist investigations the FBI conducts annually.”70

  FBI Director Sessions admitted that the probe was “unnecessarily broad”71 and again asked for clearer guidelines. He apparently got his wish. In September 1989 Attorney General Richard Thornburgh announced that he had drawn up new FBI guidelines for investigations of U.S.-based groups suspected of participating in international terrorism.

  They have been classified secret.

  In 1988 Sessions also had to explain the Library Awareness Program, when it was found that FBI agents, in searching for Soviet spies, had contacted a number of librarians—at least twenty of them in New York City—and asked them to report on the reading habits of people with foreign accents or funnysounding names.† The Bureau’s justification for this snooping was that there was a wealth of technical information in the public domain and that Soviet agents were taking full advantage of it; if the FBI could determine, for example, exactly what information a Soviet employee of the UN was looking for, it could probably discern what the Russians already knew. Supposedly only specialized scientific and technical libraries were to be contacted, but some agents apparently didn’t make that distinction. When the American Library Association and other groups protested, Sessions explained that the program was “voluntary.” Actually the Library Awareness Program predated Sessions, Webster, Kelley, Ruckelshaus, and Gray, having been established by J. Edgar Hoover in 1962. The FBI had been trying to turn librarians into informants for a quarter century.

  Sessions offered at least a partial defense for the Library Awareness Program in an interview with the Nation, saying, “Our efforts to identify and neutralize the threat posed by hostile intelligence services and their agents in the U.S. must be continued as long as a threat to our national security exists.”72

  “Neutralize” was also one of J. Edgar Hoover’s favorite words.

  It was FBI Director William Steele Sessions who finally decided the longdebated question of whether the J. Edgar Hoover Building should be renamed. “Mr. Hoover built the FBI,” Sessions told reporters at the National Press Club. “It was his genius, it was his inspiration, it was his organizational ability that allowed the Bureau to become the pre-eminent law enforcement agency in the world. And I think it’s appropriate that it should be named the J. Edgar Hoover Building.” Sessions added, “The fact that there are circumstances that suggest that there were problems in his administration, I think is unfortunate.”73

  Perhaps FBI Director Sessions should take a short walk up Pennsylvania Avenue and look at the simple inscription on the statue of The Future, which stands at the east entrance to the National Archives. From William Shakespeare’s The Tempest, act 2, scene 1, it reads, “What is past is prologue.”

  * * *

  *Although the FBI Laboratory failed at this, Bureau insiders presumed the anonymous letter writer was William Sullivan (who’d had considerable practice penning such missives during the COINTELPROs) or someone acting on his instructions. Although Sullivan had left the FBI nine months earlier, he maintained his own grapevine, often hearing of developments at SOG, or in the field, hours after they occurred.

  *A popular novel by Robert Ludlum, The Chancellor Manuscript, published in 1977, has as its plot the murder of FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover. When one group arrives to steal the files, however, it finds that another group has already lifted them. If one excludes the murder, this bears a certain similarity to what really happened, with Gray and his forces arriving a day late.

  *Both died within months after their master’s death. G-Boy, who was eighteen, died first; Cindy, who was half his age and who was Hoover’s favorite of all his dogs, because, as Hoover told Crawford, “she’s the most affectionate,” died some weeks later. “She grieved herself to death,” Crawford recalled. “She wouldn’t eat. She just lay there, by Hoover’s chair, all day long.”8

  †It was the custom in white southern families to give the deceased’s clothing to colored servants, whether it fit or not. Crawford had one suit altered but didn’t wear the rest. He explained, “My kids got me to get something a little more modern.”9

  ‡Another who disputed Hoover’s net worth was William Sullivan, who told Ovid Demaris, “If anybody ever gets into it, I think he was worth a cool million when he died. He had extensive—unless they’ve gotten rid of them very surreptitiously—holdings in Center and Snyder, Texas, and Farmington, New Mexico. I don’t know what they’ve done with this. There’s a lot of hanky-panky that went on for years…One time he got into serious trouble on his income tax manipulations, and we had to send an accountant from New York…to Houston, Texas, where apparently the operation existed. He told me afterward, ‘Good God Almighty! If the truth was known, Hoover would be in serious trouble, he was in clear violation of the law, but I think I got the whole thing straightened out.’ This man was supposed to be the best accountant in the Bureau—better than any we had in Washington. Apparently, he did straighten it out. But he did say that Hoover had done something that was a serious violation of the law.”

  Sullivan had said earlier, “Hoover had a deal with Murchison where he invested in oil wells and if they hit oil, he got his share of the profits, but if they didn’t hit oil, he didn’t share in the costs. I was told that by somebody who handled his income tax returns.”12

  *Mead was chief appraiser for the district, Hagen his assistant. Averaging 750 estate appraisals a year, they were no longer awed by their intimate, albeit belated, contact with the lives of famous people. Ironically, two of the better-known estates they’d appraised belonged to Hoover archenemies: the former Supreme Court justice Felix Frankfurter and the former CIA director Allen Dulles.

  *The folder, which Miss Gandy described as being about two inches thick, presumably contained, among other things, Sullivan’s August 28 and October 6, 1971, letters to Hoover and the director’s replies. Fortunately Sullivan himself kept copies of these letters, which he supplied to the author.

  †But even Miss Gandy’s influence couldn’t always protect him from Hoover’s wrath. While serving in the plum assignment of legal attaché to Japan, Kunkel was ordered back to Washington, for promotion to chief of staff in Hoover’s office. However, one of his children was seriously ill, and he requested a month’s delay. For this he was demoted to field agent in Dallas, whe
re he served three years’ penance before being allowed to climb back up the ladder again. Returned to the director’s good graces, as SAC of WFO, he was trusted enough to be allowed to check out the director’s stock tips.

  *The most often repeated statement was that they had “insulated” the Bureau during Watergate. Exactly how was never specified, although William Sullivan implied that the files on Senator Ervin kept him from inquiring too deeply into the FBI’s role.

  †Mary Meyer had been stabbed to death while walking along a towpath of the old C&O Canal in Georgetown in October 1964. A young black drifter was later tried and convicted of the crime. Meyer’s diary reputedly contained entries on her pot parties and sexual liaisons with Kennedy in the White House.

  *Except for his neighbors—one of whom said of him, “He’s a cantankerous old man. And that’s as polite as I can be about Mr. Tolson”—few outsiders ever saw him.23 He was interviewed by two investigators for the Senate Watergate committee, R. Scott Armstrong and Philip Haire, but Mohr sat in and answered most of the questions for him.

  †In 1974, during the Watergate hearings, the president did receive a letter bearing Clyde Tolson’s signature. It urged him not to resign.

  *The government finally gave Baker copies of more than nine hundred documents that had been purloined from his files. A number of them, old records going back to Johnson’s 1960 campaign and earlier, predated Liakakis’s employment and came from files to which she did not have access, leading Baker to conclude that either she was not his first “trojan horse” or he’d been the victim of a series of FBI bag jobs. Significantly, many of the papers dealt with the personal and business affairs of LBJ.