Enemies: A History of the FBI

by Tim Weiner

  The ideas of Marx, Lenin, and Trotsky were being spread like poison by outwardly respectable Americans, Stevenson told the senators. The Russians were pouring money, people, and propaganda into the United States, and their American agents were carrying the Russian Revolution to every city and industrial center in the country through secret committees called soviets.

  4. “There is quite a deal of hysteria”: Attorney General Gregory to T. U. Taylor, April 1918, cited in Charles McCormick, Seeing Reds: Federal Surveillance of Radicals in the Pittsbugh Mill District, 1917–1921 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2002), p. 64.

  5. “an enormous overlapping”: Memorandum of F. X. O’Donnell, Oct. 24, 1938, cited in “An Analysis of FBI Domestic Security Intelligence Investigations: Authority, Official Attitudes, and Activities in Historical Perspective,” FBI, Oct. 28, 1975.

  6. At its height the league claimed: Bruce Bielaski of the Bureau of Investigation told Congress in December 1918 that the American Protective League peaked at between 300,000 and 350,000 strong, though other government officials put its membership at 250,000.

  7. “the gravest danger” and “very dangerous”: McAdoo to Wilson, June 2, 1917, and Wilson to Gregory, June 4, 1917, in The Public Papers of Woodrow Wilson, 42, pp. 410–411 and 416, online at http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/woodrow_wilson.php; “derelict in not having sought a remedy”: Wilson quoted in John F. Fox Jr., “Bureaucratic Wrangling over Counterintelligence, 1917–18,” online at www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/csi-publications/csi-studies/studies.

  8. “in effect, and perhaps in fact”: The New York Times, Aug. 4, 1917, p. 6; put the IWW out of business: cited in Melvyn Dubofsky, “We Shall Be All”: A History of the Industrial Workers of the World (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2000), p. 233.

  9. “No one can make a goat of me”: De Woody quoted in The New York Times, Sept. 6, 1918, p. 1.

  10. “the greatest scoop in history”: David A. Langbart, “Five Months in Petrograd in 1918: Robert W. Imbrie and the US Search for Information in Russia,” Studies in Intelligence 52, no. 1 (March 2008), CIA, Center for the Study of Intelligence.

  The documents in question were delivered by the American government propaganda council, the Committee on Public Information, created by President Wilson to boost popular support for the war. The committee produced powerful posters, newsreels, and speeches—along with some strange characters, among them Edgar Sisson, a prominent magazine editor dispatched to Russia as the chief of American propaganda. Sisson was posted at the American consulate in Petrograd, present-day St. Petersburg, as the Bolshevik revolution overthrew the czar’s government. He talked the United States ambassador into paying 20,000 rubles for the documents, offered for sale by the publisher of a local scandal sheet. Sisson thought he had “the greatest scoop in history,” in the words of the State Department’s top lawyer. He delivered his smoking guns to President Wilson, who ordered their release to every big newspaper in America. Wilson, against the counsel of his War Department, sent American troops to fight the Bolsheviks. The Americans were still fighting after World War I officially ended on Nov. 11, 1918.

  11. the newly opened Soviet diplomatic offices: Moscow’s official representative was a German citizen named Ludwig Martens; he sought diplomatic recognition from the United States in vain. Like most foreign embassies, Martens’s office was designed to serve as a trade mission, a propaganda outlet, and an espionage station, not just a diplomatic post.

  To J. Edgar Hoover, the very existence of Martens seemed to prove a sinister alliance between wartime Germany and revolutionary Russia. A German citizen born and raised in Russia, interned in England as a German alien during the war, he declared himself a German upon arriving in New York, then announced himself as the Soviet ambassador. He found American industrialists happy to trade with Moscow—if they were paid in hard cash. Above all, the Soviets wanted American troops out of Russia—and American technology in.

  12. “a mass formation of the criminals of the world”: A. Mitchell Palmer, “The Case Against the Reds,” Forum 63 (February 1920), pp. 173–185.

  13. “the poison of disorder, the poison of revolt”: Addresses of President Wilson, U.S. 66th Congress, 1st Session, Senate, doc. 120, vol. 435 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1920).

  14. sixty-one … agents and thirty-five undercover informers: Hoover, “Memorandum Upon the Work of the Radical Division, Aug. 1, 1919, to March 15, 1920,” Bureau of Investigation, RG65, NARA.

  15. Teams of lock pickers: In 1919, “a shock-team of FBI, ONI, and New York police representatives succeeded in ‘picking-the-lock’ of the safe of the Japanese Consul General in New York, where they discovered a Japanese Naval Code,” a Navy officer of the era recorded. “This code was photographed, page-by-page, and re-photographed a year or two later to pick up extensive printed changes. The cipher used with this code was not too difficult and we were literally surfeited with blessings.” Capt. Laurance F. Safford, “A Brief History of Communications Intelligence in the United States,” National Security Agency (declassified March 1982).

  16. “the mad march of Red fascism”: Hoover testimony before House Committee on Un-American Activities, March 26, 1947.

  17. “a vigorous and comprehensive investigation”: Flynn memo, Aug. 12, 1919, reprinted in “Investigation into Activities of the Department of Justice, Letter from the Attorney General,” 66th Congress, 1st Session, Nov. 15, 1919.

  18. Palmer had scoured the statutes: Letter from the attorney general in response to a Senate resolution of Oct. 17, 1919, Report on the Activities of the Bureau of Investigation of the Department of Justice Against Persons Advising Anarchy, Sedition, and the Forcible Overthrow of the Government (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, Nov. 17, 1919), pp. 5–13. Attorney General Palmer had just lost a test case against three members of a tiny gang of Spanish-speaking anarchists in Buffalo, New York, who had published a pamphlet of blood-curdling rhetoric. A federal judge had tossed out the indictment on July 24, 1919, saying it had no basis in law.

  19. “terrorists … ready for any sort of work”: Edgar B. Speer, “The Russian Workingmen’s Association, sometimes called the Union of Russian Workers,” April 8, 1919, Bureau of Investigation, NARA M-1085, reel 931, doc. 313846. On Aug. 15, 1919, the New York City police, spurred by the Lusk Committee and Archibald Stevenson, conducted a second raid on the Russian house on East 15th Street. On the ground floor, they found a classroom full of immigrants learning to read and write—and studying revolution, the raiders supposed. On the top floor three men were editing a Russian-language newspaper called Bread and Freedom. The three were swiftly indicted on state charges of criminal anarchy on Aug. 20. The charges were not front-page news.

  4. COMMUNISTS

  1. “secret sessions of the heads”: August H. Loula, “Communist Party Convention: Day 1–Sept. 1, 1919,” Department of Justice/Bureau of Investigation Files, NARA M-1085, doc. 313848. Loula was keenly aware of “the importance of preserving the cover of our confidential informants,” keeping their identities secret and their work out of the public record, as the Bureau’s chief, Bill Flynn, recorded. The Socialists left Chicago divided and downhearted; one of their leaders would call the Communist movement that emerged from the divide “a ludicrous fiasco” run by a rabble of Russians and “a handful of American intellectuals with a generous sprinkling of Department of Justice agents.”

  2. “the whole game has been played”: Confidential Informant No. 121, “In Re: Communist Party Convention, Sept. 1–7, 1919,” Department of Justice/Bureau of Investigation Files, NARA M-1085, doc. 313846.

  3. “The name of this organization”: Constitution of the Communist Party of America. Report to the Communist International (Chicago: Communist Party of America, n.d. [1919]).

  4. “cutthroats and pimps”: Jacob Spolansky et al., “In Re: Communist Meeting at West Side Auditorium, Chicago,” Sept. 21, 1919, DoJ/BoI Investigative Files, NARA M-1085,
docs. 313846 and 313848.

  5. “to overthrow the Government”: J. Edgar Hoover, “Brief on the Communist Party,” submitted to the Committee on Rules, House of Representatives, 66th Congress, 2nd Session (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1920).

  6. Soviet archives exhumed after the Cold War ended: The question of whether the Comintern underwrote American Communists is settled by Comintern archives. It did. But how much it sent is still open to question. The archives show approval for four secret subsidies in precious metals and diamonds totaling more than two million Russian rubles in 1919 and 1920. That sum that cannot be precisely converted to U.S. dollars but could be hundreds of thousands of dollars, or even millions depending on how the valuables were exchanged. However, an emissary of the Communist Party of America asked the Comintern for more modest sums in 1920, suggesting a lesser level of largesse on Moscow’s part. This $60,000 budget request for the Communist Party of America, made to the Comintern by Louis C. Fraina in August 1920, included $20,000 for “Prisoners—defense, support of dependents,” $15,000 for “Agitation among the Negro,” $10,000 for “Agitation among the soldiers and sailors,” and $15,000 to start up three newspapers.

  7. “and if not, why not”: “Letter from the Attorney General Transmitting in Response to a Senate Resolution of Oct. 17, 1919” (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, Nov. 17, 1919).

  8. Communist Party chiefs in Chicago: Special Agent August Loula went back to the Russian hall, now the headquarters of the Communist Party of America, to seize some seditious pamphlets in October. He confronted the party’s leaders face-to-face. As he reported, they asked him “how they came to be honored by a visit from the Agent of the Department of Justice.” He answered that when he came back, he would have “an invitation for them to select rooms in the County Jail.” But when he read the pamphlet, he glumly concluded that “it does not contain matter upon which prosecution could be based.” August H. Loula, “A Visit to Communist Party Headquarters, Chicago–Oct. 14, 1919,” DoJ/BoI Investigative Files, NARA M-1085, doc. 202600-14.

  9. On October 27, Hoover was in New York: Hoover’s report on his New York trip is recounted in Kenneth Ackerman, Young J. Edgar: Hoover, the Red Scare, and the Assault on Civil Liberties (New York: Carroll & Graf, 2007), pp. 102–105.

  10. “It is the desire of the Bureau of Investigation”: Hoover to Caminetti, Nov. 3, 1919, NARA RG85, file 85-54235/36. The celebrations marking the second anniversary of the Russian Revolution began in New York at nightfall, with speeches by Santeri Nuorteva, the number-two man at the Soviet diplomatic offices in Manhattan, and Benjamin Gitlow, the Socialist state assemblyman turned Communist Labor Party leader. Bureau of Investigation agents in the audience took word-for-word notes in shorthand.

  11. 1,182 suspects had been arrested: List, Union of Russian Workers (Raid of Nov. 7, 1919), Memorandum for Mr. Burke, DoJ/BoI Investigative Files NARA M-1085, doc. 202600-14; Annual Report of the Commissioner General of Immigration to the Secretary of Labor: Fiscal Year Ended June 30, 1920 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1920).

  12. “They would destroy”: Briefs quoted in J. Edgar Hoover, Masters of Deceit (New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1958), p. vi.

  13. “To gather a correct, up-to-date list”: M. J. Davis, “In re: Communist Party,” Dec. 4, 1919, NARA M-1085, reel 931, doc. 313846.

  14. “a considerable number of affidavits”: Hoover to Caminetti, Dec. 16, 1919, NARA M-1085, doc. 313846.

  15. “The crowd was very cocky”: Hoover quoted in New York Tribune, Dec. 22, 1919; “Haven’t I given you”: The source of the quotation is Congressman William Vaile of Colorado, Congressional Record, Jan. 5, 1920.

  16. “It was 4:20 A.M.”: Emma Goldman, Living My Life (New York: Dover Publications, 1970), pp. 716–717.

  5. “WHO IS MR. HOOVER?”

  1. “The Communist Party is practically busted”: The agent’s identity remains uncertain. He evidently penetrated the executive committee of the Communist Party. He may have been Clarence Hathaway, a founding member of the CPUSA, and an FBI informant from 1920 onward. His undercover surveillance report went from Brigadier General Marlborough Churchill, the chief of Military Intelligence, to Hoover’s desk on Jan. 12, 1920, NARA M-1085, doc. 313846. Although the American Communists had many factions in their first decade, Ruthenberg was “the founder of the Communist Party in the United States,” in the words of Jay Lovestone, an early member and later one of the nation’s leading anti-Communists.

  2. “Arrange with your undercover informants”: Burke to Kelleher, Dec. 27, 1919, published in “Charges of Illegal Practices of the Department of Justice,” United States Senate, 66th Congress, 3rd Session (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1921), pp. 12–14.

  3. “All instructions previously issued”: Telegram to Agents in Charge, initialed JEH, Jan. 2, 1920, NARA M-1085, doc. 313846.

  4. “About 25 aliens were apprehended”: Myron J. Blackmon, Special Agent in Charge, “Report of the Red Raid in Buffalo, NY, Night of Jan. 2/3, 1920,” filed Jan. 14, 1920, NARA M-1085, doc. 202600–1613.

  5. “The attack upon our organization”: Charles E. Ruthenberg, “Report of the Executive Secretary to the Central Executive Committee of the Communist Party of America,” Jan. 18, 1920.

  6. “The Department of Justice of the United States”: A. Mitchell Palmer, “The Case Against the ‘Reds,’ ” Forum 63 (1920), pp. 173–185.

  7. “The revolutionary conspiracy is international”: Hoover, “Report on Radical Division,” reprinted in Attorney A. Mitchell General Palmer on Charges Made Against Department of Justice, 65th Congress, 2nd Session, June 1, 1920.

  8. “I am strongly opposed”: Francis Fisher Kane’s letter was printed in Survey 43, Jan. 31, 1920, pp. 501–503.

  9. “As an aftermath”: Judge Anderson’s speech was reported in the weekly Harvard Alumni Bulletin and reprinted in LaFollette’s Magazine 12, no. 2 (February 1920), p. 3. On Anderson’s record as United States Attorney and his handling of the Deer Island habeas corpus case, see his entry in The Yale Biographical Dictionary of American Law.

  10. “I’ll take great pleasure”: Skeffington quoted in Boston Globe, Jan. 13, 1920.

  11. “Q: Who is Mr. Hoover?”: The proceedings before Judge Anderson are cited in the National Popular Government League’s “Report upon the Illegal Practices of the U.S. Department of Justice,” May 1920.

  12. “This case seems”: Ibid.

  13. “The plot is nationwide”: The New York Times, April 30 and May 1, 1920.

  14. “creatures of the imagination of the Attorney General”: Hoover, Report on Radical Division, in Palmer on Charges, p. 186.

  15. “the real story of the red menace”: Hoover to Palmer, May 5, 1920, Department of Justice file 209264.

  16. “an assault upon the most sacred”: Report to the American People upon the Illegal Practices of the Department of Justice, National Popular Government League, Washington, D.C., 1920.

  17. Hoover said: “No, sir”: Report upon the Illegal Practices, op. cit.

  18. “the wrecking of the communist parties”: Hoover report to Congress on the General Intelligence Division, Oct. 5, 1920. He was half-right. Comintern files made public at the end of the century show that dues-paying membership of the Communist Party in the United States plummeted after the raids, from 23,744 in December 1919 to 2,296 in February 1920, then rose to 8,223 in April 1920; fewer than one thousand of those who remained on the rolls spoke English.

  19. “the radical situation”: Hoover report to Congress on the General Intelligence Division, Oct. 5, 1920.

  20. “We’ll get them”: The New York Times, Sept. 19, 1920.

  6. UNDERWORLDS

  1. “I am not fit for this office”: Harding quoted by a close adviser, Nicholas Murray Butler, the president of Columbia University, in Butler, Across the Busy Years: Recollections and Reflections (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1939), vol. 1, p. 411.

  2. “Daugherty has been
my best friend”: Francis Russell, The Shadow of Blooming Grove: Warren G. Harding and His Times (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1968), p. 427.

  3. “We made an effort”: Hoover to Burns, Sept. 20, 1921, NARA M-1085, doc. 202600-1617-53.

  4. “holding us responsible”: “Circular Letter to the Membership of the United Communist Party,” NARA M-1085, doc. 202600-14.

  5. “Soviet Russia is the enemy of mankind”: Harry M. Daugherty, The Inside Story of the Harding Tragedy (1932; Boston: Western Islands, 1975), p. 119.

  6. In the spring and summer of 1921: C. J. Scully, “In re: Communist Activities—Special Report,” May 1, 1921, NARA M-1085, doc. 202600-1775-8.

  7. “Rules for Underground Party Work”: Communist Party of America leaflet, undated, Comintern Archive, Russian State Archive of Socio-Political History (hereinafter RGASPI).

  8. secret four-day meeting: H. J. Lenon, “Unity Convention of Communist Parties,” NARA M-1085, doc. 202600-2265.

  9. Clarence Hathaway: Hathaway was identified as an FBI informant from 1920 onward in a March 23, 1960, memo to Hoover on a meeting between Morris Childs, the FBI’s highest-ranking infiltrator of the CPUSA, and top CP leaders Eugene Dennis and Gus Hall. The memo was declassified by the FBI in a thirty-five-volume file on the Childs operation, code-named SOLO, and published on Aug. 2, 2011, on the FBI’s website: vault.fbi.gov/solo. The document identifying Hathaway is at volume 19, page 29 of the file.

  10. “The Communist Party is definitely an outlaw organization”: C. E. Ruthenberg (writing under his pseudonym “David Damon”), The Communist 1, no. 2 (August 1921). Communist membership figures are taken from Comintern records and C. E. Ruthenberg’s own estimates published in The Communist 1, no. 9 (July 1922).