AMERICANS WHO PARTICIPATED in academic and cross-cultural exchanges with counterparts in other countries, including communist countries, found themselves in a contradictory situation: to spy or not to spy on their exchange colleagues. To participate in these programs, even ones organized by the State Department or other U.S. government agencies, meant Americans, including even teenagers, risked being targeted by the FBI. For instance, Americans who visited the Soviet Union for at least a month were questioned by the bureau upon their return to the United States. The purpose of such investigations, according to a file found at Media, was to “determine whether any of them were approached for recruitment by the Soviet Intelligence Services” either in the USSR or in the United States after they returned. But they were also questioned by the FBI to determine if they could be turned into spies for the bureau. Agents were instructed to assess people returning from Sino-Soviet bloc countries, especially those who were employed in the news media, entertainment, religious organizations, and education, and also people who were public officials, “labor leader or prominent person,” for their potential to work as informers for the bureau during their travels. Such requests were carried out as part of a special program, DESECO—Development of Selected Contacts. Attached to the memo about this program was a long list of potential informers—Americans, mostly scientists, scheduled to attend various upcoming international conventions, including the Twelfth International Conference on Low Temperature Physics in Kyoto, Japan; the Third International Symposium on Fresh Water from the Sea at Dubrovnik, Yugoslavia; the Seventh World Congress of Sociology; the International Iron and Steel Conference in Japan; and the International Astronautical Federation and Aerospace Conference in Constance, West Germany. They were asked to spy on their fellow scientists while at these conferences.
MEDIA RECORDS REVEALED that FBI files on some people spanned decades, even if nothing was ever discovered about the person that indicated even a hint of wrongdoing. One man’s ongoing file started with a five-dollar fine for breach of the peace in 1954, a minor law enforcement issue that usually would not concern the FBI. The man was still being monitored by the bureau at the time of the burglary in 1971. He had come to the attention of the FBI in 1967 because he was a conscientious objector. The bureau investigated his past extensively. As they did, agents discovered the fine and built his file beginning at that point. In the course of their investigation, agents placed in his file statements from unnamed informers who worked with him at Bellevue Medical Center in New York City in 1957. Into the file went statements that he was “described as ‘queer fish,’ ‘screwball,’ ‘smarty pants’ ”; a report that he volunteered for risky research experiments and was described by the psychiatrist who was in charge of the research as “altruistic, sincere, believer in God, but not in conventional religion”; reports from police intelligence files in Haverford, Pennsylvania, that he distributed antiwar leaflets in 1968; and a report that he was present at a rally at which other people said the war in Vietnam was “unconstitutional” and “illegal.” Item after item was added to his FBI file, none of them indicating that the man ever was a suspect in any crime.
The mindless nature of how FBI surveillance files were initiated is illustrated in a file found at Media that was based on an informer’s report about an evening he spent productively, from his and the bureau’s view, at what the FBI called the Bernheim Commune in Philadelphia. The informer had been assigned to clandestinely observe a political meeting at the commune. When the informer arrived for the meeting, he learned that it was scheduled for another day. While there, though, the informer noticed that a women’s liberation meeting was taking place in another room. Having struck out with the political meeting, the informer, being entrepreneurial and wishing to be paid for an evening’s work, saw the women’s meeting as an opportunity not to return to his agent handler empty-handed.
In the report he submitted, the informer referred to the people in the commune as intellectual revolutionaries who were not part of organizations. Among the observations he regarded as worth reporting to the FBI—and that his handling agent thought worth memorializing in FBI files—was that one of the women “kept going in and out of the meeting to attend her small child in the kitchen” and that a number of other “rather hippie-type individuals were observed coming and going from the upper floors and it would appear that the three-story house is being operated as a commune.”
As a result of the informer going to the commune for a meeting that did not take place and attending a meeting of women where, as he reported, little took place, an FBI file was nevertheless opened on every member of the commune who was at the house that evening.
Detailed reports were prepared by informers and agents about demonstrations, even if very few people attended. An FBI report about a peaceful demonstration in Philadelphia noted that it was attended by “100 demonstrators and no spectators.” They had gathered to protest research on chemical weapons used in Vietnam. The official report notes that the demonstration—organized by none other than William Davidon, future Media burglar—was covered by eighteen Philadelphia police officers, plus a group of police photographers, and police in seven cruising police cars.
In another Media file, officials expressed concern about informers who went too far. The subject was discussed in the same bureau newsletter in which agents were advised to increase paranoia.
“There have been a few instances where security informants in the New Left got carried away during a demonstration, assaulted police, etc.” The key word in this area, the official wrote, was “control.” “The [bureau headquarters officials] define this to mean that while our informants should be privy to everything going on and should rise to the maximum level of their ability in the New Left Movement, they should not become the person who carries the gun, throws the bomb, does the robbery or by some specific violative, overt act becomes a deeply involved participant. This is a judgment area and any actions which seem to border on it should be discussed.” The statement was far from a clear rejection of such behavior.
One Media file recounts a bureau correspondence with Canadian counterparts that must have left the FBI disappointed, or perhaps perplexed. According to an official response from the Royal Canadian Mounted Police found in the Media files, when asked by the FBI in 1969 to locate Americans believed to be in the Union of American Exiles in Canada, the RCMP intelligence office responded, “At the present time, we do not have a source in the position of positively identifying the individuals mentioned.”
Most reports in the Media files were about clandestine investigations with harassment as the goal. The only files that were about developing evidence for prosecution were investigations of antidraft organizations and people who were engaged in “counseling, aiding and abetting in the anti-draft movement.” Hoover wrote in 1967 that he “cannot stress too strongly for prompt expeditious handling of these cases.” He assured agents that journalists would be sources of information when developing evidence in these cases. “If it is ascertained that the news media has obtained items of an evidentiary nature, such as photographs or statements,” he instructed agents, they “must be contacted promptly in order that the evidence may be securely maintained for possible future use.”
Advice in a file on recruiting future agents emphasized that military veterans were especially valuable recruits. “Catch the veteran almost before he is home,” advised an official in a file on recruitment. The Philadelphia office, he wrote, had excellent success with approaching such people as soon as they were discharged. Veterans were prized as FBI employees because they “are mature, have already been relocated certainly at least once and have no fear of Washington, DC. They have been subject to discipline and order.” But there were some drawbacks with veterans. “Because the discharged veteran is several years further along than the current high school graduate, some may have had a ‘wild oats’ period.” Because of this, the investigations of veterans should be “more demanding” than the investigations o
f other applicants.
The physical appearance of FBI agents—at the time they were hired and throughout their employment—was extraordinarily important to the director. This preoccupation was evident in the smallest details, not to mention the oddest ones.
In one Media file, a high FBI official discussed facial hair standards when hiring clerical employees:
I recently saw a photograph of a favorably recommended clerical applicant. This photograph reflected long sideburns and long hair in the back and too full on the sides. Please, when interviewing applicants be alert for long hairs, beards, mustaches, pear-shaped heads, truck drivers, etc. We are not that hard up yet.…In connection with long hair and sideburns, where you have an applicant that you would like to favorably recommend, ask the applicant to submit to you a new photograph with short sideburns and conventional hair style. I have not had one refuse me yet.
The reference to “pear-shaped heads,” strange as it might seem, was not casual advice. Nor was it a joke. It was well known in the bureau that Hoover would not tolerate people with such heads. One had suffered a terrible fate when he met the director. One day, as new agents who had recently graduated from the FBI Academy were paraded into the director’s office one by one for a quick handshake with the director—a ceremony that took place after each class of new agents graduated—Hoover promptly ordered that one of them be dismissed from the bureau immediately. The young agent had passed the sweaty palm test—any agent who shook Hoover’s hand with a sweaty palm was fired on the spot—but he had failed the pear-shaped head test.
Weight requirements were strictly enforced. This is evident in a January 4, 1971, memo to all Philadelphia-area agents from Philadelphia SAC Jamieson. He reminded agents and other employees in the Philadelphia field office of their responsibility to follow the demands made by the director in a 1965 order: that every July, October, January, and April “each Special Agent must be weighed and the Bureau advised of the results by the last day of such months.” He reminded them their weight must be recorded in the office of Mrs. Lee Landsburg, the nurse in the FBI field office. Reverting to capital letters, he wrote, “ANY MAN FOUND TO BE OVERWEIGHT WILL BE REQUIRED TO LOSE THE WEIGHT, AND WILL BE WEIGHED WEEKLY BY HIS SUPERVISOR UNTIL HIS WEIGHT IS BROUGHT WITHIN BUREAU STANDARDS.” Heads of resident agency offices, such as Media, were to be weighed every time they came to the Philadelphia field office, but not more than once a month. Jamieson concluded by noting, “I expect every agent and male clerical employee to maintain his weight within the desirable limits at all times.”
Read today, Jamieson’s memo sounds like it might have been written for a segment on Jon Stewart’s Daily Show on Comedy Central. Actually, weight gain, even slight weight gain, was treated as a serious issue in the bureau. Some agents were fired for being only a few pounds overweight. Some were clever in how they deceived the director about weight gain. One agent, who had to meet with Hoover not long after he had been found to be overweight, bought a suit for the occasion that was too large in order to make it appear that he had recently lost, not gained, weight.
FEW PEOPLE LAUGHED when they discovered in news reports about the Media files that they had been monitored by the FBI. The members of one group managed to do so. When it was reported that Media files revealed the FBI was intercepting the mail of the Friends Peace Committee of the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting, the Quaker organization publicly announced that it would put the FBI on its mailing list and make the interception of its mail unnecessary. There was no response from the FBI—unless breaking down Quaker employee Anne Flitcraft’s front door with a sledgehammer, invading her apartment, and removing her personal and professional papers, books, and typewriter should be regarded as a response.
Another organization, the Philadelphia-based Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, also responded publicly to reports that the FBI had surveilled the league’s fiftieth anniversary celebration in 1965. Dr. Martin Luther King was the keynote speaker at the event. The heading on the file about the event was “COMMUNIST INFILTRATION OF WOMEN’S INTERNATIONAL LEAGUE FOR PEACE AND FREEDOM.” In addition to clandestinely covering the gathering, the bureau distributed biographical sketches of the candidates for the national board of the organization to FBI offices in thirty-seven cities.
After the bureau’s file on the group became public, the group released “An Open Letter to the FBI.” In it, Naomi Marcus, the chair of the league’s policy committee, wrote, “We neither appreciate nor need the FBI’s snooping on us or our members. We have always operated in an open manner. We welcome as members all who believe in working by nonviolent means to create the conditions which will make peace and freedom possible. We do not inquire into the political affiliations of those who wish to join us.…We … recognize that there are merits as well as imperfections in all existing forms of political and socio-economic systems. We do not believe in ‘devil’ theories.…We call for a curb on Big Brother, and resolve that we will not be intimidated by those who seek to discredit us or to distract us from our goals.”
In the large Philadelphia FBI office, the Media files revealed, monitoring antiwar activists and black people dominated the FBI’s workload throughout the 1960s and early 1970s. That was true until 1975 when Neil Welch, as the new special agent in charge brought an approach different from Hoover’s, shifting the emphasis of investigations at the Philadelphia office to organized crime and government corruption, areas that had been of little interest to Hoover but were ones most Americans probably assumed had always been at the top of the FBI’s agenda at all times.
AFTER I RECEIVED the first two sets of Media files, I was eager to see all the files that had been stolen. I wanted evidence of whether the burglars were distorting the overall nature of the files by distributing only files that matched a biased goal. FBI and Department of Justice officials had claimed that was the case. I called a source in the Catholic peace movement, someone I thought might have been involved in some of the clandestine draft board raids. At a coffee shop near the Washington Post offices, I asked if she knew anyone who could help me get access to all of the Media files. She agreed to explore the possibility. A few days later she called and we met again. She had talked to someone who said he thought he would be able to arrange for me to go to a place where I would have access to all of the Media files. Someone would be in touch with me about arrangements.
When I returned to the newsroom, I did something very stupid. I was delighted—actually, I was very excited—that my search for all of the Media files might be successful. As I passed the desk of Ken Clawson, without thinking I stopped and impulsively said, “Ken, guess what? I think I’m going to get to see all of the Media files.” It was Clawson who had shared a byline with me on the first story about the documents because he had gotten confirmation from the bureau that the files were authentic. When I saw his expression instantly change from relaxed and casual to fierce and hardened, I was surprised and realized I had made a mistake. “I’ll go with you,” he said rather sternly. No longer so excited, I told him that wouldn’t be possible because I was dealing with confidential sources who would deal only with me. Trying to act as though nothing important had just been discussed, I walked to my office. About thirty minutes later, Clawson appeared beside my desk. “I will go with you,” he said, a heavy emphasis on “will,” as though he was giving an order, something he was not in a position to do. He turned and walked away as though the matter was settled. I knew then that it was settled, but not in the way he intended.
I gave myself a day to think about my strong gut reaction to Clawson’s demand. I could not be certain about why he reacted so strongly. I thought there were two possible explanations. He could have been acting simply from fiercely competitive instincts and thought that if the cache of Media files was going to be found, it would be a significant story, one he was determined to report. Or—and this seemed to be the more likely cause of his reaction—after months of writing about the bureau he had perhaps developed such
a close working relationship with the director’s staff, or even the director, that he might be willing to notify the FBI that I, or we, as he intended, were going to meet either the burglars or people who might be very closely associated with them. The search for the burglars and the stolen files was at a fever pitch at this time, so I assume that details from Clawson about my plan to travel to the files would have been of keen interest to the FBI, especially because the bureau’s search for the burglars and the files had failed so far. I decided I could not take a chance. In order to eliminate the possibility of jeopardizing my anonymous sources, I concluded I had to undo my chance to see all of the Media files. Whoever the burglars were, I was not going to be used to guide the FBI to them.
Two days after Clawson made his demand to me, I met my source and explained my error in judgment and withdrew my request for access. Needless to say, my source agreed that that was necessary under the circumstances. This time, when I returned to the newsroom and stopped at Clawson’s desk, I told him there would be no trip to see the Media files. I told him my sources had called it off. He looked very disappointed.
The Burglary Page 31
