The Burglary

by Betty Medsger

  Less than a year later, Clawson quit his job at the Washington Post and became deputy director of communications in the Nixon White House and later director of communications. Soon after he moved to the White House post, I got some insight into his relationship with Hoover. Another Post colleague, White House correspondent Don Oberdorfer, told me what he had observed one day as Clawson assembled his new office in the White House. He unpacked and put on prominent display a framed and warmly inscribed photograph of J. Edgar Hoover.

  A special relationship had developed between Hoover and Clawson as a result of an interview Clawson had with him on November 16, 1970. As Curt Gentry wrote in his biography of Hoover, since “his outburst before the women’s press club in 1964, when he’d angrily denounced the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., J. Edgar Hoover had not held a press conference or given a personal interview” until the one with Clawson.

  The interview had come about under circumstances that endeared Clawson to Hoover. Thus the warm inscription. Clawson’s efforts to get an interview with the director started in the summer of 1970 when he was transferred from covering the White House to covering the Department of Justice. Post executive editor Ben Bradlee playfully bet Clawson a lunch that he could not get an interview with Hoover. Clawson was determined to win the bet. A written request to the director produced a perfunctory rejection. He tried other approaches. All failed. Then, thanks to a hallway encounter with Hoover in the Department of Justice Building that was set up by Attorney General John Mitchell, Clawson directly asked him for an interview. Hoover said no then, but he remembered the request a few days later when reviews of a book by Ramsey Clark were published in Sunday editions of newspapers. The reviews had noted that the book included scathing criticism by Clark of Hoover and the bureau. Clark had written, for example, that the bureau suffered from “the excessive domination of a single person, J. Edgar Hoover, and his self-centered concern for his reputation and that of the FBI.”

  When Clawson arrived at work that Monday morning, the day after the reviews appeared, he had eight urgent messages from the FBI director’s office. That interview Clawson wanted? He could have it now. Clawson raced to the director’s office. The director said he could have twenty minutes. It seemed as though he couldn’t stop talking. Hours passed. Clawson said later his writing hand got tired. The director missed lunch for the first time in the memory of anyone in his office.

  In Hoover’s anger over Clark’s book, he sputtered to Clawson that Clark was a “jellyfish”—the worst attorney general he had worked with in all his years as director. Clark was even worse, the director told Clawson, than Robert Kennedy. Given how much Hoover disliked Kennedy, that was quite a criticism. With Clark, said Hoover, “you never knew which way he was going to flop on an issue.” About Mitchell, the current attorney general, “There never has been an attorney general for whom I’ve had a higher regard.”

  Hoover expressed his fury regarding Bobby Kennedy urging him to hire black agents, something Hoover automatically assumed meant he would have to “lower the standards.” He said he had told Kennedy he would resign rather than do that. With pride and apparently no shame, Hoover told Clawson he “didn’t speak to Bobby Kennedy the last six months he was in office.” The director could not have been more pleased with Clawson’s story. And Bradlee, loser of the bet, took Clawson to lunch at Sans Souci, then a fashionable Washington restaurant.

  As it turned out, over a period of about three months the burglars did release all of the Media files, excluding, of course, routine blank forms and files about criminal investigations they had no interest in hampering, such as organized crime.

  In the last set of files sent to journalists by the Citizens’ Commission to Investigate the FBI, on May 3, 1971, the burglars included a statistical analysis of the files they had removed from the Media office, excluding the 30 percent of the total that were manuals, routing forms, and similar procedural materials. They described the investigative files as follows:

  1 percent—organized crime, mostly gambling.

  7 percent—leaving the military without permission.

  7 percent—draft resistance, including refusal to submit to military induction.

  20 percent—murder, rape and interstate theft.

  25 percent—bank robberies.

  40 percent—political surveillance and other investigation of political activity. Of these cases, 2 were about conservative individuals or organizations and 200 were about liberal individuals or organizations.

  THE MEDIA FILES WERE case histories that demonstrated for the first time that the FBI used its hidden and unlimited power to monitor many people on the basis of their opinions—or the opinions of their associates, or on the basis of what their appearance or lifestyle suggested to the FBI their opinions might be. Lives were imprisoned in these secret FBI files. People could neither access nor assess the files created about them by the FBI. Until the Media files became public, no one outside the bureau knew that people stood secretly accused by the FBI in files. The people who were the subjects in the files had no chance to see their FBI record, no chance to correct false information that had been placed in the files by untrained informers, and no chance to expunge this secret record of their lives.

  The FBI had assumed that the people sealed inside its files did not have the basic rights of access and review that even people charged with the most serious crimes have regarding government evidence collected about them. The most powerful law enforcement agency in the country was secret judge, secret jury, and secret warden of years-long secret investigations of countless people.

  The number three official in the bureau at the time of the burglary, William C. Sullivan, said later that “the documents they stole from us and released to the press caused a national uproar.…The documents relating to our security investigation proved beyond a doubt that the FBI was investigating students as if they were criminals.”

  By creating such records, the bureau was neither fighting crime nor protecting national security. Instead, it was—just as Davidon had feared when he decided to risk his future, and to invite others to join him in doing so—building massive files intended to intimidate people from exercising their right to dissent.

  The files stolen at Media revealed many important secrets the public needed to know, but they were just the beginning. If those secrets were found in a remote office in suburban Philadelphia, people wanted to know what was in files located in other FBI offices, including at headquarters. Except for the part of the secret FBI that was revealed at Media, most of the bureau’s secrets were still securely protected inside the FBI headquarters in Washington and in FBI offices throughout the country. Not until the chain of events set off by the Media burglary resulted in investigations of the bureau was it learned that the bureau’s operations often led to actions that harmed—and were intended to harm—the activists who were targeted. The impact often was much more than simple harassment.

  The bureau struggled mightily to make it impossible for Congress and the public to learn more about the secret FBI than was revealed in the Media files. Ultimately, the bureau would fail in that effort.

  14

  The Subterfuge Continues

  FBI OFFICIALS DREADED discovering which secrets might show up next in news reports. As the Media burglars continued to release a new set of files every ten to fourteen days until mid-May 1971, the internal files of the bureau’s investigation of the burglary reveal that the FBI reacted feverishly throughout that time as one shoe after another dropped. The director and his aides waited helplessly for news they could not stop and to arrest burglars they could not find.

  Accustomed to being in total control of the bureau and its public image, the director lost control for the first time. He wanted to keep all bureau files secret, as he always had, but now that his secrets could emerge at any time, Hoover and his top aides deemed the exposure of some secrets to be much more important than that of others. They dreaded most the damage that would be done by p
ublic exposure of two programs: SI and COINTELPRO. The director had put these programs in place many years earlier. COINTELPRO operations were regarded in the bureau as the ones that could cause the greatest damage if they became known. Hoover and his top aides had gone to great lengths to make sure that the existence of COINTELPRO was known only inside the bureau, and they were determined that would remain the case. But after the burglary, determination did not count for much. That spring the Media burglars, not the bureau, were in charge of what the public learned about the FBI.

  The other program FBI officials urgently wanted to keep secret was SI—the Security Index. It had been started by Hoover in 1939 and had a tumultuous history. Some attorneys general had been aware of the index. One had ordered Hoover to eliminate it, but Hoover never did so. It had survived that attorney general’s order, and it had continued to grow through World War II and the Cold War. Now, in the spring of 1971, it seemed possible it might be exposed and endangered by the Media burglary.

  So they could plan damage control, officials at the Intelligence Division at FBI headquarters in Washington and in the Philadelphia field office worked daily throughout the spring of 1971 to try to reconstruct the Media files so they could be prepared to comment—or not comment, as it turned out—if queried about specific files. Despite their efforts, it proved to be nearly impossible to reconstruct the Media files with precision. To some extent, they were guessing what files had been kept at Media and might emerge. That Hoover had punished the head of the Media office, the person who knew most about the files in the office, by exiling him to Atlanta hindered the reconstruction effort. Because of the difficulty of knowing what secrets would emerge next, bureau officials were uncertain for weeks whether files about the two programs they thought would be most endangered by public exposure, SI and COINTELPRO, were in the Media files.

  They were.

  The names of the two programs eventually surfaced in Media files that spring, but when they did they were not understood. That provided some relief to FBI officials, but only temporarily. Most of the stolen files were fairly straightforward, such as the report that said informers should be placed in all black student organizations at colleges. That document was clear and easily understood. Not so with SI and COINTELPRO. They were acronyms without clear reference points in the files. It took a lawsuit by a relentless television reporter, a demanding attorney general, and congressional investigations over the next five years to force into public light the files that would reveal what the COINTELPRO operations were.

  The mysterious acronyms—SI and COINTELPRO—were like messages in bottles that had washed ashore but could not be opened—dark, sealed bottles that shielded the terms from being understood even after they had surfaced. “SI” first appeared in a memo found at Media in which agents were ordered to place members of the Jewish Defense League on SI. The term appeared again in a February 26, 1971, memo that summarized an effort to have a University of California at Berkeley student placed on SI. In both instances, the meaning of the term was not clear. An FBI informer in Washington described the Berkeley student as “an inveterate Marxist revolutionist … far out,” and he recommended she be placed on the SI. After having the student monitored by informers in Berkeley, an agent there wrote, “Due to lack of information and activities of subject, San Francisco is not submitting a summary report at this time. Subject is not being recommended for inclusion on the Security Index as it is felt additional investigation is acquired [sic] before this evaluation can be reached.” Despite the agent’s reservations, however, the student was placed on the Security Index.

  In Hoover’s confidential memo to Attorney General Mitchell on March 25, the day after the first story about the Media documents was published, Hoover expressed concern about SI being revealed. It is evident he assumed the attorney general was not familiar with the term, for he explained it to him, though incompletely: SI is “a listing of individuals deemed a threat to the internal security.” If SI were revealed, Hoover informed him, “it could open the door to inquiries regarding the propriety and purpose of maintaining lists of subversives.” The danger that exposure of bureau programs aimed at subversives would cause public controversy was the director’s persistent concern as the Media secrets emerged.

  The full explanation of the Security Index was first revealed by Washington Post reporter William Greider in a June 13, 1971, article:

  Unknown to the general public or even to Congress, the federal government maintains a super-secret listing of so-called potential subversives—a file which would be the basis for federal arrests in the event of war or an “internal security emergency.”

  It is called the “Security Index,” compiled and kept up-to-date by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, supervised by the Justice Department’s Internal Security Division.

  Though it has been in existence since at least the 1930s, the government does not admit it, even when Congress makes an inquiry. Both the FBI and the Justice Department refuse to concede even that there is something called the “Security Index,” much less explain what it is.

  The index is a closely held list of the names, addresses, jobs and phone numbers of thousands of Americans considered potentially dangerous as spies or saboteurs if war or national insurrection developed. How many thousands is not known, but the list has been expanded in recent years as New Left radicals and militant black leaders were added to the rolls, joining the Old Left types from the Communist Party and Trotskyite organizations. A conservative guess based on public figures on subversives is that more than 10,000 people are kept under scrutiny as index subjects.

  It was later revealed the index included the names of more than 26,000 Americans.

  Just a year earlier, in 1970, Greider reported, Senator Sam Ervin’s Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Constitutional Rights had asked all federal departments, including the Department of Justice, to report on all of the “law enforcement–oriented or intelligence-type files” which the agencies maintained on citizens. The Department of Justice did not report the existence, let alone the details, of the Security Index at that time. Interestingly, the index was probably the only FBI collection of intelligence data on citizens that the department monitored—or was supposed to monitor—and was therefore in a position to report to the senate committee. But given that Hoover informed the attorney general about some of the basic facts concerning the Security Index soon after the Media files started to become public, it seems likely that the Department of Justice had forfeited oversight of the list much earlier.

  HOW HOOVER MANAGED the index from 1939 until the fall of 1971 is a case study in how he maintained tight control and was able to run a secret FBI within the FBI. It also illustrates the tension between his desire for protection by officials and his desire for total independence. While there was only one FBI director from 1924 to 1972, there were sixteen attorneys general—the people who technically were his direct supervisors but whom he thought of as his protectors rather than as his bosses. Bending each of them to his will usually was easy, but not always, as is seen in the reluctance of some of them to authorize illegal FBI programs in writing, including approval of his maintaining a list of Americans to be arrested and imprisoned without trial in the event of a national emergency.

  Hoover started the Security Index early in his career as director. Over the lifetime of the index, he changed its name twice. He succeeded in keeping its existence secret from the public from 1939 until the Media burglary. But that success was marked by tumultuous struggles from time to time. In the beginning, it was called the Custodial Detention Index. It became the Security Index in 1943 and then the Administrative Index, or AMDEX, in the fall of 1971. The name changes were related to increasing secrecy and had nothing to do with alterations in the nature of the program or in how it was conducted.

  The list was started the day after Germany invaded Poland in September 1939. FBI agents throughout the country were ordered to prepare reports on “persons of German, Italian and Commun
ist sympathies,” as well as other persons “whose interests may be directed primarily to the interest of some other nation than the United States” for listing on the new Custodial Detention Index. The names were gathered, according to FBI historian Athan Theoharis, not from knowledge about individuals’ subversive activities but primarily from the subscription lists of German, Italian, and communist newspapers; from membership lists of organizations; and from informant and agent reports on who attended meetings and demonstrations. This casual and imprecise method of harvesting alleged subversives’ names for such a serious purpose—to get names of “both aliens and citizens of the United States, on whom there is information available that their presence at liberty in this country in time of war or national emergency would be dangerous to the public peace and the safety of the United States Government”—was striking in view of the fact that placing names on the list could lead to their loss of freedom and, in varying ways, the destruction of their lives.

  Hoover was clear about intending to keep standards loose in regard to which people should be placed on the list of alleged subversives considered dangerous enough to be stripped of their freedom by the FBI at the time of a national emergency. People whose names were placed on the list, he instructed, should be “watched carefully … because their previous activities indicate the possibility but not the probability that they will harm the national interest.” Hoover’s language here—“possibility but not the probability”—reflects the elasticity he used to determine who should be included on the list. Over the years that elasticity was stretched more and more.

  Because there was no law authorizing such lists, Hoover warned agents from the time the list was established that its existence must be “entirely confidential.” When the full history of the director and the bureau started to emerge in the 1970s, it became known for the first time that the director never had been shy about breaking the law. Any concerns he expressed about operating outside the law were not about respect for the law or regret about breaking it but instead about the possibility of embarrassing the bureau if the violations became known.