The Burglary

by Betty Medsger

  The Church Committee investigation presented the country, for the first time, with a substantial body of information about how the secret FBI and other intelligence agencies operated. Memorably, the hearings revealed the CIA’s attempted assassinations of Cuban president Fidel Castro and its attempts to overthrow democratically elected leaders. But in the end, Frederick A. O. Schwarz Jr., the chief counsel to the Church Committee, concluded, after examining all the evidence gathered by the committee, that the worst abuses were committed by the FBI. “The FBI abuses were much more dangerous. They undermined American democracy, violated the law and subverted the Constitution.” The pervasiveness of domestic intelligence, he noted, was “reflected in the sheer volume of Americans spied upon. The FBI opened more than 500,000 domestic intelligence files, each typically including several individuals’ names.”

  On the first day of the Church Committee’s hearings, Schwarz stated the key role of the Media files in exposing abuses by the bureau:

  “Let me observe that whatever effort there was to turn off COINTELPRO occurred only after it had been exposed … by the theft of documents from the Media, Pennsylvania, office of the FBI, and exposed in the press, pursuant to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit [a reference to Carl Stern’s suit].”

  The evidence collected by the Church Committee revealed the very wide scope and impact of the secret power and influence Hoover assumed belonged to him. No part of the government or American life was outside his reach. He used his secret power to destroy individuals and to manipulate and destroy organizations, including a major American university. He secretly punished people he regarded as wrong-thinking—civil rights leaders, senior members of Congress who questioned war policy, and also average people who wrote letters to a member of Congress or dared to express their dissent by appearing at an antiwar demonstration. In Hoover’s world, the evidence showed, any American was fair game.

  In addition to the evidence gathered and testimony given before the Church Committee about abusive actions carried out by the FBI against people because of their dissent, the committee’s hearings also were notable for the insights elicited from FBI officials about the rationale for Hoover’s abusive intelligence operations.

  When asked if, during the execution of COINTELPRO operations, anybody at the FBI had discussed the operations’ constitutionality or legality, the former head of the bureau’s Racial Intelligence Section, George Moore, answered,

  “No, we never gave it a thought.”

  William C. Sullivan, the head of the FBI’s Domestic Intelligence Division for ten years and the person responsible for some of the worst elements of the bureau’s long campaign to destroy Martin Luther King, confirmed that analysis when he told the Church Committee:

  Never once did I hear anybody, including myself, raise the question: “Is this course of action which we have agreed upon lawful, is it legal, is it ethical or moral?” We never gave any thought to this line of reasoning because we were just naturally pragmatic. The one thing we were concerned about, will this course of action work, will it get us what we want, will we reach the objective we desire to reach.

  Schwarz has concluded that the “assumption of everlasting secrecy” was the key to understanding why the director assumed he could get away with abusing Americans and could create an atmosphere where integrity was not an issue. “The expectation of permanent secrecy and no effective oversight led many to ignore the law.”

  In its final report, the Church Committee’s conclusions about COINTELPRO included this observation:

  Many of the techniques used would be intolerable in a democratic society even if all the targets had been involved in violent activity, but COINTELPRO went far beyond that. The unexpressed major premise of the programs was that a law enforcement agency has the duty to do whatever is necessary to combat perceived threats to the existing social and political order.”

  Among all of the political operations conducted by the bureau, surely the most egregious was the one conducted against the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King. Hoover’s attitude toward King can be described as a nearly savage hatred. That extreme quality is evident in many COINTELPRO operations, but may be most evident in the records of FBI plots against black people, especially the years-long multifaceted operation designed to destroy King, the best-known and most respected civil rights leader. The plot involved office break-ins, use of informers, mail opening, wiretapping, and bugging of King’s office, home, and hotel rooms. In one of the most extreme operations against King, the bureau attempted to convince him to commit suicide just weeks before he was to receive the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo in 1964. In another extreme measure, Hoover instructed agents not to inform King about advance notice it had received about threats against his life. Hoover told President Johnson he regarded King as “an instrument in the hands of subversive forces seeking to undermine our nation.”

  As King delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech, widely considered one of the greatest speeches of the twentieth century, on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial on August 28, 1963, before 250,000 people who had come to the March on Washington to support civil rights and urge passage of the Civil Rights Act, top officials of the FBI listened to the speech in their offices a few blocks away at FBI headquarters and decided it was the speech of a demagogue who should be toppled by the bureau. It was then that Hoover and other officials at headquarters started to plot King’s demise. They also had the audacity to assume the FBI should surreptitiously select someone to replace King as the leader of black Americans.

  Hoover’s tendency to be particularly cruel to African Americans was also evident in the planting of false rumors that set off violent confrontations between black organizations. It was evident in his seemingly casual, callous attitude toward setting up the murder of one black man, Fred Hampton, and allowing another black man, Geronimo Pratt, to be falsely convicted for murder. Chicago Black Panther leader Hampton was shot dead in his sleep in his apartment by Chicago police after a diagram of his apartment, including where he slept, was given to police by an FBI informant with a spot on the diagram marked “Fred’s bed.” In internal documents, the FBI took credit for the killing. The information the informer provided, wrote an agent, was considered to be of “tremendous value” to the “success of the raid.” After the raid that resulted in the killing of Hampton and Mark Clark, a member of the Panthers’ Peoria chapter, the FBI installed wiretaps on the phones of the survivors of the raid so agents could listen to them talk with their lawyers. The bureau gave the FBI informer who provided the floor plan a bonus.

  Pratt, a much-decorated Vietnam veteran and Black Panther leader in Los Angeles, spent twenty-seven years in prison for a murder conviction that was overturned in 1997 by an Orange County judge who ruled that evidence that could have led to Pratt’s acquittal was concealed by the FBI at his trial. He was convicted on the basis of testimony of an FBI informer who lied at the trial.

  The FBI’s approach to investigating the Black Panther Party was in the spirit of the worst of the COINTELPRO operations—set up people to destroy one another. Testimony at the Church hearings revealed that the bureau’s national effort to destroy the Panthers involved using informants and disinformation to promote gang warfare between Panthers and other black organizations and also to promote intramural violence within branches of the party. These bureau efforts were believed to be responsible for the deaths of at least four Black Panthers who were shot to death.

  Violence was promoted by the FBI in black organizations so often in the late 1960s and early 1970s that it is impossible, in retrospect, to know whether any given violent confrontation that took place in that era was instigated by genuine animosities among actual members of the groups or was instigated by FBI agents or informers, many of whom infiltrated such groups and promoted violence.

  The sad conundrum of whether the FBI was the source of violent episodes and internal distrust in organizations in that era came to light in 2012 in two communities. People knowledgea
ble of the history of the Black Panther Party in Northern California were shocked when journalist Seth Rosenfeld reported FBI documentation that the late Richard Aoki, a deeply respected leader in ethnic studies in the Bay Area and a member of the Black Panther Party in Oakland, was an FBI informer for many years, including at the time he armed the Oakland Panthers and taught them how to use the weapons he supplied.

  In Memphis, people were stunned in 2013 when the FBI confirmed that the late Ernest Withers, the best-known and beloved photographer of the civil rights movement and of life in Memphis, was an FBI informer during the years he photographed all the major events in the movement from 1958 until 1972. Throughout that time he worked closely with key people in the movement, including Martin Luther King. During that time he filed reports with the FBI, including ones on King at the time of the sanitation workers’ strike that brought King to Memphis the week he was killed there in April 1968. Withers secretly supplied the FBI with photographs of King and others in the civil rights movement and also filed reports with agents about conversations he heard among movement members.

  MANY FBI OPERATIONS reflected Hoover’s apparent obsession with the details of the private lives of people whose opinions he disliked or of powerful people he threatened to blackmail by virtue of the secrets he kept on them in his files. A file on a COINTELPRO operation focused on Puerto Rican independence activists documents something he often did—lift his crude personal fascinations to an official mandate in intelligence gathering. An informer was instructed by the bureau “to report even the slightest bits of information concerning the personal lives” of the activists. It also illustrates his approval of cruel outcomes. During a COINTELPRO “disruption” of one Puerto Rican organization, the target of the disruption suffered a serious heart attack. In a report, FBI agents described his heart attack as a “positive result” of the bureau’s effort.

  A Los Angeles agent received enthusiastic approval from the director for a plan to punish actress Jean Seberg in 1970 for giving a contribution to the Black Panther Party. The plan was tragically successful. The agent proposed to Hoover that Seberg, then several months pregnant, be publicly humiliated by planting the false rumor that her baby’s father was a Black Panther leader. The planting of such a rumor, the agent wrote in his proposal, “could cause her embarrassment and serve to cheapen her image with the general public.” The director approved the proposed plan, noting in his response that “Jean Seberg has been a financial supporter of the B.P.P. [Black Panther Party] and should be neutralized.” He advised Los Angeles agents to increase the effectiveness of the operation by waiting a couple months so Seberg’s pregnancy would be more obvious when the rumor was planted. Apparently eager to move ahead, agents in Los Angeles planted the rumor with Los Angeles Times gossip columnist Joyce Haber as soon as the director approved the plan. Haber wrote that an international movie star who supported the “black revolution” was expecting and the “Papa’s said to be a rather prominent Black Panther.” With other details, Haber made it clear the unnamed star was Seberg. Soon after reading the rumor, Seberg went into premature labor and three days later gave birth to a dead white baby girl. After Seberg committed suicide on the anniversary of the birth of the dead baby in 1979, her husband, Romain Gary, the French novelist-diplomat, said Seberg had suffered severe depression ever since the published rumor and the birth of her dead child. He said she had tried to commit suicide each year on the anniversary of the birth.

  Shortly after Seberg’s suicide became known, then FBI director William Webster issued a contrite statement: “The days when the FBI used derogatory information to combat advocates of unpopular causes have long since passed. We are out of that business forever.”

  Hoover even felt free to secretly manipulate elections. When he learned in June 1967 that a Peace Party ticket might be formed for the 1968 presidential election, he approved a plan to destroy the effort by, in his words, labeling “as communists or communist-backed the more hysterical opponents of the President on Vietnam question in the midst of the presidential campaign [which] would be a real boon to Mr. Johnson.” He added in this note, sent to all of the bureau’s field offices, that in regard to New Left activists, “every avenue of possible embarrassment must be vigorously and enthusiastically exploited.”

  If Muhammad Ali had known about either the FBI’s surveillance of him or that he and Frazier unwittingly provided cover for the burglary of the Media FBI office, he might have thought the cover was a sort of poetic justice. The bureau built a file on Ali, beginning with its investigation of his Selective Service case. Some of his phone conversations were tapped, and FBI informers gained access to, of all things, his elementary school records in his hometown, Louisville, Kentucky. They discovered that little Cassius Clay liked art. They recorded every grade he made from elementary through high school. A minor driving citation, as well as family disagreements over his becoming a Muslim, were noted in the file. His appearances on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson were monitored and summarized by agents, at taxpayers’ expense, for the FBI director. Hoover had concluded, regarding Ali’s claim that his refusal to serve in the Army rested on religious grounds, that Ali’s beliefs “were a matter of convenience rather than ones sincerely held.” The U.S. Supreme Court rejected that claim on June 28, 1971, in a unanimous opinion that supported Ali’s claim that his “beliefs are founded on tenets of the Muslim religion as he understands them.”

  FOR HOOVER, from the beginning, much of his motivation in intelligence operations flowed from his conviction that all dissent and all movements for basic rights flowed from communism. There was a time when it was important for the FBI to competently investigate the infiltration of Soviet spies in the United States, including in government agencies where real harm could have been done. Unfortunately, this specific need in a precise period was transformed by Hoover into a vast and unending conspiracy. His focus on pursuing actual enemies evolved into seeing and pursuing enemies everywhere, even in the expression of the mildest liberal ideas. In the process, dissent was in effect secretly criminalized by the bureau. This resulted in countless numbers of innocent people being victimized while some actual enemies may have gone unnoticed. Tragically, for the bureau and the country, his obsession with communism cost him his competence.

  Hoover played major public and major private roles in the anticommunism movement. Publicly, he was the ringmaster of the movement, much more so than Senator Joseph McCarthy, whose name is most frequently connected to anticommunism. In fact, Hoover provided McCarthy much, if not most, of the material McCarthy used as the basis of his reckless investigations. Hoover wrote books and articles and gave speeches on communism, and he advised the powerful House Un-American Activities Committee to expose communists and communist sympathizers, “fellow travelers,” and liberals, who he often said were more dangerous than communists. He gave HUAC that advice in a major speech, known as the “Communist Menace” speech, on March 26, 1947.

  In that speech, Hoover prescribed the pattern for how alleged communists and others should be rooted out. He urged HUAC to publicly “expose” communists and other people whose politics were suspect. Exposure by HUAC, he said, would lead the public to “quarantine” such people in their communities. Indeed, that is what happened.

  Hoover’s two-punch plan—“expose” and “quarantine”—was carried out repeatedly throughout the country by HUAC and state and education committees in what Victor Navasky, former editor of the Nation, astutely described as “degradation ceremonies.”

  The job of HUAC and the other “shaming” groups, Navasky wrote in Naming Names, “was not to legislate or even to discover subversives—that had already been done by the intelligence agencies and their informants—so much as it was to stigmatize.”

  Hoover’s major private role in the anticommunism movement included giving HUAC the FBI’s unverified surveillance files to use as the basis of its hearings in Washington and around the country. Those unverified FBI files were the basis o
f most efforts throughout the country—in federal, state, and local government agencies; in universities; in public school boards; in businesses and other private organizations—that led to the public humiliation and dismissal of thousands of people from their jobs during the anticommunist era. The accused were not permitted to face their accusers or defend themselves.

  HUAC and other agencies “exposed” people by using the unverified FBI files. Often the accused were, as Hoover predicted would happen, quarantined. People who refused to testify were found in contempt, and some of them were imprisoned. Many lost their jobs or were shunned in their workplaces and communities. The accused had no access to the secret FBI files used to condemn them.

  In addition to placing himself in charge of searching for Americans who had suspect political opinions during the anticommunist years, and turning their names over to the various agencies that then exposed them to public scorn and loss of employment, Hoover played another very important role during this era. As the fiery prophet of anticommunism, he contributed significantly to shaping the national narrative on anticommunism. He did so in ways that made Americans deeply fearful, and, ironically, at the same time contributed significantly to Americans being intellectually defenseless against communism. His rhetoric often consisted of raw hatred of communism and of the Soviet Union. He encouraged blind, religious allegiance to the hatred, but he imparted little or no understanding of the ideology and its history. Consequently, average Americans tended to rely on the warnings Hoover preached repeatedly. As a result, if a serious communist threat had in fact developed in the United States, many, if not most, Americans would have been inadequately equipped to understand or oppose it. He drummed up fear and convinced people the FBI would get rid of the enemies that, he said, were penetrating the country’s major institutions, even elementary and high schools.