The Burglary

by Betty Medsger

  The FBI files that were the basis of these anonymous accusations were the product not only of spying by FBI agents and untrained informers, but also of reports by members of the American Legion who from 1940 to 1966 spied for the FBI in their communities as part of a formal agreement with the bureau. The large contribution made by Legion members to the FBI’s massive trove of unevaluated informer files was first reported by FBI historian Athan Theoharis in 1985 in Political Science Quarterly. From the 16,700 American Legion posts in the country, a network of 100,880 untrained volunteer informers was created. They regularly reported information to the FBI about their fellow citizens, their neighbors. This augmentation of the FBI’s spying capacity was the closest the FBI came to being like the much-despised Stasi, the spying agency in the former East Germany, where people lived in constant fear of being informed on by their neighbors, even by their spouses. East Germans, however, knew such a system existed and dreaded it. In contrast, Americans lived in innocence with no idea that the American Legion member next door might be spying on them on behalf of the FBI.

  With the establishment of COINTELPRO and other operations that encouraged the use of the best and brightest agents to devise high-impact actions, supported by an extensive network of untrained informers, a culture of carelessness and lawlessness penetrated the bureau. That was admitted by Sullivan, the longtime head of the Domestic Intelligence Division. In an internal memorandum, Sullivan wrote that many of the COINTELPRO operations were “clearly illegal.”

  Lawlessness had been part of the FBI culture for many years. In a reversal of what would be expected to be the norm in law enforcement integrity, an agent’s expressed concern about the illegality of certain practices could have serious negative consequences in Hoover’s FBI. That is illustrated in the reaction of FBI officials at Washington headquarters to a New York agent who expressed concern at a training class in Washington in 1951 about whether break-ins by FBI agents at homes and offices were unconstitutional. Headquarters officials were startled that an agent would raise such a question and ordered officials at the New York office to determine whether that agent’s “mental outlook might be present” among other agents on the New York office’s break-in squad. Washington officials urged the New York FBI officials to “determine which of these men should be retained on this type of activity and which should be deleted.” Officials in New York and Washington were relieved to learn, after an examination of New York agents’ attitudes, that no other member of the New York break-in squad had scruples about the constitutionality of break-ins.

  ANYONE COULD BECOME a target of the FBI’s political operations, but files suggest that intellectuals were among Hoover’s chief targets—professors, artists, scientists, clergy. To be an intellectual, like being black, was to be regarded as a potential subversive, if not an active one. The director’s wide brush rather than precise approach to investigations and to intelligence gathering is indicative of how the bureau monitored intellectuals of various kinds. Files were maintained on nearly all well-known writers and artists. Reading a list of writers who were in the FBI’s files gives the impression that all the leading writers were there. To name a few: Sinclair Lewis, Pearl S. Buck, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck, Thomas Mann, Carl Sandburg, Dashiell Hammett, Truman Capote, Thornton Wilder, Lillian Hellman, Robert Frost, Graham Greene, Hannah Arendt. It is an endless roll call of the best novelists, nonfiction writers, poets, essayists, and playwrights, including Nobel laureates. Science fiction writers, including Ray Bradbury, also were regarded with suspicion and placed in the files. So were some publishers, including Alfred A. Knopf. His file was active for forty years primarily because of FBI interest in the authors Knopf published, some of whom Hoover considered subversive. One entry in Knopf’s file involved a loyalty check conducted by the FBI when he was nominated to be on the advisory board of the National Park Service. A wide array of scientists, including Albert Einstein, were monitored.

  Playwright Arthur Miller wrote extensively about the atmosphere of fear that permeated the lives of artists during the Cold War. “The politics of alien conspiracy soon dominated political discourse,” he wrote in a 1996 article in the New Yorker about the late 1940s and early 1950s, a period “in our lives” when there was no “point of moral reference against which to gauge the action.…The left could not look straight at the Soviet Union’s abrogations of human rights. The anti-Communist liberals could not acknowledge the violations of those rights by congressional committees.”

  Miller recalled what happened when he submitted a screenplay, The Hook, to Harry Cohn, the head of Columbia Pictures, in 1951. It was about union corruption, including murders, on the Brooklyn waterfront. “Something that would once have been considered unthinkable” happened. “He showed my script to the FBI.” They wanted Miller to change the gangsters in the script to communists. Miller refused. Cohn chastised Miller for being unwilling to make the change that Cohn told him would have made the script “pro-American.” The American Legion, then in its formal working relationship with the FBI, organized a boycott of Miller’s play Death of a Salesman.

  In 1952, Miller wrote a play that confronted the paranoia of that time, The Crucible. In it, he surveyed the tactics of the current political investigations through the prism of the Salem witch trials that took place in Massachusetts in 1692. The Crucible received tepid reviews when it opened on Broadway in 1953, but it became a classic, produced all over the world to this day. It has been produced, wrote Miller, “wherever a political coup appears imminent.…From Argentina to Chile to Greece, Czechoslovakia, China … the play seems to present the same primeval structure of human sacrifice to the furies of fanaticism and paranoia that goes on repeating itself as though imbedded in the brain of social man.”

  Miller lamented that the “accused were unable to cry out passionately.” Few did, but historian Bernard DeVoto did so in his “Easy Chair” column in Harper’s magazine in October 1949. An early and outspoken conservationist and historian, DeVoto also wrote occasionally in defense of civil liberties. It was in that last capacity that “he tangled with the FBI,” wrote Tom Knudson in High Country News in 1994 after reviewing DeVoto’s FBI file.

  DeVoto’s biographer, novelist Wallace Stegner, once said DeVoto was a “literary department store” who wrote “aisles of fiction, shelves of history, bins of criticism and an entire warehouse of contemporary essays, conservation polemics and political musings.” For one of the books in his three-volume epic history of the American frontier, Across the Wide Missouri, he won a Pulitzer Prize. The most famous of his many columns was “Due Notice to the FBI,” a “stinging attack,” Knudson writes, “on the government spying, Red-baiting, blacklisting and Communist witch hunts that swept across America after World War II.”

  DeVoto had been interviewed by the FBI about someone he refused to identify in his article. The FBI also had asked questions of acquaintances of DeVoto’s about the same person’s politics and personal life. The FBI interview inspired this response from DeVoto in his column:

  We have occasional qualms.…We find that the FBI has put at the disposal of this or that body a hash of gossip, rumor, slander, backbiting, malice, and drunken invention which, when it makes the headlines, shatters the reputations of innocent and harmless people and of people who our laws say are innocent until someone proves them guilty in court. We are shocked. Sometimes we are scared. Sometimes we are sickened. We know that the thing stinks to heaven, that it is an avalanching danger to our society. But we don’t do anything about it.

  They ask, “Have you—has he—ever been present at a meeting or a party where anyone sympathetic to Communism was also present? Did you—did he—belong to the Liberal Club in college? Did you—did he—escort to a dance a girl who has read Lenin or is interested in abstract painting? Have you—has he—ever recommended the Progressive to a friend?”

  …I say it has gone too far. We are dividing into the hunted and the hunters. There is loose in the United S
tates the same evil that once split Salem Village between the bewitched and the accused and stole men’s reason quite away. We are informers to the secret police. Honest men are spying on their neighbors for patriotism’s sake.…

  None of us can know how much of this inquiry into the private lives of American citizens and government employees is necessary. Some of it is necessary—but we have no way of knowing which, when, or where. We have seen enough to know for sure that a great deal of it is altogether irresponsible.…

  Representatives of the FBI … have questioned me, in the past, about a number of people and I have answered their questions. That’s over. From now on, any representative of the government, properly identified, can count on a drink and perhaps informed talk about the Red (but non-Communist) Sox at my house. But if he wants information from me about anyone whatsoever, no soap.

  Predictably, Hoover was furious at this rare public rebuke of his methods. He ordered an investigation of DeVoto that went on for years, and immediately notified heads of all FBI field offices across the country, “This article reflects the necessity of constantly being on the alert.”

  New files were born. In addition to investigating DeVoto, the FBI investigated the people whose letters approving of DeVoto’s column were published in Harper’s. His file filled with rumors about his politics and also with reports that he was “a fallen away Catholic” who had a “frontier childhood” in Utah. He was, according to one report placed in the file, a “shabbily dressed author” who once taught literature at Northwestern and Harvard universities. He was placed on the “no contact” list, probably without irony about the fact that that was the point: DeVoto did not want to be contacted.

  Criticism was not tolerated. Sullivan explained years later to the Church Committee how the bureau routinely handled censure: “Anyone who wrote a book or was writing a book or we knew was going to be critical of Mr. Hoover and the FBI, we made efforts right then and there to find out anything that we could to use against them.”

  In the midst of that atmosphere, a visceral reaction against, rather than knowledge of, writers seemed to guide the director’s conviction that authors should be watched and dossiers created about them for FBI files. For instance, when he read a newspaper report that Jean-Paul Sartre, who was internationally known as a French novelist, playwright, and philosopher and had recently been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, had said he would take an active role in the French “Who Killed Kennedy Committee,” Hoover wrote on the routing slip attached to the clipping, “Find out who Sartre is.” His reported lack of reading may explain why he did not recognize the name of one of the most best known authors in the world. It was widely believed inside the bureau that he did not read even “his” books, the ones written under his name by ghostwriters. It is stunning that such a person presumed he was capable of branding writers as subversive, let alone that it was legal for him to do so.

  Suppression of writers’ free expression was a continuous bureau project, but it probably was most aggressive during the 1960s, when the bureau forcefully and secretly—and sometimes violently—attacked campus and underground newspapers. They did so with various goals: forcing the publications to close, infiltrating them with informers, and threatening the credibility—and sometimes the lives—of their staff. The FBI often worked with the CIA and Army intelligence agencies in operations against these newspapers. In all, at least 150 such newspapers were the targets of these operations, according to Angus Mackenzie, who studied the scope of the operations in 1981 for Columbia Journalism Review.

  The bureau’s systematic approach to suppressing First Amendment rights involved convincing advertisers, including Columbia Records, to cease advertising in the underground press and campus papers—an idea that originated in the San Francisco FBI office and was used elsewhere with success. Banks that held the accounts of the newspapers were successfully recruited by the bureau to help in efforts to shut them down. Upon requests from the bureau, banks provided records of advertising income and contributions that had been deposited by the newspapers. The FBI used the information to convince people to stop supporting the newspapers.

  The FBI also set up phony newspapers that hired radical young writers, giving the bureau wide ability to spy on them. It set up a photo agency, New York Press Service, that posed as an agency that served underground and campus newspapers. The person in charge, paid by the FBI, successfully solicited business with this letter to the newspapers: “The next time your organization schedules a demonstration, march, picket or office party, let us know in advance. We’ll cover it like a blanket and deliver a cost free sample of our work to your office.” Every response and every photograph shot went to the FBI.

  Probably the most aggressive operation against an alternative news organization was the one conducted against Liberation News Service (LNS), a national service that distributed stories to alternative and campus newspapers. By 1968, Mackenzie reported, the FBI had assigned three informers to penetrate LNS, while nine informers reported on it from outside. The FBI used various counterintelligence techniques in attempts to destroy LNS. Within the antiwar movement, informers used disinformation to make LNS appear to be an FBI front. The bureau created friction among staff members and once planned to burn its offices in Washington, D.C., while the staff slept upstairs.

  CONSISTENT WITH Hoover’s assumption that intellectuals often were subversives, campuses were important playing fields for the FBI during the Cold War and the Vietnam War. Professors and students were targets of the FBI throughout that long period, but the emphases were reversed during the two wars. During the Cold War, professors were the main targets. During the Vietnam War, students were the chief campus objects of scrutiny, in massive numbers. And of all campus targets, black students were considered the greatest threat. On some campuses, as the initial Media files revealed, all black students were targeted by the FBI.

  To deal with professors, whom Hoover considered to be among the country’s worst internal threats, in 1951 he created the Responsibilities Program. Officially it was closed after four years, but like his nonclosing of COINTELPRO in 1971, the Responsibilities Program continued to operate after the director “closed” it—removed its name—a gesture he thought would make it more difficult for this secret program to be discovered.

  Hoover informed state governors about the program at a closed meeting in his office in 1951, where he swore them to secrecy. He spoke to them about two targeted groups, teachers and union members. Regarding unions, he informed them he had more than 12,000 informers in various industrial plants. He recited the number of subversives in each governor’s state. He also told them that the bureau had a list of 4,463 Americans who were “the most potentially dangerous.” Those people, he said, the FBI kept “under surveillance at all times.” He told the governors that his authority for conducting such operations derived from the “responsibility of the bureau for the internal security of the country as a whole.”

  In response to the governors’ interest in what was being done about subversives on campuses, Hoover told them about the Responsibilities Program and its principal goal, the firing of professors, lecturers, and other university employees. The emphasis in the program was on state universities, but faculty at some private universities also were targeted. Even elementary and high school teachers and schools’ nonteaching staff members were subject to FBI investigation under the program.

  By Hoover’s standards, the Responsibilities Program was effective. It led to the dismissal of more than a thousand professors without due process. The program was one way he succeeded in creating an atmosphere during the peak of the Cold War in which the basic tenets of academic freedom were ignored on some of the nation’s campuses. Former FBI agents and local American Legion members were hired by university administrators or governing boards to investigate the political activities of their own students and faculty members. Some universities, including Columbia, literally opened their faculty and student files to FBI agents.
Professors and students spied on one another—sometimes at the request of the FBI, other times at the request of campus administrators and boards of regents or trustees. This, of course, fostered a poisonous learning and teaching environment. For campuses in small towns and cities, community life also was affected as selected professors were targeted for having suspect opinions.

  Entire academic disciplines were affected, especially in the social sciences. The annual conventions of anthropologists and sociologists were peppered with FBI agents and informers who wrote secret reports for FBI files on speeches and academic papers presented at the conventions. A 1958 study of social scientists found that two-thirds of the approximately twenty-five hundred social science faculty members surveyed had been visited by the FBI at least once, and one-third of them had been visited three or more times. The threatening atmosphere created by the monitoring of social science researchers and their work is believed to have had a significant impact on the type of research done in some academic fields for nearly two decades as some professors engaged primarily in quantitative research and statistical analysis that was less likely to be regarded as politically suspect by the FBI than was work based on qualitative research.

  In one of Hoover’s largest projects, the FBI directed successive sustained clandestine operations against the University of California, with an emphasis on that system’s Berkeley campus. The operations there involved hundreds of agents and informers spying on thousands of faculty and students from the late 1940s through the early 1970s. On the Berkeley campus, one of the most prestigious universities in the world, the bureau “mounted the most extensive covert operations the FBI is known to have ever undertaken in any college community,” according to Seth Rosenfeld, author of Subversives: The FBI’s War on Student Radicals and Reagan’s Rise to Power, published in 2012. The University of California may, in fact, have been the largest organization of any type Hoover targeted for disruption by the bureau. These documented FBI actions were not known until Rosenfeld researched them over a period of thirty years for his comprehensive book on the FBI’s role at Berkeley.