WHEN MEMBERS of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) learned in 1973 that the party had been the target of one of the major COINTELPRO programs, they sued the government for violating their constitutional rights. Their lawsuit produced shocking revelations about FBI conduct. As the revelations poured out in the courtroom, the attorney general imposed new restrictions and forced the FBI to abandon its harassment of the party that was still taking place during the trial.
During the thirteen years the suit unfolded in federal court in Manhattan, the FBI was forced to reveal how it had systematically harassed the party for decades, damaging the lives of hundreds of individuals and preventing members of the party from participating in public discourse. At the end of the trial, the Nixon-appointed judge who presided over the case, U.S. federal judge Thomas P. Griesa, ruled in August 1986 that the FBI’s forty-year program of continuous harassment and abuse of the party and its members had “no legal authority or justification” and “was illegal and patently unconstitutional.”
In response to a series of orders from Judge Griesa, the FBI was forced to turn over massive evidence that documented the bureau’s four decades of surveillance and dirty tricks operations conducted against the SWP. As the FBI finally conceded during the trial, and as the judge wrote in his decision:
“There is no evidence that any FBI informant ever reported an instance of planned or actual espionage, violence, terrorism or efforts to subvert the governmental structure of the United States.” In fact, the bureau found no evidence of any type of criminal activity by party members. When the massive secret records of the forty-year intense observation of the party were reviewed by Judge Griesa, he found “a consistent recital of peaceful, lawful political activities, peaceful, lawful personal activities and a total absence of any criminal activities or plans of any nature whatever.”
When the judge ordered bureau officials to submit written rationale for why the long and multifaceted SWP operation was conducted they wrote: Individuals in “subversive groups were presumed to recognize that the use of violence as a potential tool is inevitable,” and “all members are investigated sufficiently to assess their willingness to use violence for their cause.” In other words, FBI officials believed that a radical idea inevitably would lead to violent behavior—even, apparently, after forty years of being nonviolent.
Evidence produced during the case about the FBI’s operations against the SWP revealed the following:
• From 1960 to 1966, specially trained teams of FBI agents burglarized the New York offices of the SWP at least ninety-two times, an average of once every three weeks. Homes of party officers also were burglarized. Each burglary involved a team of twelve FBI agents, six working inside and six providing security outside the scene of the burglary. Fearful of being discovered by police, they carried no FBI identification and were told to “take a fall” for the bureau if they were arrested. Inside the SWP offices, they photographed and stole more than 10,000 documents. Because they had no legal right to the documents—such as financial records, membership lists, personal correspondence—they could not have obtained a search warrant to get them legally.
• During the burglaries, agents placed electronic transmitting devices and microphones in the walls of offices so agents could listen to SWP members at any time. In such instances, waiting for plaster to dry absorbed many hours.
• Auditoriums and hotels where the party held events were electronically bugged.
• Agents routinely received commendations and financial rewards from Hoover for each burglary because they involved “the highest degree of security.”
• Agents created millions of pages of dossiers on the party and individual members.
• More than sixteen hundred informers were used to infiltrate and take actions against this party that had twenty-five hundred members at its peak and a thousand members at the time it sued the government in 1973.
• In 1961, despite having never found any mention of a plan to engage in violent action, the bureau nevertheless switched from a program of harassment against the SWP to a program designed to destroy the party.
• Hundreds of members were publicly humiliated by false information the bureau planted with news media about the party’s candidates for public office, including members who ran for president of the borough of Manhattan and president of the United States.
• A man was forced out of being a scoutmaster in the Boy Scouts in Orange, New Jersey, because his wife was a member of the party.
• Members lost jobs as public school teachers, postal workers, and aerospace employees as a result of employers being told they were members of the party or as a result of derogatory false information provided by the bureau.
• A member was turned down for a government job after the FBI notified the employer the person had attended an SWP meeting—fifteen years earlier.
• FBI agents caused SWP members to be arrested for minor offenses, such as littering.
• Dirty tricks projects included physically attacking party members in their offices, making anonymous bomb threats in calls to party offices, and firing shots at an SWP office.
Three years into the SWP trial, Attorney General Edward H. Levi ordered the FBI to end its decades-long operations against the SWP. Much evidence had accumulated by then—“the largest disclosure of internal FBI workings since the theft of FBI documents in Media, PA,” reported the New York Times. FBI director Clarence Kelley just weeks earlier had announced that he had transferred the case from the bureau’s Intelligence Division to its General Investigative Division. That wasn’t enough for Levi. Two internal Department of Justice review committees he appointed recommended he should step in and stop the FBI’s actions against the SWP because, both concluded, the party’s activities did not justify bureau scrutiny.
Remarkably, until the attorney general ordered the investigation halted, FBI informers continued to operate clandestinely inside the SWP even during the trial, submitting regular reports to the bureau on the SWP’s evolving legal strategy in the case.
It was during this trial that Levi, in another unprecedented action, issued the first FBI guidelines. They required the bureau to open and continue investigations only if they were related to evidence of commission of a crime or suspicion of planning to commit a crime.
While the truth about Hoover’s secret FBI was emerging during the SWP trial and official investigations, there also were continuous efforts then by bureau officials to hide the truth. In 1980, in the course of the SWP case, it was revealed that FBI officials concealed considerable information about the bureau’s illegal break-ins in responses to Department of Justice inquiries, in response to subpoenas issued in both the Senate and House investigations of the bureau, and in responses to orders from Judge Griesa during the SWP case. When evidence of this continuing subterfuge became public, William H. Webster, the federal judge who succeeded Kelley as FBI director in February 1978, issued a public announcement that statements made by FBI officials about illegal break-ins the bureau conducted were “grossly inaccurate” during those official investigations.
ATHAN THEOHARIS MAY KNOW more about the FBI than any other person. His extensive examination of the bureau started with major research he conducted for the Church Committee. Since then, as an historian on the faculty of Marquette University, he has written extensively about the bureau. From that deep knowledge, he has concluded in regard to COINTELPRO and similar bureau operations: “I know of no case where there was a benefit to society.…The FBI gathered no information that had anything to do with finding out, say, that Joe Smith is going to bomb the Capitol, something that could have been stopped.…I can think of no crime that was stopped by information gained during COINTELPRO and COINTELPRO-like operations.…It was harass and destroy rather than investigate, prosecute and convict.”
Given the information the bureau gathered in those operations, says Theoharis, “there was no way it could have been used. It was obtained illegally, and it was worthl
ess information. What was gathered for forty years in the campaign against the Socialist Workers Party is evidence of this.”
In these programs, said Theoharis, “Hoover moved the FBI away from law enforcement.…The person in charge of law enforcement created a culture of lawlessness.”
JOURNALISTS AND SCHOLARS have found that forcing the FBI to comply with the Freedom of Information Act can take a long time and be very costly. Their difficulties pale, however, in comparison to those of four Boston men as they spent nearly forty years trying to gain access to the FBI files they needed to exonerate them and free them from death row.
The four men—Peter Limone, Joseph Salvati, Louis Greco, and Henry Tameleo—were convicted for the 1965 murder of Edward Deegan. Three of them were sentenced to die in the electric chair. All of them proclaimed their innocence from the time they were arrested. The record shows that the FBI willfully sacrificed these innocent men as part of the bureau’s ill-conceived approach to fighting organized crime in New England. For years, Hoover ignored organized crime, even saying it did not exist. When he finally acknowledged its existence, he created a law enforcement approach that failed, as this Boston case tragically illustrates.
When the crimes perpetrated by the FBI in this Boston organized crime–related case in the 1960s became known, it was evident that Hoover could be just as lawless and inhumane in criminal cases as he was in intelligence matters, perhaps more so. In the intelligence cases, dissent was trampled. In this criminal case, the truth about life-and-death matters was trampled and the FBI knowingly caused innocent people to be falsely convicted and sentenced to die. Unfortunately, in 2002, forty-year-old efforts to gain access to the crucial files that contained exonerating information continued to be rejected—by the FBI, by the Department of Justice, and by President George W. Bush.
The astonishing truth about the case remained secret for four decades: that those four men were framed by the FBI. They were convicted and kept in prison for more than three decades—where two of them died—on the basis of the false testimony of an informer the FBI knew was lying, and who, worse, actually had been coached by the FBI in his lying. FBI agents had precise advance information they had gathered from illegal electronic surveillance about plans for the murder in 1965, but they did nothing to stop it. They knew two of their informers said they would commit the murder but did nothing to stop them. One of the killers later told agents he would falsely accuse the four innocent men. FBI agents helped him carry out that plan.
The FBI presented its perjured informer to a state prosecutor, vouched for his honesty, and urged the prosecutor to try the case. At the trial the bureau in essence set up, one of the agents testified that Joseph “the Animal” Barboza, the witness he had prepared to give false testimony—and who was the only source of evidence against the four men—was an honest person whose testimony could be trusted.
On the day the four men were convicted for this crime the FBI knew they did not commit, agents in the organized crime unit of the Boston FBI office celebrated. Hoover sent commendations and financial awards to the two agents who guided the witness with his perjury. The director apparently did not blink when, a few days later, the agent in charge of the Boston office, in a memorandum to the director, praised the continued development of Barboza as an informer in the bureau’s elite Top Echelon group of informers and described him as “a professional assassin responsible for numerous homicides and acknowledged by all professional law enforcement representatives in this area to be the most dangerous individual known.”
Then, for three decades, the FBI compounded the grave injustice perpetrated against the four men by refusing to submit the only evidence that could have exonerated them, the evidence in the FBI’s files, as the four men used every legal avenue available to them to gain their freedom and clear their names—repeated requests for a new trial, efforts to have their sentences commuted, requests for clemency. The injustice was compounded for many years after Hoover had approved it and long after he died.
Hoover was informed of, and approved, each step of the framing of the men, beginning with knowing about the planned murder before it took place and through the steps that sustained the injustice after the men were convicted until he died. The injustice continued to be sustained in 2002, when, at the request of Attorney General John Ashcroft, President Bush issued an executive order requiring the Department of Justice not to turn the requested FBI files over to the four men because the release of the files would “politicize the criminal justice process” and “would be contrary to the national interest.” Astonishingly, Hoover’s secret FBI was being protected at the highest levels of the federal government at that late date in a case where the opening of the files was desperately needed to right severe injustices perpetrated by the bureau more than forty years earlier. Former FBI director Robert Mueller—first as an assistant U.S. attorney in Boston and then as the acting U.S. attorney there—throughout the 1980s, Boston Globe journalist Kevin Cullen reported, wrote letters to the parole and pardons board opposing clemency for the four men framed by the FBI as they repeatedly proclaimed their innocence.
This justice-denying secret role of the FBI in this case finally was broken open by the efforts of Representative Dan Burton, Republican from Indiana, and Vincent Garo, a Medford, Massachusetts, attorney who, as the lawyer for one of the four men, worked for more than twenty years to get access to the bureau files that eventually led to the men being exonerated, two of them posthumously, at a federal trial against the government.
The cruel official attitude toward injustice perpetrated against the men by the FBI was on display during 2004 testimony by Paul Rico, one of the two FBI agents responsible for causing the case to be brought to trial with the perjured informer-witness. When Rico was asked at a hearing of the House Committee on Government Reform, convened by Burton, chair of the committee, if he had any remorse that four innocent men went to prison, he replied, “Would you like tears or something?”
In contrast, at the same hearing, the man who prosecuted the case had much remorse, and also anger at the FBI. “I was outraged—outraged,” said Jack Zalkind. “I certainly would never have allowed myself to prosecute this case having that knowledge.…This information should have been in my hands. It should have been in the hands of the defense attorneys. It is outrageous, it’s terrible, and that trial shouldn’t have gone forward.”
In 2007 in the U.S. District Court in Boston, Judge Nancy Gertner ordered the federal government to pay an unprecedented $102 million judgment for the FBI’s role in what is known as the Deegan murder case—for “intentional misconduct, subornation of perjury, conspiracy, the framing of innocent men” in the murder of Edward “Teddy” Deegan.
The misconduct in this case ran “all the way up to the FBI director,” Judge Gertner declared in her order that damages be paid to the surviving two falsely charged men and to the families of all four men. This case “was not the work of two renegade agents. It was known to, supported by, encouraged and facilitated by the FBI hierarchy all the way to the FBI director. FBI officials up the line allowed their employees to break laws, violate rules and ruin lives, interrupted only with the occasional burst of applause.”
IN THREE FEDERAL COURTROOMS, Hoover’s secret FBI has been confronted: in Judge Clarkson Fisher’s Camden courtroom in 1973 for essentially entrapping twenty-eight people in the bureau’s desperate effort to find the Media burglars; in Judge Thomas P. Griesa’s New York courtroom in the 1980s for violating the constitutional rights of the members of a political party for more than forty years; and in Judge Nancy Gertner’s Boston courtroom in 2007 for concocting a murder trial that sent four innocent men to death row for decades on the basis of information in FBI files that would have exonerated the men.
Another federal judge, Laurence H. Silberman, has called for Hoover’s legacy to be confronted. So far that hasn’t happened. Judge Silberman’s conviction that steps need to be taken to stop the likelihood of FBI officials ever again usi
ng the FBI as Hoover used it arose from the revulsion he felt in 1975 when he was forced to read a collection of Hoover’s derogatory files about members of Congress and other well-known people. The House Judiciary Committee demanded that Silberman, then deputy attorney general, testify before the committee about Hoover’s “secret and confidential” files. It had been assumed those files had been destroyed by Hoover’s secretary, Helen Gandy, immediately after he died. Apparently she missed some. Without FBI director Clarence Kelley realizing it, they were in a file cabinet near his office.
Silberman spent three weekends at FBI headquarters reading those files that were the result, he wrote in a column in 2005 in the Wall Street Journal, of Hoover tasking “his agents with reporting privately to him any bits of dirt on figures such as Martin Luther King or their families—information Hoover sometimes used as blackmail to ensure his and the bureau’s power.” It was a sickening experience for Silberman, the worst experience he had, he said, in all his many years in public service. He wrote that he intended “to take to my grave nasty bits of information on various political figures—some still active.” But, “bad as the dirty collection business was, perhaps even worse was the evidence that he allowed—even offered—the bureau to be used by presidents for naked political purposes,” said Silberman, who was appointed to the U.S. Circuit Court in Washington, D.C., in 1985 by President Ronald Reagan.
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