by Tim Weiner
By contrast, Belmont told the Doolittle group, the CIA was shot through with “waste, inefficiency, and plain boondogglery.”
Hoover granted Doolittle an audience on October 6, 1954. The CIA’s right hand did not know what the left hand was doing, he told the general. Its spies had little if any idea of what was going on behind the Iron Curtain, and its analysts knew even less. No doubt, Hoover allowed, “some of its weaknesses and defects were due to the newness of its operations.” But the Agency lacked trained officers. It had no internal inspection service; those overseers were a crucial part of the way in which Hoover punished and promoted the FBI’s agents. The Agency needed a strong shot of the Bureau’s kind of discipline.
On October 19, 1954, Doolittle delivered his grim assessment of American intelligence to the president. “We are facing an implacable enemy whose avowed objective is world domination,” it began.
“There are no rules in such a game,” it continued. “Hitherto acceptable norms of human conduct do not apply. If the United States is to survive, long-standing American concepts of ‘fair play’ must be reconsidered. We must develop effective espionage and counterespionage services and must learn to subvert, sabotage, and destroy our enemies by more clever, more sophisticated and more effective methods than those used against us.”
Hoover’s critique shaped Doolittle’s confidential conclusion: “The ideal solution would be to wipe out CIA entirely and start all over again.”
President Eisenhower could not bring himself to do that. Instead, he leaned harder on Hoover’s reporting on the Soviet threat.
Hoover deepened the president’s fears of a devastating attack on the United States. He heavily influenced a top secret National Security Council alert to the president on potential Soviet actions that could trigger World War III. His February 28, 1955, report warned of spies and saboteurs assassinating American civilian and military leaders; smuggling nuclear weapons components and “biological, chemical or radiological warfare agents” into the United States; exploding “weapons of mass destruction” at American military bases; using underground American Communists to direct bombing attacks against government targets; and organizing “armed insurrection in the U.S. by communist party members or persons under Soviet direction” who would be armed with “cached weapons, ammunition, explosives and military communications gear.”
Hoover followed up by informing the White House that the FBI was intensifying its intelligence work along every front of the Cold War, stepping up its surveillance of Soviet diplomats and embassy personnel, looking for spies and secret agents. “Plans for the detention of enemy diplomatic personnel have been readied,” Hoover assured the president. The Bureau now listed 26,500 “potentially or actually dangerous” people on the Security Index, all of whom would be arrested and detained at the president’s command. Among them were American prisoners of war returned from North Korea, some of whom, the FBI suspected, had been brainwashed by Chinese Communist interrogators to serve as underground agents who would burrow into the American military and betray the nation if war came again.
Hoover told the White House and the Pentagon that the FBI’s “most important goal” was “the development of good double agents” to penetrate the Soviet leadership at the highest levels and gain knowledge of the Kremlin’s intentions and capabilities. He was already working on a plan to meet that theretofore unattainable goal.
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THE LONG SHADOW
ON THE MORNING of March 8, 1956, Hoover addressed the president and the National Security Council at the White House. He said he was “using every available means”—tapping telephones, opening mail, installing bugs, and breaking into the offices and safes of suspected Communist spies and saboteurs throughout the United States—to prevent a surprise Soviet attack on the United States.
His briefing, “The Present Menace of Communist Espionage and Subversion,” raised the new specter of a dirty bomb unleashed by Soviet spies. Using cobalt-60, a radioactive isotope developed for the war on cancer, the Soviets, he warned, could deliver a lethal cache in an attaché case. If unleashed in Manhattan, it could kill hundreds of thousands of people and render the city of New York uninhabitable for years. It would be a doomsday weapon.
The threat of a nuclear attack haunted Eisenhower every day. He asked Hoover what the FBI was doing to guard against the danger.
“Sometimes it is necessary to make a surreptitious entry where on occasion we have photographed secret communist records,” Hoover told the president. Everyone in the room understood that “surreptitious entry” was against the law.
Hoover explained that the FBI’s reports based on illegally gathered intelligence would be sanitized to guard their secrecy, and to protect the president and the attorney general. The reports would be scrubbed of any references to break-ins and bugs; the intelligence would be attributed to “confidential sources.”
The president commended Hoover. The minutes of the meeting record no more questions about the FBI’s methods.
Hoover went back to headquarters convinced that he had strengthened the powers of the hunting license granted him by President Roosevelt. He was certain that it would be good for at least four more years; Ike’s re-election was assured—if he lived; he had suffered a serious heart attack six months before—and if Nixon became president, he would back Hoover to the hilt. Attorney General Brownell would be steadfast, too, so long as Hoover did not tell him precisely what he was doing in the name of national security.
These men tacitly understood the code of silence Hoover required. Eisenhower had run the D-day invasion, the biggest secret operation of World War II. Nixon had been steeped in raw FBI reports from his first days in Washington. Brownell knew more about secret intelligence than any of his predecessors: he had chaired the committee that created the electronic-eavesdropping, code-making, and code-breaking behemoth of the National Security Agency in 1952.
At Hoover’s request, Brownell had asked congressional committee chairmen for new laws allowing wiretapping without a warrant. They had said no, time and again. Hoover had asked for the legal authorization for microphone surveillances—bugging, or “technicals,” in Bureauspeak—but the lawmakers spurned the request. The director would have to depend on invoking the authorities granted him explicitly by President Roosevelt and tacitly by President Eisenhower. That was good enough for the attorney general. He just didn’t want to know the details.
Hoover’s intelligence operations already ranged to the edge of the law and beyond. Each one was a potential disaster if anything went wrong. Hoover deemed the risks worth the rewards. The Cold War would not be won simply by shadowing the enemy.
“WE ALL DID IT, BECAUSE IT WAS THE BUREAU”
The FBI’s budget had doubled since the end of World War II. The Intelligence Division was now the most powerful force within the Bureau, commanding the most money, the most manpower, and the most attention from the director. The division conducted uncounted break-ins and buggings in the Eisenhower years; the routine destruction of FBI files ensured that no accurate count existed.
“Surveillances weren’t the answer,” said the FBI’s Jack Danahy, who had run more than his share, going back to the days of the atom spy rings. “We had to change our tactics.… We had to make every effort to develop live informants, utilize both mike and technical wiretaps, and become more sophisticated in our actual techniques.”
The FBI’s James R. Healy, who worked in San Francisco and northern California, recalled: “We had a group sort of like the Dirty Dozen, a very talented group of agents who effected the thorough penetration of the Communist Party underground.” His squad was “hot on the trails of the COMFUGS, communist fugitives,” who were running from federal and state charges of subversion. Healy and his men broke the FBI’s dress codes, along with many other rules, as they went deep undercover.
“The clothing that we wore fit the scene,” he said. “We were dressed in old clothes. Some of the guys let their hair grow a litt
le bit. Didn’t shave all the time. We fit in with the neighborhoods that we were following these people through … We knew what they were doing before some of them knew what they were doing. The placing of informants and the related techniques gave us an inside view of the whole Communist Party underground apparatus.”
The “related techniques” included burglaries aimed both at stealing documents and installing hidden microphones. At the FBI’s New York office, “we were using every means necessary, at that time, which was extensive use of bag jobs, surreptitious entries, mail pilferage,” recalled Graham J. Desvernine, who started working with a special unit called the Underground Squad in 1956. “We were regularly going into Communist Party headquarters and into their main vault,” Desvernine said. “Go in there and bag the place. We had keys to everything and all. I was pickin’ locks. You know, it was kind of fun, the whole thing.”
Only one FBI operation was more sensitive than the Underground Squad: a special espionage team, created in 1954, which set up “a program of intelligence collection that later became known as Program C,” said Edward S. Miller, who cut his teeth on the program’s San Francisco squad, and eventually became the number-three man in the FBI. This international effort included attempts to break into Soviet and Soviet-bloc embassies and consulates in New York, Washington, San Francisco, and other cities. One goal was to support the National Security Agency in its efforts to steal the secret codes and ciphers of America’s enemies.
Hoover’s men conducted bag jobs across the country, not just in the Communist hotbeds of the East and West coasts. In 1955, John F. McCormack, a young agent with the Cleveland office of the FBI, went on his first black-bag operation. The target was the home of a suspected Communist—a steel-mill worker with a Ph.D. from New York University. “We broke into the house, picked the lock … and photographed everything in the house,” McCormack recounted. “We later determined that he had connections with a foreign country. Basically he was there, we assumed, to do something in case of a national emergency at the steel mill.” McCormack was well aware that “you would get fired or arrested at the very least” if a break-in went wrong. “You couldn’t carry your credentials or any identification” on a black-bag job, he said. “We knew that perhaps we would be on our own if something happened. I think that all the agents that were involved did it for a sense of accomplishment. They took that risk. It was no less a risk than arresting a fugitive and getting shot. And so we all did it, because it was the Bureau.”
In Cleveland, the eighth-largest city in America in the mid-1950s, the FBI found six leading Communist figures to arrest and prosecute under the Smith Act, which had effectively outlawed membership in the Communist Party. All were found guilty.
But each of those convictions was overturned. The courts were starting to question the legal basis for the FBI’s national security investigations.
The Supreme Court, in a series of decisions starting in 1955 and 1956, voided dozens of Smith Act convictions, undercut the FBI’s use of paid informers as witnesses against the Communist Party, and upheld the right of defense lawyers to see evidence gathered through FBI surveillance. Each decision was a blow to Hoover.
The Court rejected cases built on hearsay and perjury by the Bureau’s professional witnesses, culled from the ranks of ex-Communists. The worst among them was Harvey Matusow, a high school dropout and army veteran who had joined the Communist Party in 1947, volunteered his services as an informant to the FBI in 1950, and testified in court and before Congress that Communists had infiltrated every corner of American society, from the State Department to the Boy Scouts. Matusow had recanted in a 1955 book, False Witness, and in 1956 started serving forty-four months in federal prison for perjury.
The Court was also becoming alert to the continuing use of wiretaps and bugs. In a five-to-four decision, it upheld a state court conviction based on evidence obtained by concealed microphones planted by police during warrantless break-ins. But five justices also expressed outrage that the bug had been placed in a bedroom. That decision worried Attorney General Brownell, who privately warned Hoover about where to put his microphones.
One Supreme Court ruling especially infuriated Hoover. It allowed Communist Party members to invoke the Fifth Amendment in refusing to identify their comrades. A majority opinion was written by Hoover’s oldest living nemesis, Justice Felix Frankfurter.
The justices finally ruled that the government had enforced the Smith Act too broadly by targeting words, not deeds—free speech, instead of forcible blows against the political system. That made the act almost useless for prosecuting American Communists. A decade of legal attack against the Communist Party was coming to an end. The law no longer was an effective weapon in the war on communism.
These reversals enraged Hoover. And out of that rage came the boldest attacks that Hoover ever mounted against his enemies, the most ambitious and destructive operations in the history of the FBI.
“WILL IT GET US WHAT WE WANT?”
On May 18, 1956, the new plan of attack began taking shape, the brainchild of the FBI Intelligence Division chief Al Belmont and his trusted aide, William C. Sullivan.
They called the plan COINTELPRO, short for counterintelligence program. Counterintelligence, formally defined, is the work of preventing spies from stealing your secrets. COINTELPRO was more than that. Hoover and his men aimed to subvert America’s subversives. Their stratagems were sharpened at the suggestion of agents in the field, toughened by Sullivan, and ultimately approved by Hoover.
The first operations began on August 28, 1956. Armed with the intelligence gathered through break-ins, bugs, and taps, COINTELPRO began to attack hundreds, then thousands, of suspected Communists and socialists with anonymous hate mail, tax audits by the Internal Revenue Service, and forged documents designed to sow and fertilize seeds of distrust among left-wing factions.
The idea was to instill hate, fear, doubt, and self-destruction within the American Left. The FBI used Communist techniques of propaganda and subversion. The goal was to destroy the public lives and private reputations of the members of the Communist Party and everyone connected with them.
In time there would be twelve major COINTELPRO campaigns, aimed at targets across the political spectrum, and a total of 2,340 separate operations. Most operations, in cases where the records were not burned or shredded, bore Hoover’s personal approval in his scribble of blue ink.
“OK. H.”
“I concur. H.”
“Yes, and promptly. H.”
The cleverest mind behind the birth and growth of COINTELPRO belonged to Bill Sullivan, the newly appointed chief of research and analysis at the Intelligence Division. Born in 1912 on a farm thirty-five miles west of Boston, Massachusetts, Sullivan remembered the spectacle of burning crosses in the fields near his hometown, ignited by the Ku Klux Klan, the racist secret society that arose after the Civil War and flared up mightily after World War I. He taught school, worked for the Internal Revenue Service, and then joined the FBI four months before Pearl Harbor.
Sullivan recalled his FBI training and indoctrination vividly—especially “the terrific propaganda that the instructors gave out: ‘This is the greatest organization ever devised by a human mind.’ They kept quoting Emerson: ‘An institution is the lengthened shadow of one man.’ They hit us with that almost every day. They drilled that into us.”
He rose rapidly at the Intelligence Division by virtue of his drive and ambition. Despite his appearance—he looked like a rumpled and shifty-eyed B-movie detective—Sullivan would become Hoover’s field marshal in matters of national security, chief of FBI intelligence, and commandant of COINTELPRO. In that top secret and tightly compartmentalized world, an FBI inside the FBI, Sullivan served as the executor of Hoover’s most clandestine and recondite demands.
“He was a brilliant chameleon,” Sullivan said of Hoover. “He was one of the greatest con men the country ever produced, and that takes intelligence of a certain kind, an astutenes
s, a shrewdness.”
Hoover’s talented political hatchet man and trusted deputy, Cartha “Deke” DeLoach, painted a matching portrait of Sullivan: “Brash, brilliant, brimming over with self-esteem, something of a bantam rooster, Sullivan had more ambition than was good for a man, combined with a slight deficiency in principle. For years COINTELPRO was his special domain. He ruled it with skill and daring most of the time, but occasionally with reckless abandon.” Some of the FBI’s chieftains thought the Communist Party was so demoralized “it was no longer worth worrying about,” DeLoach reflected. “But increasingly, the architect of COINTELPRO—Sullivan—was worth worrying about.”
Sullivan’s quicksilver talents for palace intrigue and his political cunning were primal forces that shaped the Bureau, the national security of the United States, and the American presidency for two decades. He came within a hair’s breadth of succeeding Hoover after the director’s death—a very close call made by President Nixon, whose downfall Sullivan then secretly helped ensure. At the end of his era, Sullivan talked in a closed Senate chamber about the thinking that drove the FBI and COINTELPRO onward.
Sullivan was capable of bearing false witness, but this testimony resonated with the ring of truth.
“This is a rough, tough, dirty business, and dangerous. It was dangerous at times. No holds were barred,” Sullivan said. And the law was not at issue: “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 realm of reasoning, because we were just naturally pragmatists. The one thing we were concerned about was this: will this course of action work, will it get us what we want?”
