by Tim Weiner
Sullivan said he and his cohorts at the FBI “could not free ourselves from that psychology with which we had been imbued as young men.” They were soldiers in the Cold War. “We never freed ourselves from that psychology that we were indoctrinated with, right after Pearl Harbor, you see.… It was just like a soldier in the battlefield. When he shot down an enemy, he did not ask himself is this legal or lawful, is it ethical? It is what he was expected to do as a soldier. We did what we were expected to do.”
“THE THINGS HE HATED, HE HATED ALL HIS LIFE”
The FBI had spied on every prominent black political figure in America since World War I. The scope of its surveillance of black leaders was impressive, considering the Bureau’s finite manpower, the burden of its responsibilities, and the limited number of hours in a day. Hoover spent his career convinced that communism was behind the civil rights movement in the United States from the start.
Hoover gave special attention to William Edward Burghardt Du Bois. Born in 1868, the venerable Du Bois had become the head of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in 1910. The NAACP, the most august civil rights group in America, had been the focus of intense FBI interest since World War II.
The FBI’s intelligence investigation of Communist influence at the NAACP began in the spring of 1941 and lasted for twenty-five years. The FBI’s Washington field office opened the case after the navy asked it to look into “fifteen colored mess attendants” protesting rampant racist conduct (American armed forces remained segregated throughout World War II). The FBI hired an informant and sought the NAACP’s “connections with the Communist party.” Four months before Pearl Harbor, FBI headquarters ordered Oklahoma City agents to investigate “Communist Party domination” at the NAACP. They reported “a strong movement on the part of the Communists to attempt to dominate this group … Consequently, the activities of the NAACP will be closely observed and scrutinized in the future.”
They were. Hoover took the investigation nationwide. FBI informants infiltrated civil rights conferences in at least ten states and filed reports on hundreds of NAACP members, including the group’s counsel, the future Supreme Court justice Thurgood Marshall.
On October 2, 1956, Hoover stepped up the FBI’s long-standing surveillance of black civil rights activists. He sent a COINTELPRO memo to the field, warning that the Communist Party was seeking to infiltrate the movement.
“The Negro situation is a paramount issue” for the Communists, the director wrote.
Hoover told President Eisenhower that the Communists were concentrating their efforts in Alabama, Georgia, and Mississippi; they intended to inject civil rights into every political issue in America; they would demand federal intervention to enforce the law of the land; they would seek the impeachment of Senator James Eastland of Mississippi, the Democratic chairman of the Judiciary Committee, a plantation master, and an ardent segregationist.
Hoover started watching the new leaders of the civil rights movement very closely. By 1957, COINTELPRO was primed as a weapon in the long struggle between black Americans and their government.
Three years before, in Brown v. Board of Education, the Supreme Court had cracked the façade of the American way of life by ordering the integration of public schools. Hoover advised Eisenhower that Communists at home and abroad saw the Brown decision as a victory, and that they aimed to “exploit the enforcement of desegregation in every way.”
The ruling threw gasoline on the smoldering embers of the Ku Klux Klan. Days after the decision, the Klan began to burn again.
“The Klan was dead until Brown,” said the FBI’s John F. McCormack, who moved from chasing Communists in Cleveland to a series of assignments in the South in 1957. “They lived down here in their own little world. There was no problem. The blacks had their own area, the blacks had their own schools.” Now the Supreme Court had told the southern whites that they had to integrate. As McCormack saw it, working-class whites feared “blacks coming into their area now. Blacks would go to school with their children, blacks gonna marry their daughters, blacks gonna take over their jobs. So that was a motivating force.… And the Klan grew.”
The Klan began dynamiting black churches, burning synagogues, shooting people in the back with hunting rifles, and infiltrating state and local law enforcement. It became the most violent American terrorist group of the twentieth century. As the Klan revived, the high sheriffs of the old South pledged to resist the new law of the land. Senator James Eastland of Mississippi spoke for them when he proclaimed that Anglo-Saxon Americans saw resistance to integration as obedience to God.
Despite the violence, Hoover took a hands-off stance toward the KKK. He would not direct the FBI to investigate or penetrate the Klan unless the president so ordered. “Headquarters came out with instructions that we were not to develop any high-level Klan informants because it might appear that we were guiding and directing the operations of the Klan,” said the FBI’s Fletcher D. Thompson, based in Georgia. This was a rationalization for racism.
Hoover had been born in nineteenth-century Washington, D.C., a southern city that stayed segregated throughout most of the twentieth century. In his world, blacks knew their place: they were servants, valets, and shoeshine boys. He feared the rise of a black “messiah,” to quote a COINTELPRO mission statement. He presided over an Anglo-Saxon America, and he aimed to preserve and defend it.
“He was very consistent throughout the years. The things he hated, he hated all his life,” Bill Sullivan said. “He hated liberalism, he hated blacks, he hated Jews—he had this great long list of hates.”
More precisely, Hoover hated ideologies more than individuals, pressure groups more than people; above all, Hoover hated threats to the stability of the American political system, and anyone who might personify that danger was an enemy for life.
Hoover’s antipathy to the idea of racial equality can explain some of his hostility to the civil rights movement, but not all of it.
His alarm at a nexus between communism and civil rights intensified in early 1957. To the FBI, the newly organized Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and its theretofore obscure director, the twenty-seven-year-old Martin Luther King, Jr., represented such a threat.
Hoover first began to focus on Bayard Rustin, the principal strategist of civil disobedience and nonviolent resistance—boycotts, sit-ins, and protest marches—at the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. The Bureau already had a substantial file on Rustin, a man seemingly made by his creator to get under Hoover’s skin—a socialist, a pacifist, and openly gay, with a prison record for draft resistance and sodomy. He remained the subject of FBI investigation for the next twenty years.
So did a white New Yorker with thick glasses, a businessman and legal counselor whom Rustin introduced to King in late 1956. His name was Stanley David Levison, and he helped draw up the founding documents for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. He became King’s closest confidant—writing his speeches, polishing the manuscript of King’s first book, preparing his tax returns, and serving as a sounding board as King drafted his first major address to white America, delivered from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial on May 17, 1957.
By that time Levison had been in the FBI’s files for five years. The Bureau suspected that he had been a key financier for the Communist Party underground since 1952. Though the evidence was circumstantial, Hoover believed it.
But only seven weeks before the Lincoln Memorial speech, the FBI took Levison off its list of top American Communists. That decision was based on information from its best informants inside the Party. Six weeks after the speech, on June 25, 1957, the FBI noted that Levison was “a CP member with no official title, who performs his CP work through mass organization activity.” He appeared to have left his leading role in the Communist underground to devote himself to civil rights.
But Hoover’s belief that communism stood behind Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement never wavered.
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br /> Hoover’s agents in Chicago and New York had been working for years on an operation to recruit and run a man who was trusted and respected in the highest ranks of the Communist Party of the United States. The operation, code-named Solo, had no precedent in the annals of the Cold War.
Solo had one terrible consequence. It would convince Hoover that the American civil rights movement was backed by Moscow and infiltrated at the top by secret Communists. It would lead him into open political warfare against King.
25
“DON’T TRUST ANYBODY”
AT A FORMAL state luncheon for the king of Morocco on November 26, 1957, J. Edgar Hoover and Richard Nixon talked face-to-face about the fact that President Eisenhower might die at any moment. The afternoon before, Ike had suffered a stroke. Nixon had rushed to the White House, where the president’s chief of staff, Sherman Adams, told him: “You may be President in twenty-four hours.”
Eisenhower recovered by the spring of 1958, though sometimes his speech and his thoughts seemed slightly askew. Hoover himself appeared to suffer a mild heart attack not long after Ike’s stroke, an undocumented cardiovascular event he kept hidden from everyone he could. His behavior began to change, as did the president’s. Both men grew more short-tempered, impatient, and demanding. But while Ike began soul-searching, seeking a thaw in the Cold War, Hoover hardened. The few men who were close to him at the FBI saw him becoming imperious, vainglorious, and grandiose.
That summer, Masters of Deceit, a meandering tract on communism, made Hoover wealthy. Written by his aides, Bill Sullivan chief among them, and published in Hoover’s name, with his face on the cover, the book sold hundreds of thousands of copies, many of them bought in bulk by patriotic groups like the American Legion. A desultory congressional investigation, mounted after his death, showed that Hoover laundered 20 percent of the book’s net profits through a tax-exempt foundation for retired FBI officers. He banked at least $71,000, equal to more than half a million today.
Masters of Deceit was published by a fabulously rich Texas oil man named Clint Murchison, who had conceived the book as a business deal. Hoover enjoyed a separate silent partnership with Murchison: he could invest in an oil well, and if it gushed, he would profit; if it was dry, he would not lose a dime. Hoover (and his number-two man, Clyde Tolson) spent summer vacations at Murchison’s elegant resort in La Jolla, California, staying in the best suite, Bungalow A, playing the ponies, dining and drinking, all on the house. “They lived in sheer opulence,” Hoover’s aide Deke DeLoach reflected years later. The La Jolla junkets were “the nearest thing to a genuine scandal in Hoover’s life.”
He liked his luxuries. A coterie of servants, all FBI employees, tended him at home on 30th Place, a leafy street of landscaped and spacious houses in northwest Washington, where he had lived for the two decades since his mother’s death. The Bureau provided him with chauffeurs, handymen, gardeners, valets, and the tax accountants who sorted out the honoraria he received, totaling tens of thousands of dollars, from corporate grandees. The gifts, given for ghostwritten speeches and articles, and as private awards for public service, supplemented the freely spent tax dollars that financed Hoover’s four-star style.
He had five bulletproof Cadillacs garaged and gleaming in Washington, New York, Chicago, Miami, and Los Angeles. His drivers took him wherever he wanted to go. When in Washington, as he was eleven months a year, he lunched at the Mayflower Hotel after leaving the Bureau at 11:45 A.M., usually ordering a slab of roast beef or, on doctor’s orders, a bowl of chicken soup and a plate of cottage cheese. By 6:15 P.M., most evenings, he was sipping a Jack Daniel’s and ordering a steak at Harvey’s Restaurant, one of the few culinary palaces near the Capitol. His drooping jowls and his pouched eyes reflected his tastes in food and drink.
Hoover was now conscious that he might not live forever. By law, he could serve as director for only six and a half more years, until he turned seventy. He sought a sinecure from the Senate majority leader, Lyndon B. Johnson of Texas. Johnson had been Hoover’s across-the-street neighbor on 30th Place since 1945. He would invite Hoover over for a glass of sour-mash whiskey or a Sunday breakfast from time to time. They had a friendship, or what passed for friendship in Washington. More precisely, they were political allies. Together they conceived a special bill of legislation. LBJ won a quick and uncontested vote from Congress granting Hoover his salary in perpetuity, from July 1958 onward, until the day he died. Johnson would see to it that Hoover never had to retire from the FBI.
Congress fawned over him during his annual appearances before the leaders of the judiciary and appropriations committees. In his public testimonies, the con man within took over; his ritual performances were stage pieces. He would receive the praises of the chairmen. He would respond by reciting statistics concocted by the FBI’s Crime Records Division, his public relations office. He would hurl purple prose against the Red threat. “Communism,” to quote the director, “represents a massive effort to transform not only the world but human nature itself.”
But the Communist Party was no longer a significant force in American political life. It had been staggered by the Justice Department’s indictments at the start of the 1950s, subverted by the FBI’s underground squads for the next five years, split by the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev’s 1956 denunciation of Stalin’s dictatorship, knocked headlong by the first blows of COINTELPRO. The Party had lost at least three-quarters of its members since the end of World War II. Perhaps twenty-two thousand card-carrying Communists remained on the rolls. A good number among them were undercover FBI agents and informants; a greater number were superannuated survivors of the Red raids of the 1920s.
Hoover had to continue to represent the Party as a mortal threat. The power of the FBI depended on having a great enemy. So did the unwavering support he enjoyed from the American people and their president.
The only thing he feared was leaks. He worried about them constantly. He was afraid that his intelligence operations would be uncovered, to his embarrassment. He did not trust the FBI’s own internal security. He kept a close eye on cases that could tarnish his reputation. What he wanted was secret intelligence that resulted in public success—national security cases that would make front-page news. They required the terrible patience he had possessed for so long.
“AMERICAN INTELLIGENCE WALKS IN BABY SHOES”
An intoxicated Soviet spy named Reino Hayhanen walked into the American Embassy in Paris in April 1957. He said he was a KGB officer, and that he had been operating in the United States for five years. Hayhanen had been ordered to return from New York to Moscow, and he rightly feared for his life, for he had fouled up. He had been given $5,000 to pass on to the American Communist underground in New York. He went on a bender instead, and bought a one-way ticket to Paris. The CIA station chief in Paris decided to fly him back to New York and turn him over to the FBI. The Bureau put him in a Public Health Service hospital on Staten Island.
“The word was that this guy’s crazy,” recalled FBI agent Philip Mogen.
Born near Leningrad, Hayhanen had been recruited into the Soviet intelligence service in the first months of World War II, at the age of twenty. After the war, the KGB began to build a legend for him—a false identity that became his life. After five years of training, his legend was ready, along with a forged American passport. Hayhanen had come to New York on the Queen Mary in 1952. He served as a courier carrying coded microfilm messages in hollowed-out coins, batteries, pens, pencils, and screws. He picked up and delivered secret intelligence at dead drops—hiding places in the parks and on the sidewalks of New York.
Once in the FBI’s hands, he identified his superior as Mikhail Svirin, who had served as first secretary of the Soviet delegation to the United Nations. The Bureau knew plenty about Soviet diplomats who were KGB spies—the FBI identified sixteen such poseurs in the late 1950s, all immune from arrest by virtue of their diplomatic passports, all expelled by the State Department under the protocols of e
spionage. Svirin had been in and out of the United States since before World War II, but by 1957 he had left New York, never to return.
“The FBI kept a keen eye and ear on what happened within the Soviet embassy and when embassy personnel traveled,” said a State Department consul, William D. Morgan. “Never could they say that the information came from eavesdropping, because they would never admit it.… If the man had been caught servicing a suspected mail box or lamp post—in other words, activity which involved really serious indications that the man was ‘performing duties not in accordance with his diplomatic status’—that, of course, was the basis for declaring him persona non grata.”
Hayhanen knew his second KGB contact as Colonel Rudolph Abel. He had gone on assignments for the colonel through the northeastern United States, carrying messages and money. “One thing about Reino, he loved life, but he had enough intelligence to warrant us getting onto the case,” said the FBI’s Edmund J. Birch, who led an espionage squad in pursuit of the KGB’s Colonel Abel, following the leads Hayhanen gave him when the spy’s pickled memory permitted.
The colonel used the alias Emil Goldfus and lived a cover life as an artist with a studio in Brooklyn. Birch, carrying a concealed camera in a briefcase, trailed him as he left a restaurant, clicking away as the suspect walked down the street. Birch took one final photo, hopped in a taxi, and sped to the FBI’s New York headquarters on Third Avenue and 69th Street. A technician dipped the film into a vat of developer. “Beautiful pictures of trees, a fire station, and, all of a sudden, one beautiful picture of his face,” Birch remembered. Hayhanen immediately identified the man in the photo as Colonel Abel.
