by Tim Weiner
The Las Vegas bugging arrest allowed the FBI to lean heavily on Maheu, who eventually laid out the details of the 1960 CIA-Mafia contract on Castro.
10. “I went all by myself”: Farland oral history, FAOH.
11. “ex-FBI agents”: Testimony of Richard Bissell, former CIA clandestine division director, Church Committee, July 22, 1975.
12. “to remove Trujillo”: Herter to Eisenhower, “Possible Action to Prevent Castroist Takeover of Dominican Republic,” April 14, 1960, DDEL.
Trujillo’s enemies were emboldened by Ambassador Farland and his number-two man, Henry Dearborn, who succeeded him as the acting ambassador. Both Americans had assured the conspirators that the United States would smile upon their work. “Ambassador Farland had had contacts with the opposition and had brought me in on them,” Dearborn said. The opposition did not trust the CIA, but “they had gotten to trust Farland and me. So I carried on the contacts with the opposition, reporting to CIA. We were using all these weird means of communication because we didn’t want to be seen with each other. Things like notes in the bottom of a grocery bag, rolled up in cigars. They were asking us for advice at times. They were asking us for help at times.
“They developed an assassination plot,” Dearborn said. “I knew they were planning to do it. I knew how they were planning to do it. I knew, more or less, who was involved. Although I was always able to say that I personally did not know any of the assassins, I knew those who were pulling the strings.
“What they wanted from the U.S.,” Dearborn said, “was moral support and, later, material and token weapon support.” They were not disappointed. The CIA sent them three .38 caliber pistols and four machine guns, delivered to the Dominican Republic in a State Department diplomatic pouch. By the time the weapons arrived, Farland, the FBI agent turned ambassador extraordinary, had returned to Washington.
13. “he was being bombarded”: Memorandum of Conference with the President, May 13, 1960, Office of Staff Secretary, Eisenhower Papers, DDEL. General Andrew Goodpaster, Ike’s military aide, wrote the memorandum on May 16. The president was in the foulest mood on May 13—weathering, in his words, in “a great storm” over the CIA’s U-2 spy plane that had crashed during a secret flight over the Soviet Union. The pilot, Francis Gary Powers, was a prisoner in Moscow (he was eventually exchanged for the Soviet spy known as Colonel Rudolph Abel). The Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev had humiliated the United States. Ike’s anger can be inferred from the record created by General Goodpaster.
28. DANGEROUS MAN
1. “rather frightening”: Robert F. Kennedy oral history, JFKL.
2. “Bobby was trying to take over the FBI”: DeLoach oral history, LBJL.
3. Hoover had told his old friend: The eyewitnesses to the demands from Joe Kennedy that JFK take RFK as attorney general—and Hoover’s personal approval of that choice—were JFK’s friend Senator George Smathers of Florida; RFK’s aide John Seigenthaler; and Hoover’s assistant, Cartha “Deke” DeLoach. “Some of Bobby and the President’s personality may have come from old man Joe Kennedy, who didn’t mind bowling people over,” DeLoach said, perceptively. “He loved the usage of power, and so did the President and Bobby—Bobby, I think, more than the President.”
4. “We did it for the reason”: Robert F. Kennedy oral history, JFKL.
5. “He offended the FBI”: Katzenbach oral history, JFKL.
6. “most unpleasant”: RFK oral history, JFKL.
7. “The great problem now”: RFK handwritten notes cited in Church Committee report.
8. “I kept the Kennedys from firing Hoover”: Evans oral history, in Deborah Hart Strober and Gerald S. Strober, The Kennedy Presidency: An Oral History of the Era (Washington, D.C.: Brassey’s, 2003), p. 269.
9. “For years CIA has not played”: Hoover notations on memos, [Deleted] to Sullivan, April 2, 1962, and Evans to Belmont, April 20, 1963; FBI/FOIA.
10. “analyze the weaknesses of US intelligence”: Director, FBI, to the Attorney General, “The Central Intelligence Agency,” blind memorandum hand-delivered April 21, 1961; Belmont to Parsons, “Central Intelligence Agency/Report for the Attorney General,” April 21, 1961.
11. “The driver of the bus”: Joseph G. Kelly oral history, FBI/FBIOH, Aug. 29, 2004.
12. “We had a leak”: Crockett oral history, FAOH.
13. “Sheridan was the principal”: LBJ White House tapes, Nov. 17, 1964, LBJL.
14. “The leaker was one Otto Otepka”: Crockett oral history, FAOH.
29. RULE BY FEAR
1. “When I heard”: RFK oral history, JFKL. Kennedy set the date of this revelation in 1961; some historians believe the meeting was in 1962, but the circumstantial evidence suggests the earlier date is correct. Hoover went on high alert after King and Levison met the attorney general and his top civil rights aides in a private dining room at the Mayflower Hotel—an odd choice of venue, since Hoover usually took his lunch at the Mayflower. Hoover quickly learned about the meeting. It represented, to him, a Communist penetration—a secret agent’s access to the highest levels of the American government. No one took any notes that survived, but the conversation remained in the memory of those who were there. Kennedy advised King that the Justice Department had little jurisdiction to protect civil rights leaders from the Klan or southern lawmen. Sit-ins and civil disobedience were not the way, Kennedy advised; an orderly campaign for blacks to register and vote was the right path. After the lunch, Kennedy’s assistant John Seigenthaler took King aside and warned him about Levison: the man was a known Communist, and King would best be rid of him. King replied, in so many words, that it would be hard to break that tie.
2. The substance of their conversation: Hoover memo to Tolson, Belmont, Sullivan, DeLoach, Jan. 9, 1962; Evans to Belmont, Feb. 2, 1962; Bland to Sullivan, Feb. 3, 1962, FBI/FOIA.
3. Lesiovsky’s meeting with Levison: The FBI’s surveillance of the meeting was the result of a very lucky break: a member of the Soviet delegation who worked for the Soviet military intelligence service had offered to serve the FBI as an agent in place. On March 13, 1962, the FBI reported that Dmitri Polyakov, code-named Top Hat, had identified every member of the Soviet diplomatic delegation in New York and Washington who served as a spy for Moscow. Top Hat helped the FBI track diplomatic developments at a high level. SA Edward F. Gamber to SAC New York, “Subject: United Nations Personnel—USSR,” March 13, 1962, FBI/FOIA. On the Levison connection to the KGB’s Lesiovsky, Birch oral history, FBI/FBIOH.
4. “Under no circumstances”: Hoover notation, Bland to Sullivan, Feb. 3, 1962, FBI/FOIA.
5. “that bastard”: The March 22, 1962, meeting between Hoover and JFK has been reconstructed through existing White House records by Robert Kennedy’s and Martin Luther King’s best biographers, Evan Thomas and Taylor Branch, respectively, but they both rely on hearsay evidence for the “bastard” quotation reproduced here.
6. “I expressed astonishment”: Hoover’s May 9, 1962, memo for the record was published by the Church Committee in 1975.
7. “Courtney I hope”: Hoover, May 22, 1961, memo to RFK and RFK’s notation, quoted in Church Committee, Assassination Plots, Interim Report: Alleged Assassination Plots Involving Foreign Leaders, pp. 127–128. Hoover’s memo reported that the FBI had interviewed the CIA’s security chief, Sheffield Edwards: “Colonel Edwards advised that in connection with CIA’s operation against Castro he personally contacted Robert Maheu,” an ex–FBI agent who worked, simultaneously, for the CIA, the Mafia, and the Las Vegas billionaire Howard Hughes. The memo noted that Maheu had served the CIA “as a ‘cut-out’ in contacts with Sam Giancana, a known hoodlum in the Chicago area.”
8. “Levison influenced him”: RFK oral history, JFKL. RFK’s close aide and successor, Nick Katzenbach, agreed. “Given the Bureau’s statement about Levison as being true, and given the way they stated it which was flatly and positively and—from really making it spooky as far as the source is concerned—I’d no reason to doubt that
,” Katzenbach said in his own oral history for the JFK Library.
Levison told King they should break off their relationship, he told the historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., in 1976: “The movement needed the Kennedys too much. I said it would not be in the interests of the movement to hold on to me if the Kennedys had doubts.”
But as the historian David J. Garrow has written, after reviewing FBI records released a decade ago:
King remained reluctant to lose Levison’s assistance and counsel, and thus he detailed a mutual friend, the young African-American attorney Clarence B. Jones, of New York, to serve as a telephonic intermediary between himself and Levison. Marshall and Robert Kennedy picked up on the ruse almost immediately, and within days Kennedy had authorized the wiretapping of Jones’s home and office. Kennedy considered adding a tap on King as well, but decided to hold off.
In early August of 1963 King happened to stay at Jones’s home for several days, at which point both the FBI and, by extension, the Kennedys were introduced to a new aspect of King’s life—namely, his sexual endeavors, which in subsequent months would all but replace Levison as the focus of the FBI’s surveillance of King. But at that time Marshall and Robert Kennedy were far more worried by the extensive evidence of King and Levison’s communication by way of Jones. The wiretap in Jones’s office recorded King saying, “I’m trying to wait until things cool off—until this civil rights debate is over—as long as they may be tapping these phones, you know.…”
David J. Garrow, “The FBI and Martin Luther King,” Atlantic Monthly, July–August 2002.
9. Hoover commanded the FBI: Director to SAC Atlanta, “Communist Infiltration of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference: Internal Security,” July 20, 1962, FBI/FOIA.
10. “The Klan got involved”: Woodcock oral history, FBI/FBIOH.
11. “I go in to see Hoover”: Davis oral history, FBI/FBIOH.
12. “The 19 million Negroes”: William C. Sullivan, “Communist Party USA/Negro Question/Internal Security—Communist,” Aug. 23, 1963, with Hoover notations and Sullivan’s response, FBI/FOIA.
13. “a really politically explosive document”: Katzenbach oral history, RFK Oral History Project, JFKL.
14. eight wiretaps and sixteen bugs: Brennan to Sullivan, “Subject: Martin Luther King Jr./Security Matter—Communist,” April 18, 1968, FBI/FOIA. The taps on King’s home telephones remained in place until April 1965; the SCLC taps until June 1966.
15. “It’s a moral issue”: McGorray oral history, FBI/FBIOH.
16. “Hoover was telling me”: Jack Danahy oral history, FBI/FBIOH.
17. “King is a ‘tom cat’ ”: Sullivan to Belmont, with Hoover notation, Jan. 27, 1964, FBI/FOIA.
18. 4,453 members: William C. Sullivan, “Communist Party USA/Negro Question/Internal Security—Communist,” Aug. 23, 1963, FBI/FOIA.
19. “I have some news for you”: William Manchester, The Death of a President (New York: Harper & Row, 1967), pp. 195–196. The source for this account was Robert F. Kennedy but, as always, it was his word against Hoover’s. “Manchester is a liar but it was obvious he was fed this by R.F.K.,” Hoover scribbled in a note to his aides on Feb. 15, 1967. FBI/FOIA.
20. “Oswald was a confidential informant”: DeLoach to Mohn, “Assassination of the President/Allegation That Oswald Was an FBI Informant,” Feb. 7, 1964, FBI/FOIA.
21. “their training, violent tendencies”: Sullivan to Belmont, Nov. 26, 1963, FBI/FOIA.
22. “gross incompetency,” “We failed,” and “a direct admission”: Hoover and DeLoach memos, Dec. 10, 1963, and Oct. 14, 1964; cited in “The Investigation of the Assassination of John F. Kennedy,” a staff report of the Church Committee conducted in 1975 but classified and unpublished until 2000.
30. “YOU GOT THIS PHONE TAPPED?”
1. “Edgar, I don’t hear you well”: LBJ/Hoover, LBJ telephone tapes, Feb. 27, 1964, LBJL.
2. “You’re my brother”: LBJ/Hoover, LBJ telephone tapes, Nov. 29, 1963, LBJL.
3. “J. Edgar Hoover is a household word”: Lyndon B. Johnson, Remarks Honoring J. Edgar Hoover, May 8, 1964.
4. “One of the troubles”: McGeorge Bundy oral history, LBJL.
5. “Mr. Hoover’s going down”: RFK to LBJ, LBJ telephone tapes, July 10, 1964, LBJL.
6. “I have no dealings with the FBI”: RFK to LBJ, LBJ telephone tapes, July 21, 1964, LBJL.
7. “Mr. Johnson at all times”: DeLoach oral history, LBJL.
8. “three sovereignties”: The quotation of LBJ comes from Burke Marshall, RFK’s civil rights deputy at Justice. Marshall oral history, LBJL. It was Marshall’s idea to use the FBI against the Klan. In a written proposal that RFK sent to the White House on June 5, 1964, Marshall presented the Klan’s work as “terrorism” and a threat to the internal security of the United States. Marshall strongly recommended that the FBI identify Klansmen and work undercover to expose the Klan’s infiltration of state and local law enforcement in the Deep South: “The techniques followed in the use of specially trained, special-assignment agents in the infiltration of Communist groups should be of value,” Marshall wrote. “I recommend taking up with the Bureau the possibility of developing a similar effort to meet this new problem.”
9. “We have found the car”: Hoover to LBJ, LBJ telephone tapes, June 21, 1964, LBJL.
10. “I haven’t got a better friend”: LBJ to Hoover, LBJ telephone tapes, June 24, 1964, LBJL.
11. “You ought to review”: Dulles to Hoover and LBJ, LBJ telephone tapes, June 26, 1964, LBJL.
12. “Mr. Hoover never would have changed”: Marshall oral history, Strober and Strober, The Kennedy Presidency, p. 317.
13. “I want you to gather intelligence”: Billy Bob Williams oral history, FBI/FBIOH.
14. “Martin Luther King yelled”: Donald Cesare oral history, FBI/FBIOH.
15. “I paid him close”: Cesare oral history, FBI/FBIOH. No informant in FBI history ever had been paid that much, as far as is known. Some funds for paying FBI informants were raised by Jewish business community leaders in Mississippi, according to several agents, including James O. Ingram, one of the more accomplished counter-Klansmen at the FBI. Jews in Jackson, Miss., “had long supported the FBI, by money and their efforts to help us. They made available money to the FBI for informants,” Ingram said. It is unclear whether Delmar Dennis, whose recruitment dated to the summer of 1964, received funds that originated from outside the FBI. Important FBI informants among Mississippi Klansmen defected before Dennis, including Sgt. Wallace Miller of the Meridian Police Department.
16. “There would be a Klan meeting”: Joseph J. Rucci, Jr., oral history, FBI/FBIOH.
17. “The Bureau was doing”: Billy Bob Williams oral history, FBI/FBIOH.
18. “the race riots”: Hoover to LBJ, LBJ telephone tapes, Sept. 9, 1964, LBJL.
19. “I’m very grateful to you”: LBJ to Hoover, LBJ telephone tapes, Oct. 23, 1964, LBJL.
20. “He told me he had spent”: RFK oral history, JFKL.
21. “He knows Martin Luther King”: LBJ to DeLoach, LBJ telephone tapes, Nov. 20, 1964, LBJL.
22. “He flatly denied”: Nicholas deB. Katzenbach, Some of It Was Fun: Working with RFK and LBJ (New York: Norton, 2008), p. 154.
23. “I’ll tell you”: LBJ to Katzenbach, LBJ telephone tapes, March 4, 1965, LBJL.
24. “We had this case wrapped up”: Shanahan oral history, FBI/FBIOH.
25. “We will not be intimidated”: LBJ televised remarks, March 26, 1965, LBJL.
31. “THE MAN I’M DEPENDING ON”
1. “We’re really going”: LBJ to Mann, LBJ telephone tapes, April 24, 1965, LBJL.
2. “We have no evidence”: Undersecretary Thomas Mann to United States Ambassador Tap Bennett, Feb. 25, 1965, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1964–1968, Volume 32, Dominican Republic.
3. “With Bureau approval”: Estill oral history, FBI/FBIOH.
4. “In my opinion”: Director of Central Intelligence Rabor
n to President Johnson, April 29, 1965, LBJ telephone tapes, LBJL.
5. “They fly us down in this C-130”: Paul Brana oral history, FBI/FBIOH.
6. “I arrived at the Regency Hotel”: Kennedy M. Crockett, Memorandum for the Record, Johnson Library, National Security File, May 18, 1965, with copies to Mann, Vance, Helms, Vaughn, and Bromley Smith for Bundy. Balaguer was identified as a recruited FBI source by Wallace Estill and Paul Brana. The record is in Foreign Relations of the United States, 1964–1968, Volume 32, Dominican Republic. Balaguer’s FBI handler, Heinrich Von Eckardt, was, implausibly, the son and namesake of the German ambassador to Mexico during World War I; the ambassador had been an addressee of the Zimmerman Telegram, the intercepted cable that drew America into the Great War.
7. “Have we done that”: This tape is shot through with deletions made in the name of national security. Though edited here for length, it conveys a president at the edge of his endurance. The Dominican crisis drove LBJ half-mad, in the eyes of some of his top aides. “Highly dubious reports from J. Edgar Hoover” agitated the president’s mind, said Undersecretary of State George Ball. “The President became the desk officer on the thing. He ran everything himself … This became a thing of such passion, almost an obsession.” But Johnson was starting to lose faith in his own judgment. “I don’t always know what’s right,” LBJ said to Fortas on May 23. “Sometimes I take other people’s judgments, and I get misled. Like sending troops in there to Santo Domingo. But the man that misled me was Lyndon Johnson. Nobody else! I did that!”
