J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and the Secrets

by Curt Gentry

  On January 25, 1950, five days after his conviction, Alger Hiss was sentenced to five years’ imprisonment on each of the two counts of perjury, the sentences to be served concurrently.

  Fifteen days later, an obscure junior senator from Wisconsin named Joseph R. McCarthy addressed a Republican women’s club in Wheeling, West Virginia.

  Although Hoover would have been loath to admit it, some of the biggest spy cases of the post-World War II era owed their discovery, at least in part, to the foresight—and wasteful spending—of none other than his longtime nemesis William J. “Wild Bill” Donovan.

  During the war a partially charred KGB codebook was found on a battlefield in Finland. In November 1944, after a series of secret negotiations, the OSS chief paid the Finns $10,000 for the book and other cipher materials they’d recovered. The purchase, however, came to the attention of Secretary of State Stettinius, who, horrified that the United States might be accused of spying on one of its allies, ordered the materials returned to the Russians.

  Donovan reluctantly complied (and, as anticipated, the KGB changed its codes) but only after making copies, which he turned over to the Army Security Agency for possible decipherment.

  For three years an ASA cryptanalyst, Meredith Gardner, tried to break the code. At first the task seemed impossible: part of the codebook had been burned beyond recognition; the code itself had been in use for a limited period, roughly from early 1944 to about May of 1945, when, thanks to Stettinius, the Russians abandoned it; the KGB used substitute names for people, places, and things; and last, but most important, the code was linked to the use of “onetime” cipher pads, which were theoretically unbreakable.

  Gardner, though, was not only patient but lucky. In the confusion of war, someone in Moscow had mistakenly sent out duplicate onetime pads; he could work with the huge backlog of foreign-directed cables the telegraph companies had been supplying the FBI since early in the war; and he had a sheaf of dated KGB messages in clear text, which the New York field office had obtained in a 1944 burglary of the New York offices of the Soviet Purchasing Commission.

  Finally, in 1948, Gardner succeeded in breaking the KGB’s 1944-45 code and began deciphering the backlog of messages. Among the first were the texts of several top-secret communications from Winston Churchill to the then-new U.S. president Harry S Truman, eventually leading the FBI to the conclusion that the KGB had a spy in the British embassy in Washington, while another deciphered message, a scientific report on the gaseous diffusion process for making uranium 235, had obviously been provided by someone inside the Manhattan Project.

  Even closer to home, late in 1948 Gardner gave his FBI contact, the headquarters supervisor Robert Lamphere, some startling information: there was a KGB agent in the Justice Department, or at least there had been in early 1945. Going over the deciphered cables, all Lamphere was able to determine was that the spy was a woman, that she’d been employed in the New York office, and that in January 1945 she’d been transferred to Washington. But it was enough. A check of the JD’s employment records disclosed that only one person fit these particulars: a twenty-eight-year-old Brooklyn-born Barnard graduate named Judith Coplon. Not only was she still employed by Justice; Coplon was at present a political analyst in the department’s Foreign Agents Registration Section—the bailiwick of young John Edgar Hoover—with access to many of the FBI’s investigative reports on known or suspected Soviet intelligence agents.

  Initially both Hoover and Attorney General Clark wanted to quietly dismiss Coplon. Of the two, Clark was the more embarrassed by her employment. During her background investigation the FBI had learned that, while attending Barnard, Miss Coplon had been affiliated with the Young Communist League and had written pro-Soviet articles for the school paper, but Justice had hired her anyway, while her personnel file contained a signed letter from Clark praising her work and promoting her to a higher grade. But the discovery of Coplon came at a very bad time for the FBI director. Although the grand jury had just indicted Hiss on two counts of perjury, he was a long way from convicted and the debacle of the Amerasia case was still fresh in mind. Added to this was the possible adverse publicity of the FBI’s having a spy “just next door” and knowing nothing about it. However, at the urging of Lamphere and the other men in the security squad, Hoover agreed to leave her in place temporarily, hoping to identify her contact.

  After making sure Coplon was denied access to especially sensitive materials, he had her placed under technical and physical surveillance. Her home and office telephone were tapped, as were the telephones of her parents and a Justice Department attorney with whom she was currently having an affair. In addition to tailing her and anyone she contacted, the FBI set up a “plant” (an observation and listening post) across the street from her apartment.

  Ordinarily special agents tried to avoid surveillance assignments, but they vied for this one. When entertaining her male friends, Miss Coplon rarely bothered to close her curtains.

  In Bureauese, the investigation was known as COPCASE/ESP/R, for COPLON CASE/ESPIONAGE/RUSSIAN. Among themselves, the agents called it the “Punch-and-Judy Show.”*

  Once or twice a month Judith Coplon spent the weekend in New York, visiting her parents. But on January 4, 1949, instead of taking the subway to Brooklyn, she headed uptown, to Washington Heights, where she met a man the agents later identified as Valentin Gubitchev, a member of the United Nations Secretariat. The pair met again, on the same street corner, on February 18. Although the agents never saw Coplon pass Gubitchev anything, there were several brief periods when they lost sight of the couple.

  Following the identification of Gubitchev as a UN employee, however, both Hoover and Clark got cold feet. They wanted to dismiss Coplon now, without publicity, under the loyalty-security program.† But Inspector Howard Fletcher, Lamphere’s boss, persuaded the director to give them just a little more time. It was a temporary reprieve, though, Fletcher emphasized.

  To speed up the process, Lamphere “decided to bait a hook”14 for Coplon and Gubitchev. In preparation for their next meeting, Lamphere prepared a bogus memorandum which he felt sure would interest the Russians. From J. Edgar Hoover, director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, to Peyton Ford, assistant to the attorney general, it stated that the American attorney for the Amtorg Trading Corporation, one Isadore Gibby Needleman, was an FBI informant.

  Amtorg, the official Russian purchasing agency in the United States, often served as a cover for Soviet espionage activities. Needleman, however, wasn’t an FBI informant. But by putting a “snitch jacket” on him, Lamphere hoped both to discredit Needleman and to sow distrust within Amtorg. It was a technique widely used in later years, in the FBI’s infamous COINTELPROs.

  Ford, who had been briefed, arranged to have the memo bucked to Miss Coplon’s desk on Friday, March 4, shortly before she was planning to leave for another New York weekend. This time Coplon and Gubitchev went out of their way to avoid possible surveillance, but eventually, fearing they were about to lose them—and well aware this might be their last chance—the squad members moved in and arrested both.

  When searched, Coplon had twenty-eight FBI documents in her purse, most of them “data slips” summarizing the contents of specific FBI reports. There was also a copy, in full, of the bogus Hoover-Ford memo. And a very incriminating typewritten note which began, “I have not been able (and I don’t think I will) to get the top secret FBI report which I described to Michael on Soviet and Communist activities in the U.S.…”*15

  It looked like an ironclad case. But Hoover himself later described it as one of the biggest disasters in the entire history of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

  Arrested on March 4, 1949, Coplon was brought to trial on the twenty-sixth of the following month, in Washington, D.C., charged with stealing government documents. And, at first, everything went well. But when the prosecution introduced the data slips into evidence, the defense attorney Archibald Palmer requested the introduction of the
documents on which they had allegedly been based. After both sides had presented their arguments, pro and con, Judge Albert Reeves said he would take the matter under advisement during the noon recess. Seemingly the only one aware of the gravity of the situation, Lamphere, in a near panic, rushed from the courtroom to FBIHQ, where the problem was bucked upstairs. D. M. “Mickey” Ladd was not one of the swiftest of the assistant directors. He owed his job to political connections (his father had been a U.S. senator) and his rise to “loyalty” (although agents used a two-word substitution for the latter), and it took a while to persuade him the matter was serious enough for them to interrupt the director and associate director’s lunch plans.

  Recognizing the dangerous ramifications of a favorable ruling, the director immediately called the attorney general; to cover himself, he used a speaker phone so that a witness, in this case Ladd, could listen in. Never before in its history had the Bureau publicly revealed its raw files, Hoover informed the AG, and rather than do so now he urged Clark to seek a mistrial or a contempt citation. Not only would a favorable ruling violate national security and expose confidential informants; it could, because of the contents of these particular files, embarrass the FBI, the Justice Department, and Clark himself. Hoover even argued that, since the files contained unverified gossip and accusations, innocent people could be hurt, a novel argument considering that Hoover had no compunctions about personally leaking such materials to everyone from Winchell to HUAC. All Ladd could recall of the attorney general’s side of the conversation was an occasional “Now, Edgar…” However, he did get the impression, which he conveyed to Lamphere and Fletcher, that the AG had promised to do something.

  By no means reassured, Hoover took an extreme step. After setting down his arguments to Clark in memorandum form, he had the FBI’s White House liaison, Ralph Roach, rush a copy over to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, where he read it to one of Truman’s aides, John Steelman, who promised to inform the president and “follow this matter closely.”16

  It was all for naught. Clark did nothing, and the judge ruled that the prosecution couldn’t have it both ways: “it could not insist on the importance of the documents to national security and at the same time use national security as a reason for refusing to reveal their contents.”17

  “The first knowledge I had that the reports had been introduced into evidence occurred after they had been presented in court,” Hoover would bitterly recall. “The reports introduced into evidence were selected by the Department and not by the Bureau.”18

  It was a historic moment: the first time anyone outside the government had seen copies of raw FBI files. And both the defense and the press made the most of it. One report identified the Hollywood actors Frederic March, Helen Hayes, John Garfield, Canada Lee, and Paul Muni as “Reds.” There were slanderous remarks about such prominent persons as Mrs. Edward U. Condon, wife of the director of the National Bureau of Standards (Dr. Condon demanded an apology from Hoover; he didn’t get it), as well as gossip concerning relative unknowns, such as the report, stamped SECRET, of a Bronx man who claimed to have seen a neighbor walking around inside his own home naked. And there was much more, little having to do with real government secrets, much having to do with politics, and some of it too “unsavory” for print, although it was read in court. It was clear that the FBI employed a vacuum cleaner approach, collecting everything on anyone and filing, rather than discarding, the dirt.

  On June 15, 1949, the New York Times topped its front page, “FBI Head Reported / to Have Resigned.” Hoover had submitted his resignation “during a heated showdown” with Attorney General Clark over departmental policy regarding the integrity of the FBI’s files, the Times reported, quoting as its source a copyrighted story in that day’s Washington Times Herald.

  The real source of the story, Drew Pearson soon reported, was “J. Edgar Hoover’s public relations man, Lou Nichols, a smart and likable Greek-American, formerly Nicholopolous, who, in his zeal to protect his boss, sometimes outsmarts himself.”

  According to Pearson, “It was Nichols who set in motion the rumor that Hoover was about to resign—as a backfire against Truman’s intimation that it might be a good thing to have Hoover resign.”19

  Whatever he may have said in private, all the president had said publicly, in his weekly press conference, was that he felt Hoover had done a good job. The reporters picked up on his use of the past tense.

  Although he didn’t report it, Pearson knew that Nichols was behind the story about the Hoover-Clark feud because Nichols had tried to plant it on him.

  The National Lawyers Guild demanded an investigation of the FBI. Through wiretaps the Bureau learned that the organization was preparing a lengthy report on the Bureau’s illegal activities, the first since the 1924 report of the twelve lawyers. Each time a new draft was finished, the FBI burglarized the NLG offices and made a copy. Well before the report was actually released, both the attorney general and the president had a prepared rebuttal in hand.

  Meanwhile, the Coplon trial went on. Robert R. Granville, the Coplon case supervisor in New York, testified that no wiretaps had been used in the case. Having lost on the files, the prosecution won on three other motions: the judge denied two defense requests for a mistrial as well as a request for the introduction of the 115-page espionage report into evidence. As for the presence of the documents in her purse, Palmer presented a literally novel defense: Miss Coplon had copied them as source material for a work of fiction she was writing. As for his client’s meetings with Gubitchev, Palmer used a love defense: Coplon was “crazy, crazy” in love. Buying neither (in rebuttal to the love story, the prosecution had used Miss Coplon’s trysts with the Justice Department attorney), the jury on June 30, 1949, convicted Coplon and sentenced her to ten years in prison.

  Any satisfaction Hoover felt over the conviction and sentence was negated just a week later, by the hung jury in the first Hiss trial. A second trial was scheduled, this time for both Gubitchev and Coplon, for that December, in New York City. Since there was no proof that any documents had been passed, the pair were charged with conspiracy to transmit documents to a foreign power.*

  In the interim Coplon fired Archibald Palmer, and the court appointed three attorneys to defend her, one a young left-wing lawyer who had no sympathy with communism but a great concern for civil liberties, Leonard Boudin. Examining the mass of evidence, Boudin concluded that an unidentified confidential informant, code-named TIGER, could only have been a wiretap, and he persuaded the second trial judge, Sylvester Ryan, to hold a hearing on the matter.

  During the hearing, the Justice Department attorneys reluctantly admitted to the court that they had just discovered that—contrary to the sworn testimony of the supervising agent Granville—there had been taps all along, on Coplon’s apartment and office phones as well as on the home phone of her parents in Brooklyn, and that the taps had remained active throughout the Washington trial, picking up, among other things, conversations between the defendant and her attorney. They had learned this, they claimed, when they asked the FBI agents for affidavits swearing that there were no taps “and the agents balked.”20 Digging deeper, Judge Ryan learned that some thirty agents had participated in the eavesdropping and that Inspector Howard Fletcher had ordered the removal of the taps just prior to the start of the New York trial, a month earlier.

  On November 9, 1949, Fletcher had memoed Assistant Director Ladd, “The above named informant [TIGER] has been furnishing information concerning the activities of the subject. In view of the imminency of her trial, it is recommended that this informant be discontinued immediately, and that all administrative records in the New York office covering the operation of this informant be discontinued.

  “Pertinent data furnished by the informant has already been furnished in letter form, and having in mind security, now and in the future, it is believed desirable that the indicated records be destroyed.”

  Although Boudin requested that the prosecution produce the
results of the illegal wiretapping (the letter referred to above), the government refused and the judge upheld the refusal. Boudin did bring out, however, that the FBI had arrested Gubitchev and Coplon without first obtaining warrants.

  On March 7, 1950, both Coplon and Gubitchev were convicted, each receiving fifteen-year sentences.*

  A total of forty years for the “stats”; the first conviction of an American citizen accused of spying for the Soviets; plus proof of what the FBI director had long contended, that the U.S.S.R. was using UN employees to conduct its espionage activities—none of these measured up, in Hoover’s view, to the public embarrassment inflicted upon the good name of the FBI. Reprimands, of varying severity, were given to many of the agents assigned to the case. Fletcher, for example, who had merely been following the director’s own policy for the destruction of wiretap records, was censured, demoted, and transferred to a subordinate post in the Washington field office.