J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and the Secrets

by Curt Gentry

  Although Hoover would probably have preferred anyone to Donovan, he believed that Allen Dulles had secret Communist leanings; in fact, he suspected the whole Dulles family, which included their sister Eleanor, of being “internationalists.”38 What concerned him most, however, was whether the sibling relationship would mean increased powers for the CIA.

  On at least this one matter, the Dulles appointment, J. Edgar Hoover and William J. Donovan were in full agreement. Dulles had called on Donovan before the appointment was announced. It was a courtesy call, really, to the grand old man of American intelligence, and Donovan, who had just turned seventy and was very conscious of it, took it as such. He’d been offered the DCI post, Dulles said: did Donovan think he should accept it?

  But Donovan was no more tactful with Dulles than he had been with Dewey. Donovan told his former subordinate that he’d been great as a lone operator, that he’d done a fine job in Switzerland, but then he said to him, “Al, this CIA job needs an expert organizer, and you’re no good whatever at that.” And he’d gone on from there.

  In recounting the Dulles visit to Stanley Lovell, Donovan added, “He left damned upset with me. But God help America if he heads up the CIA. It’s like making a marvelous telegraph operator the head of Western Union.”39

  Hoover already had a sizable file on Dulles, and he added significantly to it during his eight-year tenure as DCI. As his biographer Leonard Mosley admits, “Allen Dulles was never a man to fight off an attractive woman,”40 and Hoover documented a number of his affairs, including one with Mary Bancroft, the daughter of the publisher of the Wall Street Journal and a former OSS operative.

  The witty, acerbic Mrs. Bancroft had a number of close male friends. In corresponding with one of them, the publisher Henry Luce, she referred to FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover as “that Virgin Mary in pants.”41 Luce’s wife, Clare Boothe, liked the remark so much she repeated it as her own, to at least one too many people, her plagiarism earning her, rather than Mrs. Bancroft, a special place on J. Edgar Hoover’s enemies list.

  Although Hoover and Dulles disliked each other intensely, and Dulles went to some lengths to stop the FBI’s infiltration of the CIA, their subordinates, particularly those in counterintelligence, established close working relationships. William Sullivan and James Jesus Angleton, for example, met secretly to share information they deemed vital to their operations, while former agents who were now with the agency, such as William King Harvey, remained tapped into the Bureau’s old-boy network. It is possible that Hoover and Tolson knew of these exchanges and tacitly permitted them, since the Bureau benefited. But those engaged in such subterfuges knew they were treading on dangerous ground.*

  Yet Hoover and Dulles did reach certain accommodations. In February 1954 the Justice Department and the Central Intelligence Agency drafted an agreement whereby those agency employees caught committing criminal offenses while engaged in “national security” operations would be reported to the agency, rather than to law enforcement authorities. This understanding, which in effect put the agency above the law, remained in force for another twenty years.

  Hoover maintained a similar, albeit informal, agreement with the local police. If an FBI agent was arrested for drunken driving, theft, wife beating, homosexual solicitation, assault, or any other criminal offense, either the local SAC or FBIHQ was notified before any charges were brought (few ever were). The Bureau then handled the matter itself, acting as judge and jury, with the usual punishment being dismissal or some other disciplinary action. A paragraph in the FBI Manual covered such matters: “Any investigation…regarding any allegation against Bureau employees must be instituted promptly, and every logical lead which will establish the true facts should be completely run out unless such actions would embarrass the Bureau…” (emphasis added).43

  The six agents left the New York City field office in the predawn hours of June 18, 1953, and drove north to Ossining, some thirty miles away. Like everything else concerning this trip, their schedule had been meticulously planned so that their arrival, while it was still dark, would attract the least attention.

  Two were high-ranking FBI officials, Alan H. Belmont, who had become assistant director of the Domestic Intelligence Division after Howard Fletcher’s demotion, and Bill Branigan, chief of the Espionage Section. The most junior of the group was a young agent named Anthony Villano. For Villano, who had been in the Bureau less than four years, the trip was something of a lark, a chance to get away from office routine. He’d been ordered along for only one reason, Villano knew: he could transcribe more than 170 words per minute. The director, whom Villano idolized, had a prohibition against male agents and female stenographers traveling together.

  Once inside the gates of Sing Sing prison, they were directed to the warden’s home. Warden Wilfred Denno had vacated an apartment above his garage so that the agents would have a place to stay. He’d also provided two cells for their use as offices. Although they were located on death row, they were out of sight of the couple they had been sent to interrogate. Communications had already put in an open line to FBIHQ, and a second line connected the director with the president in the White House.

  Belmont and Branigan had a list of questions they intended to ask: it ran to thirteen pages. Villano had been instructed to bring enough office supplies for a month’s stay. It was estimated that it would take that long to complete their assignment. If all went well—and the director seemed convinced it would—the six would participate in the culmination of a plan that had been three years in the making, one which history would record as perhaps J. Edgar Hoover’s greatest intelligence coup: the confessions of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg.

  In authorized Bureau accounts, such as The FBI Story, the FBI identified the British atomic scientist Klaus Fuchs as being a Soviet agent; Fuchs identified the chemist Harry Gold as being his American contact; Gold identified David Greenglass, a young soldier who had been stationed at Los Alamos, as one of his contacts; and Greenglass implicated his wife, Ruth, and his sister and brother-in-law, Ethel and Julius Rosenberg.

  It didn’t happen quite that way.

  The FBI did identify Fuchs, from a reference in one of the KGB intercepts; from the belatedly discovered mention of his name in Israel Halperin’s notebook; and from old Gestapo records, seized after the war, which identified one Klaus Fuchs as being a German Communist. And the FBI did alert the British, who succeeded in breaking Fuchs. But Fuchs identified a photo of Gold one day after Gold himself confessed to the FBI, and Greenglass was originally suspected of another crime, the theft of some uranium samples—many Los Alamos servicemen had picked them up as souvenirs and were using them as ashtrays—and the agents only happened to show Gold his photograph. Greenglass did implicate his brother-in-law Julius, but he denied any involvement of his sister Ethel—until ten days before the trial began. The FBI had not let this stop them from arresting her, however, or from formulating a plan in which her incarceration would serve as a “lever” to get her husband, Julius, to confess.

  Immediately after Greenglass’s arrest, more than half a dozen of Julius Rosenberg’s closest friends vanished.* From this the agents concluded that Julius himself had headed a large espionage ring, most of whose members were personally known to him. If he confessed, they realized, they could probably roll up the whole network. Instead of a few arrests, the director could claim maybe one or two dozen. Getting Julius to talk became first priority. The key was Ethel, his wife and the mother of their two children.

  On July 17, 1950—the day Julius Rosenberg was arrested—Assistant Director Alan Belmont memoed Ladd suggesting the Bureau “consider every possible means to bring pressure on Rosenberg to make him talk…including a careful study of the involvement of Ethel Rosenberg, in order that charges may be placed against her, if possible.” On reading the memo, Hoover concurred, writing on the margin, “Yes by all means. If criminal division procrastinates too long let me know and I will see the A.G.”44

  Two days lat
er, Hoover wrote Attorney General McGrath, “There is no question that if Julius Rosenberg would furnish the details of his extensive espionage activities it would be possible to proceed against other individuals,” adding that “proceeding against his wife might serve as a lever in this matter.”45 There was only one problem: there was no evidence against Ethel.

  On August 4 Assistant U.S. Attorney Myles Lane questioned David Greenglass and asked him about the two occasions when he had passed Julius Rosenberg data from Los Alamos.

  LANE: “Was Ethel present on any of these occasions?”

  GREENGLASS: “Never.”

  LANE: “Did Ethel talk to you about it?”

  GREENGLASS: “Never spoke to me about it, and that’s a fact. Aside from trying to protect my sister, believe me that’s a fact.”46

  A week later, the FBI arrested Ethel Rosenberg. Despite the lack of evidence, her incarceration was an essential part of Hoover’s plan. With both Rosenbergs jailed—bail for each was set at $100,000, an unmeetable amount—the couple’s two young sons were passed from relative to relative, none of whom wanted them, until they were placed in the Jewish Children’s Home in the Bronx. According to matrons at the Women’s House of Detention, Ethel missed the children terribly, suffered severe migraines, and cried herself to sleep at night.

  But Julius didn’t break.

  It was decided to increase the pressure, by escalating the possible penalty. On February 8, 1951, about a month before the scheduled start of the trial, the Joint Congressional Committee on Atomic Energy met in secret session in Washington to discuss the Rosenberg prosecution. Present were twenty top government officials, including five senators, six congressmen, three members of the Atomic Energy Commission, and two representatives of the Justice Department, one of them Myles Lane. The main purpose of the meeting was to determine what classified information could be made public at the trial, but the topic quickly switched to the case against the Rosenbergs.

  Lane told the group that Julius Rosenberg was the “keystone to a lot of other potential espionage agents” and that the Justice Department believed that the only thing that would break Rosenberg was “the prospect of a death penalty or getting the chair.” He added, “If we can convict his wife too, and give her a stiff sentence of 25 to 30 years, that combination may serve to make this fellow disgorge and give us the information on these other individuals. It is about the only thing you can use as a lever against these people.”

  Though Lane admitted that the case was “not too strong” against Mrs. Rosenberg, it was, he said, “very important that she be convicted too, and given a stiff sentence.”*

  GORDON DEAN (CHAIRMAN OF THE AEC): “It looks as though Rosenberg is the king pin of a very large ring, and if there is any way of breaking him by having the shadow of a death penalty over him, we want to do it.”

  SENATOR BRICKER: “You mean before the trial?”

  MR. DEAN: “After the trial.”

  Lane also told the committee, “No judge has been assigned. We hope to get the strongest judge possible.”47 Lane was not leveling with the committee. A judge had already been picked, although his assignment had not yet been announced: he was the Honorable Irving R. Kaufman, a federal court justice for the Southern District of New York, who had once worked as an assistant attorney general for Tom Clark and who, according to a former FBI official, “worshipped J. Edgar Hoover.”48

  And, if Gordon Dean’s diary is to be believed, the judge had already stated, the previous day, more than a month before the trial, in an ex parte conversation with the prosecution, that he was willing to impose the death penalty as a lever to break Julius Rosenberg “if the evidence warrants.”

  There is little question that Judge Kaufman badly wanted the Rosenberg case. Roy Cohn’s later assertion that he had pulled strings to get the case assigned to Kaufman, however, has to be submitted to the same skepticism accorded any of Cohn’s boasts, particularly since, at that time, Cohn was a junior, if hyperactive, member of the prosecution team and had not yet met his mentor Joseph R. McCarthy.*

  On February 7, 1950, the day before the secret congressional committee meeting, Dean wrote in his office diary that he had conferred by phone with James McInerney, chief of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division, and asked whether Julius Rosenberg might break and make a full confession. In response, quoting the diary, “McInerney said there is no indication [of a confession] at this point and he doesn’t think there will be unless we get a death sentence. He talked to the judge and he is prepared to impose one if the evidence warrants.”50

  An ex parte communication—private contact between a judge and only one side of a legal proceeding—is forbidden under Canon 3A (4) of the American Bar Association’s Code of Judicial Conduct, adopted in 1972. However, in 1951, when the above took place, such conduct was not prohibited. It was, however, considered permissible only in case of an extreme emergency (such as a death threat). There was no emergency, extreme or otherwise, in this and the numerous other ex parte conversations Kaufman held with the prosecution.

  The problem of the weak case against Ethel Rosenberg was solved on February 23 and 24, 1951—nearly six months after her arrest and just ten days before the start of the trial—when both David and Ruth Greenglass were “reinterviewed.” Earlier, in a July 17, 1950, statement, David had claimed that he’d passed the atomic data he’d collected to Julius on a New York street corner. But now he stated that he’d given this information to Julius in the living room of the Rosenberg’s New York apartment and that Ethel, at Julius’s request, had taken his notes and “typed them up.” In her reinterview Ruth expanded on her husband’s version: “Julius then took the info into the bathroom and read it and when he came out he called Ethel and told her she had to type this info immediately. [Ruth] said Ethel then sat down at the typewriter which she placed on a bridge table in the living room and proceeded to type the info which David had given to Julius.”

  Finally the FBI had an overt act involving Ethel in the conspiracy.

  Ruth further implicated Ethel by recalling that on still another occasion she’d asked Ethel why she looked so tired and that Ethel had replied that she’d been up late typing material that David had given to Julius. Ethel told Ruth, according to Ruth’s revised statement, “that she always typed up Julius’s material…and that occasionally she had to stay up late at night to do this.”*51

  All that was missing was Woodstock No. 230099.

  The Greenglasses weren’t the only witnesses to change their testimony prior to the trial. On December 28, 1950, the FBI had arranged for Harry Gold and David Greenglass to meet secretly in a conference room in the Tombs to work out some of the discrepancies between their accounts.†

  The trial, which began on March 6, 1951, lasted less than three weeks. It was generally agreed that Emanuel Bloch, chief counsel for the two Rosenbergs, adopted the wrong defense strategy. Bloch did not deny that espionage had been committed, only that his clients had committed it. He declined to cross-examine Harry Gold, he told the jury in summation, “because there is no doubt in my mind that he impressed you as well as he impressed everybody that he was telling the absolute truth.”52 He didn’t question the value of the atomic data that Greenglass had stolen—a number of scientists, including Albert Einstein and Harold Urey, later did—but instead emphasized it, by demanding that it be impounded, “so that it remains secret from the Court, the jury and counsel.”53 He attacked the testimony of the Greenglasses but neglected to request the one thing that would have discredited them, their pretrial statements.

  Ten days into the trial, Belmont memoed Ladd, “While talking with Ray Whearty of the Department on the afternoon of March 16, he commented that with regard to the Rosenberg case if Rosenberg is convicted he thought Judge Kaufman would impose the death penalty. I inquired as to why he thought Kaufman would impose the death penalty and he said, ‘I know he will if he doesn’t change his mind.’ ”54

  The prosecution pared down its case to a
few key witnesses but managed to work in one “expert” on Soviet espionage, Elizabeth Bentley, who testified that in the early 1940s a man who identified himself as “Julius” had called her five or six times late at night asking her to relay messages to her spymaster-lover Golos.

  The defense called only two witnesses, and neither Julius nor Ethel Rosenberg helped their case. Although both proclaimed their innocence, Julius’s invoking the Fifth Amendment to any questions regarding his beliefs, associations, and alleged membership in the American Communist party did not sit well with the jury, while Ethel’s demeanor, more than her responses, worked against her. As a loyal wife and the mother of two children, from whom she was cruelly separated, Ethel might have been expected to arouse a certain amount of sympathy. Instead she came across as cold and unfeeling, her contempt for the proceedings barely concealed. On the advice of his attorney, their codefendant, Morton Sobell, did not take the stand.

  It took the jury less than a day to reach its verdict. On March 29, 1951, the three defendants were found guilty on all counts. Judge Kaufman postponed sentencing for one week, until April 5.

  Early on the morning of April 2, three days before the sentencing, Deputy Attorney General Peyton Ford called Hoover. Normally unflappable, Ford was very disturbed by the widely spreading rumor that Judge Kaufman was going to sentence both Rosenbergs, Julius and Ethel, to death.

  Hoover too was disturbed by the talk. While he thought the arguments against executing a woman were nothing more than sentimentalism, it was the “psychological reaction” of the public to executing a wife and mother and leaving two small children orphaned that he most feared. The backlash, he predicted, would be an avalanche of adverse criticism, reflecting badly on the FBI, the Justice Department, and the entire government.