J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and the Secrets

by Curt Gentry

  A tap on the reporter Henry Brandon yielded special dividends. Brandon’s wife was a close friend of Joan Kennedy, which enabled the White House to pick up Mrs. Kennedy’s comments about her husband following his accident at Chappaquiddick.†

  In December 1969 Hoover informed the president that the former secretary of defense Clark Clifford was planning to write a magazine article criticizing Nixon’s Vietnam policy. Ehrlichman to Haldeman: “This is the sort of early warning system we need more of—your game planners are now in an excellent position to map anticipatory action.”63 Haldeman to Jeb Magruder: “I agree with John’s point. Let’s get going.”64

  In May 1970, a year after the first tap was installed, Hoover met with Nixon and Haldeman in the Oval Office, and it was decided to eliminate Kissinger from the distribution chain. Thereafter all the summaries were sent to Haldeman. By now there wasn’t even the pretense of looking for leaks: the taps were being used solely to collect political intelligence—and, ironically, to keep an eye on Henry Kissinger.

  Meanwhile, stacks and stacks of paper accumulated—thirty-four summary memorandums to the President, thirty-seven to Kissinger, fifty-two to Haldeman, fifteen to Ehrlichman. To maintain tighter security, it was decided that all the summaries and related correspondence should be returned to the Bureau for safekeeping.

  There was one other White House-ordered surveillance during this period. This one was not ordered by Kissinger but was apparently used by Ehrlichman to spy on him.

  In June 1969 Ehrlichman asked the FBI to tap the home telephone of the nationally syndicated columnist Joseph Kraft. But “Hoover didn’t want to do Kraft,” Nixon would tell Dean,65 and so Ehrlichman gave the assignment to John Caulfield, the ex-NYPD cop, and John Ragan, a former FBI agent who was chief of security for the Republican National Committee.* A twenty-three-year veteran of the Bureau, Ragan had headed the thirty-five-man New York City tech squad, in charge of all wiretapping in Manhattan and the boroughs. But Ragan’s expertise was wasted, for, after he had shinnied up the telephone pole behind Kraft’s Georgetown residence to install the tap, it was learned that the columnist was in Paris covering the Vietnam peace negotiations. Apparently not wishing to use the CIA, Ehrlichman asked Hoover for coverage, and William Sullivan flew to Paris, where he arranged for the Direction de la Surveillance du Territoire, the French equivalent of the FBI, to put a bug in Kraft’s hotel room at the George V. It was learned that Kraft had interviewed the North Vietnamese delegates, but then so had many of the other reporters covering the talks. Reports were sent to FBIHQ, then hand carried to the White House. (As a thank-you gift, for his professional courtesy, the FBI director sent Jean Rochet, head of the DSTR, an autographed photograph.)

  That fall the White House requested a round-the-clock physical surveillance on Kraft. After Hoover pointed out that it was too dangerous, a compromise was reached, and for six weeks, from November 5 to December 12, the columnist was placed under “a selective spot surveillance in the evenings to check on his social contacts.”67

  “I’m baffled as to why they did it,” Kraft later told the author David Wise, after the FBI surveillances became known. “I just can’t fit it into the life in Washington that I know and that I lead.”68

  Kraft’s social life was apparently the clue. He and his wife, Polly, moved in the same Georgetown social circles as did Kissinger and his starlet of the moment. It was a “Henry” and “Joe” relationship. And Joe had himself been the recipient of more than a few of Henry’s own choice leaks.

  Unable to put Henry Kissinger under surveillance, Ehrlichman did the nextbest thing: he monitored the activities of his friend Joseph Kraft. The best evidence of this is that Kissinger himself was not sent the Kraft surveillance reports. Those reports, like the summary memorandums of the seventeen wiretaps, were later returned to the Bureau for safekeeping and eventually found their way into the office of William Sullivan.

  The thirty-seventh president of the United States did not socialize. Unlike Henry Kissinger, he was never seen on the Washington party circuit. But on the night of October 1, 1969, President Nixon, Attorney General Mitchell, and the White House adviser John Ehrlichman had dinner at 4936 Thirtieth Place NW, the home of FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover.

  Nixon had been here before, a number of times—he’d even been an over-night houseguest once, together with his wife and daughters, during the 1950s, when Puerto Rican terrorists had threatened to kill both the vice-president and the FBI director and the Bureau had decided they would be better protected in one place—but this was Ehrlichman’s first visit, and he later ridiculed everything about it, from the “dingy, almost seedy” living room to the faded photos of Hoover and Tom Mix, Hoover and various presidents, Hoover and “old-time movie actresses.”* Crawford, who had changed from his FBI garb to a white waiter’s jacket, served drinks. Clyde Tolson, “looking pale and pasty,” shambled in, shook hands, then disappeared back upstairs. Hoover discussed, in clinical detail, Tolson’s deteriorating health.

  The dinner itself was not exactly gourmet fare: steak had been flown in from Clint Murchison’s ranch in Texas, chili from Chasen’s in Beverly Hills.

  Hoover did most of the talking at the table. His main complaint seemed to be that the State Department had made it impossible for him to bug the new Russian embassy, because it had allowed Russian workmen to come over to do the construction. The president promised to see what he could do about “the little shits at State.”70

  Then, for what seemed like hours to Ehrlichman, “Hoover regaled us with stories of ‘black bag’ jobs, hair-raising escapes and so on.” The president would punctuate these tales with “Wonderful!” and “How about that, John?”

  “At the end of the evening,” Ehrlichman concluded, “Hoover would have had every reason to think he was authorized to do ‘black bag’ jobs.”71

  But Ehrlichman was wrong: this wasn’t the real point of the evening. That occurred the moment Hoover opened the front door and his guests departed, into the glare of TV lights. Besides the usual Secret Service contingent and curious neighbors, Hoover’s artificial turf was covered with reporters and cameramen.

  No hostess in Washington could lure out Richard Nixon, but J. Edgar Hoover had. Like FDR’s famous thumbs-down gesture, Nixon’s visit was a symbol of the president’s firm support.

  Yes, Hoover looked exceptionally fit, the attorney general told the press: “That man is just as alert physically and mentally as he has always been.” And no, there had been no talk of retirement.

  But then John Mitchell added a disquieting little qualification: “There is no one around right now to take his place.”72

  To assure his continuing favor, Hoover made himself even more useful to the president. Aware that Nixon was compiling an “enemies list,”* the FBI searched its files and suggested likely candidates for IRS audits. There was, as in all Hoover operations, a quid pro quo, the FBI receiving something equally valuable—tax returns and other confidential IRS data that could be used against such targets as the Klan, the New Left, and black nationalist groups. And then there were the “special requests,” as in November 1969 when H. R. Haldeman asked for a list of known or suspected homosexuals in the Washington press corps. Within hours, a detailed report was delivered to the White House, indicating that the FBI director had this particular information close at hand.

  To streamline the flow of political information to the White House, the director established, on November 26, 1969, a new program, code-named INLET, for Intelligence Letter, and all SACs were instructed to send FBIHQ, on a regular basis, interesting information relating to national security; demonstrations, disorders, or other civil disturbances; and, for spice, “items with an unusual twist or concerning prominent personalities which may be of special interest to the President and Attorney General.”73 The FBI director had already sent Nixon hundreds of such individual reports, but apparently he hoped to establish, domestically, something similar to the summary of world events the CIA delivere
d to the White House each morning.

  Also secretly, the FBI helped Vice-President Spiro Agnew with some of his speeches attacking the Reverend Ralph Abernathy, president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, by supplying derogatory information regarding both Abernathy and the late Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.† There was talk of establishing a national holiday for the slain civil rights leader, and Hoover was doing everything in his power to prevent this from happening.

  The Bureau even helped with the wording of some of Agnew’s more inflammatory speeches, leading veteran Washington watchers to conclude that the vice-president was sounding more like the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation every day.

  On November 18, 1969, Joseph Kennedy died.

  Finally, all of the Kennedys were gone, either dead—John, Robert, Joseph—or, in the case of Teddy, discredited.

  J. Edgar Hoover had outlasted them all.*

  * * *

  *The new FBI Building, first proposed at $60 million, was already the most expensive building in government. Its cost had by 1970 reached $104.5 million, surpassing the old record set by the Rayburn House Office Building, which had cost $87 million.

  *According to a former head of the FBI Laboratory, Hoover did not film his meetings. Facilities were in place to record them, however, and this was done on occasion. Hoover’s meeting with Martin Luther King, Jr., for example, was recorded.

  †Providing literal trancripts of the Panther wiretaps and bugs created a problem for the field offices, until Newark decided that asterisks be used to “refer to that colloquial phrase…which implies an unnatural physical relationship with a maternal parent,” thus sparing the director, and Helen Gandy, embarrassment.16

  *The Bureau’s expert on anonymous mailings was Assistant Director William Sullivan, author of the King suicide letter, whose style was copied by field offices all over the country. Apparently the New England Yankee had little actual contact with blacks, Puerto Ricans, or Hispanics, for in Sullivan-inspired letters they not only sound alike (using dialect more than a little reminiscent of J. Edgar Hoover’s once favorite radio show, “Amos ‘n’ Andy”) but also often misspell the same words.

  †The agency kept all the exiled black radicals under close surveillance, monitoring their telephone calls, mail, and visitors, and engaging in a variety of dirty tricks to discredit them with their host countries, thereby forcing them to move to less sympathetic locales, where extradition was possible.

  *Each faction then ordered the expulsion of the other faction. Whole BPP chapters were “purged.” In at least two instances this was literal. On March 9, 1971, one of Cleaver’s followers was shot while selling the party newspaper on a New York street. On April 19, 1971, the paper’s circulation manager, a Newton backer, was slain in retaliation.

  †Almost none of these tactics was new. They had been staples in labor disputes since the days of the Haymarket riots.

  *Reviewing the FBI’s role in one such conflict from the point of view of a legal scholar and historian, Frank Donner concludes: “The Bureau, it is clear, was criminally complicit in the violence that enveloped the two groups; more specifically, it engaged in a conspiracy to deprive individuals of their constitutionally protected rights and to life itself, a conspiracy of the very sort it is charged with policing.”23

  *Dudman had already earned himself a place on the FBI’s no-contact list, in 1962, with the publication of his book Men of the Far Right, in which he had referred to J. Edgar Hoover, not inaccurately, as the “patron saint” of the radical Right.31

  *Carswell pled no contest to sexual battery (fondling the officer) and was fined $100.

  *At Hoover’s insistence, Attorney General Mitchell agreed to remove one name from the list, that of Judge Edward Tamm, the Bureau’s former number three man. Although Tamm and Hoover had supposedly patched up their differences—Tamm occasionally lectured at the FBI Academy—Hoover never forgave him for deserting the FBI or for having a brother named Quinn Tamm.

  †Less than three years later Chief Justice Warren Burger delivered the eulogy at the memorial service for J. Edgar Hoover.

  *The FBI failed to discover that Meyer Lansky had a secret ownership in the casino. Hoover still had a blind spot so far as the Florida crime boss was concerned.

  *With some reason. In an off-the-record conversation with a Justice Department official in March 1969, Justices Warren and Brennan were told that the FBI was tapping all 109 foreign embassies in Washington. The following month, however, FBI Director Hoover, in his annual appearance before the House Appropriations Subcommittee, testified that the FBI had only 49 telephone taps and 5 microphone surveillances in place. When the justices asked who was telling the truth, the Justice Department official conferred with his superiors and reported back that there were 46 active continuous taps, while the other 63 embassies were tapped only occasionally.

  †Nor was Douglas the only Supreme Court justice so favored. In 1988, in response to a Freedom of Information Act suit, the FBI admitted that a search of its electronic indices had disclosed that in addition to Douglas, Justices Earl Warren, Abe Fortas, and Potter Stewart had been overheard on electronic surveillances: Warren seven times, Fortas and Stewart twice each. The FBI did not disclose the number of times Douglas was overheard, the dates of the interceptions, the identities of the other parties, the contents of the conversations, or whether the ELINTs were MISURs or TENSURs.

  *In Hoover memorandums, the name of John F. Kennedy’s alma mater was often lowercase.

  Hoover was well aware that Kissinger was himself a former Harvard professor. Dr. Kissinger had also, on at least one occasion, been an FBI informant, during the McCarthy era. In July 1953 Kissinger had contacted the Boston field office, asking to see an agent so that he could pass along a leaflet critical of the American atomic energy program, which he had obtained by opening someone else’s mail. Interviewed by an SA, “Kissinger identified himself as an individual who is strongly sympathetic to the FBI and added that he is now employed as a Consultant to the U.S. Army and is a former CIC [Counter-Intelligence Corps] Agent.”

  The Boston SAC concluded his report to the director as follows: “Boston will take no additional action in this matter unless called back by Kissinger. Steps will be taken, however, to make Kissinger a Confidential Source of this Division.”50

  *Asked how many wiretaps were in place at any one time during the twenty-two years he cooperated with the FBI, Horace Hampton stated, “It could have been a hundred. It could have been more…I would say that probably during the Kennedy-Johnson administrations we had quite a few. It tapered off after that. It was quite low before Kennedy.”

  Q: “What is meant by quite low?”

  A: “Well, I said a hundred.”

  Q: “In a year?”

  A: “At one time, you said. It could have been as many as that, or it could be a little more than that.”52

  In his annual testimony before the House Appropriations Subcommittee, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover never reported one hundred wiretaps, nationwide; the average number was usually in the low forties. Yet the Chesapeake and Potomac Telephone Company was only one company, covering only the Washington area. And Hampton’s figures do not include wiretaps used in criminal cases.

  *Those wiretapped, in chronological order, were: Morton Halperin, NSC, 5/9/69-2/10/71; Helmut Sonnenfeldt, NSC, 5/12/69-2/10/71; Daniel I. Davidson, NSC, 5/12/69-9/15/69; Colonel (Brigadier General) Robert E. Pursley, Department of Defense, 5/12/69-5/27/69, 5/4/70-2/10/71; Richard L. Sneider, NSC, 5/20/69-6/20/69; Richard M. Moose, NSC, 5/20/69-6/20/69; Henry Brandon, (London) Sunday Times, 5/29/69-2/10/71; Hedrick Smith, New York Times, 6/4/69-8/31/69; John P. Sears, White House, 7/23/69-10/2/69; William Safire, presidential speech writer, 8/4/69-9/15/69; Marvin Kalb, CBS News, 9/10/69-11/4/69; Ambassador William H. Sullivan, State Department, 5/4/70-2/10/71; William Beecher, New York Times, 5/4/70-2/10/71; Richard P. Pederson, State Department, 5/4/70-2/10/71; Winston Lord, NSC, 5/13/70-2/10/71; Ton
y Lake, NSC, 5/13/70-2/10/71; and James W. McLane, White House, 12/14/70-1/27/71.

  *Daniel Ellsberg, a friend of Morton Halperin’s and an occasional houseguest, was picked up fifteen times on the Halperin tap. Ellsberg, who later leaked the Pentagon Papers to the New York Times, never mentioned anything about national security, but he did talk about sex, marijuana, and LSD trips.

  †At least some of this information never reached the White House. Acting on his own, the WFO supervisor Courtland Jones destroyed the transcript of one highly personal discussion of Joan Kennedy’s “problems with Teddy,” because he “knew what those people would do with this stuff.”62

  *John Ragan, one of Lou Nichols’s men, also swept the homes of many of Nixon’s friends, including Charles “Bebe” Rebozo, the Pepsico president Donald Kendall, and Robert H. Abplanalp.

  Henry Kissinger did not use Ragan’s services. He had his White House offices swept by the Secret Service, the CIA, the NSA, and the FBI, in random order. Asked by an aide why he didn’t use the FBI on a regular basis, he responded, “Who trusted Hoover?”66

  *“I suspect he had the same interior decorator as the Munster family,” Ehrlichman later observed. But Ehrlichman’s scorn turned to astonishment when, after dinner, Hoover escorted his guests downstairs to his recreation room with its nudes and old girlie pinups. “The effect of this display was to engender disbelief—it seemed totally contrived. That impression was reinforced when Hoover deliberately called our attention to his naughty gallery, as if it were something he wanted us to know about J. Edgar Hoover.”69