Enemies: A History of the FBI (36 page)

The FBI’s files on Kennedy also included unspecified and unverified charges of “
hoodlum connections.”

On July 13, 1960, the day that JFK won the presidential nomination at the Democratic National Convention, the FBI produced a biographical sketch
on the candidate for Hoover. It reported that the senator and Frank Sinatra had socialized in New York, Las Vegas, and Palm Springs during the campaign. The FBI had a long-standing file on Sinatra. The Bureau surmised that the singer was trying to use his influence with the Kennedy clan on behalf of mobsters. Sinatra’s FBI file included his association with Sam Giancana, who was later overheard on an FBI bug boasting that he had influence with the Kennedys. The FBI would soon learn that Sinatra had introduced JFK
and
Giancana to a woman of easy virtue named Judith Campbell, who had sexually serviced the senator during the Democratic convention and maintained intimate relations with both men.

“T
HE
P
RESIDENT EXPRESSED AMAZEMENT
”

President Eisenhower called on Hoover at an urgent meeting of the National Security Council on October 13, 1960. Crushing national security concerns faced the White House that fall. The rise of Soviet-style communism in Fidel Castro’s Cuba was chief among them. But the president spent much of the National Security Council meeting talking about sex.

The political tension was high in Washington. The election was now twenty-five days away, the race was neck-and-neck, and the third of the presidential debates between Nixon and Kennedy was hours away. (They argued on television that night about American intelligence and Soviet spies. “Communist espionage goes on all the time,” Nixon said, in the nervous voice that cost him innumerable votes. “The United States can’t afford to have a es—an es—a espionage lack or should we s—uh—lag—or should I say, uh, an intelligence lag any more than we can afford to have a missile lag.”)

The president, however, spent the better part of an hour at the October 13 meeting telling Hoover to rid America of homosexuals in high places.

Two young math geniuses who worked at the National Security Agency as code breakers had defected to the Soviet Union. Bernon Mitchell, thirty-one, and William Martin, twenty-nine, had been missing from work for eight days before anyone noticed. The universal assumption—unsupported by NSA records declassified five decades later—was that Martin and Mitchell were lovers. They had flown from Washington to Havana via Mexico City, and then on to Moscow. They surfaced at a press conference in Moscow on September 6, informing the world that the NSA had
been cracking the diplomatic and intelligence codes of American allies including France, Italy, Indonesia, Egypt, and Syria.

The president turned to Hoover for a full report on the case. “
Mitchell had been found to have homosexual tendencies,” Hoover told the president, and “Martin was noticeably unstable.” But the Pentagon had granted them top secret security clearances nonetheless. The president found this outrageous. He connected communism and homosexuality, as did Hoover; they both believed without question that homosexuals were especially susceptible to foreign intelligence services.

“
The President expressed amazement that these two men had been retained after such information had been developed,” Hoover recorded in his dictated memorandum of the conversation. “He instructed the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Lyman L. Lemnitzer, to call in the officials who were responsible for clearing these two individuals and in the words of the President, ‘Give them hell.’ ”

The president asked Hoover how to cleanse the government of this threat once and for all. Hoover recounted:

There was some discussion then upon the part of the President and the Attorney General as well as myself about the setting up of a list of homosexuals in order that there be some central place to which inquiries might be directed concerning individuals who may apply for Government employment or be in Government employment.…

The President was of the opinion that this information should be in the FBI and suggested that steps be taken to see that we gathered together in the FBI any information concerning such tendencies upon the part of individuals who are either in Government or may apply for positions in Government so such information would promptly be available to all Government agencies.

The President seemed to be greatly concerned about this entire problem and left no doubt … that he was thoroughly opposed to the employment or retention in employment of individuals who might have such tendencies.

The FBI’s Sex Deviates Program had been in effect since 1951; the files filled hundreds of thousands of pages. President Eisenhower’s 1953 executive order banning homosexuals from government service equated “sexual perversion” with espionage, sabotage, mental illness, drug addiction, and
membership in the Communist Party as behavior that constituted a danger to national security. But there had never been a central file at the FBI comprising a who’s who of homosexuals in America. Now there would be.

Hoover may not have had a sex life of his own. But he had a deep interest in other people’s secret lives—notably, the life of the next president of the United States.

27

“MURDER WAS IN STYLE”

A
T THE END OF
1960, Hoover and the FBI became enmeshed in President Eisenhower’s plans to assassinate both Fidel Castro and Rafael Trujillo, the dictators of Cuba and the Dominican Republic respectively.

Hoover started to see the outlines of these dark conspiracies just before John Kennedy very narrowly defeated Richard Nixon in the November 1960 election. His gimlet eyes were opening to an underworld of power. He grasped connections between the American government and organized crime.

On October 18, 1960, Hoover wrote a terse memorandum to Richard Bissell, the CIA’s covert operations chief, with copies to the top men at Justice, State, the Pentagon, and the FBI’s chain of command. It concerned Sam Giancana and Fidel Castro.

Hoover had read FBI reports that Giancana, while enjoying a meal at La Scala, the best Italian restaurant in New York, had boasted that “
Castro was to be done away with very shortly”—by November. The mobster said he had met with the hired assassin three times in Miami. The instrument of death was to be a poison pill. And, as Hoover soon discovered, the CIA was behind the plot. Hoover started an all-pervasive electronic surveillance of Giancana—not only wiretaps and bugs, but parabolic microphones that could pick up conversations at a distance of hundreds of feet, a new technology used only in the most sensitive spy cases. “You are advised that its use has been confined to top Internal Security and Espionage cases in the past,” Hoover wrote to the FBI special agent in charge in Chicago. The Giancana investigation now was an intelligence case.

The FBI learned that Giancana was one among ten members of “the commission,” which oversaw the work of Mafia families in the United States and the Caribbean. Mafia dons aimed to revive Mob-owned casinos
in Havana from which they had been expelled by Castro, who had come to power in Cuba on January 1, 1959, by overthrowing the dictator Fulgencio Batista. Failing that, they would move their gambling and graft operations to the Dominican Republic.

The Mob liked Generalissimo Rafael Trujillo, an American ally who had held power in the Dominican Republic since 1930. He ruled by fear and fraud. His wealth, wrung from the soil of the island and the sweat of his subjects, was measured in hundreds of millions of dollars. His crimes included murder and kidnapping on American soil, the bribery and corruption of members of the United States Senate and House, and the subversion of rival Latin American leaders.

“T
HE
P
RESIDENT WAS ENTITLED TO KNOW
”

Hoover had gathered a trove of political intelligence on the murderous politics of the Caribbean during the late 1950s. His best sources included an FBI veteran turned American ambassador in the Dominican Republic, his agents and legal attachés in Miami and Havana, and the CIA counterintelligence chief, James Angleton.

A common denominator of their reporting was political corruption in Washington. Ten members of Congress had been convicted of crimes during Hoover’s years at the FBI; almost all of the cases involved relatively minor-league cases of graft. But Hoover learned through secret intelligence that some of his strongest allies in the Senate had been pocketing bribes from Batista and Trujillo. Hoover had received a report from Angleton, based on a tip from the Cuban consul general in New York, that “
Senator Homer E. Capehart has received the sum of $20,000 as a ‘fee’ to effect the entrance and asylum in the United States of Batista.” Capehart, an Indiana Republican, had been one of Hoover’s most vocal supporters in the war on communism in the Senate since 1945. Hoover also received intelligence from the American ambassador in the Dominican Republic that his most powerful supporter in Congress, Senator James Eastland of Mississippi, received money and other favors from Trujillo, one plantation master bestowing largesse on another.

Hoover shunned criminal investigations of congressmen. He very rarely handled matters involving money, sex, and politics as law enforcement cases. He classified them as intelligence matters, fit for his files and the president’s
eyes only. He brought salacious political secrets about members of Congress to the White House, and presidents from Franklin Roosevelt onward usually savored them.

“
If it was highly politically explosive … the President was entitled to know,” said Nicholas deB. Katzenbach, later the attorney general of the United States. “The Bureau didn’t give you a lot of other stuff. They did if there was homosexuality or something of that kind involved.… You know, little girls or something like that.”

Hoover never pursued Eastland on charges of corruption; it would have been awkward in the extreme to investigate his favorite senator, the Democratic chairman of the Judiciary Committee and its Internal Security Subcommittee. But Hoover had told President Eisenhower that other members of Congress were in Trujillo’s pocket.
Eisenhower himself had named two of them in a White House meeting: Senator Allen Ellender, Democrat of Louisiana, the chairman of the Senate Agriculture Committee, and Representative Harold Cooley, Democrat of North Carolina, the chairman of the House Agriculture Committee. The committees set the sugar import quotas allocated to the Dominican Republic; their decisions generated millions for the dictatorship; their chairmen received considerable largesse in return. Trujillo personally controlled roughly two-thirds of the crop and took the lion’s share of the profits.

Trujillo had distinguished himself to his American allies as a bulwark against communism. He had asserted in interviews with American newspapers that he had given the United States priceless intelligence on a “Caribbean Comintern” with headquarters at the Soviet Embassy in Mexico City and bases in New York, Miami, and Puerto Rico. Vice President Nixon had toured the Dominican Republic and hailed Trujillo in public and private. Franklin D. Roosevelt, Jr., was one among many of Trujillo’s well-paid Washington lobbyists. Trujillo bought favorable publicity by siphoning money into the hands of newspaper owners, broadcast magnates, advertising agencies, and syndicated columnists through his political and intelligence operatives, who worked out of fifty-four consulates in the United States. His going rate for endorsements from powerful and prominent gringos was $25,000 in cash.

The problems Trujillo presented were without real precedent in American political history. The United States had installed pro-American rulers through coups and plots. But it never had removed one.

“G
ET INTO THE UNDERGROUND
”

The president, the Dulles brothers, and J. Edgar Hoover hit upon an unusual solution to the problem of Trujillo. They sent a veteran FBI agent down to the Dominican Republic as the new American ambassador.

Joseph S. Farland was not a typical diplomat. His skill was in secret operations. Farland had become an FBI agent in 1943. His assignments included wiretapping, black-bag jobs, and undercover surveillance. As he explained, Hoover had chosen him to be “one of the very select group of individuals,” part of “a secret organization within a secret organization” working against the Soviet atom spies. “Our work was to get the information as to who was who and who was doing what to whom and how they were doing it.” His new assignment in the Dominican Republic was not all that different. He recalled his orders: “
Get into the underground and find out what is going on and what is going to happen at this time and in the future. It’s a delicate operation, but your background and training make you the best possible selection we have in the Department. We do not want to eliminate Trujillo. In other words, assassinate him. But we want him to take his loot and go off.”