Enemies: A History of the FBI (38 page)

Hoover was genuinely infuriated that his titular superior summoned him, rather than the other way around. It was a short walk down the corridors of the Justice Department from Hoover’s suite to Kennedy’s soaring chambers. But Hoover refused to take it. “Bobby was just about never in Mr. Hoover’s office or Hoover in his,” Katzenbach said. Unable to bear the sight or sound of one another, Hoover and RFK worked out the appointment of a go-between. An FBI agent both men knew and liked, Courtney Evans, served as their official liaison for three years. “Courtney would explain something to Bobby one way and explain something to Hoover another way,” Katzenbach said. “When he was trying to sell something Hoover
wanted to Bobby, it was explained in a way that would make it palatable to Bobby, and vice versa.” Trying to serve these two masters was a task few men could fulfill.

Later in life, Evans claimed: “
I kept the Kennedys from firing Hoover. They were incensed at him from time to time. They felt he was wasting his manpower investigating national-security cases.” But the idea of dismissing the director was close to inconceivable. “Firing J. Edgar Hoover? Jesus Christ!” Katzenbach said. “I seriously question whether President Kennedy could have made a firing stick.”

But the president vowed to fire Allen Dulles after the disaster that befell the United States at the Bay of Pigs in April 1961. Dulles had sold his plans to invade Cuba and overthrow Castro as a sure thing. The Bay of Pigs invasion left 114 of the Agency’s Cubans dead, 1,189 captured, Castro triumphant—and the president vowing, in his words, to break the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds.

JFK ordered his brother to conduct a postmortem of the invasion and to fix the apparatus of American intelligence. Among the many open questions was whether the president would appoint RFK as the director of Central Intelligence. On April 20, the day after the invasion collapsed, Bobby Kennedy called Hoover for his thoughts on how to harness the CIA.

Hoover’s never-ending disdain for the CIA was recorded in his handwritten memos of the day: “
For years CIA has not played clean with us.… CIA hasn’t changed its stripes anymore than a zebra. H.” But he found the rumor that the president might place his brother in charge of the Agency intriguing and appealing. At one blow, it would remove RFK as Hoover’s superior and condemn the cocksure Kennedy to the impossible task of washing the stain of the Bay of Pigs from the family coat of arms.

Hoover assembled a sophisticated three-part report on American intelligence and hand-delivered it to the attorney general. It covered the history of the CIA and the key personalities at the Agency. Hoover outlined the story of American espionage since 1941, stressing that Kennedy could not “
analyze the weaknesses of US intelligence today without going back to past history”; Communist infiltration during World War II had “created situations and problems which even to this day affect US intelligence operations.” He also warned against a long roster of top CIA officers, singling out the former FBI agent William K. Harvey, who was responsible for the
clandestine collection of communications intelligence at the CIA, but was also a notorious alcoholic who had fouled up the investigation of the atomic spy Klaus Fuchs.

It is unlikely that Robert Kennedy read a word of the report. Harvey became a principal participant in the CIA’s revived plots against Fidel Castro, closely overseen by the attorney general.

“A
GENTS DID NOT DRIVE BUSES
”

Hoover defied the attorney general at will. In those same days of May 1961 came the first clear case of his contempt.

The Freedom Riders, a contingent of black and white civil rights demonstrators, aimed to challenge segregation in the South by traveling together on a Greyhound bus through Alabama. The FBI, through open and secret sources, including informers, knew their plans days in advance. The Bureau tipped off state and local law enforcement officers in Alabama. The police and the Ku Klux Klan, working in concert, planned to waylay the demonstrators and beat them half to death. The FBI knew that too.

Hoover had made a conscious decision not to tell the Justice Department what he knew about the Freedom Riders and the Klan. His written reports to Kennedy about the Freedom Riders primarily concerned the Communist Party’s capabilities in Alabama.

Hoover defied direct orders from the attorney general to protect the integrationists, as he called them. Joseph G. Kelly, a thirty-seven-year-old FBI agent in the small civil rights division of the FBI, watched the story unfold at headquarters.

“
The driver of the bus refused to continue driving the Freedom Riders,” he recounted. “We had a call from the Attorney General’s Office, from Nick Katzenbach. He said that the Attorney General, Mr. Kennedy, wanted an agent to drive the Freedom bus. Of course, in those days, we didn’t always do what the Department requested if we thought it was not in the best interest of the case or the Bureau.

“So we told Katzenbach that agents did not drive buses, it wasn’t included in their resume, and that he had a number of Civil Rights Division attorneys down there who might be able to drive it. And Katzenbach said—‘Well, this is a request from the Attorney General.’ And I said, ‘I know, but that’s our answer.’ So I hung up the phone and called the Director’s office
and alerted them to the fact that Kennedy would be calling, and he did. The Director told him the same thing.”

“N
O ONE WAS SAFE FROM THE INQUISITION
”

RFK began to grasp the ubiquity of Hoover’s power. He saw that Hoover had wired the national security establishment of the United States. The director had more information and power than the attorney general.

Hoover picked up secrets across the spectrum of American politics and foreign policy. His liaison agents and his loyalists told him what was going on at the CIA, on Capitol Hill, and at the State Department. The attorney general tried to identify and neutralize Hoover’s spies inside the Kennedy administration. The battle started at the State Department—a classic armed standoff, Kennedy and Hoover, guns drawn, daring the other to fire.

“
We had a leak,” said William J. Crockett, the State Department’s top administrator under JFK. “Day after day, I would be called by the Senate Internal Security Committee to be grilled about why certain people had been given security clearances” and how the State Department set foreign policy.

Hoover’s staunch supporter, Senator James Eastland of Mississippi, led the Internal Security Committee. When Eastland went “witch-hunting,” Crockett said, “no one was safe from the inquisition.” Crockett suspected a mole in the State Department was serving as Eastland’s spy, and if the senator had a spy in the State Department, so did Hoover. Under a formal liaison agreement forged in 1951, the Internal Security staff had sent the FBI every shred of confidential information in their files. Since 1955, Hoover and Eastland had had an informal and highly secret agreement to share intelligence with each other.

Crockett sought help from the secretary of state, Dean Rusk, who went to the president, who went to his brother. RFK sent for his special assistant, Walter Sheridan—his favorite investigator from the Senate Rackets Committee, a former FBI agent, and a veteran of the National Security Agency’s eavesdropping teams. “
Sheridan was the principal so-called nigger in the woodpile” at the Kennedy Justice Department, Hoover later told Lyndon Baines Johnson. Sheridan suggested that a friend and colleague from the NSA take charge of the State Department’s security. Sheridan’s man was
caught red-handed running bugs and black-bag jobs against the leaks. Crockett had to fire him on the spot.

But he had identified the mole. “
The leaker was one Otto Otepka, a high-ranking official in the Security Office and a holdover from the McCarthy period,” Crockett said. “He justified his actions by saying: ‘I feel it is my higher duty to my country to reveal the security risks that this new Administration is bringing into government. I am willing to break the law and sacrifice my career to bring this practice to a halt.’ ” The leak investigation proved too sensitive to pursue. The bugging could not be revealed. Otepka landed a national security post seven years later in the Nixon administration.

Robert Kennedy’s use of Walter Sheridan as an undercover investigator “grossly offended the FBI,” said Katzenbach. Hoover thought that they were usurping the FBI’s powers. The director would not let Robert Kennedy subvert his command of the government’s internal security systems. He controlled the power of secret information.

29

RULE BY FEAR

H
OOVER CONVINCED THE
Kennedys that Martin Luther King, Jr., was part of Moscow’s grand design to subvert the United States of America.

He had identified King’s counselor and speechwriter Stanley Levison as a secret member of the Communist Party. His greatest and most secret source, Solo, reported that Levison had been a linchpin in the Party underground from 1952 to 1957. Levison had evidently cut his ties to the Party that year, when he began to work for King. But Hoover became convinced that Levison was still taking orders from Moscow, whispering in King’s ear, indoctrinating him in Marxist thought and subversive strategies.

On January 8, 1962, Hoover advised the attorney general in writing that Levison was a secret agent of international communism. RFK remembered the moment he learned about Levison: “
When I heard that he was tied up, perhaps, with some Communists, I asked the FBI to make an intensive investigation of him.”

Kennedy and Hoover had a telephone conversation the next day about the techniques of wiretapping and bugging.
The substance of their conversation remains classified fifty years later.

RFK took off on an around-the-world trip shortly thereafter, leaving his deputy, Byron “Whizzer” White, soon to be appointed a Supreme Court justice, in charge as acting attorney general. White asked for the FBI’s files on Levison. Hoover refused to hand them over. He thought that guarding the secrecy surrounding Solo, the FBI’s source for the charge of Communist influence over the civil rights movement, was more important than keeping the Kennedys informed.

Hoover was convinced that the KGB was trying to renew financial, political, and espionage links in America—to the Old Left, to the budding
movement that called itself the New Left, and especially to the civil rights campaign. He was encouraged by the Bureau’s breakthroughs against Soviet espionage at the United Nations, one of which gave the FBI a fresh look at Stanley Levison.

The FBI had two hundred agents keeping an eye on the United Nations. Telephone taps on UN offices were easy; planting bugs in Soviet and Soviet-bloc offices was hard; black-bag jobs inside the UN were risky and rare. But the Bureau did all three, while keeping a weather eye out for disaffected diplomats who might defect to the United States. The FBI had the UN wired: When the Soviet deputy premier Anastas Mikoyan met with the Soviet delegation at the UN in the wake of the Cuban missile crisis later that year, Hoover sent President Kennedy real-time reports on the closed-door conversations.

The FBI’s Edmund J. Birch—the agent who had nailed the KGB spy known as Colonel Abel—worked the United Nations beat. Birch had his eye on a Soviet named Viktor Lesiovsky, who had just taken a top post in the United Nations secretariat, as one of three chief assistants to the new UN secretary-general, the Burmese diplomat U Thant. Lesiovsky, who lived in a beautiful apartment on Sutton Place, the most elegant address on Manhattan’s East Side, had served as the KGB chief in India. Birch suspected that he was doing more than infiltrating the UN. He thought he was running political operations to reinvigorate Moscow’s ties with the American Left.

The thought gained power when the FBI’s United Nations surveillance team reported that Lesiovsky had met in secret with Stanley Levison.

Days later, Robert Kennedy, newly returned to Justice from his globe-trotting, personally authorized a wiretap on Levison’s New York business telephone, on 39th Street off Fifth Avenue. For good measure, Hoover’s men also bugged Levison’s office.

On March 16, 1962, the Levison tapes started rolling, and they kept rolling for six years. For Hoover, it was the next best thing to a tap on King, since Levison was a guiding light for the movement, and King consulted him constantly by telephone.

Armed with the gleanings of the twenty-four-hour surveillance, Hoover began to bombard the president, Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson, Attorney General Kennedy, and Senator Eastland, among many others, with raw intelligence reports about King, Levison, the civil rights movement, and Communist subversion. Senator Eastland’s Internal Security Committee
subpoenaed Levison to an executive session, behind closed doors. Under oath, he denied that he had been a member of the Communist Party. After that, he took the Fifth Amendment on every crucial question.

Hoover never fully explained to the Kennedys why he maintained that Levison was a Communist agent. Protecting Solo was more important, the director wrote to his aides: “
Under no circumstances should our informant be endangered.”