Enemies: A History of the FBI (41 page)

“
I want you to gather intelligence by trying to infiltrate the Klan,” Moore told his men. “We’re fixin’ to declare war.”

Moore tutored many first-tour agents in “techniques to gather intelligence … that have been used since the days of the Egyptians,” said an FBI rookie named Billy Bob Williams, an ex-marine who rooted out Klan torture chambers and killing fields in desolate Mississippi Delta hamlets.

“
Martin Luther King yelled and screamed that there weren’t enough
Yankee agents down in Mississippi—so, lo and behold, I find myself down in Mississippi,” the FBI’s Donald J. Cesare said. In Philadelphia, the hotbed of the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, a town of about 40,000, “there must have been forty to fifty agents searching all over that place,” out looking for corpses.

Cesare was an unusually experienced man for an FBI rookie. He came to Mississippi from his first tour, in Dallas, where he had investigated the Kennedy assassination. A decade before, he had been a tobacco-chewing captain in the United States Marine Corps, recruited by the CIA as a paramilitary officer during the Korean War. Among other assignments, he had trained Tibetan guerrillas loyal to the Dalai Lama. He wanted to go to East Africa in 1963, but the CIA wanted to send him back to Asia. Cesare quit—and wound up in charge of Neshoba County, Mississippi, instead of Nairobi, Kenya. Why? Because his father, chief of police in Old Forge, Pennsylvania, had always wanted his son to join the Bureau.

Cesare’s chief, Inspector Joe Sullivan, found out where the three civil rights workers’ bodies were buried. Sullivan was “very friendly with Maynard King, who was a Mississippi State Highway Patrol Captain,” Cesare said. Sullivan never told his underlings how he got the information. But Hoover knew.

On the evening of August 4, 1964, Deke DeLoach called the White House, interrupting a war council. The president had received a startling report of a Communist attack that day on American ships in the Gulf of Tonkin—a false report, but one taken as truth. The intelligence fiasco was the opening shot of America’s war in Vietnam. That night, on live television, the president told the American people that the United States had begun bombing Vietnam.

He was far happier to talk to DeLoach.

“Mr. Hoover wanted me to call you, sir, immediately and tell you the FBI has found three bodies six miles southwest of Philadelphia,” DeLoach said. “A search party of agents turned up the bodies just about 15 minutes ago.”

“You pretty much have in mind who did this job?” LBJ asked.

“Mr. President, we have some very excellent suspects,” DeLoach said. “We have some excellent circumstantial evidence.”

“How’d you find the spot? Somebody give you a lead?”

“Yes, sir, someone we have to protect with a great deal of caution, of course.”

“You don’t have much doubt but what these are the bodies, do you?”

“Mr. President, we feel very definitely these are the bodies,” DeLoach said. “It took a hell of a lot of shoveling and digging to get at them.”

Through Maynard King, who had led the FBI to the bodies, the Bureau recruited another Klansman, Delmar Dennis, a handsome twenty-seven-year-old preacher with a photographic memory. Sullivan assigned Don Cesare to handle Dennis. The preacher had a good head under his hood. He remembered license plates. He remembered phone numbers. He remembered names, dates, and places. Cesare was authorized to pay Dennis whatever it took to keep him serving as the FBI’s secret agent inside the Klan.

“
I paid him close to a quarter of a million dollars,” Cesare said—a sum worth about $1.75 million today, far greater than any FBI informant ever before had received.

Delmar Dennis earned it. “He identified all the law enforcement in Neshoba County as Klansmen,” Cesare said. He named the officers who cornered, shot, killed, and buried the outside agitators; “in particular he spelled out the order which called for the murder of the three civil rights workers which originated from Sam Bowers, who was the Imperial Wizard of the Klan in Mississippi, to the Neshoba Klavern—at that time, headed by Edgar Ray Killen,” Cesare said. “Delmar was so trusted in the Klan that he served not only the Bureau, but he also served the Klan—not only as a courier of Klan information, but he was a distributor of Klan funds too.”

It took a very long time before men like Killen and Bowers were brought to justice; in Killen’s case it took forty years. Delmar Dennis wound up a broken and disillusioned man, torn by his role as an informer. But with his recruitment, the FBI was inside the Mississippi Klan.

WHITE HATE

The day after the corpses of the three civil rights workers were found, LBJ called Hoover. “I knew you’d do it,” the president said. “If you just think that you gonna get off the payroll ’cause you’re getting a little older, you crazy as hell. I don’t retire the FBI.”

“That’s very nice of you, Mr. President,” Hoover said with evident pride. “I just finished up my physical and I passed it 100 percent.”

Then he got down to the Mississippi murder cases: “Each of these men had been
shot
,” he said. “And we have the names of the people who did it.
Now, to
prove
it is gonna be a little tougher job. The sheriff was in on it. The deputy sheriff was in on it. The justice of the peace was in on it. And there were seven other men. So we have all those names and as I say we’re concentrating now on developing the evidence.”

The deep penetration of the KKK in Mississippi led Hoover to authorize a full-blown counterintelligence program against the Klan.

COINTELPRO—WHITE HATE was inaugurated on September 2, 1964, two months after the president had told Hoover to pursue the Klan just as he had chased the Communists. WHITE HATE went on for seven years, inflicting serious and lasting damage on the Klan. White-shirted agents would fight white-sheeted Klansmen like snake-killing jungle warriors, but their job called for something more subtle than kicking down doors. It required recruiting and running informants. The FBI men had to act more like spies than soldiers. Two hundred FBI agents had worked on the Mississippi killings; they had interrogated 480 Klansmen. After the Klan murdered Lemuel Penn, a black army reserve lieutenant, outside Atlanta, the FBI expanded its work to cover every major Klan group in Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia.

These were internal security cases, not criminal investigations. They depended on the infiltration, surveillance, and sabotage of the members of the Klan and their murderous leaders.

WHITE HATE intensified rapidly in the fall of 1964. It involved all the techniques developed in the FBI’s long-running attack on the Left. Once a week during the fall of 1964, FBI agents interrogated all known members of the White Knights of the KKK, blaming other Klansmen for being snitches and naming names, sowing deep suspicion among Klan members. Few knew who was an informer and who was not. The FBI dangled small fortunes before potential KKK informers, offered outright bribes to Klansmen who could serve as double agents inside state and local police forces, planted bugs and wiretaps in Klaverns, carried out black-bag jobs to steal membership lists and (on at least one occasion) dynamite caches. The FBI’s infiltration of the Klan proved better than the Klan’s infiltration of state and local law enforcement agencies.

“
There would be a Klan meeting with ten people there, and six of them would be reporting back the next day,” said the FBI’s Joseph J. Rucci, Jr. “We had a pretty effective counter-Klan going. We would also communicate with them in the mail. I remember we would send them post cards; big post cards went through the mail. I remember one in particular showed a Klansman
and someone peeking up a sheet and it would say, the catch would be, ‘I wonder who is peeking under your sheet tonight.’ ”

The gung-ho mood of the FBI agents who ran WHITE HATE was remarkable, given the fact that their colleagues were fighting Communist infiltration of the civil rights movement with equal intensity.

The Communist Party COINTELPRO was focused on the movement and its white supporters among liberals and young leftists. “
The Bureau was doing what it was supposed to do, keeping up with foreign influences” inside the civil rights movement, Billy Bob Williams said; the FBI had identified a significant number of civil rights activists as “trained in the Soviet Union or trained in Cuba, and all they were interested in was civil
unrest
.”

“I
T MAKES ME SCARED BY
G
OD TO EVEN TALK BACK TO MY WIFE!
”

LBJ’s newly declassified diaries and telephone logs show he was in constant contact with Hoover during 1964 and 1965, sometimes two and three times a day, seeking political intelligence on many matters, most of them far from the field of law enforcement.

Hoover lived for such moments.

When simmering racial tensions flared up in the streets of New York in September 1964, LBJ sent Hoover to investigate. Hoover made a quick trip to the city and reported to the president that “
the race riots … have not been initiated by communists” but that “communists have appeared immediately” to reap political hay from them. As an aside, Hoover gave the president a report on the fortunes of his Republican rival in the upcoming election, Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona, among New York Jews. “A lot of these Jews that were going to vote for Goldwater—thinking that he was a Jew, you know—have now decided that they’re going to vote for you,” Hoover told LBJ. The two men chuckled together.

With the 1964 election three weeks away, LBJ’s chief of staff, Walter Jenkins, had been caught by a Washington, D.C., vice detail having oral sex with a man in a YMCA bathroom a block from the White House. Sexual entrapment for the purpose of political blackmail was widely assumed to be a time-honored technique of Communist intelligence services. In a matter of days, Hoover was able to assure Johnson that the case had no national security implications.

“
I’m very grateful to you for your thoroughness and your patriotism and
the way you have handled it, as I am everything else you have done,” LBJ told him.

“Of course, I realize the spot that you have been in and the terrible other burdens you have had, and it’s awful bad this thing happened. But I think we handled it with compassion,” Hoover said.

“You just remember, my friend, you have done your duty as you have been doing all your life, and I’m proud of it. And I’m prouder of you now than I have ever been before,” LBJ told him. “And as long as your Commander-in-Chief feels that way about you—”

“That’s all I care about,” Hoover replied.

The homosexuality of his top aide mystified the president, though. “I guess you are going to have to teach me something about this stuff,” LBJ said to Hoover. “I swear I can’t recognize ’em. I don’t know anything about ’em.”

“It’s a thing that you just can’t tell sometimes—just like in the case of this poor fellow Jenkins,” Hoover replied. “There are some people who walk kinda funny and so forth, that you might kinda think might be a little bit off or maybe queer.”

A week later, a deeply uncomfortable Robert Kennedy sat next to President Johnson in a limousine winding through the streets of New York.

LBJ had joined RFK on the campaign trail five days before the election as Kennedy campaigned for the U.S. Senate. The president began a guarded conversation about the political bombshells that had been kept in Jenkins’s office safe. He told Kennedy that the safe held FBI reports detailing the sexual debauchery of members of the Senate and House who consorted with prostitutes. The president wondered aloud whether they should be leaked selectively, against Republicans, before election day.

“
He told me he had spent all night sitting up and reading the files of the FBI on all these people,” Kennedy recounted. “And Lyndon talks about that information and material so freely. Lyndon talks about everybody, you see, with everybody. And of course that’s dangerous.” Kennedy had seen some of those files as attorney general. He felt their disclosure could “destroy the confidence that people in the United States had in their government and really make us a laughingstock around the world.”

Nor were these the only sex files the FBI shared with the president.

On November 18, 1964, Hoover, enraged that Martin Luther King was set to receive the Nobel Peace Prize, doubly incensed by King’s criticism of the FBI’s performance in the civil rights field, held a highly unusual press conference,
calling a group of women reporters into his offices and proclaiming that King was “the most notorious liar in the country.” LBJ, conferring with Deke DeLoach two days later, expressed a degree of sympathy for Hoover’s position.

“
He
knows
Martin Luther King,” LBJ said with a low chuckle. “I mean, he knows him better than anybody in the country.”

The FBI intelligence chief, Bill Sullivan, had run his own COINTELPRO against Martin Luther King. He had a package of the King sex tapes prepared by the FBI’s lab technicians, wrote an accompanying poison-pen letter, and sent both to King’s home. His wife opened the package.

“King, look into your heart,” the letter read. The American people soon would “know you for what you are—an evil, abnormal beast.… There is only one way out for you. You better take it before your filthy, abnormal fraudulent self is bared to the nation.”

The president knew Hoover had taped King’s sexual assignations. Hoover was using the information in an attempt to disgrace King at the White House, in Congress, and in his own home. DeLoach himself had offered newspaper reporters and editors a chance to hear the sex tapes. When Nicholas Katzenbach, now the acting attorney general of the United States, got wind of these offers to the press, he called DeLoach into his office and confronted him.

“
He flatly denied any such activity and wanted to know who had been circulating such lies,” Katzenbach recalled. “I was totally convinced who in fact was lying, but I was without the means to prove it.” Convinced that the civil rights movement faced disaster, Katzenbach flew to see the president at the LBJ Ranch in Texas, where Johnson was enjoying a break after his landslide victory in the November 1964 presidential election. The president listened, asked a few questions, and moved on.