Enemies: A History of the FBI (44 page)

Hoover had helped install a government led by an FBI informant and run by three dozen FBI-approved ministers, military chiefs, and judges. Joaquín Balaguer, the FBI’s man in Santo Domingo, was one of the last of the old-time Latin American strongmen. He ruled with a heavy hand for twenty-two years.

32

CLEARLY ILLEGAL

B
Y THE SPRING OF
1966, LBJ had sent almost a quarter of a million American soldiers to Vietnam. Thousands of American citizens protested. Hoover watched the marches with growing alarm. He saw long shadows hovering behind the antiwar movement, reaching from Hanoi to Harvard, Beijing to Berkeley.

“
The Chinese and North Vietnamese believe that by intensifying the agitation in this country, particularly on the college campus levels, it would so confuse and divide the Americans that our troops in Vietnam would have to be withdrawn in order to preserve order here,” Hoover told LBJ days after he began pouring soldiers into combat. It was an agony for the president to hear his prophecy that Vietnam would become a political war on the home front.

The peace movement affected nearly every outpost of the FBI. “
We were engaged almost every weekend with various antiwar demonstrations at the Alamo and at President Johnson’s ranch in Johnson City,” said FBI agent Cyril P. Gamber, on his first tour at the Bureau’s San Antonio, Texas, office. “Most holidays and weekends were taken up with the New Left demonstrating on one side of the road and the Klan and the Nazi Party on the other side of the road.” Like the road to the LBJ Ranch, America was cleft in two. The FBI had its right flank covered, but it knew less and less about what was happening on the left.

Hoover and his inner circle saw the protests through the old prism of the international Communist conspiracy. “
The demonstrations have been marked by a growing militancy,” Hoover wrote in a letter to all FBI special agents. “With summer approaching, the potentialities for violent outbreaks will increase immeasurably, whether demonstrations are directed at opposition toward United States foreign policy in Vietnam or protests involving
racial issues. We must not only intensify and expand our coverage … but also insure that advance signs of such outbreaks are detected.”

Hoover told his men: “
We are an intelligence agency and as such are expected to know what is going to or is likely to happen
.”

The FBI’s agents had a hard time gaining that insight as the battles of the sixties intensified. They were ill-suited to infiltrate the New Left. And Hoover was becoming cautious about the Bureau’s time-honored techniques of black-bag jobs, break-ins, bugging, wiretapping, and mail openings. He had not lost his will for political warfare. Nor had the president lost his appetite for political intelligence. But the Supreme Court and members of Congress were becoming increasingly suspicious of the power and ubiquity of secret government surveillance. And neither LBJ nor Hoover wanted to be caught spying on Americans.

“I
HAD NO ILLUSIONS
”

The patrician but politically astute Nicholas deB. Katzenbach, Bobby Kennedy’s protégé and his successor as attorney general, battled Hoover over taps and bugs. He came to understand that there were no controls over them. The Justice Department had not kept records of their installations. Once a wiretap was approved, Hoover considered it approved forever. Hoover had asserted that the FBI was free to install bugs at will, without informing a higher authority. He told Katzenbach that this power had been granted him in perpetuity by Franklin Delano Roosevelt a quarter of a century ago.

“
I was, frankly, astounded to hear this,” Katzenbach recounted. “I had no illusions that I was going to bring the FBI under my control. But I did think it was possible to institute a more orderly procedure.”

He began to demand facts and figures from the FBI; the Bureau slowly disclosed them.
Hoover had installed 738 bugs on his own authority since 1960; the Justice Department’s attorneys had been informed about only 158 of them, roughly one in five. Installing bugs in homes, offices, apartments, and hotel rooms generally required breaking and entering, which was illegal. The Bureau had conducted uncounted break-ins and black-bag jobs on Hoover’s say-so.

The attorney general proposed that henceforth taps and bugs would have to have his written approval. He was even more astonished when
Hoover appeared to agree. LBJ had made it clear to both men that he wanted wiretaps kept to a minimum—except when it came to his opponents on the left. Katzenbach readily approved surveillances on the antiwar activists of the Students for a Democratic Society.

SDS had led the first big antiwar marches on Washington. The FBI had been watching the group for three years, from the moment it was conceived. The first SDS manifesto read: “Communism as a system rests on the suppression of organized opposition. The Communist movement has failed in every sense.” But Hoover still saw the student movement through a Soviet prism. A purely American protest against authority was inconceivable to him. After that first march, Hoover had reported to the White House that “
Students for a Democratic Society, which is largely infiltrated by communists,” had made plans for antiwar protests in eighty-five more cities. He promised LBJ a full report on the Communist influence over the anti–Vietnam War demonstrations.

Hoover ordered his intelligence and internal security chiefs “to penetrate the Students for a Democratic Society so that we will have proper informant coverage similar to what we have in the Ku Klux Klan and the Communist Party itself.… Give this matter immediate attention and top priority as the President is quite concerned about the situation and wants prompt and quick action.” But the Bureau had very few sources in the New Left. No underground squads infiltrated coffeehouses and colleges—not yet. Electronic surveillance was of the essence if Hoover wanted intelligence.

“
Wire taps and microphones,” Hoover reminded the attorney general, had “made it possible for the FBI to produce highly significant intelligence information to assist our makers of international policy, as well as to hold in check subversive elements within the country.” Yet Katzenbach declined to authorize new hidden-microphone bugs on the student left. He was painfully aware of the pervasive surveillance that had been placed on Martin Luther King; he feared the political consequences of its exposure.

Hoover said he was “extremely concerned” at the decision. But he reported that he had “discontinued completely the use of microphones” and that he had “severely restricted” new wiretaps against the antiwar and civil rights movements.

Bewildered FBI agents wondered whether the old man was losing his nerve. What was Hoover doing? Why was he doing it? Very few understood
the answer. Hoover had reason to fear that the FBI’s lawbreaking would be exposed.

Senator William Fulbright, Democrat of Arkansas and chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, was threatening to create a new committee to oversee the FBI’s intelligence work; President Johnson warned Hoover to keep a very close eye on Fulbright, whom he suspected was holding secret meetings with Soviet diplomats. A far less prominent Democratic senator, Edward Long of Missouri, had started a scattershot series of hearings on government wiretapping. “
He cannot be trusted,” an FBI intelligence supervisor warned.

Hoover strongly suspected that Senator Robert F. Kennedy was leaking information about the FBI’s bugging practices. He confronted Katzenbach. The attorney general denied it. “
Just how gullible can he be!” Hoover wrote.

“H
OOVER PUT US OUT OF BUSINESS
”

Hoover knew a politically explosive case involving the FBI’s illegal bugging of a shady Washington lobbyist was working its way up to the Supreme Court.

The defendant was Fred Black, a powerful influence peddler appealing a tax-evasion conviction. The FBI had bugged Black’s suite at the Sheraton-Carlton Hotel in Washington in 1963, and it had recorded his conversations with his lawyer. The secret recordings were illegal on their face, as was the breaking and entering required to install the bugs. Hoover fought bitterly with the Justice Department over the legal necessity of disclosing these facts to the Supreme Court as it considered the case of
Black v. United States
.

Hoover used Justice Abe Fortas, newly appointed to the Court by LBJ, as a confidential informant in the case. Deke DeLoach, the FBI’s liaison to the White House, served as the go-between. Over breakfast at his home, Justice Fortas laid out a political strategy to blame the bug on Bobby Kennedy. “
He was always willing to help the FBI,” DeLoach wrote, while noting that the justice’s conduct in discussing a case before the Court was “blatantly unethical.”

Despite Hoover’s best efforts, the solicitor general of the United States,
Thurgood Marshall, revealed the FBI’s conduct to the Court. (Marshall had been a target of FBI surveillance for many years, as the leading lawyer for the NAACP.) The Court overturned the conviction. In months to come, the justices would rule that the FBI’s electronic surveillance of a public telephone booth was unconstitutional, and it would compare government eavesdropping to the “general warrants” used by the British colonialists to suppress the American Revolution.

The public disclosures of the FBI’s procedures were front-page news, as Hoover had feared. Hoover had always controlled the force of secret information. Now that secrecy was starting to erode, and with it went a measure of his power.

On July 19, 1966—six days after the
Black
bug was revealed in court—Hoover banned the FBI from using black-bag jobs and break-ins. “
No more such techniques must be used,” Hoover instructed his lieutenants.

The practice of breaking and entering was “
clearly illegal,” the FBI’s intelligence chief, William Sullivan, had reminded the director in a formal memo. “Despite this, ‘black bag’ jobs have been used because they
represent an invaluable technique
in combating subversive activities of a clandestine nature aimed at undermining and destroying our nation.”

Hoover’s old guard believed the FBI would be handcuffed. The paladins of the FBI’s intelligence and internal security divisions were dumbstruck by the director’s order.

Edward S. Miller, rising through the intelligence ranks to the number-three post at headquarters, said: “
In our time in the Bureau—and that is Hoover’s time, and subsequent to that—the only thing we had was our reliance on investigative techniques that had made us very successful against the Communist Party and Soviet Communism.” The Bureau would rise or fall by “conducting business the only way we felt that we were authorized to do,” said Miller, who faced a federal indictment a decade later for his use of black-bag jobs.

Along with breaking and entering, Hoover also suspended the Bureau’s long-standing practice of opening first-class mail.

The FBI’s mail-opening program dated back to World War I. It violated the Fourth Amendment’s ban on unwarranted searches and seizures. It had gone on without an interruption since 1940, when the British had taught the Bureau the ancient art of chamfering, cutting envelopes with scalpels and resealing them undetected.

The search for secret communications among spies and subversives in
the satchels of the U.S. mails had expanded mightily in the seven years since 1959. The FBI ran covert mail-opening operations out of post offices in eight American cities—New York, Washington, Boston, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Detroit, Seattle, and Miami—inspecting hundreds of thousands of letters and parcels, looking for evidence of espionage. Since the start of World War II, the mail-opening program had led to the identification of four Communist spies and two Americans who had offered to sell military secrets to the Soviets. Opening mail was so patently illegal that Hoover had never thought to ask any attorney general or any president for that power. Was it worth the risk to the FBI? Hoover thought not.

Hoover’s edicts created a furor inside the American intelligence community. The National Security Agency and the CIA had worked with the FBI since 1952 on a worldwide effort to steal the communications codes of foreign nations, friends and foes alike. A crucial element in that program was a gang of FBI and CIA safecrackers and burglars who could steal codebooks from foreign embassies and consulates. The ban on bag jobs threatened to bring breakthroughs in code cracking to a standstill.

The military and civilian chiefs of the National Security Agency, General Marshall Carter and Louis Tordella, went to see Hoover. They had been given fifteen minutes to make their case for reinstating the FBI’s old methods. The one-sided conversation ran for two and a half hours as Hoover rambled on about his greatest cases of the 1930s and 1940s. Carter and Tordella finally got a word in, sometime during the second hour, to plead for covert intelligence collection. Hoover turned them down.

“
Someone got to the old man,” Bill Sullivan told Tordella. But no evidence exists that anyone twisted Hoover’s arm. He knew that if his methods came to light, the Bureau would be tarnished forever. The danger of exposure was growing by the day. The political tide of civil liberties was rising. Hoover stood increasingly isolated against old-line liberals in Congress and New Left lawyers in the courts. A concerted attack on the FBI’s extralegal intelligence techniques could destroy Hoover’s image as the avatar of law and order in America.