Enemies: A History of the FBI (48 page)

FBI agents across the country began to mount new operations aimed against peaceful marchers and violent militants alike. A deep-cover squad tried to infiltrate the far left by posing as politically radicalized Vietnam veterans well supplied with guns and drugs. Four or five of them liked their new lives so much that they never came back. “
They were a bunch of renegades,” said the FBI’s Bernardo Perez, who drew the difficult assignment of reining them in years later.

Hoover did not know about some of the most politically charged operations. The director turned seventy-five on January 1, 1970. Sullivan and many of his top agents saw the director’s powers of perception dimming, his authority slipping, his awareness of what went on from day to day at the FBI starting to fail.

“
Hoover had no idea that we had agents stand there looking like they were kids in jeans and that kind of stuff at these demonstrations,” said Courtland Jones, an FBI agent who had day-to-day responsibility for the Kissinger wiretaps. “Hoover’s reaction was: ‘Who authorized this?’ ”

“He was really out of touch,” Jones said. “He should have bowed out, years before his death. The one thing that he never did and would never tolerate was to groom anyone to take his place.”

Only one man was willing to run the risk of gunning for Hoover’s job. Only one man came close to succeeding. That was Bill Sullivan, the man who knew the deepest secrets of the FBI.

34

“PULL DOWN THE TEMPLE”

A
FTER HALF A CENTURY
as America’s counterrevolutionary in chief, Hoover no longer commanded unquestioned authority.

He had made enemies at the White House and inside the FBI, and they had started summoning the courage to denounce him. The president and the attorney general were talking about replacing him. The control of secret information had always been the primary source of Hoover’s power. He had lost it.

On Monday, June 1, 1970, he made a fateful choice. He would later call it “
the greatest mistake I ever made.” He decided that Bill Sullivan would become his top commander, in charge of all the Bureau’s criminal investigations as well as its intelligence programs. Sullivan ran the daily work of the FBI—a heady dose of power for a man known to many of his colleagues as Crazy Billy.

Hoover had thought he was loyal. He had been once. But Sullivan, COINTELPRO’s creator and overlord, a master of political warfare, had been chafing under Hoover’s increasingly heavy and unsteady hand, confiding in his counterparts at the CIA and his contacts at the White House that the boss had lost his nerve. He said the FBI was losing the battle against the radical left. It was time, Sullivan advised the CIA’s Richard Helms, to start “
moving ahead of the winds of change instead of being blown by them.”

Now he had a chance to make his case directly to the president of the United States.

Nixon knew Sullivan had been handling the Kissinger wiretaps, listening in on some of the most prominent reporters and columnists in Washington as well as their suspected sources in high office. A year before, after the first
taps were installed, Nixon had sent a fiercely ambitious twenty-nine-year-old White House lawyer named Tom Charles Huston over to the FBI to meet with Sullivan. Huston had been an army intelligence officer and a leader of the conservative Young Americans for Freedom; Nixon fondly called him an arrogant son of a bitch. He made Huston the point man for all White House intelligence liaisons.

Sullivan realized that the presidential aide could open the door to the Oval Office. As they conferred in secret throughout 1969 and 1970, he carefully cultivated Huston, praising his intellect and vision. Huston returned the high regard. “
I do not think there was anyone in the government who I respected more,” Huston said.

In Nixon’s name, Huston urged Sullivan to hunt down the foreign financiers of American political ferment, to find proof that the international Communist conspiracy supported the radical left and the black militants. The demand went unsatisfied, to Nixon’s displeasure. “
President Nixon was insatiable in his desire for intelligence,” Deke DeLoach said. “He would constantly ask the FBI for more and more intelligence to prove that the riots in our country were being caused by insurgent groups in foreign countries. And they weren’t.” Sullivan in turn put intense pressure on his underlings—“
gave us all hell because we couldn’t prove that the Soviets were behind racial and student unrest,” said Jim Nolan, then a young FBI agent rising through the intelligence ranks. “We knew they were not. Nothing would have scared the Soviets more than these students.”

Sullivan blamed the failure to find the proof on Hoover. He told Huston that Hoover had cut off all formal liaisons with the CIA and the military in a fit of pique; that the FBI lacked the counterintelligence skills to obtain the secrets that the White House desired; that the Bureau needed more freedom to spy on Americans, especially on students under the age of twenty-one; that the restraints on black-bag jobs, bugging, wiretapping, and surveillance were far too constricting. Huston reported all of this to Nixon. The president readily believed it. He was railing to his advisers that the top secret reports he received on his enemies, foreign and domestic, were meaningless drivel.

By the spring of 1970, Sullivan had set upon a plan to satisfy the president’s thirst for secret intelligence—and to promote himself as Hoover’s successor. As Sullivan’s star rose at the White House, Hoover’s began to fall.

“M
AGNIFIED AND LIMITLESS
”

On Friday, June 5, 1970, Nixon called Hoover and Helms to the White House. They sat alongside Admiral Noel Gayler, director of the National Security Agency, and Lieutenant General Donald Bennett, chief of the Defense Intelligence Agency.

“
The President chewed our butts,” General Bennett remembered.

Nixon was on the warpath abroad and at home. Campuses across the country had exploded after Nixon invaded Cambodia and escalated the war in Vietnam. National Guardsmen had shot and killed four students at Kent State University in Ohio. More than a hundred bombings, arson attacks, and shootings had followed in May. The Weathermen and the Panthers, whose leaders had been to Cuba and Algeria for indoctrination, had shown that they could hit draft boards, police stations, and banks at will.

The president said that “
revolutionary terrorism” was now the gravest threat to the United States. Thousands of Americans under the age of thirty were “determined to destroy our society”; their home-grown ideology was “as dangerous as anything they could import” from Cuba, China, or Russia. “Good intelligence,” he said, was “the best way to stop terrorism.”

Nixon demanded “a plan which will enable us to curtail the illegal activities of those who are determined to destroy our society.” Sullivan had already drafted it. He had been working on it for two years. It would all but abolish the restraints on intelligence collection. The White House gave him the go-ahead to achieve that goal.

Sullivan convened five meetings of America’s spy chiefs and their deputies. “
Individually, those of us in the intelligence community are relatively small and limited,” he told the first meeting, at FBI headquarters, on June 8. “Unified, our own combined potential is magnified and limitless. It is through unity of action that we can tremendously increase our intelligence-gathering potential, and, I am certain, obtain the answers the President wants.” Hopes ran high among the old guard. “
I saw these meetings as a perfect opportunity to get back the methods we needed,” said the FBI’s Bill Cregar, who ran foreign counterintelligence programs against the Soviets. “And so did Sullivan.” The obstacle, both men knew, would be Hoover himself. He did not want to coordinate the FBI’s work with the CIA or any other intelligence service. Quite the opposite: he had cut off communication with his counterparts so thoroughly that the link between
Huston and Sullivan was the only formal liaison left between the Bureau and the rest of the American government.

The program that emerged became known as the Huston Plan. But it was Sullivan’s work from top to bottom. And it had the secret imprimatur of the president of the United States.

The plan called for America’s intelligence services to work as one. The walls between them would come down. The restrictions on intelligence gathering in the United States would be lifted. The FBI’s agents and their counterparts would be free to monitor the international communications of American citizens, intensify the electronic surveillance of American dissidents, read their mail, burglarize their homes and offices, step up undercover spying among freshmen and sophomores on campus—in short, to keep on doing what the Bureau had been doing for decades, but to do more of it, do it better, and do it in concert with the CIA and the Pentagon.

The plan conformed to the president’s philosophy on national security: Do anything it takes. He knew that opening mail was a federal crime and that black-bag jobs were burglary. But they were the best means of gathering intelligence. And Nixon believed that if a president did it, it was not illegal.

On July 14, after Huston brought the plan to the White House, the president said he approved it. But Hoover dissented. He “
went through the ceiling,” Sullivan remembered, as soon as he realized that the plan would have to be carried out on his authority—not Nixon’s. The president had not signed it; his approval was verbal, not written. “That leaves me alone as the man who made the decision,” he said. “I’m not going to accept the responsibility myself anymore, even though I’ve done it for many years.… It is becoming more and more dangerous and we are apt to get caught.”

Hoover demanded a meeting with Nixon. And he stared the president down.

Nixon believed that “
in view of the crisis of terrorism,” the plan was both “justified and responsible.” But he realized that “it would matter little what I had decided or approved” if Hoover balked. “Even if I issued a direct order to him, while he would undoubtedly carry it out, he would soon see to it that I had cause to reverse myself. There was even the remote possibility that he would resign in protest.”

Nixon withdrew the plan at Hoover’s behest. His inner circle began to denounce the director as an unreliable ally in the war on revolutionary terrorism.
“
Hoover has to be told who is President,” Huston told Haldeman on August 5. “He has become totally unreasonable and his conduct is detrimental to our domestic intelligence operations.… If he gets his way it is going to look like he is more powerful than the President.”

The new White House counsel, a thirty-one-year-old lawyer named John W. Dean, took charge of salvaging the plan. He worked in liaison with Sullivan. Despite Hoover’s dissent, electronic surveillances and surreptitious entries increased. The FBI started recruiting informants as young as eighteen. Undercover operations against the Left expanded. (The small but growing contingent of FBI agents who looked, dressed, and acted like their targets had a camaraderie and an esprit de corps all its own; the agents called themselves “Beards, Blacks, and Broads.”)

These operations sometimes took place on Sullivan’s say-so, sometimes at the command of Attorney General Mitchell, and sometimes on orders from the president himself.

The control of the FBI’s most powerful weapons began to slip from Hoover’s grasp into the hands of Nixon’s political henchmen. They believed that the ideal of national security overrode the rule of law. Their mission, above all, was the re-election of the president.

“B
RING ABOUT A CONFRONTATION
”

The president began to think about forcing Hoover from power. “
Mitchell and I had a two-hour session with the P,” Haldeman wrote in his diary on February 4, 1971. “We discussed the whole question of J. Edgar Hoover and whether he should be continued.”

Nixon chose a devious strategy. He told Mitchell to revive the Internal Security Division at the Justice Department under Assistant Attorney General Robert Mardian—a man Hoover personally despised, though he was an ardent anti-Communist. Nixon ordered Mardian and Sullivan to step up intelligence operations against the Left, to work “like J. Edgar used to.” He was starting to speak of Hoover in the past tense. He knew that his orders could “bring about a confrontation,” Haldeman wrote. “The P made it clear that Hoover has got to be replaced before the end of Nixon’s first term. We need to make this point to Hoover in such a way as to get him to resign.”

The attorney general began to feel out candidates to succeed Hoover. The strongest one was Sullivan—but Mitchell found him nakedly ambitious,
a name-dropping wheeler-dealer. At least three other Hoover aides were jockeying for the job. The corridor chatter in the halls of Justice was vicious. “
I was told five times that Hoover would be fired,” Mardian said.

While a growing cohort of his enemies inside the Nixon administration plotted to supplant him, Hoover’s foes on the left mounted a devastating and demoralizing attack on the secrecy and power of the Bureau itself. They pulled a black-bag job on the FBI. On the night of March 8, 1971, a band of thieves broke into the Bureau’s two-man office in Media, Pennsylvania, a placid suburb outside Philadelphia, jimmying the glass-paneled door in an office across the street from the county courthouse. The job was easy; the FBI had no security system to seal the secrets inside of room 204. They stole at least eight hundred documents out of the files. The group, which called itself the Citizens’ Commission to Investigate the FBI, never explained why the Media office was chosen as a target. Barry Green, whose family managed the office building, arrived at dawn to find FBI agents and police “
running all over the place, trying to figure out how this could have happened and who could have done it,” he remembered. “Who would invade an FBI office? It was like invading the lion’s den.”