Enemies: A History of the FBI (5 page)

Without a peace treaty, the United States was still in a state of war abroad. Without a president in the White House, the nation had no one to lead the war at home.

Wilson was out of the United States from December 4, 1918, to February 24, 1919. Nine days later, he left again for France, and he stayed away for four months. On the day he set sail for the second time, Wilson named an old political ally as the new attorney general.

A. Mitchell Palmer was a handsome man of forty-seven, a three-term congressman from Pennsylvania, a pacifist Quaker and a smooth talker with flexible principles and soaring ambitions. A ranking member of the Democratic National Committee, he had served as Wilson’s political manager at the 1912 Democratic convention. During 1918, he had run the Justice Department’s Alien Property Office as a fief, giving friends and cronies custody of seized German property and patents worth millions. Now he leaped at the chance to run the Justice Department.

Palmer had one great goal in mind. He fancied himself the next president of the United States.

“W
E WILL DYNAMITE YOU!
”

Thirty-six brown paper packages of dynamite made their way through the U.S. mails in late April 1919. They constituted the biggest conspiracy to commit political murder in the history of the United States.

On April 29, the first bomb arrived at the Atlanta home of Thomas W. Hardwick, who had just left his seat as a U.S. senator from Georgia. Hardwick had helped pass the new Anarchist Exclusion Act, aimed at deporting radical foreigners. The bomb blew off the hands of his housekeeper.

Not one of the mail bombs reached its intended victim. A postal clerk in New York found sixteen of them on the postage-due shelf; the bombers hadn’t used enough stamps. The would-be assassins were evidently semiliterate; they had garbled some of the addressees’ names. But their hit list was sophisticated.

Attorney General Palmer led it. Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes was on it. So was Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis, who had overseen more than one hundred Espionage Act convictions. Five members of Congress were marked for death, including Senator Overman. The secretary of labor and the federal immigration commissioner, both responsible for deportation proceedings under the Anarchist Exclusion Act, were on the list. So were the mayor and the police commissioner of New York. The most famous targets were the nation’s foremost bankers, John D. Rockefeller and J. P. Morgan. The least famous was a plump, balding twenty-nine-year-old Bureau of Investigation agent named Rayme Finch.

Finch had spent months chasing members of a gang of Italian anarchists led by Luigi Galleani, the founder of an underground journal called
Cronaca Sovversiva
—the Subversive Chronicle. Galleani had perhaps fifty followers who took to heart his calls for violent revolution, political assassination, and the use of dynamite to sow terror among the ruling class. Literate revolutionaries drew a bright line between propaganda of the word and propaganda of the deed. Galleani believed in deeds. Finch and a handful of his fellow Bureau of Investigation agents had followed a broken trail from the Ohio River Valley to the Atlantic Ocean, ending in a February 1918 raid on
Cronaca Sovversiva
’s offices in Lynn, Massachusetts. The raid led to Galleani’s arrest and, a year later, to a judicial order for his deportation, along with eight of his closest adherents, under the new Anarchist Exclusion Act. Late in January 1919, Galleani had filed his final appeal when a flier
appeared in the mill towns of Massachusetts and Connecticut, signed by “The American Anarchists.” It promised a coming storm of “blood and fire.”

“Deportation will not stop the storm from reaching these shores,” it said. “Deport us!
We will dynamite you
!”

On the night of June 2, 1919, nine more bombs went off in seven cities. Again, each target escaped alive. In New York, it was a municipal judge, though a night watchman on the street was killed. In Cleveland, it was the mayor; in Pittsburgh, a federal judge and an immigration inspector; in Boston, a local judge and a state representative. In Philadelphia, the bombers hit a church; in Paterson, New Jersey, a businessman’s home.

In Washington, D.C., a young man blew himself up on Attorney General Palmer’s doorstep. The blast rocked a row of elegant town houses. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the thirty-seven-year-old assistant secretary of the United States Navy, was coming home from a late supper with his wife, Eleanor, when the explosion shook the spring night. The front windows of their home at 2131 R Street in Washington were blown out. Across the street, Palmer was standing in the ruins of his front parlor. The façade of his house was shattered.

The sidewalks were filled with shards of glass and broken branches and bits of flesh and bone. It took a very long time to determine that the fragments of the disintegrated body were in all likelihood the mortal remains of a twenty-three-year-old immigrant named Carlo Valdinoci, the publisher of the
Cronaca Sovversiva
.

Copies of a fresh diatribe against the government, printed on pink paper, fluttered in the wreckage. “It is war, class war, and you were the first to wage it under cover of the powerful institutions you call order, in the darkness of your laws,” it read. “There will be bloodshed; we will not dodge; there will have to be murder: we will kill, because it is necessary; there will have to be destruction; we will destroy to rid the world of your tyrannical institutions.” It was signed “The Anarchist Fighters.”

“T
HE BLAZE OF REVOLUTION
”

The Boston and Pittsburgh field offices of the Bureau of Investigation were the first to report that Moscow was behind the bombings.

Palmer presumed that the Reds were responsible. He had become the
attorney general in the same week that the Soviets had proclaimed the Comintern—the international Communist movement. Announcing that the movement aimed to overthrow the existing world order, Lenin had openly invited Americans to join them.

On the morning of June 3, sitting in the ruins of his library, Palmer received a small delegation of Senate and House members. “They called upon me in strong terms to exercise all the power that was possible,” he recounted. “ ‘Palmer, ask for what you want and you will get it.’ ”

On the front page of every newspaper in America, he vowed to hunt down the bombers. Now he needed hunters.

First he chose a new leader for the Bureau of Investigation: William J. Flynn, the former chief of the U.S. Secret Service. Palmer proudly introduced him to the press as America’s finest detective. An old-time New York cop with a high school education, Flynn had worked as a plumber before finding his calling. He cut a fine rotogravure figure with his derby, his cigar, and a big belly rounded by beer and beefsteaks. He had a number of newspaper reporters in New York and Washington wrapped around his finger, and he had cultivated a reputation as a master sleuth who never gave up on a case.

Flynn had warned the nation that hundreds of thousands of foreign agents were within the United States. The government, he believed, was well within its rights to jail any number of suspects to catch a spy or a saboteur. His first move was to raid the Reds.

On June 12, 1919, Bureau of Investigation agents and New York state police sacked
the newly opened Soviet diplomatic offices at 110 East 40th Street in Manhattan. They seized reams of files—but nothing to link the Reds to the bombings.

The next day, Attorney General Palmer went to Congress and asked for money and new laws to stop the Reds and radicals. He warned that the next attacks could come within days or weeks, perhaps on the Fourth of July. He had started to see a growing global conspiracy of Communists and common crooks, parlor pinks and sexual perverts—“
a mass formation of the criminals of the world to overthrow the decencies of private life.” He took the bombing of his house as the clearest sign that “the blaze of revolution was sweeping over every institution of law and order” in America, “licking into the altars of churches, leaping into the belfry of the school bell, crawling into the sacred corners of American homes.”

On June 17, Palmer and Flynn met at the Justice Department with a handful of aides. They emerged to announce that the Bureau of Investigation would round up the bombers in short order. Flynn was convinced the attacks were the work of the Russian Bolsheviks.

Six days later, the Bureau’s agents interviewed Luigi Galleani, who was sitting in a holding cell on Deer Island in Boston Harbor, awaiting deportation. They got nothing from him. The next morning, he was on a ship to Italy, never to set foot in America again. Galleani and his anarchist gang were never charged; the investigation went on for twenty-five years without resolution. His followers would soon strike again, carrying out the biggest terrorist attack America ever had witnessed.

“S
ECRET AGENCIES PLANTED EVERYWHERE
”

Two ships crossed in the Atlantic. One took Galleani away from America. The other brought the president home.

On July 8, Woodrow Wilson returned to the United States after five futile months fighting for his League of Nations. His vision of world peace was slipping away, evanescent as the ocean waves. He had scant support from America’s wartime allies. The U.S. Senate was increasingly scornful. Wilson soon was off on a cross-country campaign, taking his argument to the citizenry. No national radio stations existed in 1919
;
the president had to deliver his message in person. He traveled over eight thousand miles by railroad, making forty speeches in fifteen states.

The president appeared as a prophet of doom. Wheezing, coughing, seeing double, blinded by headaches, Wilson delivered an apocalyptic vision to the American people. He foresaw the nation and the world under the never-ending threat of war. He spoke of the Russian Revolution as if it were a gigantic cloud of deadly gas, floating west across the Atlantic, bringing “
the poison of disorder, the poison of revolt, the poison of chaos” to America.

“Do you honestly think, my fellow-citizens, that none of that poison has got in the veins of this free people?” the president asked. “Men look you calmly in the face in America and say they are for that sort of revolution, when that sort of revolution means government by terror.” Without peace, “that poison will steadily spread, more and more rapidly until it may be that even this beloved land of ours will be distracted and distorted by it.”

He warned that the United States would have to be ready to fight “in any part of the world where the threat of war is a menace.” The enemies of the United States would not rest: “You have got to watch them with secret agencies planted everywhere.” The nation would have to keep a great standing army and navy in a constant state of high alert.

“And you can’t do that under free debate,” the president said. “You can’t do that under public counsel. Plans must be kept secret. Knowledge must be accumulated under a system which we have condemned, because we have called it a spying system. The more polite call it a system of intelligence.”

As the president whistle-stopped westward across the Great Plains, a new American intelligence system was taking shape in Washington.

“W
HEN THE TIME CAME FOR A
R
EVOLUTION
”

On August 1, 1919, the attorney general assigned J. Edgar Hoover to crush the Communist conspiracy against the United States. He had taken an instant liking to Hoover, whose tireless work won strong commendations from his chiefs at Justice.

Hoover, as the new chief of the Radical Division, had
sixty-one Bureau of Investigation agents and thirty-five undercover informers at his command. He began to fill the Bureau’s files with information from military intelligence, the State Department, and the Secret Service. He enlisted the aid of the immigration and passport services, postmasters, police commissioners, private detectives, and political vigilantes.
Teams of lock pickers and safecrackers from the Bureau and the Office of Naval Intelligence broke into foreign embassies and consulates to steal codes and ciphers.

He used the authority granted him as a magnetic force, pulling together fragments of secret information scattered throughout the government, creating classified cases against tens of thousands of political suspects. Americans and aliens alike could land on Hoover’s enemies list by attending a political rally alongside an informant or by subscribing to any of the 222 radical foreign-language newspapers published in the United States.

Hoover’s cache of secrets formed the foundation of a primitive system of central intelligence. Within three months after taking office, he controlled files on more than sixty thousand people; the Bureau compiled at least as many dossiers on the places where these people gathered, the publications
they read, and the political groups they joined. Every one of these people had to be weighed as a potential threat to national security. Each might have a role in a secret underground, each might be a camouflaged soldier in what Hoover came to call “
the mad march of Red fascism,” dedicated to creating a Soviet America.

Lenin and Stalin were rising to power out of the political chaos in Russia. The fear that their revolution would spread was immense.

On August 12, his second week on the job, Hoover began “
a vigorous and comprehensive investigation” of American citizens and aliens “advocating change in the present form of government by force or violence.” The Justice Department wanted evidence “of every nature, whether hearsay or otherwise,” against American Communists. The hearsay evidence could be used in prosecutions under new laws that Palmer was urging upon Congress.
Palmer had scoured the statutes searching for new ways to arrest and jail outspoken Americans for sedition in peacetime. In 1919, seventy such bills were introduced in Congress. None passed.

On August 23, Hoover began a series of meetings with the immigration commissioner, Anthony Caminetti, a sixty-five-year-old California politician with a big white handlebar mustache. Hoover had worked closely with Caminetti’s enforcers during the war. Caminetti controlled records on roughly 13 million immigrants—one of every eight people in America, including 1.7 million born in Germany, 1.6 million in Italy, and 1.4 million in Russia. Hoover suspected that the shock troops of Red fascism were among them. Together they began to work out a plan to rid the nation of its enemies. The Anarchist Exclusion Act gave them the power to exile foreigners advocating revolution with only a summary hearing, without indictments or convictions. Hoover proposed winning public acclaim by making two of the most famous rabble-rousers in America their first deportees: Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman. Happily for Hoover, both of them were already in jail for agitating against the war, both were due to be released within the month, and both could be charged swiftly and shipped back to their native Russia.