Enemies: A History of the FBI (51 page)

“
Oh, he died at the right time, didn’t he?” Nixon said. “Goddamn, it’d have killed him to lose that office. It would have killed him.”

A few minutes after Hoover’s casket left the Capitol, the acting attorney general, Richard Kleindienst, telephoned his most loyal assistant at the Justice Department, L. Patrick Gray.

“
Pat, I am going to appoint you acting director of the FBI,” he said.

“You have to be joking,” Gray replied.

Gray was fifty-five years old, and he had never held an authority greater than the command of a submarine. He still had his navy crew cut. He was a bull-headed man with a jutting jaw, a straight-arrow Nixon acolyte. He had known the president for a quarter of a century, and he revered him. He had one qualification: he would do anything Nixon asked. Now the president was entrusting Hoover’s legacy to him.

In a state of awe, Gray came to the White House after Hoover’s burial on May 4. Nixon gave him some sound advice. “
Never, never figure that anyone’s your friend,” the president said. “Never, never, never … You’ve got to be a conspirator. You’ve got to be totally ruthless. You’ve got to appear to be a nice guy. But underneath you need to be steely tough. That, believe me, is the way to run the Bureau.”

Gray lacked steel. He was a malleable man. He was deeply unsure of how to take control of the FBI. He dreaded being seen as “
an interloper bent on pushing Hoover into the pages of history and remolding the FBI in my own
likeness,” he wrote in a posthumously published memoir. He knew little about the Bureau. He understood nothing of its customs and traditions. He did not comprehend the conduct of the Bureau’s top commanders. He came to learn, as he wrote, that “they lied to each other and conned each other as much as they could.”

Thus began the dark ages of the FBI. In a matter of months, the joint conduct of Pat Gray; his new number-two man at the Bureau, Mark Felt; and his intelligence chief, Ed Miller, would come close to destroying the house that Hoover built.

“
Once Hoover died,” Miller remembered mournfully, “we were absolutely deluged.”

“T
HE DELICATE QUESTION OF THE
P
RESIDENT’S POWER
”

Nixon called the Bureau on May 15, 1972, after George Wallace, the racist Alabama governor who had received nearly ten million votes running for president in 1968, was gravely wounded by a deluded gunman on the campaign trail.

Mark Felt answered the president’s call.

“Bremer, the assailant, is in good physical shape,” Felt reported. “He’s got some cuts and bruises, and—”

“Good!” said Nixon. “I hope they worked him over a little more than that.”

Felt laughed. “Anyway, the psychiatrist has examined him,” he said, adding: “We’ve got a mental problem here with this guy.”

Nixon wanted one thing understood. “Be sure we don’t go through the thing we went through—the Kennedy assassination, where we didn’t really follow up adequately. You know?” He hammered home the point. “Remember, the FBI is in charge now, and they’re responsible, and I don’t want any slip-ups. Okay?”

“There’s no question about it,” Felt answered crisply. “You’re the one who’s calling the shots here.” Nixon liked that answer. “Right,” he said. “Fine. We appreciate your help. Thank you.” The conversation was over. “Yes, Mr. President,” Felt said. “Bye.” They never spoke again.

Felt was in charge at headquarters for far longer than he had anticipated. Gray had set out across America to visit all of the FBI’s fifty-nine field offices and meet every special agent in charge. The acting director was on the
road so often that agents at headquarters started calling him “Three-Day Gray.” On Friday, June 17, he checked into the fashionable Newporter Inn south of Los Angeles—as did John Mitchell, now chief of CREEP, the nickname for the Committee to Re-elect the President, and Mitchell’s trusted aide Robert Mardian, the former internal security chief at Justice.

All hell broke loose in Washington that weekend. The District of Columbia police arrested five men inside the offices of the Democratic National Committee at the Watergate office complex. Among them was James McCord, a former FBI agent and CIA officer now working as chief of security for CREEP. The men had burglary tools, electronic devices, and a gadget that the police thought was a bomb disguised as a smoke detector. It was a sophisticated electronic-eavesdropping device. The suspects had crisp hundred-dollar bills and Watergate Hotel keys in their pockets. Their ringleaders were the gung-ho Gordon Liddy, the former FBI agent counseling CREEP; and E. Howard Hunt, a former CIA officer who, the FBI quickly determined, worked for the president of the United States.

Supervisory special agent Daniel Bledsoe was running the major crimes desk at the FBI on the morning of Sunday, June 17, when he picked up the overnight report of the break-in. He recognized Liddy’s name; he had met him at the FBI a decade before. When he heard that the burglars had been caught with eavesdropping equipment, he immediately opened a case under the federal wiretapping statutes. At about four in the afternoon, his secretary answered the phone and told him the White House was calling.

“This is Agent Supervisor Dan Bledsoe,” he said. “Who am I speaking with?”

“You are speaking with John Ehrlichman. Do you know who I am?”

“Yes. You are the chief of staff there at the White House.”

“That’s right. I have a mandate from the President of the United States,” Ehrlichman said. “The FBI is to terminate the investigation of the break-in.”

Bledsoe was silent.

“Did you hear what I said?” Ehrlichman thundered. “Are you going to terminate the investigation?”

“No,” Bledsoe replied. “Under the Constitution, the FBI is obligated to initiate an investigation to determine whether there has been a violation of the illegal interception of communications statute.”

“Do you know that you are saying ‘no’ to the President of the United States?”

“Yes,” the FBI agent replied.

“Bledsoe, your career is doomed,” Ehrlichman said, and hung up.

Bledsoe called Mark Felt at home and recounted the conversation. “He laughed because he knew these people. In his high position, he knew what was occurring in the White House. He just laughed.”

Gray learned in a telephone call from Felt on Monday morning, June 19, that the FBI’s investigation of the Watergate break-in could implicate the White House. The acting director flew back to Washington and convened his first official headquarters meeting on the break-in at 4:00
P.M.
on Wednesday, June 21.

Mark Felt was at the table, along with Robert G. Kunkel, special agent in charge of the Washington field office, and Charles W. Bates, chief of the FBI’s Criminal Investigative Division. Bates recorded this and many other Watergate meetings in a running memorandum. He wrote: “
It was agreed that this was most important, that the FBI’s reputation was at stake, and that the investigation should be completely impartial, thorough and complete.” Gray instructed his men that the president’s counsel, John Dean, would sit in on all the FBI’s interviews. Gray secretly planned to keep Dean posted about the Bureau’s every move by feeding him daily summaries of the FBI’s investigations and interrogations.

The next day, FBI agents questioned Charles W. Colson, special counsel to the president, with Dean sitting by his side. Colson mentioned that the Watergate burglar E. Howard Hunt had an office safe in the White House. Dean lied instinctively to the FBI. Safe? What safe? I don’t know about any safe. Once they had left, he opened it, and saw two sheaves of documents inside. They were evidence of the dirty tricks the Plumbers had played for the president. He started thinking about how to hide them from the FBI.

Shortly after 10:00
A.M.
on June 23, President Nixon settled on a plan to scuttle the FBI investigation. “
The FBI is not under control, because Gray doesn’t exactly know how to control them,” Haldeman told the president. They agreed that the newly appointed deputy director of Central Intelligence, Lieutenant General Vernon Walters, a Nixon crony of long standing, would tell Gray to back off. He would raise the flag of national security and secrecy. Gray and Felt would do as they were told, Haldeman predicted confidently. “Felt wants to cooperate because he’s ambitious,” he said. “And that will fit rather well because the FBI agents who are working the case, at this point, feel that’s what it is. This is CIA.”

Nixon liked the idea. “Good deal!” he said. “Play it tough. That’s the way they play it and that’s the way we are going to play it.”

Walters was in Gray’s office by 2:30
P.M.
The investigation, he told Gray, could trespass into the CIA’s domain. Gray called Charles Bates the moment that Walters left his office. He made the case for standing down. Bates objected. “
I again told him I felt the FBI had no choice but to continue our full investigation and obtain all the details.”

Gray agonized until he answered an urgent summons from the White House at 6:30
P.M.
on June 28. Inside John Ehrlichman’s office, John Dean handed Gray two white manila envelopes—the documents he had taken from Hunt’s safe.

“
These should never see the light of day,” he told Gray.

“Then why give them to me?”

“Because they are such political dynamite their existence can’t even be acknowledged,” Dean said. “I need to be able to say that I gave all Hunt’s files to the FBI. That’s what I’m doing.”

Gray had a red wastebasket in his office, holding a burn bag for destroying secret documents. But he did not know what a burn bag was. Six months later, he set fire to the files in a trash bin in his backyard.

“
There is little doubt,” an internal FBI report later concluded, “that Mr. Gray made deplorable decisions of historic proportions.”

“N
O HOLDS BARRED
”

The White House and the FBI had another crisis on their hands that summer. Nixon issued orders to escalate the war on terrorists in America. But the Bureau had lost its license to use its most powerful weapon in that battle.

The Supreme Court had banned the warrantless wiretapping of Americans in a unanimous decision on June 19, 1972—the Monday after the Watergate break-in.

A wild-eyed anarchist on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list was at the center of the case. Pun Plamondon—minister of defense for the White Panthers, whose party platform rested largely on sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll—stood accused of planting a bomb at the CIA’s recruiting station near the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. His lawyers correctly suspected Plamondon had been wiretapped. The federal trial judge had granted a routine defense motion for the disclosure of the government’s evidence. Nixon’s Justice Department refused to comply. The president’s lawyers
claimed that the commander in chief had an inherent and unassailable right to wiretap at will.

The government lost. A federal appeals court ruled that even the president had to obey the Fourth Amendment—the passage in the Bill of Rights protecting Americans from warrantless searches and seizures.

The Supreme Court had never upheld warrantless wiretapping within the United States. Most of the FBI’s secret surveillance had been carried out in defiance of the Court—at the command of presidents and attorneys general, but sometimes on orders from Hoover and his subordinates—since 1939. The technology of electronic eavesdropping had expanded exponentially since then. Thousands of Americans were targets of government spying under Nixon.

Robert Mardian, as Nixon’s internal security chief, represented the government in oral arguments before the Supreme Court. Justice Byron White had asked him bluntly:
if “the President decides it’s necessary to bug John Doe’s phone,” was there “nothing under the sun John Doe can do about it?”

Mardian had said: “The President of the United States may authorize electronic surveillance; and, in those cases, it is legal.”

Justice Lewis Powell, newly appointed by President Nixon, wrote the unanimous decision rejecting that argument. “The issue before us is an important one for the people of our country and their Government,” he wrote. “It involves the delicate question of the President’s power, acting through the Attorney General, to authorize electronic surveillance in internal security matters without prior judicial approval. Successive Presidents for more than one-quarter of a century have authorized such surveillance in varying degrees, without guidance from the Congress or a definitive decision of this Court.”

That authority was now empty.

“Although some added burden will be imposed upon the Attorney General, this inconvenience is justified in a free society to protect constitutional values,” the Court ruled. “By no means of least importance will be the reassurance of the public generally that indiscriminate wiretapping and bugging of law-abiding citizens cannot occur.”

The Court said the government was free to wiretap “foreign powers or their agents”—for instance, Soviet spies—but not American citizens. Not without a warrant.

The FBI had at least six warrantless taps running on the Weather Underground
and the Black Panthers on the morning of the Supreme Court’s ruling. They had to come out at once.

The Bureau responded by reviving black-bag jobs.

Gray called in top agents from around the country in mid-September 1972. President Nixon had ordered the FBI—along with the Pentagon, the State Department, the CIA, and the National Security Agency—to come up with a national counterterrorism plan.

The world had been transfixed ten days before by the Black September killings at the 1972 Olympic Games in Munich. Eleven Israeli athletes (and eight Palestinian attackers) had died, most of them after a bungled rescue by the West German police. President Nixon had conferred on the counterterrorism problem with his national security adviser, Henry Kissinger, and his United Nations ambassador, George H. W. Bush. His personal secretary, Rose Mary Woods, told the president about the prophecies of a popular psychic named Jeane Dixon; the syndicated clairvoyant predicted a Palestinian attack against a Jewish target, such as Yitzhak Rabin, then Israel’s ambassador to the United States.