Enemies: A History of the FBI (24 page)

Under Hoover’s leadership, the FBI’s agents would spy on the Soviets abroad and at home; their work would be sifted by intelligence analysts from the State Department. Hoover would synchronize his secret operations with the secretaries of state and war. He wanted the president to know that dividing American intelligence into foreign and domestic realms was an invitation to disaster. He was already sending Truman intelligence bulletins, including hundred-page reports on the subversive activities emanating from a dozen different foreign embassies in the United States.

On October 2, 1945, Hoover sent an FBI special agent to the White House to make sure President Truman had read his proposal. He cannily selected Morton Chiles, the son of an old friend of the president’s; Truman had known Chiles since he was a baby. “
I visited President Truman for approximately 35 minutes,” Chiles reported in writing to Hoover that day. “We discussed thoroughly the Bureau’s participation in World Wide Intelligence in the Western Hemisphere and the advisability of expanding the Bureau’s jurisdiction to worldwide coverage.”

Chiles immediately realized that the president appeared unaware of Hoover’s proposition. If he had seen it, he had not read it. “I had the opportunity to fully explain to him the Bureau’s plan, the Bureau’s method of operation and all the reasons why the Bureau should expand to coverage of the world,” Chiles reported. “He expressed concern regarding the possibility that a World Wide Intelligence organization would gain the reputation of a ‘Gestapo.’ ”

This was not the first time Hoover had heard his men compared to Nazis. It was the first time he had heard it from a president.

Truman turned to the most experienced hands at the State and War departments to find a new bearing for American intelligence and national security. On November 20, a dozen of them gathered in the gilded chambers of the secretary of state. Led by Undersecretary Dean Acheson, the talks settled very little save for the fact that “
the President had stated flatly that the FBI was not to operate outside the United States.”

Sitting silently at the meeting was a man who was highly interested in the future of American intelligence: Alger Hiss of the State Department’s Office of Special Political Affairs. A rising star in American diplomacy, Hiss had been at Yalta while Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin tried to chart the way of the world after the war. He had been a Communist agent inside the government of the United States for ten years.

That same day, the chiefs of foreign espionage in Moscow received an electrifying flash sent by their leading spy in London. “
The Americans are currently investigating another Soviet intel. organization in the U.S.,” reported Kim Philby, a senior British intelligence officer and a Soviet mole. Philby had picked up the secret information in a cable from William Stephenson, the British intelligence commander in Washington. Stephenson’s unimpeachable source was the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Hoover laid out the case a week later, delivering a startling seventy-one-page top secret report to the president, the attorney general, and the secretary of state. His dossier, “Soviet Espionage in the United States,” was dated November 27, 1945. It named many names. One was Harry Dexter White, who was hard at work drawing up blueprints for the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank on behalf of the United States Treasury. Another was Alger Hiss, who was helping to build the framework for the United Nations. Hoover was telling the president that two of the leading
intellectual architects of America’s plans for the postwar world were Communist spies.

The president disregarded Hoover. He rarely read the FBI’s files and memoranda on national security. “
President Truman was not a man who appreciated or understood intelligence,” said Cartha DeLoach, Hoover’s trusted aide. “He thought that Mr. Hoover was his enemy. He treated him that way.”

The director and the president were now implacable foes. Their political struggle became a war over the national security of the United States. Hoover had served seven chief executives since World War I. He had never faced a president as an enemy. He had received extraordinary powers in secret from Franklin Roosevelt to conduct political warfare in America. He intended to use them whether Truman knew it or not.

Hoover was convinced that the president was a weak link in the chain of command. He believed that he himself would have to lead generals and politicians and the American people in the war on communism. He saw the FBI as America’s strongest force in a life-and-death fight on the home front.

Hoover had a big map in his mind. His intelligence did not stop at the American border. The threats he had faced had come from Berlin to New York, Moscow to New Mexico, and Tokyo to Hawaii. He believed that the Soviets were planning a sneak attack on the United States, and that American Communists would serve as the shock troops. He had to radiate intelligence and power from Washington around the globe to protect the United States. The world was his battlefield.

17

SHOWDOWN

H
OOVER OPENED A
secret intelligence file at the end of 1945. He took unique copies of the reports his lieutenants sent him, and he wrote his thoughts in the margins, bearing down with a fountain pen, bringing forth scrawls of royal blue ink. The imprimatur of his initial—
H
.—made his words into commands.

Reading his handwritten notes is like hearing him think out loud. His rage was personal and political, bitter and implacable, barking and biting. He had high-soaring ideas, and he had hissing fits. His sense of humor was sarcastic, sometimes petulant. His knowledge was enormous, though his mind was narrow.

These files went on for twenty-seven years. They are, in effect, Hoover’s diary; they constitute his secret history of the Cold War. They reveal above all his abiding fear that America could lose the war on communism.

In 1946 and 1947 Hoover fought his battles on three fronts. He struggled for control of American intelligence. He fought to convince American leaders that the Cold War could last for the rest of their lives. And he started a campaign of political warfare against the president.

Hoover was enraged when he learned of Truman’s plans to create a new director of Central Intelligence who would claim dominion over the FBI’s operations against spies and traitors. “
Completely unworkable,” he wrote to Attorney General Tom Clark on January 15, 1946. It would “wreck any existing agencies, including the Federal Bureau of Investigation.” The attorney general objected to his blunt language. Hoover fired back: “I most certainly don’t share views of A.G.… Appeasement can eventually bring about even more difficulties. H.”

To Hoover’s great consternation, on January 24, 1946, the president selected a rear admiral in the navy reserve, Sidney Souers, a Democratic Party
stalwart from Missouri, as
the first director of Central Intelligence. In an impromptu ceremony in the Oval Office, Truman gave Souers a black cloak, a black hat, and a little wooden dagger, knighting him as the chief of the “Cloak and Dagger Group of Snoopers.” The next day, Hoover summoned Souers to his office at FBI headquarters. He soon had the admiral eating out of his hand. “
He wanted it understood very clearly that he intended to depend upon the FBI to a large extent for advice and counsel,” Hoover wrote to his top assistants. He added the admiral to his list of useful underlings.

By himself, Hoover could not kill the blueprint for what became the Central Intelligence Agency. But he would do everything he could to protect his power. He went to the Pentagon to consult with General Dwight D. Eisenhower, the most powerful man in the American military. Hoover argued that Truman was going to ruin American espionage with the new Central Intelligence system. “
General Eisenhower inquired how this would affect the Federal Bureau of Investigation,” Hoover recorded. The director replied that “it appeared that the FBI would withdraw from foreign operations.” Eisenhower “expressed amazement and real concern.” Hoover added the general to his list of powerful allies.

“A
DIRECT PENETRATION
”

Having failed to stop the investiture of the director of Central Intelligence, Hoover penetrated and sabotaged the fledgling spy agency.

Hoover had received a call for help from Colonel Bill Quinn, an army man who was trying to create a new Central Intelligence corps for covert operations and espionage. The colonel faced fierce opposition from the uniformed military, who told him his outfit was riddled with Communists. The FBI had files filled with rumors that Central Intelligence was hiring Reds.

Hat in hand, Quinn went to Hoover. This is how the colonel recalled it:

“
What do you want me to do?” Hoover asked.

“Mr. Hoover,” Quinn said, “the simple answer to your question is to find out if I have any commies in my organization.”

“Well, we can do that,” Hoover said.

“While you’re doing it subversively, would you please check them criminally?”

“All right.”

“Before we decide on how to do it, for posterity, and for ultimate cooperation, I would like to ask that you send me a representative to be your liaison with my organization.”

At this, Hoover almost fell out of his seat, the colonel recalled. “I know what was going on in his mind,” Quinn recounted. “He was probably thinking, ‘My God, this guy is asking for a direct penetration in his agency.’ ”

Quinn had just invited Hoover to spy on his spies. Liaison was penetration. You shook hands with the right hand and picked pockets with the left.

The Bureau investigated the political loyalties of dozens of Central Intelligence officers, many of whom were hired specifically for their Russian and Eastern European backgrounds, making them suspect in Hoover’s eyes. The first three directors of Central Intelligence asked Hoover to provide them with seasoned FBI officers, field training, formal reports, the names and identities of trusted informants and recruited foreign agents. Hoover took pleasure in rejecting their pleas.

His resentment over his exclusion from worldwide intelligence smoldered. He aimed to regain his preeminence.

“A
TIME OF SOME HYSTERIA
”

At Hoover’s request, Admiral Souers wrote to President Truman on April 17, 1946: “
It is of the utmost urgency that the Federal Bureau of Investigation be permitted to continue its security functions … in the countries of the Western Hemisphere, in London, Paris, Rome, Manila, Tokyo, and the American Zone in Germany. The security mission which it performs may be illustrated by the Canadian investigation in Ottawa which reaches into the United States as well as England.”

The “Canadian investigation” was about to begin to reveal the reach of Soviet espionage into America’s atomic arsenal.

The case began with the carelessness of a thirty-six-year-old Red Army lieutenant, Igor Sergeyevich Guzenko, who served as one of Stalin’s spies in the office of the Soviet military attaché in Ottawa, Canada. He was a code clerk who handled secret cables and ciphers. One night he tossed aside two rough drafts of encoded messages to Moscow. A cleaning woman who doubled as a Soviet security officer found the crumpled communiqués and
informed the ambassador. The penalty for security violations in Stalin’s secret service was Siberian exile or death. Guzenko gathered up every secret cable he could carry and fled for his life. He spent three days on the run before convincing the Royal Canadian Mounted Police to protect him.

The FBI’s legal attaché in Ottawa joined in the interrogation of Guzenko. Hoover soon put seventy-five agents on the case.

The Guzenko case revealed four facts: Ottawa was a command center for Soviet espionage throughout North America. The Soviets had placed a spy somewhere inside the State Department. A British nuclear physicist named Allan Nunn May had penetrated the Manhattan Project for Moscow. The theft of the secret of the atomic bomb was the highest priority of Soviet intelligence.

Another defector from the world of Soviet espionage now was in the FBI’s hands. Her name was Elizabeth Bentley; she had been a committed American Communist. She had first approached the FBI in 1942, but the Bureau did not take her at her word. She was confused, intellectually and ideologically, about why she was switching sides.

“
She was a flake. A wacko, really,” said FBI special agent Jack Danahy, who worked the case for years. “She had a series of crazy lovers, Fascists in Italy and Communists in the United States.” When she turned to the FBI, “she made a play for every agent in the office that she talked to.… We worried about it. But, hey, we weren’t finding informants in convents, you know.”

The Bureau always had its doubts about Bentley. She was a heavy drinker, but she seemed to have a good memory when sober. Her story was strange, but this much was true: Bentley had been a courier who served a network of Soviet spies. She named names—eighty in all, though none would ever go to jail for espionage, and only two would ever be convicted of any crime.