Enemies: A History of the FBI (26 page)

Nixon’s performance impressed Hoover.

“
Who’s that young man?” Hoover asked an old friend after the hearing. “He looks like he’s going to be a good man for us.”

19

SURPRISE ATTACK

T
HE PRESIDENT WAS
increasingly convinced of the dangers of the Communist threat. But he was also deeply wary of J. Edgar Hoover. “
Very strongly anti-FBI,” the White House counsel Clark Clifford wrote in his notes of a May 2, 1947, conversation with Truman. “Wants to be sure to hold FBI down.”

Truman felt that Hoover led “a sort of a dictatorial operation,” said Treasury Secretary John Snyder, an old friend and a political confidant to the president. “That was, I think, Mr. Truman’s general feeling, that Mr. Hoover had built up
a Frankenstein in the FBI.”

Hoover knew what the president thought. He used his knowledge skillfully as he kept up his struggle to take control of American intelligence.
He artfully twisted the arms of ranking members of Congress as they weighed a new National Security Act in the spring and summer of 1947.

The bill proposed to unify the American military services under the aegis of the Pentagon; to create a secretary of defense to oversee the army, the navy, and a nuclear-armed air force; to form a new National Security Council to coordinate military, intelligence, and diplomatic powers at the White House; and to establish the first permanent peacetime American espionage service. “Espionage is as old as man,” Hoover began. “We have always had it and we will continue to have it until the brotherhood of man becomes a reality as well as an ideal.” Until then, the United States had to have a permanent and professional spy service established under law. He said no one was better qualified to run it than he himself.

Hoover acknowledged “the uneasiness and apprehension of responsible leaders” starved for information on the intentions and capabilities of the Soviet Union and its allies. He said he would meet their needs. He would oversee foreign intelligence collected by FBI agents, diplomats, and military
officers overseas. State Department experts in Washington would analyze the work. The Bureau would continue hunting foreign spies and tapping into Communist plans in the United States.

Good intelligence could prevent another Pearl Harbor. “A future attack might be launched against American territory,” Hoover said. “Its disastrous effects can be minimized through intelligence coverage which will forewarn us and thus make it possible to be prepared. The modern advances of science and its military application are a warning of what we might expect, but that is not sufficient: we must prepare ourselves by knowing when and where and how an attack will be directed at us. We can do this only by possessing adequate intelligence coverage on a worldwide basis.”

Hoover said “the FBI could provide the worldwide intelligence coverage with a staff of approximately 1,200 employees at an estimated cost of $15,000,000” a year. By contrast, he pointed out, the plan for the CIA ran to estimates as high as “3,000 employees at an annual cost of $60,000,000.” Hoover condemned the proposal for the CIA as nothing but the “dreams of visionary but impractical empire-builders.”

Rear Admiral Roscoe Hillenkoetter had just become the third director of Central Intelligence in fourteen months. (Hoover and his aides had met the admiral and found him “
very frank in his statement that he knew nothing” about his new job.) Hoover argued that intelligence should be “a career and not just another tour of duty”; hiring time-serving military men to run intelligence operations for a year or two was “unfair to the nation.” Above all, Hoover asserted, America did not want a Central Intelligence Agency led by a shadowy czar who would run America’s spying operations, evaluate the secrets they gathered, and pass judgment on the work of the FBI’s foreign espionage agents.

Hoover capped his secret briefing by playing on the president’s fears of a secret police. “Luckily for us,” he said, “there is no more horrible example of what can happen through the creation of one vast central superstructure that both investigates and judges than the German Gestapo.”

“I
T IS A TRAGEDY
”

Hoover was surpassed by a rival whose rhetoric flew higher. Allen Dulles was Wild Bill Donovan’s leading protégé, a star at Donovan’s Wall Street law firm, and the brother of John Foster Dulles, the Republican Party’s
shadow secretary of state. Puffing on his pipe, he gave suave, sophisticated, and factually slippery testimony to a closed congressional hearing on the National Security Act on June 27, 1947.

Dulles testified that the blueprint for the new CIA was sound. The United States had “
the raw material for building the greatest intelligence service in the world,” he said. A few dozen skilled men serving abroad should do the trick. “I do not believe in a big agency,” he said. “You ought to keep it small. If this thing gets to be a great big octopus, it should not function well.… The operation of the service must neither be flamboyant nor over-shrouded in mystery and abracadabra which the amateur detective likes to assume. All that is required for success is hard work, discriminating judgment, and common sense.”

One month later, on July 26, President Truman signed the National Security Act. The FBI was given no new powers to prosecute the Cold War. The director of Central Intelligence was given many.

Hoover began spying on the CIA from that day forward. He started wiretapping CIA officers suspected of Communist sympathies or homosexual tendencies. Reading reports on “utter confusion” at the Agency, Hoover commented: “
It is a tragedy that the true phoniness of CIA isn’t exposed.” The Agency begged for FBI men experienced in espionage. Hoover consented, with the hope and expectation that his agents would serve as his spies inside the CIA. Few did—too few for Hoover’s satisfaction—although one soon reported: “If the people of this nation are depending upon CIA in its present form to prevent another Pearl Harbor disaster, they should start digging fox holes now.”

Hoover’s political warfare intensified month by month. “
It strikes me as a waste of time to cultivate this outfit,” he wrote after offering CIA officials a tour of the FBI’s training academy. He furiously rejected an aide’s draft of a polite letter to the director of Central Intelligence: “
Please
cut out all of the slobbering palaver. We know they have no use for us & I don’t intend to do a Munich.” When the CIA asked the FBI what it knew about the Comintern, Hoover swatted down the request: “Waste no time on it. We have more pressing matters.”

Hoover quickly formed an alliance with the new secretary of defense, James Forrestal, a Wall Street magnate who had been running the navy. On October 24, 1947, Hoover dominated a Pentagon meeting attended by leaders of the CIA, army and navy intelligence, and the president’s national security staff. He invoked “
the present widespread belief that our intelligence
group is entirely inept.” He inveighed against State Department leaks about a New York grand jury’s investigation into the Communist Party. He explained the FBI’s suspicions about the influence of left-wing scientists working for the newly formed Atomic Energy Commission, the civilians overseeing America’s deadliest weapons. The commissioners told him that America knew nothing about the Soviet threat.

“T
HE SMUGGLING INTO THE
U
NITED
S
TATES OF AN ATOMIC BOMB
”

Hoover sent a terrifying letter to Forrestal the next week. He warned against “
the smuggling into the United States of an atomic bomb, or parts thereof which could be later assembled in this country.” He envisioned Moscow’s spies carrying the components of a bomb in diplomatic pouches, saboteurs assembling them in secret, and suicide bombers blowing up the landmarks of the government of the United States. The fear of a surprise attack ruled the day.

Hoover’s warning in November 1947 was the first of its kind. Over the next decade he issued a steady stream of alerts against the threat of terrorists and spies wielding atomic, biological, and chemical weapons against American cities, a nightmare that still haunts the nation’s leaders. Forrestal convened a secret group he called the War Council, comprising the uniformed and civilian chiefs of the American military, to respond to Hoover’s alarm. The council reached out to Vannevar Bush, the government’s chief science adviser, and Karl Compton, the president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; both men had advised President Truman to drop the atomic bomb on Japan without warning. The War Council led a highly classified project to assess the threat of weapons of mass destruction as instruments of political terror. It explored “the use of biological agents” and “fissionable materials”—a dirty bomb—and set off a search for a shield against a catastrophic attack that continues to this day.

“Your original letter was the thing which first prompted us to undertake this study,” the secretary of defense wrote to Hoover. “Because of the major responsibilities of the Federal Bureau of Investigation for the development of information which bears upon the whole subject,” Forrestal continued, “preparedness in this particular field will require the very closest cooperation between our two organizations.”

Having defined the threat as a question of national survival, Hoover pushed for a powerful series of indictments that would charge the leaders of the Communist Party of the United States with a conspiracy aimed at “destroying the Government by force and violence.” The charges required a political and legal judgment that a state of emergency existed between the United States and the Soviets, and that American Communists were unlawful combatants in the Cold War.

Eleven Communist Party leaders were convicted at the first trial and faced five-year sentences. Six went to prison; five jumped bail. In the coming months, 115 more American Communists across the country faced identical charges. Ninety-three were convicted. All the indictments were brought under the 1940 Smith Act, which had outlawed membership in the Party. Each case rested on a 1,350-page document Hoover filed in court, a new version of the case he had been making since World War I. But now he had witnesses. The Bureau had been running a double agent inside the Party for five years. He was a middling and mild-mannered Communist functionary who delivered devastating testimony to the grand jury and at the trial of the eleven leaders. In time, his story became a classic black-and-white television show called
I Led Three Lives
, with an introduction instantly familiar to a generation of Americans: “This is the story, the fantastically true story, of Herbert A. Philbrick … Average citizen, high-level member of the Communist Party, counterspy for the Federal Bureau of Investigation.”

“I
NSIDE THE ENEMY’S HOUSE
”

Hoover’s case against the Communist conspiracy was strengthened by secret evidence: a handful of files from the archives of Soviet intelligence. They came from Arlington Hall, an old girls’ school across the Potomac near the Pentagon, now the center of America’s efforts to read Soviet cables sent during and immediately after World War II.

The United States Army’s Signal Intelligence Service had obtained copies of thousands of wartime cables sent from Moscow to its outposts in America, including Amtorg, the Soviet trade mission that had served as a front for espionage since 1920. In a 1944 black-bag job, the FBI broke into Amtorg’s New York office and stole reams of Russian-language messages and their enciphered equivalents. The Soviet ciphers were five-digit numbers
arranged in five separate cryptographic systems. They were supposed to have been used once and never again, giving each message a unique pattern, and making the systems unbreakable. But the Soviet intelligence service had blundered, under great pressure, during the war. After Germany invaded the Soviet Union and drove toward Moscow, duplicate sets of ciphers were sent to Soviet spies around the world. The army cryptanalysts had discovered a handful of these duplicate ciphers in October 1943. The duplication made it theoretically possible to crack the encoded communications among Soviet spies and spymasters—if a pattern could be found.

Meredith Gardner was a master of this arcane craft. Gardner worked with a pencil, a pad, and punch cards. But knowledge was growing at his fingertips. A civilian linguist, he had learned Russian and Japanese quickly after joining the army code breakers in the first months of World War II, when he was not quite thirty years old. In 1946, Gardner had begun to break fragments of Soviet intelligence communiqués, starting with a two-year-old message to Moscow from New York, within a passage in plain English spelling out a name, bracketed by two Russian code words. Gardner saw in a flash of insight that the two code words must be “spell” and “end spell.” He had created a crack in the code. He broke another wartime message to Moscow that included the names of the leading scientists building the atomic bomb at the Manhattan Project. The Soviet code word for the bomb was Enormoz.