Enemies: A History of the FBI (30 page)

On June 20, 1951, less than four weeks after the Homer case broke, Hoover escalated the FBI’s
Sex Deviates Program. The FBI alerted universities and state and local police to the subversive threat, seeking to drive homosexuals from every institution of government, higher learning, and law enforcement in the nation. The FBI’s files on American homosexuals grew
to 300,000 pages over the next twenty-five years before they were destroyed. It took six decades, until 2011, before homosexuals could openly serve in the United States military.

Hoover then ratcheted up the Responsibilities Program, a new nationwide campaign launched in secret in the spring and summer of 1951. The FBI, under law, was supposed to share its investigative files only within the executive branch of government. Hoover already had breached that wall by leaking files to his favorite members of Congress. The Responsibilities Program began feeding governors, mayors, and other state and local leaders ammunition to attack subversives at home. The local special agent in charge of FBI regional offices served as the go-between for Hoover and the nation’s political officials. For the next four years, the Responsibilities Program served as a tool for purging the faculties of state universities, colleges, and public schools of hundreds of suspect leftists, until its secrecy was breached by a publicity-hunting state education commissioner. Together, the Responsibilities and Sex Deviates programs resulted in the dismissals of uncounted teachers across the country.

Hoover took up the homosexual issue in his first meeting with Truman’s director of Central Intelligence, Walter Bedell Smith, a four-star army general who had been Eisenhower’s chief of staff throughout World War II. General Smith had earned a reputation as Ike’s hatchet man, the sharp teeth behind Ike’s warm grin. He had served as Truman’s ambassador to the Soviet Union; he had gone eyeball-to-eyeball with Stalin. He was a man of great force and short temper, intolerant of imperfection. He and Edgar Hoover hit it off. They had a lot in common.

They sat down for an informal luncheon in a private suite at the Mayflower Hotel. After pleasantries, Hoover raised the issue of homosexuality at the CIA. “
General Smith seemed to be considerably amazed at the wide prevalence of this condition,” Hoover wrote. “He inquired as to the percentage of persons in the population who had tendencies along this line.” Hoover said he would send over an FBI synopsis of Alfred S. Kinsey’s
Sexual Behavior in the Human Male
, which reported that one man out of ten was a practicing homosexual, a far greater number than most Americans supposed.

Hoover and General Smith had greater concerns. They thought that the Soviets had infiltrated the CIA. Each and every one of the guerrilla operations the Agency had launched in the past two years had gone wrong. Hundreds of the CIA’s recruited foreign agents had been parachuted behind
enemy lines, inside the Iron Curtain, and almost all of them had been captured or killed. The CIA was making no headway in its war on communism overseas. The FBI was not breaking any new cases against Communist spies, either.

Some of these failures could be laid to Philby’s betrayals—but not all of them. If the Soviets still had a man in the high councils of American intelligence, then the secret operations of the United States could still be sabotaged, at home and abroad.

Hoover decided that he had to change the way the FBI and the CIA worked with each other against the Soviets. Hoover assigned the FBI’s Sam Papich to serve at CIA headquarters, and General Smith assigned Jim Angleton to get along with the FBI. Papich, born in Montana, with roots in Yugoslavia, had served undercover for the FBI in Rio de Janeiro during and after World War II, posing as a representative of Dun and Bradstreet. Angleton, born in Idaho, educated at Yale, was an American spy in Italy during the war. These two men kept liaison between the FBI and the CIA alive for the next two decades.

Angleton soon thereafter became the chief of the counterintelligence staff at the CIA, the man in charge of identifying Soviet spies. He made a professional practice of studying the espionage cases of years gone by, trying to decode decades of Soviet deception. He found patterns in the carpet of the past few others could see, some of them invisible to the naked eye and the rational mind.

His elevation to chief of counterintelligence was a coup for J. Edgar Hoover. The depth of Angleton’s discussions with the FBI was astonishing; he was by far Hoover’s best source on what was going on inside the CIA. “
He has been very cooperative and, as you know, has volunteered considerable information which has been of assistance to us,” Papich reported. “The fact that he has dealt with the Bureau in a very frank manner, free of the cloak-and-dagger atmosphere usually found in CIA, has made him a person who could work with the Bureau.”

On July 2, 1952, Angleton told the FBI that the CIA’s political front groups and propaganda organizations throughout Europe were “
widely exposed to penetration by Soviet agents.” He said that the KGB must have planted spies among the thousands of Eastern European and White Russian refugees the CIA recruited in Germany and England in its efforts to roll back the Soviets. The CIA’s operations in Europe were filled with political exiles and “émigrés who were using the organization to feather their nests,” Angleton
said. He let drop that the CIA’s covert operations commander, Frank Wisner, who already had spent hundreds of millions of dollars in secret, had just requested $28 million more to expand his overseas empire. Hoover wrote in his royal blue hand: “It is shocking that such waste and looseness can prevail and nothing can be done about it.”

There was something to be done. The national security of the United States hung in the balance of the 1952 presidential election. Hoover worked to ensure that General Eisenhower would be president of the United States and Richard Nixon the vice president. The Republican ticket was set on July 11. The Democrats chose Governor Adlai Stevenson of Illinois on July 24. Hoover already had a report on Stevenson in hand. Assistant FBI director Mickey Ladd had dredged it up from the Sex Deviates files: “
Pursuant to your request, there is attached hereto a blind memorandum concerning Governor Stevenson, who, it has been alleged, is a known homosexual.”

At the hour of Adlai Stevenson’s presidential nomination, a nineteen-page memo about the Democratic candidate went to the FBI’s Lou Nichols, who handled relations with Congress and the press. It featured a compendium of vicious gossip, including a report from a New York police detective who said the governor not only was one of the best-known homosexuals in the state of Illinois but used the drag name “Adeline.” Hoover made sure that this scuttlebutt reached Richard Nixon, the Republican campaign committee, and a large number of journalists.

The election of Eisenhower and Nixon in November 1952, along with a Republican sweep of the House and the Senate, ended two decades of Democratic dominance in Washington—the era that Senator Joseph McCarthy called “twenty years of treason.” At the start of those twenty years, Hoover had led a small, weak organization with 353 special agents and a budget well under $3 million. He now led an anti-Communist army of 6,451 men with 8,206 support staff and $90 million to spend.

A few days after his victory, Ike assured Hoover that he wanted him to run the FBI for as long as he was president, and that he would have the complete support of the White House in the years to come. Some men were more respected in Washington, but not many. Some may have been more feared, but very few.

22

NO SENSE OF DECENCY

A
DIRECT TELEPHONE LINE
now ran from the White House to Hoover’s home. Eisenhower called only on occasion, but
Nixon called twice a day, early in the morning and late at night.

Hoover extended his influence into every corner of the ever-expanding national security establishment. As Hoover reported to the newly inaugurated president on January 26, 1953, FBI agents now worked “
day-to-day and person-to-person” at the White House, the Pentagon, the Office of the Secretary of Defense, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the National Security Agency, the CIA, the State Department, Congress, six American embassies, army intelligence bases in Germany and Austria, and a dozen more centers of America’s global power.

Hoover took a seat at the National Security Council, alongside the secretary of defense and the secretary of state. The new attorney general, Herbert Brownell, Jr., took Hoover’s word as law. Brownell’s deputy and successor, William Rogers, became a close personal friend to Hoover, and he sat down twice a week for working lunches with the director. Hoover helped to shape the policies and strategies of the government on everything from national security to civil rights.

American anticommunism came to full power under Eisenhower. Hoover’s men investigated nominees for posts ranging from foreign ambassador to congressional aide. They oversaw internal security purges throughout the government, destroying lives and careers over suspicions of disloyalty or homosexuality.

Hoover’s impact at the State Department was immense. With the full backing of Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, an FBI agent named R. W. “Scott” McLeod took a job as the internal security chief at State. His political purges of Washington and embassies and consulates overseas used FBI
methods, including wiretaps, to force liberals and suspected leftists out of the Foreign Service. An uncounted number of diplomats resigned in despair.

FBI men were ever present in the new organizations Eisenhower created to project American influence and power, such as the United States Information Agency, which broadcast American ideas throughout the world. FBI special agents Charles Noone and Joe Walsh ran the USIA’s internal security operations in Washington and New York. The FBI conducted full field investigations of every USIA employee, checking every detail of their lives from childhood onward.

“
Our bible was Executive Order 10450, issued by President Eisenhower,” Walsh recounted. “This order related to Federal employees as affecting the country’s national security. Denial of such employment was spelled out to include anyone associated with communism, homosexuals, drunks, and other social aberrants who might be considered threats to the security of the USA. It was a nasty business—seeking out and identifying people suspected of homosexuality,” he said. “There were several awfully decent and intelligent people who worked within the Agency whom I got to know well and enjoyed working within the Agency programs who, suddenly and peremptorily, dropped out of the picture—disappeared! Under investigation, they had admitted their homosexuality and had resigned.”

No one in government was exempt, even those who already held top secret security clearances. Stanley Grand was a State Department officer working with the CIA on the coup that overthrew the government of Guatemala in 1954. “
It was not a good time for the State Department,” he recalled. “We all had to be reinvestigated by the FBI and get new clearances, which most of us did. Some people were terribly damaged.… One officer I know, who was an excellent officer, got so fed up because he knew the kind of false charges that might be brought against him, that he committed suicide. It was a tragedy.”

But Ike’s new internal security regime was a triumph for Hoover. It affirmed the president’s faith in the FBI as the front line of American national security.

The White House read Hoover’s reports on the Soviets as the most authoritative in the government. Attorney General Brownell said: “
The FBI reported to me one of the results of their counterintelligence work against the communist conspiracy. They had learned that Stalin was ill and Malenkov
was acting for him and would succeed him if Stalin died. Stalin did die on March 3, 1953, and it is now history that Malenkov succeeded him.”

By contrast, the United States had no ambassador in Moscow when Stalin died, and the CIA had no spies inside the Soviet Union. The first CIA officer dispatched to Moscow was seduced by his Russian housekeeper—she was a KGB colonel—photographed in the physical act of love, blackmailed, and fired by the Agency for his indiscretions in 1953. His replacement was caught in the act of espionage, arrested, and deported shortly after he arrived.

The FBI now had Communist informants across America. Through witnesses, wiretaps, bugs, break-ins, and relentless surveillance, the FBI had penetrated and infiltrated the Communist Party of the United States. Many Communists indicted and convicted under the Smith Act went to jail in silence, some went underground, but others became cooperating witnesses. Hoover took some satisfaction when top Communists went to prison, but he saw his intelligence operations as more crucial than any law enforcement work. The two missions demanded different techniques.

A cop confronting an evildoer wants to string him up. A spy wants to string him along. Waiting and watching required a terrible patience. Hoover had it. After twenty years of attack and a decade of counterattack, the FBI was starting to understand the scope of the KGB’s operations in America.

The Bureau had a handful of double agents working against the KGB. The first productive break was the case of Boris Morros. Born in Russia in 1895, the same year as Hoover, Morros came to the United States in the wake of the Bolshevik revolution, making his way to Los Angeles and the world of make-believe. He worked at Paramount Pictures, arranging musical soundtracks for B movies, and he ran the Boris Morros Music Company on the side.