Enemies: A History of the FBI (32 page)

GAME WITHOUT RULES

A
FTER THIRTY YEARS
as director of the FBI, Hoover’s political antennae were so finely tuned that news of the most sensitive presidential decisions arrived almost immediately on his desk.

On July 16, 1954, President Eisenhower summoned a retired three-star general named Jimmy Doolittle. Ten years before, Doolittle had led the first American bombing of Tokyo. Now the president wanted Doolittle to help him overhaul the CIA. Ike wanted the report done by October.

Hoover found out about this top secret investigation within days. “
The President stated that he wanted General Doolittle to conduct a thorough and objective study of CIA’s covert operations,” Hoover learned from Pat Coyne, an FBI veteran who served as the National Security Council’s most trusted intelligence staffer. Ike wanted “to unearth any evidence that the CIA was not operating efficiently and to make any recommendations which would improve the organization in any way whatever. He summarized his position by stating that he wanted Doolittle to make the survey as thorough and exhaustive as would be done if the President himself were handling the assignment.”

Hoover also got word that Doolittle had told the president: “There was one individual in Government who could be of extremely valuable assistance to him regarding correct and proper administration of intelligence operations. Doolittle stated that this person was J. Edgar Hoover.”

Hoover strongly doubted that the problems of the CIA could be fixed. He wrote to his national security aides: “
I have a completely defeatist attitude as to any effective corrective measures which might improve CIA. H.”

Hoover had made plainly evident his personal and professional contempt for the CIA’s chief, Allen Dulles. He deigned to meet with Dulles no
more than half a dozen times during the eight years of Eisenhower’s presidency. He made sure that his aides reflected his thinking.

“
How in the world can I do business with the Bureau?” Dulles had shouted at his FBI liaison in an unguarded moment. “I try and you keep striking back.”

The Doolittle investigation presented Hoover one more opportunity to stake his claim to preeminence in American intelligence.

“W
IPE OUT
CIA
ENTIRELY
”

The FBI’s intelligence division chief, Al Belmont, indoctrinated General Doolittle and his investigators for three hours on August 25, 1954.

“
Doolittle viewed the Bureau as a model in guiding him,” Belmont reported with satisfaction. “I placed unusually great stress on the fact that the Bureau, in addition to being a law enforcement body, was also very much in the intelligence field. I made it clear that we were expending every effort to keep apprised of all activities of the Communist Party. We had Soviet and satellite diplomats under constant observation; and that as far as the Bureau was concerned, we could never relax.”

By contrast, Belmont told the Doolittle group, the CIA was shot through with “waste, inefficiency, and plain boondogglery.”

Hoover granted Doolittle an audience on October 6, 1954. The CIA’s right hand did not know what the left hand was doing, he told the general. Its spies had little if any idea of what was going on behind the Iron Curtain, and its analysts knew even less. No doubt, Hoover allowed, “
some of its weaknesses and defects were due to the newness of its operations.” But the Agency lacked trained officers. It had no internal inspection service; those overseers were a crucial part of the way in which Hoover punished and promoted the FBI’s agents. The Agency needed a strong shot of the Bureau’s kind of discipline.

On October 19, 1954, Doolittle delivered his grim assessment of American intelligence to the president. “
We are facing an implacable enemy whose avowed objective is world domination,” it began.

“There are no rules in such a game,” it continued. “Hitherto acceptable norms of human conduct do not apply. If the United States is to survive, long-standing American concepts of ‘fair play’ must be reconsidered. We
must develop effective espionage and counterespionage services and must learn to subvert, sabotage, and destroy our enemies by more clever, more sophisticated and more effective methods than those used against us.”

Hoover’s critique shaped Doolittle’s confidential conclusion: “
The ideal solution would be to wipe out CIA entirely and start all over again.”

President Eisenhower could not bring himself to do that. Instead, he leaned harder on Hoover’s reporting on the Soviet threat.

Hoover deepened the president’s fears of a devastating attack on the United States. He heavily influenced a top secret National Security Council alert to the president on potential Soviet actions that could trigger World War III.
His February 28, 1955, report warned of spies and saboteurs assassinating American civilian and military leaders; smuggling nuclear weapons components and “biological, chemical or radiological warfare agents” into the United States; exploding “weapons of mass destruction” at American military bases; using underground American Communists to direct bombing attacks against government targets; and organizing “armed insurrection in the U.S. by communist party members or persons under Soviet direction” who would be armed with “cached weapons, ammunition, explosives and military communications gear.”

Hoover followed up by informing the White House that the FBI was intensifying its intelligence work along every front of the Cold War, stepping up its surveillance of Soviet diplomats and embassy personnel, looking for spies and secret agents. “
Plans for the detention of enemy diplomatic personnel have been readied,” Hoover assured the president. The Bureau now listed 26,500 “potentially or actually dangerous” people on the Security Index, all of whom would be arrested and detained at the president’s command. Among them were American prisoners of war returned from North Korea, some of whom, the FBI suspected, had been brainwashed by Chinese Communist interrogators to serve as underground agents who would burrow into the American military and betray the nation if war came again.

Hoover told the White House and the Pentagon that the FBI’s “
most important goal” was “the development of good double agents” to penetrate the Soviet leadership at the highest levels and gain knowledge of the Kremlin’s intentions and capabilities. He was already working on a plan to meet that theretofore unattainable goal.

24

THE LONG SHADOW

O
N THE MORNING
of March 8, 1956, Hoover addressed the president and the National Security Council at the White House. He said he was “using every available means”—tapping telephones, opening mail, installing bugs, and breaking into the offices and safes of suspected Communist spies and saboteurs throughout the United States—to prevent a surprise Soviet attack on the United States.

His briefing, “The Present Menace of Communist Espionage and Subversion,” raised the new specter of a dirty bomb unleashed by Soviet spies.
Using cobalt-60, a radioactive isotope developed for the war on cancer, the Soviets, he warned, could deliver a lethal cache in an attaché case. If unleashed in Manhattan, it could kill hundreds of thousands of people and render the city of New York uninhabitable for years. It would be a doomsday weapon.

The threat of a nuclear attack haunted Eisenhower every day. He asked Hoover what the FBI was doing to guard against the danger.

“
Sometimes it is necessary to make a surreptitious entry where on occasion we have photographed secret communist records,” Hoover told the president. Everyone in the room understood that “surreptitious entry” was against the law.

Hoover explained that the FBI’s reports based on illegally gathered intelligence would be sanitized to guard their secrecy, and to protect the president and the attorney general. The reports would be scrubbed of any references to break-ins and bugs; the intelligence would be attributed to “confidential sources.”

The president commended Hoover. The minutes of the meeting record no more questions about the FBI’s methods.

Hoover went back to headquarters convinced that he had strengthened
the powers of the hunting license granted him by President Roosevelt. He was certain that it would be good for at least four more years; Ike’s re-election was assured—if he lived; he had suffered a serious heart attack six months before—and if Nixon became president, he would back Hoover to the hilt. Attorney General Brownell would be steadfast, too, so long as Hoover did not tell him precisely what he was doing in the name of national security.

These men tacitly understood the code of silence Hoover required. Eisenhower had run the D-day invasion, the biggest secret operation of World War II. Nixon had been steeped in raw FBI reports from his first days in Washington. Brownell knew more about secret intelligence than any of his predecessors: he had chaired the committee that created the electronic-eavesdropping, code-making, and code-breaking behemoth of the National Security Agency in 1952.

At Hoover’s request, Brownell had asked congressional committee chairmen for new laws allowing wiretapping without a warrant. They had said no, time and again.
Hoover had asked for the legal authorization for microphone surveillances—bugging, or “technicals,” in Bureauspeak—but the lawmakers spurned the request. The director would have to depend on invoking the authorities granted him explicitly by President Roosevelt and tacitly by President Eisenhower. That was good enough for the attorney general. He just didn’t want to know the details.

Hoover’s intelligence operations already ranged to the edge of the law and beyond. Each one was a potential disaster if anything went wrong. Hoover deemed the risks worth the rewards. The Cold War would not be won simply by shadowing the enemy.

“W
E ALL DID IT, BECAUSE IT WAS THE
B
UREAU
”

The FBI’s budget had doubled since the end of World War II. The Intelligence Division was now the most powerful force within the Bureau, commanding the most money, the most manpower, and the most attention from the director. The division conducted uncounted break-ins and buggings in the Eisenhower years; the routine destruction of FBI files ensured that no accurate count existed.

“
Surveillances weren’t the answer,” said the FBI’s Jack Danahy, who had run more than his share, going back to the days of the atom spy rings. “We
had to change our tactics.… We had to make every effort to develop live informants, utilize both mike and technical wiretaps, and become more sophisticated in our actual techniques.”

The FBI’s James R. Healy, who worked in San Francisco and northern California, recalled: “
We had a group sort of like the Dirty Dozen, a very talented group of agents who effected the thorough penetration of the Communist Party underground.” His squad was “hot on the trails of the COMFUGS, communist fugitives,” who were running from federal and state charges of subversion. Healy and his men broke the FBI’s dress codes, along with many other rules, as they went deep undercover.

“The clothing that we wore fit the scene,” he said. “We were dressed in old clothes. Some of the guys let their hair grow a little bit. Didn’t shave all the time. We fit in with the neighborhoods that we were following these people through … We knew what they were doing before some of them knew what they were doing. The placing of informants and the related techniques gave us an inside view of the whole Communist Party underground apparatus.”

The “related techniques” included burglaries aimed both at stealing documents and installing hidden microphones. At the FBI’s New York office, “
we were using every means necessary, at that time, which was extensive use of bag jobs, surreptitious entries, mail pilferage,” recalled Graham J. Desvernine, who started working with a special unit called the Underground Squad in 1956. “We were regularly going into Communist Party headquarters and into their main vault,” Desvernine said. “Go in there and bag the place. We had keys to everything and all. I was pickin’ locks. You know, it was kind of fun, the whole thing.”

Only one FBI operation was more sensitive than the Underground Squad: a special espionage team, created in 1954, which set up “
a program of intelligence collection that later became known as Program C,” said Edward S. Miller, who cut his teeth on the program’s San Francisco squad, and eventually became the number-three man in the FBI. This international effort included attempts to break into Soviet and Soviet-bloc embassies and consulates in New York, Washington, San Francisco, and other cities. One goal was to support the National Security Agency in its efforts to steal the secret codes and ciphers of America’s enemies.

Hoover’s men conducted bag jobs across the country, not just in the Communist hotbeds of the East and West coasts. In 1955, John F. McCormack, a young agent with the Cleveland office of the FBI, went on his first
black-bag operation. The target was the home of a suspected Communist—a steel-mill worker with a Ph.D. from New York University. “
We broke into the house, picked the lock … and photographed everything in the house,” McCormack recounted. “We later determined that he had connections with a foreign country. Basically he was there, we assumed, to do something in case of a national emergency at the steel mill.” McCormack was well aware that “you would get fired or arrested at the very least” if a break-in went wrong. “You couldn’t carry your credentials or any identification” on a black-bag job, he said. “We knew that perhaps we would be on our own if something happened. I think that all the agents that were involved did it for a sense of accomplishment. They took that risk. It was no less a risk than arresting a fugitive and getting shot. And so we all did it, because it was the Bureau.”