Enemies: A History of the FBI (33 page)

In Cleveland, the eighth-largest city in America in the mid-1950s, the FBI found six leading Communist figures to arrest and prosecute under the Smith Act, which had effectively outlawed membership in the Communist Party. All were found guilty.

But each of those convictions was overturned. The courts were starting to question the legal basis for the FBI’s national security investigations.

The Supreme Court, in a series of decisions starting in 1955 and 1956, voided dozens of Smith Act convictions, undercut the FBI’s use of paid informers as witnesses against the Communist Party, and upheld the right of defense lawyers to see evidence gathered through FBI surveillance. Each decision was a blow to Hoover.

The Court rejected cases built on hearsay and perjury by the Bureau’s professional witnesses, culled from the ranks of ex-Communists. The worst among them was Harvey Matusow, a high school dropout and army veteran who had joined the Communist Party in 1947, volunteered his services as an informant to the FBI in 1950, and testified in court and before Congress that Communists had infiltrated every corner of American society, from the State Department to the Boy Scouts. Matusow had recanted in a 1955 book,
False Witness
, and in 1956 started serving forty-four months in federal prison for perjury.

The Court was also becoming alert to the continuing use of wiretaps and bugs. In a five-to-four decision, it upheld a state court conviction based on evidence obtained by concealed microphones planted by police during warrantless break-ins. But five justices also expressed outrage that the bug
had been placed in a bedroom. That decision worried Attorney General Brownell, who privately warned Hoover about where to put his microphones.

One Supreme Court ruling especially infuriated Hoover. It allowed Communist Party members to invoke the Fifth Amendment in refusing to identify their comrades. A majority opinion was written by Hoover’s oldest living nemesis, Justice Felix Frankfurter.

The justices finally ruled that the government had enforced the Smith Act too broadly by targeting words, not deeds—free speech, instead of forcible blows against the political system. That made the act almost useless for prosecuting American Communists. A decade of legal attack against the Communist Party was coming to an end. The law no longer was an effective weapon in the war on communism.

These reversals enraged Hoover. And out of that rage came the boldest attacks that Hoover ever mounted against his enemies, the most ambitious and destructive operations in the history of the FBI.

“W
ILL IT GET US WHAT WE WANT?
”

On May 18, 1956, the new plan of attack began taking shape, the brainchild of the FBI Intelligence Division chief Al Belmont and his trusted aide, William C. Sullivan.

They called the plan COINTELPRO, short for counterintelligence program. Counterintelligence, formally defined, is the work of preventing spies from stealing your secrets. COINTELPRO was more than that. Hoover and his men aimed to subvert America’s subversives. Their stratagems were sharpened at the suggestion of agents in the field, toughened by Sullivan, and ultimately approved by Hoover.

The first operations began on August 28, 1956. Armed with the intelligence gathered through break-ins, bugs, and taps, COINTELPRO began to attack hundreds, then thousands, of suspected Communists and socialists with anonymous hate mail, tax audits by the Internal Revenue Service, and forged documents designed to sow and fertilize seeds of distrust among left-wing factions.

The idea was to instill hate, fear, doubt, and self-destruction within the American Left. The FBI used Communist techniques of propaganda and
subversion. The goal was to destroy the public lives and private reputations of the members of the Communist Party and everyone connected with them.

In time there would be twelve major COINTELPRO campaigns, aimed at targets across the political spectrum, and a total of 2,340 separate operations. Most operations, in cases where the records were not burned or shredded, bore Hoover’s personal approval in his scribble of blue ink.

“OK. H.”

“I concur. H.”

“Yes, and promptly. H.”

The cleverest mind behind the birth and growth of COINTELPRO belonged to Bill Sullivan, the newly appointed chief of research and analysis at the Intelligence Division. Born in 1912 on a farm thirty-five miles west of Boston, Massachusetts, Sullivan remembered the spectacle of burning crosses in the fields near his hometown, ignited by the Ku Klux Klan, the racist secret society that arose after the Civil War and flared up mightily after World War I. He taught school, worked for the Internal Revenue Service, and then joined the FBI four months before Pearl Harbor.

Sullivan recalled his FBI training and indoctrination vividly—especially “
the terrific propaganda that the instructors gave out:
‘This is the greatest organization ever devised by a human mind.’
They kept quoting Emerson:
‘An institution is the lengthened shadow of one man.’
They hit us with that almost every day. They drilled that into us.”

He rose rapidly at the Intelligence Division by virtue of his drive and ambition. Despite his appearance—he looked like a rumpled and shifty-eyed B-movie detective—Sullivan would become Hoover’s field marshal in matters of national security, chief of FBI intelligence, and commandant of COINTELPRO. In that top secret and tightly compartmentalized world, an FBI inside the FBI, Sullivan served as the executor of Hoover’s most clandestine and recondite demands.

“
He was a brilliant chameleon,” Sullivan said of Hoover. “He was one of the greatest con men the country ever produced, and that takes intelligence of a certain kind, an astuteness, a shrewdness.”

Hoover’s talented political hatchet man and trusted deputy, Cartha “Deke” DeLoach, painted a matching portrait of Sullivan: “
Brash, brilliant, brimming over with self-esteem, something of a bantam rooster, Sullivan had more ambition than was good for a man, combined with a slight deficiency in principle. For years COINTELPRO was his special domain. He
ruled it with skill and daring most of the time, but occasionally with reckless abandon.” Some of the FBI’s chieftains thought the Communist Party was so demoralized “it was no longer worth worrying about,” DeLoach reflected. “But increasingly, the architect of COINTELPRO—Sullivan—was worth worrying about.”

Sullivan’s quicksilver talents for palace intrigue and his political cunning were primal forces that shaped the Bureau, the national security of the United States, and the American presidency for two decades. He came within a hair’s breadth of succeeding Hoover after the director’s death—a very close call made by President Nixon, whose downfall Sullivan then secretly helped ensure. At the end of his era, Sullivan talked in a closed Senate chamber about the thinking that drove the FBI and COINTELPRO onward.

Sullivan was capable of bearing false witness, but this testimony resonated with the ring of truth.

“
This is a rough, tough, dirty business, and dangerous. It was dangerous at times. No holds were barred,” Sullivan said. And the law was not at issue: “Never once did I hear anybody, including myself, raise the question: ‘Is this course of action which we have agreed upon lawful? Is it legal? Is it ethical or moral?’ We never gave any thought to this realm of reasoning, because we were just naturally pragmatists. The one thing we were concerned about was this: will this course of action work, will it get us what we want?”

Sullivan said he and his cohorts at the FBI “could not free ourselves from that psychology with which we had been imbued as young men.” They were soldiers in the Cold War. “We never freed ourselves from that psychology that we were indoctrinated with, right after Pearl Harbor, you see.… It was just like a soldier in the battlefield. When he shot down an enemy, he did not ask himself is this legal or lawful, is it ethical? It is what he was expected to do as a soldier. We did what we were expected to do.”

“T
HE THINGS HE HATED, HE HATED ALL HIS LIFE
”

The FBI had spied on every prominent black political figure in America since World War I. The scope of its surveillance of black leaders was impressive, considering the Bureau’s finite manpower, the burden of its responsibilities, and the limited number of hours in a day. Hoover spent his career convinced that communism was behind the civil rights movement in the United States from the start.

Hoover gave special attention to William Edward Burghardt Du Bois. Born in 1868, the venerable Du Bois had become the head of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in 1910. The NAACP, the most august civil rights group in America, had been the focus of intense FBI interest since World War II.

The FBI’s intelligence investigation of Communist influence at the NAACP began in the spring of 1941 and lasted for twenty-five years. The FBI’s Washington field office opened the case after the navy asked it to look into “fifteen colored mess attendants” protesting rampant racist conduct (American armed forces remained segregated throughout World War II). The FBI hired an informant and sought the NAACP’s “
connections with the Communist party.” Four months before Pearl Harbor, FBI headquarters ordered Oklahoma City agents to investigate “Communist Party domination” at the NAACP. They reported “a strong movement on the part of the Communists to attempt to dominate this group … Consequently, the activities of the NAACP will be closely observed and scrutinized in the future.”

They were. Hoover took the investigation nationwide. FBI informants infiltrated civil rights conferences in at least ten states and filed reports on hundreds of NAACP members, including the group’s counsel, the future Supreme Court justice Thurgood Marshall.

On October 2, 1956, Hoover stepped up the FBI’s long-standing surveillance of black civil rights activists. He sent a COINTELPRO memo to the field, warning that the Communist Party was seeking to infiltrate the movement.

“
The Negro situation is a paramount issue” for the Communists, the director wrote.

Hoover told President Eisenhower that the Communists were concentrating their efforts in Alabama, Georgia, and Mississippi; they intended to inject civil rights into every political issue in America; they would demand federal intervention to enforce the law of the land; they would seek the impeachment of Senator James Eastland of Mississippi, the Democratic chairman of the Judiciary Committee, a plantation master, and an ardent segregationist.

Hoover started watching the new leaders of the civil rights movement very closely. By 1957, COINTELPRO was primed as a weapon in the long struggle between black Americans and their government.

Three years before, in
Brown v. Board of Education
, the Supreme Court had cracked the façade of the American way of life by ordering the integration
of public schools. Hoover advised Eisenhower that Communists at home and abroad saw the
Brown
decision as a victory, and that they aimed to “
exploit the enforcement of desegregation in every way.”

The ruling threw gasoline on the smoldering embers of the Ku Klux Klan. Days after the decision, the Klan began to burn again.

“
The Klan was dead until
Brown
,” said the FBI’s John F. McCormack, who moved from chasing Communists in Cleveland to a series of assignments in the South in 1957. “They lived down here in their own little world. There was no problem. The blacks had their own area, the blacks had their own schools.” Now the Supreme Court had told the southern whites that they had to integrate. As McCormack saw it, working-class whites feared “blacks coming into their area now. Blacks would go to school with their children, blacks gonna marry their daughters, blacks gonna take over their jobs. So that was a motivating force.… And the Klan grew.”

The Klan began dynamiting black churches, burning synagogues, shooting people in the back with hunting rifles, and infiltrating state and local law enforcement. It became the most violent American terrorist group of the twentieth century. As the Klan revived, the high sheriffs of the old South pledged to resist the new law of the land. Senator James Eastland of Mississippi spoke for them when he proclaimed that Anglo-Saxon Americans saw resistance to integration as obedience to God.

Despite the violence, Hoover took a hands-off stance toward the KKK. He would not direct the FBI to investigate or penetrate the Klan unless the president so ordered. “
Headquarters came out with instructions that we were not to develop any high-level Klan informants because it might appear that we were guiding and directing the operations of the Klan,” said the FBI’s Fletcher D. Thompson, based in Georgia. This was a rationalization for racism.

Hoover had been born in nineteenth-century Washington, D.C., a southern city that stayed segregated throughout most of the twentieth century. In his world, blacks knew their place: they were servants, valets, and shoeshine boys. He feared the rise of
a black “messiah,” to quote a COINTELPRO mission statement. He presided over an Anglo-Saxon America, and he aimed to preserve and defend it.

“
He was very consistent throughout the years. The things he hated, he hated all his life,” Bill Sullivan said. “He hated liberalism, he hated blacks, he hated Jews—he had this great long list of hates.”

More precisely, Hoover hated ideologies more than individuals, pressure
groups more than people; above all, Hoover hated threats to the stability of the American political system, and anyone who might personify that danger was an enemy for life.

Hoover’s antipathy to the idea of racial equality can explain some of his hostility to the civil rights movement, but not all of it.

His alarm at a nexus between communism and civil rights intensified in early 1957. To the FBI, the newly organized Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and its theretofore obscure director, the twenty-seven-year-old Martin Luther King, Jr., represented such a threat.

Hoover first began to focus on Bayard Rustin, the principal strategist of civil disobedience and nonviolent resistance—boycotts, sit-ins, and protest marches—at the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. The Bureau already had a substantial file on Rustin, a man seemingly made by his creator to get under Hoover’s skin—a socialist, a pacifist, and openly gay, with a prison record for draft resistance and sodomy. He remained the subject of FBI investigation for the next twenty years.