Enemies: A History of the FBI (34 page)

So did a white New Yorker with thick glasses, a businessman and legal counselor whom Rustin introduced to King in late 1956. His name was Stanley David Levison, and he helped draw up the founding documents for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. He became King’s closest confidant—writing his speeches, polishing the manuscript of King’s first book, preparing his tax returns, and serving as a sounding board as King drafted his first major address to white America, delivered from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial on May 17, 1957.

By that time Levison had been in the FBI’s files for five years. The Bureau suspected that he had been a key financier for the Communist Party underground since 1952. Though the evidence was circumstantial, Hoover believed it.

But only seven weeks before the Lincoln Memorial speech, the FBI took Levison off its list of top American Communists. That decision was based on information from its best informants inside the Party. Six weeks after the speech, on June 25, 1957, the FBI noted that Levison was “
a CP member with no official title, who performs his CP work through mass organization activity.” He appeared to have left his leading role in the Communist underground to devote himself to civil rights.

But Hoover’s belief that communism stood behind Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement never wavered.

Hoover’s agents in Chicago and New York had been working for years on
an operation to recruit and run a man who was trusted and respected in the highest ranks of the Communist Party of the United States. The operation, code-named Solo, had no precedent in the annals of the Cold War.

Solo had one terrible consequence. It would convince Hoover that the American civil rights movement was backed by Moscow and infiltrated at the top by secret Communists. It would lead him into open political warfare against King.

25

“DON’T TRUST ANYBODY”

A
T A FORMAL
state luncheon for the king of Morocco on November 26, 1957, J. Edgar Hoover and Richard Nixon talked face-to-face about the fact that President Eisenhower might die at any moment. The afternoon before, Ike had suffered a stroke. Nixon had rushed to the White House, where the president’s chief of staff, Sherman Adams, told him: “
You may be President in twenty-four hours.”

Eisenhower recovered by the spring of 1958, though sometimes his speech and his thoughts seemed slightly askew. Hoover himself appeared to suffer a mild heart attack not long after Ike’s stroke, an undocumented cardiovascular event he kept hidden from everyone he could. His behavior began to change, as did the president’s. Both men grew more short-tempered, impatient, and demanding. But while Ike began soul-searching, seeking a thaw in the Cold War, Hoover hardened. The few men who were close to him at the FBI saw him becoming imperious, vainglorious, and grandiose.

That summer,
Masters of Deceit
, a meandering tract on communism, made Hoover wealthy. Written by his aides, Bill Sullivan chief among them, and published in Hoover’s name, with his face on the cover, the book sold hundreds of thousands of copies, many of them bought in bulk by patriotic groups like the American Legion. A desultory congressional investigation, mounted after his death, showed that Hoover laundered 20 percent of the book’s net profits through a tax-exempt foundation for retired FBI officers. He banked at least $71,000, equal to more than half a million today.

Masters of Deceit
was published by a fabulously rich Texas oil man named Clint Murchison, who had conceived the book as a business deal. Hoover enjoyed a separate silent partnership with Murchison: he could invest in an oil well, and if it gushed, he would profit; if it was dry, he would not lose a dime. Hoover (and his number-two man, Clyde Tolson) spent summer vacations
at Murchison’s elegant resort in La Jolla, California, staying in the best suite, Bungalow A, playing the ponies, dining and drinking, all on the house. “
They lived in sheer opulence,” Hoover’s aide Deke DeLoach reflected years later. The La Jolla junkets were “the nearest thing to a genuine scandal in Hoover’s life.”

He liked his luxuries. A coterie of servants, all FBI employees, tended him at home on 30th Place, a leafy street of landscaped and spacious houses in northwest Washington, where he had lived for the two decades since his mother’s death. The Bureau provided him with chauffeurs, handymen, gardeners, valets, and the tax accountants who sorted out the honoraria he received, totaling tens of thousands of dollars, from corporate grandees. The gifts, given for ghostwritten speeches and articles, and as private awards for public service, supplemented the freely spent tax dollars that financed Hoover’s four-star style.

He had five bulletproof Cadillacs garaged and gleaming in Washington, New York, Chicago, Miami, and Los Angeles. His drivers took him wherever he wanted to go. When in Washington, as he was eleven months a year, he lunched at the Mayflower Hotel after leaving the Bureau at 11:45
A.M.
, usually ordering a slab of roast beef or, on doctor’s orders, a bowl of chicken soup and a plate of cottage cheese. By 6:15
P.M.
, most evenings, he was sipping a Jack Daniel’s and ordering a steak at Harvey’s Restaurant, one of the few culinary palaces near the Capitol. His drooping jowls and his pouched eyes reflected his tastes in food and drink.

Hoover was now conscious that he might not live forever. By law, he could serve as director for only six and a half more years, until he turned seventy. He sought a sinecure from the Senate majority leader, Lyndon B. Johnson of Texas. Johnson had been Hoover’s across-the-street neighbor on 30th Place since 1945. He would invite Hoover over for a glass of sour-mash whiskey or a Sunday breakfast from time to time. They had a friendship, or what passed for friendship in Washington. More precisely, they were political allies. Together they conceived a special bill of legislation. LBJ won a quick and uncontested vote from Congress granting Hoover his salary in perpetuity, from July 1958 onward, until the day he died. Johnson would see to it that Hoover never had to retire from the FBI.

Congress fawned over him during his annual appearances before the leaders of the judiciary and appropriations committees. In his public testimonies, the con man within took over; his ritual performances were stage pieces. He would receive the praises of the chairmen. He would respond by
reciting statistics concocted by the FBI’s Crime Records Division, his public relations office. He would hurl purple prose against the Red threat. “
Communism,” to quote the director, “represents a massive effort to transform not only the world but human nature itself.”

But the Communist Party was no longer a significant force in American political life. It had been staggered by the Justice Department’s indictments at the start of the 1950s, subverted by the FBI’s underground squads for the next five years, split by the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev’s 1956 denunciation of Stalin’s dictatorship, knocked headlong by the first blows of COINTELPRO. The Party had lost at least three-quarters of its members since the end of World War II. Perhaps twenty-two thousand card-carrying Communists remained on the rolls. A good number among them were undercover FBI agents and informants; a greater number were superannuated survivors of the Red raids of the 1920s.

Hoover had to continue to represent the Party as a mortal threat. The power of the FBI depended on having a great enemy. So did the unwavering support he enjoyed from the American people and their president.

The only thing he feared was leaks. He worried about them constantly. He was afraid that his intelligence operations would be uncovered, to his embarrassment. He did not trust the FBI’s own internal security. He kept a close eye on cases that could tarnish his reputation. What he wanted was secret intelligence that resulted in public success—national security cases that would make front-page news. They required the terrible patience he had possessed for so long.

“A
MERICAN INTELLIGENCE WALKS IN BABY SHOES
”

An intoxicated Soviet spy named Reino Hayhanen walked into the American Embassy in Paris in April 1957. He said he was a KGB officer, and that he had been operating in the United States for five years. Hayhanen had been ordered to return from New York to Moscow, and he rightly feared for his life, for he had fouled up. He had been given $5,000 to pass on to the American Communist underground in New York. He went on a bender instead, and bought a one-way ticket to Paris. The CIA station chief in Paris decided to fly him back to New York and turn him over to the FBI. The Bureau put him in a Public Health Service hospital on Staten Island.

“
The word was that this guy’s crazy,” recalled FBI agent Philip Mogen.

Born near Leningrad, Hayhanen had been recruited into the Soviet intelligence service in the first months of World War II, at the age of twenty. After the war, the KGB began to build a legend for him—a false identity that became his life. After five years of training, his legend was ready, along with
a forged American passport. Hayhanen had come to New York on the
Queen Mary
in 1952. He served as a courier carrying coded microfilm messages in hollowed-out coins, batteries, pens, pencils, and screws. He picked up and delivered secret intelligence at dead drops—hiding places in the parks and on the sidewalks of New York.

Once in the FBI’s hands, he identified his superior as Mikhail Svirin, who had served as first secretary of the Soviet delegation to the United Nations. The Bureau knew plenty about Soviet diplomats who were KGB spies—
the FBI identified sixteen such poseurs in the late 1950s, all immune from arrest by virtue of their diplomatic passports, all expelled by the State Department under the protocols of espionage. Svirin had been in and out of the United States since before World War II, but by 1957 he had left New York, never to return.

“
The FBI kept a keen eye and ear on what happened within the Soviet embassy and when embassy personnel traveled,” said a State Department consul, William D. Morgan. “Never could they say that the information came from eavesdropping, because they would never admit it.… If the man had been caught servicing a suspected mail box or lamp post—in other words, activity which involved really serious indications that the man was ‘performing duties not in accordance with his diplomatic status’—that, of course, was the basis for declaring him
persona non grata
.”

Hayhanen knew his second KGB contact as Colonel Rudolph Abel. He had gone on assignments for the colonel through the northeastern United States, carrying messages and money. “
One thing about Reino, he loved life, but he had enough intelligence to warrant us getting onto the case,” said the FBI’s Edmund J. Birch, who led an espionage squad in pursuit of the KGB’s Colonel Abel, following the leads Hayhanen gave him when the spy’s pickled memory permitted.

The colonel used the alias Emil Goldfus and lived a cover life as an artist with a studio in Brooklyn. Birch, carrying a concealed camera in a briefcase, trailed him as he left a restaurant, clicking away as the suspect walked down the street. Birch took one final photo, hopped in a taxi, and sped to the FBI’s New York headquarters on Third Avenue and 69th Street. A technician dipped the film into a vat of developer. “Beautiful pictures of trees, a
fire station, and, all of a sudden, one beautiful picture of his face,” Birch remembered. Hayhanen immediately identified the man in the photo as Colonel Abel.

The FBI had never fully grasped the workings of the spies who had given up their lives and their identities to serve the Soviet state outside the comfortable confines of embassies and consulates. Birch and his fellow agents kept Abel under constant surveillance, four three-man squads working around the clock. He never did anything remotely illegal. The FBI was “trying to find out what kind of apparatus he had going for him in New York,” Birch said. “I don’t think we ever found any … and after awhile, the Bureau finally said, as the Bureau always said, ‘Enough is enough.’ ”

The arrest of Colonel Abel on June 21, 1957, was the spy story of the decade. But it was a source of endless frustration for Hoover. The colonel could not be charged with espionage; the FBI’s evidence was hearsay. The arrest was executed by immigration agents under the Foreign Agents Registration Act, the statute that Justice used when a spy case could not be made in open court.

The Bureau needed to break Abel. Agents “interviewed him like crazy, every day,” for months on end, Birch said. “He was telling them nothing.” The first series of interrogations took place in a makeshift prison for illegal immigrants outside McAllen, Texas, on the Mexican border. Abel was being held in “
a wetback camp, in a wire cage, which was hot and uncomfortable,” said the FBI’s Ed Gamber, who questioned Abel eight hours a day for six weeks. “He was a real stand-up guy for the Soviets. He was a gentleman; he was polite; he was a nice guy—except when you asked him about the KGB.”

Teams of FBI agents, one after another, spent more than two years questioning Abel in a cell at the Atlanta federal penitentiary, one of the toughest prisons in the United States. “I’ll talk with you about art, mathematics, photography, anything you want to talk about, but don’t ask me about my intelligence background,” Abel said to the FBI’s Alden F. Miller. “I made the resolution when I was arrested in New York and I have not said anything, and I’m not going to now.” The best the FBI could do was to photograph Abel’s artwork and search it for signs of steganography—a message hidden in an image. They found none.