Enemies: A History of the FBI (45 page)

The cost of his cautiousness was high for the FBI chieftains pursuing spies and saboteurs.

“
Hoover put us out of business in 1966 and 1967 when he placed sharp restrictions on intelligence collection” using bugs and black-bag jobs, said Bill Cregar, a former professional football player who had become one of the Bureau’s leading Soviet intelligence specialists. “We need technical coverage
on every Soviet in the country. I didn’t give a damn about the Black Panthers myself, but I did about the Russians.”

Hoover’s restrictions on illegal intelligence-gathering methods hobbled the FBI’s spy hunters. The Bureau’s increasingly relentless focus on American political protests drained time and energy away from foreign counterintelligence. The results were evident.

For the next decade, from 1966 to 1976, the FBI did not make a single major case of espionage against a Soviet spy.

“O
NE BIG JOB BEFORE YOU GO OUT
”

The president’s hunger for intelligence on the American Left grew more and more ravenous. Hoover tried to satisfy it by burrowing into the growing antiwar and black power movements with infiltrators and informants.

The Bureau instituted a nationwide program called VIDEM, for Vietnam demonstrations. It sent the White House a steady stream of intelligence on the leaders of the movement, the identities of people who sent telegrams to the president protesting the war, and the organizers of church and campus meetings on Vietnam. One peace conference in Philadelphia generated a forty-one-page FBI report, based on thirteen informants and sources, including verbatim transcripts of each speech and background checks on the chaplains, ministers, and professors in attendance.

Some FBI agents made extraordinary efforts to confirm the suspicions of the president and the director that the Soviets were behind the antiwar movement. The FBI’s Ed Birch—the man who had nailed Colonel Abel of the KGB in 1957—had trailed the Soviet spy Viktor Lesiovsky across the country as he traveled from his diplomatic post at the United Nations secretariat earlier in the 1960s. He suspected that Lesiovsky, who had met in 1962 with Stanley Levison, Martin Luther King’s counselor, was secretly financing the American Left with Soviet funds. “
That guy traveled,” Birch said. “But what got me was the places that he went to,” including the University of Michigan, the seedbed of SDS. “It was always my impression—but I couldn’t convince anybody in the Bureau of this—that this guy helped with the funding of the SDS.” The evidence of Soviet financial support for the American antiwar and civil rights movements always proved elusive.

The nation’s cities became war zones in the long hot summer of 1967. Black Americans fought the army and the National Guard as well as the
police across the country; the forces of law and order suppressed seventy-five separate riots, sometimes with live ammunition and orders to shoot to kill. Forty-three people died in Detroit, where the army was deployed for eight days of combat and patrols; twenty-six in Newark, where the army was alerted for riot duty. In all, the nation suffered eighty-eight deaths and 1,397 injuries; the police arrested 16,389 people; economic damage was estimated at $664.5 million.

As Detroit smoldered on the morning of July 25, 1967, Hoover called the president with some real-time intelligence: the transcript of a wiretapped conversation between Martin Luther King and Stanley Levison, who remained under FBI surveillance.

“
King was told by Levison, who is his principal advisor, and who is a secret communist, that he has more to gain nationally by agreeing with the violence,” Hoover reported, confiding that this fresh intelligence was the result of an FBI tap. Hoover said that King thought “the President is afraid at this time and is willing to make concessions.” The president did not fear Martin Luther King. But he
was
afraid that there was an unseen hand behind the upheavals. He thought foreign agents—maybe the Cubans, perhaps the Soviets—might be instigating the urban riots. He told Hoover to “keep your men busy to find the central connection” between the Communists and the black power movement. “We’ll find some central theme,” the president said.

Hoover said he would get right on it. One month later, on August 25, the FBI inaugurated COINTELPRO—BLACK HATE.

Orders went out to twenty-three FBI field offices to “
disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize the activities of black nationalist hate type organizations.” The Bureau singled out Martin Luther King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference along with Stokely Carmichael and H. Rap Brown’s Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). Hoover publicly labeled King along with his more radical counterparts as the leading “rabble-rousers” and “firebrands” inciting black riots. BLACK HATE went hand in hand with the newly created “Ghetto Informant Program.” Within the year three thousand people had been enlisted as FBI sources—many of them respectable businessmen, military veterans, and senior citizens—to keep watch over the black communities of urban America. BLACK HATE and the Ghetto Informant ranks soon doubled in size and scope.

In the fall of 1967, the urban riots ebbed but the peace marches grew. The
protesters in Washington chanted: “Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?” The president ordered the FBI, the CIA, and the army to root out the conspiracy to overthrow his government.

“I’m
not
going to let the Communists take this government and
they’re doing it right now
,” LBJ shouted at Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, Secretary of State Dean Rusk, and Director of Central Intelligence Richard Helms during a ninety-five-minute Saturday morning meeting on November 4, 1967.

On his orders,
liberal-minded men—like the new attorney general, Ramsey Clark, and his deputy Warren Christopher, later President Bill Clinton’s secretary of state—commanded the FBI to spy on Americans in concert with the United States Army and the National Security Agency. Some 1,500 army intelligence officers in civilian clothing undertook the surveillance of some 100,000 American citizens. Army intelligence shared all their reports with the FBI over the next three years. The CIA tracked antiwar leaders and black militants who traveled overseas, and it reported back to the FBI.

The FBI, in turn, shared thousands of selected files on Americans with army intelligence and the CIA. All three intelligence services sent the names of Americans to the National Security Agency for inclusion on a global watch list; the NSA relayed back to the FBI hundreds of transcripts of intercepted telephone calls to and from suspect Americans.

The president had created a concerted effort to organize a secret police. He was trying to synchronize the gears of the FBI, the CIA, and the army to create an all-pervasive intelligence machine that would watch citizens as if they were foreign spies.

But the political forces at work in the world in 1968 were too powerful to control. None of the intelligence the president received calmed his troubled mind. By the time of the Tet offensive at the end of January 1968—with 400,000 Communist troops striking almost every major city and military garrison in South Vietnam—LBJ believed that his enemies had encircled him in Washington.

He was a haunted man when he spoke to Hoover on February 14, 1968.

“
I don’t want anybody to know I called you,” LBJ said in a hoarse whisper, breathing heavily, sounding exhausted.

“I want you personally to do one big job before you go out,” the president said. What he wanted was an intensified search for spies in Washington.
He suspected that American politicians and political aides were serving the Communist cause.

The FBI’s electronic surveillance of foreign embassies and consulates now included closed-circuit television monitoring as well as wiretap coverage of the Soviets in Washington and New York. LBJ told Hoover to step up the surveillance in a search for Americans leaking information to the nation’s enemies. He wanted reports on senators, congressmen, their staffs on Capitol Hill, and any other prominent American citizens who might be in secret contact with Communists in foreign embassies. He feared that congressional staff members were secretly working for the Soviets, perhaps delivering government documents to the KGB, on behalf of their bosses.

“If you don’t do anything else—and that is while you and I are here—I want you to watch, with all the care and caution and judgment that you ever have built up over forty or fifty years, these embassies and what those who’re dedicated to overthrowing us are doing,” the president said.

“I would watch it like nobody’s business and I’d make it the highest priority,” LBJ told Hoover. “See who they’re talking to, what they’re saying … I just want you to personally take charge of this and watch it yourself.”

He wanted Hoover to scrutinize politically suspect members of Congress with special attention. “I’m going to insist that everybody who has secret documents be carefully cleared,” he said. “Say to those committee chairmen, ‘The President has ordered us to check everybody.’

“Because when McNamara goes up and testifies before Fulbright that we are breaking the North Vietnamese code and a goddamn Commie sympathizer goes and tells it, they just change their codes.… Chase down every damn lead and see who they saw and who they talked to and when and how … You the only guy in the government that’s watching it. I just want to order you now to be more diligent than you’ve ever been in your life.”

“I’ll give it my personal attention, Mr. President,” Hoover said.

The FBI sent squads of agents to spy on the diplomatic compounds of allies and enemies alike. They gave special attention to the embassy of South Vietnam, America’s faltering partner in the war on communism, trying to see if Americans were working with foreign diplomats and spies to subvert the president.

“A
PILLAR OF STRENGTH IN A CITY OF WEAK MEN
”

Lyndon Johnson renounced his power on March 31, 1968. He said he would not seek reelection. He spoke to the nation on television, his face a crumpled mask of exhaustion, his voice tinged with bitterness and despair.

To LBJ’s anguish, and to Hoover’s anger, Senator Robert F. Kennedy immediately became the front-runner for the Democratic nomination. Both men had good reason to believe that their most bitter political enemy would be the next president. Hoover feared a concomitant surge from the left wing of America, and most of all a rise among the radicals in the black power movement. RFK’s campaign was catalyzing black voters across America; the candidate had a newfound fervor for the politics of liberation.

Four days after LBJ stood down from the presidential election, Hoover wrote to his field agents to be on guard against the forces he had labeled BLACK HATE: “
The Negro youth and moderates must be made to understand that if they succumb to revolutionary teaching, they will be dead revolutionaries.”

The next evening, Martin Luther King was assassinated in Memphis.

The killing unleashed unfettered rage across the country; the flames burned close to the White House. Returning from King’s funeral in Memphis, Attorney General Ramsey Clark looked down upon Washington, D.C., from his airplane. The burning city, aglow as night fell, was in the grip of the most dangerous insurrection since the war of 1812. King’s killer, James Earl Ray, eluded the biggest manhunt in FBI history by taking a bus to Toronto and an airplane to London. A Scotland Yard detective arrested him sixty-six days later as he tried to board a flight for Brussels.

On April 23, the Students for a Democratic Society seized Columbia University; six days later police stormed the campus and arrested seven hundred students. It took the FBI ten more days to respond. The response was COINTELPRO—NEW LEFT.

The first wave of the FBI’s national attack on the antiwar movement included explicit instructions from Hoover and Sullivan to all field offices: Instigate conflicts among New Left leaders. Exploit the rifts between SDS and its rival factions. Create the false impression that an FBI agent stood behind every mailbox, that informants riddled their ranks. Use disinformation to disrupt them. Drive them mad. But COINTELPRO was behind the curve. More than one hundred campuses across the country had already been hit by student protests. The marches were breaking barricades, and at
their fringes were militants willing to toss Molotov cocktails and more. Hoover sent out a fierce call to arms for his special agents in charge across America. “
I have been appalled by the reaction of some of our field offices to some of the acts of violence and terrorism which have occurred … on college campuses,” he wrote. “I expect an immediate and aggressive response.”

Hoover saw a gathering storm unlike anything since the great police, coal, and steel strikes that swept the nation as the American Left rose up after World War I. But the FBI had no answer to the violence and rage that shook America that spring.

Robert Kennedy was assassinated in Los Angeles on June 6. Millions of Americans had put their hopes in him. Hoover was more cold-eyed. “
He became a kind of Messiah for the generation gap and individuals who were pro-King and still are,” Hoover wrote in a memo to his top aides after RFK’s death. Kennedy’s election would have been the end of Hoover’s power.

The murder left the path to the White House open for a man who vowed to restore the rule of law and order. Hoover now had reason to hope for a restoration, a return to Republican verities, and a renaissance for the FBI. His old friend Richard Nixon might be elected president in November.

It was a very close call. The contest between Nixon and LBJ’s vice president, Hubert Humphrey, swung on public opinion about the war in Vietnam. Half a million American soldiers now fought; they died by the hundreds each week. Ten days before the election, after an all-night meeting with his closest military and intelligence aides, Johnson was set to announce a halt to the American bombing of Vietnam and a plan for a negotiated peace. But at the last minute, President Thieu of South Vietnam balked.

“
We’ve lost Thieu,” LBJ told an aide on the eve of the election. “He thinks that we will sell him out.”