Enemies: A History of the FBI (49 page)

Hoover reacted to the theft as if an assassin had tried to cut out his heart. He suspected the thieves were allied with the radical Catholic priests Daniel and Philip Berrigan, who had been imprisoned for destroying draft files; Hoover himself accused them, in public, on the thinnest evidence, of conspiring to kidnap Henry Kissinger. He assured the White House that arrests were imminent. But despite a nationwide investigation that lasted for at least six years, no one ever was charged in the theft. The case remained unsolved.

The Citizens’ Commission to Investigate the FBI copied the stolen files and delivered them to members of Congress and the press. It took weeks, in some cases months, before the reporters began to understand the documents. They were fragmentary records of undercover FBI operations to infiltrate twenty-two college campuses with informers, and they described the wiretapping of the Philadelphia chapter of the Black Panthers. It took a year before one reporter made a concerted effort to decode a word that appeared on the files: COINTELPRO. The word was unknown outside the FBI.

In a desperate effort to keep the deepest secrets of the FBI from being exposed, Hoover ordered an end to COINTELPRO six weeks after the Media break-in. Hundreds of operations, almost all of them aimed at the
Left, were killed. Sullivan, their intellectual author, was incensed. He told his allies that Hoover had sheathed the most powerful weapon the Bureau had ever deployed to disrupt, disarm, and destroy its enemies.

Nixon revived their purpose a few weeks later.

“L
ET’S GET THESE BASTARDS
”

The newly installed White House tapes were rolling now, and they recorded the old friendship and the new frictions between Nixon and Hoover.

Reminiscing in the Oval Office on May 26, Hoover recounted the hatred between President Johnson and Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy. He said he had warned that Kennedy would try “
to steal the nomination from Lyndon” at the Democratic National Convention in 1964.

“That’s what got me in bad with Bobby,” Hoover said.

“In
bed
with him?” Nixon said.

“No—in
bad
with him,” Hoover chortled.

Nixon then attempted a vocal impersonation of LBJ: “Ah couldn’t have been President without J. Edgar Hoover. Now don’t let those sons of bitches getcha.” Laughter ensued.

Later that day, on the telephone, Nixon told Hoover to do anything it took to find a pair of Black Liberation Army snipers who had killed two New York City police officers. “
The national security information we seek is unlimited,” said Nixon. “Okay? And you’ll tell the Attorney General that’s what I’ve suggested—well,
ordered
—and you do it. Okay? Don’t you agree with this?”

“I agree with it thoroughly,” Hoover said.

“By God, let’s get these bastards,” the president said.

“I’ll go all out on the intelligence on this thing,” Hoover responded.

“Go in with everything you’ve got,” Nixon said. “Surveillance, electronic and everything.” The president invoked the mantra of national security; Hoover responded ritually.

Two weeks later,
The New York Times
began to publish the Pentagon Papers, a top secret history of the Vietnam War. The papers had been purloined by Daniel Ellsberg, who had worked on the study as a civilian analyst for the Defense Department. He had become a dedicated antiwar activist, and he had been trying to leak the study for many months. Hoover and Sullivan quickly identified Ellsberg as the prime suspect.

On June 17, Haldeman told the president that he thought the Brookings Institution, a think tank in Washington, might have files that could serve as evidence against Ellsberg. Nixon leaped at the idea of stealing them. “
Do you remember Huston’s plan?
Implement
it,” said the president. “Goddamn it, get in and get those files.
Blow the safe and get it
.”

Nixon wanted political intelligence so badly that he created his own secret squad of burglars and wiretappers. He authorized the creation of a secret White House unit that had the capability to conduct those kinds of missions. The group was nicknamed the Plumbers, because in the beginning they sought to plug the leaks that plagued the president. They would carry out black-bag jobs, wiretaps, and disinformation campaigns on his behalf.

Their mastermind was a strange kind of genius named G. Gordon Liddy. He had spent five years in Hoover’s FBI, from 1957 to 1962, rising to the rank of a supervisor at headquarters, where he had learned the dark arts of COINTELPRO. Liddy was installed in a cover job as general counsel for the Committee to Re-elect the President, whose chairman was John Mitchell. He drew up plans, which he presented in person in the office of the attorney general, to spend $1 million on secret agents who would kidnap antiwar leaders and spirit them off to Mexico, entrap liberal politicians with prostitutes working out of bugged houseboats, plant informants inside the campaigns of Nixon’s opponents, and wiretap the Democratic Party apparatus for the 1972 presidential campaign. Mitchell disapproved of kidnapping and blackmail—in retrospect, he said, he should have thrown Liddy out the window—but the espionage elements of the plan survived.

Liddy bungled them from beginning to end. His first mission was breaking into the office of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist, where he failed to find defamatory files. His last mission, nine months later, was bugging the Democratic Party headquarters at the Watergate, where he and his confreres, all former agents of the FBI and the CIA, were captured.

“
Why Watergate?” said the FBI’s Ed Miller, a veteran of many a black-bag job, who would soon rise to succeed Sullivan as third in command at the Bureau. “Because of Sullivan’s influence on the White House … They became enamored with surreptitious entries as being a gangbuster investigative technique. And that’s when the White House decided to create their own.”

If Hoover would not do the dirty work the president wanted done, Nixon would have to do it himself.

“R
AISE HOLY HELL
”

The president created the Plumbers because he thought Hoover had lost the will to conduct political warfare. Many of the elements of the bill of impeachment drawn up against Nixon three years later grew out of his frustrations with the FBI, his thirst for the secrets Hoover no longer supplied, and the bugging and burglary that followed.

The Pentagon Papers case was the breaking point. Ellsberg, after going underground, surrendered on June 28, 1971. The FBI had to make a case, under the Espionage Act of 1917, that could send him to prison for the rest of his life. But “
Hoover refused to investigate,” Nixon said. “That’s why we conducted the investigation over here. It was as simple as that.”

The plot to remove J. Edgar Hoover started the next day.

The denouement began with a “bizarre story,” as Nixon recounted it: “Edgar Hoover refused to investigate because Marx—Marx’s daughter was married to that son-of-a-bitch Ellsberg.” The father-in-law of the son-of-a-bitch was not Karl Marx, nor Groucho Marx, as Nixon pointed out, but Louis Marx, a wealthy toy manufacturer who contributed every year to a Christmas charity run by Hoover. He was officially listed at headquarters as a friend of the FBI. Sullivan and his intelligence chief, Charles Brennan, decided that Marx had to be interviewed in the Ellsberg case. He was ready to testify against his son-in-law. Hoover said no. But the interview went ahead. Hoover summarily removed Brennan as chief of the Intelligence Division.

Enraged, Sullivan tried to organize a revolt among the leaders of the FBI. The White House and the attorney general heard within hours about his fury. Mitchell told the president on June 29 that a revolution was brewing in the Bureau. “
In terms of discipline, Hoover is right. In terms of his decision, he was wrong,” Nixon told Mitchell. “He just cannot—and I really feel that you have to tell him this—he cannot, with my going tomorrow to address the FBI graduation, and also with the Ellsberg case being the issue—he cannot take anything which causes dissension within the FBI ranks. It’s just going to raise holy hell. They’ll say, ‘This crotchety old man did it again,’ see. That’s my feeling about it.”

Mitchell replied: “Well, I don’t think there’s any doubt about it, Mr. President. I think this might be the last straw as far as he’s concerned.”

Nixon said: “You tell him, ‘I’ve talked to the President and, Edgar, he doesn’t want to embarrass you in a disciplinary matter where he has overruled the director, but he feels
very
strongly. He’s coming over there to the
FBI, you know, and after all, we—and he knows that discipline is important, but he feels very strongly that we must not have the Ellsberg thing be a reason for dissension in the Bureau. That could raise holy hell.’ Could that be all right?”

“Yes, sir,” Mitchell said. “We’ll try it that way and see how it flies. I would hope that he doesn’t blow his stack and leave the fold.”

Nixon said: “Well, if he does now, I’ll be ready.”

The Supreme Court ruled on June 30 that the newspapers had the right to publish the Pentagon Papers. That ruling came down as Nixon was praising Hoover before a hundred graduates of the FBI’s training academy.

“
As a young Congressman I worked with him and with others in the Federal Bureau of Investigation in major investigations of various subversive elements in this country,” he said. “Let me tell you something. Anybody who is strong, anybody who fights for what he believes in, anybody who stands up when it is tough is bound to be controversial. And I say that insofar as he is concerned, there may be controversy, but the great majority of the American people back Mr. Hoover.”

The question was whether Nixon and Hoover still backed each other. They spoke by telephone the next day. Nixon asked Hoover what the Supreme Court decision meant for the prosecution of the Ellsberg case.

P
RESIDENT
N
IXON:
What’s your public relations judgment on it, Edgar? I’d just like to know.

H
OOVER:
My public relations judgment, Mr. President, is that you should remain absolutely silent about it.

P
RESIDENT
N
IXON:
You would?

H
OOVER:
I would … And I think we ought to be
awful careful
what we do in this case of this man Ellsberg. Because there again, they’re going to make a martyr out of him. All of the press in the country are going to, of course, come to the front that he’s a martyr. And in view of what the Supreme Court has now said, I doubt whether we’re going to be able to get a conviction of him.

The president was furious. “I talked to Hoover last night and Hoover is not going after this case as strong as I would like,” Nixon complained to Haldeman. “There’s something dragging him.”

“You don’t have the feeling the FBI is really pursuing this?” asked Haldeman.

“Yeah, particularly the conspiracy side,” Nixon said. “I want to go after everyone. I’m not so interested in Ellsberg, but we have to go after everybody who’s a member of this conspiracy.”

Nixon believed to the marrow of his bones that he was up against a vast left-wing cabal—an array of forces ranging from the intelligence services of Communist dictatorships to the liberal wing of the Democratic Party—and that Western civilization hung in the balance of this struggle. On July 6, he gave a speech to newspaper and television executives at the great columned building housing the National Archives and the original copy of the Constitution of the United States. “When I see those columns,” he said, “I think of what happened to Greece and Rome.”

“They lost their will to live,” he said. “They became subject to the decadence that destroys civilization. The United States is reaching that period.”

“A
HELL OF A CONFRONTATION
”

Bill Sullivan had an ultimatum: Hoover had to go. He went to see Robert Mardian at the internal security division of the Justice Department, carrying a threatening weapon: two suitcases filled with transcripts and summaries of the warrantless Kissinger wiretaps on Nixon aides and newsmen. The taps were arguably unlawful; without question, they were politically explosive.

Sullivan said that Hoover could use the documents to blackmail the president of the United States—a startling if implausible idea. Deeply alarmed, Mardian called the White House. The president went on high alert.

“The P agreed to meet with J. Edgar Hoover tomorrow to seek his resignation,” Haldeman wrote in his diary on Friday, September 17. But later that day, Nixon quailed at the thought. He put off the meeting, and he tried to convince the attorney general to tell the director to step down on his seventy-seventh birthday, New Year’s Day 1972. Mitchell said Hoover would not accept such an order from anybody but the president.

Dreading the conversation, Nixon invited Hoover to breakfast at the White House at 8:30 on Monday, September 20. The director played it perfectly.
“
He was trying to demonstrate that despite his age he was still physically, mentally, and emotionally equipped to carry on,” Nixon recounted in his memoirs. “I tried to point out as gently and subtly as I could that as an astute politician he must recognize that the attacks were going to mount.” He was too subtle by half. Hoover replied: “More than anything else, I want to see
you
re-elected in 1972. If you feel that my staying on as head of the Bureau hurts your chances for re-election, just let me know.”

The president lost his spine. “At the end of the day,” Haldeman recorded, “he got around to reporting to me on his very-much-off-the-record breakfast meeting with J. Edgar Hoover. Said that it’s ‘no go’ at this time. Hoover didn’t take the bait, apparently, and is going to stay on as a political matter. He feels it’s much better for the P for him to do so. He will then pull out at any point in the future when the P feels that it would be politically necessary.”