Enemies: A History of the FBI (75 page)

• Foreign Affairs Oral History (FAOH): more than fifteen hundred oral histories of American diplomats (and diplomats who served as intelligence officers) have been compiled by the Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training and many are available online at
http://www.adst.org/Oral_History.htm

• Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library (FDRL)

• Harry S. Truman Presidential Library (HSTL)

• Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidential Library (DDEL)

• John F. Kennedy Presidential Library (JFKL)

• Richard M. Nixon Presidential Library (RMNL)

• Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library (GRFL)

• Jimmy Carter Presidential Library (JCL)

• George H. W. Bush Library (GHWBL)

• Records of the Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities (hereinafter “Church Committee” or CC)

• Federal Bureau of Investigation records and documents published on the FBI’s history website,
http://vault.fbi.gov
/ (FBI), were an invaluable source for this book. Interested readers may peruse the Bureau’s original files on the ACLU, the American Nazi Party, COINTELPRO, Fidel Castro, the Freedom Riders, Martin Luther King, Jr., Saddam Hussein, and other subjects ranging from Jimmy Hoffa to Jimi Hendrix. A unique collection of records on the origins of the Communist Party of the United States of America dating to 1919 is at
http://www.marxists.org/history/usa/eam/index.html
.

P
ART
I  •  Spies and Saboteurs

1.
A
NARCHY

  
1.
“He worked Sundays and nights”:
O’Brian interview, CBS News, May 2, 1972 (the day that Hoover died).

  
2.
“I sometimes have thought”:
Fennell interview, in Ovid Demaris,
The Director: An Oral Biography of J. Edgar Hoover
(New York: Harper’s Magazine Press, 1975).

  
3.
“cool relentless logic”:
Hester O’Neill, “J. Edgar Hoover’s Schooldays,”
American Boy and Open Road
, Sept. 1954.

  
4.
“filled our unsuspecting communities”:
President Wilson’s war message to Congress, April 2, 1917.

  
5.
“When we declared war”:
O’Brian quoted in
The New York Times
, Oct. 9, 1918.

  
6.
“Immense pressure”:
John Lord O’Brian, “New Encroachments on Individual Freedom,”
Harvard Law Review
66, no. 1 (Nov. 1952), p. 14.

  
7.
Von Papen began to build a propaganda machine:
On the scope of the German effort, see testimony of A. Bruce Bielaski (Director, Bureau of Investigation, Department of Justice), Senate Judiciary Committee, 65th Congress, 2nd Session, Dec. 6, 1918 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1919).

  
8.
“We might as well admit openly”:
Bernstorff cited in Arthur S. Link,
Wilson: The Struggle for Neutrality
,
1914–1915
(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1960), p. 378.

  
9.
“the gravest threats”:
Woodrow Wilson, Third Annual Message to Congress, Dec. 7, 1915.

2.
R
EVOLUTION

  
1.
“I believe in power”:
Theodore Roosevelt letter to George Otto Trevelyan, June 19, 1908, in Joseph Bucklin Bishop,
Theodore Roosevelt and His Time Shown in His Own Letters
(New York: C. Scribner’s Sons, 1920), pp. 92–94.

  
2.
“The time of the great social revolutions has arrived”:
Theodore Roosevelt,
American Ideals
,
and Other Essays
,
Social and Political
(New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1897), p. 304.

  
3.
“anarchy is a crime”:
Theodore Roosevelt, First Annual Message to Congress, Dec. 3, 1901, online at the American Presidency Project,
http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu
.

  
4.
“I have always been averse”:
Attorney General Brewster cited in Homer Cummings and Carl McFarland,
Federal Justice: Chapters in the History of Justice and the Federal Executive
(New York: Macmillan, 1937), p. 373.

  
5.
“These people should all be marked”:
Robert A. Pinkerton, “Detective Surveillance of Anarchists,”
North American Review
173, no. 540 (1901), p. 39.

  
6.
“the methods of Russian spies and detectives”:
Unsigned editorial in the
Salem
(Oregon)
Capitol Journal
, reprinted in the
Portland Oregonian
, July 8, 1905, cited in Jerry A. O’Callaghan, “Senator Mitchell and the Oregon Land Frauds, 1905,”
Pacific Historical Review
21, no. 3 (Aug. 1952), p. 261;
“outrageous conduct”:
Attorney General Wickersham to President Taft, May 10, 1912, NARA RG 60, Jones Pardon file case.

  
7.
“
ROOSEVELT
, in his characteristic dynamic fashion”:
Findlay to Hoover, “Memorandum for the Director: Re: Early History of the Bureau of Investigation, United States Department of Justice,” Nov. 19, 1943.

  
8.
“The Department of Justice”:
Annual Report of the Attorney General of the United States, 1907, online at
www.fbi.gov/libref/historic/history/origins
.

  
9.
“American ideas of government”:
Hearings of House Appropriations Committee on Deficiency Appropriations
, 59th Congress, 2nd Session (1907). On Jan. 17, 1908, the chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, Representative James A. Tawney, a Minnesota Republican, laid a trap for Attorney General Bonaparte. The Appropriations Committee controlled the course of federal spending. Bonaparte was asked, in an open hearing, how many Secret Service agents and private eyes the Justice Department had hired over the past year. “It would be difficult to say,” he replied, trying his best to avoid the question. He was reminded that there was a specific amount of money authorized for the Secret Service and a legal requirement that the appropriation be limited to that service alone. Had he ever employed private detectives as well? “We have to employ certain special agents from time to time,” Bonaparte replied. “We have to have some detective service.… But you do not need a great many, and you must remember that the class of men … is one you have to employ with a good deal of caution.”
   “They are not always a high type of man?” Bonaparte was asked. “No, sir,” Bonaparte replied.
   Congressman Tawney not only blocked Bonaparte’s request for federal money to create the new Bureau of Investigation, but he went one step further: he wrote a provision into the federal budget barring the Justice Department from using Secret Service agents as investigators.

10.
“ready to kick the Constitution”:
Twain to Rev. J. H. Twichell, Feb. 16, 1905,
Mark Twain’s Letters
(New York: Harper & Brothers, 1919), p. 766.

11.
On July 26, 1908:
The FBI’s records note June 29, 1908, as the date when Bonaparte dipped into his miscellaneous funds to hire Secret Service agents (sources differ as to whether it was eight, nine, or ten agents). But the Bureau calls the date of the formal signed order, July 26, 1908, its official founding day.
   The order Bonaparte signed creating a permanent “force of special agents” reads as follows:

All matters relating to investigations under the Department, except those to be made by bank examiners, and in connection with the naturalization service, will be referred to the Chief Examiner for a memorandum as to whether any member of the force of special agents under his direction is available for the work to be performed. No authorization of expenditure for special examinations shall be made by any officer of the Department, without first ascertaining whether one of the regular force is available for the service desired, and, in case the service cannot be performed by the regular force of special agents of the Department, the matter will be specially called to the attention of the Attorney General, or Acting Attorney General, together with a statement from the Chief Examiner as to the reasons why a regular employee cannot be assigned to the work, before authorization shall be made for any expenditure of any money for this purpose.
CHARLES J. BONAPARTE
, Attorney General.

The glorified accountant who held his job by patronage and bore the title of “chief examiner” was, in effect, the director of the Bureau of Investigation in its first years.

12.
“The difficulties encountered”:
Bonaparte to Roosevelt, Jan. 14, 1909, online at
www.fbi.gov/libref/historic/history/origins.htm
.

13.
“The Attorney General knows”:
Bonaparte, Annual Report of the Attorney General of the United States, December 1908, online at
www.fbi.gov/libref/historic/history/origins.htm
.

3.
T
RAITORS

  
1.
“vicious spies and conspirators”:
Woodrow Wilson, “Address on Flag Day at Washington,” June 14, 1917.

  
2.
“I believe in the right of free speech”:
Ernest Freeberg,
Democracy’s Prisoner: Eugene V. Debs, the Great War, and the Right to Dissent
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2008), pp. 98–104.

  
3.
“traitors, scoundrels, and spies”:
Statement of Senator Lee Overman,
Congressional Record
, 65th Congress, 2nd Session, April 4, 1918 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1919).
   Senator Overman convened Judiciary Committee hearings on the Red threat only two months after the end of World War I. The hearings in many ways anticipated the work of Senator Joseph McCarthy more than thirty years later. They influenced the course of the great Red scare of 1919.
   In January 1919, Overman took testimonies on Germany’s wartime espionage against the United States. The hearings were a bust, since not a single act of German sabotage had troubled the nation since Black Tom.
   Senator Overman and his Judiciary Committee colleagues quickly turned their attention to the international Communist conspiracy. “I do not know whether we can go into this question right now, under our resolution, and investigate Bolshevism,” the senator said. But they did, and immediately.
   Archibald E. Stevenson, a thirty-five-year-old Wall Street lawyer and a self-proclaimed expert on the Red threat, riveted the committee. Stevenson said that thousands upon thousands of Americans—ministers, professors, politicians, publishers—were in thrall to the Russian Revolution. He named hundreds of names, including nationally respected figures like Jane Addams, the Chicago social reformer, and Charles Beard, one of America’s foremost historians. Some were active Bolshevik agents, he said; others were deluded intellectuals.
   The ideas of Marx, Lenin, and Trotsky were being spread like poison by outwardly respectable Americans, Stevenson told the senators. The Russians were pouring money, people, and propaganda into the United States, and their American agents were carrying the Russian Revolution to every city and industrial center in the country through secret committees called soviets.