Enemies: A History of the FBI (80 page)

  
7.
“An Agent could not be expected”:
History of the SIS
, vol. 1, pp. 14ff.

14.
T
HE
M
ACHINE OF
D
ETECTION

  
1.
“a very likely source of information”:
Hoover to Attorney General, Feb. 14, 1943, FBI, cited in Katherine A. S. Sibley,
Red Spies in America: Stolen Secrets and the Dawn of the Cold War
(Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2004). Sibley’s book is the single best source, bar none, on the origins of Soviet espionage in America.

  
2.
“It was obvious”:
The transcript of the wiretap and the FBI’s summary of the conversation are reproduced and reliably reconstructed from fragments of declassified FBI documents cited in
Red Spies in America
and John Earl Haynes, Harvey Klehr, and Alexander Vassilev,
Spies: The Rise and Fall of the KGB in America
(New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2009).

  
3.
“like children lost in the woods”:
Duggan’s quote comes from a 1940 KGB file cited in Haynes, Klehr, and Vassilev,
Spies
, p. 239.

  
4.
“a human side of Edgar Hoover”:
Biddle,
In Brief Authority
, pp. 258–259.

  
5.
“a ‘custodial detention’ list of citizens”:
Biddle to Assistant Attorney General Hugh Cox and Hoover, July 6, 1943, DOJ, cited in “The Scope of FBI Counterintelligence,”
CI Reader
, National Counterintelligence Executive, Director of National Intelligence, pp. 178–181.

  
6.
“where revolutionary preachings are given”:
Memo for the Director, Aug. 19, 1940, FBI,
CI Reader
, “Scope of FBI Domestic Intelligence.”

  
7.
“opposed to the American way of life”:
Hoover to M. F. McGuire, Assistant to the Attorney General, Aug. 21, 1940, FBI,
CI Reader
, “Scope of FBI Domestic Intelligence.”

  
8.
“who may be dangerous”:
Hoover to FBI Field Offices, “Dangerousness Classification,” Aug. 14, 1943, FBI/FOIA.

  
9.
“key figures”:
Security Index cards were supposed to be prepared “only on those individuals of the greatest importance to the Communist movement”; as of early 1946, after the list was cut back, there were 10,763 Security Index cards on “communists and members of the Nationalist Party of Puerto Rico.” D. M. Ladd to Hoover, Feb. 27, 1946, FBI,
CI Reader
, “The Custodial Detention Program.”

15.
O
RGANIZING THE
W
ORLD

  
1.
“the system that has worked so successfully”:
Donovan to Clark, Aug. 29, 1945, FBI, collected in FRUS Intelligence, pp. 24–26.

  
2.
“He was in possession”:
Donald Shannon, oral history interview, Sept. 4, 2003, FBI/FBIOH.

  
3.
“to be in a position”:
Hoover to Watson, March 5, 1941, FDRL.

P
ART
III  •  Cold War

16.
N
O
G
ESTAPO

  
1.
“the right to guide”:
Churchill quoted in Raymond A. Callahan,
Churchill: Retreat from Empire
(Wilmington, Del.: SR Books, 1984), p. 185.

  
2.
“The joint chiefs of staff”:
The military was widely opposed to Donovan. The United States had three different and opposing teams of spies and secret agents out in the world as the Allies fought to deliver a death blow to Nazi Germany. One was Hoover’s. One was Donovan’s. And one belonged to the army intelligence chief, General George Veazey Strong.
   The general’s service was code-named The Pond. Strong had created it shortly after taking his post as chief of army intelligence in the fall of 1942. Its orders were to uncover spying and subversion against the United States by its wartime allies, the British and the Soviets. “Its existence was not known,” Brigadier General Hayes Kroner said in secret postwar testimony at a closed congressional hearing; only a very few men, including “the President himself, who had to know by virtue of his approving certain operations, knew it existed.” The generals had put a highly unusual army officer, John “Frenchy” Grombach, in charge of The Pond. His orders were impressive: “He would not only institute a secret intelligence service, looking to the current war effort, but he would lay the foundation for a perpetual, a far-seeing, a far-distant, continuing secret intelligence service,” General Kroner testified. “That was the birth of high-level intelligence, secret intelligence operations in our government.”
   The FBI knew Frenchy Grombach well. “As you know,” read a report circulated among Hoover’s top national security aides, “Colonel Grombach for the past five years has been handling ultra secret intelligence work for the Army and the White House.” The colonel long served as an FBI source on Communist influence inside American intelligence.

  
3.
“their use as a secret intelligence agency”:
Park Report, Rose A. Conway files, OSS/Donovan folder, HSTL;
“drastic action”:
Colonel Richard Park, Jr., Memorandum for the President, April 13, 1945, FBI/FOIA.

  
4.
“I said, ‘What the hell is this?’ ”:
Vaughan interview, in Ovid Demaris,
The Director: An Oral Biography of J. Edgar Hoover
(New York: Harper’s Magazine Press, 1975), p. 109.

  
5.
“future communications along that line”:
Vaughan to Hoover, April 23, 1945, HSTL.

  
6.
“building up a Gestapo”:
FRUS Intelligence, p. 4 (HST conversation with White House budget director Harold D. Smith, May 4, 1945).

  
7.
“a dumb son of a bitch”:
HST oral history quoted in Merle Miller,
Plain Speaking: An Oral Biography of Harry S. Truman
(New York: Berkley, 1974), p. 226.

  
8.
Hoover had renewed his power:
See Athan Theoharis,
The FBI and American Democracy: A Brief Critical History
(Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2004). We know much of what we know about FBI wiretapping thanks to tireless work over three decades by Theoharis.
   A Truman Library oral history given by Attorney General Tom Clark’s executive assistant H. Graham Morison—fascinating but unfortunately unverifiable—suggests that at least some wiretap authorizations were rejected during 1946 and 1947:

MORISON:
 … One of my most difficult tasks was those little slips—about just like this, not much larger than that—which would come in from J. Edgar Hoover for authority to wiretap.

Q: Requests from J. Edgar Hoover for wiretapping?

MORISON:
Yes. I accumulated those damn things in my desk drawer until I had about fifty and then Edgar called the Attorney General and said, “I want to know why some fifty requests for wiretaps were not acted upon.”

He said, “Well, I guess Graham Morison has them. It is his job to first review them.”
   So, he called and asked about them. I said, “Tom, you revere our Constitution; I know you do, I’ve talked to you about it. There is no authority in law and it is in contradiction of the civil rights of a free people to permit this invasion of their privacy.…” And he said, “Well, Edgar’s coming up. You have to carry the ball.”
   I said, “I’ll be delighted to.”
   So he came up and the Attorney General asked me to state my position to Hoover.… I said, “Mr. Hoover, about the requested wiretaps. You studied law, as I did. I have a great reverence for our Constitution, and as a lawyer, I am persuaded that you know and I know that we have absolutely no authority—however you may feel about it and despite your desire to know about the actions of citizens—to invade their privacy in peacetime. It makes a mockery out of our Constitution and as far as I’m concerned, I will not let you do it.”
   And he said, “Well, Mr. Attorney General, what about you?”
   Tom Clark replied, “Well, whatever he says, Edgar, I will follow.” … It’s a strange thing, but after this incident Tom said, “My God, I thought I would never see the day when somebody would ‘buck’ Edgar! He has walked over every Attorney General since Attorney General Stone.…”
   And I said, “Well, blame it on me.”
   He said, “That’s what I intend to do.” We never had any repercussions, but it ended the matter while I was there.

Q: Did you block those wiretaps?

MORISON:
Every one of them.

Q: Were there no wiretaps by the FBI during the Truman administration?

MORISON:
None that required the approval of the Attorney General were authorized while I was Executive Assistant in ’46 or ’47. There may have been some after I left that post.

  
9.
“to confine the FBI”:
FRUS Intelligence, p. 4 (HST conversations with White House budget director Smith, July 6 and Sept. 5, 1945).

10.
“The future welfare of the United States”:
Hoover to Clark, Aug. 29, 1945, FRUS Intelligence, pp. 24–26.

11.
“Donovan’s plans”:
Hoover to Clark, Sept. 6, 1945, FRUS Intelligence, pp. 31–32.

12.
“FBI Plan for United States Secret World-Wide Intelligence Coverage”:
undated but prepared on Sept. 21, 1945, FBI/FOIA. “The FBI plan provides for the joint operation in every country of the world of the Office of Military Intelligence, the Office of Naval Intelligence, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation,” Hoover’s presentation read. “Foreign and domestic intelligence are inseparable and constitute one field of operation,” he argued. “The Communist movement originated in Russia but operates in the United States. To follow these organizations access must be had to their origin and headquarters in foreign countries as well as to their activities in the United States.” Hoover’s intelligence reports for the White House in the summer of 1945 covered the subversive activities of Soviets, Germans, Japanese, Chinese, Filipinos, French, Italian, Koreans, Poles, Spaniards, Yugoslavs, and Puerto Ricans in the United States.

13.
“I visited President Truman”:
Chiles to Hoover, Oct. 2, 1945, FBI, FRUS Intelligence, pp. 55–56. In 1990, forty-five years after Hoover sent him to see Truman at the White House, Morton Chiles recorded a home video recounting the conversation: “Mr. Hoover sent me over to see President Truman … because it was very urgent that someone get to Mr. Truman before he signed an executive order [which would] put Wild Bill Donovan in charge of world-wide intelligence … [Truman] was very grateful that I had come over to brief him on this because he knew nothing of it. He said that Roosevelt never told him anything.” Chiles memoir, FBI/FBIOH.

14.
“the President had stated flatly”:
Minutes of the 168th Meeting of the Secretary of State’s Staff Committee, Nov. 20, 1945, FRUS Intelligence, pp. 118–120.