Enemies: A History of the FBI (82 page)

13.
“We now had dozens”:
Robert J. Lamphere and Tom Shachtman,
The FBI-KGB War: A Special Agent’s Story
(Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 1995), pp. 96–97.

14.
“I am going through”:
Truman to Churchill, July 10, 1948, cited in David McCullough,
Truman
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992), pp. 648–649.

15.
“like an animated shuttlecock”:
Pearson wrote in his Sept. 26, 1948, syndicated newspaper column, Washington Merry-Go-Round, that the “handsome FBI-man Lou Nichols” met every few days with the chairmen of HUAC and the Senate investigations subcommittee. How did Pearson know this? He correctly suspected that Hoover’s men had him under surveillance. So he put Hoover’s man under surveillance. He wrote in that same column: “This town’s name is not Moscow, but it’s gotten to be a place where sleuths tail other sleuths almost as much as the NKVD secret police do.”

16.
“an acquittal under very embarrassing circumstances”:
Jones memo to Ladd, Jan. 16, 1947, FBI, cited by the official FBI historian John J. Fox, Jr., “In the Enemy’s House: Venona and the Maturation of American Counterintelligence,” presented at the Oct. 27, 2005, Symposium on Cryptologic History.

17.
One was Laurence Duggan:
Duggan was grilled by the FBI in December 1948 after Chambers went public; and the next week by his old Soviet intelligence contacts. He died five days later by jumping or falling out of a sixteenth-story window. Hiss was indicted for perjury by a federal grand jury in December 1948 after denying under oath that he had given State Department documents to Chambers. He was convicted and sentenced to five years. Chambers had lied to the grand jury too, but without penalty. Soviet intelligence files published in 2009 proved Hiss had been a spy.

18.
“No, I was not”:
The executive-session testimony Chambers gave was never officially released. Excerpts from the transcript were first published in Sam Tanenhaus,
Whittaker Chambers: A Biography
(New York: Modern Library, 1998), pp. 216–219. The open testimony is at p. 221.
   The question of why the FBI deliberately ignored what Chambers had confessed to A. A. Berle in September 1939 and in his first interview with the Bureau in May 1942 has a pointed answer. The journalist Isaac Don Levine had been the go-between for Berle; Hoover had blackballed him in the summer of 1939; when Hoover blackballed you, you and your associates stayed blackballed. Levine had embarrassed the Bureau. He had written a series of stories for the
Saturday Evening Post
—a magazine with five million subscribers—which told the story of Soviet espionage in America for the first time. It was the story of Walter Krivitsky, a senior Soviet intelligence officer who had broken with Stalin, defected in Paris, met with the American ambassador, William Bullitt, and won his help to come to the United States. His information had helped convince Bullitt, once an ardent supporter of Soviet recognition, that Stalin’s government was a gigantic conspiracy to commit murder. Ambassador Bullitt, a journalist himself in his youth, knew and trusted Levine as a talented foreign correspondent. He vouchsafed for the Soviet defector.
   The
Saturday Evening Post
stories were riveting. They described how Stalin liquidated his real and imagined rivals. They detailed how the Soviet secret police had stolen the passports of the American volunteers who had fought in the Spanish Civil War and used the documents for the international travels of Soviet espionage agents. They laid out in some detail the workings of the Soviet foreign intelligence apparatus in the United States—and they suggested that the Soviets had been running rings around the FBI for years.
   The FBI had interviewed Krivitsky twice in New York, the first time shortly after the first article appeared in print. He was the first Soviet spy to speak with anyone at the Bureau. A retired senior FBI counterintelligence officer, Raymond J. Batvinis, reviewed the Krivitsky case file more than sixty years after it was closed. He concluded that Hoover himself decided that Krivitsky could not be trusted and should not be believed. Hoover based his judgment on an editor’s note accompanying the first article that described Krivitsky as “still a believer in the true Communism of Lenin.” That was too much for Hoover. He then wrote off Levine because he had written Krivitsky’s story. His ban tainted Berle’s report. “How can we make sense of the FBI’s failure to recognize a unique and extraordinarily valuable source of information that could have broken open Soviet intelligence activities in the Western Hemisphere like an egg?” Batvinis wrote in 2007, with the perspective of a man who had spent his career hunting spies. He concluded that Hoover and his men simply lacked “the professional skills” they needed to interview and understand a defecting Soviet intelligence officer. The result was a lost decade.

19.
“Hoover did his thing”:
Spingarn oral history, March 29, 1967, HSTL, and Spingarn interview in Ovid Demaris,
The Director: An Oral Biography of J. Edgar Hoover
(New York: Harper’s Magazine Press, 1975).

20.
“That was contrary to our whole tradition”:
Spingarn oral history, March 29, 1967, HSTL.

21.
“We began to fall out”:
Tom C. Clark oral history, Oct. 17, 1972, HSTL.

22.
“the program for the detention of Communists”:
[Deleted] to Ladd, “CIA Requests for Information Concerning Aliens,” Nov. 19, 1948, FBI/FOIA.

23.
“For some months representatives”:
Hoover to Souers, July 7, 1950, FRUS Intelligence.

24.
Congress secretly financed:
In 1971, in a signing statement repealing the Emergency Detention Act of 1950, President Nixon said: “No President has ever attempted to use the provisions of this act. And while six detention camps were established and funded by the Congress, none of them was ever used for the purposes of this legislation. In fact, all six camps have been abandoned or used for other purposes since 1957.”

25.
Dewey defeats Truman:
One of the fifty reporters who unanimously predicted Truman’s defeat was Bert Andrews, the Washington bureau chief of the reputable Republican daily the
New York Herald Tribune
, who had just won the Pulitzer Prize for a series on the loyalty and security programs. He was a secret confidant for Nixon and Chambers and he plied both men ruthlessly for scoops; riding the arc of the Red hunt, he vowed that he could make Nixon president. When Truman saw the fifty-to-nothing prediction of the press, he said: “I know every one of those fifty fellows. There isn’t one of them has enough sense to pound sand in a rat hole.”

20.
P
ARANOIA

  
1.
“She bestrides the world like a Colossus”:
Robert Payne,
Report on America
(New York: John Day, 1949), p. 3.

  
2.
“She gives the impression”:
Jan. 4, 1945, KGB file cited by Haynes, Klehr, and Vassilev in
Spies
, pp. 288–289. The report on Judith Coplon, aka Sima, was not a decoded Venona message but a file transcribed by Vassilev from KGB archives. The Soviet central intelligence agency changed its name thirteen times between 1917 and 1991. KGB, short for Committee on State Security, was adopted in March 1954 and lasted until Oct. 1991. The Soviet military intelligence service, which also changed its name, is hereinafter GRU, short for Chief Intelligence Directorate.

  
3.
“O.K.—H.”:
Memo to Ladd, Nov. 11, 1949, FBI, cited in Alan F. Westin, “The Wire-Tapping Problem: An Analysis and a Legislative Proposal,”
Columbia Law Review
52, no. 2 (November 1952), pp. 165–208. Westin’s analysis contains extensive excerpts from the Coplon trial and appeals record, including the fact that 50 FBI agents monitored the Coplon taps, that an FBI agent gave false testimony at the first trial, and that the FBI destroyed the wiretap records before the second trial.

  
4.
“the entire Coplon affair”:
Lamphere and Shachtman,
The FBI-KGB War
, pp. 115–122.

  
5.
By September 7, 1949, informed:
MI5 records cited in Michael S. Goodman, “Who Is Trying to Keep What Secret from Whom and Why? MI5-FBI Relations and the Klaus Fuchs Case,”
Journal of Cold War Studies
7, no. 3 (2005), pp. 124–146.

  
6.
“Fuchs knew as much”:
Keay to Fletcher, “Klaus Fuchs: Espionage,” Feb. 21, 1950, FBI/FOIA.

  
7.
“But after that connection with Gold”:
Donald Shannon, FBI Oral History Project interview, Sept. 4, 2003, FBI/FBIOH.

  
8.
“Take note”:
Hoover notation, Ladd to Hoover, “Subject: Foocase,” Feb. 16, 1950, FBI/FOIA.

  
9.
“What the competitors have on them”:
Moscow Center to KGB New York, April 10, 1950, Vassilev transcription cited in Haynes, Klehr, and Vassilev,
Spies
.

10.
“At the Hall he had a reputation”:
National Security Agency, “L’Affaire Weisband,” in
Breaches in the Dike—the Security Cases
, NSA DOCID 3188691.

11.
“implemented a set of defensive measures”:
Vassilev transcription of March 1949 and July 1949 KGB files; “The FBI began piecing together”: National Security Agency, “L’Affaire Weisband.”

12.
“Mr. Hoover was not one who trusted anyone”:
Furgerson oral history, FBI/FBIOH.

13.
“It is outrageous”:
Hoover note on memo, Keay to Ladd, April 7, 1949, FBI/FOIA.
   Trying to battle Allen Dulles for the title of American intelligence czar, Hoover wrote to Dulles staking out his claims. The FBI’s authority covered all the foreigners in the United States whom the CIA was trying to recruit and run as agents overseas—not only aliens and defectors but foreign students and businessmen. In short, the CIA should not fish in the FBI’s waters. This was a very sore point.
   Dulles had convinced members of Congress to draft new and sweeping legislation. The CIA Act of 1949 strengthened and expanded the power of the director of Central Intelligence, the office Dulles sought. Among those proposed powers was the CIA’s right to bring foreigners into the United States for training as spies and saboteurs against Stalin. Hoover saw this legislative language as a threat to America. What if the aliens turned out to be double agents? What if a Russian defector learned about American intelligence and then returned to Moscow? Hoover wrote in his royal-blue hand that he would fight “this astounding provision,” endorsed by Dulles and his allies at the CIA.
   Upon further review, Hoover decided the whole bill was a disaster. “Make certain,” he instructed, “that we in no way at any time approve the overall proposition. We oppose its enactment & it is viciously bad.”
   Hoover wrote to the attorney general that Dulles and his allies threatened “hopeless confusion” on the home front. His warning went unheeded. The CIA Act was rammed through Congress in great secrecy, with next to no debate. It granted the Agency, among other powers, a secret budget hidden in the Pentagon’s ledgers, the right to spend that money without accounting for it, the license to bring one hundred aliens a year into the United States and grant them permanent residence status without regard to their past war crimes or terrorist conduct, and a degree of freedom in conducting domestic operations, short of serving as a secret police.
   The battle that Hoover and Dulles had begun to wage would shape American intelligence for decades. The fight between the FBI and the CIA started in Washington but it soon spread across the country and overseas. Their theater of war was, on occasion, a theater of the absurd.
   Admiral Roscoe Hillenkoetter, Truman’s director of Central Intelligence, knew he was unqualified; he had said so himself. But the admiral deeply resented being undermined by Wild Bill Donovan, Allen Dulles, and their favorite CIA officer, Frank Wisner, who ran the Agency’s rapidly expanding worldwide campaign of commando operations and psychological warfare against Stalin. All three were leaking derogatory information as part of the Dulles campaign to become director. The admiral took the issue to President Truman and to Hoover; he advised the FBI that “the President had bitterly criticized General Donovan for trying to meddle in CIA affairs and had also termed him ‘a prying SOB.’ ”
   Hoover happily placed Harry Truman’s pungent observations in his CIA dossier. On April 5, 1950, Hoover’s file grew thicker. Hoover had picked up word that Wisner’s officers were working in Hollywood, “trying to recruit undercover Intelligence persons in the movie colony out here,” as a letter from a reliable informant read. “One of the ‘lines’ used is that the FBI is all washed up … There is quite a whispering campaign going on which is untrue and unfair.” Enraged, Hoover demanded a full-scale field investigation of Wisner, his Hollywood recruiters, and their “slanderous statements against the Bureau.”
   The FBI’s liaison at the CIA, Cartha “Deke” DeLoach—a young agent who emulated Hoover in appearance, word, and deed—told the director of Central Intelligence that Wisner’s men were “infringing on the jurisdiction of the FBI” and “slanderously trying to undermine the Bureau.” The admiral began a long lament against Wisner. He was a lord of misrule; “ ‘bad elements’ and incompetent personnel” were rife among his officers. But his star was ascending. The admiral said Wisner would soon take over every branch of the CIA’s worldwide clandestine service; his patron Allen Dulles would be close behind him. The admiral told the FBI agent that he would resign from the CIA as soon as he could find a ship that the president would let him command.
   Wisner ran the only branch of the American government on which Hoover did not have a handle. “What do we know of him?” Hoover had written on the first FBI memo to mention Wisner, which misidentified him as a “prominent newspaperman,” rather than a well-bred lawyer who had run operations in Romania for Wild Bill Donovan in World War II.
   Hoover was appalled to learn, as he soon did, that Wisner’s outfit had more money and more power than the FBI.