Enemies: A History of the FBI (83 page)

14.
“This is the most shocking picture”:
Hoover note on memo, Mohr to Tolson, “CIA Appropriations,” Aug. 18, 1951, FBI/FOIA.

21.
“I
T LOOKS LIKE
W
ORLD
W
AR
III
IS HERE
”

  
1.
“espionage, sabotage, subversive activities”:
Truman statement, July 24, 1950, HSTL. Some of Truman’s aides were shocked at the scope of this statement. “How in Hell did this get out?” the national security aide Stephen Spingarn wrote to his White House colleague, George Elsey. “Don’t know—thought you were handling,” replied Elsey, who suspected Hoover was attempting a power grab.

  
2.
“ten substantial and highly reliable”:
FBI report to White House, “Present International Situation and the Role of American Communists in the Event of War,” Aug. 24, 1950, HSTL.

  
3.
sexual entrapment and blackmail by foreign intelligence services:
The Soviets ran operations called honey traps. An attractive young woman (or an attractive young man) would flirt with an American abroad. Their coupling took place in a hotel room wired by the KGB. The American would be confronted with pictures of the tryst and a proposition: work with Moscow or face the music. The CIA grappled with cases of this kind in the Truman years. The longtime CIA station chief in Switzerland, a homosexual, had fallen into a honey trap; he was under suspicion of succumbing and serving the Soviets. He was recalled to Washington and he shot himself. The CIA hushed up the case, but the FBI knew a thing or two about it. A few years later, the most powerful foreign policy columnist in Washington, Joe Alsop, fell into a honey trap with a young man in Moscow. The FBI knew all about that one. The FBI also knew, as few did, that throughout the years Whittaker Chambers had been an underground Soviet agent, he had constantly picked up men for furtive one-night stands in New York and Washington. He had broken with communism and homosexuality at exactly the same time. The secrets and the sex—the fake names, the encoded language, the thrills and dangers—had been two sides of one coin to Chambers.

  
4.
“The Soviets knew”:
Conway oral history, FBI/FBIOH.

  
5.
Sex Deviates Program:
The origins and scope of the Sex Deviates Program and the Responsibilities Program are laid out in a report to Hoover from the FBI Executives’ Conference, chaired by Tolson, “Dissemination of Information by the Bureau Outside the Executive Departments,” Oct. 14, 1953, FBI/FOIA.

  
6.
“General Smith seemed to be”:
Hoover memorandum for Tolson and Ladd, Oct. 18, 1950, FBI/FOIA. Hoover was particularly concerned about a CIA officer named Carmel Offie, who worked under the CIA’s clandestine services chief, Frank Wisner. He suspected that Offie was an espionage agent for Israel. He knew for a fact that Offie had well-connected friends in high places all over Washington, that he was a social butterfly with an ear for hot gossip and an eye out for loose lips, and that he was a flamboyant and promiscuous homosexual with a police record for having had oral sex in a public rest room in Lafayette Park, across the street from the White House.
   Hoover had the record. An FBI memo to Hoover preparing him for his meeting with General Smith read: “We have on several occasions found it necessary to advise CIA of arrest records received at the Identification Division which reflected the homosexual activity of CIA employees. The case of Carmel Offie represents a typical example. Offie, as you know, remained on the CIA payroll for a long period of time after CIA became acquainted with the fact that he was a homosexual.
   “You will recall that Offie is currently being investigated by the FBI due to his alleged participation in Israeli espionage activities,” the memo concluded.

  
7.
“He has been very cooperative”:
Roach to Belmont, transmitting Papich memo, Sept. 27, 1954, FBI/FOIA.

  
8.
“widely exposed to penetration”:
Keay to Belmont, with Hoover note, transmitting Papich memo, “Central Intelligence Agency/Security of its Operations,” July 2, 1952, FBI/FOIA.

  
9.
“Pursuant to your request”:
Ladd to Hoover, June 24, 1952, FBI/FOIA.

22.
N
O
S
ENSE OF
D
ECENCY

  
1.
Nixon called twice a day:
Ed Tamm, a top aide to Hoover who became a federal judge, recalled that during the Eisenhower administration, “right before the director left for the office, Nixon called him, every morning,” and called again “every night, and told him what was going to happen tomorrow and who he was going to see.” Tamm interview cited in Curt Gentry,
J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and the Secrets
(New York: W. W. Norton, 1991), p. 404.

  
2.
“day-to-day and person-to-person”:
“FBI Liaison Activities,” Jan. 26, 1953, FBI/FOIA.

  
3.
“Our bible was Executive Order 10450”:
Walsh interview, Foreign Affairs Oral History (FAOH).

  
4.
“It was not a good time”:
Grand interview, FAOH.

  
5.
“The FBI reported to me”:
Attorney General Herbert Brownell, “The Fight Against Communism,” national radio and television address, April 9, 1954.

  
6.
“robbing the whole of the war industry”:
The anonymous letter to Hoover, dated Aug. 7, 1943, was reproduced in the National Security Agency’s 1995 release of historical documents from the Venona files.

  
7.
“How many other like situations”:
Hoover notation on memo from Ladd, June 23, 1947, FBI, cited in John F. Fox, Jr., “What the Spiders Did: U.S. and Soviet Counterintelligence Before the Cold War,”
Journal of Cold War Studies
11, no. 3 (Summer 2009), p. 222. My reconstruction of the career of Boris Morros comes from the decoded Venona documents and the work of John Earl Haynes, Harvey Klehr, and Alexander Vassilev in
Spies: The Rise and Fall of the KGB in America
, pp. 445–453. The key Soviet agent ensnared in the Mocase was a longtime illegal known as Jack Soble, whose cover was a shaving-brush company with importing and exporting offices in Paris. Soble’s agents in America included Martha Dodd Stern, the daughter of an American ambassador to Germany; her husband, Alfred Stern, a millionaire New York investment broker; Jane Foster Zlatovski, an 11th-generation American and a veteran of Wild Bill Donovan’s Office of Strategic Services, and her husband, George Zlatovski, an army intelligence officer during and after World War II.

  
8.
“No one need erect”:
McCarthy to Hoover, July 30, 1952, FBI/FOIA.

  
9.
“McCarthy is a former Marine”:
San Diego Evening Tribune
interview with Hoover, Aug. 22, 1953, cited in Gentry,
J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and the Secrets
, p. 431.

10.
“neither sacrosanct nor immune”:
Transcript of telephone conversation between Allen and Foster Dulles cited in David M. Barrett,
The CIA and Congress: The Untold Story from Truman to Kennedy
(Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2005), p. 184.

11.
“Senator McCarthy had found”:
Papich to Hoover, Aug. 5, 1953, FBI files, DDEL.

12.
“thirty-one potentially friendly witnesses”:
The reports to Hoover and the quotations from conversations between the FBI and McCarthy’s staff during the summer and fall of 1953 are recorded in three separate documents: an untitled 12-page report attached to a memo from Roach to Belmont, July 14, 1953, FBI/FOIA; Belmont to Boardman, “Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations (Army-McCarthy Hearings)/Communist Penetration of Central Intelligence Agency,” July 28, 1953, FBI/FOIA; and an appended “Analysis of Alleged Communist Penetration into the Central Intelligence Agency Involving Past and Present Employees,” July 28, 1953, FBI/FOIA.

13.
“My boys, I am convinced”:
Hagerty diaries, June 8, 1954, DDEL.

23.
G
AME
W
ITHOUT
R
ULES

  
1.
“The President stated”:
Roach to Belmont, “Doolittle Study of Covert Operations/Central Intelligence Agency,” Aug. 18, 1954, FBI/FOIA.

  
2.
“I have a completely defeatist attitude”:
Hoover note, Keay to Belmont, “Central Intelligence Agency,” Aug. 18, 1954, FBI/FOIA. Hoover’s attitude brightened when he saw a detailed FBI report on Doolittle’s interview with the CIA’s Jim Angleton, who was about to take charge of the Agency’s counterintelligence operations. Angleton’s work spilled over into domestic politics; like Hoover, he saw American leftists as Moscow’s puppets. He also ran a section called Special Projects, salvaging the wreckage of blown covert operations. The report came via Angleton himself, Hoover’s best spy inside the CIA. Hoover could not have had a more useful source, short of a wiretap on Allen Dulles.
   Hoover and Angleton appeared to have little in common on the surface, save anticommunism. Hoover was one of the most recognized people in America, the tough cop who looked like a well-fed bulldog. Angleton was one of the most shadowy men in Washington, a tubercular chain-smoker who resembled a wraith. But they thought alike. They grasped the intricacies of counterintelligence operations, where one spy service tries to penetrate another unseen. They were skilled at the political intrigues of Washington, where backstabbing is an art form, and alliances struck at noon are betrayed at midnight.
   On Aug. 19, 1954, “Angleton advised that he ‘opened up’ ” to the Doolittle group, telling them “exactly how he felt about his agency.” The CIA’s covert operations were racked by “confusion, duplication, and waste of manpower and money,” Angleton said. Many had “failed miserably.”
   Angleton went on to report that “CIA’s counterespionage coverage was disgracefully weak.” The men he had to work with included “inexperienced personnel … many who became connected with the Agency simply for the ride.”
   Angleton said the CIA was “incapable of doing an efficient job if political and psychological warfare operations were to be handled jointly with divisions responsible for espionage and counterespionage activities.” Running coups, broadcasting propaganda, fixing elections, and bribing politicians was not intelligence work. The real work was the collection of information through espionage—stealing secrets. Hoover could not have agreed more.
   Doolittle asked how the FBI and the CIA were getting along. Angleton said that “as far as he was concerned, the relations were excellent.” At his level, perhaps they were. But at the top, they were terrible.

  
3.
“How in the world”:
Keay to Belmont, incorporating Papich memo, “Relations with Central Intelligence Agency; Interview with Allen Dulles, May 22, 1954,” FBI/FOIA.

  
4.
“Doolittle viewed the Bureau”:
Belmont to Boardman, “Doolittle Study of Covert Operations/Central Intelligence Agency,” Aug. 30, 1954, FBI/FOIA.

  
5.
“some of its weaknesses and defects”:
Hoover to Tolson, Nov. 19, 1954, FBI/FOIA.

  
6.
“We are facing”:
Doolittle “Report on the Covert Activities of the Central Intelligence Agency,” Sept. 30, 1954, declassified Aug. 20, 2001, CIA.