Enemies: A History of the FBI (84 page)

  
7.
“The ideal solution”:
Hoover to Tolson, Nov. 19, 1954, FBI/FOIA.

  
8.
“His February 28, 1955, report”:
Belmont was a key member of the NSC planning board subcommittee; the report, “Study of Possible Hostile Soviet Actions,” was adopted by the president and the NSC on March 31, 1955.

  
9.
“Plans for the detention”:
Hoover report, “The Internal Security Program,” NSC 5509, part 8, April 8, 1955.

10.
“most important goal”:
Hoover report to General Mark Clark, Jan. 25, 1955, FBI/FOIA.

24.
T
HE
L
ONG
S
HADOW

  
1.
Using cobalt-60:
Belmont to Roach, “Director’s Briefing: National Security Council, March 8, 1956,” dated March 22, 1956, FBI/FOIA. This is the only known record that shows the discussion of a “dirty bomb” using cobalt-60 at the NSC briefing.

  
2.
“Sometimes it is necessary”:
Minutes of the 279th meeting of the National Security Council, March 8, 1956, partly declassified with deletions, DDEL.

  
3.
Hoover had asked:
On March 8, 1955, Hoover wrote to Attorney General Brownell trying to renew the approvals for warrantless wiretaps he had won in his May 21, 1940, letter from President Roosevelt. Hoover pointedly asked Brownell if that letter still gave the FBI legal authority for wiretapping. If not, Hoover asked the attorney general “to present this matter to President Eisenhower to determine whether he holds the same view.” Brownell wrote back eight days later: “I personally explained to the President, the Cabinet, the National Security Council and the Senate and House Judiciary Committees during 1954 the present policy and procedure on wiretaps.… I do not think it necessary to reopen the matter at this time.”

  
4.
“Surveillances weren’t the answer”:
Jack Danahy, FBI/FBIOH.

  
5.
“We had a group sort of like the Dirty Dozen”:
James R. Healy, May 3, 2007, FBI/FBIOH.

  
6.
“we were using every means”:
Graham J. Desvernine, FBI/FBIOH, Oct. 4, 2006. Desvernine soon joined a small group “whose responsibility was solely the surveillance and recording of conversations from within the car of William Z. Foster”—the head of the Communist Party of the United States. Hoover had been after him since the Bridgman raids of 1922. Foster had run for president three times, in 1924, 1928, and 1932—and been imprisoned only once, and briefly, for his work. His car was the setting for one-on-one meetings among the CPUSA’s dwindling brain trust. William Z. Foster, the grandfather of the CPUSA, would die in 1961 in Moscow, where he was buried in the Kremlin wall.

  
7.
“a program of intelligence collection”:
Edward S. Miller, FBI/FBIOH, May 23, 2008. The CIA’s brilliant but doomed Berlin Tunnel project, conceived and executed by the cashiered FBI agent Bill Harvey, was the crown jewel of Program C.

  
8.
“We broke into the house”:
John F. McCormack, Oct. 31, 2006, FBI/FBIOH.

  
9.
“the terrific propaganda”:
Sullivan oral history interview, in Demaris,
The Director
, pp. 76–77. Emphasis in original.

10.
“He was a brilliant chameleon”:
Sullivan oral history interview, in Demaris,
The Director
, pp. 76–77.

11.
“Brash, brilliant”:
Cartha D. “Deke” DeLoach,
Hoover’s FBI: The Inside Story by Hoover’s Trusted Lieutenant
(Washington, D.C.: Regnery, 1995), pp. 270–271.

12.
“This is a rough, tough, dirty business”:
Sullivan deposition, Church Committee, Nov. 1, 1975.

13.
“connections with the Communist party”:
Summaries of FBI field office reports in “Scope of FBI Domestic Intelligence,”
CI Reader
.

14.
“The Negro situation”:
Hoover to New York Special Agent in Charge, Oct. 2, 1956, FBI/FOIA.

15.
“exploit the enforcement”:
Hoover statement, “Racial Tension and Civil Rights,” presented March 9, 1956, DDEL.

16.
“The Klan was dead”:
McCormack oral history, FBI/FBIOH.

17.
“Headquarters came out with instructions”:
Fletcher D. Thompson oral history, FBI/FBIOH. As Thompson recounted, a handful of FBI agents worked the Klan beat in the 1950s: “We had one agent up in Summerton, South Carolina, by the name of E. Fleming Mason, who was one of the Bureau characters—he had a number of high-level informants,” Thompson remembered. “Never did he ask them, nor did he arrange the interview, but it just so happened that he ran into them at one place or another and they ‘volunteered’ this information. I remember one report in particular. Fleming said he was driving down the road one morning and he noticed his socks didn’t match and he stopped at this country store to buy a pair of socks. And he saw his friend, the Exalted Cyclops, and ‘he volunteered the following information …’ ”

18.
a black “messiah”:
The instructions to the field for the 1968 iteration of the “Black Nationalist” COINTELPRO read: “Prevent the rise of a ‘messiah’ who could unify and electrify the militant black nationalist movement. Malcolm X might have been such a ‘messiah’; he is the martyr of the movement today. Martin Luther King … King could be a real contender.”

19.
“He was very consistent”:
Sullivan oral history, Demaris,
The Director
, p. 226.

20.
“a CP member with no official title”:
Redacted FBI document dated June 25, 1957, and first cited in David J. Garrow, “The FBI and Martin Luther King,”
Atlantic Monthly
, July-August 2002.

25.
“D
ON’T TRUST ANYBODY
”

  
1.
At a formal state luncheon:
United States Ambassador Donald Norland, then a young State Department officer attending the luncheon, overheard Hoover and Nixon as they “talked very animatedly … very concerned about the President’s health.” Norland oral history, FAOH.

  
2.
“You may be President”:
Richard Nixon,
RN: The Memoirs of Richard Nixon
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 1990), p. 184.

  
3.
“They lived in sheer opulence”:
DeLoach,
Hoover’s FBI
, p. 103.

  
4.
“Communism,” to quote the director:
Hoover speech, “Communist Illusion and Democratic Reality.”

  
5.
“The word was that this guy’s crazy”:
Mogen oral history, FBI/FBIOH.

  
6.
a forged American passport:
Hayhanen had gone before an American diplomat in Helsinki, Finland, bearing the birth certificate of a long-dead boy named Eugene Maki, who had been born to Finnish immigrants in Idaho. The document had been obtained by Soviet agents in America sometime late in the 1940s. He had sailed from England aboard the
Queen Mary
and arrived at New York City on Oct. 21, 1952, carrying a freshly issued American passport awarded on the basis of the birth certificate. Passport fraud was an issue that drove Hoover to distraction. In 1955, he had helped install a personal and political ally, Frances Knight, as the head of the passport office at the State Department, where she worked with a dozen FBI agents. She served Hoover and the FBI with unswerving devotion for twenty-two years. “She was extremely right-wing,” recalled Ronald Somerville, a longtime director of the State Department’s Bureau of Consular Affairs. “She provided to the FBI and received from the FBI comprehensive reporting on the movements of Americans abroad. She was very active in denying passports to people whose loyalty might be questioned” (Ronald Somerville oral history, FAOH).

  
7.
the FBI identified sixteen:
444th Meeting of the National Security Council, May 13, 1960, FRUS 1958–1960, Volume 10, Part 1.

  
8.
“The FBI kept a keen eye”:
William D. Morgan oral history, FAOH.

  
9.
“One thing about Reino”:
Edmund J. Birch oral history, FBI/FBIOH, Aug. 28, 2005.

10.
“a wetback camp”:
Gamber oral history, FBI/FBIOH.

11.
“If we discovered a Soviet spy”:
Eisenhower at 444th Meeting of the National Security Council, May 13, 1960, FRUS 1958–1960, Volume 10, Part 1.

12.
“We have been trying”:
Belmont to Boardman, “Subject: Courier system between Communist Party USA and Communist Party, Soviet Union,” Aug. 30, 1957, FBI/FOIA.

13.
The FBI’s first debriefings:
The thirty-volume, 4,252-page set of files, an initial release of a far larger dossier, is available online at an FBI website,
http://vault.fbi.gov/solo
.

14.
“When I introduced him to Hoover”:
Nixon oral history interview with Frank Gannon, May 12, 1983, University of Georgia,
http://www.libs.uga.edu/media/collections/nixon/nixonday3.html
. Emphasis in original.

26.
I
MMORAL
C
ONDUCT

  
1.
“This is what happens”:
Hoover note, Rosen to Hoover, March 7, 1959, FBI/FOIA.

  
2.
“The ensuing problems and publicity”:
Graham Desvernine, FBI/FBIOH, op. cit.

  
3.
“hoodlum connections”:
Jones to DeLoach, “Senator John F. Kennedy of Massachusetts,” July 7, 1960, FBI/FOIA.

  
4.
“Mitchell had been found”:
Hoover memorandum for Tolson et al., Oct. 14, 1960, FBI/FOIA.

  
5.
“The President expressed amazement”:
Ibid.

27.
“M
URDER WAS IN STYLE
”

  
1.
“Castro was to be done away with”:
McAndrews to Rosen, Oct. 19, 1960; “You are advised”: Hoover to SAC, Chicago, Airtel/June Mail, June 19, 1961, captioned “Subject: Samuel M. Giancana,” FBI/FOIA.

  
2.
“Senator Homer E. Capehart”:
Papich to Frohbose, “Subject: Fulgencio Batista/Internal Security—Cuba,” July 20, 1959, FBI/FOIA.