J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and the Secrets (107 page)

Mitchell, or someone working for him, now leaked this information to
Life
magazine, which ran a six-page exposé of the Fortas-Wolfson connection, including the fact that the justice had met secretly with the financier following his indictment.

Fortas now claimed that the $20,000 was for research and writing services and that he had finally returned it when he found he didn’t have time to undertake the assignment. But Wolfson himself, apparently hoping to make a deal, demolished this explanation by producing documents which showed that he had agreed to pay Fortas $20,000 a year for life or, in the event of his death, to pay Fortas’s widow a like amount every year during her lifetime.

Confronted with the documents, Fortas resigned from the Court.

Hoover could claim no credit for this victory. In fact, realizing that he would probably be the chief suspect, he carefully dissociated himself from it, with a remarkable memorandum. On June 2, 1969, he sent the attorney general a “Personal and Confidential” memo in which he stated that he had learned from “a reliable source” that “in connection with the investigation involving former Supreme Court Justice Abe Fortas, the Department [of Justice] furnished considerable information to William Lambert, writer for
Life
magazine, which not only enabled Lambert to expose the Fortas tie-in with the Wolfson Foundation but additionally kept Lambert advised regarding” the ongoing FBI investigation.

There is no better proof of Hoover’s mastery of the bureaucratic process. With this single memorandum, he accomplished three things: (1) he cleared the FBI of complicity in leaking the information to
Life;
(2) he put Mitchell on notice that nothing he did escaped him; and (3) he created a document which could be most embarrassing to the administration if the attorney general, or the president, ever turned on him.

Mitchell did the only smart thing: he played dumb, responding, “We have started an investigation within the Department, with the hope of ascertaining the source of such leaks.”
⁴⁰

Removing Fortas didn’t solve Nixon’s problems with the Court, since, with the Senate’s rejection of both his nominees, Haynsworth and Carswell, he still had to find an acceptable conservative to fill the vacant seat. But if he could eliminate one more liberal…

Again Justice Douglas, who had already survived a Nixon-ordered IRS audit, was targeted, and Congressman Gerald Ford was given the assignment of mounting an impeachment drive. As before, Hoover supplied much of the ammunition, although this time the CIA also contributed.

However, Ford’s effort went badly, and on June 5, 1970, Nixon called Hoover to check out a possible new charge. Was he aware, the president asked, that Douglas had an article in “one of those magazines”? Hoover was and declared the publication—the literary magazine
Evergreen Review,
which had published an excerpt from Justice Douglas’s latest book,
Points of Rebellion
—“pornographic.” Hoover’s memorandum concerning the conversation noted, “The President asked if he had Jerry Ford call me, would I fill him in on this; that he is a good man. I told him I would.”
⁴¹

Gerald Ford hardly needed Nixon’s endorsement. Hoover had spotted him as a comer when he first became a candidate for Congress, a judgment that had
been confirmed in Ford’s maiden speech, when he’d asked for a pay raise for the FBI director. And Ford, of course, had been Hoover’s informant on the Warren Commission.

Hoover gave Ford the information, which he used, but it didn’t help; after weeks of hearings, the House committee issued a 924-page report, which concluded, “There is no credible evidence that would warrant preparation of impeachment charges.”
⁴²

Associate Justice William O. Douglas suspected, rightly, that Hoover had supplied much of the “evidence” used against him. They were old enemies and had been since 1939, when Douglas had first joined the Court.

The justice suspected the FBI director of other things. In 1966, in a case of great sensitivity,
Black
v.
U.S.,
which dealt with FBI wiretapping, Douglas’s swing vote became known before the decision was announced. Greatly disturbed, Douglas went to Chief Justice Warren and asked him how often he had the conference room “swept.” Surprised by Douglas’s interest in such mundane matters, Warren responded that he believed the janitor cleaned it daily.

After Douglas clarified his usage, Warren did some checking and found that the cost of “de-bugging” the room would be about $5,000. There was no provision in the Court’s budget for such an expense. However, the chief justice discovered, the FBI was willing to “sweep” the room without charge. And, presuming this would please Douglas, Warren took the FBI up on its offer.
⁴³

Although he couldn’t prove it, Douglas remained convinced the conference room was bugged—there were other leaks—and he was “morally certain” that at various times “all Supreme Court wires were tapped.” He identified those most likely to be doing the tapping as “the FBI, the CIA and the National Security Council.” Douglas saw taps and bugs everywhere.
^*
“In the sixties, no important conversation or conference in Washington was immune from wiretapping or electronic surveillance,” he believed, while “the clandestine electronic ears in Nixon’s days were everywhere in Washington.”
⁴⁴

There were those who thought Justice Douglas paranoid. But Douglas
had
been wiretapped, and by the FBI, in every administration from that of Harry Truman, when he was picked up on the Corcoran taps, to that of Richard Nixon, when, on June 25, 1970, Hoover sent H. R. Haldeman a report on a wiretapped conversation in which Douglas’s tactics in the impeachment battle were discussed.
^†

But Justice Douglas’s suspicions went beyond electronic surveillances. He was also convinced that his office in the Supreme Court had been burglarized. This had occurred during the Johnson administration, and again the chief suspect was the FBI.

For some years William O. Douglas had been writing, in great secrecy he believed, the final volume of his memoirs, dealing with his Court years. He was so obsessed with preventing leaks that he made only one copy of the manuscript.

Sometime between October 4 and November 12, 1968, the final draft of his section on Lyndon Baines Johnson was stolen from his office in the Supreme Court.

No novice at writing, having published thirty other books, Douglas began the difficult task of trying to re-create from memory the missing pages: “…his passion for power encompassed money. He and Lady Bird came to Washington originally bringing with them about $20,000. Lyndon ran that sum up to at least $20 million by the time he left the White House. His fingerprints will be found on no documents; his footprints never appeared. Telephone logs never recorded what he said, for he spoke through stout allies, like Sam Rayburn, to stout bureaucrats, like Laurence C. Fly of the Federal Communications Commission.”
⁴⁵

But it wasn’t the same, he realized. The earlier draft, as best he could remember it, had been far stronger. And for this he never forgave J. Edgar Hoover or Lyndon Baines Johnson.

The irony of the Douglas impeachment attempt was that it need never have happened. If the FBI had been tapping and bugging Douglas on a continuing basis, as he suspected, Hoover would have learned that the justice was planning to retire in the spring of 1969, on his thirtieth anniversary on the Court—he’d already written his letter of resignation—but with the IRS audit and the impeachment talk, the feisty Douglas had decided “to stay on indefinitely until the last hound dog had stopped snapping at my heels.”
⁴⁶

Asked if the Supreme Court had been bugged, William Sullivan told the author, “We didn’t need to. We had lots of sources on the Court, clerks and such.”
⁴⁷

Recently released FBI documents identify some of those sources. During the various appeals in the Rosenberg case, the FBI kept a close watch on the Court. The chief of the Supreme Court police, Captain Philip H. Crook, was an informant. In a 1953 memorandum Crook was described as having “furnished immediately all information heard by his men stationed throughout the Supreme
Court building. He kept the special agents advised of the arrival and departures of persons having important roles in this case.” Another FBI memorandum stated that Harold B. Willey, then clerk of the Supreme Court, told FBI agents the best places to be to “know what action individual judges, or the court as a whole, was taking.” A few days after the executions of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, an FBI memo recommended that Captain Crook, Mr. Willey, and T. Perry Lippitt, the marshal of the Supreme Court, be sent “a letter of appreciation by the director for their wholehearted cooperation in this case.”
⁴⁸

On Friday, May 9, 1969, the
New York Times,
in a front-page story by its Pentagon correspondent, William Beecher, reported that the United States was conducting bombing raids in Cambodia. Although this escalation of the Vietnam War wasn’t news to the Cambodians, the North Vietnamese, or the U.S. Air Force, which had been falsifying its reports since the bombing started, it had been kept from the American public; and Henry Kissinger, reading the article while weekending at the presidential compound in Key Biscayne, Florida, was enraged.

At 10:35 A.M. Kissinger placed a call to J. Edgar Hoover and asked if he could “make a major effort” to find the source of the leak, using “whatever resources” were necessary. Hoover told him he would take care of it right away. There was no mention of wiretapping, at least not in the FBI director’s memorandum of the conversation, but Kissinger’s remarks, together with his request that the investigation be handled “discreetly,”
⁴⁹
certainly didn’t rule it out.

Still upset, Kissinger called Hoover two more times that day, asking what progress had been made. At 5:05
P.M.
Hoover called Kissinger to report that Beecher might have obtained the information from a number of places: the Department of Defense, where the personnel were “largely Kennedy people and anti-Nixon”; the Systems Analysis Agency in the Pentagon, where “at least 118 of the 124 employees” were “still McNamara people and express a very definite Kennedy philosophy”; or Kissinger’s own office in the White House, from someone on the staff of the National Security Council.

It is unclear from Hoover’s memorandum of the conversation who first mentioned the name of the Kissinger aide Morton Halperin, whom the FBI director described as one of those “so-called arrogant, harvard-type Kennedy men,”
^*
but it is clear Hoover considered him a prime suspect.

That was as far as they had gotten, Hoover reported. Kissinger urged the director to follow this as far as the FBI could take it, adding that they (presumably meaning he and the president) would “destroy whoever did this.”
⁵¹

Unknown to Kissinger, Hoover had already asked William Sullivan to place a technical surveillance on Halperin’s home telephone. This was to be special coverage (SPECOV), Hoover told Sullivan, on a strictly need-to-know basis, and Sullivan repeated this to Courtland Jones, when he called the Washington field office supervisor in his office in the Old Post Office Building.

The FBI had a number of secret listening posts in Washington and its environs, including a large facility at the FBI Academy at Quantico, Virginia—it was from here that the wires of the Central Intelligence Agency, at nearby Langley, were supposedly tapped—but the heart of its electronic surveillance operations was the Old Post Office Building, which was located in the Federal Triangle, close to FBI headquarters in the Justice Department Building but far enough away that an attorney general wouldn’t accidentally walk in.

Since the Post Office had moved into its new building in 1934, the Bureau had gradually taken over most of the old building. Here, behind locked doors, with the tightest possible security, scores of monitors sat in front of small consoles, earphones on their heads, listening to, and recording, thousands of conversations.

However, there was a problem with the Old Post Office Building: it was haunted, by a live ghost. Years before anyone could remember, Admiral Richard Byrd, the polar explorer, had been assigned offices here, and he would wander the halls, dropping in on the FBI monitoring stations. Locked doors, receptionists, guards, color-coded passes—nothing seemed to hinder him: monitors, poised over their consoles, would suddenly look up and see the admiral standing there. Fortunately, he never seemed very interested in what they were doing; he was, the agents decided, just lonely and wanted someone to tell his stories to. Hoover tried, numerous times, to have him evicted, to another office building, but Byrd was a legend, too, with his own supporters, who didn’t want to discomfit him. When he died, in 1957, the agents missed him.

With Sullivan’s instructions in hand, Jones went to the office of Ernest Belter, who headed the WFO monitoring station.

“I just got a call from Bill Sullivan and he got a call from the White House and he wants us to put on this coverage right away,” Jones said. He then handled Belter a piece of scratch paper with the name, address, and telephone number of Morton Halperin on it.

“Is it really urgent?” Belter asked.

“Well, it’s from Sullivan,” Jones responded, “so that automatically makes it urgent.”

Jones told Belter that knowledge of the coverage was to be tightly held; only old and trusted employees were to be used. They would receive no paper on this installation, and they were to generate no paper. There would be no indexing of the log summaries, no use of symbol numbers, no ELSUR cards. Only one copy of the daily log would be made, and it should be hand carried to Sullivan’s office first thing each morning.

This went against all established procedures, and it worried Belter a bit. There was a nagging thought in the back of his mind, but he suppressed it and got to work. The supervisor James Gaffney, liaison to the telephone company, was dispatched to see Horace Hampton.