The Worth of War (24 page)

Thus, popular government requires a combination of government transparency and citizen privacy. To exercise influence over it, citizens must know what the government is doing. At the same time, citizens seeking to exercise influence over the government need protection from retaliation and intimidation. Unfortunately, however, objective conditions in the United States today are far from these ideals. Today, indeed, the state keeps more and more of its activities secret while the citizenry has less and less privacy.

SURVEILLANCE

After Yardley's Black Chamber was closed in 1929, the government briefly refrained from random or blanket surveillance activities. During the 1930s, though, the new Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) began to make extensive use of wiretaps, various listening devices, and postal surveillance against targeted groups such as suspected subversives and criminals, as well as President Franklin D. Roosevelt's chief political foes. As early as 1934, President Roosevelt asked FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover to monitor the activities of Louisiana Governor Huey Long, who had become one of FDR's most formidable political opponents and a potential challenger for the 1936 Democratic presidential nomination.
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The 1934 Federal Communications Act expressly prohibited the interception of electronic communications, and the Supreme
Court subsequently held that evidence obtained from such intercepts could not be used in court. The FBI, nevertheless, decided that it was not bound by the legislation. This view was supported by President Roosevelt, who believed that the government's ability to intercept telephone calls was too important to be limited by legal niceties. In a 1940 memo, for example, the president authorized the FBI to use wiretaps when it believed that subversive activities might be discussed in the intercepted communication. Then as now, national security claims seemed to outweigh all other interests and became a pretext for surveillance programs that went far beyond any real security concerns.

During the 1940 presidential campaign, for example, the FBI reportedly conducted more than two hundred investigations of President Roosevelt's political foes, as well as those among his friends about whom the president harbored suspicions. For example, the FBI conducted physical and electronic surveillance of United Mine Workers President John L. Lewis, a nominal but wavering Roosevelt ally. Matters did not turn out to the president's liking when Lewis discovered that his telephones were being tapped and angrily confronted Roosevelt. FDR claimed to know nothing about the matter though the surveillance had, in fact, been undertaken on his orders.

Over the next three decades, the FBI's growing arsenal of electronic surveillance devices, nominally devoted to protecting the nation from spies and criminals, also provided political intelligence that served Roosevelt and his successors in the White House. Director Hoover also assembled information that could serve his own purposes. Through electronic and physical surveillance, Hoover created dossiers on hundreds, if not thousands, of important political figures. He used this information, especially if it included evidence of financial improprieties or sexual peccadillos, to intimidate or blackmail his foes or to reward allies by revealing embarrassing or unsavory facts about their own political opponents. Any bit of damaging information in a politician's FBI dossier could make that individual vulnerable to pressure from the bureau. As one former FBI executive explained, “The moment Hoover would get something on a senator, he'd send one of
the errand boys up and advise the senator that we're in the course of an investigation and we by chance happened to come up with this [damaging information]. From that time on the senator's right in his pocket.”
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One such politician whose FBI dossier was reportedly quite voluminous was Senator—later President—John F. Kennedy. Electronic eavesdropping had provided Hoover with such extensive knowledge of Kennedy's personal foibles that the president could not risk opposing, much less firing, the Director even though he apparently wished to do so. On one occasion, Hoover told Kennedy that electronic surveillance had revealed that the president was having an affair with a woman named Judith Campbell Exner, who also happened to be involved with Chicago gangster Sam Giancana.
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Hoover's possession of this and other facts that might seriously have undermined Kennedy's presidency gave the director considerable leverage over the president.

Through the use of surveillance, threats to the FBI and its director could, as Hoover liked to say, be “neutralized.” For example, in 1941, Congressman Martin Dies of Texas, then chairman of the House UnAmerican Activities Committee (HUAC), claimed that the FBI had been lax in its efforts to protect the nation from spies and subversives and informed the attorney general that he hoped to be named to replace Hoover as head of the agency. Upon learning of Dies's criticisms and efforts to supplant him, Hoover had his agents target the congressman for electronic surveillance. The FBI learned that Dies had taken a $2,000 bribe to help a refugee enter the United States. Hoover confronted Dies with the evidence but promised not to disclose the information or to seek an indictment so long as Dies did as he was told. Dies never again criticized the FBI or its director.

Or, take the case of Tennessee Senator Estes Kefauver. The senator headed the Senate Special Committee to Investigate Crime in Interstate Commerce and, in 1951, in a direct challenge to Hoover's preeminence in this realm, announced plans for televised hearings on organized crime in America. The hearings, seen in the early days of television, created a sensation and vaulted the previously obscure
senator into a position of national prominence as gangster after gangster was called to testify before the television cameras. Many refused to answer questions, citing Fifth Amendment rights. This scene was repeated so frequently that “taking the Fifth” became a favorite slang expression. During the course of the hearings, the names of several of J. Edgar Hoover's friends and cronies including, Joseph P. Kennedy, oil millionaire Clint Murchison, and columnist Walter Winchell were linked to organized crime.

Hoover had been opposed to the hearings from the start because they seemed to imply that the FBI had been lax in its own duties. Now with some of his political allies implicated, Hoover examined the FBI's dossier on Kefauver and found evidence from electronic surveillance suggesting that the senator had accepted financial payoffs. Confronted with this material, Kefauver abruptly, and without explanation, ended the hearings. Not completely satisfied to merely neutralize the senator, Hoover then gave the damaging financial information, along with surveillance data containing evidence of Kefauver's marital infidelities, to Republican vice presidential candidate Richard Nixon for use against the Stevenson–Kefauver ticket in the 1952 presidential campaign.
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From the 1940s to Hoover's death in 1972, the FBI controlled thousands of wire taps and listening devices, covertly opened hundreds of thousands of pieces of mail each year, and examined thousands of cables sent from the United States to foreign countries. Every member of Congress was subject to surveillance, as was the Supreme Court and other important institutions and political figures. At its height, this system of surveillance gave the FBI and its Director considerable political power. Hoover, for example, provided Governor Thomas E. Dewey with material that helped him defeat his then-rival for the Republican presidential nomination, Governor Harold Stassen.
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Hoover reportedly helped to secure the Supreme Court appointment of Chief Justice Warren Burger by the simple expedient of making certain that adverse information would be found and highlighted in the background checks of other potential nominees.

Hoover also played a major role in advancing the career of then-Congressman
Richard Nixon. In 1948, young Congressman Nixon was a member of HUAC. In that capacity, he became a leading figure in the sensational espionage case involving former Communist party activist Whittaker Chambers and State Department official Alger Hiss. Chambers accused Hiss of spying for the Soviet Union—a charge that Hiss resolutely denied. Nixon saw the case as a vehicle that might bolster his own political career. Director Hoover, for his part, saw Nixon as a potentially useful tool and ally and saw to it that Nixon was provided with information from the FBI's files on the case. Without publicly revealing his sources, Nixon used Hoover's help to take a lead role in the HUAC hearings. The attendant publicity made Nixon a political star and led to his being named Eisenhower's running mate in the 1952 presidential campaign. It almost goes without saying that Hoover began to build a thick dossier on Nixon to ensure that his new protégée could, if necessary, be encouraged to remember his political obligations. This dossier reportedly became important a quarter of a century later when President Nixon summoned Director Hoover to the oval office intending to order him to retire. A brief conversation ensued, and Director Hoover remained in office.

Hoover also provided Senator Joseph McCarthy with confidential FBI reports to bolster the senator's charges that government institutions had been infiltrated by Communist agents. At the same time, Hoover suppressed other information in the FBI's files dealing with the senator's substance abuse, moral deficiencies, and financial misdeeds. Of course, after 1954 when Hoover and President Dwight D. Eisenhower decided that the senator was becoming a political liability, some of this damaging information, collected via the FBI's electronic surveillance of the senator, was leaked to the news media and helped to destroy McCarthy.

The FBI's impact on the American political process went beyond the bureau's capacity to help or hinder the careers of prominent politicians. FBI surveillance also became a tool designed to destroy the left-wing and dissident political movements that J. Edgar Hoover and his allies viewed as inimical to their own vision of the American way
of life. Beginning during the Eisenhower administration and continuing through the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, with the tacit assent of the White House and the approval of a number of congressional leaders, Hoover launched a series of illegal covert operations labeled Counter Intelligence Programs or COINTELPRO aimed at disrupting these groups. Most of these operations targeted civil rights organizations, anti–Vietnam War groups, women's rights groups, socialist organizations, and “New Left” groups such as the Students for a Democratic Society. A small number of COINTELPRO operations also targeted the Ku Klux Klan.

To begin with, COINTELPRO relied upon extensive surveillance of targeted groups. The FBI examined their mail, tapped their telephones, hid microphones in members' homes and offices, and sent informers to infiltrate the various organizations. The information collected through these surveillance efforts then became the basis for FBI campaigns of disruption and intimidation. Spouses were informed of one another's infidelities. Arrest records and sexual histories were leaked to the press or used to “neutralize” targeted individuals. Foreshadowing the potential uses of social media, unwitting individuals, found via electronic surveillance to have business, family, or personal ties to the bureau's targets, were sent derogatory information on the alleged subversives.

After a time, the FBI went beyond these tactics and brought criminal charges based upon planted evidence, instigated IRS audits, harassed unfortunate targets at their places of work and their children's schools, and sowed suspicion and distrust within targeted groups by planting false evidence indicating that one or more members were FBI informants. Rivalries among various groups were exploited—in several instances, leading to what amounted to gang warfare between the Black Panther Party and other black organizations. Local law enforcement officials were encouraged to conduct violent raids, which on several occasions led to the deaths of targeted individuals.

Particularly after the 1963 “March on Washington,” civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. was targeted by the FBI, in the words of
Hoover's deputy, William C. Sullivan, as, “the most dangerous Negro of the future…from the standpoint of Communism, the Negro, and national security.”
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Based on this assessment, the FBI employed hidden microphones, phone taps, and other methods to place King and all his associates under extensive surveillance. Through these means, the FBI was moved to label two of King's white advisers, Stanley Levison and Jack O'Dell, as Communists. Though the electronic evidence was questionable, they forced King to disassociate himself from both men. The FBI also collected a good deal of electronic information on King's numerous extramarital flings, which Hoover shared with various politicians and, as mentioned above, with King's wife.

COINTELPRO was brought to a halt in 1971 when a group calling itself the Citizens' Commission to Investigate the FBI burglarized the small FBI field office in Media, Pennsylvania, and stole more than a thousand files. Some contained references to COINTELPRO and an NBC newsman, Carl Stern, won a federal suit to compel the FBI to release documents relating to the program. Hoover was forced to bring COINTELPRO, though not his routine surveillance activities, to an end.

The CIA: Operation CHAOS

Particularly during the 1960s, domestic surveillance activities were also undertaken by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). The CIA was established by the 1947 National Security Act that had also created the Department of Defense. The agency's main missions were foreign intelligence and counterintelligence activities, and the CIA was generally prohibited from engaging in intelligence collection activities within the United States. Soon after its creation, however, the CIA began to engage in domestic activities such as planting false stories in the American news media and recruiting agents from various American ethnic communities. To provide cover for its domestic activities, the CIA established a Domestic Operations Division, which operated various front companies that purported to be private business concerns.