Safety from external danger is the most powerful director of national conduct. Even the ardent love of liberty will, after a time, give way to its dictates. The violent destruction of life and property incident to war, the continual effort and alarm attendant on a state of continual danger, will compel nations the most attached to liberty to resort for repose and security to institutions which have a tendency to destroy their civil and political rights. To be more safe, they at length become willing to run the risk of being less free.
This mission creates a conflict that the authors of the Constitution foresaw ten generations ago. A free people must have both security and liberty. They are warring forces, yet we cannot have one without the other. Over the decades, the Bureau has best served the cause of national security by bending and breaking the law. A secret police is anathema in a democracy. But the FBI’s powers make it America’s closest counterpart.
At their command, the Bureau has violated the freedoms of the Bill of Rights to enforce the president’s powers as commander in chief. “The Constitution has never greatly bothered any wartime president,” FDR’s attorney general once wrote — and every president since has seen himself at war.
“I sometimes have thought that he really — I don’t know how to put it — had a fear of becoming too personally involved with people,” she reflected. If he ever expressed love beyond his devotion to God and country, there were no witnesses. He was sentimental about dogs, but unemotional about people. His inner life was a mystery, even to his immediate family and his few close friends.
He told the paper, after a stirring victory over a college team, that debating had given him “a practical and beneficial example of life, which is nothing more or less than the matching of one man’s wit against another.”
On the day America entered WW1, Wilson signed executive orders giving the Justice Department the power to command the arrest and imprisonment, without trial, of any foreigner deemed disloyal.
“I believe in power,” President Roosevelt wrote in June 1908, at the hour he decided to create the force that became the FBI. His presidency possessed “more power than in any other office in any great republic or constitutional monarchy of modern times,” he recorded with pride. “I have used every ounce of power there was.” Catapulted into the presidency by an anarchist assassin at the turn of the 20th century, Roosevelt fought to enforce democracy, to impose political order, to build a nation under law.
Anarchy was among the great dumb forces loosed upon the world. The anarchists aimed to destroy power itself; to pull down the pillars of western civilization. They had assassinated the president of France in 1894, the PM of Spain in 1897, the empress of Austria in 1898, the king of Italy in 1900 — and the president of the US in 1901.
President Roosevelt had tasted imperial power and liked it. He acted alone when he carved a great canal out of the Panama jungle; he alone chose to send the American navy on a global show of force. He knew that foreigners might fight back when America projected its power across the world. But in the first years of his presidency, Roosevelt had no real power to fight crimes against the US. His Justice Department was only beginning to learn to uphold the rule of law.
“The difficulties encountered in recruiting a trustworthy and efficient detective force are serious,” Bonaparte privately warned the president. The force had to have “some acquaintance with the haunts and habits of criminals, and its members are obliged to frequently associate with and use their work persons of extremely low moral standards.” Detectives were “often tempted to manufacture the evidence desired,” Bonaparte said. The attorney general had to be the man “justly to be called to account” for their work.
The Espionage Act made possession of information that could harm America punishable by death; imprisonment awaited anyone who could “utter, print, write, or publish” disloyal ideas. 1,055 people were convicted under the Espionage Act. Not one was a spy. Most were political dissidents who spoke against the war. Their crimes were words, not deeds.
“It is war, class war, and you were the first to wage it under cover of the powerful institutions you call order, in the darkness of your laws. There will be bloodshed; we will not dodge; there will have to be murder: we will kill, because it is necessary; there will have to be destruction; we will destroy to rid the world of your tyrannical institutions.” It was signed “The Anarchist Fighters.”
No national radio stations existed in 1919, the president had to deliver his message in person. He traveled over 8,000 miles by railroad, making forty speeches in 15 states.
“And you can’t do that under free debate,” the president said. “You can’t do that under public counsel. Plans must be kept secret. Knowledge must be accumulated under a system which we have condemned, because we have called it a spying system. The more polite call it a system of intelligence.”
Hoover’s cache of secrets formed the foundation of a primitive system of central intelligence. Within 3 months after taking office, he controlled files on more than 60,000 people; the Bureau compiled at least as many dossiers on the places where these people gathered, the publication they read, and the political groups they joined.
Lenin and Stalin were rising to power out of the political chaos in Russia. The fear that their revolution would spread was immense.
On September 9, three-quarters of the Boston police department walked out when their commissioner rejected their call for a union. The cops were no more Communist than Woodrow Wilson, but the president called them criminals, and Massachusetts governor Calvin Coolidge called out the National Guard and fired every one of the 1,117 protesting policemen.
He took to his berth, but he could not rise at the next stop, in Kansas. “I seemed to have gone to pieces,” he muttered. The train sped back to Washington. Wilson collapsed at the White House a week later. On October 2, a catastrophic stroke took him to the edge of death.
The publicity was tremendous. Palmer was hailed as a conquering hero. The acclaim from politicians and the press grew. The Palmer for President bandwagon began rolling. Filled with pride and the intoxicating spirit of self-promotion, Palmer proclaimed that the arrests had destroyed a Communist plot against America.
The scope of the assignment was breathtaking: NYC alone had 79 local branches of the Communist Party and the Communist Labor Party, each with its own set of leaders.
The great majority of the workers were neither Reds nor radicals. They had no grand political agenda; they wanted a living wage and a decent life, not an armed revolution to overthrow the ruling class.
The Bureau backed the barons. Hoover saw the fight between capital and labor as a lifelong struggle in the war on communism. “Communists and most subversive activities are always attached to labor situations,” he wrote years later. “It is a practical impossibility to divorce Communism from labor situations.”
If recognition came, there would be Soviet embassies and diplomats in the US. If there were diplomats, there would be spies.
The survival of the Bureau — and its revival as a secret intelligence service — depended on Hoover’s political cunning, his stoic patience, his iron will. In time, the man became the institution. They would withstand every political storm for the rest of his life. He never lost his faith that the fate of the nation lay with him and his work. And he never took his eyes off his enemies.
An even older law, the Logan Act of 1790, outlawed the communication of hostile conspiracies between Americans and a foreign country. But Congress never had voted to grant the Soviet Union diplomatic recognition — it was not a country, in the eyes of American law — so the Logan Act was out.
General MacArthur’s soldiers burned down the camps by the river; one of the Bonus Marchers was killed in the melee. The spectacle of the US Army chasing the unarmed veterans, their wives, and their children out of the shadow of the Capitol was a scene of American urban combat without parallel since the Civil War.
The war on crime and the war on communism were not the battles in which Americans were engaged. They were struggling to survive. They were starved for a strong leader. They were ready for a president who would create “an American dictatorship based on the consent of the governed,” in the startling words of Congressman Fish. The election of FDR was foreordained from the moment he was nominated. FDR was ready to use every power the Constitution granted — and more — to save the Republic from political and economic chaos.
The greatest dangers to liberty lie in insidious encroachments by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding.
Crime is contagious. If the government become a law-breaker, it breeds contempt for the law; it invites every man to become a law unto himself; it invites anarchy. To declare that in the administration of the criminal law the end justifies the means — to declare that the government may commit crimes in order to secure the conviction of a private criminal — would bring terrible retribution.
The lawmakers thought they had made wiretaps a crime. But they had left Hoover a loophole. He interpreted “disclosure” in a lawyerly way: wiretapping was not illegal if the information was not used as evidence in court. Therefore, if it was secret, it was legal. Wiretapping, bugging, and break-ins became a holy trinity for FBI intelligence operations from the 1930s onward. Hoover believed that they were essential tools for protecting the US against spies and saboteurs. President Roosevelt knew such methods were standard practice in the game of nations.
At the highest levels of power in Washington, an awareness dawned that Hoover might be listening to private conversations. This sense that the FBI was omnipresent was its own kind of power.
But Hoover won this battle as well. He responded by schooling the attorney general on “the difference between ‘investigate’ activity and ‘intelligence’ activity.” The FBI’s intelligence work was not aimed at indicting criminals after they committed crimes. It was intended to stop spies and saboteurs before they struck. When the FBI did intelligence operations, it was not working for the attorney general and the Justice Department. It was working for the POTUS.
The failure to analyze Magic and turn its secret information into a plan of action would prove fatal. Collecting intelligence was one thing. Coordinating it — connecting the dots — was quite another. The army did not tell the navy what it knew. The navy did not tel the army. Neither told Hoover.
The FBI’s secret history recounts: “An Agent could not be expected to produce any worthwhile information until after he had served on assignment for a number of months at the very minimum in order to learn local customs, the language, etc.”
But more than a few months abroad proved too much for many FBI agents. Scores if not hundreds resigned from their undercover work with the SIS or requested transfers home, “thoroughly disgusted” and “completely disillusioned when faced with something entirely different from the glamorous picture envisioned by them before undertaking the assignment.”
Hoover put the attaches to work making friends with the police chiefs and internal security ministers of Latin America. Wining, dining, and sometimes bribing the chief of police — preferably, the chief of the secret police — was a far more effective means of gathering intelligence than posing as magazine stringers and soap salesmen.
Hoover was clearly not reflective or philosophic. Edgar Hoover was primarily a man of immediate action.
It was a moment of overwhelming sadness and fear. Truman said he felt like the moon and the stars and the planets had fallen upon him.
Hoover’s reports gave him cause to wonder if the White House was a nest of vipers. Would FDR’s aides be loyal to him? Could Truman trust them?
They traveled overland to Brussels and flew to Berlin, once the fourth-largest city in the world. American and British warplanes had bombed most of Berlin to rubble and the Soviets had crushed what remained. On July 16, a motorcade took Truman through the city. The ruins stank of death. Corpses rotted in the rubble and wild dogs scavenged their bones. A civilization lay in a state of collapse. “I thought of Carthage, Baalbek, Jerusalem…,” Truman wrote in his diary. “I hope for some sort of peace — but I fear that machines are ahead of morals by some centuries and when morals catch up there’ll be no reason for any of it.”
Reading his handwritten notes is like hearing him think out loud. His rage was personal and political, bitter and implacable, barking and biting. He had high-soaring ideas, and he had hissing fits. Hi sense of humor was sarcastic, sometimes petulant. His knowledge was enormous, though is mind was narrow.
“Before we decide on how to do it, for posterity, and for ultimate cooperation, I would like to ask that you send me a representative to be your liaison with my organization.”
At this, Hoover almost fell out of his seat, the colonel recalled. “I know what was going on in his mind,” Quinn recounted. “He was probably thinking, ‘My God, this guy is asking for a direct penetration in his agency.’”
Quinn had just invited Hoover to spy on his spies. Liaison was penetration. You shook hands with the right hand and pick pockets with the left.
Nixon was 34 years old, a politician of high intelligence, immense ambition, and a barely tapped but bottomless talent for intrigue. He had risen from humble roots by virtue of hard work fueled by frustrated dreams.
Congressman Nixon asked Chambers the most pointed questions that day. He knew the right questions to ask because he knew the answers in advance. He had been studying the FBI’s files for five months, courtesy of Hoover. Nixon launched his political career in hot pursuit of Hiss and the secret Communists of the New Deal.
The detentions would begin in time of war, an emergency, a national crisis, a “threatened invasion” or a “rebellion.” Under the plan, the president would sign an emergency order suspending the writ of habeas corpus and instructing the FBI to begin the nationwide roundup.
Truman looked powerless and political spent as the election approached. Crossing through Indiana by train on a long whistle-stop campaign, with the election four weeks away, Truman caught a glimpse of a Newsweek magazine poll of America’s fifty most prominent political reporters. Their unanimous prediction: Dewey defeats Truman. Every poll and every pundit said the same. Hoover went to sleep on election night confident in that outcome.
No other power at any time in the world’s history has possessed so varied or so great an influence on other nations. The British Empire had collapsed. The Soviets had lost 27M dead in the war. China was in chaos as a communist army strode toward its capital. Germany and Japan were crushed and under occupation. The US had half the world’s wealth, half its material production, two-thirds of its machines, and its only atomic arsenal. Yet before the year was out, the US would lose its monopoly on the atomic bomb, and with that loss came a sense of intense peril at the highest levels of government.
Truman declared a national emergency, tripled the Pentagon’s budget, appointed General Eisenhower the supreme commander of NATO, and rejected top secret calls by General MacArthur and the Joint Chiefs of Staff to drop the entire American arsenal of atomic bombs on China and Manchuria. But Truman said he was prepared to use the bomb if the had to.
“It looks like WW3 is here,” Truman wrote in his diary on December 9. “I hope not — but we must meet whatever comes — and we will.”
Reflecting on the past lives of the British spies at Cambridge in the 1930s, Hoover conflated their communism with their homosexuality.
The connection seemed self-evident to him. Homosexuality and communism were causes for instant dismissal from American government service — and most other categories of employment. Communists and homosexuals both had clandestine and compartmented lives. They inhabited secret underground communities. They used coded language. Hoover believed, as did is peers, that both were uniquely susceptible to sexual entrapment and blackmail by foreign intelligence services.
The FBI, under law, was supposed to share its investigative files only within the executive branch of government. Hoover already had breached that wall by leaking files to his favorite members of Congress.
Each and every one of the guerrilla operations the Agency had launched in the past two years had gone wrong. Hundreds of the CIA’s recruited foreign agents had been parachuted behind enemy lines, inside the Iron Curtain, and almost all of them had been captured or killed. The CIA was making no headway in its war on communism overseas. The FBI was not breaking any new cases against Communist spies, either.
By contrast, the US had no ambassador in Moscow when Stalin died, and the CIA had no spies inside the Soviet Union. The first CIA officer dispatched to Moscow was seduced by his Russian housekeeper — she was a KGB colonel — photographed in the physical act of love, blackmailed, and fired by the Agency for his indiscretions in 1953. His replacement was caught in the act of espionage, arrested, and deported shortly after he arrived.
Hoover took some satisfaction when top Communists went to prison, but he saw his intelligence operations as more crucial than any law enforcement work. The two missions demanded different techniques.
A cop confronting an evildoer wants to string him up. A spy wants to string him along. Waiting and watching required a terrible patience. Hoover had it. After 20 years of attack and a decade of counterattack, the FBI was starting to understand the scope of the KGB’s operations in America.
The judge who had pronounced the death sentence against the atom spies said the crimes were “worse than murder.”
Hoover understood McCarthy. He told a newspaper reporter: “McCarthy is a former Marine. He was an amateur boxer. He’s Irish. Combine these, and you’re going to have a vigorous individual who’s not going to be pushed around.”
No doubt, Hoover allowed, “some of its weaknesses and defects were due to the newness of its operations.” The the Agency lacked trained officers. It had no internal inspection service; those overseers were a crucial part of the way in which Hoover punished and promoted the FBI’s agents. The Agency needed a strong shot of the Bureau’s kind of discipline.
Sullivan recalled his FBI training and indoctrination vividly — especially “the terrific propaganda that the instructors gave out: ‘This is the greatest organization ever devised by a human mind.’ They kept quoting Emerson: ‘An institution is the lengthened shadow of one man.’ They hit us with that almost every day. They drilled that into us.”
Sullivan was capable of bearing false witness, but this testimony resonated with the ring of truth.
“This is a rough, tough, dirty business, and dangerous. It was dangerous at times. No holds were barred.” And the law was not at issue: “Never once did I hear anybody, including myself, raise the question: ‘Is this course of action which we have agreed upon lawful? Is it legal? Is it ethical or moral?’ We never gave any thought to this realm of reasoning, because we were just naturally pragmatists. The one thing we were concerned about was this: will this course of action work, will it get us what we want?”
Sullivan said he and his cohorts at the FBI “could not free ourselves from that psychology with which we had been imbued as young men.” They were soldiers in the Cold War. “We never freed ourselves from that psychology that we were indoctrinated with, right after Pearl Harbor, you see… It was just like a soldier in the battlefield. When he shot down an enemy, he did not ask himself if this legal or lawful, is it ethical? It is what he was expected to do as a soldier. We did what we were expected to do.”
The FBI had spied on every prominent black political figure in America since WW1. The scope of its surveillance of black leaders was impressive, considering the Bureau’s finite manpower, the burden of its responsibilities, and the limited number of hours in a day. Hoover spent his career convinced that communism was behind the civil rights movement in the US from the start.
The ruling threw gasoline on the smoldering embers of the KKK. Days after the decision, the Klan began to burn again.
“The Klan was dead until Brown. They lived down here in their own little world. There was no problem. The blacks had their own area, the blacks had their own schools.” Now the Supreme Court had told the southern whites that they had to integrate. As McCormack saw it, working-class whites feared “blacks coming into their area now. Blacks would to to school with their children, blacks gonna marry their daughters, blacks gonna take over their jobs. So that was a motiving force… And the Klan grew.”
Despite the violence, Hoover took a hands-off stand toward the KKK. H would not direct the FBI to investigate or penetrate the Klan unless the president so ordered. “Headquarters came out with instructions that we were not to develop any high-level Klan informants because it might appear that we were guiding and directing the operations of the Klan.” This was a rationalization for racism.
Hoover had been born in the 19th-century Washington DC, a southern city that stayed segregated throughout most of the 20th century. In his world, blacks knew their place: they were servants, valets, and shoeshine boys. He feared the rise of a black “messiah,” to quote a COINTELPRO mission statement. He presided over an Anglo-Saxon America, and he aimed to preserve and defend it.
“He was very consistent throughout the years. The things he hated, he hated all his life,” Bill Sullivan said. “He hated liberalism, he hated blacks, he hated Jews — he had this great long list of hates.”
Hoover had to continue to represent the Party as a mortal threat. The power of the FBI depended on having a great enemy. So did the unwavering support he enjoyed from the American people and their president.
The Bureau needed to break Abel. Agents “interviewed him like crazy, every day,” for months on end.
Moscow liked Ike: he understood the meaning of war and he was willing to risk the chances of peace.
I thought only little girls giggled, Mr. Giancana.
Hoover shunned criminal investigations of congressmen. He very rarely handled matters involving money, sex, and politics as law enforcement cases. He classified them as intelligence matters, fit for his files and the president’s eyes only. He brought salacious political secrets about members of Congress to the White House, and the presidents from FDR onward usually savored them.
Farland encountered his fellow Americans under unusual protocols. The list of politicos who enjoyed Trujillo’s money, rum, and girls was long. The once and future Dominican ambassador to the US, Manuel de Moya, once of Trujillo’s chief intelligence officers, maintained a mansion on the edge of Santo Domingo where American congressmen were entertained — “a love vest just outside of the city that you entered by a maze of hedges so no car could be observed,” as Farland described it. “It was totally wired. There were two-way mirrors. There was a supply of whatever one wanted in the way of your desire. A number of our Congressmen made use of that and were photographed and taped.”
I know all I want to know about this damn country. All I want from you is to make diddly-darn sure that I’m well supplied with liquor in my hotel room for a week.
“As far as you are concerned, in my estimation, you’re nothing but a two-bit dictator and your country compared to mine is nothing but a fly speck on a map.”
“Mr. Ambassador, my friend, in moments of stress, we oftentimes make comments that we really don’t mean. Let’s forgive and forget.”
RFK thought he could impose his authority over Hoover: “For the first time since he had been Director of the FBI, he had to take instructions or orders from the Attorney General of the US — and couldn’t go over his head.”
But Hoover did not care to be instructed by an insolent young man who had never command anything but his brother’s presidential campaign.
Hoover believed that “Bobby was trying to take over the FBI, and run the FBI, water down the FBI. He was trying to re-do the whole machine to his own liking, and he didn’t have the experience or respect to command things like that.”
JFK was the third president in a row to appoint his campaign manager as AG; the office had become a political post, requiring loyalty above all.
The FBI had 200 agents keeping an eye on the UN. Telephone taps on UN offices were easy; planting bugs in Soviet and Soviet bloc offices was hard; black-bag jobs inside the UN were risky and rare. But the Bureau did all three, while keeping a weather eye out for disaffected diplomats who might defect to the US.
Every sunrise brought a fresh series of crises, landing like morning paper on the front porch.
The FBI’s infiltration of the Klan proved better than the Klan’s infiltration of state and local law enforcement agencies.
“There would be a Klan meeting with 10 people there, and 6 of them would be reporting back the next day.”
He told Kennedy that the safe held FBI reports detailing the sexual debauchery of members of the Senate and House who consorted with prostitutes. The presidents wondered aloud whether they should be leaked selectively, against Republicans, before election day.
Kennedy had seen some of those files as AG. He felt their disclosure could “destroy the confidence that people in the US had in their government and really make us a laughingstock around the world.”
Now, Edgar, here’s the play. Our State Department, far as I can tell, and I wouldn’t say this to anybody but you, is not worth a damn, they’re a bunch of sissy fellows and they never come up with a solution.
“The President expected the Agency to devote the necessary personnel and material resources in the Dominican Republic required to win the presidential election for the candidate favored by the US government. The President’s statements were unequivocal. He wants to win the election, and he expects the Agency to arrange for this to happen.”
The US provided as much cash as could be safely smuggled into Balaguer’s hands. President Johnson had ordered that the candidate would receive all the campaign money he needed, along with information and propaganda, courtesy of the CIA and the State Department.
Balaguer won the vote by a margin of 57 percent to Bosch’s 39 percent — a landslide built on American money, intelligence and power. The American press universally reported that the vote was free and fair.
We are an intelligence agency and as such are expected to know what is going to or is likely to happen.
He told Katzenbach that this power had been granted him in perpetuity by FDR a quarter of a century ago.
“I was, frankly, astounded to hear this,” Katzenbach recounted. “I had no illusions that I was going to bring the FBI under my control. But I did think it was possible to institute a more orderly procedure.”
“Communism as a system rests on the suppression of organized opposition. The Communist movement has failed in every sense.” But Hoover still saw the student movement through a Soviet prism. A purely American protest against authority was inconceivable to him.
A concerted attack on the FBI’s extralegal intelligence techniques could destroy Hoover’s image as the avatar of law and order in America.
Some 1,500 army intelligence officers in civilian clothing undertook the surveillance of some 100,000 American citizens. Army intelligence shared all their reports with the FBI over the next 3 years. The CIA tracked antiwar leaders and black militants who traveled overseas, and it reported back to the FBI.
The president had created a concerted effort to organize a secret police. He was trying to synchronize the gears of the FBI, the CIA, and the army to create an all-pervasive intelligence machine that would watch citizens as if they were foreign spies.
Johnson renounced his power on March 31, 1968. He said he would not seek reelection. He spoke to the nation on TV, his face a crumpled mask of exhaustion, his voice tinged with bitterness and despair.
We’ve lost Thieu. He thinks that we will sell him out.
But Nixon put his complete trust in no one — not even Hoover, a man whom he called “my closest personal friend of all in public life.”
Nixon also learned from Hoover how to lie to Congress about wiretapping without being caught.
“That was Mr. Hoover’s common practice. He told me about it. He said, ‘You know, about a month or so before I ever go up to testify before the Appropriation Committee I discontinued all taps so that when they ask me the question as to whether we are tapping anybody, I can say no.’” Once Hoover was done with his annual appearances in Congress, the FBI would turn the taps back on.
Nixon had apocalyptic visions of a revolution in America, his dark thoughts driven deeper by the political assassinations, ghetto riots, and antiwar marches of the sixties. His inaugural parade ran into a brief but furious hail of rocks, bottles, and beer cans tossed b hundreds of antiwar protesters. On the campaign trail, Nixon’s mantra had been “Bring Us Together.” The people he thought were ripping America apart were screaming curses at his black limousines as it rolled to the White House.
But the FBI did not have a clue about the student movement, and the students were the ones who worried Nixon the most.
Nixon feared that they were a subversive threat as powerful as the Soviets, the Chinese, and the Vietcong. He spoke of the campus uprising at American universities in one of his first major addresses.
“This is the way civilization begin to die,” he said. He quoted Yeats: “Things fall apart. The center cannot hold. None of us has the right to suppose it cannot happen here.”
In the East Room, Hoover gave Nixon a gold badge, making him an honorable member of the FBI, and Nixon spoke about the rule of law. “Our problem,” the president said, “is to see to it that, all over America, our laws — the written laws — deserve the respect of all Americans, and that those who carry out the law — who have that hard, difficult, grueling, sometimes dangerous task of enforcing the law — that they can carry out their responsibilities in a way that deserves respect.”
“This was going to come and destroy us. We were going to end up with FBI agents arrested. Not because what they did was wrong. But because nobody knew what was right or wrong.” Not knowing that difference is a legal definition of insanity.
He was railing to his advisers that the top secret reports he received on his enemies, foreign and domestic, were meaningless drivel.
He drew up plans to spend $1M on secret agents who would kidnap antiwar leaders and spirit them off to Mexico, entrap liberal politicians with prostitutes working out of bugged houseboats, plant informants inside the campaigns of Nixon’s opponents, and wiretap the Democratic Party apparatus for the 1972 presidential campaign.
As a young Congressman I worked with him and with others in the FBI in major investigations of various subversive elements in this country. Let me tell you something. Anybody who is strong, anybody who fights for what he believes in, anybody who stands up when it is tough is bound to be controversial. And I say that insofar as he is concerned, there may be controversy, but the great majority of the American people back Mr. Hoover.
And I think we ought to be awful careful what we do in this case of this man Ellsberg. Because there again, they’re going to make a martyr out of him.
When I see those columns, I think of what happened to Greece and Rome. They lost their will to live. They became subject to the decadence that destroys civilization. The US is reaching that period.
Felt went to Hoover’s inner sanctum to brief the director on the altercation. Hoover listened, shook his head sadly, and stared out the window. He had long feared a betrayal from within. “There were a few men who could tear down all that I have built up over the years,” he had written. Now, for the first time, Felt saw Hoover as he was — an isolated old man, alone at the top, no longer basking in adulation, fearing for the future.
Nixon had come to the most perilous point of his presidency. He could ill afford to lose Hoover’s loyalty. What might the director do to hold on to his power? The hint of blackmail lingered.
“We’ve got to avoid the situation where he could leave with a blast,” Nixon said. “We may have on our hands here a man who will pull down the temple with him, including me.”
The idea that Hoover could bring down the government of the US was an extraordinary thought. It plagued the president. “I mean, he considers himself a patriot, but he now see himself as McCarthy did,” Nixon said.
Sullivan struck hardest at Hoover’s cult of personality: “As you know you have become a legend in your lifetime with a surrounding mythology linked to incredible power,” he wrote. “We did all possible to build up your legend. We kept away from anything which would disturb you and kept flowing into your office what you wanted to hear. This was all part of the game but it got to be a deadly game that has accomplished no good. All we did was to help put you out of touch with the real world and this could not help but have a bearing on your decisions as the years went by.” He concluded with a plea: “I gently suggest you retire for your own good, that of the Bureau, the intelligence community, and law enforcement.”
As political attacks on him multiplied and became increasingly shrill and unfair, Hoover experienced loneliness and a fear that his life’s work was being destroyed.
Nixon gave him some sound advice, “Never, never figure that anyone’s your friend. Never, never, never… You’ve got to be a conspirator. You’ve got to be totally ruthless. You’ve got to appear to be a nice guy. But underneath you need to be steely tough. That, believe me, is the way to run the Bureau.”
Gray lacked steel. He was a malleable man. He was deeply unsure of how to take control of the FBI. He understood nothing of its customs and traditions. He did not comprehend the conduct of the Bureau’s top commanders. He came to learn, as he wrote, that “they lied to each other and conned each other as much as they could.”
They deeply resented the fact that the president had placed Pat Gray, a man they considered a political stooge, in charge of the FBI.
“It hurt all of us deeply,” said the chief of the FBI’s accounting and fraud division. Felt was Hoover’s rightful heir.
This stuff didn’t leak when Hoover was there. I’ve never known of a leak when Hoover was there. I could talk to him in this office about everything. And the reason is that — it wasn’t because they loved him, but they feared him. And they’ve got to fear the man at the top. You’ve got to play it exactly that way. You’ve got to be brutal, tough, and respected. I understand leaking out of the CIA, those goddamned cookie-pushers. But if it leaks out of the Bureau, the the whole damn place ought to be fired.”
There were times, and, Lyndon Johnson told me this same thing — when I felt that the only person in this goddamned government who was standing with me was Edgar Hoover. He would break his ass if he saw something that was wrong being done, if somebody was pissing on us…. What you’ve got to do is to do like Hoover.
“I don’t think a cop should run the Bureau,” the president once had said. “Policemen are too narrow.” He had been compelled to go against his instincts. The FBI needed law and order.
“You’re going to have to let me think about it,” Levi said. “The agents might get caught going in.”
“It’s already in,” Daly replied. “The microphone’s in.” That was the time-honored procedure: first the break-in to install the tap, then the approval to turn it on. The traditions of the FBI differed from the rules of criminal procedure.
Felt and Miller believed that, if the went to trial, they could convince a jury that the FBI had the power to bend the law in pursuit of national security, a power that flowed directly from the POTUS. They thought they could prove that the president’s sworn duty to protect and defend the Constitution gave him to power to break and enter a citizen’s door. They would assert that a president could violate the rights of an individual to preserve the interests of the nation.
Carter had an unusual take on the enemies of the US. “Peace is not the mere absence of war,” Cater said when he received the nomination. “Peace is action to stamp out international terrorism.”
But the new president had a hard time getting control of the instruments of American intelligence and law enforcement. The congressional inquiries of the CIA and the FBI — and the criminal investigation inside the Bureau — had led to upheavals and bitterness at both agencies. Neither was prepared to collaborate on counterterrorism.
The Bureau placed these political suspects under photographic and visual surveillance, infiltrated their meetings and rallies with undercover agents and informants, investigated their church groups and campus organizations, scrutinized their financial and telephone records, searched through their garbage cans, and confronted them with aggressive face-to-face interviews.
The investigation lasted four years. It produced no evidence.
Though the compromise of intelligence files was severe, the biggest thing the FBI lost in the case was its public reputation as a force impervious to foreign spies. The image of a desperate man trading secrets for sex with a Soviet spy was indelible to idealistic young FBI agents. “I never, ever dreamed that anybody within the FBI would ever do anything wrong. Because I always thought we were the most perfect people.”
Traitors like Hanssen and Ames could work undetected for years on end because American counterintelligence had become a shambles. The FBI and the CIA had not been on speaking terms for most the the past 40 years. The sniping and the silences between them did more harm to American national security than the Soviets.
North soon came up with another concept. The FBI would remove $2M in cash from the Fed, treat it with a chemical solution, and deliver it over to the kidnappers in Lebanon. The ransom would self-destruct in two hours.
The independence counsel would conclude that President Reagan, the SecDef, the director of CIA, and their aides had skirted or broken the law. But President Bush eventually granted pardons to all who faced criminal charges.
He did as Reagan had done in absolving Mark Felt and Ed Miller. He let national security trump the rule of law.
Marquise knew from bitter experience how often the FBI had no idea what was in its own files. The Bureau was a pyramid of paper, and it stayed that way well into the 21st century. “You’d spend all kinds of time putting things and you couldn’t get things out. It would have said ‘No Record’ for probably 95 percent of the major cases in the Bureau.”
Strategic analysis was the big picture, the power to know what your enemy is thinking. It was not about what happened five minutes ago, but what might happen five months from now; not a smart guess, but sifted and refined intelligence. without it, taking action usually was a shot in the dark.
The expert took a long look at the state of the Bureau’s technologies. The average American teenager had more computer power than most FBI agents. “You guys aren’t on life support. You’re dead.”
A steady roar of rage at the FBI reverberated after the shock of the September 11 attacks. The anger culminated in a debate at the highest levels of the government over dismantling the Bureau and building a new intelligence service in its place.
After working counterintelligence for 16 years, she had developed a finely honed sixth sense: suspicion.
Waves of fear lashed at the foundations of the US. Every ringing telephone in Washington sounded like an air raid alert. The specter of terrorist assaults with nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons surged every day and broke and rose again each night. The CIA was convinced they were coming, at the command of al-Qaeda’s leaders, safe in their Afghan redoubts. The president wanted a shield to hold back the tide and a sword to beat back the invaders. He sent a paramilitary team to Afghanistan; American missile strikes and bombing raids were imminent.
He was explicit about the detention of suspected terrorists. “RFK’s Justice Department, it is said, would arrest mobsters for spitting on the side walk,” he said. The FBI would use “the same aggressive arrest and detention tactics in the war on terror. Let the terrorists among us be warned: If you overstay your visa — even by one day — we will arrest you. If you violate a local law, you will be put in jail and kept in custody as long as possible. We will use every available statute. We will seek every prosecutorial advantage. We will use all our weapons.”
“We found that we were giving them too much data in too raw form”; as a result, hundreds of FBI agents spent much of the fall of 2001 chasing thousands of false leads. “It’s the nature of intelligence that many tips lead nowhere,” he said, “but you have to go down some blind alleys to find the tips that pay off.”
The FBI focused for 4 years on the wrong man. The Bureau was drowning in false leads; its networks were crashing; its desktop computers still required 12 clicks to save a document.
Soufan approached the wounded prisoner at the black site with a soft voice and a storehouse of foreknowledge. “I asked him his name,” Soufan later testified. “He replied with his alias. Then I asked him: ‘How about if I call you Hani?’ That was the name his mother nicknamed him as a child. He looked at me in shock, said okay, and we started talking.”
Harsh techniques were introduced — at first, stripping the prisoner of his clothes and depriving him of sleep for 48 hours at a time — and “Abu Zubaydah shut down and stopped talking.” Then the FBI took over again. Its officers blasted the prisoner with noise, froze him with cold, and buried him in a mock coffin. The techniques had been approved at the highest levels of the American government.
The Bureau still had no capacity to use intelligence as a weapon of national security. It was consumed by reacting to the events of the day, the hour, and the minute. It could not see over the horizon.
Saddam said he had used the telephone only twice and rarely slept in the same bed two nights running since the first American war against Iraq began in 1991.
Where were the weapons of mass destruction? Did they exist at all? They did not, Saddam said. It had been a long-running bluff, a deception intended to keep the Iranians, the Israelis, and the Americans at bay.
Stellar Wind had to be reauthorized by the signatures of President Bush and AG Ashcroft every 45 days. They acted on the basis of reports from the CIA — intelligence officers called them “the scary memos” — justifying the continuing surveillance.
Cheney was adamant: no one had the right to challenge the president’s power. They spying would continue at his command. It would go on with or without the Justice Department’s approval.
The president signed the authorization alone in the White House on the morning of March 11. It explicitly asserted that his powers as commander in chief overrode all other laws of the land.
Without doubt he saw a political disaster at hand. “I had to make a big decision, and fast. I thought about the Saturday Night Massacre in 1973” — when Nixon defied the Justice Department over his secret tapes, forced the AG and his deputy to resign, and destroyed his presidential aura of power. “That was not a historical crisis I was eager to replicate. It wouldn’t give me much satisfaction to know I was right on the legal principles while my administration imploded and our key programs in the war on terror were exposed in the media.”
“If we dont’ do this, people will die.” You can all supply your own this: “If we don’t collect this type of information,” or “If we don’t use this technique,” or “If we don’t extend this authority.” It is extraordinarily difficult to be the attorney standing in front of the freight train that is the need for this… It takes far more than a sharp legal mind to say “no” when it matters most. It takes moral character. It takes an ability to see the future. It takes an appreciation of the damage that will flow from an unjustified “yes.” It takes an understanding that, in the long run, intelligence under law is the only sustainable intelligence in this country.
Mueller had confidently reported to the commission that he was making great strides, “turning to the next stage of transforming the Bureau into an intelligence agency.” But the FBI was at least five years away from that goal.
Silberman’s report on the FBI, in the works throughout the winter of 2004 and sent to the White House on March 31, 2005, was a steel-wire scrubbing. “It has now been 3.5 years from the September 11 attacks. 3.5 years after December 7, 1941, the US had built and equipped an army and a navy that had crossed two oceans, the English Channel, and the Rhine; it had already won Germany’s surrender and was two months from vanquishing Japan. The FBI has spent the past 3.5 years building the beginnings of an intelligence service.” The report warned that it would take until 2010 to accomplish that task.
Since much of the world’s telecommunications traffic is routed through the US, regardless of its origins, the NSA and the FBI could trap an international email stored on a Microsoft server or trace a call switched through an ATT office without a warrant.
On the home front, Americans had become inured to the gaze of closed-circuit cameras, the gloved hands of airport guards, and the phalanx of cops and guardsmen in combat gear. Many willingly surrendered liberties for a promise of security. They might not love Big Brother, but they knew he was part of the family now.
He would be approaching 70 by then, and he had aged in office, his hair white, his face gray, his eyes weary, as every morning brought a barrage of fresh threats and false alarms. But ever since he had confronted a president over the limits of his powers to spy on American citizens, he had stood for a principle. He had said back then that he wanted no historian to write: “You won the war on terrorism, but you sacrificed your civil liberties.”
The chance remained that the principle might prevail, the possibility that in a time of continual danger Americans could be both safe and free.