Official and Confidential (34 page)

According to Bernard Spindel, an electronics specialist, FBI bugging of Capitol Hill was routine in the mid-sixties. In 1965, while checking a congressman's phone, he found a
bugging device wired into Congress' telephone frame room. Then, using a detector, he tracked a multi-line Alpeth cable that was spliced into the one serving both houses of Congress and their hearing rooms. The cable terminated at the old Esso Building at 261 Constitution Avenue, in a room rented by the Justice Department.

‘I was able to monitor senators' and congressmen's conversations on that cable,' recalled Spindel's partner Earl Jaycox, ‘and it was one that shouldn't have been carrying their calls. We understood from our conversations with telephone company employees that the cable had been put in at the direction of the FBI.'
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Spindel was to have testified about all this to the Subcommittee on Invasion of Privacy, chaired by Senator Edward Long, the Democratic senator from Missouri. Then, on the eve of the hearing, he was told Senator Long had reached an ‘understanding' with the FBI, that he was not to discuss FBI operations on the stand. When Spindel tried to do so anyway, Long silenced him. ‘We will not,' he said, ‘go into this area.' The reason, according to Long's Chief Counsel Bernard Fensterwald, was that the Senator had been blackmailed into submission by the FBI.

For eight years in the sixties, Long did battle with what he called ‘the snooping monster,' the invasion of citizens' privacy by the tappers, microphone planters and mail openers of modern life. He also wanted something that was then just a pious hope, a Freedom of Information Act to give citizens access to government records.

In 1963, as chairman of a judiciary subcommittee, Long began to probe government efficiency. Fired by the discovery that state agencies spent $20 million on eavesdropping equipment each year, he ordered an inquiry. The resulting hearings ground on for more than three years, and spelled the Senator's ruin.

When Long decided to hold hearings specifically on the FBI, Edgar was furious. ‘Pressure,' an aide had earlier advised,
‘would have to be applied so that the personal interest of Senator Long became involved, rather than any ideological basis.' Years later, in a sworn affidavit, Fensterwald gave this account of what followed in 1966.

‘The FBI,' Fensterwald said, ‘knew they were going to be the next subject of the committee hearings. Hoover's man [Assistant Director] Cartha DeLoach made an appointment and came to Long's office with another agent. They never come alone. Long had me sit in on it, probably because he expected it to be about our FBI investigation. I doubt that he knew it was going to be “This Is Your Life, Senator Long.” They had a file folder with them, and DeLoach said something like, “Senator, I think you ought to read this file that we have on you. You know we would never use it, because you're a friend of ours, but you never know what unscrupulous people will do. And we just thought you ought to know the type of stuff that might get around and might be harmful to you.”'

‘They handed him the folder, a fairly thin one, as I recall. And Long just sat there and read it for a few minutes. Then he closed the file, he thanked them and they went on their way. The next thing I knew we had orders to skip over the FBI inquiries and go on to whatever other agency was next. I think there were some perfunctory face-saving hearings, but we never got into the heavy stuff – the wire-tapping and so on.'

DeLoach, who has denied the Fensterwald allegation, was Edgar's principal go-between with Senator Long. He wrote of one visit to Long: ‘I asked him point-blank whether or not he intended to hold hearings concerning the FBI at any time. He stated he did not. I asked him if he would be willing to give us a commitment that he would in no way embarrass the FBI. He said he would agree to do this … I told Senator Long that, to sum up, it was our understanding that we had a commitment from him that he would not bother the FBI. He stated this was true and that we could have his word in this regard … He stated that at the conclusion of his hearings he
intended to use the FBI as a shining example for other agencies to follow.

‘It is important,' DeLoach wrote, ‘that we stay in touch with Senator Long in view of his changeable personality. While
we have neutralized the threat
[author's emphasis] of being embarrassed by the Long Committee, we have not yet eliminated certain dangers … We therefore must keep on top of this situation at all times.'

A year later Long was the subject of an expose in
Life
magazine. It reported that Long had received payments from Morris Shenker, chief counsel to Jimmy Hoffa, the crooked leader of the Teamsters Union. His probe of federal snooping,
Life
claimed, was inspired by Teamsters cronies and had blunted government efforts to fight organized crime.

A Senate ethics committee inquiry found no facts to support these allegations. Long had focused on privacy before the suspect payments were made, and he and Shenker also shared clients who had nothing to do with Hoffa. The
Life
article and the ensuing furor, however, wrecked Long's political career. He failed to win reelection in 1968.

Another member of Congress, also a prominent campaigner for the privacy rights of American citizens, fell foul of the FBI and
Life
magazine in circumstances that suggest the Bureau maliciously fed
Life
false information.

In the mid-sixties, Cornelius Gallagher was regarded as one of the best and brightest of the Democratic Party's young men. A Korean War hero from Bayonne, New Jersey, he had been in Congress since 1958. Six feet tall, silver-haired in his early forties, he soon became congressional adviser to the Arms Control Agency and a delegate to the Disarmament Conference. He was friendly with the Kennedy brothers and was mentioned as a possible Vice President to Lyndon Johnson in 1964.

Like Senator Long, Gallagher's major domestic interest was what he perceived as the encroachment of the Big
Brother mentality. He worried about the thousands of people whose private lives, thanks to modern gadgetry, were no longer private at all. He wondered about data banks and the growing use of lie detectors, about genetic engineering and the psychological testing of children. Who had access to such information? What safeguards did the citizen have?

The result of the Congressman's worrying was the creation in 1963 of the Subcommittee on Privacy, an out-growth of the House Committee on Government Operations. Private business, educational bodies, even medical institutions, drew much of its fire. Soon, however, in part because the FBI and the IRS pried personal information out of credit bureaus, the committee's work began to give both those agencies bad press.

It was not what Gallagher was doing so much as what he refused to do that brought the first clash with Edgar. The trouble began when he came under unexpected pressure from the Teamsters Union and from Roy Cohn, Edgar's protégé from the McCarthy days.

Cohn, who said he was speaking on Edgar's behalf, astonished the Congressman by
urging
him to hold hearings on evidence of illegal FBI and IRS surveillance. The purpose, Cohn explained, was to embarrass former Attorney General Robert Kennedy, on whose authority the wiretaps had been installed.

When Gallagher refused to hold hearings, saying it was outside his committee's mandate, Cohn responded with wheedling and threats. ‘Mr Hoover wants to give you a big buildup,' he said. ‘If you're their friend, anything you need you get. But if you're not a friend, and you don't cooperate, that means you're an enemy.'

Months later, while signing correspondence one evening, Gallagher paused at a letter he knew nothing about. ‘In the letter, which was all typed and waiting for my signature, I was asking the Attorney General to supply my committee with copies of the authorizations for the bugging of Martin
Luther King. I knew about that bugging, because John Rooney had taken great delight in playing the sex stuff to me. But I had no plans to ask for the files, and I had dictated no such letter. I called in my secretary and asked where the letter had come from.'

Gallagher's secretary, Elizabeth May, recalled the incident vividly. ‘Roy Cohn,' she said, ‘had dictated the letter to me on the telephone. He indicated that he was following FBI instructions. I typed up the letter and left it for the Congressman with the rest of his mail. I thought he must know about it. When Mr Gallagher asked me what it was, and I told him, he was really wild. He called Cohn right away.'

At a new meeting with the Congressman, Cohn told Gallagher the letter was ‘another chance' for him to cooperate, and urged him to send it. When Gallagher refused, Cohn told him: ‘You're gonna be sorry …' The Congressman ignored the threat and pressed on with his privacy hearings.

At Easter 1967, there was a mysterious burglary at Gallagher's house by raiders apparently interested only in documents. Police contacts told the Congressman it was ‘an FBI job.' ‘Then,' Gallagher recalled, ‘a top guy I knew at Bell Telephone told me the FBI was bugging our phone.'

The real body blow, however, was an article that fall in
Life
magazine. It focused on ‘the Fix,' the blackmail and bribery that guarantees the Mob the blind eye, or the active assistance, of police and elected officials. Specifically,
Life
named the mobster ‘Bayonne Joe' Zicarelli, and claimed he was ‘on the best of terms with the widely respected Democratic representative from Hudson County, Congressman Cornelius E. Gallagher …' The politician and the mafioso, said the magazine, had regular ‘get-togethers,' sometimes for Sunday brunch, at a suburban inn.

Gallagher strenuously denied the relationship, but complained to
Life
executives in vain. When he considered suing for libel, lawyers warned the case would generate more adverse publicity and that public officials rarely win libel
cases. Then, in July 1968, three
Life
reporters interviewed the Congressman at his office. He readily admitted two innocent encounters with Zicarelli, who was a prominent figure in the area, but again denied compromising contacts.

That same month, Gallagher's attorney, Lawrence Weisman, asked him to fly to an urgent meeting at Newark Airport. What they had to discuss, he said, could not be discussed on the telephone. At Newark, Weisman explained that he had spent part of the day at Roy Cohn's office. At Cohn's suggestion, he had listened in on an extension as Cohn talked on the telephone with Cartha DeLoach of the FBI.

DeLoach allegedly claimed the Bureau had ‘incontestable' proof that a missing New Jersey gambler, Barney O'Brien, had died of a heart attack in the Congressman's house ‘while lying next to Gallagher's wife.' The body had supposedly been removed by Kayo Konigsberg, a gangster linked to Zicarelli. According to Gallagher and his attorney, DeLoach made it clear he had recently been in touch with
Life
. ‘If you still know that guy,' DeLoach was quoted as saying, ‘you had better get word to him to resign from Congress. He's not going to last more than a week after the story hits.'

The story hit on August 8, 1968, and it was one of the most savage attacks on a public figure in the history of twentieth-century journalism.
THE CONGRESSMAN AND THE HOODLUM
, shouted the headline. Gallagher was described as ‘a man who time and again has served as the tool and collaborator of a Cosa Nostra gang lord.'

At the core of the story was what appeared to be a journalistic scoop, drawing on transcripts of an eight-year-old wiretap on Mafia boss Zicarelli. According to
Life
, they showed that the mob boss had reached out to the congressman to get the police off his back:

GALLAGHER:
I got hold of these people [Bayonne Police] and there will be no further problem.

ZICARELLI:
I hope so, because they're ruining me.

GALLAGHER:
They damn well better not.

ZICARELLI:
They're doing a job on me like was never done before.

GALLAGHER:
I laced into them.

The
Life
exposé sparked prolonged public debate. To the astonishment of many, however, the Congressman was reelected that year with a healthy majority. He continued his campaign for privacy rights and for laws to limit the powers of the IRS and the Bureau of the Budget.

It was an IRS investigation in 1972 that brought the ruin the
Life
article had failed to achieve. Gallagher was charged with evading taxes and helping a local official to do the same. He pleaded guilty, following an impassioned speech to the House about his ordeal, and went to jail for seventeen months.
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Meanwhile, thanks to a redrawing of constituency boundaries, his congressional seat ceased to exist. Gallagher received messages of support and sympathy from Gerald Ford, then Vice President, former Secretary of State Dean Rusk and many others. Rusk has characterized Edgar as ‘a veiled blackmailer.'

The House Ethics Committee found no evidence that the Congressman had ever been involved with organized crime.
Life
had run its story about the supposed cadaver in Gallagher's house in spite of the fact that its alleged source, Kayo Konigsberg, was in the Mental Center for Federal Prisoners at the time. He later said the
Life
account was ‘a phony' and that the FBI had tried to persuade him to ‘frameup' the Congressman.

There is no evidence that the damning ‘transcript' of conversations between Gallagher and the Mafia boss Zicarelli ever existed in the files of any law enforcement agency. In 1968 the IRS, the CIA, the Narcotics Bureau, the Secret Service, the New York City Police, the Manhattan District Attorney and the New York Rackets Bureau all
pleaded ignorance. As for the FBI, Attorney General Ramsey Clark said he was advised that ‘the FBI does not have and has not had any transcripts or logs that could be the basis for the quotations in the
Life
magazine story …' Nor have any such transcripts turned up in the thousands of documents that have since been made public.
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A review of FBI files in Newark, New Jersey, has produced none, and agents who worked the Zicarelli case in the sixties said they knew of no such evidence.