The Burglary (48 page)

Whatever caused the attorney general to ignore Hoover's March 1971 request that he seek an injunction against publication of the Media files—excessive pique at Hoover's 1970 behavior, excessive caution about exposing criminal operations being hatched in the White House, or excessive fear of the damage Hoover could cause because of what he knew and could reveal about demands for illegal operations he carried out at the president's request—a few months later, in the fall of 1971, Mitchell gave the director reason to be optimistic when he gave him written approval to defy the law Congress had just passed requiring an end to the bureau's maintaining lists of subversives to be detained.

Hoover's secret FBI had trumped Congress just seven months after the Media burglary. From inside the FBI, it appeared Hoover's subterfuge might continue, despite the Media revelations. Even before the burglary, however, Hoover's world had started to change. Some critics had surfaced, including a few former agents. They had aired complaints, but they had not revealed details of the bureau's operations. Hoover thought he had easily discredited them as just a few disgruntled agents. Nevertheless, he no longer felt completely secure. He was seventy-six in 1971 and, bureau insiders later reported, feared his enemies might learn about his illegal actions and use that information to force him out of office. He had become meticulous about appearing to be abiding strictly by the law. But the Media files were a profound challenge. They provided the public with firsthand evidence—some of it in his own words—of how he operated the FBI. He was still able to fool Congress and to engage the attorney general as an enabler in violating the law, but he could not refute the truth of his own secret files now on display for the first time.

15

O
NE OMINOUS
“message in a bottle” from the Media burglars remained a secret—COINTELPRO. Despite having demonstrated inside the bureau in September 1971 that he was still a master at subterfuge, it was not possible for the director and his top aides to rest easy that fall. They were determined to stay the course, but they also feared daily that the worst was yet to come. What if someone was able to figure out what COINTELPRO was?

COINTELPRO hovered over the FBI.

The possible exposure of the program was regarded inside the bureau as the most dangerous bureau operation that could be exposed. It was assumed by bureau officials that the public's reaction to it would be much more explosive than the reaction to the Security Index had been. As threatening as the Security Index was, people inside the FBI realized that if COINTELPRO became known, people would realize that the bureau conducted operations far more controversial and damaging to Americans' rights than creating lists of alleged subversives to be arrested during a national emergency. For that reason, FBI officials desperately hoped in the spring of 1971 that COINTELPRO never would become public, that it would remain buried in the bureau's most secret files. But they lived with a grim truth throughout that spring: The Media burglars were still free and were able to distribute files at any time, and for all FBI officials knew, the burglars might have a file that would reveal the existence of COINTELPRO.

Clever as the director had been through the years in protecting himself and the bureau, he would have realized that if COINTELPRO records
became public, it would be impossible for him to avoid responsibility. Unknown outside the bureau, there was a long trail of secret files that provided detailed evidence that Hoover himself created the COINTELPRO operations, sought proposals for them, and had authorized and monitored most of them. Not only that, but he had put a premium on the development of COINTELPRO projects. Only the best agents were to be permitted to conduct them, and they would be rewarded for doing so. He had kept these operations a secret from most attorneys general he served under, including the current one—not that Attorney General Mitchell would have opposed them.

The only Media file that mentioned COINTELPRO arrived in my mailbox on April 5, 1971. The term was near the top of a routing slip that included the request that agents distribute the attached article that had been published in
Barron's,
the weekly financial publication, on how campus protests should be handled more forcefully by college presidents. There was no
clue about what the term “COINTELPRO” meant, but simply reporting about the file that contained the term set off an alarm inside the FBI. To bureau officials, a very important shoe had just dropped. As soon as my story about that file—written without the unexplained “COINTELPRO” term—was published on April 6, headquarters officials realized that one of their worst fears, public exposure of COINTELPRO, had just come closer to being realized. They had been waiting to see if that file would be released by the burglars. When it was, they knew then with certainty that the term existed outside the FBI for the first time. Something had to be done.
My story on the files that arrived that day from the burglars emphasized the one with the COINTELPRO routing slip and was headlined “FBI Secretly Prods Colleges on New Left.” On a copy of the story included in the MEDBURG investigative file, Hoover handwrote three brief notes, each one a request for documents mentioned in the story.

This document, a simple routing slip, had more impact than any other file stolen from the Media office. The term at the top, COINTELPRO, had never been seen before outside the bureau. It was the name of one of Hoover's most carefully guarded secrets—dirty tricks operations conducted against dissidents.

He acted quickly. On the same day the story was published, he wrote to the heads of all the field offices then conducting COINTELPRO operations and told them that the program's “90-day status letters will no longer be required and should be discontinued.” That change suggested that the director was trying to increase secrecy about the program by eliminating one of the layers of reporting that documented progress in COINTELPRO operations.
But in that same memorandum to field offices he also made it clear that COINTELPRO was still an important program despite the potential danger that could result from its name now being known outside the bureau. He told the agents in charge of the field offices that they must “continue aggressive and imaginative participation in the program.”

Two days after he learned that the COINTELPRO routing slip had been released by the burglars, Hoover wrote a letter to the attorney general. His April 8 letter to Mitchell seemed to be designed as a warning that something new and controversial might emerge at any time from the Media files. Specifically, he expressed concern that the burglars might make COINTELPRO public, but he did not mention the routing slip that already had been released. He informed the attorney general that the term, used alone, did not make the program “readily comprehensible.” Perhaps still hoping that the routing slip would spark no interest and COINTELPRO would remain secret, even from the attorney general, Hoover did not explain the nature of COINTELPRO operations, only that they existed.

By three weeks after the bureau learned from my story that the COINTELPRO routing slip had been released, concern at FBI headquarters apparently had increased dramatically about the possible exposure of the
program. Hoover made a radical decision: he eliminated those programs he had started in 1956 and that he regarded as so important to his intelligence operation.

He took that extreme step after FBI official Charles Brennan wrote a memo to him on April 27, 1971, recommending the closure of COINTELPRO. This should be done, Brennan wrote, in order “to afford additional security to our sensitive techniques and operations.…These programs involve a variety of sensitive intelligence techniques and disruptive activities, which are afforded close supervision at the Seat of Government [a bureau term for the national FBI headquarters in Washington]. They have been carefully supervised with all actions being afforded prior Bureau approval and an effort has been made to avoid engaging in harassment. Although successful over the years, it is felt they should now be discontinued for security reasons because of their sensitivity.” Beginning three years later, as some COINTELPRO operations were revealed for the first time, it would be discovered that the operations not only did not avoid harassment but were designed specifically to be harassment, often of law-abiding Americans, sometimes for years and sometimes by provoking violence.

The director immediately agreed with the recommendation to close COINTELPRO. On April 28, he sent a memorandum to field offices ordering the immediate discontinuance of all COINTELPRO operations. Given the importance of COINTELPRO to the FBI, this would appear to have been a profoundly significant decision, one that would be disruptive to some of the major operations of the bureau. That was not a problem, however, for just as changing the name of the Security Index and its predecessor, the Custodial Detention Index, were ruses to cover his earlier defiance, the internal announcement that COINTELPRO was being closed was not what it appeared to be.

When the details of COINTELPRO started to be revealed, more than two years later, reporters at first accepted the FBI's official statement that the program no longer existed, that it had been canceled on April 28, 1971. That was not true. Consistent with past Hoover practice, his order to eliminate COINTELPRO was designed to protect and to deceive. Once again the devil was in Hoover's nomenclature. The program was no longer called COINTELPRO, but the program itself, with all the same qualities and practices, continued. From now on, Hoover wrote when he notified FBI officials that he had “closed” COINTELPRO, such operations would be conducted on an ad hoc basis, each approved by the director. That was exactly how they had been operated before. The only difference was that now the
operations did not have the COINTELPRO designation. Therefore, if someone asked—as people did, beginning a year after the burglary—FBI officials would be able to say—as they did—“That program doesn't exist anymore.” But it did.

New COINTELPRO-like operations, in fact, continued to be initiated at that time in 1971, including efforts to destroy the reputation of
John Kerry, after he testified before Senator
J. William Fulbright's Senate Foreign Relations Committee and called the war in Vietnam “a tragic mistake.” The FBI eventually created a 2,934-page file on Kerry—the future Massachusetts senator, 2004 Democratic presidential candidate and secretary of state—and a 19,978-page file on
Vietnam Veterans Against the War, the prominent organization of veterans returning from Vietnam he led in 1971. In fact, many such operations were conducted against individuals and organizations throughout the mid-1970s.

Given that the COINTELPRO operations had not been revealed by May 2, 1972, the day Hoover died, a little more than a year after the term surfaced on a Media file, he may have remained confident until his death that the program, perhaps his darkest secret, would remain hidden forever. That COINTELPRO had not been revealed by then may have convinced Hoover that the legacy he had spent a lifetime developing might not be redefined by what the Media files revealed or by the accusations a few former agents made against him in the last two years of his life—or by the powerful secrets he knew had not yet been revealed. Maybe those secrets would remain sealed.

HOOVER'S STRONGEST SUPPORTERS
pulled out all the stops in the spring of 1971 to buoy his spirits. They encircled him with warm support and angry defenses in that year that was marked by harsh public criticism—a time that was what
New York Times
columnist
Tom Wicker described in an April 15, 1971, column as “the worst period of controversy Mr. Hoover has encountered in his 47-year career.”

Thanks to a campaign by the bureau's public relations office, on May 10, 1971, the forty-seventh anniversary of Hoover's becoming director of the bureau, seventy-one members of Congress placed tributes to him in the
Congressional Record
.