The Burglary (62 page)

MANY FBI OPERATIONS
reflected Hoover's apparent obsession with the details of the private lives of people whose opinions he disliked or of powerful people he threatened to blackmail by virtue of the secrets he kept on them in his files. A file on a COINTELPRO operation focused on Puerto Rican independence activists documents something he often did—lift his crude personal fascinations to an official mandate in intelligence gathering. An informer was instructed by the bureau “to report even the slightest bits of information concerning the personal lives” of the activists. It also illustrates his approval of cruel outcomes. During a COINTELPRO “disruption” of one Puerto Rican organization, the target of the disruption suffered a serious heart attack. In a report, FBI agents described his heart attack as a “positive result” of the bureau's effort.

A Los Angeles agent received enthusiastic approval from the director for a plan to punish actress Jean Seberg in 1970 for giving a contribution to the Black Panther Party. The plan was tragically successful. The agent
proposed to Hoover that Seberg, then several months pregnant, be publicly humiliated by planting the false rumor that her baby's father was a Black Panther leader. The planting of such a rumor, the agent wrote in his proposal, “could cause her embarrassment and serve to cheapen her image with the general public.” The director approved the proposed plan, noting in his response that “Jean Seberg has been a financial supporter of the B.P.P. [Black Panther Party] and should be neutralized.” He advised Los Angeles agents to increase the effectiveness of the operation by waiting a couple months so Seberg's pregnancy would be more obvious when the rumor was planted. Apparently eager to move ahead, agents in Los Angeles planted the rumor with
Los Angeles Times
gossip columnist
Joyce Haber as soon as the director approved the plan. Haber wrote that an international movie star who supported the “black revolution” was expecting and the “Papa's said to be a rather prominent Black Panther.” With other details, Haber made it clear the unnamed star was Seberg. Soon after reading the rumor, Seberg went into premature labor and three days later gave birth to a dead white baby girl. After Seberg committed suicide on the anniversary of the birth of the dead baby in 1979, her husband,
Romain Gary, the French novelist-diplomat, said Seberg had suffered severe depression ever since the published rumor and the birth of her dead child. He said she had tried to commit suicide each year on the anniversary of the birth.

Shortly after Seberg's suicide became known, then FBI director
William Webster issued a contrite statement: “The days when the FBI used derogatory information to combat advocates of unpopular causes have long since passed. We are out of that business forever.”

Hoover even felt free to secretly manipulate elections. When he learned in June 1967 that a Peace Party ticket might be formed for the 1968 presidential election, he approved a plan to destroy the effort by, in his words, labeling “as communists or communist-backed the more hysterical opponents of the President on Vietnam question in the midst of the presidential campaign [which] would be a real boon to Mr. Johnson.” He added in this note, sent to all of the bureau's field offices, that in regard to New Left activists, “every avenue of possible embarrassment must be vigorously and enthusiastically exploited.”

If Muhammad Ali had known about either the FBI's surveillance of him or that he and Frazier unwittingly provided cover for the burglary of the Media FBI office, he might have thought the cover was a sort of poetic justice. The bureau built a file on Ali, beginning with its investigation of his Selective Service case. Some of his phone conversations were tapped, and
FBI informers gained access to, of all things, his elementary school records in his hometown, Louisville, Kentucky. They discovered that little Cassius Clay liked art. They recorded every grade he made from elementary through high school. A minor driving citation, as well as family disagreements over his becoming a Muslim, were noted in the file. His appearances on
The Tonight Show
with Johnny Carson were monitored and summarized by agents, at taxpayers' expense, for the FBI director. Hoover had concluded, regarding Ali's claim that his refusal to serve in the Army rested on religious grounds, that Ali's beliefs “were a matter of convenience rather than ones sincerely held.” The U.S. Supreme Court rejected that claim on June 28, 1971, in a unanimous opinion that supported Ali's claim that his “beliefs are founded on tenets of the Muslim religion as he understands them.”

FOR HOOVER
, from the beginning, much of his motivation in intelligence operations flowed from his conviction that all dissent and all movements for basic rights flowed from communism. There was a time when it was important for the FBI to competently investigate the infiltration of Soviet spies in the United States, including in government agencies where real harm could have been done. Unfortunately, this specific need in a precise period was transformed by Hoover into a vast and unending conspiracy. His focus on pursuing actual enemies evolved into seeing and pursuing enemies everywhere, even in the expression of the mildest liberal ideas. In the process, dissent was in effect secretly criminalized by the bureau. This resulted in countless numbers of innocent people being victimized while some actual enemies may have gone unnoticed. Tragically, for the bureau and the country, his obsession with communism cost him his competence.

Hoover played major public and major private roles in the anticommunism movement.
Publicly, he was the ringmaster of the movement, much more so than Senator
Joseph McCarthy, whose name is most frequently connected to anticommunism.
In fact, Hoover provided McCarthy much, if not most, of the material McCarthy used as the basis of his reckless investigations. Hoover wrote books and articles and gave speeches on communism, and he advised the powerful House Un-American Activities Committee to expose communists and communist sympathizers, “fellow travelers,” and liberals, who he often said were more dangerous than communists.
He gave HUAC that advice in a major speech, known as the “Communist Menace” speech, on March 26, 1947.

In that speech, Hoover prescribed the pattern for how alleged
communists and others should be rooted out. He urged HUAC to publicly “expose” communists and other people whose politics were suspect. Exposure by HUAC, he said, would lead the public to “quarantine” such people in their communities. Indeed, that is what happened.

Hoover's two-punch plan—“expose” and “quarantine”—was carried out repeatedly throughout the country by HUAC and state and education committees in what
Victor Navasky, former editor of the
Nation,
astutely described as “degradation ceremonies.”

The job of HUAC and the other “shaming” groups, Navasky wrote in
Naming Names,
“was not to legislate or even to discover subversives—that had already been done by the intelligence agencies and their informants—so much as it was to stigmatize.”

Hoover's major private role in the anticommunism movement included giving HUAC the FBI's unverified surveillance files to use as the basis of its hearings in Washington and around the country.
Those unverified FBI files were the basis of most efforts throughout the country—in federal, state, and local government agencies; in universities; in public school boards; in businesses and other private organizations—that led to the public humiliation and dismissal of thousands of people from their jobs during the anticommunist era. The accused were not permitted to face their accusers or defend themselves.

HUAC and other agencies “exposed” people by using the unverified FBI files. Often the accused were, as Hoover predicted would happen, quarantined. People who refused to testify were found in contempt, and some of them were imprisoned. Many lost their jobs or were shunned in their workplaces and communities.
The accused had no access to the secret FBI files used to condemn them.

In addition to placing himself in charge of searching for Americans who had suspect political opinions during the anticommunist years, and turning their names over to the various agencies that then exposed them to public scorn and loss of employment, Hoover played another very important role during this era. As the fiery prophet of anticommunism, he contributed significantly to shaping the national narrative on anticommunism. He did so in ways that made Americans deeply fearful, and, ironically, at the same time contributed significantly to Americans being intellectually defenseless against communism. His rhetoric often consisted of raw hatred of communism and of the Soviet Union. He encouraged blind, religious allegiance to the hatred, but he imparted little or no understanding of the ideology and its history. Consequently, average Americans tended to rely on the warnings
Hoover preached repeatedly. As a result, if a serious communist threat had in fact developed in the United States, many, if not most, Americans would have been inadequately equipped to understand or oppose it. He drummed up fear and convinced people the FBI would get rid of the enemies that, he said, were penetrating the country's major institutions, even elementary and high schools.

The FBI files that were the basis of these anonymous accusations were the product not only of spying by FBI agents and untrained informers, but also of reports by members of the
American Legion who from 1940 to 1966 spied for the FBI in their communities as part of a formal agreement with the bureau.
The large contribution made by Legion members to the FBI's massive trove of unevaluated informer files was first reported by FBI historian
Athan Theoharis in 1985 in
Political Science Quarterly.
From the 16,700 American Legion posts in the country, a network of 100,880 untrained volunteer informers was created. They regularly reported information to the FBI about their fellow citizens, their neighbors. This augmentation of the FBI's spying capacity was the closest the FBI came to being like the much-despised
Stasi, the spying agency in the former
East Germany, where people lived in constant fear of being informed on by their neighbors, even by their spouses. East Germans, however, knew such a system existed and dreaded it. In contrast, Americans lived in innocence with no idea that the American Legion member next door might be spying on them on behalf of the FBI.

With the establishment of
COINTELPRO and other operations that encouraged the use of the best and brightest agents to devise high-impact actions, supported by an extensive network of untrained informers, a culture of carelessness and lawlessness penetrated the bureau. That was admitted by Sullivan, the longtime head of the Domestic Intelligence Division.
In an internal memorandum, Sullivan wrote that many of the COINTELPRO operations were “clearly illegal.”

Lawlessness had been part of the FBI culture for many years. In a reversal of what would be expected to be the norm in law enforcement integrity, an
agent's expressed concern about the illegality of certain practices could have serious negative consequences in Hoover's FBI.
That is illustrated in the reaction of FBI officials at Washington headquarters to a New York agent who expressed concern at a training class in Washington in 1951 about whether break-ins by FBI agents at homes and offices were unconstitutional. Headquarters officials were startled that an agent would raise such a question and ordered officials at the New York office to determine whether that agent's “mental outlook might be present” among other agents on the New York office's break-in squad. Washington officials urged the New York FBI officials to “determine which of these men should be retained on this type of activity and which should be deleted.” Officials in New York and Washington were relieved to learn, after an examination of New York agents' attitudes, that no other member of the New York break-in squad had scruples about the constitutionality of break-ins.

ANYONE COULD BECOME
a target of the FBI's political operations, but files suggest that intellectuals were among Hoover's chief targets—professors, artists, scientists, clergy. To be an intellectual, like being black, was to be regarded as a potential subversive, if not an active one. The director's wide brush rather than precise approach to investigations and to intelligence gathering is indicative of how the bureau monitored intellectuals of various kinds. Files were maintained on nearly all well-known writers and artists. Reading a list of writers who were in the FBI's files gives the impression that all the leading writers were there.
To name a few: Sinclair Lewis, Pearl S. Buck, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck, Thomas Mann, Carl Sandburg, Dashiell Hammett, Truman Capote, Thornton Wilder, Lillian Hellman, Robert Frost, Graham Greene, Hannah Arendt. It is an endless roll call of the best novelists, nonfiction writers, poets, essayists, and playwrights, including Nobel laureates.
Science fiction writers, including Ray Bradbury, also were regarded with suspicion and placed in the files.
So were some publishers, including Alfred A. Knopf. His file was active for forty years primarily because of FBI interest in the authors Knopf published, some of whom Hoover considered subversive. One entry in Knopf's file involved a loyalty check conducted by the FBI when he was nominated to be on the advisory board of the National Park Service.
A wide array of scientists, including Albert Einstein, were monitored.

Playwright
Arthur Miller wrote extensively about the atmosphere of fear that permeated the lives of artists during the
Cold War. “
The politics of alien conspiracy soon dominated political discourse,” he wrote in a 1996 article in the
New Yorker
about the late 1940s and early 1950s, a period “in our lives” when there was no “point of moral reference against which to gauge the action.…The left could not look straight at the Soviet Union's abrogations of human rights. The anti-Communist liberals could not acknowledge the violations of those rights by congressional committees.”