The Burglary (65 page)

In 1965, a high-ranking FBI official, acting on Hoover's behalf, secretly asked for and received direct assistance on Hoover's behalf from Supreme Court justice
Abe Fortas regarding a case then pending before the court that involved the bureau. After Fortas, in response to Hoover's inquiry, violated a court rule that prohibits justices from discussing pending cases with anyone outside the court, Hoover wrote in a memo to the FBI official who consulted with the justice that Fortas had demonstrated he was “a more honest man than I gave him credit for being.” It was a strange interpretation of honesty. Hoover said he had feared Fortas “would try to weasel out [of helping Hoover] on grounds it was improper for him as a member of the
court to even discuss the matter”—as, of course, it was. To Hoover, it was more important that the justice serve Hoover's interest than it was that he maintain the integrity required by the court.

IN THE ANNALS
of both national law enforcement agencies and intelligence agencies, the roles Hoover played and the adulation he sought and received were unique. He repeatedly stretched his responsibilities into areas that were not part of his official responsibility. As Ungar wrote, “The FBI acted as if it had an entire way of life to protect.” With the growth of protest, the bureau “became ever more frightened and confused until it saw itself as a bulwark against the lawlessness and disintegration of the American way of life. The FBI felt it had a mission to set things right again, and if that meant its own escalation of tactics and some desperate measures in the name of law, then so be it.”

Hoover's roles in regard to the Vietnam War and racial issues—the two most important issues in the country in the twentieth century—were the most far-reaching of all his self-appointed intrusions into important areas of American life.

From the beginning of the Vietnam War, he made himself the watchdog of dissent against the war. His efforts got under way in the summer of 1964, as the
Johnson administration was still trying to determine whether a U.S. Navy ship had been attacked by North Vietnamese forces in the Gulf of Tonkin. Acting as though it was certain the attack had occurred, members of the administration urged Congress to authorize President Johnson to send troops to Vietnam to retaliate against this attack. The measure authorizing those first troops, the
Gulf of Tonkin Resolution—an extremely important piece of legislation that would be relied on for a decade by both President Johnson and President Nixon as Congress's ongoing blank check authorizing the war—passed unanimously in the House of Representatives. In the Senate, only Senator
Ernest Gruening, Democrat from Alaska, and Senator
Wayne Morse, Democrat from Oregon, voted against the measure. Gruening warned his colleagues they were signing “a predated declaration of war.” Morse predicted that “history will record that we have made a great mistake by giving the president war making powers in the absence of a declaration of war. What is wrong with letting the Constitution operate as written by our constitutional fathers?”

The FBI director was watching closely as this first Vietnam War authorization legislation was being debated. He, of course, had no professional
responsibility in relation to legislation or to war planning. But he regarded those who did not support the war to be subversives who should be targeted by the FBI, and he used the bureau to enforce that position from the time of those congressional debates on the first war legislation in 1964 until he died in 1972. He had agents collect the names of people who sent telegrams to Senator Morse expressing support for his stand against the war resolution and started files on them. That was the beginning of the lists he collected in connection with the Vietnam War. Later, he expanded COINTELPRO to include operations against antiwar activists.

Two years after the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution was passed, Senator J. William Fulbright, Democrat from Arkansas, convened hearings on the progress of the war. Hoover and his agents were listening and watching again. At President Johnson's request, Hoover placed Fulbright under constant surveillance, including when he dined at embassies. Hoover assigned agents to find evidence that Fulbright, one of the most respected senior members of Congress at the time, “was either a communist agent or a dupe of the communist powers.”

Throughout the Vietnam War, the FBI supported the assumption of Presidents Johnson and Nixon that opposition to the war in the United States was not homegrown but was made possible by financial support from foreign—most likely communist—governments.
It was difficult for American intelligence operators to let go of the idea that foreign governments were providing the antiwar movement with financial support because they knew the United States, through the CIA, had provided aid for years to antigovernment groups in Eastern Europe and elsewhere. Because of that, they “easily calculated,” wrote former CIA agent
Vincent Marchetti, that “somehow the communist countries were now getting even by using American groups to stir up trouble in the United States.” Hard as the CIA and FBI tried to establish evidence of foreign support for American activists, such evidence never was found, according to Marchetti and officials of both the CIA and the FBI. Ungar, in his extensive research, reached the same conclusion: “Despite many investigations, no such link ever was found.”

WHEN MEMBERS
of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) learned in 1973 that the party had been the target of one of the major COINTELPRO programs, they sued the government for violating their constitutional rights. Their lawsuit produced shocking revelations about FBI conduct. As the revelations poured out in the courtroom, the attorney general imposed new
restrictions and forced the FBI to abandon its harassment of the party that was still taking place during the trial.

During the thirteen years the suit unfolded in federal court in Manhattan, the FBI was forced to reveal how it had systematically harassed the party for decades, damaging the lives of hundreds of individuals and preventing members of the party from participating in public discourse. At the end of the trial, the Nixon-appointed judge who presided over the case, U.S. federal judge
Thomas P. Griesa, ruled in August 1986 that the FBI's forty-year program of continuous harassment and abuse of the party and its members had “no legal authority or justification” and “was illegal and patently unconstitutional.”

In response to a series of orders from Judge Griesa, the FBI was forced to turn over massive evidence that documented the bureau's four decades of surveillance and dirty tricks operations conducted against the SWP. As the FBI finally conceded during the trial, and as the judge wrote in his decision:

“There is no evidence that any FBI informant ever reported an instance of planned or actual espionage, violence, terrorism or efforts to subvert the governmental structure of the United States.” In fact, the bureau found no evidence of any type of criminal activity by party members. When the massive secret records of the forty-year intense observation of the party were reviewed by Judge Griesa, he found “a consistent recital of peaceful, lawful political activities, peaceful, lawful personal activities and a total absence of any criminal activities or plans of any nature whatever.”

When the judge ordered bureau officials to submit written rationale for why the long and multifaceted SWP operation was conducted they wrote: Individuals in “subversive groups were presumed to recognize that the use of violence as a potential tool is inevitable,” and “all members are investigated sufficiently to assess their willingness to use violence for their cause.” In other words, FBI officials believed that a radical idea inevitably would lead to violent behavior—even, apparently, after forty years of being nonviolent.

Evidence produced during the case about the FBI's operations against the SWP revealed the following:

Three years into the SWP trial, Attorney General Edward H.
Levi ordered the FBI to end its decades-long operations against the SWP. Much evidence had accumulated by then—“the largest disclosure of internal FBI workings since the theft of FBI documents in Media, PA,” reported the
New York Times
. FBI director Clarence Kelley just weeks earlier had announced that he had transferred the case from the bureau's Intelligence Division to its General Investigative Division. That wasn't enough for Levi. Two internal Department of Justice review committees he appointed recommended he should step in and stop the FBI's actions against the SWP because, both concluded, the party's activities did not justify bureau scrutiny.

Remarkably, until the attorney general ordered the investigation halted, FBI informers continued to operate clandestinely inside the SWP even during the trial, submitting regular reports to the bureau on the SWP's evolving legal strategy in the case.

It was during this trial that Levi, in another unprecedented action, issued the first FBI guidelines. They required the bureau to open and continue investigations only if they were related to evidence of commission of a crime or suspicion of planning to commit a crime.

While the truth about Hoover's secret FBI was emerging during the SWP trial and official investigations, there also were continuous efforts then by bureau officials to hide the truth. In 1980, in the course of the SWP case, it was revealed that FBI officials concealed considerable information about the bureau's illegal break-ins in responses to Department of Justice inquiries, in response to subpoenas issued in both the Senate and House investigations of the bureau, and in responses to orders from Judge Griesa during the SWP case. When evidence of this continuing subterfuge became public, William H. Webster, the federal judge who succeeded Kelley as FBI director in February 1978, issued a public announcement that statements made by FBI officials about illegal break-ins the bureau conducted were “grossly inaccurate” during those official investigations.

ATHAN THEOHARIS MAY KNOW
more about the FBI than any other person. His extensive examination of the bureau started with major research he conducted for the Church Committee. Since then, as an historian on the faculty of Marquette University, he has written extensively about the bureau. From that deep knowledge, he has concluded in regard to COINTELPRO and similar bureau operations: “I know of no case where there was a benefit to society.…The FBI gathered no information that had anything to do with finding out, say, that Joe Smith is going to bomb the Capitol, something that could have been stopped.…I can think of no crime that was stopped by information gained during COINTELPRO and COINTELPRO-like operations.…It was harass and destroy rather than investigate, prosecute and convict.”