J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and the Secrets (110 page)

“W
e have a Soviet mole in the New York espionage section,” William Sullivan informed the director, laying out the evidence that had led him to this conclusion: leaks, botched operations, blown covers.

“Find out who he is,” Hoover ordered.

Sullivan explained that the spy was too deeply planted to be exposed by an internal investigation. The only solution would be to gradually transfer the personnel out of the section, replacing them with new men.

“Absolutely not,” Hoover responded; “some smart newspaper man is bound to find out that we are transferring people out of the New York office.”

We could do it quietly…

No.

After nearly thirty years in the Bureau, most of them at SOG, Sullivan knew that one argument almost always worked with the director. “Mr. Hoover,” he pleaded, “your reputation is going to be severely tarnished if the public ever learns that we have been penetrated by the Russian KGB.”

“I know that,” the director snapped, “but no transfers.”

Despite repeated memos, and new evidence of penetration, Hoover remained adamant.

“At the time I left the FBI in 1971,” Sullivan later stated, “the Russians still had a man in our office and none of us knew who he was.”
¹

On January 1, 1970, J. Edgar Hoover had turned seventy-five—and even more careful. He was living on borrowed time and knew it. Aware that Haldeman, Ehrlichman, and possibly even Mitchell wanted him replaced, he was determined
not to give them probable cause. Just one little mistake could do it.

The secret bombing of Cambodia had been followed by a secret “incursion” into that country. When this escalation of the Vietnam War became known, protest demonstrations erupted on college campuses all over the country.

Please, Sullivan begged the director, let us lower the age of campus informants from twenty-one to eighteen; as it is right now, we don’t know what’s going on.

No, Hoover told him, use the local police; that way if something bad happens, the criticism won’t be on us.

Something bad did happen, that May, at Kent State University, in Ohio.

The KGB wasn’t the only organization to penetrate the FBI. SA Tony Villano, who was working with the New York City organized crime squad, learned that one of his fellow agents, Joseph Stabile, had accepted a $10,000 bribe from the Mafia.

Stabile was no ordinary agent. One of the few SAs to speak Sicilian, he was used as interpreter on virtually all of the Mafia wiretaps in the New York and New England area. He not only knew who was being tapped, and what was said; he also knew the identities of most of the squad’s confidential informants.

When Villano confronted him with evidence of the payoff, Stabile offered him a piece of the action. “There’s a fortune to be made out there,” he bragged. “Like a hundred grand in no time at all—it’s better than being assigned to Las Vegas.”
²
Resisting the offer, Villano blew the whistle on Stabile.

The charges panicked FBIHQ. It was Hoover’s proud boast that no FBI agent had ever taken a bribe.
^*
Relays of inspectors descended on the New York field office from SOG. To his amazement, Villano discovered that they seemed more interested in discrediting him than in investigating Stabile: “Basically they were not so much concerned with uncovering any more evidence as they were with learning whether I intended to embarrass the Bureau.”
³

Both Stabile and Villano were polygraphed—and both passed. Although there was other evidence supporting Villano’s charges, the inconclusive results of the polygraph were excuse enough for FBIHQ to close the investigation. Joseph Stabile remained on the organized crime squad. Anthony Villano decided to resign.

A lot had happened since the young, idealistic special agent had been sent to Sing Sing in 1953, expecting to interrogate the Rosenbergs. Attempting to explain why he was leaving the Bureau after nineteen years, Villano told his
son, “I’m forty-five, and all my idols have turned out to have feet of clay.”

“That’s the difference between us,” his son responded across the generation gap. “By the time I was seventeen I had no idols.”
^*
4

Although the FBI’s secret COINTELPROs continued, any new action which could conceivably result in embarrassment to the Bureau was disapproved. Except for the seventeen Kissinger wiretaps—which had been ordered by the White House and approved by the attorney general—Hoover so severely curtailed the number of FBI taps and bugs that many operations in both the espionage and the criminal fields had to be discontinued.

Unwilling to let his own men use these investigative shortcuts, Hoover was not about to take such risks on behalf of others. When the National Security Agency routinely requested FBI assistance on three bag jobs, Hoover said no. When the CIA made another routine request, asking for taps on two foreign embassies, Hoover told CIA Director Richard Helms that he’d have to get written authorization from either the president or the attorney general, and this Helms was not inclined to do. When the attorney general himself requested the placement of a bug, on a Justice Department case, Hoover made sure the signed authorization included the words “with trespass.”

Although the other intelligence directors complained among themselves about the “new Hoover”—cautious, wary, obsessed with protecting his reputation, constantly “covering his ass”—the FBI director’s personal ties with Richard Nixon were so well known and long established that none dared take their complaints to the White House.

Not even when, on February 26, 1970, Hoover broke off liaison with the Central Intelligence Agency.

It was almost as if Hoover had been waiting for an excuse to make the break. The incident which triggered the schism between the nation’s two most powerful intelligence agencies was minor. An FBI agent in the Denver field office passed on some information to the CIA’s Denver station chief, who indiscreetly repeated it to the local police, and Hoover learned of it.

He didn’t know the identity of the special agent, however, and he demanded that CIA Director Richard Helms provide it. Helms called in the station chief and asked him to name his source. Considering it “a point of honor and personal integrity,” he declined to do so, and Helms, apparently assuming Hoover would respect this gentlemanly code, wrote the FBI director to that effect.

“This is not satisfactory,” Hoover scrawled across the bottom of the letter. “I want our Denver office to have absolutely no contacts with CIA. I want
direct liaison here with CIA terminated & any contact with CIA in the future to be by letter only. H.”
⁵
With a few strokes of blue ink, Hoover ended formal liaison with the CIA.

It had been a shotgun marriage, performed by the president and most reluctantly entered into by the FBI director. Although, over the years, Hoover had managed to reap more than an equal share of the nuptial benefits, the divorce must have given him a tremendous sense of personal satisfaction. It was his final revenge against William “Wild Bill” Donovan and his bastard offspring.

Contrary to Hoover’s instructions, some working-level contacts were maintained—for example, William Sullivan continued to meet periodically with James Jesus Angleton, the CIA’s legendary spy master, although both were careful to keep such meetings discreet—but the job of Sam Papich, the FBI’s liaison to the CIA, was abolished, and Papich, one of the Bureau’s best men, resigned shortly afterward. Helms’s plea that “this Agency can only fully perform its duties in the furtherance of the national security when it has the closest coordination and teamwork with the Federal Bureau of Investigation” fell on deaf ears.
⁶
So did the CIA director’s requests that the FBI continue to provide electronic and other domestic surveillance assistance.

Coincidentally, the same day Hoover broke off liaison with the CIA, he was summoned to the Oval Office for a meeting with the president and Ehrlichman. It was not a stroking session. Nixon was disappointed in the FBI’s performance in a number of areas. As far as he was concerned, the Bureau was doing far too little about riots, student demonstrations, domestic dissidents, organized crime.

Nixon started with the latter. According to a recent poll, the Mafia, not the Vietnam War, was the number one public concern in America. Nixon urged Hoover to get the Bureau more deeply involved in such cases.

To prove he was on top of the situation, the director trotted out his “stats.” On that very day the Justice Department had a backlog of exactly 1,057 cases against La Cosa Nostra figures, Hoover told Nixon. These cases sat untried because there weren’t enough prosecuting attorneys. Why add to that number before the backlog was cleared up?

But the director hadn’t come to the White House to talk about organized crime, or any of the other topics on the president’s agenda. Before Nixon or Ehrlichman could interrupt, he began an angry denunciation of the Black Panthers. “Who finances the Black Panthers?” he asked rhetorically. “They get their money from Leonard Bernstein and Peter Duchin and that crowd.”

Yet, only minutes later, Hoover stated, “we suspect—and can’t yet prove—that the Panthers and the Students for a Democratic Society get millions of dollars from the Soviet Union via the Communist Party of the United States.”
⁷

This was ridiculous, and no one knew it better than J. Edgar Hoover. The moribund American Communist party was so thoroughly infiltrated that the FBI knew where almost every cent of its funding came from and what it was used for. And it knew exactly how much support Russia was supplying to the
CPUSA, since the two couriers, Jack and Morris Childs (the two brothers who shared the code name Solo), had been FBI informants since the early 1950s.

As often happened in his meetings with Hoover, Nixon found himself doing more listening than talking. The rest of the president’s agenda went undiscussed.

“Leonard Bernstein, Peter Duchin and that crowd” were very much on the director’s mind. Recently the symphony conductor had given a gala fundraiser for the Panthers in his Park Avenue duplex. Tom Wolfe later immortalized the occasion in his hilariously funny essay “Radical Chic: The Party at Lenny’s,” but to J. Edgar Hoover there was nothing funny about it. The day after the party he had the social columns combed for the names of the attendees. Those who didn’t already have FBI files now had, while the party’s host was the target of a special COINTELPRO operation.

In an attempt to “neutralize” Bernstein, the Bureau tried to plant items about the conductor’s alleged homosexuality, with emphasis on his reputed fondness for young boys, but, without an arrest record to back it up, even the Hollywood trades wouldn’t touch the story.

Hoover did much better when it came to neutralizing two other BPP supporters. Among those who signed petitions protesting police actions against the Panthers was a well-known female singer. In her early, struggling years, when “gigs” were few and far between, she had appeared in a pornographic movie. Filmed in a San Francisco motel room, it was a “loop,” a short film of about ten minutes’ duration, in which she committed fellatio with an actor dressed as a sailor. For years she’d believed no copies still existed.

But the FBI had one—it was, according to a former Hoover aide, one of the director’s favorite films, and was often played in the “blue room” for SACs making their annual pilgrimage back to SOG for retraining.

A print was sent to the singer, together with an anonymous note suggesting that if she was so desperate for publicity (a newspaper clipping of her BPP support was attached), perhaps her fans might be interested in seeing her first film. Once a “checkbook liberal,” she never again endorsed a controversial cause.

The actress Jean Seberg was another target. Monitoring a telephone call to Seberg from Black Panther headquarters, the FBI learned that the actress was pregnant, and not by her estranged husband, the French author Romain Gary. Assuming, erroneously, that the father was Raymond “Masai” Hewitt, the BPP minister of information, Richard Wallace Held, the case agent in charge of COINTELPRO activities against the Panthers, cabeled headquarters proposing:

“Bureau permission is requested to publicize the pregnancy of Jean Seberg, well-known white movie actress, by [Black Panther Raymond Hewitt] by advising Hollywood ‘Gossip-Columnists’…of the situation. It is felt that the possible publication of ‘Seberg’s plight’ could cause her embarrassment and serve to cheapen her image with the general public.”
⁸

Hoover responded, “Jean Seberg has been a financial supporter of the BPP and should be neutralized.”
⁹

The first item, which ran in Joyce Haber’s column in the
Los Angeles Times,
was “blind”: it didn’t mention Seberg’s name. Lest there be any doubt about the actress’s identity, however, that same day Hoover circulated a report on Seberg to Ehrlichman, Mitchell, and Kleindienst.

On June 8 the
Hollywood Reporter
observed, “Friends wondering how long Jean Seberg will be able to keep that secret…” But it didn’t say what the “secret” was.
¹⁰

The Hollywood trade paper followed this with a July 15 item reading, “Hear a Black Panther’s the pappy of a certain film queen’s expected baby, but her estranged hubby’s taking her back anyway.”
¹¹

On August 7 Jean Seberg attempted suicide with an overdose of sleeping pills.

It remained for
Newsweek
to tie all the items together. Its August 24 issue—which appeared on the stands on August 17—stated that Seberg and Gary were reportedly about to remarry, “even though the baby Jean expects in October is by another man—a black activist she met in California.”
¹²

Three days later Seberg went into labor. Her child, born two months prematurely, lived only two days. The actress insisted that the funeral be open coffin. People who attended said the infant girl was light-skinned and appeared to have Caucasian features.