J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and the Secrets (112 page)

Hoover was livid. Not only was this snot-nosed kid contradicting him; he was asking the FBI to prepare a report on its own alleged failures! Intelligence gaps indeed!

Hoover contained his anger long enough to poll the other directors on what they thought the president had meant. After some discussion, all three backed Huston. Irritated by this turn of events, Hoover finally agreed that they should prepare an options paper and abruptly dismissed the meeting.

Later Tom Charles Huston looked back at these meetings with a sense of astonishment at his own—and the president’s—naïveté. From the start, there was an “atmosphere of duplicity.”
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Here was the president of the United States, asking for a comprehensive report on intelligence-collecting methods that could be used against domestic radicals, and sitting across the table from him were the nation’s four intelligence chiefs, not one of whom saw fit to inform him that most of these techniques were already being used against these same groups. They just silently sat there—Hoover, Helms, Gayler, and Bennett—each with his own secrets. Nixon didn’t know about the CIA’s mailopening
program, or the FBI’s COINTELPROs, or the NSA’s monitoring of domestic telephone calls, or the DIA’s planting informants among campus groups.

Not only were they deceiving the president and his representative; they were playing games with each other. “The Bureau had its own game going,” Huston later realized, while, across the Potomac, “the CIA had its own game going…They did not want to have revealed the fact that they were working on each other’s turf.”
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The task of drawing up the report was left to a working staff made up of representatives of the four agencies and Huston. The guiding force was the FBI representative, William Sullivan, who saw this as a golden opportunity to reinstate, with presidential approval, the intelligence practices Hoover had forbidden since 1966. Although the final report would become known as the Huston Plan, its real architect was Sullivan, who took the impressionable Huston in hand and led him every step of the way. Selling the program to the other intelligence agencies was no problem; for years they’d been begging Hoover to remove his restraints. Sullivan’s real problem was selling the plan to his own boss.

As early as June 6, the day after the meeting with the president, Sullivan enthusiastically memoed the director, “Individually, those of us in the intelligence community are relatively small and limited. Unified, our combined potential is magnified and limitless. It is through unity of action that we can tremendously increase our intelligence-gathering potential, and, I am certain, obtain the answers the President wants.”
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After several rocky starts, the working staff finally produced a first draft, and the members showed it to their superiors. While the other directors had no objections to it, when Sullivan presented the report to Hoover he immediately balked, refusing to sign it unless it was completely rewritten to eliminate the extreme options. He wouldn’t put his signature on a report that called for wiretapping, bugging, mail opening, burglaries. Nor would he approve making the ad hoc committee a permanent committee, which would in effect give it authority over the FBI.

“For years and years and years I have approved opening mail and other similar operations, but no,” Hoover told Sullivan. “It is becoming more and more dangerous and we are apt to get caught. I am not opposed to doing this. I am not opposed to continuing the burglaries and the opening of mail and other similar activities, providing someone higher than myself approves of it…I no longer want to accept the sole responsibility. [If] the attorney general or some other high ranking person in the White House [approves] then I will carry out their decision. But I am not going to accept the responsibility myself anymore, even though I’ve done it for many years.

“Number two, I cannot look to the attorney general to approve these because the attorney general was not asked to be a member of the ad hoc committee.
I cannot turn to the ad hoc committee to approve of these burglaries and opening mail as recommended here. The ad hoc committee by its very nature will go out of business when this report has been approved.

“
That leaves me alone as the man who made the decision. I am not going to do that anymore.
”
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It would be unfair to the others involved to rewrite the whole report, Sullivan argued. What about adding his objections in the form of footnotes? Hoover agreed, and Sullivan set to work amending the report. He showed the amended draft to the director on the morning of June 23, and Hoover approved it.

Finding the director willing to go this far, Sullivan decided to press his luck. The CIA was unhappy with the break in liaison with the FBI; the agency felt it was being discriminated against. Wouldn’t this be a good time to reestablish liaison? Surely the CIA had learned its lesson.

But Sullivan had misread Hoover’s mood. He immediately jumped at the opportunity this presented. To prove there was no discrimination involved, he told Mark Felt to also cut off liaison with the National Security Agency, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the Secret Service, the Internal Revenue Service, and Army, Navy, and Air Force intelligence. The only liaison offices left in operation were those with Congress and the White House.

“It was one of those unbelievable damn things,” William Sullivan recalled. “It was a nightmare.”
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It was not, he had begun to suspect, the act of a rational mind.

Yet to Hoover the act was not only rational but necessary. If the extreme options in the final report were adopted, and implemented, and the wholesale bugging, tapping, mail opening, and break-ins became known—as almost invariably they would be, when attempted by amateurs—the Nixon administration itself could easily self-destruct.

By cutting off liaison, Hoover hoped to distance the FBI, and his own reputation, from the inevitable holocaust.

The other directors were shown the footnoted report that same day. Nothing J. Edgar Hoover did much surprised Richard Helms, but Admiral Gayler and General Bennett, both newcomers to the intelligence scene, were furious. Hoover’s objections, they complained to Huston, made it look as if they had made
recommendations
rather than simply suggesting possible
options.
Huston tried to placate them, saying he’d personally relay their complaints to the president. There wasn’t much else he could do: the signing ceremony was only two days away. Huston himself wasn’t particularly bothered by Hoover’s opposition. His attitude seemed to be “What the White House wanted, the White House would get.”
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William Sullivan wasn’t the only one who misread J. Edgar Hoover. What neither Sullivan nor Huston realized was that the FBI director had an ace in the hole.

The signing ceremony took place as scheduled, on June 25, 1970, in J. Edgar Hoover’s office.

The director of the FBI was nearly two decades older than the three other directors. And he was more than four and a half decades older than that “hippie intellectual.” But it wasn’t just age or seniority or the president’s appointment that made him chairman of the ad hoc committee. He was the head of American intelligence, and he didn’t intend to let any of them forget it.

The others had come expecting a quick signing; with the exception of Huston, all were busy men, with pressing appointments. They weren’t prepared for a bravura performance.

J. Edgar Hoover opened the signing ceremony by commending the members for their outstanding effort and cooperative spirit. Then, to their astonishment, he began reading the special report page by page by page, all forty-three pages. At the end of each page he would pause and ask, Any comments, Admiral Gayler? Any comments, General Bennett? Any comments, Mr. Helms?—saving Huston for last. Openly showing his contempt for the young White House liaison, Hoover repeatedly got his name wrong: Any comments, Mr. Hoffman? Any comments, Mr. Hutchison? After the sixth or seventh variation, the red-faced Huston stopped trying to correct him.

In each category there were two suggested options: that the intelligence-collecting practice be continued as it was or slightly intensified; or that it should be expanded, broadened, or greatly intensified.

For example, under the category Electronic Surveillances and Penetrations, the least-extreme option was that present procedures be changed to intensify coverage of foreign nationals; the most extreme would intensify the coverage of “individuals and groups in the United States who pose a major threat to the internal security.”

Then came the newly added footnote: “The FBI does not wish to change its present procedure of selective coverage on major internal security threats as it believes this coverage is adequate at this time. The FBI would not oppose other agencies seeking authority of the Attorney General for coverage required by them and therefore instituting such coverage themselves.”
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In essence, the FBI won’t commit the illegal act, but you can do it yourself, if the attorney general approves.

Mail coverage: “The FBI is opposed to implementing any covert mail coverage because it is clearly illegal.” Surreptitious entry: “The FBI is opposed to surreptitious entry.”

There was no admission that the FBI had ever committed these acts or, in the case of the mail opening, that it was still sharing the fruits of the CIA’s several programs.

Development of campus sources: “The FBI is opposed to removing any present controls and restrictions.” Use of military undercover agents: “The FBI is opposed.” A permanent interagency committee: “The FBI is opposed.”
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Finally Admiral Gayler couldn’t restrain himself any longer. He objected to
one of the FBI’s footnotes, and General Bennett quickly backed him.

J. Edgar Hoover was not accustomed to being interrupted or having his opinions challenged. Although CIA Director Helms tried to soothe the waters, Hoover was clearly upset, and, reading even faster, he hurried through the remaining pages.

The signing itself took only a few minutes, after which Hoover dismissed the committee, and Huston delivered the special report to the president. He also wrote a long memorandum to Haldeman, recounting the turbulent history of the committee and at the same time puffing up his own role. Huston reported that he had gone into “this exercise” anticipating that the CIA would refuse to cooperate, but “the only stumbling block was Mr. Hoover.” From the very start, Hoover had tried to subvert the purpose of the committee, but Huston “declined to acquiesce in this approach, and succeeded in getting the committee back on target.” Except for Hoover, everyone else was dissatisfied with current collection procedures, including the FBI director’s own men. The director was “bull-headed as hell” and “getting old and worried about his legend,” but Huston was sure that after a face-to-face stroking session with the president, he’d come along. Hoover was enough of a trouper, Huston was still convinced, that he’d “accede to any decision which the President makes.”
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Huston then recommended that all of the most extreme options be adopted.

Nixon sat on the report for several weeks, then, via Haldeman, sent word that he had approved all of Huston’s recommendations except one. He didn’t want to meet with Hoover.

The Huston Plan was now official presidential policy. A single copy of the approved report was sent by courier to each of the four directors: Hoover, Helms, Gayler, and Bennett.

Bennett had the least reaction: nothing in the plan much affected the DIA. But Gayler was “surprised” that the president had chosen the most extreme options, and Helms was “greatly concerned,” while Hoover, according to Sullivan, “went through the ceiling.”
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Or, more accurately, he went across the hall. For Hoover’s hole card, which he had avoided playing until it became absolutely necessary, was Attorney General John Mitchell.

The attorney general knew nothing of the plan. He hadn’t even been informed of the existence of the ad hoc committee. And he was angry at having been bypassed by Huston and the White House.

Mitchell immediately agreed with Hoover: the illegalities spelled out in the plan could not be presidential policy. He told Hoover to sit tight until the president’s return from San Clemente in several days.

Back in his office, the FBI director covered himself by dictating another memo, in which he recounted his conversation with Mitchell and renewed his “clear-cut and specific opposition to the lifting of the various investigative restraints.” However, good soldier that he was, he added that the FBI was prepared to implement the provisions of the plan—but only with the explicit authorization of the attorney general or the president.
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When Nixon returned to the White House on July 27, one of his first conversations was with the attorney general. According to Mitchell, he informed the president that “the proposals contained in the plan, in toto, were inimical to the best interests of the country and certainly should not be something that the President of the United States should be approving.”
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Nixon had not yet installed his taping system, so there is no way to verify Mitchell’s version of the conversation. Since he later approved other, similar illegalities, there is some reason to suspect that what he told the president was that Hoover was strongly opposed to the plan and would make trouble if ordered to put it into effect.

Nixon probably came closer to the truth when, years later, he wrote in his memoirs, “I knew that if Hoover had decided not to cooperate, it would matter little what I had decided or approved. Even if I issued a direct order to him, while he would undoubtedly carry it out, he would soon see to it that I had cause to reverse myself.”
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J. Edgar Hoover had won the battle. Nixon revoked his approval and ordered the FBI, CIA, NSA, and DIA to return their copies of the plan to the White House “for reconsideration.”

When they were examined, it was apparent that all four of the copies had been restapled, indicating that each of the intelligence agencies had removed the original staple to make photocopies.