J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and the Secrets (59 page)

Any satisfaction Hoover felt over the conviction and sentence was negated just a week later, by the hung jury in the first Hiss trial. A second trial was scheduled, this time for both Gubitchev and Coplon, for that December, in New York City. Since there was no proof that any documents had been passed, the pair were charged with conspiracy to transmit documents to a foreign power.
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In the interim Coplon fired Archibald Palmer, and the court appointed three attorneys to defend her, one a young left-wing lawyer who had no sympathy with communism but a great concern for civil liberties, Leonard Boudin. Examining the mass of evidence, Boudin concluded that an unidentified confidential informant, code-named TIGER, could only have been a wiretap, and he persuaded the second trial judge, Sylvester Ryan, to hold a hearing on the matter.

During the hearing, the Justice Department attorneys reluctantly admitted to the court that they had just discovered that—contrary to the sworn testimony of the supervising agent Granville—there had been taps all along, on Coplon’s apartment and office phones as well as on the home phone of her parents in Brooklyn, and that the taps had remained active throughout the
Washington trial, picking up, among other things, conversations between the defendant and her attorney. They had learned this, they claimed, when they asked the FBI agents for affidavits swearing that there were no taps “and the agents balked.”
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Digging deeper, Judge Ryan learned that some thirty agents had participated in the eavesdropping and that Inspector Howard Fletcher had ordered the removal of the taps just prior to the start of the New York trial, a month earlier.

On November 9, 1949, Fletcher had memoed Assistant Director Ladd, “The above named informant [TIGER] has been furnishing information concerning the activities of the subject. In view of the imminency of her trial, it is recommended that this informant be discontinued immediately, and that all administrative records in the New York office covering the operation of this informant be discontinued.

“Pertinent data furnished by the informant has already been furnished in letter form, and having in mind security, now and in the future, it is believed desirable that the indicated records be destroyed.”

Although Boudin requested that the prosecution produce the results of the illegal wiretapping (the letter referred to above), the government refused and the judge upheld the refusal. Boudin did bring out, however, that the FBI had arrested Gubitchev and Coplon without first obtaining warrants.

On March 7, 1950, both Coplon and Gubitchev were convicted, each receiving fifteen-year sentences.
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A total of forty years for the “stats”; the first conviction of an American citizen accused of spying for the Soviets; plus proof of what the FBI director had long contended, that the U.S.S.R. was using UN employees to conduct its espionage activities—none of these measured up, in Hoover’s view, to the public embarrassment inflicted upon the good name of the FBI. Reprimands, of varying severity, were given to many of the agents assigned to the case. Fletcher, for example, who had merely been following the director’s own policy for the destruction of wiretap records, was censured, demoted, and transferred to a subordinate post in the Washington field office.

On December 5, 1950, the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, presided over by Judge Learned Hand, on hearing Boudin’s appeal in the Coplon cases, unanimously set aside both the Washington and the New York convictions. The Washington conviction was reversed because of the wiretapping of privileged conversations between Coplon and her original attorney, Archibald Palmer; the New York conviction was set aside on two grounds: the illegality of the arrest; and the government’s refusal, supported by the U.S. District Court, to turn over the products of the illegal wiretapping.
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On the twenty-seventh of that same month, Congress, at the urging of FBI
Director J. Edgar Hoover, passed legislation giving federal agents the power to make warrantless arrests in cases involving espionage, sabotage, and other major crimes.

Attorneys Palmer and Boudin and Judges Ryan, Sylvester, and Hand earned permanent places on J. Edgar Hoover’s enemies list. As for Coplon, Hoover spent seventeen years savoring his revenge.

Although Hand’s decision that the arrest was illegal meant that the materials in Coplon’s handbag couldn’t be introduced into evidence, and without them the Justice Department had no case and therefore no intention of retrying Coplon, Hoover persuaded the attorney general to refuse to dismiss the indictments.

As for what this meant, Coplon expressed it best herself, in a December 22, 1984, letter to the
Nation,
following an erroneous statement by Harrison Salisbury to the effect that she had fled the country following her conviction.

After denouncing Salisbury’s charge as “an outrageous lie and careless editing,” she continued, “In the thirty-four years since my trials, I have lived in New York City continuously, raised a family of four,
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worked and been active in my community. For seventeen of those years, until my case was dismissed in 1967, I remained on $40,000 no-interest cash bail raised by my family (a considerable amount in those days). During those years I was not permitted to vote, drive a car or leave the Southern or Eastern Districts of New York. Flee the country indeed! I couldn’t cross the Hudson River to attend the unveiling of my father’s gravestone.”

Coplon’s indictment was finally dismissed by Attorney General Ramsey Clark—whose father, Tom Clark, had been AG during the Coplon trials—during the administration of President Lyndon Baines Johnson, over the very strong protests of FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover.

The Coplon case resulted in many changes, all of them secret. On June 29 Hoover informed the SACs that “highly confidential” and “most secretive” sources—that is, the records of all technical surveillances—were to be kept separate from the general case files so that, as Athan G. Theoharis and John Stuart Cox have noted, they wouldn’t be “vulnerable to court-ordered discovery motions, congressional subpoenas, or requests from the Justice Department.”
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When such information was sent to FBIHQ from the field, it was to be placed in a sealed envelope marked with the code name JUNE; this then was to be placed in a second envelope, addressed to the director and marked PERSONAL AND CONFIDENTIAL.
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In early July, Hoover further amended and expanded this procedure, in another SAC letter. Agent reports containing
any
“sensitive” materials which if made known could cause embarrassment to the Bureau would be divided into two parts: investigative and administrative pages, with the sensitive material being placed in the latter. As an example, Hoover cited the hypothetical case of a Communist party member whose loose morals included heavy drinking and living with a known prostitute. The evidence regarding his party membership should be included in the investigative pages; the accusations regarding his loose morals, in the administrative pages. Or, in another example he cited, if, during the course of a white-slave-trafficking investigation, agents recovered “an address book containing data identifying prominent public officials…unless the names appearing therein are material to the investigation, this type of information should be placed in the administrative section.”
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But Hoover had more in mind than a hooker’s trick book. Because SAC letters, even if telexed or coded, could conceivably fall into the wrong hands, they were always followed up by a telephone call from an inspector or assistant director who transmitted orally what the director really meant.
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A list of the sensitive matters which should be restricted to the administrative pages would include the identities of informants; discrepancies in the testimony of a government witness; incriminating personal information regarding same; privileged medical records; sealed court documents; illegally obtained bank, telephone, or credit company records; IRS and census data (which, despite disclaimers to the contrary, were usually made available to the FBI on an informal basis, or by informants in the appropriate departments); and, of course, the use of any form of technical surveillance—mail openings, breakins, wiretaps, microphone installations, and the theft and decipherment of codes—and the products of such acts.

Eventually, however, some Justice Department attorneys “wised up” to these practices, and in 1951 Hoover modified the procedure, making the administrative pages “cover letters.” The former special agent G. Gordon Liddy has explained how this worked: “Instead of the report’s containing page after page of narrative, each interview was placed on a special form, called an FD-302. Only that form was given the defense,” while investigative “leads and sensitive matters were put in a ‘cover letter’ that accompanied the report but, because not considered a part of it, were withheld from the defense and the courts.”
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The more sensitive materials, however, were never seen by Justice Department attorneys or anyone outside the Bureau. These were kept separately, in field office safes, in the special file room at FBIHQ, in a “blackmail file” in the printshop, and in the files of the assistant directors and the associate director. The most sensitive of all were kept in the director’s own Official/Confidential and Personal files.

Thus, from about 1949 on, as one legacy of the Coplon case, it was no longer possible to take literally the facts as set forth in the FBI case files (including a good portion of those later released under the Freedom of Information Act). They told only part of the story, or as the
Nation
editor and publisher Victor Navasky put it, in critiquing the work of an author on the Hiss case, “He makes the mistake of assuming that FBI memorandums provide answers rather than clues.”
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There was still another legacy, as the former special agent Walter Sheridan has pointed out. When the supervising agent in the Coplon case testified that no wiretaps had been used in the investigation and later testimony proved otherwise, the Bureau “got badly burned.” To circumvent a recurrence, a “separation of functions” was introduced. In a case which involved wiretapping, for example, the agent who was called to the stand to testify wouldn’t be the agent, or clerk, who participated in the actual tapping, “so he could honestly say that he didn’t know the source of information.”
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The refusal of his agents to sign affidavits stating that no wiretapping had occurred in the Coplon case must have concerned the FBI director. That one agent had committed perjury on behalf of the Bureau didn’t mean that all other agents in the future would be willing to do likewise. In this way he protected them and, of course, himself too.

Through both of the Coplon trials, the FBI had been able to keep one secret: the identity of the “confidential informant” whose lead had resulted in the identification of Judith Coplon as a probable Soviet spy. All through 1949 Meredith Gardner had patiently continued deciphering the “Venona” traffic, as the cables between the KGB in Moscow and the Soviet embassy in Washington and its consulate in New York had become known. Others of his findings now began bearing fruit. Evidence developed by the FBI led to the identification of the Soviet agent inside the Manhattan Project as a British atomic scientist, Klaus Fuchs, while the list of possible spies within the British embassy in Washington during the period 1944-45 had narrowed from five to three, with the most likely suspect being one Donald Maclean.

Because of the British connections, when the new MI-5/MI-6 representative arrived in Washington in August 1949, to serve as liaison with both the FBI and the CIA, he was made privy to this information. Although known as Kim to his friends, who soon included Mickey Ladd of the FBI and James Jesus Angleton of the CIA, his full name was Harold Adrian Russell Philby.
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Former headquarters personnel describe the printshop in the basement of the Department of Justice Building similarly: it was the FBI’s chamber of horrors.

Ostensibly, the printing section, which was a unit of Crime Records, was responsible for publishing the annual
Uniform Crime Reports,
the monthly
Law Enforcement Bulletin,
and
The Investigator,
an in-house magazine, as well as the director’s speeches. But behind its always locked doors were darker secrets. One was the “blue room,” the small theater where Hoover, Tolson, and other select FBI officials watched surveillance films and pornographic movies. Another was an ultra-secure room which housed files and physical evidence—such as still prints, films, and recording tapes from especially sensitive surveillances—which the director deemed worth preserving.
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And still another was the office of the man who, for more than two decades, served as the FBI’s chief blackmailer.

The FBI’s official congressional liaison was whoever was currently heading Crime Records—Lou Nichols or his successors, Cartha “Deke” DeLoach, Robert Wick, Tom Bishop. One of the congressional liaison’s duties, as Bishop bluntly put it, was “selling” hostile congressmen on “liking the FBI.”
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More often than not, this was the job of the man in the printshop, operating on oral instructions from the fifth floor.

William Sullivan explained how this worked, in an interview after he left the FBI: “The moment [Hoover] would get something on a senator he’d send one of the errand boys up and advise the senator that we’re in the course of an investigation and we by chance happened to come up with this data on your daughter. But we wanted you to know this; we realize you’d want to know it. Well, Jesus, what does that tell the senator? From that time on the senator’s right in his pocket.”
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Cartha DeLoach provided another example, when lecturing a class of some fifty senior agents called back to SOG for retraining in November 1963, the same week President Kennedy was assassinated. Asked what headquarters did with all “this memorandum stuff we put in about things we see,” DeLoach responded, “You fellows have been in the Bureau for more than ten years so I guess I can talk to you off the record. The other night we picked up a situation where this senator was seen drunk, in a hit-and-run accident, and some goodlooking broad was with him. By noon of the next day the good senator was aware that we had the information and we never had any trouble with him on appropriations since.
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