J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and the Secrets (67 page)

Hoover also controlled the small-town police departments of America by dominating the leadership of the International Association of Chiefs of Police, as he had since the 1930s. Every year the FBI director was offered first chance at delivering the keynote speech at the organization’s national convention, and on more than half a dozen occasions he’d accepted. Whether he was flailing “sob-sister judges” or “lily-livered wardens,” he received standing ovations. It was a rare year when the resolutions committee failed to issue a proclamation (prepared in advance by Crime Records, the wording approved by the director himself) praising “the Honorable J. Edgar Hoover.”

But the real manipulation of the IACP occurred behind the scenes. For many years, Quinn Tamm, Ed Tamm’s brother, was the FBI liaison to the IACP, and he helped rig its elections.

Although Quinn Tamm never occupied the number three spot, as did his brother, his FBI career was also quite remarkable. He’d joined the Bureau in 1934; four years later, at age twenty-eight, he’d become its youngest inspector. He ran the Identification Division for seventeen years, then Training and Inspection, then the FBI Laboratory. Even after Ed Tamm’s appointment to the
court, and fall from grace, Hoover continued to trust Quinn Tamm with such sensitive assignments as keeping the IACP in line.

“We used to control the election of officers,” Tamm would admit; “we had a helluva lot of friends around, and we would control the nominating committee.”
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Only Hoover-approved candidates—those who espoused his views on law and order, with none of this social-ills-begat-crime nonsense—were nominated.

In 1959 Police Chief Parker of Los Angeles ran for election as vice-president of the IACP, a necessary first step to its presidency and the recognition of his peers. But Parker didn’t win. A small-town chief did. Quinn Tamm’s lobbying saw to that.

But there was more to Hoover’s control over the police than fixed elections. There was fear. No one dared oppose the FBI director. Politicians were not the only ones who were afraid of his legendary files. Rumor had it—a rumor that Hoover made no effort to discourage—that the FBI director’s files on local police departments were exceptionally detailed. Patrick Murphy knew a lot of policemen—he’d headed departments in New York City, Detroit, Syracuse, Washington, D.C.—who were “terrified” of Hoover and what might be in his files. It was common gossip in police circles, Murphy says, “that if he wanted to burn people he could do it.”
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It is possible to pinpoint exactly when J. Edgar Hoover’s control over the International Association of Chiefs of Police ended. It occurred in 1961, when Quinn Tamm quit the FBI and—despite J. Edgar Hoover’s frantic backstage maneuverings—was offered, and accepted, the job of executive director of the IACP.

Addressing the association’s annual convention in St. Louis a few days later, Tamm remarked that the IACP once was and should have remained “the dominant voice in law enforcement. This, I fear, has not been true.” He didn’t mention J. Edgar Hoover by name, but he didn’t need to. From now on, Tamm said, the IACP “must be the spokesman for law enforcement in this country.”
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The gauntlet had been thrown down. But by then Hoover’s power was so rapidly eroding that the IACP and Quinn Tamm were among the least of his problems.

Not all of the president’s appointments met with Hoover’s favor. In February 1953 Eisenhower named Allen Dulles, the brother of Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, director of the Central Intelligence Agency.

Although Hoover would probably have preferred anyone to Donovan, he believed that Allen Dulles had secret Communist leanings; in fact, he suspected the whole Dulles family, which included their sister Eleanor, of being “internationalists.”
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What concerned him most, however, was whether the sibling relationship would mean increased powers for the CIA.

On at least this one matter, the Dulles appointment, J. Edgar Hoover and William J. Donovan were in full agreement. Dulles had called on Donovan before the appointment was announced. It was a courtesy call, really, to the
grand old man of American intelligence, and Donovan, who had just turned seventy and was very conscious of it, took it as such. He’d been offered the DCI post, Dulles said: did Donovan think he should accept it?

But Donovan was no more tactful with Dulles than he had been with Dewey. Donovan told his former subordinate that he’d been great as a lone operator, that he’d done a fine job in Switzerland, but then he said to him, “Al, this CIA job needs an expert organizer, and you’re no good whatever at that.” And he’d gone on from there.

In recounting the Dulles visit to Stanley Lovell, Donovan added, “He left damned upset with me. But God help America if he heads up the CIA. It’s like making a marvelous telegraph operator the head of Western Union.”
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Hoover already had a sizable file on Dulles, and he added significantly to it during his eight-year tenure as DCI. As his biographer Leonard Mosley admits, “Allen Dulles was never a man to fight off an attractive woman,”
⁴⁰
and Hoover documented a number of his affairs, including one with Mary Bancroft, the daughter of the publisher of the
Wall Street Journal
and a former OSS operative.

The witty, acerbic Mrs. Bancroft had a number of close male friends. In corresponding with one of them, the publisher Henry Luce, she referred to FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover as “that Virgin Mary in pants.”
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Luce’s wife, Clare Boothe, liked the remark so much she repeated it as her own, to at least one too many people, her plagiarism earning her, rather than Mrs. Bancroft, a special place on J. Edgar Hoover’s enemies list.

Although Hoover and Dulles disliked each other intensely, and Dulles went to some lengths to stop the FBI’s infiltration of the CIA, their subordinates, particularly those in counterintelligence, established close working relationships. William Sullivan and James Jesus Angleton, for example, met secretly to share information they deemed vital to their operations, while former agents who were now with the agency, such as William King Harvey, remained tapped into the Bureau’s old-boy network. It is possible that Hoover and Tolson knew of these exchanges and tacitly permitted them, since the Bureau benefited. But those engaged in such subterfuges knew they were treading on dangerous ground.
^*

Yet Hoover and Dulles did reach certain accommodations. In February 1954 the Justice Department and the Central Intelligence Agency drafted an agreement whereby those agency employees caught committing criminal offenses while engaged in “national security” operations would be reported to the agency, rather than to law enforcement authorities. This understanding,
which in effect put the agency above the law, remained in force for another twenty years.

Hoover maintained a similar, albeit informal, agreement with the local police. If an FBI agent was arrested for drunken driving, theft, wife beating, homosexual solicitation, assault, or any other criminal offense, either the local SAC or FBIHQ was notified before any charges were brought (few ever were). The Bureau then handled the matter itself, acting as judge and jury, with the usual punishment being dismissal or some other disciplinary action. A paragraph in the FBI Manual covered such matters: “Any investigation…regarding any allegation against Bureau employees must be instituted promptly, and every logical lead which will establish the true facts should be completely run out
unless such actions would embarrass the Bureau
…” (emphasis added).
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The six agents left the New York City field office in the predawn hours of June 18, 1953, and drove north to Ossining, some thirty miles away. Like everything else concerning this trip, their schedule had been meticulously planned so that their arrival, while it was still dark, would attract the least attention.

Two were high-ranking FBI officials, Alan H. Belmont, who had become assistant director of the Domestic Intelligence Division after Howard Fletcher’s demotion, and Bill Branigan, chief of the Espionage Section. The most junior of the group was a young agent named Anthony Villano. For Villano, who had been in the Bureau less than four years, the trip was something of a lark, a chance to get away from office routine. He’d been ordered along for only one reason, Villano knew: he could transcribe more than 170 words per minute. The director, whom Villano idolized, had a prohibition against male agents and female stenographers traveling together.

Once inside the gates of Sing Sing prison, they were directed to the warden’s home. Warden Wilfred Denno had vacated an apartment above his garage so that the agents would have a place to stay. He’d also provided two cells for their use as offices. Although they were located on death row, they were out of sight of the couple they had been sent to interrogate. Communications had already put in an open line to FBIHQ, and a second line connected the director with the president in the White House.

Belmont and Branigan had a list of questions they intended to ask: it ran to thirteen pages. Villano had been instructed to bring enough office supplies for a month’s stay. It was estimated that it would take that long to complete their assignment. If all went well—and the director seemed convinced it would—the six would participate in the culmination of a plan that had been three years in the making, one which history would record as perhaps J. Edgar Hoover’s greatest intelligence coup: the confessions of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg.

In authorized Bureau accounts, such as
The FBI Story,
the FBI identified the British atomic scientist Klaus Fuchs as being a Soviet agent; Fuchs identified the chemist Harry Gold as being his American contact; Gold identified David Greenglass, a young soldier who had been stationed at Los Alamos, as one of
his contacts; and Greenglass implicated his wife, Ruth, and his sister and brother-in-law, Ethel and Julius Rosenberg.

It didn’t happen quite that way.

The FBI did identify Fuchs, from a reference in one of the KGB intercepts; from the belatedly discovered mention of his name in Israel Halperin’s notebook; and from old Gestapo records, seized after the war, which identified one Klaus Fuchs as being a German Communist. And the FBI did alert the British, who succeeded in breaking Fuchs. But Fuchs identified a photo of Gold one day
after
Gold himself confessed to the FBI, and Greenglass was originally suspected of another crime, the theft of some uranium samples—many Los Alamos servicemen had picked them up as souvenirs and were using them as ashtrays—and the agents only happened to show Gold his photograph. Greenglass did implicate his brother-in-law Julius, but he denied any involvement of his sister Ethel—until ten days before the trial began. The FBI had not let this stop them from arresting her, however, or from formulating a plan in which her incarceration would serve as a “lever” to get her husband, Julius, to confess.

Immediately after Greenglass’s arrest, more than half a dozen of Julius Rosenberg’s closest friends vanished.
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From this the agents concluded that Julius himself had headed a large espionage ring, most of whose members were personally known to him. If he confessed, they realized, they could probably roll up the whole network. Instead of a few arrests, the director could claim maybe one or two dozen. Getting Julius to talk became first priority. The key was Ethel, his wife and the mother of their two children.

On July 17, 1950—the day Julius Rosenberg was arrested—Assistant Director Alan Belmont memoed Ladd suggesting the Bureau “consider every possible means to bring pressure on Rosenberg to make him talk…including a careful study of the involvement of Ethel Rosenberg, in order that charges may be placed against her, if possible.” On reading the memo, Hoover concurred, writing on the margin, “Yes by all means. If criminal division procrastinates too long let me know and I will see the A.G.”
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Two days later, Hoover wrote Attorney General McGrath, “There is no question that if Julius Rosenberg would furnish the details of his extensive espionage activities it would be possible to proceed against other individuals,” adding that “proceeding against his wife might serve as a lever in this matter.”
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There was only one problem: there was no evidence against Ethel.

On August 4 Assistant U.S. Attorney Myles Lane questioned David Greenglass and asked him about the two occasions when he had passed Julius Rosenberg data from Los Alamos.

L
ANE
: “Was Ethel present on any of these occasions?”

G
REENGLASS
: “Never.”

L
ANE
: “Did Ethel talk to you about it?”

G
REENGLASS
: “Never spoke to me about it, and that’s a fact. Aside from trying to protect my sister, believe me that’s a fact.”
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A week later, the FBI arrested Ethel Rosenberg. Despite the lack of evidence, her incarceration was an essential part of Hoover’s plan. With both Rosenbergs jailed—bail for each was set at $100,000, an unmeetable amount—the couple’s two young sons were passed from relative to relative, none of whom wanted them, until they were placed in the Jewish Children’s Home in the Bronx. According to matrons at the Women’s House of Detention, Ethel missed the children terribly, suffered severe migraines, and cried herself to sleep at night.

But Julius didn’t break.

It was decided to increase the pressure, by escalating the possible penalty. On February 8, 1951, about a month before the scheduled start of the trial, the Joint Congressional Committee on Atomic Energy met in secret session in Washington to discuss the Rosenberg prosecution. Present were twenty top government officials, including five senators, six congressmen, three members of the Atomic Energy Commission, and two representatives of the Justice Department, one of them Myles Lane. The main purpose of the meeting was to determine what classified information could be made public at the trial, but the topic quickly switched to the case against the Rosenbergs.