Operation Solo (37 page)

Some have argued that there is no evidence that, after meeting King, Levison maintained his ties to the party or that in counseling King he acted in behalf of the party. Maybe so. Maybe the scales suddenly and miraculously lifted from his eyes. Maybe,
mirabile dictu
, he suddenly repudiated the ideology that for at least a decade had motivated him energetically to serve the party. Maybe he suddenly decided to devote himself to bringing about full freedom to a minority of Americans instead of trying to impose communist tyranny upon all Americans. Levison, after all, would not have been the first communist to abandon communism.

However, the president, the attorney general, and the FBI had to confront and evaluate some verifiable realities, in addition to maybes, illuminated by SOLO and New York surveillance teams.

And these showed that the party had such confidence in Levison's devotion and loyalty to communism that in the 1950s it still entrusted him with the sensitive duty of managing party finances and keeping all the secrets attendant thereto. What
evidence was there that Levison had experienced a dramatic change of heart and outlook?

Usually, people who underwent an ideological metamorphosis and renounced communism did not care thereafter to hobnob with communist believers whose faith they no longer shared. The believers (and the KGB) in turn looked upon defectors from the party as moral lepers to be shunned or traitors to be punished. Yet Levison for years after 1956 enjoyed the comradeship and collaboration of at least two important party officials, Lem Harris, a friend of Jack, and O'Dell, a hidden member of the ruling council of the American party. Manifestly, he had done nothing to erode their trust of him. And Levison of course continued to see his brother, Roy Bennett, who remained active in party finances and donated substantial sums to the party well after 1956.

Then an FBI surveillance team discovered that Levison was seeing someone else—KGB officer Victor Lessiovsky, a sophisticated and engaging operative well known to Western security services. Lessiovsky specialized in influence operations, that is, in inducing influential foreigners to do, wittingly or unwittingly, what the Soviet Union wanted them to do. In Rangoon, he had cultivated U Thant, a talented Burmese who, as the KGB presciently divined, had a future on the world stage. After being elected, with Soviet support, the secretary general of the United Nations, U Thant, brought Lessiovsky to New York in 1961 as one of his three official personal assistants.
¹⁵
Regardless, the FBI well understood that the KGB did not succeed in ensconcing one of its best officers atop the United Nations with the expectation that he simply would serve as an altruistic advocate of amity among nations or as a cultural attaché eager to introduce the American masses to the undoubted wonders of Russian literature, music, art, and science.
Immune from American law, at liberty to roam the corridors and chambers of the United Nations and speak with the imprimatur of the secretary general, Lessiovsky could freely stalk big game from all over the world. Would a skilled intelligence officer so emplaced fritter away his time and risk his career (the United States could not arrest him; it could only expel him), by repeatedly indulging himself in idle lunches or amusing cocktail conversation with an undistinguished lawyer (at least, publicly undistinguished) who had nothing to offer the KGB, or with someone who had deserted the party and its discipline, or with someone about whom the KGB knew nothing, someone who could be an FBI provocateur, someone Lessiovsky just bumped into on the street and thought was good for laughs? And why would an ordinary American lawyer and car dealer meet, again and again, with a Soviet assistant to the boss of the United Nations? And why would Roy Bennett consort with KGB officer Lessiovsky?

Despite friendly, personal explanations, pleas, and exhortations from the president and attorney general of the United States, King disingenuously persisted in relying upon a key member of the Communist Party and upon someone regularly dealing with the KGB. King announced that O'Dell was leaving the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, but stayed in contact with him. And he ostensibly severed relations with Levison, but then carefully arranged to maintain both of them surreptitiously through an intermediary and eventually renewed them openly. Why?

Judging that these questions must be answered, Attorney General Kennedy authorized an FBI investigation and electronic surveillance of King and Levison. Morris and Jack were uninvolved in the investigation and wholly ignorant of it. Voluminous SOLO data available to the author show that Jack and Morris made just one brief reference to King in their reports after 1960. On June 25, 1964, the KGB radioed Jack a message for relay to Gus Hall: “We were informed that Robert Kennedy demanded of Martin Luther King that he get rid of Jack O'Dell, who allegedly has close connections with the CPUSA or is a CP member. This is for your information.” How did the KGB learn what Robert Kennedy said in a private conversation with King?

FBI listening devices planted in hotel rooms occupied by King and visited by others reportedly recorded words and acts inconsistent with those of a Christian minister and moral exemplar, and salacious rumors about goings-on in saintly hotel rooms spread. According to other rumors, the FBI in a calculated campaign of defamation offered selected journalists the opportunity to hear tape recordings featuring the Reverend Dr. King in action. Supposedly, all these journalists, being prim, proper, and uncompetitive professionals disinterested in scoops and scandal, refused the chance to listen with their own ears.

No matter how accurate or inaccurate these rumors, in 1975 they affected SOLO, as did other FBI actions of which Morris and Jack were ignorant. J. Edgar Hoover abruptly and furiously fired a close deputy, William Sullivan, who as chief of domestic intelligence operations knew all about Levison, O'Dell, King, and whatever the bugs told about activities in hotel rooms. On orders from Hoover, agents changed the lock on Sullivan's office so suddenly that he had no time to clear out his desk. Subsequently, Wannall told Morris this story: “I want you to know that Bill Sullivan has been less than truthful on certain things. When Sullivan left the Bureau, he left so fast that he left a drawer full of supposedly personal stuff behind. We inventoried the contents of that drawer. Among the stuff we found was a letter addressed to King.” Wannall generally related to Morris what the letter said. Here are some verbatim quotations:

Wannall continued, “Well, we searched through the vouchers on the travel of agents and we found that an agent made a trip to Miami on November 21, a Saturday. We talked to that agent. He said he got a call from Bill Sullivan who told him to go to Washington National Airport where a package would be delivered to him. Sullivan told the agent to take the package and go to Miami and then call Sullivan. The agent called Sullivan and Sullivan told him to address the package to Martin Luther King at the address of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and mail it. On that same day, there was another agent—I have the man still working in our division—and he was in the office on a Saturday and Sullivan came out and asked him for a sheet of unwatermarked paper. As you know, Bill did a lot of his own typing, and he typed something on the unwatermarked paper and put it in an
envelope and told this agent to take it over to an office. That was the agent who took a package to Miami. Now, if you count thirty-four days from November 21, that Saturday, you come to Christmas… what he was saying was, ‘Here is a man of the cloth in the pulpit talking about the birth of Christ,' when he really was an immoral man.”

In other words, Sullivan composed and caused to be mailed a letter that sounded like a warning to King that he better confess his sins or commit suicide before Christmas.

At a different time, another package was addressed to King's wife, Coretta, who was never suspected of anything other than being a good wife and was never investigated by the FBI. The package reportedly contained materials a husband would not want his wife to see, materials doubtless compiled and sent by someone in the FBI.

Years later, in 1975, as congressional investigators set out to prove the FBI guilty of violating the civil rights of citizens, they focused upon its alleged treatment of King. While they might question or disagree with many acts of the FBI, relatively few ever were found to have been unauthorized or unlawful; many of the complex, legalistic issues raised were difficult for the public to understand and failed to excite popular wrath. But the degradation of a crusading clergyman who had become a folk hero to many people was something laymen could understand and condemn.

 

 

THE SELECT SENATE COMMITTEE on Intelligence Activities under the chairmanship of Frank Church on February 14, 1975, demanded the complete FBI files on fifty different subjects, including King. The demand was so sweeping and so affronted the concept of separation of powers between the executive and legislative branches of government that the FBI, upon the advice of Justice Department attorneys, did not reply. In the spring, Wannall began to receive reports from retired FBI agents that congressional staff members asked them about matters pertaining to King. Some of these agents knew Morris or Jack, or had been peripherally involved in SOLO. And they were aware
that the complete King file would reveal to an informed analyst, American or Soviet, that the FBI had penetrated the innermost sanctum of the American Communist Party, and that it was monitoring secret messages transmitted by the KGB to the party. And although the names of Jack and Morris appeared nowhere in the King file, it would not take the KGB long to deduce that they were the penetrations. To a man, the retired agents refused to tell the committee staff anything. Frustrated, the committee issued a new, specific, and formal demand for the King file.

Meanwhile, in an understanding with the FBI, the committee agreed that the Bureau could withhold data that might identify sources or disclose sensitive investigative techniques, provided that two designated Justice Department attorneys concurred that their suppression was justified. Accordingly, the FBI deleted all references that might point to SOLO and so much other material that only about a dozen pages remained. Even though the Justice Department approved the deletions, the sparsity of the few innocuous pages infuriated the committee. It accused the FBI of gamesmanship and duplicity and threatened to subpoena the entire file and to interrogate FBI agents under oath in public session.

Accompanied by Deputy Director James Adams, Wannall briefed Director Kelley about the crisis.

“Do you feel they are going to get the papers?” Kelley asked.

Wannall replied, “Yes. If they are going to subpoena Kissinger then it looks as if they can subpoena and get this material.”

As Wannall saw it, the Bureau had two choices. It could abandon SOLO before the committee exposed it and immediately hide Morris, Eva, Jack, and Roz. Or it could gamble by telling Senator Church about SOLO in hopes of persuading the committee to drop its demands for the King file.

Kelley chose to gamble and authorized Wannall to tell Church as much as he judged necessary.

Given the prevailing political climate, the decision to trust an unfriendly senator with information that until recently had been withheld even from the president was not easy. From Capitol Hill a stream of venom poured down on the FBI and the intelligence community in general. Senator Robert Morgan called the FBI “the
greatest threat to the United States” and “rotten to the core.” Kelley sent him a polite letter suggesting that he had been misquoted. Morgan curtly replied, “I was quoted correctly.” Young people who not long ago had joined throngs in the streets to chant “Ho! Ho! Ho! Ho Chi Minh is going to win,” now held positions on congressional committees, and defamation of the United States had become a popular Washington sport.

Although Church had treated Wannall courteously, he and his committee appeared aligned with congressional elements hostile to the FBI. He had allowed staff members to violate agreements with the Bureau by attempting to interrogate former agents around the country and by reneging on the pledge to abide by the judgment of Justice Department lawyers about which data could be released. And any politicians, by selectively extracting from SOLO files, could grab headlines such as “FBI Funds U.S. Commies.” Yet, to do nothing was disaster.