The Burglary (35 page)

The burglars had been very strict about being sure to wear gloves during the burglary and as they worked for days with the documents at the farm. It never occurred to them that they needed to protect against more than their own fingerprints—that the documents they copied had their own telltale markings that could reveal on which machine they had been copied. Not that they could have done anything about that. The documents had to be copied. But if they had known, perhaps they would not have made the copies on machines in their own offices.

As Raines listened to the sounds of the Xerox maintenance man replacing the drum in the outer office, he wondered why the man was taking the drum and not just making sample copies. Did that mean they already knew this machine was the culprit, and they were taking it away because they needed the drum as evidence? Was it all going to come to this—being unmasked by a Xerox copier? In that moment, Raines felt sure the drum on his department's copier, the drum carried down the sidewalk by the Xerox maintenance man, had become a smoking gun.

He called Davidon right away. Davidon acted quickly. He found a sharp metal object and made a bold scratch on the drum of his department's Xerox copier. This, he assumed, would change the footprint left by that machine and make it more difficult to match the many documents he had made on this copier. To decrease even more the chances of the copier being detected, the afternoon Davidon heard from Raines, he and another professor—the one person who had turned down Davidon's invitation to participate in the
Media group—after the president of Haverford College and his staff had left for the day, removed the drum from Davidon's department's copier and exchanged it with that of the copier in the president's outer office. Sure enough, Xerox workers came to Davidon's department a couple days later and made sample documents on the Xerox copier.

EXACTLY ONE MONTH AFTER
the burglary, Hoover assigned Roy K. Moore to be in charge of the MEDBURG investigation. The appointment signaled Hoover's increased sense of urgency and the very high priority he gave the case. Hoover considered Moore one of the bureau's best investigators. Moore also was highly regarded by many of his peers. He had been in charge of several earlier high-profile investigations, including the 1964 murder of the three civil rights workers in Neshoba County, Mississippi; the 1963 Birmingham, Alabama, church bombing that killed four young girls; and the 1955 midair explosion of an airplane over Colorado that killed all forty-four people aboard. After he had settled into Philadelphia, Moore reviewed MEDBURG and immediately endorsed the continued search for the suspect copiers as crucial to the investigation.

The results of that search continued to be very frustrating, especially given the huge effort put into collecting thousands of sample copies. Like the search for human suspects, the one for suspect copiers went nowhere. None of the marks on the thousands of copies that were collected matched those on any of the documents released by the burglars. This seems strange, especially in light of the evidence presumably obtained from the copier Raines used. Either his department's copier actually was due to have its drum replaced—a striking coincidence of timing—or one or more Xerox officials had engaged in their own act of resistance and not reported that a match had been established between the markings on copies of stolen Media FBI documents and those on the machine Raines used to make hundreds of those copies. Or perhaps the matching test might simply have failed.

There were other frustrations inside the FBI. Just two weeks after the first Media documents became public, Hoover even offered to “step aside” if at any time the president or the attorney general felt that he might be “a burden or handicap to the re-election” of Nixon. The director described his offer to resign in a memorandum in which he summarized an April 6 phone conversation with Deputy Attorney General
Richard Kleindienst. The conversation took place the day after Representative
Hale Boggs, Democrat from Louisiana, claimed on the floor of the House that the FBI had tapped
his phone. Boggs's public accusation, never proven, led to an announcement from the attorney general that the FBI had never wiretapped the phone of any member of the House or Senate.

Kleindienst reassured Hoover in their conversation that he was “a good American” and that “the thing is going to subside.” But Kleindienst infuriated Hoover the next day when he announced, in an interview the deputy attorney general had sought on the CBS morning television news, that the Department of Justice would welcome an investigation of the FBI. He said he thought “the only way public confidence in the FBI can be restored is through a congressional investigation.” To Hoover this was extraordinary. No member of any administration had ever called for an investigation of the FBI.

The impact was explosive, especially to Kleindienst's ears. Shortly after he returned to his office after the interview, he took a call from Hoover. The director denounced Kleindienst's public call for an investigation of the bureau so loudly that Kleindienst had to hold the phone away from his ear. Colleagues in his office could hear every word across the room as the director issued a threat:

“If I am called upon to testify before Congress, I will have to tell
all
that I know about this matter.”

Kleindienst did not fully grasp what Hoover meant. He soon would. The director was alluding to the illegal wiretapping of phones that Henry Kissinger, supported by President Nixon, had asked Hoover to conduct beginning in May 1969.

It had all started when Kissinger, then Nixon's national security adviser, was beside himself the morning of May 9, 1969, when he read a story in the
New York Times
that revealed that the United States was secretly conducting bombing raids in Cambodia. He called Hoover immediately that morning to ask what could be done to discover who had leaked the secret. FBI records indicate he called the director two more times that day, pressing him urgently. By the end of the afternoon, a tap had been placed on the home phone of
Morton Halperin, a senior staff member with responsibility for national security in Kissinger's office, and would remain on it for a year and a half, long after he stopped working for Kissinger.

As Colonel
Alexander Haig, Kissinger's top aide, put it to an FBI official a short time later, Kissinger “considered the entire policy would be ruined unless these leaks could be stopped, and that damage to the country would be irreparable.” In the end, seventeen people were tapped as part of this secret operation conducted by the FBI for Kissinger and the president.
Besides Halperin, those who were tapped included six other members of Kissinger's staff, four journalists, two White House advisers, a deputy assistant secretary of state, an ambassador, a brigadier general with the Defense Department, and one of the president's speechwriters. Hoover wrote in a May 9 memorandum about a conversation he had with Kissinger that Kissinger “appreciated this very much, and he hoped I would follow it up as far as we can take it and they will destroy whoever did this if we find him, no matter where he is.”

Hoover had entered into this illegal arrangement on behalf of the president and Kissinger with great reluctance from the moment Kissinger's request was made. At first, the White House insisted there be no paper records of the project. Hoover, extremely fearful of being discovered carrying out this high-level illegal project, insisted that paper trails be kept. He ordered
William Sullivan, then assistant director in charge of domestic intelligence, to make sure that each tap was authorized in writing by the attorney general. The whereabouts of the highly secret wiretap transcripts—kept at first in Sullivan's office under lock and key, then transferred to an office at the Department of Justice when Sullivan fell out of favor with Hoover in 1971, and ultimately placed in the office of presidential adviser
John Ehrlichman at the White House—later became a major issue during the Watergate investigations.

When the taps were first put in place, both Kissinger and his top aide, Colonel
Alexander Haig, went regularly to Sullivan's office to read the transcripts. They seemed to enjoy perusing the personal and political conversations that had been transcribed by FBI listeners who worked secretly in the heart of the bureau's electronic surveillance operations in the Old Post Office Building. The operations had been placed there years earlier rather than at FBI headquarters in the Department of Justice Building to make it unlikely an attorney general would accidentally walk in and discover them. Though Hoover required the attorney general to sign off on this high-level illegal operation being conducted for Kissinger and Nixon, he usually conducted such surveillance without the approval or knowledge of the attorney general. In the end, despite many months of daily transcripts of the conversations of seventeen highly placed government officials and journalists recorded around the clock, not a single clue emerged from the tapped phones about anyone leaking stories.

To Hoover, this project was fire, and he was determined it would not burn him. In his time of crisis in early April 1971, provoked first by the Media burglary revelations and then by Kleindienst's public call for an
investigation of the FBI, he immediately realized he could use the Kissinger taps as blackmail against the White House.
If there was an investigation of the FBI, he told the president, as he repeated to him the threat he had just made to Kleindienst: “I will have to tell
all
that I know about this matter.” Unlike Kleindienst, the president knew exactly what Hoover was talking about.

Within two hours, Kleindienst was interviewed again on television—at his request, as before. This time he withdrew his call for an investigation of the FBI.

Less than a year earlier, Hoover had destroyed the president's plan to create a large domestic intelligence operation that would have been a secret collaborative effort by all intelligence agencies, with the FBI in charge. Not wanting to let go of the FBI's sole responsibility for domestic intelligence, Hoover said he would agree to the project only if each illegal operation was approved in writing by either the attorney general or the president. In anger, Nixon withdrew the plan, which all the other intelligence agencies had endorsed. Now, less than a year later, Hoover had defeated the president again by reminding him that he possessed evidence—signed authorizations of illegal wiretaps against the administration's own staff members and journalists—that could destroy Nixon.

The FBI had never been investigated. And Hoover had just assured it would not be investigated now. He did so as a chorus inside and outside Congress, in the aftermath of the publication of the first Media files, was calling for congressional scrutiny of the bureau. He must have felt confident that the blackmail he had just used against the president would guarantee that the president, for his own protection, would not only convince Kleindienst to retract his call but would also do everything he could to block any serious effort by Congress to investigate the bureau.

THE STORM THAT RAGED
at FBI headquarters over the first Media revelations also hit CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia. Hoover had recently ordered FBI officials to cut off relations with the CIA. Dealings between the two agencies had always been somewhat uncomfortable. When the CIA was formed, Hoover wanted it to be an expansion of the bureau.
Failing to convince President Truman to do that, he occasionally engaged in dirty tricks against the agency when he thought it was conducting operations the FBI should have been directing—such as break-ins at embassies in Washington.

Now, in the spring of 1971, Hoover and the CIA director, Richard Helms, seemed to be in the same boat. The Media burglary had made the heads of both of these powerful agencies fearful that their most closely held secrets—elaborately hidden illegal domestic spying operations—would be exposed. At the FBI, the threat came from outside—the Media burglars and what they could continue to make public. At the CIA, the threat came from inside—CIA agents who wanted to know the truth about their own agency.

On March 25, 1971, the day after the
Washington Post
published the first evidence from Media files of illegal domestic intelligence operations by the FBI, Richard Helms received a forceful memorandum, labeled “CIA Domestic Activities.” It came from a group of CIA agents who asked him if the CIA was conducting intelligence operations directed against American citizens despite the fact that its charter, issued when the agency was established by Congress in 1947, forbade it from engaging in domestic operations. The agents were members of one of five management advisory groups, or MAGs, as they were called inside the agency, small groups of CIA employees who occasionally advised superiors. The members of the MAG who wrote to Helms advised the director's office. That such groups had long existed at the CIA was a sharp contrast with the FBI. There was no system at the bureau for employees to send criticism up the line to Hoover and his top aides. In fact, it would have been anathema to his demands for devotion and total loyalty. However, in the end, the existence of formal internal channels to advise CIA officials did not seem to matter.

Noting that they were concerned because of the recent exposure of the domestic intelligence activities of “other federal agencies,” the MAG members who sent the memorandum that day to Helms “through”
William Colby, then the executive director and later the CIA director, addressed Helms with bold comments: