J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and the Secrets (130 page)

Although Hoover had locked Sullivan out of his office, it was widely rumored in the Bureau that the former assistant to the director had prepared for his probable departure well in advance, these preparations including the Xeroxing of a large number of key documents. Sullivan denied this. However, when his sister’s barn burned, several years before his death, Sullivan told numerous people that all of his records had been destroyed with it.

There are some who suspect that Sullivan told this tale simply as a ruse to discourage FBI bag jobs. He didn’t have a telephone in his cabin, he told the author when he visited him there, because he wanted to save the taxpayers the cost of tapping it. He knew his Sugar Hill telephone was tapped, and that his mail was being opened, because he knew the men who were doing it: they’d all carried on similar operations for him, when he headed Domestic Intelligence, and had made sure he was alerted.

Most of Sullivan’s last years were spent testifying before congressional committees and giving depositions in various court cases, such as the Morton Halperin wiretapping suit.

About a quarter hour before sunrise on November 9, 1977, William Sullivan was walking in the woods near his Sugar Hill, New Hampshire, home when a twenty-one-year-old hunter equipped with a Remington 30-06 automatic rifle shot him in the back, the bullet slamming into Sullivan’s right shoulder and exiting through the left side of his neck. Sullivan was carried to the nearby home of the Sugar Hill police chief, Gary Young, a close friend with whom he had been planning to go hunting later that day. By the time an ambulance arrived, accompanied by officials of the state police, the fish and game department, and the FBI, Sullivan was dead. The hunter, the son of a state police official, said he had mistaken Sullivan for a deer.
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Both the fish and game department and the state Police of New Hampshire investigated the shooting and on November 19 the young hunter pleaded nolo contendere to fish and game violation no. 207:37, the misdemeanor charge of carelessly shooting a human being. He was later fined $500 and had his hunting license suspended for ten years. Through a spokesman, the Sullivan family said it accepted the shooting as an accident and forgave the hunter.

Because he had been the number three man at the FBI, and his battles with the late FBI director J. Edgar Hoover had been much publicized, Sullivan’s death would have rated more than a brief mention on the obituary pages, but his scheduled appearance the following week before the House Select Committee on the Assassinations of President John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther
King, Jr.—Sullivan’s division had been involved in the FBI investigations of both killings—assured front-page coverage. Attorney William Kunstler called a press conference to announce that there wasn’t “the slightest doubt” that William Sullivan was murdered, because he was about to “blow the whistle”
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on FBI operations that would have provided direct links to the slayings of Kennedy, King, and Malcolm X. Kunstler also announced that he would ask Attorney General Griffin Bell to have the Justice Department investigate. The Justice Department later stated there was no reason to open an investigation, since, as the JD spokesman Terence Adamson noted, “the person responsible for the shooting has acknowledged it and the physical evidence substantiates his account.”
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Clarence Kelley had announced his intention to retire shortly after Carter took office, in early 1977, and the president had appointed a blue-ribbon panel to pick his successor. The panel, whose dozen members included F. A. O. Schwarz, Jr., Charles Morgan, former southern field director of the ACLU, Attorney General Bell, and Kelley himself, screened 235 résumés. Aware of how they could be slanted, FBI name checks were not used, the panel instead relying on frank, tough questioning. Anyone who had any connection with the COINTELPROs, for example, was eliminated. Although the list was reduced to five finalists, the unanimous choice of the panel was the forthright Neil J. Welch, Buffalo SAC, who told its members, “To improve federal law enforcement, the best thing you could do would be sandbag Bureau headquarters and rip out the phones.”
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Carter, who interviewed each of the finalists, instead chose William Hedgcock Webster, a former prosecutor and trial and appellate court judge from St. Louis, and the Senate confirmed him, by a vote of 90 to 0, on February 23, 1978.

Judge Webster, as he liked to be called, brought to his job “a reputation for absolute integrity,” according to the
New York Times.
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Newsweek
characterized him as a “straight arrow, sternly rectitudinous” and a man of “probity and discretion.”
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The
Washington Post,
in reviewing his first three years, would call him “the man who brought pride back to the FBI.” “If he did nothing else,” the paper noted, “Webster managed to get the FBI off the front pages of the nation’s newspapers.”
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“I had a learning process when I got there,” Webster later admitted. “It was a rough time. People were talking about ripping J. Edgar Hoover’s name right off the building.”
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Although he appointed James B. Adams deputy associate director, Webster wasn’t much concerned about the old Hooverites: most of those remaining were soon due to reach the mandatory retirement age of seventy, and for them there would be no exemptions. Unlike Kelley, Webster could refer to “the new FBI” and get away with it. In a highly symbolic act, Webster had a bust and a portrait of Hoover removed from the director’s suite, but he waited seventeen months to do it, and it wasn’t until after Adams and John J. McDermott, the last two holdovers from the Hoover era, had retired. On replacing them, Webster restructed the high
command, appointing not one associate director but three executive associate directors—Homer A. Boynton, Jr., Donald W. Moore, Jr., and Lee Colwell—none of whom was closely identified with Hoover. They were also better educated and, at fifty-two, forty-nine, and forty-five, decidedly younger than their predecessors.
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His first priorities, Webster said, were reestablishing morale and momentum. Once these had been accomplished to his satisfaction, he shifted the Bureau’s direction from the realms of car thefts and bank robberies—Hoover’s easy statistics—to the new, to the FBI, areas of white-collar crime, corruption by public officials, and, still later, drugs. The Abscam investigations—which led to the convictions of one senator and six representatives—occurred under Webster. Although some denounced the techniques that were employed as entrapment, Webster had learned at least one lesson from Hoover: frightening Congress wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. Webster appeared fairly candid, although properly reserved, with the congressional oversight committees, which for the most part praised him, and the appropriations committees, which gave him what he wanted. Espionage received special emphasis, as did counterintelligence. Judge Webster took great pride in the Bureau’s high-technology crime solving, which consisted of greater use of computers and more court-ordered electronic surveillances than ever before. There was no more lily-white male FBI: by 1987 the Bureau’s 9,100 special agents included 350 Hispanics, 350 blacks, and 650 women. The SACs in Indianapolis and Atlanta were black. Certain rules were eased. Agents no longer faced automatic firing for engaging in extramarital affairs or living with someone outside the bonds of matrimony, although “practicing homosexuals” were still banned from Bureau jobs.
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There were some well-publicized problems, mostly in the counterintelligence field. A Bureau supervisor waited three months before investigating Barbara Walker’s claim that her ex-husband, John Walker, was a Soviet spy. Edward Lee Howard, a CIA renegade, escaped to Russia while supposedly under FBI surveillance. Richard Miller, a special agent with the Los Angeles field office, confessed to having passed a Bureau document on U.S. intelligence needs to a female KGB agent with whom he was having an affair. Brought to trial and sentenced to two life terms plus fifty years, Miller was the first FBI agent ever convicted of spying for the Soviets.
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But these were aberrations,
Bureau spokesmen explained, claiming they were far outnumbered by the Bureau’s unheralded successes. The difference was that, unlike Hoover’s, Webster’s first priority wasn’t page-one headlines. It made sense. Respect for Webster remained as high as ever.

There were murmurs of discontent, most of them from agents who had served under Clarence Kelley. It was Kelley, they pointed out, who brought the FBI into the high-tech era, by adopting new data-collection and information-retrieval systems, Kelley who pioneered Abscam (Neil Welch had first used video surveillance, which so impressed juries, while Buffalo SAC), and Kelley who had cleaned up the corruption in the Administrative Division—but Webster took all the credit.

Included among Kelley’s legacies were the FBI guidelines, which had been drawn up by Attorney General Levi in 1976. Acting as the Bureau’s spokesman before the Church committee, James Adams had begged Congress for guidelines, implying that many of the “excesses” of the Hoover years would never have happened had the Bureau’s authority been clearly spelled out. William Sullivan, for one, thought this was a cop-out. “For godsakes,” he told an interviewer, “we have manual after manual in the Bureau
loaded
with guidelines…Guidelines telling you how to shake hands, what kind of clothes to wear, on up to guidelines saying that you should never break any law…All kinds of guidelines and if we abided by these guidelines we would never have gotten into any of these things.”
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Under the Levi-Kelley guidelines, the FBI had to have evidence of a criminal act, or intent to commit a crime, before it could place an individual under surveillance or infiltrate a suspected criminal or politically subversive organization.

But after Ronald Reagan became president—the second FBI informant to attain that high office, Gerald Ford having preceded him—there was a move to loosen these “restrictions” on the FBI. At first it was covert, buried in a little-publicized recommendation in the attorney general’s August 30, 1981, voluminous task force report on crime. Recommendation 31 called for a comprehensive review of all legislation, guidelines, and regulations that “impeded” the effective performance of federal law enforcement and suggested that the attorney general take “whatever appropriate action is necessary within the constitutional framework” to eliminate those impediments.
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In March 1983 it became overt, Attorney General William French Smith announcing that he had just completed the first comprehensive revision of the FBI guidelines since 1976. Once again, the Bureau could investigate an organization on proof of “advocacy” of violence. Instead of “domestic security,” the
new rubric was “domestic and international terrorism.” “FBI Gets Wider Powers for Domestic Spying,” read a typical headline.

Although the American Civil Liberties Union and other civil rights advocates protested, noting that the Supreme Court had ruled that mere advocacy was not enough to warrant prosecution and that such investigations would “chill legitimate First Amendment activity,” the criticism was not sustained.
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Nothing bad would happen, everyone seemed convinced, as long as Judge Webster was director.

In May 1987 President Reagan announced that William Webster would be the new director of the Central Intelligence Agency, replacing the late William Casey. If anything could cause the earth to move in Congressional Cemetery, this was it. But not until July did the president and Attorney General Edwin Meese III find someone to fill the FBI vacancy. He was William S. Sessions, a reputedly tough, law-and-order judge from Texas. Asked why the president had picked Sessions, whom
Newsweek
promptly dubbed a “Webster clone,” a senior administration official quipped, “Because he was willing to do it.”
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Washington scuttlebutt had it that at least a dozen others had been asked to take the job, and declined.

Confirmed by a vote of 90 to 0 that September, Sessions said that he would like to see greater clarity and specificity in the guidelines. Sessions had barely settled into office when he was buried under an avalanche of criticism, most of which more rightly belonged to his predecessors. A great deal of the new FBI director’s time was spent apologizing for things he wasn’t responsible for.

At the time Sessions became director, in November 1987, the FBI had 439 Hispanic agents. In 1988 some 300 of them filed a lawsuit charging the Bureau with “systematic discrimination.” In addition to being subject to overt and covert harassment, the suit alleged, Hispanic agents were being denied regular assignments (many of them found themselves on the “Taco Circuit,” where they were used only to monitor wiretaps on Spanish-speaking suspects), promotions, and entry into the FBI Career Development Program.
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The agents won the suit, and in September 1990, on the recommendation of a special court-appointed review panel, Director Sessions promoted 11 Hispanic agents who had previously been denied promotions because of their ethnic background.

It was not a popular decision, in some quarters. “A lot of the old-timers around here believed that the Bureau would be admitting too much if we handed out promotions to the Hispanic agents,” observed a senior official. “And, of course, that’s what we’re doing. We’re admitting that there has been a serious problem and that we’re trying to overcome it.”
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Nor was the discrimination restricted to Hispanics. A black agent from the
Chicago field office, Donald Rochon, also sued the Bureau, claiming that he and his wife had been victims of a planned campaign of often vicious racial harassment by his white colleagues. They forged his signature on a death and dismemberment policy, pasted a photograph of an ape over that of his son in a family portrait, drowned a black doll in effigy, ordered unwanted merchandise sent to his home address, scrawled “don’t come” across invitations to office parties, and made threatening, and obscene, telephone calls to his wife, who was white. Apparently no one had told them the COINTELPROs against blacks were over. When SA Rochon complained to his superior, he was himself censured. When one of the harassing agents, Gary Miller, confessed to some of the “pranks” and was suspended without pay for two weeks, fellow agents established a fund to cover his salary loss. Two other special agents found to have participated in the abuse were ordered to join Miller in three one-hour sessions of racial sensitivity training. As Patricia Motto, one of Rochon’s attorneys, put it, after failing repeatedly to get the FBI to take any serious disciplinary action, “You start to feel like you’re fencing with Hoover’s ghost.”
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