Official and Confidential (19 page)

Edgar survived the crisis because he had the most powerful protector of all, the President. Characteristically, Roosevelt made light of the row. ‘Edgar,' he called across the room at a Washington Press Club reception. ‘What are they trying to do to you?' ‘I don't know, Mr President,' Edgar
replied. Roosevelt then made an exaggerated thumbs-down gesture with both hands, proclaiming loudly, ‘That's for them.' Everyone present knew Edgar's job was safe for the foreseeable future.

‘Hoover continued in his job and added to his power,' observed Roosevelt's Interior Secretary Harold Ickes, ‘because he managed to worm himself into the complete confidence of the President.' Edgar achieved that, as he would with future presidents, by sending a stream of political intelligence to the White House.

‘He started playing up to him,' said William Sullivan, ‘telling him little tidbits of gossip about high-ranking public officials whenever he could …' Francis Biddle, who followed Jackson as Attorney General, had the same experience. ‘Lunching alone with me in a room adjoining my office,' Biddle recalled, Hoover began ‘sharing some of his extraordinarily broad knowledge of the intimate details of what my associates in the Cabinet did and said, of their likes and dislikes, their weaknesses and their associations.'

In June 1940, when Roosevelt wrote to thank him for the ‘wonderful job' he was doing, Edgar responded with flattery. He told the President his note was ‘one of the most inspiring messages which I have ever been privileged to receive … a symbol of the principles for which our nation stands.'

The job Edgar was doing, as both men knew, was far beyond the proper responsibilities of an FBI Director. Roosevelt had asked the FBI to ‘look over' the mountain of critical telegrams he had received after making a broadcast on national defense. Edgar obliged by running name checks and opening files on hundreds of citizens.

FBI political espionage for the White House became routine. In late 1940, when the President asked Edgar to assign an agent to Palm Beach to watch the administration's ‘friends and enemies,' Edgar obliged with ‘complete coverage.'

Roosevelt turned to Edgar for help when, at a time the
Chicago Tribune
was opposing his defense plans, he wanted
to boost a rival paper in the city. ‘FDR used the FBI for all kinds of dirty tricks,' said the
Tribune
's Walter Trohan, who became a trusted Bureau contact. ‘When the new newspaper, the
Sun
, was trying to put the
Tribune
out of business, the government used the FBI to intimidate newspaper publishers. I took it up with Hoover later, and he said, “Yeah, but I got a letter directing me to do it.” And he showed me the order. He wanted proof before he did that kind of thing …'

As time went on, Roosevelt often bypassed his Attorney General and communicated directly with Edgar. A long line of future attorneys general, who theoretically had full authority over the Director of the FBI, would have to learn to live with the same humiliation. As Secretary Ickes noted in his diary in June 1941, Edgar had become ‘so strong that apparently he can dictate who is to be the Attorney General, his titular chief.'

Edward Ennis, a senior aide to Francis Biddle, felt that attorneys general were cowed by Edgar's relationship with the President, and by an ‘even deeper fear that he had files on everybody.' The best that could be said, wrote Assistant Secretary of State Adolf Berle, was that Edgar ‘has run a secret police with the minimum of collision with civil liberties, and that is about all you can expect of any chief of secret police.'

The fact was, though, that for the first time in the nation's history, a federal official did wield such power, and his assault on civil liberties would be persistent and serious.

In May 1940, Roosevelt gave the go-ahead for use of that vital tool of any secret police, the telephone tap. On its face, Edgar's track record on wiretapping was entirely respectable. The Bureau's first manual, issued in 1928, said flatly that tapping was ‘improper, illegal … unethical' and would not be tolerated. Edgar had assured Congress that any agent caught wiretapping would be fired.

Though some sought to find loopholes in it, the Federal Communications Act of 1934 had seemed to outlaw wiretapping altogether. And, in spite of an Attorney General's ruling
that allowed some tapping with prior approval, Edgar continued to say that he was against it except in life-or-death circumstances, such as kidnappings. The testimony of his own men, however, makes it clear that was not true.

For two months in 1936, five FBI agents were forced to reveal in court that the Bureau mounted round-the-clock wiretaps to investigate a case of interstate theft in New York. The evidence made it clear that this was nothing unusual, that there had been dozens of similar assignments, using the most sophisticated equipment available.

According to other agents, Edgar had on occasion used bugging to further his own private interests. There had been the time, years earlier, when he ordered taps on the telephones of Roosevelt's Postmaster General James Farley, who wanted him replaced as FBI Director. In 1937, during a clampdown on brothels in Baltimore, reporters had asked Edgar about rumors that telephones were bugged during the operation. ‘We have to do that sometimes,' he said carefully. It later emerged that there had been bugging – enough to fill two volumes of notes on conversations in one brothel alone. Part of their mission, former agents were quoted as saying, had been to get smear material on police officials who had fallen out with Edgar.

‘Perhaps only Mr Hoover himself,' Federal Communications Chairman James Fly was to write, ‘can tell exactly how many times he has instructed his men to break the law that his Bureau was supposed to enforce; but he has chosen not to discuss such details.' In 1940, when Edgar was quietly lobbying for looser wiretapping laws, it was Fly's congressional testimony that ensured the legislation was rejected. Edgar detested the FCC Chairman from then on, so much so that – even two decades later in retirement – Fly insisted on meeting a reporter out of doors, for fear his home was bugged by the FBI.

In the spring of 1940, convinced that wiretapping was vital to national security, President Roosevelt overrode the law. He
authorized the Attorney General to permit eavesdropping on ‘persons suspected of subversive activities against the United States, including suspected spies …' This order, Francis Biddle pointed out long afterward, ‘opened the door pretty wide to wiretapping of anyone
suspected of subversive activities
[Biddle's emphasis].' It was to remain Edgar's basic authority for telephone tapping for a quarter of a century.

Attorney General Robert Jackson was so unhappy about this development that he distanced himself from the issue and let Edgar decide who should be wiretapped. Evidence of the sort of bugging Edgar would approve came less than a year later.

Harry Bridges, the thirty-five-year-old leader of the International Longshoremen's and Warehousemen's Union, had long been a thorn in the side of management. He was also an irritant to Edgar personally. Five years earlier, when Edgar had briefed Roosevelt on the internal threat from Communists, he had named Bridges as the man who could paralyze the nation's shipping. Even after the union leader came out in favor of a peace agreement with management, Edgar pursued him relentlessly.

Bridges was vulnerable because he had been born in Australia. Edgar claimed he was a Communist, and foreignborn Communists could be deported for membership in ‘an organization advocating the violent overthrow of the government.' Bridges said he had never joined the Party, though he admitted being an admirer of ‘the Soviet workers' state.' The result of his latest deportation hearing was still pending in the summer of 1941.

That August, Leon Goodelman, a reporter for the New York newspaper
PM
, received a call from the secretary of the Citizens' Committee for Harry Bridges. Bridges, he was told, was currently staying at the Edison Hotel on West Forty-seventh Street. He had discovered his telephone was being tapped, and invited the reporter to come and see for himself.

Goodelman found he had a scoop on his hands. Bridges explained he had been staying at the Edison intermittently since early July. He was accustomed to being surveilled by the FBI and became suspicious when, even though he asked for different accommodation, the hotel persisted in giving him one particular room, number 1027. Then, down in the hotel lobby, Bridges spotted an FBI agent who had attended one of his deportation hearings. After identifying two more agents, Bridges decided to experiment. Using the telephone in his room, he called a union colleague to make an appointment at a nearby drugstore. Sure enough, one of the FBI agents turned up at the rendezvous. If they knew about his appointment, Bridges reasoned, then they were listening to his calls.

‘I went back to the hotel,' he recalled, ‘went in my door very fast and dove over to the connecting door, lay down and looked under it into the next room. Two pairs of feet went by my eye and I could see some bunched-up telephone wire on the floor … After tipping off my friends that I was being tapped, I sort of settled down to have some fun with the FBI. I left the room very quietly, and ducked out of the hotel.'

Soon, armed with a pair of binoculars, Bridges was watching his room, and the room next door to it, from the roof garden of the hotel across the street. ‘There were the two guys,' he said, ‘stretched out on the twin beds with their earphones on, thinking I was still in the room.' First with colleagues, then with reporter Goodelman and a photographer, the union leader watched his watchers for days. Whenever Bridges left his room, the journalists noticed, one of the agents next door would sit down to work at a typewriter. He was also seen pasting little pieces of paper together – scraps from Bridges' wastebasket.

Then Goodelman used a nail file to pry open the telephone connector box in Bridges' room, revealing a hidden radio induction microphone, a dual-function bug capable of transmitting both speech on the telephone and conversation in the
room. The police were called, and the agent on duty next door had to flee via the fire escape. He left behind wires leading through the wall to Bridges' phone, abandoned wiring and a piece of carbon paper. The carbon bore the telltale words ‘Evelle J. Younger, Special Agent.'

The FBI had been caught red-handed. Francis Biddle, who took over as Attorney General that month, faced awkward questions from the Senate Judiciary Committee. ‘When all this came out in the newspapers,' he said, ‘I could not resist suggesting to Hoover that he tell the story of the unfortunate tap directly to the President. We went over to the White House together. FDR was delighted; and, with one of his great grins, intent on every word, slapped Hoover on the back when he had finished. “By God, Edgar, that's the first time you've been caught with your pants down.”'

Roosevelt might not have laughed so hard had he known what Edgar was saying behind his back. ‘Hoover stated quite frankly,' Assistant Attorney General Norman Littell wrote in his journal, ‘that, if he were put on the stand as a result of the reopening of the Bridges case, he would frankly state that he was authorized to tap the wires by the President himself.' Hoover, Littell observed, ‘knows no loyalty to the commander-in-chief. He would just let the chief take the rap for authorizing an illegal act …'

Roosevelt himself had few qualms about the use of wiretaps by the executive. He reportedly used Edgar to tap one of his own former advisers, Tommy ‘the Cork' Corcoran, and even requested coverage of a serving Cabinet member, Postmaster General Jim Farley. Edgar is said to have balked at that, but passed on Farley's conversations when they were picked up on an FBI bug of someone else. During the run-up to the 1944 election, he would reportedly supply the White House with the results of wiretaps on Republican politicians – an alleged Watergate three decades before the scandal that would topple Richard Nixon.

According to Nixon, Edgar told him ‘every president since Roosevelt' had given him bugging assignments. As the Senate Intelligence Committee would discover in 1975, Presidents Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson – and Nixon – all used the Bureau to conduct wiretaps and surveillance for purposes that had nothing to do with national security or crime, and which can only be described as political. By ignoring ethics, and on occasion the law, and by using the FBI to do it, they all made themselves beholden to Edgar.

Against that background, it is hardly surprising that Edgar would feel free to deceive Congress on the subject. ‘In Chicago,' veteran FBI surveillance specialist Wesley Swearingen was to recall, ‘we'd get a call from headquarters a couple of days before Hoover was due to appear before the House Appropriations Committee. They'd tell us he was going to tell the Congressmen we had such and such a number of wiretaps going right now – always a real low figure. We'd have dozens on in our city alone, but this call from the Bureau would instruct us that for now we were to reduce them to only one – say, on Communist Party headquarters. So we'd get in touch with the phone company and say, “As of midnight Tuesday until midnight Wednesday, that's the only wiretap we want working in Chicago.” Hoover would march in, make his speech, give some low figure that was accurate that day, and the Congressmen would be impressed. Then, Wednesday night, they turned them all back on again.'

We shall probably never know how much wiretapping was done solely on the authority of senior FBI officials, without the approval of attorneys general. Records of such taps were maintained by designated assistant directors, but in 1953 Edgar ordered that assistant directors' office files be destroyed every six months. The only such file that survives, that of Lou Nichols, contains substantial information on wiretaps – including a series of reports on John Monroe, a Washington influence peddler who held Edgar's attention not
least because he reportedly claimed the Director was ‘a fairy.'