Hoover and the Un-Americans
by Kenneth O'Reilly *
While ACLU officials Morris Ernst and Irving Ferman were busy
collaborating with the FBI, the United States Senate condemned
Joseph R. McCarthy for conduct unbecoming a United States Senator.
The condemnation did not, however, terminate McCarthyism as a
political phenomenon. In some ways, McCarthy's demise ushered in
a more pervasive McCarthyism. The House Committee on Un-American
Activities and the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee
continued to promote the menace, while FBI officials' priorities
remained unchanged. In 1959, two years after McCarthy's death,
over 400 agents in the FBI's New York Field Office were assigned
to "communism" and only four to organized crime. FBI assistance
to the congressional internal security committees also escalated
dramatically in response to a new program launched by the FBI in
1956 -- the first of the COINTELPROs. Never content merely to
spy and gather intelligence, FBI officials had always intended
to use the information gathered during their investigations to
discredit dissident political activities. Hereafter, they
pursued these objectives on a truly grand scale.
McCarthyism at Bay
This apparent paradox -- the escalation of McCarthyism at
the very time the junior Senator from Wisconsin was fading
into oblivion -- can be explained in part by the anticommunist
politics favored by the Eisenhower administration. Less than
two weeks after his inauguration, President Eisenhower directed
his congressional liaison, General Wilton B. Persons, and Vice-
President Nixon to work with HUAC and the various congressional
investigating committees searching for Communists in government.
Nixon and Persons hoped to direct the congressional red-hunters
by identifying "what ought to be investigated," thereby
confining the ongoing search for subversives to New Deal and
Fair Deal personnel while precluding "investigations of the
present Administration." Justice Department officials,
moreover, felt that the Republicans' electoral success had led
to "changed conditions" and thus the FBI should now extend "as
much cooperation as possible" to HUAC and other red-hunting
committees.
The President publicly questioned whether CPUSA members should
be allowed to teach. Even when teaching mathematics, Eisenhower
mused, party propagandists could substitute political symbols
for apples and oranges. J. Edgar Hoover also supported the
HUAC-SISS investigations. In March he ordered twenty-four field
offices to compile reports on "subversive persons" employed at
fifty-six universities and colleges. A month later, the FBI
Director warned the House and Senate Appropriations Subcommittees
of Communist infiltration in education at all levels.
The administration's support for the anticommunist politics of
HUAC and FBI officials was further reflected in the decision to
create a new loyalty-security program. Established by executive
order in April 1953, the Eisenhower loyalty-security program
made it easier to fire not only potential security risks and
those few Communists who had infiltrated the government, but
New Deal holdovers as well. (In June 1954 Attorney General
Herbert Brownell, Jr., told the Cabinet that there were "some
500 Government employees on an FBI 'pick-up list' in case of
an emergency.") Then, at HUAC's recommendation, the President
amended the loyalty-security program by authorizing loyalty
review boards to take into consideration whether a federal
employee had ever taken the Fifth Amendment before a
congressional investigating committee. Led by Attorney General
Brownell, the administration also lobbied for an immunity bill
and on August 20, 1954, Congress passed the Compulsory
Testimony Act. President Eisenhower commended the virtues of
this new law three days later:
Investigation and prosecution of crimes involving national
security have been seriously hampered by witnesses who have
invoked the Constitutional privilege against self-incrimination
embodied in the Fifth Amendment. This Act provides a new means
of breaking through the secrecy which is characteristic of
traitors, spies and saboteurs.
Although this act empowered congressional committees to request
the District Court for the District of Columbia to grant
immunity to recalcitrant witnesses, neither HUAC nor any of the
other red-hunting committees made much use of it. The Un-American
Activities Committee was quite content to fire twenty or more
questions at unfriendly witnesses and receive the same answer
each time: "I refuse to answer on the grounds that it may
incriminate me." In addition, the Supreme Court had recently
decided, in Hoffman v. U.S., that Fifth Amendment protections
extended to questions about other individuals and could
further be invoked in response to any question that tended to
incriminate, whether it was incriminatory or not. In Rogers v.
U.S. the Court had ruled that a witness who testified regarding
his or her own Communist affiliations thereby waived all
constitutional rights and must answer questions regarding other
persons as well. In these circumstances, those summoned by the
Velde, Jenner, and McCarthy committees had few choices. They
could take the Fifth, become a Committee informer, or refuse
to testify on other grounds -- in which case they risked
indictment for contempt of Congress and, ultimately, jail.
(The FBI even kept justice Department prosecutors posted on the
strategy that members of allegedly subversive groups intended
to pursue when called to testify.) Witnesses who took the Fifth
also risked losing their jobs and were routinely investigated
by the FBI for inclusion on the Security Index. The Bureau held
a dossier on everyone who took the Fifth Amendment before a
congressional investigating committee.
The condemnation of Senator McCarthy might have signalled a
thaw in the domestic Cold War, but the anticommunist politics
favored by the Eisenhower administration, HUAC, and FBI
officials remained unchallenged. A series of Supreme Court
rulings in 1956 and 1957, however, did impose substantive
restrictions on FBI officials' attempts to exploit antiradical
fears and the administration's concomitant attempt to devise a
"total program [that] will have the effect of outlawing the
Communist Party without becoming involved in the constitutional
complications of actual outlawry." These decisions limited the
scope of permissible testimony by FBI informers and granted
defense counsel greater access to pretrial statements that
government witnesses had made to the FBI; challenged the
procedures of congressional committees investigating subversive
activities; and questioned the constitutionality of Smith Act
prosecutions, Subversive Activities Control Board hearings,
and certain aspects of the Eisenhower administration's loyalty-
security program.
The Supreme Court's rulings did not reflect a change in
congressional temperament. HUAC member Donald Jackson was not
alone when he charged that the Court's decision to invalidate
a contempt of Congress citation against John T. Watkins for
refusing to answer Committee questions was "a victory greater
than any achieved by the Soviet on the battlefield since World
War II." During the Eighty-Fifth Congress, 101 anti-Court and
anti-civil liberties bills were introduced. Led by Louis
Nichols, the FBI lobbied extensively for new legislation to
undo the effects of the recent rulings, particularly the
Jencks decision, which granted defendants greater access to
FBI reports. In 1959, two years after he left the Bureau,
Nichols wrote an influential American Bar Association report
that inspired in part yet another attempt by anticommunist
congressmen to shore up the nation's internal security
machinery.
The Escalation of McCarthyism
The FBI's response to the Supreme Court decisions of 1956
and 1957 was not so narrowly limited. Realizing that it would
no longer be feasible to prosecute Communists, in August 1956
Bureau officials decided to augment their earlier political
activities. They launched the first of a series of formal
counterintelligence programs (COINTELPROs) designed "to
expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit or otherwise neutralize"
groups and individuals whom FBI officials had categorized as
opposed to the national interest. The FBI's counterintelligence
program was initiated unilaterally without the knowledge or
authorization of the Attorney General or the President, at a
time when Communist party membership was declining spectacularly,
and when even FBI officials no longer considered the CPUSA an
espionage threat. Thus began a massive campaign to bring
Communists "into disrepute before the American public."
Once institutionalized within the Domestic Intelligence
Division (headed from 1961 to 1971 by William C. Sullivan),
this COINTELPRO-Communist party expanded to include indigenous
radicals and nonradicals. In March 1960 another Bureau program,
COMINFIL, sought to prevent Communist infiltration of
"legitimate mass organizations" ranging from the Boy Scouts to
the NAACP. Under COMINFIL, the FBI began to investigate those
whom FBI officials considered as being possibly under Communist
influence. In time, the Bureau expanded its structured
counterintelligence activities to include such diverse groups
and amorphous movements (and their sympathizers) as the
Socialist Workers party (1961), "White Hate Groups" (1964),
"Black Nationalist Hate Groups" (1967), and the "New Left"
(1968).
Counterintelligence operations (some of which violated criminal
statutes relating to mail fraud, incited violence, and involved
sending obscene material through the mail and extortion) were
not intended merely to invoke sanctions against dissidents.
They also had an explicitly educational purpose -- developing
logically, if not inevitably, from the earlier and less formal
program of February 1946. Under the counterintelligence
programs, FBI officials were more concerned with dramatizing
the Communist threat than neutralizing the Communist party.
When the CPUSA began to disintegrate in the late 1950s, FBI
officials felt compelled to serve as cheerleaders for their
archfoe. Accordingly, the collapse of the party newspaper in
1958 prompted FBI officials to draft a "statement which the
Director may desire to use as an official publicity release
explaining the discontinuance of the 'Daily Worker' for the
American people." Hoover rejected this suggestion and instead
ordered the Crime Records Division to give the FBI-authored
statement to Hearst columnist George Sokolsky.
This leak to Sokolsky was not atypical. The FBI's attempts
to shape public opinion accelerated between 1956 and 1971,
the years the Bureau operated the various COINTELPROs. The
most frequently used techniques, however, had long been
employed by FBI Assistant Director Nichols. These included
anonymous mailings (whether reprints of published articles
or FBI-authored pamphlets, news stories, or poison-pen
letters); leaks to friendly journalists, congressmen, and
other public opinion leaders; and efforts to prevent
radicals from speaking, meeting, teaching, writing, and
publishing.
Following Nichols's retirement from the Bureau in late 1957,
Cartha DeLoach carried on these activities. Starting out as an
agent assigned to investigate Communists in Toledo and Akron,
Ohio, DeLoach moved to Washington D.C. after World War II and
was assigned to the Crime Records Division. Appointed FBI
Assistant Director for Crime Records in 1959, he directed all
FBI investigative activities six years later. Cultivating
newsmen, congressmen, and even President Lyndon B. Johnson,
DeLoach, like Nichols before him, was Hoover's troubleshooter."
Less concerned than Nichols with the possibility that his
activities would become publicly compromised, DeLoach not
only furnished information to newspaper reporters and other
publicists but supervised the production and distribution on
college campuses of a newspaper, the Rational Observer, billed
as the work of "a small group of students."
As part of his counterintelligence responsibilities,
DeLoach developed a "Mass Media Program" that included over
300 newspaper reporters, columnists, radio commentators, and
television news investigators. Under DeLoach's supervision on
the local level, FBI field offices cultivated their own media
contacts. The Chicago Field Office, for instance, had one or
more sources at various newspapers (Chicago Tribune, Chicago
American, Chicago Daily News, Chicago Sun-Times, Chicago
Defender, Joliet Herald, Rockford Register Republic, Rockford
Morning Star, and Waukegan News Star), television stations
(ABC, NBC, and CBS local affiliates), radio stations (WGN),
and news organizations (City News Bureau and Field
Communications Corporation). These sources could be counted
on to publicize the FBI's position on virtually any issue and
to discredit not only the CPUSA but "the liberal press and
the bleeding hearts."
Counterintelligence and the Committee
As part of the counterintelligence program, DeLoach and other
FBI officials also worked closely with the House Committee on
Un-American Activities -- whether by directing Committee staff
to FBI informers or public source information, servicing HUAC
requests for specific files, providing Committee members and
staff with FBI reports, or assisting the Committee's efforts
to compile charts detailing the "structure and organization"
of the CPUSA. The FBI, in return, routinely exploited HUAC's
public hearings to expose the Communist associations of
Security Index subjects.
Other targets were selected under COINTELPRO through regular
reviews of the seemingly endless lists of names of people whom
FBI informers had identified as Communist during testimony
before the Committee.
The Bureau's dissemination of published HUAC hearings and
reports did not begin with the new counterintelligence
program. It dated from January 1939 and escalated under the
Truman loyalty program. Because Truman's program required
FBI and Civil Service Commission investigators to search HUAC
files for information bearing on the loyalty of incumbent or
applicant federal employees, two FBI agents were assigned
permanently to the Committee file room. (Prior to March 25,
1947, when Truman established the loyalty program by issuing
Executive Order 9835, Committee staff searched the files;
after that date agency investigators did their own searching
because file room staff could not keep pace.) When President
Eisenhower expanded the loyalty program in 1953 but did not
specifically mention the Committee's files, Hoover announced
that the FBI continued to check the data accumulated by
Martin Dies and HUAC in all federal employee security
investigations.
More importantly, six days after Truman issued Executive
Order 9835, HUAC Chairman J. Parnell Thomas named John
McDowell (R., Penn.), Richard Vail (R., Ill.), and John Wood
(D., Ga.) to a three-man subcommittee that was to draw up a
master list of subversive organizations. The first
installment, scheduled to be completed and presented within
a few days to Attorney General Tom Clark, was to serve as a
guide for loyalty investigators. HUAC demanded the immediate
dismissal of any federal employee who had been or remained a
member of any proscribed organization. This list, and
subsequent installments, had an immediate impact. The FBI
treated the Attorney General's list of subversive
organizations as only one list among many lists -- and a
rather limited one at that. If a federal employee was a
member of a group listed by HUAC but not by the Attorney
General, the FBI reported that fact to the justice Department
and to the appropriate loyalty board.
The FBI also relied on the Dies Committee's Appendix IX,
published in 1944 and aptly entitled Communist Front
Organizations. Prepared when the Dies Committee's future
was very much in doubt by a subcommittee headed by John M.
Costello (D., Cal.), Appendix IX was a hastily compiled,
rather careless cross-section of the Committee's files.
When finished, it totaled seven volumes and just under
2,000 pages. Some 250 groups were labeled Communist
fronts and the seventh volume consisted of a 22,000 name
index. Although 7,000 sets were published at a cost of
$20,000, the full Committee membership deemed Appendix IX
irresponsible, expunged it from the record, and ordered
the existing copies destroyed. Appendix IX was immediately
removed from the Library of Congress and government
document rooms. A few sets, however, had already been sold
to private subscribers and government agencies. The FBI
immediately cross-indexed its copy.
When political scientist Robert Carr interviewed Richard
Nixon and John Wood regarding the continued use of Appendix
IX, both claimed to be unaware of its contents and the facts
surrounding its controversial publication. In March 1950,
however, Committee Chairman Wood announced that HUAC staff
were updating Appendix IX to make it "a bible of subversive
activities in the United States." Appendix IX, of course,
was already a bible of sorts and not only for intelligence
and security officers. A Republican club in Chicago used it
to redbait Senator Paul H. Douglas, and Senator McCarthy
relied heavily on it because it was more extensive than the
Attorney General's list. For example, of the twenty-eight
alleged CPUSA fronts that McCarthy listed after New York
City Municipal Court judge Dorothy Kenyon's name, only four
were cited by the Attorney General. According to ex-FBI
agent Kenneth Bierly of Counterattack, "everybody has a
copy" -- including, among others, the staff of the American
Legion's Firing Line, blacklister Allen Zoll of the
National Council of American Education, and Richard E.
Combs, counsel to the California Fact-Finding Committee on
Un-American Activities. Appendix IX was so popular that a
private organization reportedly reproduced it in 1954 to
meet the needs of the blacklisters.
The FBI and private-sector blacklisters also relied
on another HUAC publication, the Guide to Subversive
Organizations and Publications. Actively promoted by FBI
agent Lee Pennington even before it was first published
as a handbook in December 1948, the Guide declared 563
organizations and 190 publications subversive and was
updated and expanded in 1951, 1957, and 1961. J. Edgar
Hoover, for his part, furnished each field office with at
least two copies and referred concerned citizens to the
Committee's "convenient" report so they might "spot"
fronts and "not be fooled into giving them ... support."
The FBI not only helped HUAC compile the various editions
of its Guide (whether by directly leaking information to
the Committee or through publicity given by the Committee
to the testimony of FBI informers). FBI officials, in
addition, monitored the various editions of the Guide,
occasionally gleaning information previously unknown to
the Bureau. FBI officials and agents were most likely to
use the Guide when preparing "characterizations" or
"thumbnail" sketches for dissemination outside the Bureau
both to other governmentagencies and to friendly
journalists. Local FBI field offices were instructed to
compile these sketches on five-by-eight cards and to
review them periodically. These characterizations were
not to be disseminated until they could be laundered
(that is, until all of the sources or documentation
cited were "public source" in nature).
What's in a Name?
The Bureau had long been in the intelligence laundry
business -- using HUAC as conduit for the furtive
dissemination of political intelligence from its
classified files. The so-called COINTELPROs, then, did
not represent a change in FBI officials' anticommunist
Weltanschauung. The counterintelligence programs of 1956
to 1971 differed from earlier FBI activities principally
in that a complete paper record was created of FBI
actions, a record that was maintained in both the central
COINTELPRO file at Bureau headquarters and in the field
office counterintelligence files. (In 1975 the former
COINTELPRO-New Left supervisor claimed that the COINTELPRO
caption was, in some ways, simply an "administrative
device to channel the mail to" FBI headquarters.) Under
the various counterintelligence programs, field office
proposals for disruptive or educational action,
authorizations from senior FBI officials, and periodic
summary reports recording tangible results were recorded
in writing.
Prior to 1956 FBI officials had been reluctant to risk
creating such a paper record of their political efforts.
This reluctance stemmed not from a greater sensitivity
to civil liberties but from a concern that formal record
keeping practices could increase the FBI's vulnerability.
Accordingly, written records of the Bureau's earlier
assistance to HUAC and conservative newspaper reporters
were destroyed under "Do Not File" procedures, falsified,
or filed under the Bureau's individual case captions --
making it difficult to ascertain the scope of the FBI's
political activities without total access to the
headquarters and field office files. In contrast, during
the lifetime of the formal COINTELPROs, exactly 3,247
disruptive actions were proposed, of which 2,370 were
carried out. This is not to say that the FBI's less
formal activities ceased when COINTELPRO began. As
Internal Security Section chief Alan H. Belmont noted
in an August 1959 memorandum to Hoover, "the Counter-
intelligence Program is one of the special programs that
we have devised to disorganize and disrupt the Communist
Party".
One such program involved the dissemination of blind
memorandums regarding subversive activities to local and
state police officials. Another more formal program,
begun in February 1951, authorized "the dissemination
of information to appropriate authorities on a strictly
confidential basis concerning Communist or subversive
elements in public utilities or public or semi-public
organizations." This so-called Responsibilities Program
(Responsibilities of the FBI in the Internal Security
Field) was launched on February 17 following Hoover's
meeting with a group of state governors representing the
executive committee of the 1951 Governors' Conference.
All information volunteered by the FBI was oral and
recipients included a "large number of state and local
officials." The Bureau's role was not to be compromised;
otherwise, as senior FBI officials noted, "our standard
claim that the files of the FBI are confidential" would
be threatened."
The Responsibilities Program clearly indicates that the
launching of the first COINTELPRO in August 1956 did not
represent a shift in Bureau policy. Nor can COINTELPRO
be considered simply as a skeleton in the FBI's closet.
Only a small number of the FBI counterintelligence actions
conducted between 1956 and 1971 were carried out as formal
COINTELPRO operations. The vast majority were thus not
recorded in the central COINTELPRO file but were under
other program files or individual case captions.
* a "readers digest" of Chapter 8, "Counterintelligence",
of Hoover and the Un-Americans, by Kenneth O'Reilly, Temple
University Press, 1983.